Online Banking
I'm not sure what is going on in the UK but here in Australia online banking is the norm. I'd argue banks big and small are passionately pursuing digital innovation - something that keeps us all on our toes.
There are several drivers.
First, IT and particularly smartphone penetration is amongst the highest in the world. Banking has increasingly become a companion activity. We see this every night in our data. People sit down to watch TV and start paying bills and checking balances.
Second, banks here invested ahead of demand - especially CBA. Take contactless terminals - they are everywhere. In the US you will struggle to find them. What that means is ideas like tap-and-go payments made possible by Kaching suddenly have very broad appeal. We've also invested many hundreds of millions of dollars creating one of the most modern core banking platforms in the world. What this means is instant visibility into account status and real-time payments. This not only puts people in control of their money, but makes the digital world more secure and meaningful.
We are past the digital tipping point. A new world of banking is upon us - a world that will start on small screens everywhere. The key to unlocking this innovation isn't dollars. They are important and they must flow at some point, but in reality they are realitvely small in the context of any Banks overal P&L.
The crux of the issue is culture. To fully capture the online opportunity any business needs to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship - one that harnesses their natural strengths in things like Risk and Security -- and applies them to new challenges. THe culture needs to be based on "yes" principles rather than "no". Most importantly, it has to be maniacly passionate about customer - about surprising and delighting them.
Once the right culture is in place and tested, innovations like Kaching and the CBA property app flow. Interestingly, culture is hard to replicate and hard to compete against.
It also makes for a pretty fun place to be.
Book Review : Two Non-Fiction Books on Destruction
A relatively recent book on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, including information straight from the man himself. I got this hoping for an exciting and twisty crime story about a master criminal, but it turns out the Madoff’s scheme was stupidly simple – he lied about some stuff and keep lying. He wasn’t even very clever about it, but somehow managed to keep the house of cards upright for decades.
Henriques’ book covers a huge amount of ground – going back to Madoff’s childhood upbringing to his peak as a pillar of the New York community. A huge amount of research has been distilled into a very readable story – just about everyone who ever met Madoff seems to have been interviewed, and enough time has passed that the full effects of the scam have been revealed. I just wish that the crime was more ingenious.
Recommended if you like this sort of thing
Death From the Skies! By Philip Plait
Plait runs the popular Bad Astronomy blog which is far more interesting than it has any right to be, this book is even better. There are many books that seek to explain the wonders of the universe in an entertaining way, but Death From the Skies! is the only one that takes the “How could this kill us all” approach. From supernovas to comets, Plait runs down the numbers and details exactly what would happen to the Earth should such misfortune strike (spoiler: it doesn’t look good).
Plait clearly explains the concepts behind familiar astronomical terms and breaks down the magnitude (usually way to large large) and probability (usually not small enough) of each occurrence. It’s all very entertaining, but not something you want to read straight before going to sleep.
Highly recommended
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Book Review : Cryptic and Oceanic – Two SciFi Short Story Collections
A mammoth collection of scifi short stories by the prolific Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has an old-fashioned manner and his stories remind me strongly of the tales from the 50s and 60s that I grew up reading – this is not a bad thing.
Not every story is a corker, but most are good and some are downright excellent. My one complaint is that they tend to be rather constant in tone and style, I finished the book yesterday and the stories are all starting to blend together in my head.
Recommended if you like this sort of thing
Oceanic By Greg Egan
Another collection of Scifi short stories, this time by Greg Egan. Egan is a programmer, and his stories are hard-as-diamond tales of artificial life, strange physical frontiers behind every atom, and clear-eyed researchers heroically hunched over keyboards in darkened rooms. Great stuff, and this collection really shows his ferocious imagination and range as a writer. The title story (full text here) in particular is a very well done piece that packs a lot of depth into a few pages.
Highly recommended
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Objectives and Key Results
At work we plan each quarter by writing Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs for short. The idea is that there are a number of broad objectives, then specific quantifiable and measurable key results that achieve them. So I thought I would try writing some personal OKRs here, though for the year rather than just a quarter. These are more a draft than anything fixed, so I would much appreciate any advice about how to achieve them, what else I should try to do, or anything else.
It is a bit late, this already being 2012, but that is like work too. The top level points are the objectives, the second level are the key results.
- See some more of the world.
- Visit the east coast of the US / Canada, and see at least 3 of the 5 friends I know over that way.
