What can we do but tend our garden?

The chicken fence and BDUF

2010-10-30T18:17:00.004+01:00

This is my first blog post in over a year - I've been Twittering, Yamming and Facebooking instead. When I logged in I found a draft post from 2008 about our Canada road trip just lying around like a half-eaten pizza, but decided not to finish it - usually wise with pizza of that age too.

So, I've just spent two days in the garden, building an enclosure for Paris, Amy and Martha. We had been using some of this netting from Omlet, but I was fed up with having to climb over it, and it just looks a bit scruffy.
The requirements were simple: it had to be a permanent fence, not too expensive; with a gate in it so that we could get in to retrieve eggs, clean out the Eglu and so on. How hard could it be? I decided on a post and rail fence, with 3" posts and 3" half-round rails with chicken wire fixed on to it to retain the chickens (radical use for chicken wire!). After a little difficulty getting hold of the wood (eventually found at Curtiss Timber who were most helpful) I started to build the fence. To be on the safe side, I designed it to be nearly 20% taller than the netting had been.

It too a little longer than I had expected - a combination of incompetence, lack of some tools and some contraints on the working area - like some of it was in the middle of a rose bush - but eventually it was finished. I proudly displayed it, working door with latch and all, to my family and started to put the tools away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw first Martha, and then Amy fly straight up and perch on my lovely new fence.

After two day work the new fence met all the requirements, except for the primary one of actually keeping the chickens where we wanted them and thereby preventing them from digging up all the bulbs in the garden. My office worker's hands were raw, I was tired and I felt like I'd been beaten up. And the bloody fence didn't work!

What tortuous lesson am I going to draw from this sorry tale? What happened was that the hens saw the new fence as an inviting perch in a way that the old netting never was. Despite being higher than the netting, the new fence was therefore worse at its main function. I've seen this happen so often in business, where the shiny new system fails to deliver the expected benefits. It underlines the importance of taking a small step at a time and validating as you go that you are getting the value you expected. Big-bang deployments, especially those developed using a a waterfall process like my fence, almost never deliver the desired result.

Reality

2009-02-09T22:16:00.003Z

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

2008-07-17T22:39:00.006+01:00

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?

2008-04-23T06:50:00.000+01:00

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.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Mad Old Men

2008-04-23T06:43:00.001+01:00

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!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Specialized Defroster Shoes

2008-03-16T22:02:00.003Z

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?

2008-01-28T16:58:00.001Z

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?

2007-12-18T00:26:00.001Z

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!

2007-12-08T22:41:00.001Z

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

2007-11-12T23:20:00.000Z

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

2007-10-16T06:09:00.000+01:00

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?

2007-10-11T06:14:00.000+01:00

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...

2007-10-10T22:45:00.000+01:00

..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

2007-10-01T22:27:00.000+01:00

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

2007-09-17T06:42:00.000+01:00

Tense and nervous, waiting for the start.

Racing

A well earned banana for everyone.

SOA still struggling

2007-09-14T12:18:00.000+01:00

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.

Playtime

2007-05-14T22:52:00.000+01:00

Working for an IT consultancy can be tough. The hours can be long and you can be away from home for a long time. For most of us the variety of the work and the quality of the people we work with make up for the privations of the job. But however keen you are it is important to get away from the screen occasionally, to refresh your mind and body and to reset your perspectives.

Some people become gym rats and choose their hotel by the quality of its exercise facilities. Personally I can’t stand gyms so I look for something different. When I was working in Singapore for several months I bought a very cheap mountain bike, and believe me you haven’t lived until you’ve tried mountain biking in 34 degrees and close to 100% humidity. If you are on a long term assignment you can probably find somewhere in or around your hotel where you can keep a bike, and particularly at this time of year it is a brilliant way to get the office out of your head.

An assignment in Ipswich gave me a perfect opportunity to learn to ride a unicycle - the staff at the Marriot Courtyard became used to seeing me falling off it in their car park, and as I got slightly more competent I ventured further afield and the denizens of Ipswich were entertained by my attempts to keep vaguely upright. Unicycles are great because they are really easy to sling in the back of the car, and if they aren’t too big it isn’t impossible to carry them on the train - I guess it helps if you have a slight exhibitionist streak. I’ve since unicycled all over Twford Down while on assignment in Winchester (the only time I’ver ever met another unicyclist while on an after-work ride) although I bottled out of taking the uni to Dallas.

If you can’t manage the wheels (or for some inexplicable reason you don’t get on with pedalling) then what about your feet? Sling a pair of lightweight walking boots in your luggage, buy an OS map of wherever you are and start exploring. Even cities can be interesting places to walk - the Thames path goes right through London, and the City is very different out of hours.

It's just garbage

2007-05-09T21:07:00.000+01:00

A dead body is just another rubbish disposal problem. If anyone makes a fuss about mine when I'm dead, I'll come back and haunt them (OK, given that I don't expect any kind of afterlife that may be a bit of an empty threat). I simply don't understand why anyone needs a helpline to know whether bits of their relative might have been removed (for pretty sensible scientific reasons) several years ago. I get on fine with my parents, but when they die whatever it is that makes them human will be gone, and the physical remains will have really very little relevance to what or who they were. While I may miss them as people, I won't be getting sentimental over the garbage that's left.

Reality disrupting SOA sales effort

2007-03-25T21:49:00.000+01:00

I’ve had conversations about the practicalities of SOA with various people over the past couple of years, and the gulf between what we expressed in relatively private forums and the public pronouncements was striking. It was apparent to most of us that the pre-requisites for successful SOA were significant, and unlikely to be present in any organisation we had ever encountered. It was also clear that there were huge challenges in delivering adequate quality of service from SOA-based systems.

