Reality

There's no real point to this post. Perhaps that's the point.

I was sitting in a fake Irish bar, in a concrete hotel in Bloomsbury. The clientele was...interesting, and probably didn't support the image the hotel wants to promote. They didn't have any real beer so I was drinking a Stella Artois, served in one of those ridiculous goblets. I was reading William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition' and appropriately the jukebox was playing The Who - first 'Won't Get Fooled Again', then 'I Can't Explain'. I found it increasingly difficult to feel where the book ended and reality began.

That's all.

Why Software Sucks

Earlier this year I enjoyed reading David Platt's 'Why Software Sucks', in which he discusses why software is regarded so poorly by so many people. It was entertaining, well written and contained a fair amount of wisdom. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone considering writing any software with a user interface.

I was reminded of the book today, when this masterpiece popped up on my screen (Click on it to see it full size):


I've read it several times now and I'm still not sure what it means. I'm pretty certain that I'm not likely to trust any site that asks questions like that. I'm also sure that I don't really trust the test and QA processes of any organisation that lets software like that out of the door.

To make matters worse, there is no way to tell this baffling and irritating dialog to go away. Choose 'No' and it will reappear every time you go back to the page that launched it.

It is always nice to have your prejudices reinforced (I'm not a massive Microsoft fan), and I did really enjoy the slightly theatrical rant I was able to have as a result. But my employer forces me to use this software, and I think I'd really rather they didn't, particularly when there are a number of open-source alternatives that treat their users with a little more respect.

P.S. I initially thought that it was another display of suckiness that it wasn't possible to tell Blogger to upload the picture of the dialog full size - but to do so would ruin the design of the page, so it's probably OK.

Quality Software Development - Science or Art?

In a thoughtful and well reasoned post on Sys-Con, Dirk Morris draws on the arguments in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to put forward the view that software development is both Science and Art. Rather more interestingly he suggests that Open Source tends more towards the science, and proprietary software tends more towards the art, citing Apple's OS X as the prime example - open source engineering at the core, with proprietary eye candy on top.

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Mad Old Men

I took my son J (13) to his first real gig on Sunday. We went to see the Blockheads at the Stables in Milton Keynes. J isn't a big Blockheads fan (although he might be now), but he's a pretty good musician and singer, so I thought he'd enjoy it. After 3 songs, he turned to me a said with a big grin "they're just a bunch of mad old men". I guess they are, but after 30 years of playing together they are an unbelievably good band; with some absolutely classic old material as well as some surprisingly good new stuff it all adds up to a great night out.
I've seen them three times now in the last year or so, twice at Cox's Yard in Stratford upon Avon and this time at the Stables. The Stables is a nice venue, set up by John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, but Cox's suits the Blockheads better - something I think Johnny Turnbull had in mind when he asked the audience to give themselves a round of applause for staying sat down all night. On the other hand, if we'd been at Cox's J would have difficulty seeing anything - neither of us are particularly tall.
Anyway, overall we really enjoyed it, the nearly two hours of their set passed very quickly (certainly much more quickly than the 40 minutes of the support act, which was absolute torture). If you get the chance to go and see them, don't miss out!

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Specialized Defroster Shoes

Cold feet are not something I have ever really suffered from - at least, not unless they were soaking wet. So I've been cycling offroad year-round in a pair of lightweight summer cycling shoes for a quite some time. The uppers are largely mesh, so they do tend to fill with water/mud fairly frequently in winter riding. Usually, on the wetsuit principle, the water/mud warms up and after the initial unpleasantness my feet are OK again, but when it is really cold this doesn't always work, and does tend to provoke some protest from the kind person who washes my socks. So when I found myself in the Specialized Concept Store and saw a pair of Defrosters I thought I'd give them a try.

I bought a pair of size 44 rather than my usual 43, and I despite going up a size I can't fit my feet in with anything but my thinnest socks on as they are too narrow. Despite that , my feet have been extremely warm on all of my recent rides. Of course, as soon as I bought them the rains stopped and the trails got dryer than I've ever seen them at this time of year, but today in the rain, mud and severe winds they got a proper test and passed with flying colours. It was very comforting to have such warm, dry feet in such inclement conditions.

