However there are differences between Foursquare/Gowalla and Facebook. Facebook has, time and time again, played fast and loose with its users’ information and privacy. The general vibe I get from Facebook is that they’re only providing a service in order to get data from you that they can exploit and/or sell. Over the last year I’ve gradually reduced the amount of information I have on there, the amount of information I add and the level to which I share it. I just don’t feel comfortable with the site – yet, with any social media service, you have to be where the people are in order to make the connections so I keep my account active. I tend to use it as a back-up service to Twitter… somewhere for conversations that can’t be constrained into 140 characters (which is kinda weird of me because, as someone pointed out the other day, my Twitter stream is unlocked so EVERYBODY can see that and do what the hell they want with it).

Facebook Places isn’t available in Canada yet but they HAVE enabled the privacy settings so you can go in there and preemptively set your privacy before it comes North of the border. This is important even if you don’t intend to use the service.

You need to click Account->Privacy Settings->Customize Settings. Then there are three different settings to adjust:

• “Things I Share->Places I check in” determines how widely your whereabouts will be broadcast. Do you want everybody to see where you are? Just your friends? Just a subset of your friends? Nobody at all? The most private you can get with this setting is to click on “Custom” and select “Only Me” from the list box

• “Things I Share->Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” will cause your presence to appear in lists of people at an establishment/event. Depending on Facebook’s implementation, this might override your “Places I check in” setting and let people outside your friends list see where you are. If you’re interested in your privacy you probably want to disable this setting

• “Things Others Share->Friends can check me in to Places” is super-important. It’s the geo equivalent of having other people tag you in photos. Worse in fact. If someone checks you in as being down the pub in the middle of the afternoon there’s nothing to show that you WEREN’T actually there. At least with a photo other people can look at the photo and SEE that you aren’t in it. If this option isn’t disabled then your whereabouts and your privacy are totally out of your control. I suspect all but the most cavalier of users will want to set this option to Disabled. Even if you never intend to use Facebook Places yourself, you should go and turn this setting off

Good luck and be careful out there.

The first computers I ever built (and then disassembled and then rebuilt) never seemed to gather any dust. But over the last 5 years I’ve seen an increasing amount of dust gathering inside my computers’ cases. I have no idea why… it seems to have corresponded roughly to when I moved from the UK to Canada so maybe Canada is a dustier country

Over the last year I’ve seen the internal temperatures in my current desktop PC steadily rising:

Before cleaning

These are the Core0 – Core3 temps and two copies of the hard drive temp.

So last week I opened up the case and vacuumed it. I cleaned all the vents, sucked the dust off the fans, sucked all the dust bunnies out and cleaned the processor heatsink.

The heatsink was problematic. The PC has a Core2Quad processor (big heatsink) in an Apevia X-QPack mATX case (small case). As a result there’s not much space and the narrow nozzle of the vacuum cleaner was never going to get anywhere near the heatsink without me disassembling the case. Rather than do that, I used the poor man’s compressed air duster (ie I blew through a straw) and blew the dust out of the heatsink vanes then vacuumed everything up.

With everything reassembled and allowed to run for 24 hours, the temperatures dropped to:

Temperatures after cleaning

Those temperatures are Core0 – Core3, “CPU temp”, “motherboard temp” and the hard drive. [Actually, at time of writing, they're 5C below those numbers - but today's a much colder day]

Not sure where the “CPU temp” and “motherboard temp” sensors are being read from. The case has a front panel temperature LCD and two free-floating sensors which I’ve attached to the top of the hard drive and the chipset heatsink… but those are currently reading 26 and 47 degrees… so apparently not related.

To complicate things slightly, between taking the two sets of readings I also upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 (more about that later). I’ve seen some reports on the internet from people who noticed the reported sensor temperatures dropping as a result of the upgrade. I did the upgrade a day before I cleaned and didn’t see any fall in reported temperatures afterwards so I don’t believe that that’s a factor in the improvement that I’m seeing.

So there you have it: a year’s worth of dust had clogged up my CPU heatsink and fans to elevate temperatures by approximately 15C. If it’s been over a year since you opened up YOUR computer’s case then maybe you should give it a spring cleaning too?

