Some of us held off a little while until the tool support had matured, but after a few months there was no great benefit to sticking with CVS, and subversion spread quickly. In a short time, it became the free source control system of choice.

Switching to subversion fixed a problem that with CVS, but it didn’t fundamentally change how we’d used source control as a team. That’s important.

The rationale for switching a team from subversion to git is less clear-cut and, I’m going to argue, you could end up affecting how your team works together for the worse.

Git is a more complex tool, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I have no doubt it will get simpler tooling with time. Its speed is a huge improvement over svn and for some I’m sure sufficient reason to change. And, of course, it doesn’t drop pesky .svn folders all over the place. All improvements, straightforwardly.

But, if subversion is a team-based tool, git is designed around individual developers, loosely-connected in social groups. This distinction is what makes git an excellent social tool - an excellent choice for software developed by a diverse group of individuals as open-source projects often are. Just for the record, github rocks.

However, git’s group-development virtues are team-development vices.

Branching is an evil for small teams. Single-trunk development with continuous, often, easy integration leads to fewer bugs, better communication between team members, sharper code. I’d go further than most agile proponents here: if your team is small enough to handle it, this is what you should do; if it isn’t, it’s time to split the team.

On the softer side, the commitment that a team-member makes to keeping the trunk clean is important in itself. It’s these norms and commitments, personal promises and bindings that make the difference between a team and a group of individuals. And, our chosen tools are a part of that team structure.

Git is a gift for those people on your team who are not team players, but not necessarily a boon for the team. I’ve seen this play out a couple of times now, surely others have too?

So, what I think most teams would do better with is a subversion that’s faster and doesn’t leave .svn folders around, one that’s easy to set up and doesn’t have 200+ commands to play with. Perhaps if subversion were up on github we could all have a go at making it.

By any rational measures it should have been awful - I had my wallet and my mobile phone nicked by someone on the tube, and struggled through Saturday with a mild hangover and a dodgy back.

But all that faded away. I had the lucky chance to work with James Adam (something I’ve been wanted to do since I employed him, and then left the company) and James Andrews on a very silly hack. And, then we won a prize for making the chap from O’Reilly laugh. Perfect.

Here’s what we did - we call it ’subterranean homesick news’:

James reveals how we did it.

Thanks to the BBC for letting us play with their video and subtitling data. Worth it just to see Bob getting all political again. We live in hope that one day we’ll see Bob Dylan signing on all BBC programmes.

Let me tell you what happened on my way home tonight.

I was waiting at the Bus Stop, just East of New Cross Station. As it happened, I’d been out for a drink and a friend of mine had stolen my lighter. I asked someone who was walking past for a light and he took pains to give me one - it was windy and it took longer than it should have, but there we go.

The chap had walked 5 yards past the bus stop when a Police car screamed to a halt beside him. Three officers jumped out. One of them asked me if he was with another person, to which I replied he wasn’t. They made him turn out his pockets and then let him get on his way. They got back in to the car.

I thought that they were supposed to fill out a form to tell him why he’d been stopped and searched, so I tapped on the window of the police car and asked, politely, why they hadn’t. “I gave him a choice,” the Policeman driving said, “either I could he could come down to Deptford station and fill in a form which would take 20 minutes or he could go on his way”. I asked the driver for his number, which he freely gave me - PL 197.

I let it go at that - I don’t know the intricacies of the law in this case. The Police car performed a U-turn in the road to head back West into London. As it passed the bus stop the policeman driving made a V-sign at me. A few minutes later the car passed again going east and they waved at me, rudely, from the car.

Needless to say, I called the Met hotline to complain. Let’s see what happens here - this isn’t right.

He purported to work for Accuread, and his plastic ID looked plastic enough.

I’m not sure one can be too cynical about these things – perhaps he really did work for my gas supplier, perhaps he was from another gas company doing ‘market research’, most cynically, he didn’t work for a gas company at all.

If any of the latter answers are the case, then this is a serious matter. I’m wondering how to take it further.

I’ve sat through the required 100-hours of ‘input sessions’ (lessons); scraped through six hours of ‘class-work’ (lessons); my ‘elicitation’ (asking) skills have had the required ‘appropriacy’ (appropriateness); I’ve allowed students to ‘practise communicatively’ (speak); I’ve supplemented my lesson plans with ‘realia’ (props); I’ve ‘concept-checked’ (asked questions), ‘monitored’ (listened), and ‘facilitated’ (taught). By all accounts, I think, I deserve to pass.

Tomorrow, I have my final moderation interview (I’m sure there’s a less straightforward TEFL name for it). And, I fully intend to butcher my language in the way that they see fit.

“One final point”, we were taught (!) today in an lesson (!), “don’t use the word ‘teach’ in your interview, there are much more precise words like present or facilitate.” Give me strength!

What’s more, I intend, against all scientific advice, to talk about how carefully I matched my ‘class-work’ activities to individual students’ learning styles. I might even use the word ‘kinaesthetic’ if I’m feeling particularly ‘courageful’.

