Data Circle

MySociety has an interesting post about growing pains of WhatDoTheyKnow, a popular site for tracking Freedom of Information requests. It’s well worth a read if you’re involved with building any applications with Ruby on Rails which need to scale to thousands of visitors per day and you don’t want your servers to turn into a pile of molten metal. I did find this quote particularly depressing though:

“Ruby’s memory manager never returns memory to the operating system”

That has certainly put me off using Ruby on Rails for the time being…

Mapumental is a cool new service brought to you by the brainboxes at mySociety with some help from 4ip. Basically it allows you to see exactly where in the country you can afford to live (based on “average” house prices) and still commute to a given place of work.

Unfortunately you need an invite to get access to the interactive site, so you’ll have to make do with the teaser video for now. However, I can confirm that the system is one of the coolest and potentially most useful sites I’ve seen in ages. Hopefully there will be some improvements to come, some of the things I’d like to see include:

1. Ability to set a start time which isn’t 9:00am, for those of us who have to be in work earlier, work shifts or are students with lectures at varying times each day.
2. Rent data as well as house prices, as the latter doesn’t help much if you can’t afford to buy or the banks won’t give you the credit you need. Not entirely sure how this would work as house prices are kept at the Land Registry but there is no equivalent for rents.

A slightly quieter story which has been doing the rounds this week is the news that Yahoo has disabled new registrations for GeoCities accounts and announced that the service will be shut down later this year.

I personally have fond memories of GeoCities, when I first started on the Web most of the sites I visited regularly had a geocities.com address—though this was before the company was acquired by Yahoo. GeoCities was one of the first places where you could get free hosting without too much hassle, and it certainly stayed around longer than most. Most of all I will remember the small ‘g’ logo which followed you as you scrolled down the screen, and the dozens of forum posts across the Web asking how to achieve the same effect on other sites.

I suspect Yahoo’s reason for killing off Geocities is simple: the service costs money to run and doesn’t bring in much revenue—I’d be very surprised if it breaks even. Yahoo desperately needs to cut costs and turn back into a profitable company, and Geocities is a service which can quickly and easily be jettisoned to help achieve this goal. Yahoo would of course like you to upgrade to their paid web hosting service, but at $9.95/month you can find a much better deal elsewhere.

Of course, if Yahoo had any sense they would have let Microsoft buy them when a good offer was on the table, instead of trundling along as an independent company trying to cut costs in a desperate attempt to please aggrieved shareholders, who have seen the value of their holdings plummet.

Further Information

• GeoCities will close later this year (Yahoo Help)
• RIP Geocities – Yahoo kills off ‘your home on the web’ (Guardian Unlimited)
• Yahoo pulls the plug on GeoCities (BBC News)
• GeoCities demolished (The Register)

As most people in the IT industry have probably heard by now, Oracle is going to buy Sun. As with most big business transactions, the official purchase hasn’t taken place yet, but with a definite offer agreed upon it is unlikely to unravel before the deal closes in the summer.

The acquisition throws up all sorts of questions, but the one that seems to be raging at the moment is “what will happen to MySQL?” In my mind, there are several possibilities:

1. Business as usual: MySQL continues as part of Oracle, just as it has been part of Sun. Oracle gains in several ways, but principally by having another outlet to offer support contracts. The other major benefit to Oracle is being able to offer its database software as a natural upgrade path for businesses who feel that they have outgrown MySQL, in the same was that SQL Server is seen as an upgrade from Microsoft Access. Oracle could also use MySQL as a recruitment tool, in that external developers who commit regularly to the base source code could be offered jobs as Oracle developers.
2. MySQL is sold or spun-off into a separate company: This would enable Oracle to recoup some of the money it paid for Sun, and avoid having two products which could potentially compete with each other. On the other hand, having MySQL owned by another company could be saving up a dangerous competitor for the future.
3. Kill off MySQL: It wouldn’t be too difficult for Oracle to try and kill off MySQL by redeploying all the existing paid developers and letting the project languish with no official support or development. However, given that Oracle has paid a substantial amount of money for Sun, I think an attempt to kill off MySQL – as opposed to selling it – is unlikely to happen. Furthermore, the core of MySQL is open source, so there could always be a fork, albeit not under the MySQL name, if Oracle did attempt to quietly brush it under the carpet.

Sun’s other big property, Java, on the other hand will probably be in safe hands with Oracle, as it already relies heavily on the technology for some of its middleware products. There’s also Solaris, and with it OpenSolaris, which may or may not go anywhere.

Ironically, at the time of writing there is still a huge image on the MySQL home page (number 5 on the list of images) telling users to “get off proprietary databases and save millions now!”, which links to a TCO Savings Calculator showing Oracle costing nearly twenty times as much as MySQL. I wonder how long that will last?

