They took my name and number. This evening ( a day later ) they called to make an appointment for me to discuss – it would be 10 minutes later in the week. I asked on the phone if they could just give me a quote. The girl on the other end of the line told me that she was just a call centre worker. So, 10 minutes. That’s when I told her I wasn’t interested anymore.

When I was growing up in Ireland, a man used to just walk down the street with a cart, and a ladder. If you wanted your windows cleaning you walked outside your front door and gave him the money ( I think 5 quid maybe ). He asked to fill up his bucket, and 10 minutes later your windows were clean. He would come back a week or two later.

No appointment – just a matter of catching the guy as he walked. No appointment, let alone an appointment to discuss making an appointment.

Somehow we made things more complicated than they used to be. I know that I’m getting older now. I come from a generation where coal-men delivered coal once a week, milk-men delivered milk and eggs every morning, the soda-man came at weekends with locally brewed pop, the butcher knew to wrap a bone for the dog with our order, our chips came in last week’s paper – they were made with hand cut potatoes ( I think from Irish soil ).

Why on earth do I need to make an appointment to talk with someone about cleaning my windows? What’s the big deal? Stay in so we can discuss cleaning them? It worries me – I suspect that they want to see what I’m willing to pay. I’m betting a sight more than the 5 quid of the old days.

Of course I’m realistic – people need to make money on this. It could save me a lot of work. To be honest, I’m mostly interested in my front windows. The back ones will be hosed repeatedly during the summer by my sons soaking each other, me, friends.

So, we’ll wash them ourselves. It’s what we should be doing anyway. Appointment for a 10 minute chat about it indeed. They picked someone with far too much nostalgia this time.

Facebook suggest that 200,000 and rising of their users die each year. Their accounts can be ‘memorialized’ – put into a state where the Facebook system knows that the user isn’t alive anymore, won’t recommend connecting with that person, but will leave their wall open for friends to write messages to them.

Their data is protected too. A lawyer who lost her husband, wanted to get to the photos in his account and couldn’t. Didn’t have the rights. This lawyer deals with intellectual property law and has had to work with Facebook in the past. She told of a case where a guy had killed his girlfriend, yet pictures of the couple in supposedly happier times still were available on her Facebook account.

The article made me think of a few things. Firstly that your virtual estate can be as messy as your real life one. It is almost worthwhile thinking of a will for your virtual records – especially if you think children or relatives would benefit from access.

Secondly, the potential for Facebook is enormous over time. It is like a living archive. Our histories in hundreds of years time could still be referenced – instead of finding a name on a family tree, people will be able to find us on their tree, read what makes us laugh, maybe see videos of us. Learn about us personally. That is just one potential. What about the trends and patterns over time. Every single day we help describe them to Facebook.

We talked at work about this a bit over lunch one day. Some people ( I work with software developers ) though Facebook wouldn’t exist even in 10 years, or if it did, it wouldn’t exist how it is now. I disagree. I don’t much care for Facebook to be honest with you, I don’t use it – but I do see the significance of it, especially in this radio segment. That the data it keeps will live long after we’re gone. Surely that data can be utilized for important, and lucrative ventures.

It makes me wonder.

Orion can help you step closer to the cloudy nirvana of building and running your Google App Engine web apps, entirely in the browser.

[ You can follow Orion on Twitter too - it's well worth keeping an eye on! ]

I really like the simplicity of the datastore using Python and Google App Engine. As a software developer, I guess I’m a little more excited about developing user interfaces than server side code – although I recognize that one secret of the good, fast user interfaces I admire, is well organized data. App Engine lets me work on the server side in an efficient way, to cultivate simple RESTful interfaces for my web client.

Until now I’ve used Eclipse as my development tool, adding the PyDev plugin into the Web Development edition of Eclipse, so that I have a JavaScript and Python editor, and sometimes the App Engine Eclipse plugin.

Now I think I don’t need to use Eclipse any more for this. I can do all of my development in my web browser thanks to Orion.

Here’s how … this works for windows – I’ll test on my mac soon, but think it should be just the same.

• Setup a WebDav server on your local machine [ I followed this advice for Windows  ]
• Download the App Engine SDK
• Create a new project, or  use an existing project and start it up.

• Map the App Engine project folder to a WebDav site

• Unzip the contents of this WebDav Plugin into the App Engine project folder
• Install the Code Mirror Plugin to your Orion making sure to check the Python option
• After that you should be able to use Orion to navigate to your webdav folder

• One extra note – I had to map mime types for my webdav server in IIS for Python ( text/x-python ) and for Yaml files ( text/x-yaml )

So this leaves a brilliant workflow where you can code HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Python in your browser. Keep the local Appengine dev site running – just switch from tab to tab – code, and refresh your web app. Use the SDK tool to deploy when you’re ready.

