NOTE: you are reading this on NDNL. The new blog is now at http://nilsgeylen.com/blog and you should visit it.

Last weekend, I went to see Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. While the production was local, the cast and crew were largely American. The director was from the US. We had a chat after the show. He said that a month before the US elections, you just had to do a show about assasinating the president. I agreed, and thought: there’s a reason this guy’s living in Europe.

In 2006, there were 11,600 US residents living in Belgium (Dutch source, page 155). I’ve met a few of them (a couple dozen, source: my own memory) and over time, I’ve assigned them to three main categories.

We’re not from here

These are the tourists. They make that very clear. They may be clad in plaid trousers and are often over 100. Sometimes they are younger. In that case they talk about pot and beer a lot, but are too young to have tasted either.

They’re friendly types. The old ones think everything here is cute, the younger ones think everything here is awesome. They’re disappointed when not every city here looks like Bruges. They don’t get how we survive without Burger King.

We’d rather be home

These are the expats. They make that very clear too. They live and work here. Their children go to school here. They have Belgian friends. But… never ever will they assimilate. They’re Americans at heart and only passing through. Often they resent being here.

They’re the preppy types: succesful enough to be sent abroad from work, but not so succesful they were sent to London or Paris. They regret this and tell you quite frankly. They’re disappointed not every city looks like uptown Brussels. They don’t get how we survive without living in the US ourselves.

We wish we could stay

These are the exiles. They don’t need to make this clear – it shows in every way. Exiles live and breathe continental Europe. They drink Pastis and special beers because they like it. They love sitting on a café terrace in the autumn sun. They ride bikes, speak our language.

They’re the outsiders. They were never at home in the US. They’re geeks and dorks, outcasts, punks. They’re often the intellectuals, atheists, freethinkers. They’re socialists or vegetarians. Gays and lesbians. Writers. Designers. Actors. Directors.

Their hearts beat to a gentler drum. An American in Paris, the Gershwin tune. Un’altra canzone.

And every single one of them thinks and hopes Obama will win. So they can have their triumph. So they could go back. But only as tourists. Then they’ll come home again. To Europe.

NOTE: you are reading this on NDNL. The new blog is now at http://nilsgeylen.com/blog and you should visit it.

Things still look a tad garish. Perhaps it could do with a cute header image. Other than that, the retina-scorching hues you see on the blog don’t mean your display has gone kaput overnight. To the contrary.

NOTE: you are reading this on NDNL. The new blog is now at http://nilsgeylen.com/blog and you should visit it.

Cloud computing is an often used term these days. But what is the cloud precisely? Who owns it? How do we access it? And more importantly, are we using it as we should? As far as I’m concerned, I think we’ve been doing it all wrong. And now it seems Windows will come to the rescue.

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is to be understood as

a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet (‘in the cloud’)

While that definition remains vague, many of us are using cloud services already.

Typically, we think of the cloud as the combination of (free) services that you use to store and manage your data, such as Gmail or Flickr. After all, the cloud is considered a synonym for the internet.

Technically, however, the cloud could be anything from Google data centres to your own host. But even the ISP which stores your emails and your own machine can be considered part of the cloud: whenever you sync your email to Gmail, when you use P2P networks, when you post crash reports or usage stats (e.g. scrobbling to Last.fm or Wakoopa) you are, in a way, contributing to the cloud.

4 ways to the clouds

SaaS

The term Software as a Service (SaaS) is often used as a synonym for cloud computing (although strictly speaking it isn’t). It implies the ad hoc access to online tools that work as applications. Of course, you will always need another application to access the tool. Google Docs for word processing is an example of that: you do not need to install Word to write a letter – but you do need a browser to access your Google account.

RIA

Rich internet applications are another way of accessing the cloud. In that case, you do not even need a browser. With Adobe’s AIR for instance, all you have to do is install the framework, get the app you need, and you’re set. An AIR app runs on your desktop and communicates with your online service of choice. Twhirl for Twitter is an example of that.

Widgets

Much like RIAs, widgets run on your desktop. Unlike RIAs they do not strictly need a framework. With Vista or OS X they run natively within your operating system. Yahoo! Widgets works in a similar way, although you still need to install the Yahoo! widget engine (formerly Konfabulator) to run them. And Google has its own sidebar with widgets too. In a way, widgets are just skinned miniature apps.

