Beyond the Code

I thought I'd share with you some of the more interesting items being given out in the exhibition hall at TechEd Developers 2006. In addition to the normal pens and t-shirts, there are a few more, less obvious freebies on offer:

From Intel, USB rechargeable torches

From both Perforce and Business Objects, balsa wood toy planes

From Macrovision, a pen incorporating a bubble wand

From ATX Software, ping pong balls

From Ivar Jacobson Consulting, insulated travel mugs

and the pièce de résistance, from PreEmptive Solutions, black boxer shorts

This is the kind of thing journalists get sent on a daily basis. This is meant to make us write nice things about companies. From a press release from BridgeHead Software:

"UK companies are markedly less willing than their US counterparts to seek out and embrace new techniques for managing archived data over the long term."

And they wonder why we don't write about them.

I'm in Barcelona for Microsoft's TechEd Developers 2006, where they're going to tell us how wonderful Visual Studio, SQL Server and the .NET framework are. Much the same as they did last year, then.

Sarcasm aside, they've split the developer event from the IT Pro (you can't call them Sysadmins) event this year, which is good, since it makes the conference smaller and more focused. While programmers often do need to do some system administration, especially during testing, the day-to-day business of the two roles are different in all but the smallest companies.

I'll be writing up the main stories of the event over on Builder UK, but I'll blog the other goings on of the conference right here. Right, Keynote speech, here I come.

You'd have thought that, having invented it, Tim Berners-Lee would know how the web worked. The Web Science project he wants to launch will study the World Wide Web, how it's working and what's being done with it. This might sound a bit pointless -- surely he just has to look at the web to see what people are using it for? -- but Berners-Lee has a very good point: there are so many different things being done on the web, in so many different ways, that it's difficult to tell what works and what doesn't. None of this is anything to do with the W3C's traditional area of markup languages, protocols and specifications; it's about the human aspect of the web.

The technology that makes the web possible is deliberately simple, open and flexible. This gave it a low barrier to entry -- particularly compared with Ted Nelson's stillborn Project Xanadu -- and meant that people were able to run in all directions with it. It also meant it was impossible to keep track of what applications people used it for. Sure, most people creating the web know how a web site works, but ask them and chances are they'll start talking about HTML.

It's important for anyone creating an information system -- even those that don't involve "computers" -- to realise that people aren't going to use it in the way you intended, and they're even going to use it in ways that never crossed your mind. A prime example of this is the Short Message Service on mobile phones. This was added to the GSM standard, almost as an afterthought, with applications like voicemail notifications and telemetry in mind. Had you told the engineers responsible that years later SMS would be used by skool kdz txtN ea othR 2 sA SUL, I imagine they'd have been horrified. Why go to all that bother, when you can use the same piece of equipment to just talk to each other?

We're an inventive species. Our ability to take something designed as a tool for one thing, and turn it into a tool for something else is how we make progress much of the time. For this to be truly successful, we should take the time to look back at ourselves to see where we're doing this well, and where it's not going so great.