There was a lot of talk last year about the importance of teaching kids to code, much of it centred around a well-intentioned but rather confused e-petition; much of the surrounding rhetoric asked where the “programmers of the future” were going to come from if IT teaching in schools was neglected. Sidestepping the question of the difference between “programming” and “IT” for a moment, this concern completely ignores the fact that many of today’s coders didn’t receive any formal computing tuition at school (or in some cases any at all). That’s not to say that many of them wouldn’t have benefitted from tuition, of course! But it’s still worth bearing in mind.

So, as one of the coders of today, I thought I’d note down what “computing” and “IT” involved when I was at school (to the best of my recollection), just out of interest. I was born in 1978, so my schooling spans the 1980s and 1990s; it all took place in the UK, but we moved around a bit and I attended some state and some private schools.

Primary school: I don’t have any very clear memories of “computing” at primary school. I do remember there being computers (BBC Micros) at school; at my first primary school (which I left when I was about 6) the only memory I have of using it was for non-educational games at a school Summer Fête. At my last primary school (a tiny local state school) the computer (again, a BBC Micro) was used for educational games: off the top of my head I can remember playing Podd, Granny’s Garden, and Dread Dragon Droom. My parents had a BBC Micro at home, and I do remember that both I and my sister (nearly 4 years younger than me) were often asked to help at school when the computer “went wrong”, though our expert advice generally amounted to “try pressing SHIFT-BREAK”.

Secondary school: My private secondary school was equipped with a state-of-the-art Computer Room full of BBC Micros, connected by Econet. From the first year (now known as Year 7) we had “Computer Studies” lessons, which were taught by our Maths teacher and consisted of doing what I would later call “maths coursework” (problem-solving, usually starting with a specific problem and reasoning from this to a general solution for all instances of the problem, and possibly — for more advanced pupils — an algorithm describing this solution) with the help of the computer; the computer was used more as an interactive way of presenting the problem than as a way of solving it, though. I remember messing about ‘drawing’ simple smiley faces in ASCII characters (by means of a series of PRINT statements of literal strings of characters) when I’d finished a problem before the end of the lesson, and I remember our teacher being quite impressed by this (which I thought was a bit silly, as it was clearly very easy).

10 PRINT "                "
20 PRINT "&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&"
30 PRINT "&              &"
40 PRINT "&   O      O   &"
50 PRINT "&       ^      &"
60 PRINT "|   \______/   |"
70 PRINT "|______________|"
80 PRINT "                "

This was also the first time I’d had a personal account with a password, a personal ‘place’ to store things on the EcoNet. I can still remember the password I used! I can also remember watching the head maths teacher log in with his password (nobody worried about shoulder-surfing in those days) to perform some admin task, and seeing that when he did this, he could see inside everybody’s accounts. So my friend Julie and I wondered what would happen if we typed in his name and password… the answer, obviously, being that we too could then access everybody’s accounts. We copied games from other people’s accounts, certain that this was OK because the games were still in their accounts, so we clearly hadn’t “stolen” them. I forget how we were found out — we probably just told people! — but I do remember that it resulted in a stern lecture about “hacking” from our maths teacher.

In the third year (Year 9) our “Computer Studies” lessons were replaced by “IT” lessons; these were also taught by a maths teacher, and began with “How to use a three-button mouse” (the state-of-the-art Computer Room having by then been upgraded from BBCs to Archimedes). To practise using a mouse we were asked to solve the Fifteen puzzle. Subsequent lessons involved learning to use word processing software and spreadsheet software (I think we even got as far as writing spreadsheet functions).

Now, I’ve had computers at home for as long as I can remember — first an Apple ][, then a BBC Micro, then in the mid-80s my parents got a Mac Plus and from that point on it was Macs all the way. I should make it clear, however, that I really didn’t do much in the way of programming on any of these: I typed in listings from computer magazines and could manage the basics of BASIC; later, on the Mac, I played around with HyperCard quite a bit; but that’s about as far as it went. In general I was more interested in racking up world-class hi-scores on Tetris (my dad showed me how to use ResEdit to hack the leader board, e.g. when shareware games came with the programmers’ own unbeatable hi-scores already filling the board, but I didn’t usually need it!). However, my experience at home meant that a lot of the “computing” to which we were introduced at school really wasn’t new to me in any way. It’s hard to imagine what I’d have made of it if it was: I suspect the educational games would have probably still been fun (as far as I can remember, everybody seemed to enjoy playing on the computer); I found the maths coursework fun with or without a computer, though I think the novelty of the computers made the maths slightly more exciting for some; I can’t imagine that I’d have been particularly inspired or enthused by the “IT” lessons, as they seemed to be geared more to secretarial work than anything more exciting. I presume I would have found them harder if I’d never been exposed to a computer before, or a mouse (we’d had a Mac for several years by then, and I’d used a Lisa briefly when I was about 5, so I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t know what a computer mouse was); I suppose I might have been excited by what computers could do if I’d never encountered them before, though a) I’m not sure how impressive word-processing would be for anybody who’d already seen a typewriter, and b) I was 13 or 14 when these lessons were introduced, and it’s quite hard to get teenage girls to admit to enthusiasm for anything at school.