A picture of my ‘IDE’:

Limitations – I used this with localhost – so it is secure enough for me, but means that I can’t  access from another computer. The Python editor only offers syntax highlighting, not error checking or assistance as yet ( an opportunity ). The advantage for me in this is just keeping everything light – in the browser – I no longer need to run an additional IDE.

The ultimate for me would be somehow for Google to host something like an Orion tool sitting on a virtual SDK, where a developer could choose to create a new project, build, deploy and test it in a hosted environment.

It is exciting – the prospect of creating and developing a project entirely in the cloud as well as running and deploying it there. I’m sure that will come in time … but for now, this for me, at least, is a fresh and liberating next step.

Oh – and here’s what I’ve been building with Orion and App Engine – an experimental Orion plugin catalog, which I’ll write more about in the future.

Even when working at the airport in London, I could just point my browser to my hosted site, and code using my own laptop instead of my work one.

The JavaScript editor is fine – on a par at least with the Eclipse editor from WTP that I’d been using for the past couple of years. It has built in error checking ( currently based on JS Lint ), and good tabbing, along with neat little touches like CTRL-/ to comment blocks of code out.

Since I was new to the team, I asked how I could change the settings within my editor – to switch from the standard serif font, and to make it smaller. So I learned to be careful what I ask … because it wasn’t possible to set that from a user interface. And so my first project was born. To provide a UI for setting editor preferences.

However, where would that UI belong? On a settings page – so I needed to develop that too. And since I was working on that, I was asked to relocate the plugins page to the settings area, and to revamp the page while I was doing so.

My first job snowballed. The CSS that I started working on was almost immediately picked up for use in the GIT management pages too – even though I didn’t have commit rights, it was so easy to share it with my colleague in another country. He just had to point his browser to my Orion site’s URL, and there it all was – has code sharing ever been so easy!? Or so dangerous !?

Along the way I experimented with some aspects of web development that I hadn’t played with before. The editor settings are stored in HTML5 Local storage for now. Each editor tab open changes styles immediately when the settings are applied by using local storage events. This is the basic idea …

window.addEventListener("storage", function(e) {
    console.log("Local storage was modified");
}, false);

… and provides a great way of communicating parameters across tabs.

Changing the syntax color choices in the editor ultimately change the css rules for the entire document as opposed to changing the rules for a dom element. This results in powerfully and instantly changing the color settings for all open JavaScript editors.

And I used css3 transitions for the first time to give an animated effect when the services area opens and closes. I used to have to use dojo animation for that, now a few lines of css do the trick. Brilliant.

So, in conclusion – Orion is now my preferred way of developing web applications, I have hopes to use it for more and more projects as time progresses – and hopefully one day for my App Engine projects ( for which I think it would be the ideal tool ).

It works well – no need for cumbersome tools ( even vi seems cumbersome in comparison when you have a site hosted and linked to git ). Just four browser tabs.

So – roughly it took about 30 years from the first store I visited to driving past the closed BlockBuster. We transitioned from tape, to dvd, blueray ( not me ), and finally to digital on demand movies.

I’ve reached a stage where I want to reduce my footprint. I think I’ve always been that way. As long as I have a macbook, smartphone/iPad and my guitar, I think I’d be ok. I won’t buy another dvd, and likely won’t buy a CD again.

I’m writing this because I was debating with someone that books will be the next to go. It took 30 years for movies, books have been around for thousands of years. I think it’ll take much less than 30 years for us to say goodbye to books as we use them now. I’ve been reading books on my iPad, and I’m starting to adjust. With all of the kindles that Amazon have been developing, it seems that we’ll see more and more transition to digital publishing in short order. At least in the Western world.

So, will there be bookstores like Chapters in 30 years time? I wouldn’t bet on it, to tell you the truth. I think that stores like Starbucks will become bigger, and maybe help us socialize new and good choices of books, music and movies.

I just think the clock is ticking now.

Our new project page is here. It’ll take a few days for the work items to settle and a little longer for us to get into a rhythm. Our team is small, and distributed. We have three developers right now, working in our spare time. We’re backed by some great volunteers at IBM and at ShelterBox – experienced managers, marketers, lawyers, usability experts … so I hope that we can make this work. In some ways this is an experiment, we’re new to this kind of collaboration. But we’re not new to developing software … so we’ll see how we progress …

Truth is that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to use my software skills to help communities and with this initiative I have an amazing opportunity. The charity is called ShelterBox. They respond to natural disasters by shipping pre formulated boxes each of which contains amongst other things a tent, cooking equipment, blankets.

If all goes to plan, I’m going to lead a small team to develop an iPhone app for ShelterBox. We’re going to wire the app to social media with the aim of offering another platform for ShelterBox’s supporters to understand and share how they’re helping people in need.

It is a learning experience on so many fronts. I’ve had to work with lawyers and executives internally to make sure that I do this by IBM’s rules and standards. At times it can be frustrating, but it is also a life lesson – learning how to cover ourselves, learning how to keep pushing.

The ShelterBox team are wonderful. Let’s hope we can push this along.