It’s ironic. I decided to leave the commercial world and try teaching to get away from this; to escape from the utter, utter nonsense that spews forth whenever business folk open their mouths. How disappointing to find not only the same paucity of speech but also the same pseudoscientific, cargo-culting crap in English teaching.

Must try not to lose my temper in the interview… must try not to lose my temper in the interview… must try not to lose my temper in the interview…

We wanted to buy the mother-in-law a simple-to-use Skype phone so that she can more cheaply call my various brothers- and sisters-in-law who are in far-flung places. BT’s overseas call charges are a scam.

We ordered a wireless phone from the Skype website. We were staying in Berlin and so we asked for it to be delivered to my brother-in-law’s address in Plymouth. Skype cancelled the order without informing me. Not only that, but when I found out and emailed them I received a canned response with a list of ‘some common reasons why orders are cancelled’. WTF?

I remained determined to reduce the mother-in-law’s phone bill. So, rushing to a nearby Comet store on Christmas Eve, I picked up a Philips Skype telephone. The box had a nice smiley person on it, and it oozed ease-of-use.

Cue two hours of trying to get the bloody thing installed and working on a windows PC – an install program that was bloody awful; settings that weren’t remembered between reboots; cryptic dialog boxes now appearing when the PC started up. At one point there were two boxes on the screen, one telling me to upgrade Skype to the latest version and the other telling me that if I did then the phone might stop working. Sigh.

Even when it did seem to be working the phone only intermittently showed the Skype contacts it was supposed to, and there was no way to call a number through Skype that hadn’t been entered into your computer’s contact list. Or at least, no way I could fathom out. Oh, and of course you only find this stuff out after you’ve left the phone to charge for ‘at least’ 24 hours.

Why do people put up with this crap? And why on earth does Skype give its seal-of-approval to such a piece of shite technology?

So, it went back to Comet. Ease-of-use my arse. To my complete surprise, the staff in Comet were really helpful and took the box back in good faith, crediting me back the full amount. Full marks there. I’ll shop there again because of it, and probably next time I’ll be shopping for a more expensive item.

There’s an example there that Virgin could learn from – be nice to people on the way out or they won’t come back. I bought Liz an iPhone for Christmas, and needed to transfer her number from Virgin to O2. However, Virgin provide no information on their website about how to leave their service, but plenty about how to switch from other suppliers to them. Nothing like being treated like an adult…

SEO specialists are the astrologers of the internet age. The only difference I discern is that most SEO experts believe in the truth of the advice they’re giving. I suppose that gives them a touch more integrity, though it also makes them a touch more stupid than their stargazing brethren. Both professions, if you can call them that, exist because our reptilian brains find it hard to discriminate between coincidence and consequence.

Let’s try an experiment. A thousand people in a room are asked to toss a coin ten times. It’s a contest to see who can throw the most heads in row. Let’s make it a financial contest. They all pay £1 into a pot, and there is a guaranteed prize for anyone who can throw five or more heads in a row. Not five heads in total, but five in a row. Tricky, eh?

How much should that prize be? It must be pretty unlikely, right? A big prize must be on offer, perhaps the whole pot. Maybe no-one will be able to claim it.

Does it surprise you to learn the prize for throwing five or more heads in a row would only be £9? That’s right, nearly 11% of participants are expected to throw five heads consecutively, nearly 50 people will throw six in a row.

But what has this got to do with SEO consultants?

Well, if you took the 46 (or so) people who threw 6 heads in a row, and asked them how they did it, you could be sure that some of them had technique. One of them would tell you it’s important to throw the coin to exactly the same height each time; one of them might tell you to cross your fingers; another that it’s the way they flicked their wrist. All of them of course would be wrong. It’s a coincidence that they achieved an unlikely result, not a consequence of anything they did. There’s no way you can pick which of the 1000 players will win the prize in advance.

And SEO? Most SEO consultants sell themselves on their past record. I did for years. I had rules of thumb, and metrics and tricks and techniques. I read all the right forums, and used all the right jargon. No-one ever knocked my record. But honestly, I was a fraud. The truth is, once a site is moderately well-structured the rest is luck. I once managed to achieve the equivalent of six heads in a row and that guaranteed my ‘expertise’ - I was expert in the same way the 46 coin-tossers were lucky. Not inherently, but by reputation.

It’s pretty simple to structure a site so that the search-engines are receptive to it. It doesn’t take much expertise or indeed much time. After that you’re on your own - if people want to link to your site, they will and the site will improve in rankings. If they don’t, you need to do something different. Um, that’s pretty much it. Honest.

Oh, and don’t go and do anything stupid or immoral - like the PayPerPost advertisers were attempting. You’ll get caught, because it’s not good for the rest of us and Google, at least, cares about that.

You might as well consult star-charts as SEO consultants to improve your search engine rankings. But then, perhaps I’m too harsh here. I’m likely to be much more cynical about these things than you. I’m a Scorpio, after all.