For whatever reason, people seemed reluctant to express these concerns in public. Perhaps they didn’t want to kill the goose that might lay the golden eggs, or perhaps they just didn’t want to be seen to be out of step with the rest of the industry. Something seems to have changed, and the first items of dissent are appearing. The lead article in “Information Age”, March 2007 issue (not yet online - I’ll edit and insert the link when available), is called “Structural Hazard - The Pitfalls of Service Oriented Architecture” . The article discusses the difficulties of governance, infrastructure and culture, as well as the potential SOA has to make the organisation’s IT even more complicated, rather than simpler. Steve Jones, in his Service Architecture blog, points out the implications SOA has for availability, and also notes the potential for complexity. There are other examples - Googling for “SOA pitfalls” gives 691000 hits.

I don’t know what has prompted the new realism (perhaps people realised that the goose didn’t appear to be laying any golden eggs), but it can only be a good thing and will likely lead to a healthier relationship between the IT industry and its customers.

What's wrong with process?

2007-03-21T23:08:00.000Z

Ivar Jacobsen makes some interesting comments about the value of process in a recent article on the Dr. Dobbs site. He is obviously setting himself up to introduce his new ‘Essential Unified Process‘ as the answer to the issues he raises in the next article in the series, but many of his points are nonetheless valid.

Of course, process blindly applied is unlikely to be useful, and process without underlying understanding of engineering good practice is of equally dubious value. Which is why my three priorities for my teams’ learning and development this year are:

RUP - as a process framework, backed up by practitioners who understand how to use RMC to produce a process and a set of guidance that is sensible for the project

UML - as a common language that allows communication between elements of the team with the minimum possible ambiguity and maximum clarity

Construction - good practice as embodied in Code Complete, Steve McConnell’s seminal book on the skills, tactics and techniques needed to build quality software

All three elements, applied with intelligence and with the benefit of experience, need to be present to deliver a successful project. Oh, and a bit of luck too.

Hardware and Productivity

2007-03-13T23:07:00.000Z

Developers working with modern IDEs like Eclipse, Team Studio or Netbeans need all the screen space that they can get. Martin Fowler points out the value of larger screens in his ‘Big Screen’ blog article, and states that his $700 investment in a pair of Samsung 204Bs could easily be cost justified.

In fact it gets easier by the day as Pricerunner tells me that today he would only need to pay just over $600. Unfortunately this translates to £600 in the UK :-(, but the Samsungs are high-end kit so if you were prepared to slip your standards a bit a 20″, 1650×1050 widescreen TFT could be yours for less than £150. You know it makes sense.

While I’m on the subject of hardware, when I began my IT career a gigabyte of disk storage cost about 10 times the annual salary of a junior programmer (as I was then). Today, the cost of a gigabyte of disk is roughly a minute of a junior programmer’s salary, leading to the conclusion that the storage for our 50MB Outlook Inbox is worth three seconds of their time. Perhaps it is time to revisit the cost/benefit assessment for that particular limitation…

Open Source Quality

2007-03-08T07:01:00.000Z

It has always been said that the openness of open source led to higher quality code, because there were more pairs of eyes looking over the code, and because if they found a problem they could fix it rather than having a depressing conversation with first line support.

As far as I know, there has not been much actual research to prove this point, it has been more like an article of faith for the Open Source community. But the Register reports that Fortify Software (which uses Fortify SCA tools and Findbugs to look for defects in software – as a service) are finding some very low defect rates in popular OSS applications. You can see the results at the Open Review pages.

The relevance for us as developers, apart from confirmation that using OSS does not necessarily represent a technical risk, is that the principles espoused in Builder.com’s 10 Commandments of Ego-lesss Programming really do lead to higher quality. For what is OSS if it isn’t a comprehensive implementation of those commandments?

Blue, and big...

2007-02-23T07:44:00.000Z

I used to work for them, and I have some good friends who work for IBM, and the company does a lot of things really well. Doesn't mean you can't poke a bit of fun at them now and again, and this post by FSJ (Fake Steve Jobs) is just brilliant. In fact, FSJ is well worth adding to your blogroll for his entertaining view on the IT business.

Interoperable Acquisition

2007-01-22T22:55:00.000Z

At the tail-end of last year, the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) published a paper on ‘Interoperable Acquisition for Systems of Systems‘. Although it has a defence slant (the SEI is largely funded by the US military), there seems to be some considerable relevance for organisations interested in adopting SOA and/or a multi-sourcing model for their IT systems. I struggled through the paper, wincing at the callous mangling of the English language*, only to find that the conclusion was that governance around the procurement, construction and operation of ‘Systems of Systems’ was really hard and the authors wanted more research funds to figure out the solution to the problems. Contrast this with the current hype around SOA as the solution to all an organisation’s IT issues. So the message for us is that we should be careful about diving in to the SOA pool, particularly about what we promise our customers, and that wherever there is uncertainty, there is a consulting opportunity

*The most painful being the use of ‘fielded’ when they appeared to mean ‘deployed’ or ‘in use in the field’. I hate it when they verb nouns like that.

Essential Reading?

2007-01-16T22:56:00.000Z

Reg Developer just asked the question "Do you own these bookshelf must-haves?". Clearly, they just want to boost their associate fees from Computer Manuals, but it is an interesting topic for discussion. I own a few of them, although my copy of Petzold is a bit out-of-date. I've always wanted a set of Knuth's books, but when I put them on my Christmas list I generally get told I'm being too 'sad', whatever that means. What about you?

Orange SPV M600 and Pocket PC Reviewed

2007-01-10T21:54:00.000Z

I am a long term Palm user - my first Palm device was a PalmPilot Personal in 1997. I wrote some impressions of my then new Palm TX just over a year ago. Just before Christmas 2006 I took delivery of my first Pocket PC, an Orange SPV M600. I have also spent time with a Windows Mobile Smartphone, an Orange SPV C500, where I found the Smartphone facilities so hard to use that I didn't bother - it was pretty rubbish as a phone too. This review will cover my opinions of the new device and the OS.