What general lessons can we draw from this about IT teaching in schools? Absolutely none: it’s simply an anecdotal account of my personal experience, from a time when most pupils wouldn’t be expected to be familiar with computers already (whereas now I suspect most schoolchildren have already encountered computers by the time they reach primary school, let alone secondary school). I don’t think it taught me anything that helped me learn to program (I suppose the maths may have been useful, but we’d have done that without computers, and indeed after those first couple of years I don’t remember using computers for maths again) and I don’t remember it ever even occurring to me that computers might be relevant in a career context.

The story of how I got from there to my current situation, and what I learned outside school, can be a subject for another blog post. In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear other people’s experience of IT/computing at school!

I’m not going to rehash the issues here because other people have already done it far better than I could ever hope to do, so I’ll just point to them:

• I first became aware of the Google+ problem when ex-Googler geek guru Skud blogged about getting her Google+ account suspended for violation of their names policy. Her blog recounts the whole saga; she’s also documented the names policy in detail and set up the excellent My Name Is Me project (“supporting your freedom to choose the name you use on social networks and other online services”).
• But why all the fuss? GeekFeminism.org addresses the question: Who is harmed by a real names policy?
• At a technical level, too, the policy is unworkable nonsense, as an excellent article on ‘Falsehoods programmers believe about names’ helps to explain. If you’re building systems that interact with names, you need to read, mark, and inwardly digest the information in this article.
• If you just want a quick overview, the Guardian summed up the story (and has plenty more articles about Google+).
• The Guardian also featured a rather problematic Comment Is Free piece by Krishnan Guru Murthy about online anonymity.

It’s partly this last article that prompted me to write about this at all, as — in an all-too-common mistake, and a pet hate of mine — the author seems to be conflating anonymity and pseudonymity. They’re different. Anonymity is when people don’t know who you are; pseudonymity is when they don’t know the name on your birth certificate. How often do you check your friends’ ID? Do you ask them to show you their passport or other forms of ID (a utility bill in their name, perhaps?) before trusting them as a friend? I know I don’t. I know my friends’ names, sure — usually a first name and a surname (yes, most of my friends have Western-style names) — but in several cases the name I know them by probably isn’t the name on their birth certificate. Some are married, and have taken a new surname to mark that change; some use a different name from their birth name for other reasons, whether they’ve changed it by deed poll (which is simple and costs no money) or simply choose to use that name for some or all aspects of their lives.

Among my ex-boyfriends, for example, I can count the following:

• Someone who had changed his name by deed poll to a single name (no surname). This caused difficulties with official forms (which often demanded a surname), but he managed to claim benefits under his chosen name.
• Someone who always went by a pseudonym and refused to acknowledge his birth name (though I did later find it out, to his annoyance). I don’t know what he used in official contexts (banking, passport, etc) but in all the social contexts where I’d encountered him he was only known by the pseudonym and most people didn’t know his birth name.
• Someone to whom I was first introduced by his online pseudonym — a Firstname Lastname format, but a name taken from a song, so (arguably) obviously a pseudonym. (I learned his birth name fairly early on in the relationship, in fact before learning that he was actually married. You can’t win ‘em all.)
• Someone to whom I was first introduced by his persistent offline pseudonym — his Tudor re-enactment name, to be precise. (Again, I learned his birth name fairly soon, but he regarded both names as “really” him in different contexts, and was happy to be addressed as either.)

OK, maybe I’ve had more than my fair share of ‘alternative’ boyfriends. But none of these people were anonymous in any sense, to me or to the other people who knew them by their pseudonyms. The pseudonyms were consistent and persistent. They also weren’t a reliable indicator of the trustworthiness of the person: choosing a new name for yourself doesn’t make you any more or less likely to be a liar, a troll, an idiot, or a philanderer than sticking with your birth name. A reputation accrues to the name you use, whether you were born with that name or not, and that reputation can be good or bad.

My first experience of online communities was on usenet and local University newsgroups. On the local newsgroups, most people went by the same names they’d used to register for their course — so those names were “real” enough for the University. On the other hand, I generally didn’t know much about them except their name (and their 8-character user id). If all I know about someone is that they are called “John Smith” and that they’ve written something interesting on netnews, what difference does it make to me whether they were actually born John Smith or Peter Scroggins? (Or, indeed, Patricia Scroggins?) The question is whether I can trust that the “John Smith” I interact with today is the same person as the “John Smith” I interact with tomorrow: that the name is a persistent handle for the “real person” behind it (whether or not I ever actually meet them in “real life” — an infuriatingly inaccurate term for physical space, given that I spend so much of my quite-real-thank-you-very-much life interacting with people online).

Later, I ventured out into usenet proper, where far more people were known by obviously pseudonymous (often punning) names — I was reminded of my dad’s habit of entering his name on hi-score boards as “Sue Donnym”. However, these names were as fixed as the “real” names on local netnews, and had their own character, their own style of writing — I would have known if they had been appropriated by a different person — so again, what did it matter if they hadn’t been born “Sue Donnym”?