Oh yes, that’s a good idea. But, what happens when your survey, filled as it must be with leading questions and bound to give you the answers you want, doesn’t return the most flattering of results. Hmm, tricky.

Not, it seems, for Power Reviews.

What happens if only 40% of your survey respondents say that they ‘research products online more than half the time’, whatever that question means?

Well, if you start by saying that 65% of users fall into a ‘Social Researcher’ category then you can say 64% of them ‘research products online more than half the time’. That pesky 40% number is transformed, magically, into a clear majority. Breathe easy PR people, the press release, spun into a more positive light, can be released.

That may not be exactly what they did, but it’s common practice. Take note: if the ’social researcher’ category was defined post hoc, then this is a simple statistical fallacy - akin to the the sharpshooter fallacy.

Statistically, the numbers would be meaningless, but that’s not really the point, is it? And that’s just one example of what I thought to be misleading use of statistics in that press release. Please, Power Reviews, could you publish the complete research so I can reassure myself as to your methods and conclusions?

That aside, I dislike most the banality of this genre of press release. Power Reviews are certainly not alone in releasing this bland flavour of news - pay for a survey, scatter-spam the results, wait for coverage. It’s all a little bit patronising, really.

I’ll no doubt get accused of bias here since my old company, Reevoo, did a similar press release a few weeks ago. I’m not biased.

Guys, come on, since when does doing a simple survey constitute news? We’re all consumers, aren’t we? We all know whether we really use reviews to make purchases or not, don’t we? And so do your customers, yes?

And, for all the evidence that people are disposed to say that they used reviews to make their purchases, we don’t need to pretend that advertising doesn’t work. Do we?

I know you chaps have real data, about people’s real online behaviour, not about their opinion of what they were doing after the fact. How about publishing some of that?

Oh, and Journalists, when these press releases land on your desk, please scribble all over them and send them straight back. Don’t play their game and publish it.

Hmm. It occurs to me that the poor chap who mailed the CDs - he’ll no doubt lose his job - may have been working around an intransigent IT department.

An IT department which you’d hope could muster the meagre talent required to filter a few fields from a text file. Hell, any half-competent programmer I’ve ever worked with could have done this in a few lines of shell script or, if the data were XMhelL with a couple of XSLT matchers.

So, maybe the HMRC doesn’t have IT resource they can deploy on a 10 minute task like that.

Or, maybe they asked one of the cowboy IT consultancies to quote them for the job and received a ‘burdensome’ price - after all, it’s an enterprise-y task that’s much harder to do on a 25 million line file than on a 10 line one. Isn’t it? Umm. Not really.

I can’t help feeling that the real problem may be a lack of agility in their development and IT management. And everyone knows that the harder it is to work with IT departments, the more people learn to work without them. Policies or no policies, skills or no skills, expert or bonehead.

Moreover, I’ll predict that the announced inquiry won’t touch this - instead they’ll suggest management and HR failures and recommend more security training for staff. I hope I’m proved wrong here.

Thankfully, it’s not as if they’ve chosen anyone with links to the IT consultancies I mentioned above to conduct the review - they’ve gone with the chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers…

One last point: I’ve read much suggesting this is a problem specific to the public sector. It definitely isn’t. Most big companies have similar data management issues, IT intransigences and security holes. Most small ones too, I think. More on that anon.

Here’s how my local pizza shop works – I phone them up, they tell me how long until they can deliver it, then they deliver it. I’m always at home when they deliver because I phoned them up and they told me when they’d deliver it. It’s never more than an hour after I phone them that it turns up. The pizza box has the delivery driver’s mobile number on it, in case after he’s sped off I realise he’s forgotten something. It’s like magic.

Here’s how DHL works – they don’t tell me that they’re coming except through some cryptic code their deeply unusable order tracking page. A page, of course, that I have to make a point of remembering to visit.

They put a big note through my door telling me I was out. The note says “While you were out…” with ‘you’ printed in a big red italic font to make me feel special. The note itself is a masterclass in poor design. Attached to the note is a map to their local delivery centre, presumably in case that I forget what I paid them for and go and collect the parcel myself.

I phone them to arrange redelivery, hoping to speak to someone who might be able to get in touch with the van driver and tell him he missed me by two minutes and I’m at home now. No luck. Just an automated service that lets me get it redelivered tomorrow – not tomorrow morning or afternoon, but just some time tomorrow. It’s like… well, shite.

Of course DHL aren’t alone in this – I don’t think I’ve had a good online delivery experience. They all seem to be geared towards delivering to 9-5 businesses with receptionists or stockrooms to take delivery.

Update: oddly enough, I’ve just been searching their website and found a press release announcing their DHL@Home service which sounds like it’s just the job. The press release was written in April, and talks about all the things that pissed me off today. I wonder if the service actually exists, it didn’t for me, and now I know that they’re well aware of the problems I’ve mentioned.