Hardware
I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing the hardware; the M600 is one of the many versions of the HTC Prophet (others include the iMate JAMin, the Qtek S200, O2 XDA neo), the specs are on the Orange pages and if you go to 'Help and Support' you can download a pdf of the user manual. To summarise, the phone looks cool in its slightly rubberised metallic finish, it is small enough to be held to youre ear as a phone without making you feel ridiculous, the QVGA screen is bright and clear and the overall feel is solid. Some colleagues have drop tested their M600s and they have proved to be quite robust.

Presumably to increase battery life, the M600 uses a relatively slow TI OMAP 850 200MHz processor. This tradeoff makes sense most of the time; the exception being graphically intensive operations like changing the screen orientation from portrait to landscape, which is painfully slow, and turning the camera off which is even more excruciatingly glacial. Coupled with the position of the camera button where it is easy to press it by accident this causes a slgnificant issue; I have resolved this by re-assigning the camera button to bring up the Today screen instead, leaving camera access via the Start menu.

Phone
As a phone the M600 is very good. On all the attributes that matter - call sound quality, signal strength and reliability - it scores highly. Even battery life is not bad, comfortably outlasting the C500, although heavy PDA use reduces this (presumably due to the backllght, which is very bright), as does using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Integration with the PIM Contacts list is very good, some compensation for the lack of a hardware keypad. The soft keypad is usable with your fingers, so you don't need to get the stylus out to make a call. The designers have also thought about one handed use whlch is generally possible using the 5-way navigator and 4 hard buttons. Bluetooth to a Jabra BT250 headset works well, with good range and the speech recognition is tolerant of different environments and background noise. Overall it's as good as a phone from the traditional suppliers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which is all one can really ask for.

PDA
OS and ActiveSync
My first impression of the OS is that it is chaotic - the developers clearly had no agreed UI guidelines, or if they did there was no QA to ensure that they were followed. Each app, or sometimes each dialog within an app seems to have a different way of confirming actions. All the UI constructs (pop up menus, OK buttons, 'Done' buttons or menu items) seem to be used at random, and you have to hunt around the screen to find things. This is in huge contrast to the Zen of Palm, and considering the amount of money Microsoft have spent on this stuff it is frankly unforgivable.

Then there's this nonsense about the close button not closing apps, so that your available memory gets gradually eaten up. The remedy is to burrow several layers deep into the menus and find 'Running Programs' in the Memory applet and close a few apps down. If that doesn't free up enough memory, then just reset/reboot the machine. This is a hassle I could do without, and again sharply contrasts with the simplicity and usability of the Palm. So while a lot of the individual pieces are pretty good, the overall impression is that Pocket PC is a rather amateur effort.

And then there is ActiveSync. This is another area where the amateurishness makes itself felt. The UI on the PC side is just weird. If you try to see if you can configure sync for Notes, a dialog tells you that there is nothing to configure. There is nothing to configure for Contacts either, but in that case it tells you by simply presenting a 'Settings...' option, but it is always greyed out. Then there is the 'Resolve Items...' command. This appears in the middle of an information area of the application window when Active Sync has failed to sync something. Although the rest of the application is a rich client using Windows controls, this one looks like a hyperlink - blue, underlined - and following the Windows UI guidelines the elipsis (...) means that clicking it should take you to another dialog. But it doesn't - it just seems to run a Sync again, which will usually fail, for whatever reason it originally did. At no time does it suggest a cause for the failure, or any corrective action you might take. The whole thing looks and works like an early beta, not something at version 4.2. When it works, the continuous syncing is quite handy, compared to the sync on demand approach of Palm Hotsysnc. The trouble is that it doesn't seem to be very reliable or dependable.

Text Entry
I'm writing this using Notes on the M600. Of the text entry methods available to me I've chosen to use letter recognition, and I already seem to be faster with it than I was with Graffiti - I was a big Graffiti user, at least until the TX's broken character recognition put me off. Other options are the Block Recognizer - a Graffiti clone, Transcriber - cursive script recognition and a pop-up keyboard. All feature word completion which works well once you get used to it and increases the overall speed of entry.

Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Notes
The PIM apps are a match for the standard Palm equivalents, but for my calendar and address book I'd got used to the excellent TMP and Address XT, and compared to these the Pocket PC versions are a bit disappointing. I've mentioned phone integration with the Contacts application before, and it really is very good. I find it easy to find a contact and call them, either without the stylus, using just the 5-way navigator, or by writing part of their name into the search field. The possible hits are shown as you write, so you just need to write enough to get the person you want into the visible search list. It would be even easier if you could filter your Outlook contacts that get synced as you could with Windows Mobile 2003. This option has disappeared from PPC 5.0 and if you have nearly a thousand contacts it is a bit of a pain. I used to be able to add a category to the one hundred or so contacts I wanted on the phone, and ActiveSync just copied those. Now I get the lot, with obvious consequences for memory use and usabiity. While we are on the subject of categories, the Notes app doesn't support them at all, which is again a pain if you have a lot of Notes in Outlook.

Pocket Office
I have not actually tried these apps yet, although I did establish that the Orange supplied ClearVue PDF reader was unable to make sense of anything but the very simplest documents and was therefore pretty much useless. Pocket Word, Excel and Powerpoint don't look as full featured as the Docs To Go apps on the Palm, and syncronisation seems to be more of a manual operation. If I get around to using them I'll post a review then.

Media Player
Another thing I haven't tried is listening to music on the M600. The headphone socket is a 2.5mm effort so I can't use my favourite headphones without an adaptor, and I don't fancy being unable to make a phone call because I used the battery up listening to Warren Zevon. If I get the time I might try it for curiosity's sake, and if I do I might remember to come back and update this report.