- Visit at least 2 more European countries.
- Visit Scotland.
- Visit 2 more places in the UK
- Improve my dancing (and enjoy it)
- Learn at least one new dance this year (probably Balboa)
- Go out for social swing (Lindy Hop) dancing regularly
- Take some classes / workshops to improve my blues
- Do some swing and/or blues with friends while I am back in NZ visiting
- Go to the London Swing Festival again
- Work out where I stand with God, and what that means.
- Discuss more with some friends. Not sure exactly what.
- Finish reading some of the books that are on my shelf, and write up some responses to them.
- Any other advice?
- Improve my social life, and build and maintain a good group of friends with whom I regularly do things
- Host at least 3 social gatherings (parties / dinners / whatever) at my flat
- Hmm, not sure what else to do towards this, any suggestions?
- Improve how I dress
- Buy a suit, or at least something a bit more formal, for the odd occasion when that might be necessary
- Hmm, not sure about this one either, any advice?
- Maintain other hobbies
- Bake something for other people at least once a month, preferably more often.
- Do some work on my existing programming projects such as theQuotebook and Fridge.
- Do some work on electronics projects, such as the paper keyboard I started on last year, some kind of floor instrument, or something else based on the Teensy.
Well, does anyone have any suggestions about how to achieve some of these, or other things I should aim for?
Knowing When The Funnel Doesn't Matter
Most marketers in tech - and most inudstries -- obsess over the funnel. At what point and what rate are we converting people from awareness to consideration to buying and loyalty. There are as many funnel taxonomies as there are views on how to move someone through the funnel.
But does the funnel matter for all purchases? Arguably not. Think of a good burger - lots of awareness, lots of loyalty, not much of a funnel. The argument has long been that the funnel matters most for any capital purchase. But as Aaker points out, as industries mature and we accept basic quality and performance benchmarks exist, funnels start to collapse. Relating his experience of replacing his computer, he says "there was no funnel experience, I passed by awareness, comprehension, and preference and skipped directly to purchase. Makes me wonder about the logic of many marketing programs as well as accompanying analytical efforts to measure results."
Knowing where a funnel matters most, and where it matters less, is critical. Aaker makes a key point that for many, brand awareness up front might not even matter and can be replaced by recommendation. I've long argued that most marketers would do well to focus on replacing awareness with recommendation.
How do you drive recommendation?
Toby's Estate in NYC
For those of you looking for a Flat White in NYC, look no further than Toby's Estate. You'll also be able to experience Pro Barristas pouring hot water into a ceramic double dripper from a Hario kettle, or pulling a carefully calibrated shot of espresso from one of only two La Marzocco Strada machines found stateside.
Crème brûlée
I got a blowtorch for Christmas, and what better way to break it in than to make Crème brûlée?
(I think it is pretty obvious this is my first attempt, but it tasted just fine)
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Reading Old Books
I have been going through a phase of reading old, out-of-copyright books – partly because I find it fascinating to see how various literary forms evolved over time, partly because if you go back far enough the books read like science-fiction – alien concepts and strange customs abound, partly because it allows me to affect an air of being well read, but mostly because you can download them for free from Project Gutenberg and I am a cheap bastard.
A Voyage to the South Sea by William Bligh
A while ago I read The Bounty by Caroline Alexander, a modern account of Captain Bligh’s famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons expedition to Tahiti aboard The Bounty. It focused mainly on what happened after everyone got home again. This book is the tale told by the man himself, compiled by Bligh from his logs kept during the voyage and it is a fascinating read. Even if there wasn’t a (spoiler alert!) mutiny, it would make for a cracking story as Bligh has an eye for both nautical detail during the voyage and a keen interest in how Tahitian society (very different to the English system) worked after The Bounty arrives.
And breadfruit, the dude was obsessed with breadfruit.
Once the mutiny occurs, the story turns into an epic struggle of survival as Bligh and his few remaining crew find that people treat you differently when you turn up on their island without a fully armed three-masted collier anchored just outside their reef.
It is a real pleasure to drop into the world of a competent person doing an interesting job. Since it is taken directly from his meticulous logs there is a charming matter-of-fact style as things unfold without foreshadowing or subplots. The one problem for a modern reader is that it is almost impossible to avoid hearing the text being read in James T. Kirk’s Captain’s Log voice; the style is exactly the same.
