alex.mullr.net/blog

I’ve had the chance to play with Plasq’s new beta-invite-only software Skitch for about a month now, and it’s really great.

At the same time however, it highlights (for me at least) a problem with beta software in general. I’ve been sitting, making silly little pictures, happily using this software. The thing I’ve failed to take into account is that so far, it’s been completely free.

I wonder what happens when I have to pay £15 for the software – chances are, I’ll stop using it… and this goes for everything, including (but not limited to) Gmail, Flickr and Lastfm. As a side note, I actually do pay a tiny amount for some extra features on Lastfm and probably would pay for Gmail if they implemented the same system. So beta software is all well and good, but remember that it won’t stay beta forever (or maybe it will, who knows these days).

And as for invite-only sites and software: keep doing it, but make sure I get an invite – it makes me feel all special inside…

I spent a week at the University of York on a Headstart course – it was in the Computer Science department, so it was a week beginning to learn Prolog and use Alice software. The only downside i could notice was that the university seemed to see it as a week to advertise themselves to me, and i really hate advertising.

Nevertheless, it was so incredibly worth it: the student helpers (Louis, Matt, Rana) were great fun and something i’ve started to notice is that at every university i’ve been to so far, all the undergraduates are all enthusiastic about their course. They even went and set up a Facebook group to post photos and keep in touch after the week.

On Tuesday the 3rd we had a good speech from Helen Bowyer, who works in the emerging technology department at IBM – she spoke on getting information to and from mobile devices via bluetooth, as well as accessibility and technology for disabled people. The connection here is that she is was a recent graduate from York University.

The next day we had a fantastic lecture from Professor John Clarke (ex-government advisor) on security. Some memorable quotes:

• “There is no such thing as privacy anymore” – very topical given the current attitudes towards social networking websites
• “People are not your best asset, they are your worst nightmare” – the example he gave was holding open locked doors for the person behind you. This is very appropriate as it has happened at school a few times now, resulting in the theft of phones/laptops.

I just plain loved it.

On Friday i got a GNER train back from York to Kings Cross (luckily not underwater) and seeing as it was technically my first time on a train in the UK, i decided to give the onboard Wi-Fi a go. A couple of things were immediately evident:

1. It is so incredibly slow – Google Reader actually wouldn’t finish loading, so i had to resort to just reading the news
2. It is pretty expensive – £4.95 for one hour, £7.95 for two hours
3. I had the pleasure of being logged off the connection halfway through, which for me meant the end of my browsing unless i forked over more money – I had my receipt (with logon code) emailed to my Gmail account. Yes, i should’ve made an offline copy, as that would’ve meant i could just keep going, but i didn’t

All in all, a crap experience (except the actual trip to York – fantastic). I won’t be doing it again any time soon – I’d rather use the data connection from my phone, and that’s saying something.