Third Party Applications
There were a few things on my Palm that I used regularly - Metro, eReader and Palm Keyring being the most frequently needed. I was pleased to find that there were PPC versions of the first two available at the same cost as the Palm versions - free. These seem to work fine on the M600, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could use the eBooks purchased for the Palm on the M600 without any trouble. For the password vault, I'm trying out the open source KeyPass. It's early days yet but it seems to be OK.

The other thing I'm trying out is a utility called Magic Button. This aims to deal with the application shutdown/memory issue discussed above, by actually closing applications when the close button is tapped. Again, this seems to be doing it's job and it is also free.

The Verdict
The only thing I'm still depending on the TX for is waking me up in the morning (using the excellent Palmary Clock), so at the moment it looks like I'm going to be able to stop carrying the TX around, and just use the M600. It works fine as a phone, and the PIM functions are good enough. It's both ironic and extremely surprising that in many ways Microsoft Office and Outlook integration works better on the Palm. The Pocket PC OS is frustrating - it is fairly easy to see where the user experience could be massively improved by actually managing the developers rather than letting them hack away at random. It is interesting that the market is clearly saying that this inconsistency and general flakiness is not a barrier to success - I think a discussion of the reasons for that requires its own post. I'll miss Palm, but probably not enough to make me continue using two devices where I could manage with just the M600.

'No proof' organic food is better

2007-01-07T18:27:00.000Z

The BBC and many other leaned organs report David Milliband's remarks saying that there is 'No proof' organic food is better.
I think that this is missing the point. It may well be the case that organic food is not better for the person consuming it, but it is unquestionably the case that it is better for the planet, probably better for the farm workers who no longer have to be exposed to the pesticides and other chemicals, and probably better for the animals who are treated so unpleasantly in intensive farming regimes. It is unfortunates that buying organic for such reasons requires a greater level of altruism than buying because it directly affects your health.

Software Development should be fun

2007-01-01T22:20:00.000Z

Like a lot of people my age, I got into what is now called the IT business because I really enjoyed programming. We didn't really consider the money side of things, or whether it was a long-term career, we just liked messing around with computers. If people were going to pay us for it, that was even better. The word 'geek' came later...

David Intersimone, now Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist for Borland Software, has an article on the Dr. Dobbs site called "Why Programming is Fun", which reminded me how I got started. But it isn't just nostalgia for me - I think we need to bring some of that attitude back. I know the last few years have been hard, and projects today are more challenging than they ever were 20 years ago, but these things do not preclude enjoyment. David's article quotes 5 reasons why software development is fun from Fred Brookes legendary "Mythical Man Month":

The sheer joy of making things.

The pleasure of making things that are useful to other people.

The fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts.

The joy of always learning.

The delight of working in a tractable medium.

I don't see anything in that list that is less valid today than it was when Brooks wrote it. A critical part of my job, and the job of our sales teams, is to make sure that those aspects of our work are not overshadowed by less positive influences.

Sect Schools

2006-11-19T23:21:00.000Z

Any of you who think that so called 'faith schools' are only encouraging and promoting divisiveness and conflict might be interested in this online petition, which:

proposes the term "sect school" in place of the term "faith school"

calls for amendments to the Education Bill (published 28th February 2006) to prevent the further proliferation of sect schools in the UK

calls for an end to state-funded education which is controlled by any religious group or affiliated with any religious beliefs

More at The Brights.

Edit: You can also petition the UK government direct at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/nofaithinschools/, although this may just be a ploy to gather names and addresses so that they can send the black vans round. Paranoid, me?

Bad Code

2006-10-12T16:11:00.000+01:00

The "Bad Code" posting on Wired's 27B Stroke 6 blog is both funny and sad. I can't add much to it, just go and read. If you aren't a coder, a little bit of background research might be needed, but it isn't too hard.

big and bad

2006-10-09T22:46:00.000+01:00

I was cycling around Warwickshire in an eco-friendly sort of way at the weekend, and in between the excessively frequent stops to repair the damage caused by the visits of the puncture fairy I was thinking about SUVs. Probably prompted by the amount of time one has to spend as a cyclist trying to avoid being killed by them, I was trying to figure out why a) they existed at all and b) why they sold in such numbers. Engineers are generally rational people, so why would they create something quite as preposterous as a Porsche Cayenne Turbo? Obviously, they did it because they wanted to keep their jobs and feed their children, but apart from relishing the challenge of building a 2 tonne off-roader that will go from 0-60 in under 5 seconds, can they really have felt happy about what they were doing? Engineering is about solving problems, but the modern SUV solves very few problems while creating rather a lot of them. In the beginning, SUVs existed as workhorses, to be used by farmers, foresters, explorers and construction workers to get places ordinary cars couldn't go. If you've ever been in a Willys Jeep or a Series 1 Landrover, you will appreciate just how utilitarian these utility vehicles were. Then for many years, the Range Rover was the only 'luxury' 4x4, sold to the landowners rather than their staff, and just as acceptable in Mayfair as in the country. The wider popularity of alleged off-roaders was driven by the American market (the Cayenne and the BMW X5 were created for that market), and according to the American Automobile industry, SUV purchasers

"tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."

(Keith Bradsher, "High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV")

So the problem SUVs solve is how to sell more vehicles to vain, selfish, nervous people, and for that the rest of us must accept unnecessary levels of pollution, increased accident risks and many other reductions in our quality of life. Would it not have been a btter engineering solution to invest in some education and therapy?

Fruitstock

2006-08-05T21:44:00.000+01:00

Just got back from a day at fruitstock with my children. What inspired marketing! For less than the cost of a TV advert, Innocent make a lot of friends,, enhance their cool image, and give a lot of people a good time. As you can see from the picture, it was pretty popular.