At the same time, I was spending more time on IRC. Here everybody went by a nickname, a one-word handle: there were people on IRC who knew me primarily as “jaffa” and would have been hard pushed to remember my “real” name (if indeed they ever knew it). But again, those names were persistent: on the local channel, at least, it would have been a clear breach of etiquette for someone else to sign on using my ‘nick’. (On global channels, if I’d planned to become a frequent user of a channel where there was already another jaffa, I’d've chosen a different nick, but I’d've stuck to it.)

It’s possible that the closer you get to someone, the more likely you are to find out what their “wallet name” is (I’m grateful to Skud for coining the phrase) — the name on their credit cards, the name on their passport — but there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of what that means for your relationship with them. How would you react if you found out that somebody you’d known for years by one name was actually born with a different name? That would surely depend on lots of different factors: your own attitudes to trust, privacy, and pseudonymity; the reasons that person had for changing their name; perhaps the extent to which they had deliberately or actively misled you about their name; and doubtless all sorts of circumstances specific to the situation and the people involved.

Perhaps knowing someone’s “wallet name” matters to you a lot; perhaps it doesn’t. I don’t think it matters to me in most circumstances. But it certainly shouldn’t matter to Google Plus. The usual objection is that Google need to know your “real name” so that they can join up Google+ with your other online activity: but if all your other online activity is conducted under a persistent pseudonym, then your “wallet name” is surely less valuable to them than the pseudonym. This objection is often accompanied by snarking to the effect that Google is a business giving us a free service, so we shouldn’t complain; sure, they’re at liberty to make that decision as a business, but that doesn’t oblige me to like it, to defend their choices, or to use their services. I’m not deleting my account, because I don’t mind people finding me by my birth name (which is the name I use for all official purposes and most social purposes); but I suspect it’ll be like my facebook account, another namesquatting homepage to prevent other people claiming my name. Beyond that, I don’t feel I want to invest time and effort in a service which potentially disenfranchises many of the people I know, love, and respect online.

This year, however, there was absolutely no chance of me attending: I’m currently on maternity leave, and while my 16-week-old baby daughter may be a true digital native, I figured the conference might be a bit much for her. ;-) I hadn’t even planned to try to follow along remotely, but the day of the conference dawned (I was reminded by a Google calendar alert, added optimistically about a year ago!) and I didn’t have any other plans, so I thought I’d dip in to the streaming video and see what I could get out of it. To be honest I expected it to be an even worse experience than previously — streaming video over our home broadband rather than the University’s ethernet, on a laptop or mobile rather than the 19-inch monitor I had at work… and of course trying to look after the baby at the same time!

Looking for the video link on the IWMW website I discovered that the streaming this year would be done through Adobe Connect. I confess I’d never heard of this before, but I’m afraid my heart sank; I feared I’d have to download some kind of awful desktop client which would turn out not to work on my Mac, and so on, and so forth. However when I clicked on the link I was delighted to find that a) it was entirely web based, and b) it all Just Worked: all I had to do was log in as a guest (no tiresome account creation, hurrah!) and I was immediately presented with a page showing the live video, the presentation slides playing through in sync with the video, a live chat session, and a Twitter search for the conference/session hashtags. It was like having the conference in miniature on my laptop — all that was missing was the bar. :-) I’m not normally keen on ’tiled’ displays but it managed to feel uncluttered and easy on the eye, and it was easy to make any panel full-screen (e.g. to see small text on the slides a bit better) and switch back to the tiled display again.

After the initial excitement had worn off I realised that the Twitter feed wasn’t actually a live-updating search, just a static one; but I mentioned this to @iwmwlive on Twitter and it was fixed for the next session — many thanks to Marieke for sorting things out behind the scenes! (Incidentally, nobody seemed to be using the chat log much, but Twitter was clearly fulfilling the backchannel role very effectively.)

A chance remark by @jeremyspeller suggested that there was also an iPad app for Adobe Connect, so I decided to give that a quick try too. Again, it was all surprisingly smooth, though the embedded Twitter panel didn’t work at all there (as it relied on Flash). Also, while I wasn’t expecting the video to keep running audibly in the background while I switched apps, I wasn’t expecting Connect to log me out every time I switched apps (which it did) — I think this would quickly get annoying if I was trying to follow along on the iPad alone, but as it was I could use my Mac or my iPhone* to keep an eye on Twitter at the same time. In the end I moved back to the laptop for the video/slides as that made it easier to watch everything from the sofa while holding the baby!

