I could do something sensible like resolve to save some money, get fitter or lose some weight. But everyone does that, and most of them end up abandoning it after January, just like I would.

I’ve resolved to do something that’s not too easy, but is at least plausible and fun. Since I’ve already decided not to do a several week holiday this year I might as well give me a target to get me out of the flat, and the country.

So, here goes:

By the 31st of December 2008, I resolve to have visited each of the 27 member states of the European Union.

I’ve had this idea in the back of my head for a few months, and it was originally ‘visit each capital city for a day.’ The version above allows more wiggle room (notably allowing me to count the seven countries I’ve already visited if I need to, even if Greece is a stretch since it was over fifteen years ago.)

Still, it’s going to be interesting if I really commit myself to doing it. And, barring any disasters, I plan to give it my best.

At least it makes the progress post easier, here’s the first one:

With 134 non-working days left I still need to visit 20 countries (27 to do then in all ’08.)
Countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.
Countries I’ve visited pre-2008 are in grey, countries visited in 2008 are scored out.

I had this problem during the festival season last year and I expect it’ll be as bad this year, although the problem isn’t just with the festival sites. All I want from a listings website is the ability to really browse to see what’s going on. I find this impossible on most sites, I’ll try and outline the issues I normally have:

Don’t make me search.
I want a option to list everything. I don’t want to have to search for an event type, date, or artist. I don’t care how many results there are. edfringe.com is terrible for this, there’s no way to initiate any sort of browsing at all unless you use a search term.

Once you’ve provided an option to show everything it needs to be useful, that means not showing four hundred pages with five results to a page (like The List). That brings me to …

Think about your results page(s) and make them customisable
My ideal results page has a good number of events listed, with enough information to make a decision about each one. Perhaps 20 or so in a nice three column format. Ideally I don’t want to have to scroll to read them, but I’ll concede that point. The current layout of events (and even shopping) sites might hint that that sort of layout is difficult but you just have to look at how much information any major news site can cram onto a page to see how badly some listings are laid out.

Not everyone wants that sort of information, so make the pages customisable. At a minimum the user should be able to choose the number of results, ideally they should have the choice to select what extra information gets shown (blurb, times, similar shows, pictures, reviews, etc). In a perfect world there would be a choice of layout too.

Match the paper functionality first
I can do several things with a paper brochure that I can’t with most websites. I can flick back and forth between arbitrary pages to compare things, not just one page backwards or forwards. I can skip whole blocks of pages, and I can always turn the pages regardless of what I was reading at the time.

In comparison most website navigation is limited to the classic First / Previous / Next / Last set of buttons, and these are often put in an awkward place so you have to go looking for them if you’re not at the start or end of the listing. Let’s have more navigation buttons, and make sure they’re always on-screen if your page is scrollable. Add a mechanism for jumping between two marked pages, add a way to move by a selectable number of pages.

There are other things I can do with the paper version, I can mark entries I like, scribble notes beside things, dog-ear pages that interest me, even rip out a page and stick it on the fridge. Whilst that last one is a challenge there should be a print/e-mail option for each page of results. Many sites allow you to mark entries (normally as ‘favourites’) and some allow you to take notes, but most force you to click through to an events page to do so. I should be able to take notes and make marks on the results page — just like starring/unstarring messages in GMail.

Then add in all the extra features
I’m not trying to get rid of the extra features and functionality of these sites, I just don’t think they should replace the basic functionality the site is looking to emulate. You need a strong foundation to build upon. Then you can add in searches, preferably a simple search and, if useful, a more fully-featured advanced one.

Advanced search could borrow functionality from the some of the new online calendars, if I can add a calendar event by typing “Dinner at Howies, 7pm Saturday” and it extracts the time/date and location automatically I don’t see why I can’t search with something like “Comedy after 9pm Saturday” or “Play at lunchtime, weekdays”.

Then you can go to town on the recommendations, the randomly selected shows, the “people who like X also like Y” and all the other tools to help people find what they’re looking for.

From there you can look at really leveraging the web, tying the system into the other social websites out there, integrating things into peoples calendars, blogs, and e-mail. Expand into other technologies with e-tickets and mobile phone services.

Am I asking too much ? None of the listings sites I use come close to the sort of usability I’d like to see, maybe Edinburgh is badly served in this respect but I suspect the problem is with web designers getting carried away with what they can do and never really using the sites they design to work out what they should do.

The fact that many of these sites have a monopoly for the online ticketing of their events means that there’s not much pressure to change, I just think they might encourage more sales with an easier to use website. They’d certainly save money on manning their phone lines and printing their brochures if more people could be convinced to use their website.