Welcoming Homer the tree-hugger

2006-08-04T08:08:00.000+01:00

In his post in the BBC's Green Room series, George Meyer welcomes hypocrites to the green cause. Because even hypocrites are better than evironmental rapists who neither know nor care what damage they do. He says:

We will now accept:

* Ignoramuses
* Poseurs
* Backstabbers
* Know-it-alls
* Opportunists
* Busybodies
* Hypocrites (like me)
* People Who Talk a Good Game
* Total Nutjobs

It's wide open. If Michael Crichton ever comes to his senses, we'll even take him. He's a big fellow, maybe he can lug around pamphlets or something.

It's a fair point - the recent evidence of the speed with which the glaciers and ice-caps are shrinking makes it clear that the change is real and accelerating. It is no time to be snobbish about who's on board the bus.

Don't go quietly

2006-03-17T22:12:00.000Z

In 1988 the following text was published in full page advertisements in the quality papers:

We have had less freedom than we believed. That which we have enjoyed has been too dependent on the benevolence of our rulers. Our freedoms have remained their possession, rationed out to us as subjects rather than being our own inalienable possession as citizens. To make real the freedoms we once took for granted means for the first time to take them for ourselves.

The time has come to demand political, civil and human rights in the United Kingdom. We call, therefore, for a new constitutional settlement which will:-
Enshrine, by means of a Bill of Rights, such civil liberties as the right to peaceful assembly, to freedom of association, to freedom from discrimination, to freedom from detention without trial, to trial by jury, to privacy and to freedom of expression.
Subject Executive powers and prerogatives, by whomsoever exercised, to the rule of law.

Establish freedom of information and open government.

Create a fair electoral system of proportional representation.

Reform the Upper House to establish a democratic, non-hereditary Second Chamber.

Place the Executive under the power of a democratically renewed Parliament and all agencies of the state under the rule of law.

Ensure the independence of a reformed judiciary.
Provide legal remedies for all abuses of power by the state and by officials of central and local government.

Guarantee an equitable distribution of power between the nations of the United Kingdom and between local, regional and central government.

Draw up a written constitution anchored in the ideal of universal citizenship, that incorporates these reforms.

The inscription of laws does not guarantee their realisation. Only people themselves can ensure freedom, democracy and equality before the law. Nonetheless, such ends are far better demanded, and more effectively obtained and guarded, once they belong to everyone by inalienable right.Add your name to ours. sign the charter now!

That was Charter 88; signatories were led by Lord Scarman and many other high profile figures from the law, civil service, politics, media and business. How much progress have we made in nearly 20 years? You can still follow that link and add your name, and you can still apply pressure for our democracy to be made as good as we like to think it is.

Please send money now

2006-03-13T22:09:00.000Z

For years, I have deliberately avoided skiing, as the last thing I need is another expensive hobby, especially one that also demands large chunks of my annual leave. Then, last autumn, my wife suggested that we share a chalet with some friends. We quickly realised that we'd left booking a bit late but eventually, having got nowhere with internet searches and so-called specialist ski agents, our local travel agency found us a place in Les Deux Alpes for the February half-term week. The most expensive week in the calendar :-(

So that I wouldn't look a complete muppet when I got there, I booked a 'Learn to Ski in a Day' session at the Snowdome in Tamworth. That was well worth the money, and the instructor was excellent. More than can be said for me. My excuse is that my unicyclist insticts are just all wrong for skiing.

Once in Les Deux Alpes, for the first couple of days, I was just crap. I heard what the instructors said, but I just could not make it happen. I lay in bed at the end of day 2 thinking that I had just wasted thousands of pounds (family of 5 in peak week) - I was really quite fed up. By day three, I was just getting the ocasional feeling that I'd got it right and I was feeling better about it. On day 4 I forgot my lift pass and had to miss the lesson, so I got to spend the morning just practising the things that I felt I needed to. That really helped, and by day 6 I'd got it and was hooked. Now my problem is how to find the money to do it at least once every year.

Never apologise never explain

2006-03-13T20:32:00.000Z

Right

Cowards complain as Ramsay kills turkey

2005-12-17T23:19:00.000Z

I'll admit to a degree of bias on this report from BBC News as I'm a vegetarian. However it seems quite clear to me that people who complain about seeing where their food comes from are just being cowards. If you don't like the fact that cute little animals get killed for your pleasure, then don't eat them. I would go so far as to say that you should be prepared to kill them yourself, or you shouldn't be eating them. Why should someone else be expected to do your dirty work?

This is the argument at the heart of my vegetarianism - I'm not particularly sensitive about cute little animals, although I think that mistreating any living thing is probably bad for the people who do it, as well as the victims. I don't have a religious objection as I don't have a religion. It just seems counter to my conscience to ask others to do things that I am not comfortable doing. Just don't ask where that conscience comes from - I have no idea.

Merry Hell

2005-12-08T06:27:00.000Z

A BBC News Magazine article entitled Merry Hell talks about the effect evil minority pressure groups, such as the one that caused so much trouble over 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' earlier this year, can have on retailers. Sainsburys and Woolworths have pulled the DVD of the show from their shelves following complaints. It suggests that bloggers and other rational people are capable of writing more complaints than a bunch of nutters. Sounds like a plan...
I was thinking of boycotting them until I realised that it would leave me without a source of food. The supermarkets have pretty much done for the independent retailers around here. I'm boycotting ASDA because of Wal-Mart's atrocious human rights record, both with their direct employees and those of their suppliers, Tescos because I just don't think it is healthy for one company to be so dominant and Waitrose don't have a store that I can get to without burning unacceptable quantities of fossil fuels. So if I refused to shop at Sainsburys I'd get hungry. If only Ocado would improve their site design so that it didn't take longer to place an order than it does to drive round to Sainsburys and just buy the stuff.