* I am not being sponsored by Apple to write this post, honest :-)

So much for the experience of the medium; what about the message? To be honest I’ve never been 100% convinced by the “amplified conference” model: while it obviously has its benefits, it seems to encourage attempts to be present in several places at once, which for me inevitably results in not really fully being present in any of them. It can be hard enough just to concentrate on a talk and its associated slides; once you try to follow Twitter at the same time, one of them’s surely going to suffer. Of course, this problem was compounded for me by trying to look after a small baby at the same time! As a result, my overall experience of the conference was rather impressionistic — I felt that I was getting an idea of some of the dominant themes (times are hard for web teams; search is really important; privacy is complicated; “web 2.0″ technologies are still important even though we’re still flailing a bit when it comes to explaining how/why they’re most useful to HE…) and I was picking up interesting snippets but I wasn’t coming away with a coherent picture of any of the plenaries (which was a shame as what bits I did pick up sounded really interesting!). It was much like skimming through a series of articles — and, as when I’m skimming, I was mentally earmarking things for revisiting in more depth later, even though I know that I’m unlikely to have time to do so this year.

What would I do differently if I was trying to participate remotely again (apart from hiring a babysitter!)? The main thing I’d do is prepare a bit more — look through the conference schedule, work out what was on when and which bits I was most keen to catch. I’d also set up Tweetdeck or similar in the background mirroring the embedded Twitter search — as it was, every time I wanted to tweet I found I was getting distracted by everything else in my timeline, as my Twitter client wasn’t doing any filtering.

On the whole, though, it was a surprisingly useful experience and I was pleased to feel that I could participate a little bit despite being somewhat “out of the loop” on maternity leave. Kudos to the IWMW11 team for getting everything set up so smoothly!

My view of the conference

There are one or two places, though, where the autocorrection is wrong. The most aggravating one of these is “its”, which always gets autocorrected to “it’s”. Now, you do get a chance to say “no”: if you type “its”, a tooltip-type bubble pops up with the proposed autocorrection “it’s” and you can press the “[x]” to make it go away, to decline the edit. But it’s not easy (the “[x]” is about 4 pixels wide) and in order to do this you have to notice it in the first place.

It's got its apostrophes confused

I’m used to it now, I never type the words “its” or “it’s” without checking, but it’s still irksome. You could argue that by always using “it’s” iOS was actually just following modern usage, BUT YOU’D BE WRONG AND SO WOULD ALL THE PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN “ITS” AND “IT’S”.^[2] Ahem.

So much for the actual wrongness. There are two other categories of annoying autocorrection (or absence of autocorrection):

1. Oh, come on, you know what I meant
2. Huh?

Category one includes things like failing to realise that “sine” was a mostly-off-by-one for “some”, and failing to realise that “fir” is a mistyping of “for”. These are real words, I can’t really blame iOS for this, but… it just feels as though it somehow ought to be able to predict that “some” is more likely than “sine” in most people’s SMSs, and “for” is more likely than “fir”. (No, I haven’t checked, but I think a corpus of SMSs would back me up on this one.) If I was a mathematician or a lumberjack then I’d probably be really glad that the autocorrection wasn’t trampling all over my perfectly valid use of “sine” or “fir” … but I’m not. (Unfailingly changing “reading” to “Reading” is even more understandable, but still usually wrong.)

Category two is the autocorrections which are just baffling. Examples:

• When I mistype “to” as “ti”, it changes it to “ti’”. That’s “ti” with an apostrophe after it. Is that even a word? Google suggests “Ti’ punch”. Is that really more commonly used than the word “to”? Is there some other meaning I’m missing?
• Various mistypings of “want” seem to get changed to “Wang” (with a capital W). OK, it’s a common Chinese surname, but it’s quite unlikely to be the word I actually Wang…
• Various mistypings of “gone” get changed to “Gond”. Google suggests that this is something to do with Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t even want to know.

In all these cases, though, I wouldn’t want to replace a guess that’s frequently wrong for me with a guess that’s frequently wrong for someone else: what I really want is an opportunity to configure this behaviour, to decide which autocorrections help me and which are far more likely to hinder. I want to be able to add rules like:

• never autocorrect anything to “ti’” (because it’s not a word in my vocabulary!)
• never add an apostrophe to “its” (because I know better than iOS here)
• correct “fir” to “for” (because while I might want to say “fir”, that’ll be a far less frequent annoyance)
• never autocapitalise things (because proper nouns are hard to guess, and I’d rather do them by hand than get annoyed by wrong guesses)

I also want to be able to edit things out of its autocorrection dictionary altogether (if I have a sudden burning need to txt people about Wang of Gond, I’m sure I’ll be able to type it by hand) and add things in. The latter does seem to happen eventually (if I type “OYCS” it does now suggest “OUCS” — i.e. Oxford University Computing Services, where I work) but I want to be able to accelerate the process, because I do still actually know more about my life than it does. Just about.

Also, less practically, I want to understand how the software makes its predictions and corrections. In a former job, a long time ago, I spent quite a lot of time editing/processing electronic texts which had been keyed from photocopies of 16th century texts, and once in an idle moment I started trying to write a script to pick out common keying errors automatically — particularly the substitution of “f” for a medial “s”. My efforts were painfully naive, but it was clear that there were some combinations of letters that never happened in English, and others which sometimes happened but were extremely unlikely, and so on. If anybody knows of any readable explanations of the algorithms behind autocorrection and predictive text (assuming they’re not all trade secrets?), please do point me to them!

^[1] very old in-joke, sorry
^[2] This one’s STUPIDLY SIMPLE, people!!!