A Journey of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
This early novel in the form of a diary purports to be a day-to-day account of the life of a young London man during the 1665 outbreak of the black plague as people were dying in their thousands. Defoe did actually live through the plague but he was only 5 at the time, so the story is fictionalized but obviously carefully researched. Defoe uses the experiences of the narrator to highlight how various aspects of society (the rich, the poor, etc) reacted to the plague, maintaining a detached tone while horrible things are occurring on all sides. The thing that struck me the most was the general atmosphere of resigned bewilderment that permeates the book – nobody in pre-germ theory London really understands what is going on but society continues on as best as it can while people are dropping dead and whole streets worth of houses are empty or contain only corpses.
After reading lots of disaster fiction (The Day of the Triffids, Dawn of the Dead, etc) I was heartened to see that people do not automatically devolve into angry, paranoid mobs during a real life events that kill a large percentage of the population, although plenty of isolated complete bastardry apparently will occur.
The Battle of the Safes, or, British Invincibles Versus Yankee Ironclads by George Augustus SalaAnd now for something completely different. During the Paris Exhibition of 1867 a public relations spat broke out between a British firm of safe makers and an upstart American firm as to who made the safest safes. This was apparently a big deal in an age when people kept large amounts of cash on hand.
The American firm challenged the British to a public demonstration where each firm nominated a crack team to break into the other’s safe in the shortest possible time. Everything should be simple but the Americans (boo-hiss) keep changing the rules in their favour. Eventually the contest comes to an unsatisfying conclusion but everyone can see that the British (yeay!) have scored a great moral victory.
This is a short, enjoyable, one-sided account of an inconsequential event, filled with all kinds of intrigue and skullduggery. Nothing really gets resolved but it doesn’t matter unless you are really into safes (and the illustrations are great.)
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One Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is something I'll write about more soon. In the meantime, I just stumbled across this quote that is thought-provoking:
“Every one of us can send emails on Sunday night, but how many of us know how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon? If you don’t know how to go to the movies from 2 to 4, you’re in trouble because you’ve just taken on something that unbalances life, but you haven’t rebalanced it with something else.”
Ricardo Semler
Capturing Video at the Speed of Light
When I was a child I used to amuse myself by imagining how things would look if light moved at a few meters per second. I thought it would be cool if you could walk into a dark room, turn on the light and watch as the light spread throughout the scene. Wielding a flashlight would be interesting – you could easily make curved beams.
Now these guys have built a camera fast enough to show the same effect:
Of course, they do cheat a bit by only taking a 1 dimensional slice at a time and relying on the fact that they can repeatably fire identical pulses of light to make their images. Still this is exactly what I imagined it would be like.
Now someone needs to build the high wattage laser targeting system capable of taking out houseflies without blinding humans that I invented when I was 9.
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Foo Fighters
I unexpectedly went to the Foo Fighters concert yesterday.
Click to enlargeUnexpectedly because I wasn’t planning on going, but a friend had to pull out and I bought her ticket. That was also unexpected, because I don’t really dig the Foo Fighters.
I mean, I think they are OK. Acceptable. Competent. But lacking in that spark that I look for in a rock band.
The weather was not good, it had rained all afternoon and Western Springs Raceway was already soggy when we turned up so we staked a spot on the terraces and watched the support acts. We missed local heroes, Cairo Knife Fight, a band I know nothing about except that bFM name checks them constantly but never actually plays their tracks.
The second support act was Fucked Up – a canadian punk/death metal outfit who should have been terrible but come over very well. The lead singer left the stage and spent most of the set wandering around the crowd hugging people and occasionally drinking their beer between verses.
Next came the highlight of the evening for me – Tenacious D. For a joke band they did a tight set and Jack Black is genuinely funny on stage.
Finally, the Foo Fighters. Although they are not my favorite band, you have to respect a group that are prepared to play for almost 3 hours, even if 20 minutes of that was Dave Grohl nattering to the crowd. They played all their hits (after 17 years they have had quite a few) and seemed pleased to be here. The crowd loved it and even the rain let off to let them play. I can understand why Grohl is so popular, he comes across as a sincere and decent person. In my book that is a strike against him as a rocker, but I seem to be outnumbered.
Despite the rain I had a great time at the Foo Fighters. Not enough to buy their music, but I certainly got my money’s worth.