Software with services

A final way of accessing the cloud is one that sounds very new and very vague, but promising as well. In fact it’s what Google is doing with Chrome and what Microsoft would like to see with Silverlight. The idea is not to use a separate framework (like Adobe’s AIR), but to present the content in a browser as a separate process.

This becomes most clear in Chrome, where you can unlock a service (say Gmail) and have it run in a separate application window, independent from the main browser process. Silverlight, as I understand it, is also a way to present rich internet content in the browser. So far, I haven’t seen any breakaway usages like with Chrome, but that may soon change.

Current rumours about Windows 7 will have us believe that the successor to Vista will not feature any pre-installed, standalone applications for email or multimedia (read: Mail and Media Player). Instead, Microsoft is looking at a more enhanced way of using their online counterparts: Windows Live and Office Live and Silverlight.

And now, apparently, Microsoft is about to introduce yet another, newer incarnation of Windows – aptly codenamed Cloud. This mystery product seems to involve “software plus services where web-based components supplement functionality of the main desktop software”.

Personally, I think that is in fact the way to go.

The fog

It’s clear that the cloud is everywhere and nowhere. Like the internet, no one owns it. That implies the data is yours… but the service provider owns the tools. In the end, that approach locks you in as much as any proprietary desktop software package would have: if the service changes or collapses, your data is gone.

Furthermore, at any given moment I may have some documents with Google, my mindmaps could be with MindMeister and my wiki with MindTouch. That way, the cloud becomes a thick, dense fog. And if I’m having trouble managing my own stuff, what about people trying to connect with me, using other services and frameworks?

Think: if you want to share your data in the cloud, you have to invite collaborators, viewers, etc. Now you’re not only locked into the service, but into a maze of passwords and guest accounts and you’re not sure what happens next.

The solution

When setting up this new, self-hosted blog, I chose to have my lifestream self-hosted too. That way, I take back part of the cloud and I can share it as I see fit. I may set up a wiki at some point, and if there was some document sharing software, I’d use that too.

The way I see it, I need storage for my data, an on-the-fly ‘sotware interface’ to access it and an app to tie it together. That app could be a browser like chrome or perhaps this new Microsoft Cloud ‘software with services’.

That way, I would have my files on my server, use an online service to edit it, and have my desktop application as a gateway. But the files I edit are mine. They’re not locked in and they don’t die when Google does.

Of course, owning your part of the cloud, also means paying for it. But in my view, I think I’d rather pay for that ‘connective software interface’ than for yet another web 2.0 service that effectively owns my data (Flickr locks you out of downloading your own pics, for instance, when your account expires).

I may be all wrong about this, but one thing’s for sure: the cloud, we’re definitely not in it yet.

From now on, NDNL will no longer be updated. I’ve set up shop at nilsgeylen.com and the new blog there resides under the subfolder /blog

nilsgeylen.com/blog

Hence also the new blog’s tentative title: dotcomslashblog. The creativity!

Most functionality is in place; bear with me as I trod along trying to make things work and/or look good.

Should you update any feeds?

The short answer: yes, that would be best. Here it is.

The long answer: you certainly should if you’re subscribed to the wordpress.com feed

http://nodependenciesnologo.wordpress.com/feed

I’ll double-post for a while, but that feed will soon be phased out.

You could also switch if you’re subscribed to the FeedBurner feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ndnl

I’ve already redirected that one to syndicate content from the new domain, but it’d be stupid to stay with that. That one too may be deleted at a certain time. My apologies if one or the other pops up twice in your reader.

Then again: most people already ‘grab’ their stuff from ‘the cloud’ – getting their content here and there, from Twitter or Friendfeed – without sticking to silly outdated things like RSS.

And to think we were convinced we’d be able to keep up.

So, in any case, head on over to the new address and subscribe – if you like. Using your browser will subscribe you to

http://nilsgeylen.com/blog/feed

whereas using the feed icon will subscribe you to the new feedburner feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dotcomslashblog

If all that makes sense.

What should you expect?

Nothing – that always works out to your advantage. Let’s just say I intend to post more, but also ‘more seriously’. The terms ‘grown-up’ and ‘higher quality’ sprang to mind.

Incidentally, that is also why the blog is in a folder, not in the root: I tend to think that blogs are on their way out and the main domain will reflect that broader choice of new, more appropriate services and modes of communicating. But as it says on the home page, more about that soon.