We saw that we can use a common hashing algorithm (the algorithm I used is called MD5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5) to turn “donkey” into “9443b0fceb8c03b6a514a706ea69df0b” and I told you that there’s no programmatic way to turn that back into “donkey” – the hashing algorithm is one-way. However, if you did last week’s homework and pasted that ciphertext into a search engine you’ll have found you got many returns. Why?

A little history: when the commonly used hashing algorithms were created, they were designed to be computationally “expensive”. That means they take a lot of processor power (and hence time) to calculate. This was deliberate – a user only has to login occasionally so it didn’t matter if it took 2 or 3 seconds to check their password. The excellent side effect of this delay was that it prevented a hacker from trying to guess your password by brute-force. Even assuming you’d been silly and used a dictionary word as your password, a hacker couldn’t break into your account by trying every word in the dictionary as he’d be there for a very long time. A quick calculation with my machine’s dictionary says, taking 3 seconds per attempt, it would take 3.4 days to attempt every dictionary word. Unfortunately for hashing algorithms, computers have got very much faster in the last 20 years – even my little laptop can generate a hash in 0.04 seconds. Suddenly the time to run through the entire dictionary has shrunk to one hour and our apparent security has vanished.

Things get even worse though. If you have a dictionary word as your password and I have access to a hash of it, I can tell you your password in just 5 seconds. I paste the hash into a search engine – one click on “search” and I have your password. What’s happened is that hackers have done all the hard work up front – they’re already run entire dictionaries through the common hashing algorithms and they’ve posted the lists of words and hashes on the internet where search engines have found them and indexed them. So although it’s technically true that we can’t take a hash value and “unhash” it, hackers do have access to functionality that can perform a similar job – for single words.

“OK”, I hear you say, “but I’d never be stupid enough to just use a plain dictionary word as my password – I’ll put a number on the end of it”. Right then… that might help, but it might not… 8339e38c61175dbd07846ad70dc226b2 and 2484b2d1aec71de2ca87f88af401a6af are hashes of dictionary words with numbers on the end and both are indexed by Google (vote1234 and password99 in case you can’t be bothered checking). Although if your password is “aardvark50″ then you’re safe as its hash 0913c211b2eaa2a8b3b11fe53bdf9b4f doesn’t appear on the internet (until now of course because Google will index this blog post and your secret will soon be out!).

So how should we, as programmers, prevent our users’ passwords being cracked like this? The answer is surprisingly simple. We concatenate the password with some other information before we hash it.

The best approach is two-pronged. Firstly we concatenate with a fixed nonsense string eg “78g^&FB%V^&I” – this ensures that, however simple a password the user has entered, we’ve created something that’s pretty much guaranteed to never have existed as a string before in the history of the Internet. Secondly we also concatenate it with a piece of information that’s specific to that user on our site eg their username. This is just icing on the cake to make sure that the hashing is different for each user – so if two users use the same password then their hashes will be different. The procedure is the same as before: we apply this “super-hash” to the password that the user initially sets before we store it in our database and we apply the same “super-hash” to the user’s password attempt before we check it against the database entry.

So now, if user “smith” sets their password as “donkey”, the hash that we’re storing is the hash of “smithdonkey78g^&FB%V^&I”. Good luck finding an online hash dictionary that contains THAT!

Incidentally, my previous post is currently the second return on Google for “9443b0fceb8c03b6a514a706ea69df0b” (the hash of “donkey”) and I’ve actually had incoming traffic from that as a search term, so we KNOW that people are actually using search engines to crack hashed passwords like this. Consider yourself warned and make your code secure.

But password storage is a dangerous area. Every month we hear about a high-profile web site being hacked into and all the user accounts made public together with their passwords. This is not good – especially as it’s fairly common for users to keep the same password across all of the sites they access.

Good web site security is about defence in depth. Yes, you set up security so that hackers hopefully can’t get access to your site’s files and databases. But you shouldn’t stop there. Any site whose password list has been published has made one other simple and easily avoidable mistake: they’ve made the mistake of storing their users’ passwords in plain text.

Storing passwords in plaintext is a dangerous mistake that’s easily avoided – there’s a much smarter way to do it and it involves something called a hashing algorithm. A hashing algorithm is a form of encryption which is ONE WAY i.e. you can convert the plaintext to the encrypted form (know as ciphertext) but you can’t convert it back again. For example, if you start with “donkey” and run it through a well-known hashing algorithm you end up with “9443b0fceb8c03b6a514a706ea69df0b”. In theory, there’s no easy way to go the other way and turn that back into “donkey”.