Ends and means

2005-12-05T21:50:00.000Z

Condi Rice's statement today sounded awfully close to a claim that the end justifies the means. US foreign policy has always seemed to have an element of 'might is right' about it, but as soon as you start to suggest that anything is permissible if it prevents terrorism, it seems to me that you have adopted the terrorists logic. And if you have adopted their logic, their morality goes along with it. Once you have thus surrendered the moral high ground, you will be locked into an escalating cycle of violence which no-one can win. Someone in the US State Department needs to start reading the history books and thinking with their brain, assuming they can find one.

Palm TX: First Impressions

2005-11-30T18:56:00.000Z

This is my 5th Palm device since 1997. I've had a 512k Pilot Personal, a 4M Palm IIIx, a 16M Clié T625c and then a 64M Tungsten T3. The T3 I won in a competition (thanks Proporta!) but all the others I paid approximately £200 for, so I guess that is what I consider to be an acceptable price for a PDA. With all of the others this meant that I had to wait for the price to drop, but the TX started at this price. As recorded at Palm 24/7 (scroll down to the 'Palm Europe Trade-in Offer' article) I traded my Pilot Personal in so I got a very good price, but the Dixons airport stores are selling the TX for £195 and it is readily available online for around £210. Such is progress in electronics - I'm glad I don't have to try to make a living off hardware.
Right, on to those impressions...

The screen is really nice, bright and clear.

Graffiti 2 still sucks (or blows goats, depending on your idiom preferences) but recognition seems better than the T3

I've seen all the posts from people moaning about the lack of a cradle.I have a drawer full of cradles that I have never used so I am very happy to have a cable in the box.

Wi-Fi - just brilliant. Easy to configure, performance is fine, just works.

MP3 player - pTunes is fine, no frills but perfectly functional.The TX appears as a mobile device in WMP 10 so getting music on and off the card is really easy. I've only got a 256Mb card but now I've confirmed that the TX can do the business as an MP3 player I'll be ordering something bigger!

Compatibility seems ok. Just one of my favourite programs fails to work - the freeware currency converter 'Currency' causes a soft reset every time I try to run it.

Outlook synchronisation didn't work. I got a load of OLERR: errors and the Calendar synch failed. This happened with my T3 too, and after trying the various things in Palm's knowledgebase I took their suggestion and gave my money to Chapura for PocketMirror. This is actually a pretty major flaw, and I think it is pathetic that Palm's suggestion when their software doesn't work is to buy someone else's - just fix it for Gods sake! I do have six years worth of data in my Calendar and if I cleaned it up the problem might go away, but PocketMirror and the Intellisync software that came with my T625C work fine on exactly the same Outlook data so it clearly isn't impossible to make it work if you know what you are doing.

Despite the Outlook hassles, overall I think I'd have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the TX. Of course I'm lucky that I'm not bothered by the T3 features that didn't make it to the TX. I never used the voice recorder, I just can't get agitated about the lack of an LED and I can live without a vibrating alarm. Others may feel differently, but for me the lack of a slider, Wi-Fi, longer battery life, non-volatile RAM and better screen are more than adequate compensation.
The final paragraph was going to read "This review written entirely on the palm using Graffiti 2 and posted using u*blog". Unfortunately, u*blog worked fine until I pressed the 'post' button, at which point it soft reset the TX. It doesn't have an export function, so the portion of the review that survived the crash (about 60% of it) had to be copied bit by bit (to keep under the clipboard limit) into Memos. Any suggestions for a Palm blogging tool that works on a TX?

fundaMentalists

2005-11-30T15:07:00.000Z

Talking about possible future problems like climate change, loss of biological diversity and disease, Royal Society president Lord May says in a speech today

"Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason. The Enlightenment's core values, which lie at the heart of the Royal Society - free, open, unpredjudiced, uninhibited questioning and enquiry; individual liberty; separation of church and state - are under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East."

Amen to that, brother. (via the Register)

Another step towards Big Brother

2005-11-16T14:24:00.000Z

Another excellent article at the Register. Technology is obviously going to make all sorts of things possible, but just because something can be done does not necessarily mean that it should be done. Dealing with untaxed and more seriously uninsured cars is obviously a good thing - uninsured drivers cause a lot of grief every year. But as we all know

Power corrupts - absolute power is kind of neat

or something like that. Technology or even legislation introduced for honourable reasons (look, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here, OK?) can later be used in less benign ways. It is really difficult to know where the line should be drawn but if we don't draw it somewhere, pretty soon we may have no say in the matter at all. At the very least there should be an open and informed debate about the price we are prepared to pay for security and law enforcement, and I don't see that debate happening at the moment.

Software companies are stupid

2005-11-13T22:25:00.000Z

Mike Magee at the Inquirer has been chatting to some hardware guys - serious hardware guys, the one who design and make chips. He says that they are muttering that all the software indstry has done with the power that the chip manufacturers have given them is use it to allow them to make stupid software. I think they've got a point, but I'm not sure that the software companies are the villains here.
I'll use storage for the following argument, since it is easy to compare like with like - it is a lot harder for processors, although similar logic applies. I am old enough to remember when 2GB of storage took up the space of a large wardrobe and cost £100,000. I just checked and today 2GB of storage can be had for £0.61 as part of a 200GB disk, and if you put it in your wardrobe you'd probably lose it. At the time, as a programmer, I was paid about £8000 a year. On that basis, it was worth spending quite a lot of my time making my software as smart as possible if that saved hardware spend. 2GB of storage=12 man years of effort. I reckon an equivalent junior programmer today gets about £25,000 p.a. which makes 2GB of storage worth approximately 3 man minutes of effort. This fundamentally changes the economics of software development and means that the advances in hardware are just used in an attempt to do the same stuff more cheaply, rather than to innovate and really take advantage of what is possible.
To go back to a familiar theme for this blog, we once again see how a focus on price alone has negative consequences for the society and individuals alike. Just imagine what we could have achieved if we had decided to explore the possibilities of the computing power we now have - HAL 9000 could have been a reality in 2001. On second thoughts, perhaps that wouldn't have been such a great idea.