These are my third pair of Specialized shoes, but the first for a few years and the first that I have found to be too narrow. Perhaps they now use a different last?

Apart from the width issue, the only other issue I have with them is that clearance for Crank Brothers pedals is pretty marginal - you need to fit the shims provided with the cleats, and even then clipping in is not as easy as it should be.

There really isn't much choice in the winter mtb shoe market, and finding a shop with anything in stock seems to be a major challenge. In fact, I think this was the first time I had found any winter show in stock in my size, so I didn't really get much choice. So overall, I guess I'd give them a 6 out of 10.

Can outsourcing save money?

The AA has decided to bring its datacentre operation back in house to save money. This isn't very surprising if you stop to think about the basic economics, but it does seem quite brave of them to admit that the outsource decision was flawed. It has always seemed unlikely to me that you could save money by outsourcing infrastructure in this way, unless your in house setup was totally incompetent (in which case fixing it would seem to be the better option). Unlike in the early days of facilities management, there is no option to save money by consolidation workload onto fewer mainframes, so the cost model for the outsourcer is likely to be the same as yours - add in a profit margin and account management overheads and you are paying more. Even worse is the degree to which your ability to support your business is compromised. I have worked on accounts with some large infrastructure outsourcers over the past year and the striking thing is how long it now takes to make any changes - and how much it costs.

The other interesting thing about this news item was the decision to accept a lower level of availability - 99.5% instead of the 99.9% or more that is usually asked for. Like Google's practice of running their datacentres rather hotter than is considered normal, it suggests that there are a few bits of conventional wisdom that could do with revisiting.  All it takes is a clear look at the numbers

Is it China? Or is it you?

Will Hutton, in the Observer, explains "why the Himalayas might not look like this for much longer". He points out that the Chinese are playing an enthusiastic role in the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem, and seems to assign a large part of the blame to the lack of democratic accountability in China. But we should look closer to home for those responsible for this destruction of the environment. Have you bought a computer recently? Have you benefited from the deflation in consumer goods prices? Ever wondered how it is possible to make all this stuff so cheaply? It isn't just that the workers in China don't get paid very much; or that they don't get sick pay, or a pension. It is also that there are no expensive restrictions on the disposal of toxic waste, or the emission of toxic pollutants or greenhouse gases. When we 'outsource' this manufacturing, we also outsource the damage that it does to the environment. The companies that do this do it knowingly but in general the consumers who collude with them just close their eyes to the reality - out of sight, out of mind. But it won't go away; there is only one planet, and we are all living on it. We must consume less, no matter how tempting those low prices might be.

Good job HP!

Not quite such a good job Citylink.

HP have been doing pretty well in the PC market recently. Looking around my house there are 5 computers, 3 belonging to us and two belonging to my employer - they are all HPs. I can't answer for my employer, but in the case of our machines I didn't go looking for an HP, it just seemed to be that the best deal I could find was an HP. Now it turns out that the after-sales service is just as good.

My son has an HP laptop, abut 9 months old, which recently started forecasting the demise of its hard disk. So we called HP and they said they'd pick it up on Wednesday. On Monday we got home from work to find a card from Citylink saying they'd tried to deliver something, and if we wrote on the card where we wanted it left they'd have another go on Tuesday. So we wrote some instructions and left the card for the Citylink driver, and when we got back from work we found a card saying that he was actually trying to collect the laptop. On Wednesday, as arranged, we were in to hand him the laptop - he had a specially designed transit case for it with lots of foam padding. On Friday he reappeared, with the transit case again - I wondered if a routing error had just returned the broken machine to us. But no, the computer had a new hard drive and a reflashed BIOS and seems to be fixed - all under warranty. I think this is pretty good service - if Citylink had managed to turn up on the right day I'd say it was perfect service.