But how the heck does this help us with passwords? Surely we’re going to have to turn the encrypted password back to plaintext in order to check it? Nope – there’s a neater way of doing this.

When the user initially sets their password, we run the hashing algorithm on the plaintext password and generate a hashed version of it. We store that hashed version in our database. When a user attempts to login, we hash their password attempt and compare THAT to the ciphertext of the previously hashed password that we’ve stored. Because the hashing algorithm is repeatable, if the password they attempted to login with matches the password they setup originally, then the two hashed ciphertexts will match too and we’ll successfully validate their login.

There’s no excuse for not knowing about this design pattern – Unix & Linux systems have been handling user passwords in this way for the last 30 years.

When you implement a system like this, there’s one thing you CAN’T do. And that’s recover a password that a user’s forgotten. Remember that the hashing algorithm is one way. You can’t turn “9443b0fceb8c03b6a514a706ea69df0b” back into “donkey” when the user can’t remember their password. As a result of this you should, as a user, be very wary of any websites which offer to email you your password when you’ve forgotten it. If they can email your password to you then they’re not using a hashing algorithm to store it in their database and therefore their database is not secure should a hacker get access to it. As a programmer, if you use a hashing algorithm to safeguard your users’ passwords then all you can do if a user has forgotten their password is to generate a new one for them (or let them set a new one themselves). This is generally done via an email that you send them – either containing a new random password that you generated for them or (better still) a one-off link that gives them access to a special page on the website where they can set a new password.

OK then, we’re sorted are we? Everything’s secure and protected from the hackers? Unfortunately not.

DO NOT IMPLEMENT WHAT I’VE JUST DESCRIBED.

There’s a flaw and I’ll tell you in a few days what that flaw is. In the meantime, you might like to paste that ciphertext into your favorite search engine and wonder about what just happened.

The talk was given by Linda Rising and titled “Who Do You Trust?”

Trust is the most important factor in implementation of the Agile software development methodology because social dynamics & interaction are the biggest cost driver in software development – bigger than better tools and methods.

A previous talk of Linda’s has covered the Agile placebo effect… does Agile software development work because we THINK it’s going to work? We go into an Agile project expecting things to work.

She started with a disclaimer that, amongst other things, this is a “Presentation of a disturbing nature”. A nice introduction that got everybody’s attention.

In Computer Science, we never do experiments… proper scientific experiments with a hypothesis, observation etc - seeing results from a change in development methodology doesn’t prove anything.

She introduced the Robber’s Cave Experiment – conducted at a campground in Oklahoma in 1954. Two teams of 12 year old boys, same backgrounds, balanced teams. Both teams were transported to the campground separately, didn’t know the other team existed.

The experiment was conducted in three phases:

Phase I: The 1st week was spent in isolation… each team quickly “became an us”: gave their teams names, designed a flag, places became “our” swimming hole, “our” firepit etc

Study team gradually let them know the other group existed – but not yet seen. This resulted in immediate division, saying things like “I hope THEY don’t use OUR swimming hole” – even though the makeup of the other group was identical, there was nothing different between the two sets of children.

Phase II: The two groups were introduced to each other and staff organized competitions & events with a winner & loser, prize trophies and money. Deliberately designed to create friction between the teams.
The trophies were displayed in the common mess hall where both teams could see them and talk about their victories.

As phase II progressed, one team burnt the other team’s flag – then the other team retaliated and burnt their flag… eventually staff had to intervene.
Then they started raiding each other’s cabins at night. More retaliation led to rocks being stockpiled for use defending themselves against attacks. Again staff intervened and had to bring phase II to an end.

Phase III was about having fun together. They scheduled non-competitive activities eg watching movies, eating together.

(At this point Linda compared this action to corporate team building exercises – you bring together different parts of the business, different teams, and just expect them to enjoy mingling)

Phase III failed – the teams were still far apart – there were food fights and yelling. If you’ve ever been on a corporate team building exercise, this probably isn’t a surprise to you.