The thing is, often it’s obvious when you’re doing things inefficiently (if you’re putting in a lot of effort for little gain, or finding yourself doing the same things again and again) but much less obvious how to fix this. There are lots of tutorials that teach you how to learn things properly from scratch; and if you’re actually getting errors, it’s easy to search for them and find out how to fix them (or at least make them go away, which isn’t always the same thing). But, assuming you don’t have time to start again from scratch (and, in a particularly frustrating vicious circle, if things aren’t actually broken then it’s hard to justify taking the time to fix them, particularly since if you’re doing things inefficiently you probably don’t have lots of spare time in which to sit down and learn how to do them properly…) it can be incredibly difficult to see how to get from where you are to where you want to be: a classic case of “I wouldn’t start from here”. It’s as if you’d learned a natural language in fragments from a dictionary and never had a chance to talk to a fluent speaker: you’d feel sure that “By what sequence of steps in what sequence of directions can I walk in a short amount of time from the place where I am now to the place where I can catch a train?” wasn’t the best way to ask your question, but no amount of looking up “direction” or “place” or “what” or “where” in a dictionary would be likely to get you to “What’s the quickest way to the station from here?”

I won’t try to recap everything that was taught in the course (the slides should be available online soon, and I’ll add the link here when they are) but the DBI, Template::Toolkit and DateTime sections covered about 80% of the Perl I write (and could probably reduce the number of lines of code by half!), and the Testing section (writing unit tests with Test::More) covered about 80% of the Perl I should be writing, hem hem. I thought the Object Oriented Perl section would be the hard bit (I’ve never really done any object-oriented programming — cutting and pasting bits of other people’s Perl without understanding it doesn’t count!) but one of Dave’s slides made more sense of OOP than anything else I’d tried to read about it so far. By the time we got to a quick overview of Moose, I was itching to go and rewrite every bit of code I’d ever touched (there never seems to be time because of the day-to-day bug-fixing, firefighting, and the million-and-one other things that always need doing, but I was seriously considering taking two weeks’ holiday to rewrite it all in my so-called ‘spare time’).

And as if all the geeky joy of learning how to do things more efficiently and elegantly wasn’t enough, the course also included a short digression about badgers! As some of my readers may know, I have a bit of a thing about badgers, so I’m delighted to learn that it was specially requested by the author as the cover animal for the Template::Toolkit book (which I do own, and no, the badger wasn’t the only reason I bought it). Maybe not everything in black and white makes sense, but a hell of a lot of things in Perl seem a lot clearer than they did before.

It’s a lot less aggressive than Let Me Google That For You (best when pre-combined with search terms, e.g. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google) and its less work-safe companion, but the underlying attitude is not dissimilar — basically, “dude, this is easy, you could find this stuff out by Googling for it”. Now, I know the xkcd flowchart shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it did make me think just how much knowledge and assumptions are embedded in an instruction like “Google the name of the program plus a few words related to what you want to do” — not to mention “follow any instructions”. It’s assuming that you know:

1. how to “Google” something (really, not everybody can even get this far)
2. the name of the program (or the operating system)
3. the correct terminology for the thing you’re trying to do
4. how to narrow your search down with relevant search terms
5. what you want to do in the first place!

Let’s unpack that a bit more:

What is its name called?

When I’ve been doing helpdesk support, the Windows users I’ve spoken to often don’t seem to know that they’re using Windows (though “it’s a computer” or “it’s a PC” usually gives the game away), let alone the name of any software they might be running. In a University environment, “the web” is as likely to mean Firefox as Internet Explorer; and as for “So I went into my email”… it’s anybody’s guess what client they’re using. (“Okay, are you using Outlook Express, maybe? Thunderbird? Eudora? Do any of those sound familiar?” “No, I went to the bit where I put in my password…” “Is this on the web?” “It’s the bit where you go to the internet and you put in your password, you know, your university password.”) Google produced an video of ordinary people attempting to explain what a web browser is — it’s quite enlightening. How far would you get googling for the answer if your search was along the lines of “my email doesn’t work” or “the google crashes”?

Calling a spade a thing you dig with

Not all words are equal; some types of terminology make for better searches than others. Things which would be intelligible to a human being may result in a lot of frustrating irrelevance if you type them into a search box. For example, there’s a world of difference between “How do I make it so that when I go to the web I start with my webmail?” and “change default home page”.

The straight and narrow

Of course, the above example is still quite vague: there’s a difference between “change default home page” and “change default home page ‘internet explorer 8′”. Knowing which terms will successfully narrow down your search to the level of detail you want requires some awareness of the hierarchy or taxonomy you’re dealing with — you don’t have to call it that, of course, but it helps to know (for example) that there are several operating systems out there, and lots of different programs that you can run on those operating systems; that a web browser is a type of program, and there are lots of different web browsers; that any given web browser will have several different versions… and so on.