Maybe it just takes someone to lead the way, the first decently usable listings site will inevitably pull the others up to the same standard eventually. I guess that’s the point where I should stop ranting about it and go knock up a demo …

They only told me the reasons for the call after I’d given them my card details, which makes me wonder what would’ve happened if I’d refused. Then they’d have had to prove that they were who they said they were, and that they had a legitimate reason for calling, but they can’t give me any information without me proving that I’m who I say I am and and that I have a legitimate reason for calling. I couldn’t think of a way they could do that currently, maybe it’s time to start giving two passwords per account. A ‘them’ password they use and a ‘you’ password you use, doesn’t seem like a bad idea …

I’m surprised there aren’t more bogus phone scams, but I guess e-mail is cheaper and less easy to trace. For now. I predict the take-off of Voice-over-IP is gonna bring phone phishing out of the woodwork.

Good ol’ fashioned e-mail spam goes from strength to strength, one of my latest:

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here [snip] are bad.

What? This is supposed to make me click that link? And really wouldn’t eating you’re dog and then killing yourself be easier? I guess a plague of dog-eating zombies might be a little disturbing. At the end of the e-mail:

My dog and I are still alive

Eh, good. I think.

Speaking of To Do lists, another neat little blog is collecting them.

Thinking about it it’d be nice if GMail allowed people to plug-in new sidebar content where the Chat / Labels / Invite boxes are. Or at least let make it a bit more customisable, I’d rather have a calendar than a chat box. There’s probably a way to do it in Firefox using something like GreaseMonkey, there’s already a few GMail hacks out there. And there’s this Google Dark hack, which is great (if pointless).

Finally, if you need more distraction, here’s what happens when you let grown-ups get carried away with their marble madness sets. Enjoy.

Nod to the UnorthodoxY Moron for some of the links in this blatant filler post.

A few words about these two pictures are after the jump …

Of course they’ll serve other drinks if you ask, but having a default option plonked in front of you neatly avoids the whole tourist “Hmmm, what shall I have” thing and gives the whole place a different feel from the competition.

I think the idea, with the music, the tables, the continually appearing booze, would work equally well over here. Particularly in Edinburgh where you can trade on the local breweries and base it in somewhere with an (almost) genuine history. The tourists would love it, plus you’d be able to cater for the stag nights and work nights out that roam the city.

Personally if I was to create a similar beer hall in Edinburgh I might lean more towards having buxom wenches dishing out the pints rather than the mustachioed Czech guys we had. But maybe that’s just me.

I’ll take this opportunity to state here that virtual machine technology will be the next big thing in computing. Mark my words, it’ll be what people talk about more and more over the next few years.

There’s potential for a lot of good here. Worried about viruses and spyware? Do your browsing in a virtual machine and you can always nuke it if it goes bad (you can already do this with VMwares Browser Appliance and I’m sure there are others.) Sensitive documents to work on? Do it all in a VM hopefully protected from anything running inside other VMs. Any no need to dual boot to switch OSes for just one app, have as many OSes as you like.

There is another side too. Copy protected CD? Play it inside the VM and grab the digital output from the machine. Time locked software? Install it in a VM and just go back to a saved state every few days. Your particular views on the whole digital rights management issue will dictate whether you think that’s a bad thing or not.

There are many more desktop applications, good and bad, for VMs but that’s not even scraping the surface of what they can do in the server area. One of VMwares products can move a virtual machine between two physical machines while it’s running.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the internet telephony business starting to look seriously at running soft switches under virtual machines for just that sort of advantage. In fact I think I’ll go off and see if I can come up with a nice telecoms appliance to enter the challenge with …

Whilst I’m sure that most of the tickets went to genuine buyers many went to touts that immediately threw them on eBay for at least twice the price. This clearly isn’t “bought a ticket and can’t go” it’s pure “bought a ticket to turn a quick profit”. This isn’t unique to T in the Park, it’s been going on for ages.

Now you could argue that that’s the free market at work, and perhaps you’re right. It’s even been suggested to me that perhaps the event organisers should just release the tickets on eBay in the first place and they’d go for whatever the market’ll pay. But let’s assume that we want to try to ensure that only genuine buyers get tickets, to do that we need to look at what it’s reasonable to expect to do with a bought ticket and ways we can dissuade the touts.

There are probably many different ways of doing this (tattooed tickets ?) but I’ll knock up a list of what I think is reasonable expectations for a ticket.