Linda pointed out that you might expect behaviour like this if the team divisions had been based on things like religion & politics.
But we also see it in development teams and other relatively trivial settings.
For example, during software project recaps, you hear people talking about “us”, “them”, “the others”.
eg something trivial like maybe some of the developers got a T-shirt, others didn’t. Maybe this was caused by a distributed team. The T-shirt is not the actual problem but is a symptom of thinking about the distributed team differently. – “oh, I forgot to order enough for the guys in Victoria”.

We see the “others” as the enemy. And yet we think of ourselves as unbiased & rational when it comes to decision making.

Psychologists see this as a hard-wired reaction – so it must have an evolutionary benefit. Our ancestors had to answer lot of classification questions quickly: is this food edible or not edible? Is this person a friend or a foe? The decisions are made very rapidly.

Another experiment: conducted by Jane Elliott, a 3rd grade teacher in Iowa in 1968. She was trying to give her class of white kids a feeling of what it might be like living in the US as a black person. She separated the class into blue eyed and brown eyed children and told them that it had been scientifically proven that blue eyed children were better. There’s a TV documentary you can watch about this experiment here: http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

The part of the outcome that’s interesting to us right now is that the kids were all as good as each other and yet the kids who were set aside “knew” that they weren’t as good as the others – they bought into the labelling.

Research says managers sort employees into winners/losers as early as 3 weeks after starting to work with them. At an Agile conference Linda asked a table of managers if this was true. They said “well yes, but we are always right”

If you get two groups of people who disagree on an issue and give them the same paper on the subject to read about it, both groups will say that it supports their point of view. We see what we want to see. The managers alter whatever facts they see about the employee to suit the decision that they’ve already made.

Everybody makes mistakes. However we forgive our own behaviour but not others. “MY intentions were good even if I missed the deadline” – people’s judgment of their own performance is “contest sensitive”, but their judgment of other people’s behaviour is absolute.

So people get stereotyped. But people are complex. When we label people we lose appreciation of their other talents. BUT interestingly we also do this to ourselves.

Eg: take a group of maths students and give them a hard test. When the test starts with a male/female tick box, men outperform women – as this is the gender stereotype. Remove the box and give the same test and both genders perform the same. Similar research playing video games has shown that both genders will give up easier if they’re playing as a female avatar.

Another example is the Solomon Asch experiment:

A group consisting of one test subject and a number of actors are asked simple questions related to line lengths on cards. The test subject is always asked last.
For the first couple of rounds, everyone agrees then the 1st actor gives a clearly wrong answer & the others agree with them.
A significant number of test subjects go along with the incorrect answer too.

Recent research shows that if you put the test subject in an MRI machine you can see that there’s no debate going on in their head – they’re not thinking “should I say this – I don’t want to look out of place”. They actually see the wrong line as correct. The actors set the filter for the line lengths & our brain believes it.

So if other people can lead us to believe that about line lengths, how about more significant things?

So what have we got now…

• We’ve shown that stereotypes change our behaviour.
• And we’ve shown that our behaviour affects other people’s behaviour.

And so we have a self-fulfilling prophecy: we judge our employee as not being very good and treat him accordingly and so that’s how he behaves. Hence the managers at the Agile conference ARE always right about their judgments.

So how do we change this – how do we use these things to our advantage.

Rule #1 of good management: catch your team members doing something right and praise them for it.

Linda mentioned she’d been to project retrospectives where they always started by repeating Norm Kerth’s Prime Directive: “Everyone is doing the best job they can”. It seems cheesy but after a while the team members start to believe it’s true & eventually they create that in the team – everyone IS doing their best.

Back to the boys in the campground: the study team created problems that the groups must work together to solve.

They cut off the water to the campground and set the boys to search for the “leak” along the mile long pipeline. Required all the boys to work together. They discovered a clogged valve… they said “we” found it & celebrated together.

Other tasks followed that required everybody to work together to accomplish, culminating in a ‘last night of camp’ where they sat around the same camp fire and alternated singing songs for each other. Both groups insisted on going home on the same bus and the team who’d won the most prize money bought everybody milk-shakes.