Target-driven management

Once again, I am inspired by Simon Caulkin of the Observer. The context of his rant is the health service, but the lessons are far more broadly applicable. It's long been the case that you could trace the ills of most organisations back to the performance-related pay schemes of its managers, but the problem has got worse (at least in the UK) since our government's enthusiasm for 'proving' what a good job it is doing by 'meeting' targets.

In our business, I have seen many instances of damaging targets. I once worked in an organisation where it was decreed that we all should be given a target of contributing a certain number of pieces of 'intellectual capital' to the knowledge bases every year. Unsurprisingly the knowledge bases soon filled up with utter cr*p, but hey, we met the targets so the bonuses were paid. To deal with the quality issue, someone came up with a cunning plan - all contributions had to be rated by one's peers, and only those which had a high enough score would count. So a system of 'you rate mine and I'll rate yours' arose, the knowledge bases continued to fill with rubbish - and we continued to get our bonuses, effectively being paid for wasting the companies' money and time. Other instances are paying people a bonus based on bugs fixed, which leads to the deliberate introduction of easy-to-fix bugs and a nice little earner, or rating people by lines of code written, which leads to an orgy of cut-and-pasting.

Caulkin points out

if enough pressure is applied, people will meet targets - even if they destroy the organisation in doing so. As quality guru W Edwards Deming put it: 'What do "targets" accomplish? Nothing. Wrong: their accomplishment is negative.'

At a high enough level of abstraction, targets are fairly benign. It is when they are chosen just because they are measurable the damage really starts. They also usually encourage short term thinking, erode trust and therefore the feeling of personal responsibility for outcomes. Targets are set top-down, in advance - the management equivalent of waterfall development. Human nature being what it is, targets trump thinking - and if we've learned one thing about software development in the last 40 years it is that thinking generally helps the process.

The agile movement tends to avoid numerical targets in favour of more woolly but also more useful aims such as delivering value to your customer. My experience is that when we trust people to do a good job, and remove the obstacles to them doing so, the results are invariably superior than when trying to coerce that behaviour by the use of targets.

Open Source Lessons

Writing in The Observer (a UK Sunday Newspaper) Simon Caulkin suggested that open source development represented a new way of working with wider applicability than software development. Commenting on a new book by management guru Gary Hamel, he points out that existing top-down management structures are both expensive and inefficient, and then continues:

But internet-enabled networks offer a credible third way, Hamel believes. The prime exemplar is Linux, the open-source operating system developed by a self-selecting band of volunteers linked only by the web and their motivation to contribute. There are now 150,000 open-source projects using the freely given energy and initiative of 1.6 million people, according to estimates. While many of these are not-for-profit enterprises, the lessons that they embody have wide application...

Leaving aside that the primary purpose of management books is to sell management books, there is clearly a grain of truth here. The self-organising teams of the agile movement, and the open source community have shown that it is possible to manage complex endeavours without a huge management overhead, and often in a way that is far more enjoyable for the workers than conventionally managed efforts. The main objection that I can see is that the members of successful agile development teams and open-source projects are largely self-selected and drawn from a very thin layer at the top of the development gene pool. Translating their experience to the wider working world will be challenging; and of course, getting management to support it will be like getting turkeys to vote for Christmas :-)

Why did he jump?

That's the big question he doesn't answer, but apart from that this interview in the Microsoft Architecture Journal with Don Ferguson, ex-Chief Architect for IBM Software Group and now a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, makes interesting reading. Some selected nuggets of wisdom:

You should never underestimate the importance of a social network. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what someone may say to you that can push the reset button in your brain and make you think differently.

...communication skills matter. They really do. It's really important to understand how to write well and how to present well.

Secondly, many people who work in technology suffer from the "endgame fallacy." We are all pretty bright. We see a lot of customers. We see what they are doing and then plot a trajectory for where they will be in a few years. Once you do this, however, it's too tempting to build what they will need in five years, and not what they need next or are ready for.

Still wish he'd explained what was behind his move from the top technical job in IBM software to Microsoft though.

I paid £4...