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Oakura font
Community halls are not
usually photogenic!
In March 2011 we went on a family holiday to Taranaki and while driving around Mt Taranaki one day we came across this community hall in Oakura. Community halls aren't particularly interesting, as a rule, but I definitely approved of the font used on this one. I've been unable to find the actual source of the font anywhere and I've always wanted to learn how to make a font, so I decided to make my own font, based on the letters I had.
Fonts are almost always a work in progress. I've got this one to the point where it now has all standard english upper and lower case characters, numerals and many items of punctuation, so it's time to release it more publicly.
If you like the font but there are particular characters you want added, please e-mail me and I can probably add them fairly easily. I'm also very open to constructive criticism. I want to make things more consistent and I think the numerals are fairly ugly at present. There are definitely elements where my sources (the letters A H K L O R and U) result in a clash of forms where they meet in a derivative character - after all those aren't normally the characters one would start with!
This is not expected to be used for general text: it's for headings and decorations. A font for general text is enormously more work and needs much greater consistency than this.
The original letters have been preserved with only minor differences.
The font has been built by drawing each letter as an SVG drawing (using Inkscape) and importing that into FontForge which has been used to manage the metrics, and for producing the final TrueType file.
The current version of the Oakura font is available on Gitorious. More specifically you can download Oakura.ttf if you're not interested in the source images for each glyph.
The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License version 1.1 (or, at your option, any later version). You may also use it under the terms of the CC-BY license although that is less permissive. These license things are all very complicated, but essentially they mean that you may use and modify the font and it is not necessary to visibly credit me, and your use of the font in no way restricts anything about any document you create with it. The full license details are here if you're curious.
I'm happiest with the uppercase, apart from X, V & Z. The letters t & f should match at the crossbars and the ascenders for h, b & d should probably match the ones for i, j, k, l & t, but how that should affect n, m, p & r? ... and q?
Zero Email
Love what they are up to at Atos. While banning email might seem extreme, it might be the only way to drive change quickly.
“We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”
Bob & Doreen
Thought you might enjoy this.
Seeing Clearly
I'm a big fan of Evernote. If you are too, try out Clearly in the Chrome store. Great way to reduce the clutter and read.
A Time for Angry Nerds
In one of those must read posts over at HBR the case is well made for a few more Angry Nerds.
Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse…..
…in 2008, Apple announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Third-party developers would be welcome to write software for the phone, in just the way they’d done for years with Windows and Mac OS. With one epic exception: users could install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and then each individual app was to be vetted, at first under standards that could be inferred only through what made it through and what didn’t. For example, apps that emulated or even improved on Apple’s own apps weren’t allowed.
The original sin behind the Microsoft case was made much worse. The issue wasn’t whether it would be possible to buy an iPhone without Apple’s Safari browser. It was that no other browser would be permitted…
….Developers can’t duplicate functionality already on offer in the Store. They can’t license their work as Free Software, because those license terms conflict with Apple’s.
The content restrictions are unexplored territory. At the height of Windows’s market dominance, Microsoft had no role in determining what software would and wouldn’t run on its machines, much less whether the content inside that software was to be allowed to see the light of screen…
…tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world. Why would we possibly want this to be how the world of ideas works, and why would we think that merely having competing tech companies—each of which is empowered to censor—solves the problem?
This is especially troubling as governments have come to realize that this framework makes their own censorship vastly easier…
…A flowering of innovation and communication was ignited by the rise of the PC and the Web and their generative characteristics. Software was installed one machine at a time, a relationship among myriad software makers and users. Sites could appear anywhere on the Web, a relationship among myriad webmasters and surfers. Now activity is clumping around a handful of portals: two or three OS makers that are in a position to manage all apps (and content within them) in an ongoing way….
….If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.
Taking Back Your Attention
Great post from Tony over at The MIX. Key points for taking back your attention include:
- Let your deepest values become a more powerful guide to your behaviors
What do you truly stand for? How do you want to behave, no matter what? Keep those commitments front and center through your days, both as a source of energy and direction for your behaviors. - Build deliberate practices
Set up ritualized behaviors you do at specific times until they become automatic. For example, begin by doing the most important thing first in the morning, uninterrupted, for 60 to 90 minutes. Make the start time and the stop time inviolable, so you know exactly how long you're going to have to stay the course. - Create "precommitments" to minimize temptation
Our capacity for self-control gets depleted every time we exercise it. Turn off your email entirely at certain times during the day. Consider working at times on a laptop that isn't hooked up to the Internet. Do this for the same reason you should remove alluring foods from your shelves (or avoid all-you-can-eat buffets) when you're on a diet. - Start small
Attention operates like a muscle. Subject it to stress--but not too much stress--and over time your attention will get stronger. What's your current limit for truly focused concentration? Build it up in increments. And don't go past 90 minutes without a break.