Why does Hersheys smell like vomit?

2005-11-06T22:33:00.000Z

No pretence at social or political significance today. Just a deep philosophical question - why does Hersheys chocolate smell like regurgitated lunch?
I presume that it is possible to buy decent chocolate in the USA, but the stuff we seem to hear about over here is Hersheys. People visiting from America bring Hersheys stuff as gifts for our children. And it smells like vomit, especially Hersheys Kisses. Looking at the ingredients, I can't see that it actually contains any sick, they must just process the cocoa in a special way to achieve the effect.
It's kind of embarrassing that many people probably think that Cadburys Dairy Milk is the pinnacle of British chocolate making, but at least it doesn't smell of sick.

PR firm demonstrates extreme stupidity

2005-11-04T06:15:00.000Z

Someone trying to promote an amusingly named web design firm called WebXperts posted the surprise news this week that Google returned Dubya's biography when asked to search for 'failure'. They said

This search result dilemma was discovered by WebXperts Design, Incorporated, an Atlanta web development and consulting company. The programmers discovered the anomaly on October 19th, 2005 and reported it to local news agencies.

Given that the BBC reported this back in 2003, this only seems to demonstrate that WebXperts wouldn't know the web from a hole in the ground. In case you too managed to miss this news Wikipedia has a good explanation of what it is all about.

Here comes 1984

2005-11-01T19:07:00.000Z

I know I keep going on about this, but it is really important. Just go and read Martin Brampton's article, and remember what Benjamin Franklin said: "Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security". Don't let these illiberal enthusiasts for a totalitarian state sneak this stuff in under the guise of protecting you from terrorism. You won't be protected, and one day you will wake up and realise what you have lost - and there will be no way back but to fight for it. Then you'll be the terrorist...

Software developers 'abandoned' by management

2005-11-01T12:08:00.000Z

I think I'm getting kind of obsessional about poor quality and the choices our society is making. This article at vnunet is yet another example of how the current obsession with low price as the only differentiator in fact leads to lower quality of life and higher real costs for most of us. I don't think, in 20 years in the industry, that I've ever worked in a software development organisation where management saw quality as an important aspect of their job. Price, and schedule were the main drivers. Quality was 'what can we get away with?'. I don't blame the managers - the reality is that no-one is demanding quality as their priority measure, so in our market economy we get what the market demands which is 'faster, cheaper'. But as the old saying goes: "you can have it good, cheap, or fast - pick any two". As a developer it is depressing to be constantly pressured to release code that you aren't happy with - and as a customer, it's pretty depressing to pay for buggy software. But that seems to be the choice we have made as a society.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

2005-11-01T10:57:00.000Z

Sony is just so wrong here. Performing criminal acts against ones customers is not generally thought of as being a winning commercial strategy. The record lables must hold the moral high ground if they want to survive, and this kind of idiocy is so counterproductive. Great work by Mark to unearth the skulduggery.

Morgan Spurlock strikes again

2005-10-27T22:04:00.000+01:00

If you are in the UK, and you have cable or satellite (not sure if it's on Freeview) you should watch Morgan Spurlock's new show on More4. The first episode showed Morgan and his girlfriend trying to live on the minimum wage in Ohio for 30 days. Showing how the richest country in the world subsidises the lifestyles of the better off by exploiting the poor and vulnerable without even the protection of a basic welfare state, it is another sobering look at the other side of the American Dream. Now we know how they can afford that $419bn defence budget (are my prejudices showing?). It is Morgan's job to give it some shock value, but the consensus seems to be that his view is not inaccurate.

Seasonal Warning

2005-10-17T21:49:00.000+01:00

Christmas is approaching inexorably, so I'd just like to remind you that anything that is marketed as an Ideal Gift is likely to be anything but. It is almost certainly not a useful item, but something created specifically to be given away, and to make sure that the process is as painless as possible it will be something that no-one would ever want to keep for themselves. When I rule the world, anyone found giving an 'Ideal Gift' will have their entrails extracted by eagles before being dipped in a salt bath. So just say no - you know it makes sense. If you can't think of anything to give someone, try Good Gifts, Great Gifts or Oxfam Unwrapped. Actually, these are great alternatives to any presents, not just Ideal Gifts. Few of us in the developed world actually need a present this Christmas, so why not spend your money on someone who does?

Devil's Advocate: Why poor customer service is all too common

2005-10-12T14:41:00.000+01:00

Martin Brampton's column on Silicon.com raises a number of issues, but his basic thesis, that poor customer service is caused by an almost total disconnect between the people to whom you complain and the people who actually do the stuff you complain about, seems sound.
On a related subject, under the title "Airline cost-cutting gone mad" Stephen McDowell of Interactive Investor asks how much cheaper airlines can get now that they are asking the passengers to clean the planes before they disembark.
Neither Brampton nor McDowell ask why this situation has arisen. It's my belief that it is the result of the constant drive towards lower price as almost the only market differentiator. Coupled with the general dumbing down in society which has resulted in fewer people being able to discriminate between articles or services of varying qualities, it has led to a situation where 'just good enough' is all that is available. I also think that there has been confusion between the pursuit of high quality and elitism, and once again the casualty has been quality.