Linda suggested maybe this experiment wasn’t surprising… after all the boys were all very similar. The experiment was repeated in 1963 in Beirut with a mix of Christians & Muslims. During phase II there was serious fighting and three group members threatened a member of the other group with knives that they’d stolen from the camp kitchen. The study team intervened and cancelled the experiment – there was no Phase III. To be expected?

However the groups were NOT divided by religion. The three group members who had the knives were all Christians – and the opposing group member that they threatened was also a Christian.

In this case, group membership trumped religion even though the religious divisions were hundreds of years old and the groups had only been together for a week.

So there are two responses here that are hard-wired. One is that we quickly judge people into groups as “us” and “them”. The other is that we like to work in small teams and we like to collaborate.

So to resolve conflict it’s necessary to cooperate on shared goals.

Similarly to the campground, this must combine the entire organization – it can’t just be development.

Agile practices help with this:
- face-to-face communication increase cooperation. Strongest effect of any variable
- Stand-up meetings
- pairing – produces better result than either individuals could achieve individually
- short iteration timeboxes means everybody gets frequent goals to work together on
- project retrospectives

Liking someone is not required for these activities to pay-off
Liking someone is different from “respect”

Social interdependence requires:
- common goals
- outcomes affected by actions of others
- individuals only reach goals if others reach goals

In a collaboration, nobody succeeds unless everyone does. Therefore efforts must be coordinated.
The coordination produces respect.
We all like being trusted and respected.
It follows then that Agile teams get trust and respect all day and are therefore happy

This has a positive impact and results in effort improvement in both individuals and the group.

Linda has a book out called ‘Fearless Change’ that documents design patterns for introducing change into organizations. People tell me I’m lucky at draws but last night was one of my unlucky nights… in the door prize raffle the guy immediately to my right won a copy and the guy immediately to my left won a copy and I left empty handed. Although I did leave with a head full of interesting information!

I’m taking advanced PHP at BCIT on Saturday mornings at the moment so couldn’t get there for the morning sessions but raced over to Discovery Parks for the afternoon. Very very glad I did – some interesting sessions, great discussion and met a lot of interesting people.

I photographed all the flip charts I could find and took notes in the sessions I attended. I’ll post the notes I took once I’ve edited them so they make a least a little bit of sense. In the meantime, here’s the flip charts:

Helen’s selling soap at a cart in a mall down in White Rock so wasn’t going to be able to see the parade as it passed near home but the day’s relay actually started (at a rather hideous 6:30am) down in White Rock just opposite her mall. So we decided to both go down to White Rock and see it there together.

Of course we were lateish leaving home. Took the side-roads through White Rock to avoid any traffic snarl-ups and by the time we got to the mall the parking lots were jam-packed. After getting the car sorted out we ran over to the start… only to be faced by crowds coming BACK in our direction… we’d missed it. Helen started walking down the road after it but a) there’s crowds of people coming back at us and getting in the way and b) the torch is being taken away from us by people RUNNING. Never going to win that battle.

So back to the car. The people in the car next to us had done their homework and knew where the torch was going next so we headed off to the sea-front to try and catch up with it. Parking along the sea-front was nuts… simply nuts. The parking lots were full, the streets were full, the residential areas were full. By the time we’d managed to find a parking spot (you know what’s coming, don’t you?) we’d missed it again. Helen goes into panic mode and we start running down the street after it – but you already know the problems with this, don’t you? We gave it a good try, running along the sea-front for a good ten minutes but to no avail. Defeated, we headed back to the car (which by now was a long way away).

At this point Helen’s getting despondent and realizing that she really rather wanted to see the torch. We checked the clock… 7:20. Torch is in North Delta at 8:35, mall opens at 9:30… hmmmm… we can just about make it there and back.

So off we head back to home (why didn’t we think of this before I’m thinking). We got back to North Delta and parked near the route. We had plenty of time to get a good spot, run into some people we knew and watch as other people turned out and filled up the route. Then the police start driving up and down and the road’s closed. The excitement levels are building as the sponsor’s vehicles pass by – lots of official torch relay bottles of coke and life-size Olympic mascots and… wait… the guy in that truck looks remarkably like John Biehler. Hey – it is! And Miss604 sitting in front of him!

Quite a surprise!!