If you don’t like serious, there’s also a stream and a tlog. The former self-hosted on Sweetcron, the latter still over at Tumblr – for now.

Oh, and a hat-tip to my mate Allen from Sustainable Hosting, who’s made this switch a cinch.

Obama. Whatever you think of US elections, the US, or elections in general, the name resonates.

And it inspires. Today, I saw this video of French artistes “La Chanson du Dimanche” on Smaran’s tumblelog.

But Obama has been inspiring designers and other graphics artists as well. Notably so. The funny thing is that when it comes to McCain, most stuff you get to see looks like this.

Ugly and traditional. It’s almost like a Microsoft versus Apple thing, because when you search for Obama artwork, you get the most fascinating results.

Here are a couple examples.

An interesting read on Counternotions that I didn’t get to until today deals with why Apple doesn’t do concept products (as in ‘concept car’ or ‘Microsoft Surface’).

Most fascinating is the video that shows one of Apple’s rare (is it the only ever?) concept products: the ‘Knowledge Navigator’, a laptop-style device that connects to a proto-internet and scrapes and organizes data from various (’online’?) sources.

It’s interesting to see how most of these notions have by now been implemented, either by Apple itself or by various other hard and software providers.

Notebooks

Laptops, notebooks and subnotebooks – they’re everywhere these days. And they’re getting smaller, thinner and lighter. We now have the MacBook Air, the EEEPC and recently the new Dell Mini 9 – among many, may others.

Email, calendar, todo

We get all our productivity tools online these days, from web-based email to AIR apps or widgets for our todo lists. With GMail, Basecamp, Remember the Milk… we often don’t know what to do first – nevermind the social media networks.

Make sure to take in that upper right icon: does it stand for ‘multimedia’? If nothing else, our current computing environment is based on almost soley that.

Search

Well, does this need clarification? Although… intelligent search has seen some interesting advances, based on the concept of semantics, ranging from Cuil’s new magazine-style interface over Powerset’s new algorithm for searching Wikipedia, to the amazing Freebase Parallax.

Maps

Google maps is old news, Google Earth looks great, but it’s mashups that are talk of the town, such as Twittervision. But think of combining those… in your GPS.

Or how about mashing Surface with WorldWide Telescope, and Google Earth 3D with PhotoSynth… Maybe it would get you something like this:

It’s nothing less but handheld augmented reality but on your iPhone: excited yet?

Touch

This is an area in which concepts abound, but real products are still scarce. We’ve seen the Minority Report-style interfaces and Microsoft’s Surface, but those are not widely available, for now. Closest we’ve come today are the iPhone and the HTC. Obviously, rumours of a MacBook Touch abound…

Video and chat

Video is everywhere, as are video video chat, and online video streaming. Now micro blogging has been heading towards video as well – think Twitter meets YouTube – in services such as Seesmic, and it’s gone mobile with Qik.

Apple may not ‘do’ concepts, but if this was their vision of 2008, you’d certainly want them to do more of those.

Cool factoid for skeptics everywhere.

A Dutch public broadcast TV show that deals with consumer rights has aired an episode that exposes the ‘astrological consultants’ of another (commercial) TV network as frauds.

Obviously, that wasn’t hard to do.

Yet, as a result, the commercial station cancelled their show, claiming that they’re “investigating how the production company selects and hires these consultants”. No taking the blame then, but at least this crap’s now off the air.

This will no doubt upset the dozens of viewers who paid inordinate amounts to call in and have their problems analysed and receive bogus ‘advice’ in return.

The upside however is that this creates another precedent in the ‘war on malignant daytime television’.

In the past, similar fraudulent programmes have been widely criticized and cancelled, or at least augmented so viewers stand a fair chance and won’t be scammed. This one means another win for the cause.

Only one English article so far covers the story.

To read more on debunking and astrology, visit the James Randi Foundation or Phil Plait’s excellent pages on astrology.

In all likelihood related: The End of Television

Part copy editing, part technical writing and part training, creating good user guides may be one of the hardest kinds of writing. Creating a user guide that works for anyone – no matter their technical skills – and presenting that content in an elearning or online environment is even harder.

It’s what I’ve been trying the past year or so.

Simple 1, 2, 3

Recently, I’ve been looking into new ways to present this kind of content. In itself, that’s not hard. You describe simple steps in the simplest way: click here, go there, do that.