Further Reading

• Will Oracle kill MySQL? Who cares? (The Register)

After some time with no posts, I’ve decided to revamp Data Circle, with a new theme and a commitment to post at least one technology commentary each week, increasing slowly as I get closer to handing my thesis in and don’t have to dedicate every evening and weekend to that. I’m intending for weekly posts to be longer and more thoughtful, with the occasional news item in between, rather than just announcements of new software versions and other tidbits.

An interesting post from the WordPress development blog popped up in my RSS reader a couple of days ago, announcing the Summer of Code students who will be working on the software over the next few months. Whilst I was interested to see the potential new features and improvements, as I run WordPress on a number of sites, the final sentence of the post was what caught my attention:

“Seriously, we didn’t get more than a couple of applications from female student developers. Where are all the geek girls?”

That’s a bit disappointing, though perhaps not surprising—and the fact that it’s not surprising is disappointing in itself.

In my mind, there are three potential reasons why women don’t go into IT:

1. Concious discrimination from men: This can manifest itself in a number of ways, from men thinking “X is a girl/woman, and so can’t be up to the job” to paying women less than men for the same job or denying them promotional prospects.
2. Environmental factors: I suspect that the IT environment can be off-putting to some people, including women in particular. This could be because the industry is dominated by men, so women don’t feel like applying for jobs in IT, creating a vicious circle, or because there aren’t many strong female role models. I find the latter argument a bit odd, as I look up to people who are successful in business regardless of their gender, but perhaps I’m just awkward like that.
3. The type of work available: It’s possible that the type of work available in IT appeals more to men than it does to women, for biological or social reasons.

Clearly concious discrimination is something which should be stamped out—apart from anything else it’s both illegal and unfair to pay someone less for the same job or deny them promotion simply because of their gender, or indeed any other biological reason. I don’t know if concious gender discrimination is widespread within IT, as not being female I’ve yet to encounter it, but I can’t remember any of the geeks I know making discriminating comments about women in the industry.

Environmental factors are somewhat harder to change, as they’re not necessarily intentional—the fact that the gender balance is heavily weighted in favour of men doesn’t mean that every man working in IT wants to keep women out at all costs. One way round the lack of women in IT being a vicious circle is to discriminate in favour of women in some way, e.g. by mandating that a certain percentage of IT workers are female or by offering better salaries, incentives and bursaries only to women. The problem with this solution though is that it simply reverses the flow of discrimination against someone else, as discrimination in favour of one group is also discrimination against everyone who isn’t in that group. Even more dangerous is the possibility that it actually reinforces the view held by some people that women are not as capable with IT as men, because if they were surely they wouldn’t need all this special help to get into the industry? I don’t agree with the latter view, but I can see how people could jump to that conclusion. I also don’t think it’s fair to promote people based on their gender, whether that be male or female (or anything else, if you want to reject gender as an concept).

I think the type of work available is the least problematic, and probably also the easiest to solve. Every single company relies on IT to some extent, so even if you want to stereotype women as working in retail for example, there are still plenty of opportunities for IT positions.

So, what is the best way to encourage more women into the IT industry? Some suggestions of mine include:

1. Tougher enforcement of anti-discrimination laws: There’s no excuse for paying people different salaries/wages if they’re doing the same job, but it still happens and to my mind that’s a failure of the system to haul up discriminating employers and bosses in court and punish them for breaking the law.
2. Don’t fall into the trap of positive discrimination: It seems like a good idea at first, but it causes an awful lot of resentment and can ultimately undermine the perception of women in an industry.
3. Publicise the female-friendly factors of IT more: IT is an incredibly flexible industry—to a large degree you can work where you want, when you want and how you want (in theory at least). I can’t think of a better industry for women who are looking to start a family. Before anyone jumps on me for encouraging gender stereotypes, I know not all women have or want to have children, but many do, and the IT industry offers opportunities to combine childcare with getting back to work, which I think is good for both the employee and the employer.
4. Don’t just look at the numbers, look at the reasons: One of the big issues is that people look at the percentage of people in the IT industry who are female, and then panic because the gender ratio isn’t “correct” (which often means 50:50). No industry is ever going to have a perfect gender balance, and there might be perfectly good reasons for any inbalance. For example, men tend to be, on average, physically stronger than women, so it’s not surprising that there are more men than women in the construction industry. It may be that the nature of work in the IT industry appeals more to men than women because, ultimately, our brains work differently to a certain extent.

Of course, being a bloke I might be completely wrong about all the points above, and perhaps there is a lot more concious discrimination in IT than I think.

Around this time last year, I made some technology predictions for 2008. You can read the full details in the original post, but I have summarised how true (or false!) the predictions turned out to be here.

What will happen

Huge surge in demand for online video: The BBC’s iPlayer service has already been causing consternation amongst ISPs who complain that the popularity of the service is increasing the demands for bandwidth from customers. From the statistics I’ve seen, iPlayer is still small fry compared with general file sharing, but that could all change in the next twelve months as more and more content becomes available through the major media players.