Then the torch arrived. Pretty cool! But at the end of the day it’s just a guy in funny clothes jogging with a flaming torch. Admittedly not something that you see every day but somehow it seemed a little anti-climactic (or maybe that was just after the shock of seeing John and Rebecca). We all had a good laugh and then headed off for our days and we got back to White Rock JUST in time for Helen to open up.

Some more pictures:

I was pretty depressed about it going into our meeting… I’d only had replies from two of our members and they’d both said “put me on whichever side you see fit”. They were just trying to make life easier for me but it rather short-circuited my evil plans: if they don’t tell me their personal preference then I can’t switch them to the opposite team. And I’d wanted SIX volunteers.

I got to the meeting early and had a quick word with the Chairman and asked him to call me up for 5 minutes before we got to the speakers.

So I stood in the middle of the stage and explained again what we were doing for Table Topics: “we’re having a mini-debate with two minute speeches. The topic is ‘Money is corrupting sports’ and I want 3 volunteers for each side of the debate”. I gestured theatrically with my arms and said “I’d like 3 people who believe that money IS corrupting sports to come and stand on my LEFT and 3 people who believe that money is NOT corrupting sports to come and stand on my RIGHT”. By asking them to come up to the front and stand on one side of me or the other I forced them to make a commitment to one preferred opinion or the other. I got my six speakers up front and then I gave them the twist.

The response was fantastic: some looks of horror, some looks of confusion, some “oh Jon you are EVIL” looks and some wide grins. I explained it again… “the people on my LEFT who’ve come up here because they believe that money IS corrupting sports, I want you to each talk about why money is NOT corrupting sports. The people on my RIGHT who believe that money is NOT corrupting sports, you’ll be talking about why money IS corrupting sports”. I explained that the purpose of the debate wasn’t to persuade people that your personal opinion was right but to make the speakers think and exercise their speaking skills.

I suggested that they think of possible topics during the first half of the meeting and then confer with their team members during the break to make sure that they’re not all saying the same things and to decide on their speaking order.

As I sat down, the person sitting next to me, one of the debate speakers, turned and said “Jon, that is SO evil”. I replied “I know. Awesome isn’t it?” – she grinned and nodded.

During the mid-meeting break, the room was a hive of activity. I could hear people brainstorming ideas and dividing up topics. Non-speaking members joined in – they went over to join with the groups and share their ideas.

Just to add some further spice, I asked for a secret vote before the debate and again afterwards. According to the pre-debate vote, we narrowly believed that money IS corrupting sports.

The first affirmative speaker talked about the Olympics and the vast quantities of money that flows in and out of that – a strong argument with which to lead off. The first rebuttal talked about children and their love of playing sports – a good argument that reminded us that ’sports’ isn’t just professional sports.

The second affirmative looked at superstars like Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant – do they still love sport or have the multi-million dollar paychecks led to their problems? The second rebuttal brought us back to the Olympics again but this time looking at the investments that the Lower Mainland has got out of the event – would we ever have got the Richmond Oval or the Canada Line without the Olympics?

The third affirmative talked about sports gambling and the billions of dollars which change hands based on the results of sports games. The debate finished with the third rebuttal speaker who talked about how money led to professional sports which in turn redefined what was possible in the field of human achievement.

Six great two minute speeches with six great opinions. I was glad I was sitting down to listen because I was just blown away by how well our members stepped up to the challenge.

After the debate the second secret vote said resoundingly that money is NOT corrupting sports. That doesn’t mean that we had winners or losers in our contest though… everybody put on a great performance. Several members said to me afterwards that it was the best Table Topics they’ve seen. I can only take some of the responsibility – the original idea wasn’t mine and it was the amazing performances from our members that really made it a winning evening. It just goes to show that when you shake things up at Toastmasters you really get the best out of your club members.

It’s not a replacement for a laptop:

• it has no USB ports for peripherals
• no multi-tasking (we think)
• limited opportunity to develop applications for it (developers have to work within the walled garden of the AppStore and users have to sync through iTunes)

But it’s too big to be pocketable so it’s not a replacement for a PDA like an iPod Touch.

If I wanted to actually “do” anything then I’d take a laptop along with me, if I wanted to read a book or a PDF then my gut feel is that I’d rather have an eReader (Engadget has a great comparison with the Kindle), if it’s just for casual internet access then a smartphone will do.