Another Panorama
Click for the big view
Here is another panorama made from shots from my cell phone, this time from outside of the brand new Viaduct Event Center. It is surprising to me that Hugin managed to stitch together the constantly moving waves in a fairly convincing manner.
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Jumping Frogs – Using Python to Solve Puzzles
A few months ago I came across the following puzzle in a video game I was playing:
Three frogs are happily hopping along a narrow board together when they meet another group of three frogs traveling in the opposite direction. These frogs can only move in the direction they are facing, and only if there is a space directly in front of them. Additionally, a frog can jump over the frog in front but only if there is clear space on the other side to land in.
How can the frogs (moving one at a time) pass each other and continue on their way?
Of course, this is a hoary old puzzle that most people come across and solve as children. It should be only a couple of minutes work with a pen and paper to confirm that it is possible to exchange both sets of frogs but I wouldn’t be much of a programmer if I used a piece of paper where hundreds of dollars of computer equipment would do just as well.
To solve a puzzle like this programatically requires three things: a representation of the current state of the problem, a way of generating every possibly legal move from a given position, and a way of figuring out when is a good time to stop.
Firstly, the representation of the board is a simple python list:
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start = [1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1]
Frogs traveling right or left are represented by “1″ and “-1″ respectively. Empty spaces that frog can move into are represented by “0″. The advantage of this representation is that you can calculate the new position of a frog by:
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newPos = pos + (representation * distance)
where pos is the current index in the array, distance is the size of the hop (either 1 or 2) and representation is either 1 or -1.
Next, we need a way of generating legal moves for a given position:
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def legalMoves(board): moves = [] for pos, piece in enumerate( board ): jumpmove = pos + (piece * 2) move = pos + (piece) if ( piece == 0 ): continue if (not (( jumpmove < 0 ) or ( jumpmove >= len(board)))): if (board[jumpmove] == 0): t = list(board) t[pos] = 0 t[jumpmove] = piece moves.append(t) if (not ((move < 0) or ( move >= len(board)))): if ( board[move] == 0): t = list(board) t[pos] = 0 t[move] = piece moves.append(t) return moves
Now we need a way of keeping track of all board positions we have seen, so once we find the target we can print the states that led to the solution:
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def evalAll( current, target ): next = [] for a in current: n = legalMoves(a[-1]) for q in n: t = list(a) t.append(q) if ( q == target ): return t next.append(t) return next
This code keeps a list of lists, each sublist being it’s own list of the sequence of moves investigated so far. For each sequence of moves, the next legal moves are discovered and new sequences are added to be investigated the next time this function is called. Technically this is called a breadth-first search because at all of the current legal moves are investigated before moving on the next stage. This is a very simplistic way of doing the job, but in this case the puzzle is small enough that it works well enough.
Finally, a simple wrapper that we can use to set things up and return the final result.
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def solve(start): temp=[[start]] end = list(start) end.reverse() while(temp[-1] != end): temp = evalAll(temp, end) return temp
So now we can do this:
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print solve([1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1]) [[1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1], [1, 1, 0, 1, -1, -1, -1], [1, 1, -1, 1, 0, -1, -1], [1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 0, -1], [1, 1, -1, 0, -1, 1, -1], [1, 0, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1], [0, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1], [-1, 1, 0, 1, -1, 1, -1], [-1, 1, -1, 1, 0, 1, -1], [-1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, 0], [-1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 0, 1], [-1, 1, -1, 0, -1, 1, 1], [-1, 0, -1, 1, -1, 1, 1], [-1, -1, 0, 1, -1, 1, 1], [-1, -1, -1, 1, 0, 1, 1], [-1, -1, -1, 0, 1, 1, 1]]
Success!
You might say this is a waste of time since you figured out the problem in your head. Good for you, but try this on for size:
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[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1]
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