1. It allows the holder to go to the event
2. It doesn’t require the buyer to be the eventual holder (i.e. gifts)
3. It doesn’t require the holder to bring anything unreasonable to the gig (not everyone has photo id or credit cards)
4. It doesn’t allow people to sell on tickets for a profit
5. Ideally, it doesn’t penalise people whose plans change in cases where the tickets are bought far in advance

In addition whatever system gets used needs to not add unnecessary strain to the buying process and certainly shouldn’t slow down entry to the event. If it also helped to prevent ticket forgery that’d be a bonus.

The easiest way to achieve the last two goals is to only allow ticket exchange through an official process, this could allow tickets to be returned for a refund and then sold on again. Perhaps refunds could be held until the tickets are resold, there could be an automatic discounting system so that unsold tickets get cheaper the closer to the event it gets. Banning non-official sales will not stop people trying so there needs to be some way to tie a ticket to the correct user. This probably means not sending the tickets out until close to the event and stopping the return/refund/exchange offer before you start delivering the tickets.

A lot of places print names on the tickets and claim they’ll check photo id, I dislike this because not everyone has photo id, even if they do it might not be the sort of thing they want to take with them, it requires manual (and reasonably alert) checking and photo id can be fairly easily faked (you’d see “Tickets with free id” being sold I’ve no doubt). You could make people turn up with the credit card used to buy the ticket, but then not every owns the credit card they use to buy the tickets and many pay cash in person for them.

The other thing that I’ve heard talked about is using mobiles phone, I think it’s reasonably fair to assume most people nowadays have a mobile and they probably take it most places with them. So you provide a mobile number when you buy each ticket, then you prove you have that mobile when you turn up. The problem with this is verifying a mobiles number at the gate, the method to find each mobiles own number is different and often time consuming. You can’t just send a text code to the mobile before the event because that could be passed on with a ticket. For high value events I’d imagine you’d get touts buying disposable phones and selling them with the tickets.

When I started writing this post I was fairly sure I’d come up with something at least half workable by the end of it. It seems that it’s maybe a much more difficult problem, anything that is physically or electronically transferable is at danger of being sold on. That leaves something biometric, photos id is a good idea but just something that some people tend to balk at.

Since I’ve been spent the time working on this post I guess I should come up with some sort of idea. How about printing photos on the tickets themselves ? You’d supply a photo when buying a ticket and that’d be printed on the ticket sent to you.

Online buying would require a digital photo, perhaps pre-registered and approved. Buying in real life could work with a pre-registered photo, photo id, a loose photo or even a camera in the shop like casinos have nowadays. I guess buying tickets as gifts would require you having a photo of the recipient, that might be a bit of extra work. People buying over the phone would have to pre-register I guess.

I think it might work, but there might be a better idea out there …

A bit more searching revealed at least one other person who wants some sort of ticket alerts. Let’s make a wish list for a decent ticket alert service …

1. Different alert mechanisms (RSS, e-mail, SMS, personalised home page, etc)
2. Different alert timings (event announced, tickets on sale, tickets running out, event date, etc)
3. Multiple filter options (any/all of band, area, distance?, venue, event, price, time, day, rating ?)
4. Multiple streams per user for different settings
5. Optional recommendation of similar events based on known preferences
6. Decent coverage, say 99% of all events

Only the last point is difficult, getting the information, once you have that the rest is just a matter of organisation, storage, processing and presentation (spot the over-simplification !)

If the stumbling block is getting the data I’m not sure I see why, both the bands and the venues should be motivated to enter the information to encourage sales, I guess the trick is getting enough momentum behind it to convince users on all sides that it’s worth their time. Start off by offering enough incentives to get the basic service off the ground, get the initial data by scraping the current ticket sites and aggregating as much existing information as possible.

It’s got built in money making potential with if you offer a click through to buy the tickets via an affiliate, like Ticketmaster’s Affiliate Scheme.

Worth some more thought I feel.

Instead of having several bulky transformers, one per device, there should be some way of having a single transformer per room that supplies all the low voltage devices.

In a perfect world you could have a new type of wall socket that supplies 12v so that the transformer can be wired into the mains in a cupboard somewhere, hell, feed the heat into your central heating system.

I suspect there’s issues with running 12v over long distances, but I only dimly remember high school physics so I’m not sure. In any case there’s bound to be a neater way than having a pile of black boxes taking up space and generating unused heat.

Of course if Google Book Search gets anywhere then they’ll have this sort of thing covered, you’ll just need to bolt something onto the Google API that filters results according to books it knows you have.

I’m sure I’m missing the obvious step that makes this all possible and useful, but it’s not come to me yet.