I think a major part of the market for the iPad is going to be iPhone users who are finding it too hard to read all the information that they’ve got access to on the screen of their phone.

Besides products, Apple are also great at making markets. Just because few people can see a need for a product today doesn’t mean that they couldn’t take advantage of it if they had one. Lots of Apple fans will buy them regardless, even if they already carry an iPhone and a MacBook around with them. And once they get the product out there in people’s hands in quantity, applications and use-cases will follow. It’s sure to be another winner.

I think most people considering the iPad will already have a smartphone and probably a laptop as well. I think we can also assume that these people carry their smartphone with them everywhere. So, if we’re assuming that technology purchases are made with the intention of simplifying our lives then will you be taking your iPad with you in situations where you previously took your laptop (which I see as a win)? Or will you now be carrying three devices (which I see as a fail)?

Continuing from that… if you’re already carrying your smartphone around with you everywhere, I see the 3G option as unnecessary for most people. Why not save the $130+$30/month (or Canadian equivalent) for iPad 3G access and tether the iPad to your phone? As far as I can see, there’s no definitive statement as to whether or not the iPad can be tethered. But you can bet that any lock-down that Apple put on it will be broken within a month or two and I’m sure tethering is one of the things that the community will enable.

Whilst thinking about phones, one of the features that interested me was the inclusion of a microphone. Whenever I see a microphone on a wireless device, my first thought is of Skype (even though I’ve barely ever used Skype myself!). The lack of a camera might be an issue for some people but, especially now that Apple have graciously allowed VoIP applications to connect over 3G, you could actually use the iPad to make phone calls. It’s probably a little on the large side to replace your mobile phone and the lack of multi-tasking means that you couldn’t talk to someone whilst you get information for them from an email or a webpage but I think it’s an interesting use-case – especially when tied to an unlimited data plan.

Oh, and we can’t talk about the iPad without talking about the horendous name. Everyone seems to have agreed that it’s dreadful.. but then is it much more dreadful than iPod sounded when we first heard it? Heck, look at all the flack that Nintendo took for the Wii and that didn’t stop it flying off the shelves. I suspect in a few months we’ll have forgotten all the feminine hygiene wisecracks and moved on. Breaking out of the i{thing} naming pattern is long overdue for Apple. But the brand recognition of i{thing} is immense… I can’t see Apple having the guts to do it and, as a result, I think it’s actually becoming an Achilles heel of the brand as much as it’s a strength.

It’s a role I’ve done a dozen times before and the format is always the same: the Table Topics Master poses questions and invites members to come up and talk, spontaneously, on the topic for 1-2 minutes. Stuff like “my favorite vacation” or “how would you feel if you had no internet for a day?”. It’s a lot of fun and we hear some great speeches and some not-so-great speeches but it’s always the same format.

This week I’m changing things around and we’re having a debate.

I got the idea from the Toastmasters officer training that I went to tonight. I’ve seen a mini-debate done in Table Topics before but one of the other VP Education officers at tonight’s training mentioned a twist. Something evil. And I’m stealing the idea because it makes me do a little evil happy dance inside.

The subject that I’ve chosen for the debate is “Money is corrupting sports”… a topic that I hope many of our members will feel passionate about one way or the other but also I hope that nobody will feel offended by people arguing against their point-of-view. I chose the subject from an incredible pair of lists at http://www.ada.org.nz/moots.php

So I’m looking for 3 speakers for each side of the debate – I’ve emailed out the subject in advance and asked for volunteer speakers for each side.

Usually with Table Topics you don’t tell anybody the subject in advance… that’s sort of the point. But I need to this week because I want people who are passionate about the subject to step forward. I’ve also warned them that I’d like it to be in the spirit of a normal Table Topics session – i.e. even though you’ve had the question in advance I don’t want you to do a lot of preparation for it.

Except… here’s the kicker…

At the start of the meeting I’m going to tell them all that they’re speaking for the opposite side of the debate to the one that they’ve signed up for.

It’s beautifully evil. But it’s also totally valid. The point of a debate at Toastmasters is not really to persuade people about the opinion that you hold but to make you think on your feet and exercise your speaking skills. Being forced to talk against your personally held beliefs is a perfect example.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the club members. I’ll be sure to post again after the meeting.