I also predicted that other channels would follow the BBC’s lead in providing online access to at least part of their programming schedule. This hasn’t happened yet, mainly due to the endless bickering over Project Kangaroo and whether it impedes competition or not. With the credit crunch taking a particularly heavy toll on media companies, we may well see Channel 4 pull out altogether in order to save costs.

Crunch time for Digital Rights Management: I predicted that DRM would face a backlash and be on its way out by the end of 2008. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened, though there have been some positive moves in this area.

Victory in the format war: The format war ended in February this year, with victory for Blu-ray after Toshiba dropped its support for HD-DVD. I didn’t call for either side in my prediction, though Blu-ray did appear to have slightly more support to begin with. I still expect it to be some time before Blu-ray overtakes the current DVD format, partly because many people already have large DVD collections and also because of the cost of Blu-ray players has yet to come down to a sensible value. Combined with the credit crunch, which is affecting the sales of electronic devices, I suspect it will be several years before Blu-ray overtakes DVD as the standard format for releasing films. Finally, the last VHS manufacturer has only just stopped creating tapes, so DVDs may well be around for a similar length of time.

What won’t happen

Linux on the Desktop: As I predicted, Linux still hasn’t captured a significant (which I rather arbitrarily defined as 10%) proportion of the desktop market. However, Ubuntu and Fedora have both made huge strides towards making Linux a platform which is accessible to everyone, so perhaps we’ll see more people switching in 2009.

Super-fast broadband in the UK: The argument is still raging in the UK about whether we should have fibre to the home and who should pick up the tab for installing it. BT is understandably concerned about making a return on its investment if it has to build the infrastructure and then be forced to share it with competitors at small profit margins, and Virgin Media is only likely to install fibre in areas with dense populations where it can sign up sufficient subscribers to recoup its costs. For the moment, it looks like the UK will remain a first world country with second rate access to the Internet, lagging far behind our competitors across both the Channel and the Atlantic.

That just about wraps it up for 2008—I’ll be posting predictions for 2009 in the next couple of days.

Further reading

• Inquiry into Project Kangaroo (Competition Commission)
• Pull out of Project Kangaroo, broadcasters told (Guardian)
• High definition optical disc format war (Wikipedia)
• Last major VHS supplier ejects from tape biz (The Register)
• UK behind in global rush to broadband (Guardian)

In an unexpected move, France’s competition regulator has ordered Apple to allow companies other than Orange (which currently has exclusive distribution rights within France) to sell the coveted iPhone handset in the country. Whilst I find this somewhat ironic, coming from a court in a country which is well known for maintaining state monopolies in many industries, it’s pleasing to see that regulators can occasionally do their job and intervene to protect competition within a market.

Hopefully this decision will be followed in other countries, including here in the UK where o2 currently has exclusive rights to distribute the iPhone. There’s no guarantee that this will happen, and the French case isn’t binding on UK courts or regulators (though I’m sure it would be taken into account) but it’s a positive move nevertheless.

Personally, I find it a bit ridiculous that your choice of handset should determine your operator, or vice-versa. Consumers should be free to mix and match whichever combination they want and to switch without being penalised (other than the cost of a contract or new handset of course). That’s by far the best way to drive down prices and ensure that customers get a good deal, knowing that they can switch to another provider or handset if they’re not happy with their current situation.

Of course, even if you could use the iPhone on any operator, you do have to wonder whether it is worth forking out hundreds of pounds and possibly signing up to an expensive contract for the dubious privileges of being able to worship Saint Steve and being a target for muggers. But hey, it’s the principle of fair competition which counts.

Further reading

• France strips Orange of its exclusive iPhone rights

For those of you running WordPress blogs, you might be interested to know that version 2.6.1 has been released. The highlighted improvements for additional languages, IIS users and installations with lots of plugins don’t provide much benefit to me personally, but it’s good to see that development is still pressing ahead at a decent speed. As always, a full list of changesrent a car bulgariaландшафт is available, and my advice would be to upgrade as soon as possible.

The Open Rights Group have recently launched a fundraising drive, under the name ORG-GRO and the slogan “Protect your Bits”. Conceived three years ago at OpenTech 2005 with 1,000 people pledging £5/month in financial support, the ORG is often seen as the UK’s equivalent to the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a well-known US lobby group working for digital freedom.

At present, the organisation seems to be doing a lot of good work on a very small budget. The only thing that worries me at the moment is that ORG gets their office space for free. Whilst this is obviously a fine thing in theory as it saves the organisation a significant amount of money which can be spent on forwarding the aims of the group, it does raise the possibility that they could be kicked out of their office at short notice and forced to find somewhere else.

I personally don’t support the Open Rights Group at the moment, because environmental organisations seem to sweep up most of my spare funds, but if you have a fiver a month to spare and want to see your digital rights protected, then you should sign up to support ORG now. Just one minor note though, if at all possible you should setup a standing order rather than a PayPal subscription, otherwise a proportion of your donation goes towards propping up a credit institution in Luxembourg.

Other people supporting the Open Rights Group

• John Leach