What users really want

“Find a menu item or button which looks related to what you want to do”, says xkcd — but actually, knowing (or articulating) what you’re trying to do may be harder than it looks, and is probably half the battle. “How do I stop it going all funny every time I click here?” isn’t much help whether you’re googling or looking for menu items (again, it helps if you know some more specific terminology for “going all funny” or how to describe to a computer where “here” is); and often what people think they want to do is “stop it giving that error”. There isn’t usually a menu item that says “Make it stop going all funny” — it’ll be something more like Tools → Preferences → Advanced → Deactivate Epic Fail.

End of an error

Typing an error message into Google is a useful strategy for solving problems, and may seem obvious; but even that involves some more deeply embedded assumptions: it assumes that you’re even allowing for the possibility that an error message is an attempt to communicate something to you (so that you can do something about it, or pass the message on to someone who can do something about it), rather than just a sign that “it’s all broken”. Too many users seem to think that computers exist in two states, “working” and “broken”: if it’s not working, then obviously it’s broken; and if it’s broken, then obviously what you want to do is get it working.

Simon Tatham says, in How to Report Bugs Effectively (which, incidentally, should be compulsory reading for anyone who ever has to talk to anybody else about computers): “Numbers in error messages are there because the computer is too confused to report the error in words, but is doing the best it can to get the important information to you somehow.” At the end of the day, it’s all about communication: the programmer, the software (insofar as it can be regarded as an agent), the user, the IT support guy — they’re all trying to pass information (in the broadest sense) from one agent to another without losing data. Starting with lots of unexamined assumptions is a bit like giving someone a document in a proprietary format, without checking that they’ve got the necessary software to decode it — at best they’ll spend unnecessary time and effort reverse-engineering it, at worst they won’t be able to extract any of the message you were trying to convey. Why make people guess? Even Google can’t read your mind. So far.

1. The ability to set an ‘expiry date’ on email when it arrives.

I get a lot of mailing-list email to my personal account which contains offers, “what’s on”-type information, the sort of thing which might be useful at some point over the next couple of weeks but isn’t immediately useful now. I keep it in my inbox as a way of keeping it “on my radar”, reminding me occasionally that it’s there in case I want to look at it; but I’d like to be able to tag it for expiry in, say, a couple of weeks — or when the next email from that mailing-list comes in.

Similarly, at work I get a lot of email containing ideas or suggestions for things that I could do if I had time; I want to set them to expire (or at least require manually ‘renewing’) after a couple of months. If I haven’t found time to do something within that amount of time, then either a) it’s too time-consuming/complicated to do inbetween other tasks, and should either become a genuine project/task and be logged/managed as such, or b) it’s just not actually that important.

Also, most emails don’t need keeping for ever. At work, I keep a lot of ‘paper trails’ in email; if I haven’t referred back to them within 6 months then I’ll probably never need to — but if I haven’t referred back to them in 6 months then I certainly won’t remember to go back and delete them after that time. At home, I keep a lot of confirmation emails from online shopping; I don’t want to waste paper by printing them out, but once I’ve saved them to my ‘admin’ folder they’re basically in a black hole. I want to save them to whichever folder is relevant but also set them to expire in, say, 1 year’s time (very few receipts etc need keeping longer than that). Organisational emails from friends don’t need keeping for ever — I may want to keep the emails where we tried to organise a party or something, but they’re not such works of literary genius or items of such sentimental value that I’m likely ever to revisit them.

(To be honest, I can’t remember when I last went back and re-read an old email for sentimental or nostalgic reasons. Occasionally I grep through my various read-mail files for specific bits of contact information, or for half-remembered words or phrases; but even that’s quite rare. Maybe I shouldn’t be keeping any of it.)

2. The ability to move things from email to other applications more easily.

This is getting better with more integrated calendaring, contacts, task-lists, etc. (not to mention Google Wave!), but there are things that just aren’t easy enough yet:

• When an email contains dates and times, I want to be able to add those easily to my calendar, with a link to the email. It should be possible to delete the email from the event, or vice versa, or both at once.
• When an email contains an address, I want to be able to add it easily to my contacts, with the email address, and whatever context is necessary from the email.
• When an email has a PDF or doc attached, I want to be able to add that easily to a document store, detaching it from the email, but keeping a link to the email. Again, it should be possible to delete email and document in one go.
• When an email contains a bit of text that I want to save, I want to be able to highlight that extract and save it as a snippet, automatically adding a ‘citation’ consisting of the name/email address and the timestamp.

3. The ability to tag and filter more flexibly.

This is the area where it’s almost certainly me who’s deficient, not the email clients. I want to be able to:

• manually tag emails with as many keywords as I like
• search/filter according to the presence/absence of single tags or combinations of tags
• define rules for automated tagging according to sender/subject etc

Tagging probably entirely removes the need for folders (and is obviously more flexible as things can belong in multiple categories), but I admit that I still think in terms of folders. Ideally the user interface would make it possible for me to set up virtual ‘folders’ based on tags, rules, etc to ease the mental transition from one model to the other.