In practice though, things are not that easy, and there’s a lot to take into account, such as terminology and consistency. Also, using numbering or bullets, evidently seems the way to go, but what do you number? Every action, every click? And speaking of: what exactly is an action?

Also, think of what a tutorial should look like. Type, spacing, indenting… The way you design a manual makes up for half its efficiency as well.

Click that thing

Say you’d have to explain someone how to open a simple app, such as MS Office’s Excel.

As soon as you try for yourself, you’ll notice that there are lots of ways to do that. The question is: which one is standard, which one is the simplest?

Moreover: how do you put into words things like ‘go there with your mouse’?

Or something like:

start typing the first letters of the app’s name or a part of its name and wait a bit because your search box will automatically suggest a number of possibilities and the more you type, the shorter that list becomes so it’s easy for you to make your choice and, oh, making your choice can be done either by clicking or hitting enter…

See? Definitely not that easy.

My Way?

For now, I’m using the simplest method I can think of, like here for opening that app:

But I wonder how this would pan out when trying to describe distribution lists or pivot tables?

Or the Apple Way?

While researching this, though, I came up with one of the best manuals I’ve seen in a while. Accuse me of fanboism all you like, but evidently it’s from an Apple user’s guide, in this case iWork.

Luckily, all our courses have screenshots and screencasts as well. But that doesn’t mean the procedural bit shouldn’t work either – and work at its simplest and its best.

Have you ever written or tried writing any of these? What’s the best/worst manual you’ve ever seen? Links and screenshots would be welcomed.

Disclaimer: I didn’t make these up. Dutch tech site Webwereld (Web World) did. They’re interesting enough though, so I’m listing them here. First paragraph sums up their post, second is my opinion. Fair use, right?

1. Firefox is owned by Google

Not using IE because it’s a product of mega global biz corp Microsoft, but using FF instead because it’s supposedly independent, is an invalid argument. The greater part of Mozilla’s income is based on Google ad revenue. According to Mozilla’s financial statements, that figure is as high as 85%, Webwereld points out.

I agree, but then again: every organization is “owned” by someone. Even the foundations and the not-for-profits have to bow to some industry rep some time. It’s part of wanting to play the game: you gotta get in to be part of it. Or: can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – sad but true.

2. Firefox is unsafe

Right, you thought you were using this cutting edge, sub-underground piece of software that no hacker would ever be interested in, but by now FF is popular enough for the trolls to pounce on. Webwereld refers to the recent vulnerabilities in version 3 that were exposed only hours after its release.

We’re bound to see this with every piece of successful software. The days that OS X was used by only a couple of happy few are long gone already. And it wouldn’t surprise me if it were to happen to some of the more popular Linux distros as well. Hell, even Twitter gets spammed to bits and no one I know has ever heard of it.

3. Firefox neglects older OS’s

FF3 won’t run on any Windows version prior to 2000 or OS X before 10.4, simple as that. Opera, Webwereld claims, will even trudge along on Windows 95.

Obviously, this is part of how fast FF is evolving these days. Look at all the features of the latest version and you’ll soon realize that some of these tools weren’t even available a few years back. You can’t expect backward compatibility of new technology to an infinite extent. On the other hand, they’re right: Camino for instance, even runs on 10.3 – not a lot of software does that.

4. Firefox is slow

This one speaks for itself. Granted, a lot of this may have to do with running buggy extensions, but apparently Mozilla itself owned up to this fault and promised to bump the Javascript speeds by forty – because apparently it’s really needed.

And I agree. Firefox 1.5 was fast, 2 shuddered, 3 has almost ground to a halt no matter what you say. Again, extensions may be blamed, but that shouldn’t matter. I still love FF on my PC but nothing beats Safari (besides WebKit apparently) on the Mac (or on PC even) – and boy, is Opera fast too – pity it’s so ugly.

5. Addons create instability

This is like shooting sitting ducks: add-ons are the first and foremost cause of any issue you may encounter with FF. And, as Webwereld states, it’s a bitch to fire up in SafeMode and try every extension one by one to discover which one is the problem.

Exactly. And if it’s a combination of add-ons, you’re screwed. But like one of the commenters said on the Webwereld post: “You can’t blame Firefox for badly written add-ons” and I agree. Maybe Mozilla should screen the these more, like Apple does with the iPhone App Store. Or maybe one day, Flock will finally work out its issues and bring us a browser that has it all, right from the box.