..for the new Radiohead album, 'In Rainbows. I thought that £4 was probably more than the band would get if I bought a CD, or downloaded it from iTunes, but it was less than I would be prepared to pay for a CD. I almost never buy downloaded music, because I hate the DRM schemes that limit the devices on which I can play it. If I buy a CD, I can listen to it in my car, in any one of the 6 rooms in my house that have a CD player or three rooms with a computer, or I can rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player. If I lose my player, or a hard disc, I don't lose my music. I know I can get round the DRM if I can be bothered to do a bit of research on the net, but it is the principle of the thing. So I still buy CDs, usually from on-line retailers now that Fopp is gone.

What about the music? Well, I've only listened all the way through once, but I like it better than 'Kid A', or 'Amnesiac', or 'Hail to the Thief', but less than 'The Bends' or 'OK Computer' - it's rockier than the last three releases without being a return to the dense, complex textures of the earlier stuff. I do wonder how the rest of the band feel - it seems to me that everything they've done since 'OK Computer' has sounded like a Thom Yorke solo project rather than a full band effort. Still, I guess they get a fair share of the cash.

Spb Time review

I wouldn't be writing this review at all if Windows Mobile 5 didn't have some serious shortcomings in the alarms department. As a recent deserter from the Palm camp, I'd been used to using my PDA (a Palm TX) as my alarm clock - I always had it with me and with some add-on midi files the sounds were fine for waking me up. Trying to use the WM5 Alarm applet in my Orange SPV M600 to do the same thing got me in to trouble. Sometimes the alarm just wouldn't sound at all, leading to some embarrassing oversleeping incidents, and if it did sound, there was often no way of cancelling the alarm, so it just kept on sounding. A bit of googling revealed that these were known issues that had been around a while but which Microsoft had not thought important enough to fix. My searches also revealed that there was no easy solution to these problems.

I tried a couple of freeware alarm programs, but wasn't particularly impressed - some of them suffered from the same issues as the built-in app, and all had pretty ropey UIs. So I turned to the commercial solutions. Spb Time was actually the third of these that I tried. One of a suite of applications from the same developers, Spb Time's UI is anything but ropey, my alarms now go off when I want them to and can be cancelled by a nice big red button or snoozed with a big green one. I also now have a very nice skinnable clock and world clock, countdown timers and stopwatches (with lap times that can be saved to a text file) all accessible through a Today plugin. Alarms can be set to go off on particular days of the week, so it is easy to set different alarms to get you up for work in the week and for whatever you do at the weekend. You can also set a one time alarm for a time in the next 24 hours. There are plenty of options for sounds (MP3s included), repeat intervals, auto-snooze and snooze delays. All in all it is a great little application, does exactly what is claimed for it and the cost is reasonable, particularly at today's $/£ exchange rate. If the experience encourages you to try other Spb apps you can get a discount on those as an existing customer. I hope you can tell, I'm really very impressed. Just to be clear, I have no connection with Spb Software except as a satisfied user of their product.

Just as a footnote if unlike me you've stayed loyal to Palm you can get pretty much the same functionality from Palmary Clock, which was one of the most used applications on my old TX.

Team Banana

Tense and nervous, waiting for the start.

Racing

A well earned banana for everyone.

SOA still struggling

I don't want to be a luddite about this, but it has been apparent for some time that the hype about SOA was out of all proportion to actual implementation. I've formed this view based on talking to customers, partners and competitors about what they are actually doing, but this report seems to confirm my observations. Apparently,

Only 10 per cent of respondents believe that their business understands SOA 'quite well' and 22 per cent pointed to a 'medium amount' of knowledge.

and

A third of respondents to the survey have started to design and implement systems based on SOA principles, and a further 16 per cent are in the planning stage.

However, this still leaves a significant number of companies which have yet to embark on this route. Some 16 per cent are planning to look at SOA 'sometime in the future', and 23 per cent have 'no plans' to use SOA at all.

Since SOA has now been around for several years, but a very large proportion of the people who claim to have actually adopted SOA turn out in reality to have implemented a bit of EAI or used a couple of Web Services inside a single application, I think it may be time to ask whether it will ever deliver the goods.