4. The ability to set automated replies based on sender/subject/time

For example, an ‘out-of-office’ reply to work colleagues during out-of-work hours, telling them that I’ll deal with their query in the morning; an ‘out-of-socialising’ reply to friends during work hours, telling them that I may check personal mail during work but they shouldn’t rely on it and I probably won’t have time to give them a long reply (but they can phone my mobile if it’s urgent).

5. The ability to set different levels of alert for new emails or other triggers

Rather than choosing between a popup alert for all new mail or nothing, I’d like to have, say, an SMS alert when email from my husband arrives in my personal inbox; an audible alert when email from certain senders arrives in my work inbox (as it’s probably important enough to interrupt other things for); no alert at all for emails from mailing lists; some kind of alert when my inbox goes over a certain number.

6. The ability to queue specific emails to be sent automatically at specific times

I want to be able to write work-related emails at the end of the day or in odd moments in the evening, but set them to be sent at 8:50am the next day, so I don’t end up getting sucked into work email exchanges late at night. If I write the email and postpone it, I don’t currently have a way to remind myself that there’s an email sitting in the invisible out-tray. Also, if I’m writing official announcements or questions to send to mailing lists, the time when I get a chance to write the text is not necessarily the best time to send the email (something sent to a mailing list on a Friday afternoon risks getting buried in an avalanche of silliness and pedantry; the same email sent on a Monday morning will get a much more sober and potentially more useful response). Ideally, this would work in close conjunction with my calendar, so it’d be easy to, say, set a reminder email to be sent half an hour before a meeting.

7. Built-in coffee-making functionality

Ideally this would be triggered when the inbox goes over a certain number of messages, or when email from specific colleagues arrives … Well, hey, I can dream. :-)

My husband took my name when we got married, and as well as providing an opportunity to learn how to make a deed poll for free the process forced us both to think about our web and email presences, the extent to which these are tied to our ‘real’ names, and by extension the searchability of names in general.

One of my husband’s priorities, when he knew he’d be changing his name, was to register a gmail address under his new name (you can see why I married him!). This meant choosing the format of the email address: firstname.lastname, lastname.firstname, initial.lastname… the choices are endless, and it was only when I came to suggest that he should choose something consistent with other family members that I realised that my family have managed to be as inconsistent as possible:

Dad: firstnamelastname@gmail
Mum: firstname.lastname@gmail
Sister: f.lastname@gmail
me: firstnamelas@gmail

In my case I just used the same username as my longest-standing email address, which in turn was chosen because of the username policy on that particular system. The sysadmin writes:

I don’t routinely allocate usernames which are very likely to clash (ie, ones which someone else – including a later new user – would be likely to want.) I also try to avoid allocating usernames in a way that encourages people to guess the email address of someone whose real name they know but whose username they don’t. This means I don’t generally issue just first name, or just surname, unless the name is very unusual. As a suggestion, more sensible alternatives include initial(s) and surname, or first name and remaining initials.

All well and good, but they also imposed an 8-character limit; my surname’s longer than that, and my first name plus initials would have looked like a rather odd word. (These days I’m more likely to run into the minimum character limit, having adopted a 2-character nickname — which was allowed on LiveJournal and Twitter, but disallowed on eBay and a few other sites).

Fortunately, gmail makes our family’s inconsistent data slightly better by ignoring dots in the local-part of the address; so firstname.lastname and firstnamelastname are the same account… as indeed is first...name...last...name, if you want to be awkward. Good news for the early adopter who has the username anticip...........ation@gmail (yes, it’s gone).

Then there’s the searchability of your name. My husband opted to keep his ‘bachelor name’ (to coin a phrase) as his middle name (as women sometimes do with their maiden names — e.g. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Heather Mills McCartney) so that a web search for him under his unmarried name would still find him. We’re both lucky enough to have names which are moderately unusual (we’re not drowning in an unsearchable sea of John/Jane Smiths or equivalent), we’ve been early-enough adopters to claim our names on various sites, and we managed to claim our facebook usernames of choice without even having to get up at 4am.

Despite the excitement of the great username giveaway, Facebook still stands out as the one big social networking service where you’re actually expected to use your real name (I’m not counting LinkedIn because that’s really more about the ‘networking’ than the ‘social’). I cut my internet teeth in an era when an 8-character username was expected, even hip (I got quite attached to the four-letters-four-digits userid I was allocated at university; it was as much part of my identity as my ‘real’ name or my IRC nick), so the idea of using your actual name — your fuzzy, human-readable, nowhere-near-unique, not-even-adequately-namespaced name — seemed just absurd! And yet it works, unless you’re trying to find your schoolfriend Jane Smith (and you’re not even 100% sure that she hasn’t married, so even looking through all “over 500″ Jane Smiths (Janes Smith?) might not help. At the end of the day, we’re used to dealing with the idea of knowing people who share a name; in the UK we even tend to eschew adding a “Jr.” or “III” as disambiguation. Maybe the Facebook fashion is the future: a future where we force computers to adapt to our redundancy-filled systems rather than forcing ourselves into their high-information mould? The sci-fi stereotype seems to tend in the opposite direction (I’d be interested to know if there are earlier instances of this than Zamyatin’s We with its protagonist D-503) but perhaps in 30 years my loyal adherence to the 8-character username I chose in 1999 will seem as archaic as giving a married woman her husband’s initial (e.g. Elizabeth Jones becoming “Mrs J. Smith” on marrying John Smith) does now … or even taking her husband’s surname.

The interface is simple: just lift the phone to your ear (a small bleep lets you know that the motion has been detected and it’s ready to start) and speak your search terms. A nice touch is that the ‘soundwave’ icon displayed while it’s processing the input actually does change with each search; in the picture below, the search being performed is actually “parrot sketch” (not the previous search, which is still displayed in the search box at the top of the screen), and it’s a reasonably plausible shape for that phrase:

Voice search shows the shape of your words

It only very occasionally concedes defeat altogether, with a laconic “didn’t get that” (not to be confused with “didn’t go through”, which seems to be a momentary failure to connect):

Google Voice Search failure modes

So how accurate are the results when it does find something? Once I’d tried a few different searches, including my name (an awkward pileup of consonants at the best of times, but it made a valiant attempt) and the name of this blog (reliably recognised, I’m pleased to say!), I decided to try something a bit more systematic. I was hoping to find some kind of list of words used to calibrate speech recognition software, but eventually found a spondee list for Speech Reception Threshold testing (Stanley A. Gelfand, Essentials of audiology, New York : Thieme, 2001. Appendix B). Recipients of the test are expected to be familiar with these words/phrases already, but if that’s the case, Google should be familiar with them too; and if not, then it’s as good as any other arbitrary selection. I tried each word twice, and recorded the results:

NB: the application does warn that “Voice Search only works in English, and works best for North American English accents”; I didn’t attempt to fake a North American English accent, but I did try to speak clearly and minimise background noise.

It’s interesting how many of the incorrect results were company or brand names: Comcast, Amtrak, Experian, Schwinn, Netflix, Hotchalk, Amway. They don’t all get more hits on Google than the corresponding correct word, either (there are more armchairs on Google than Comcasts, and more backbones than Experians), though perhaps they do get more hits than other incorrect guesses which the voice recognition rejects.

In most cases, the incorrect result is similar in shape to the search word: it’s easy to see how one gets from “drawbridge” to “corporate”, from “horseshoe” to “ocean”, from “mushroom” to “machine”, or even from “railroad” to “male names”. I would say that some of the incorrect guesses have more syllables than the original words, but syllable counting is notoriously difficult; and when allowing for the difference between British English and North American English accents as well, all bets are off.

However, there are some really baffling guesses: “hotdog” only shares at most one vowel with Google’s guess of “pa”, and “birthday” is a lost cause — only the second half of the word seems to come through, with the ‘thday’ /TteI/ being rendered as ‘sta’ (/steI/) and ‘spa’ (/speI/). That’s my best guess, anyway. And I really can’t see how you get from “airplane” to “sam”.

The one really frustrating thing, though, is not being able to ‘teach’ the search: there’s no way to teach the application what your voice sounds like with a series of reference words; and there’s no way to tell Google what you were really searching for, not even the usual “did you mean…” option — though it’s possible that they use clickthroughs from searches as a rough indicator of success. Google could, if they recorded each search and allowed users to ‘transcribe’ their searches at the same time, amass a vast corpus of spoken English words and their written forms — in fact, this is apparently what they intended to do with the previous incarnation of Google Voice Search — but the privacy implications of this are problematic, particularly given that the iPhone Google app has to be downloaded via iTunes and hence via a personal and extremely trackable account.

Incidentally, the title of this post is what I got when using Voice Search to search for “speech recognition” — Google Voice Search is not quite speechless, but it’s also not quite there yet.

<head> </head>

They were simple to make; I just printed out the tags on ordinary white paper, cut the paper around them to a triangular template (based on some earrings I already had, so I knew they wouldn’t be too big to wear) and laminated the result (leaving a reasonable margin, partly to prevent the laminated layers from separating and partly to leave room to attach the actual earring hooks). The laminating plastic is thin enough that I could just use a needle to punch through that ‘margin’ to insert the hooks.

The problem with using XML tags for decorative purposes is that anything requiring symmetry is always thwarted by the fact that the closing tag is always one character longer than its opening counterpart: there’s no way to make your <tag> and </tag> line up exactly. I’d already encountered this problem when making Christmas cards for colleagues last year, too:

First drafts of an XML-ish Christmas card

While hand-lettering makes it easy to compensate for the asymmetry with creative kerning, the result doesn’t quite look like XML any more.

There is something iconic about markup, though, beyond the punning potential of <head> tags on earrings or hats, and <body> tags (or perhaps <front/> and <back/>?) on tshirts, and so on. Maybe it’s just the retro cool of monospace text; or maybe it’s more that it appeals to our desire to name things, to label them, to impose on them our interpretation of them.

Whatever the reason, I’m pleased to say that the earrings got a good receptionl! I’m happy to make more for other people on a best-effort basis, but equally happy for other people to copy the idea — and I note that someone else is selling a much more robust-looking version over on Etsy. XML: the iconic designer brand that anybody can use!