Re-building

2005-10-08T11:47:00.000+01:00

Re-building
Way back at the end of June, I broke my collarbone during the Mountain Mayhem 2005 24-hour mountain bike race. The medical advice at the time was to leave it alone and it would heal of its own accord. I was somewhat sceptical about this, as the two ends of the bone were severely displaced and nowhere near each other, so I didn't really see how they would re-connect. Anyway, they didn't, so last week I had an operation to have a bone graft and a plate put in to hold the bone together, the results of which you can see above. I hope it works because I've spent the whole summer unable to ride my bicycle, unicycle or motorcycle and it is starting to depress me.

National Insecurity Cards

2005-09-26T14:10:00.000+01:00

This is quite an old article on AlterNet from my favourite security consultant, Bruce Schneier. In it he argues very persuasively that ID cards make us less rather than more secure. At the core of his argument is the principle that security measures should be evaluated not based on how they work, but on how they fail. Well worth a read, if you value your safety and liberty.

BusinessWeek Best of the Web

2005-09-20T10:26:00.000+01:00

A useful list of sites (via Jack Schofield at the Guardian)

LJK Setright

2005-09-19T16:24:00.000+01:00

LJK Setright was the most original contributor to motoring journalism over the past 40 years. In Car magazine through its heyday in the '70s I used to turn to his column first. I would always learn something, and I would always enjoy the read, even if I didn't always agree with his position on, say, environmentalism. Highly individual, and a private person to the end, I think it is unlikely that we will see anyone write like he did again. He leaves a treasure trove of books to remember him by - a little searching at Amazon will prove very rewarding. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had directed his intellect towards some of the issues we find in software development.

Moral Hazard?

2005-09-15T10:03:00.000+01:00

In the New Yorker article, "THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH - The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.", Malcolm Gladwell sheds some light on how The USA manages to be the wealthiest country in the world and yet allow a huge proportion of its population to live with third world standards of healthcare. I found it shocking reading, and a grim warning to us in the UK of what we have to lose. The article doesn't address the financial aspects of the issue, but it seems likely that the cost incurred by society due to the endemic ill health and suffering would outweigh the saving in taxes.

Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19

2005-09-15T09:50:00.000+01:00

Just a reminder - next Monday is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Possibly even more pointless than trying to get 2000 petes in one place, Talk Like a Pirate Day is in its eleventh year, but it didn't become an international event until Dave Barry gave it wider publicity in 2002. The site has plenty of help and advice if you are a beginner at talking like a pirate, and less desirably but inevitably there are now some merchandising opportunities as well.

An unnecessary gathering of people called Peter!

2005-09-14T16:55:00.000+01:00

The current record for the largest number of people of the same name gathered together is held by the Mohammeds from Dubai. As a Pete myself, I wholeheartedly support Pete's attempt to bring the record back to Britain. If you are a Pete, register and make plans to be there next year for the largest gathering of Petes in history.

Survival of the fittest?

2005-09-12T06:46:00.000+01:00

More from the BBC on whether Katrina will shock America into rejecting the Social Darwinism that has been so influential in shaping its policies for over a hundred years. As the article states, the Americans are basically a kindly people so I find it hard to believe that they can turn their backs once again, yet I fear that they are too well practised at seeing only what they want to see, and hearing only what they want to hear. I hope to be proven wrong, as the passing of peak oil will make the world an increasingly uncomfortable place, and we will all need to learn to be more interdependent and less independent.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

2005-09-11T21:31:00.000+01:00

Have you been touched? Read Bobby Henderson's Open Letter to the Kansas School Board and be saved! Since I discovered this my life has been turned around and I feel like there is a reason for living again.

24FightingChickens

2005-09-10T11:04:00.000+01:00

I was disappointed when Rob Redmond took his wonderful Karate site, 24 Fighting Chickens, offline last year. Rob had been very active online, and had annoyed a lot of people by applying logic and common sense to the learning of Karate. I found nearly all of his writing to be very enlightening, and I was quite happy to agree to disagree with the (very) few bits that I either didn't get or actually thought were wrong. The site is now back on line, although most of the original content is absent. He's now running it as a Karate blog, although he has switched off the ability to comment. Still worth a read.

The Dark Side

2005-09-06T22:30:00.000+01:00

America is the world's richest country, but that wealth is very unevenly distributed. When Katrina struck, the glossy veneer was stripped off, and the rest of the world could see the reality behind the glitz. It wasn't pretty. America sustains much of its wealth on the backs of illegal immigrants or poor blacks who live and work in third world poverty. These were the people who suffered in New Orleans, who will suffer for years to come. The state won't look after them once the eyes of the world turn away again. This lack of compassion, this exploitation, is justified by the American Dream in which everyone has the potential to rise up from poverty and become a millionaire. Yet social mobility in the USA is very low, because this underclass has little education and hence little opportunity. With my liberal European outlook I would find it hard to live in America, knowing what underpinned my prosperity.

But just when I was feeling all smug in my comfortable anti-Americanism, I found that the UK keeps the US company at the bottom of the social mobility scale. My experience suggests that our divide is less racial and more class based, but I don't suppose that that is any comfort to those who suffer from it.

The Ex-Blogging Officer

2005-09-06T22:19:00.000+01:00

Well, while I was away, Chris Locke seems to have got himself separated from his gig as CBO for Highbeam Research. I thought he was doing a pretty good job, and I don't know the circumstances of their parting, but Chris has been asking for donations to pay the rent. He's kind of like the Stonehenge of the internet, so he should be worth preserving. Please give generously.

He's still working on a new book, and there's a blog site for that too. Even stranger than usual, I have to admit I find this one quite heavy going, and I don't really have the time to try and get it all straight in my head. YMMV, and it is at least worth having a look.

It's been so long...

2005-09-06T22:17:00.000+01:00

Can't believe it has been so long since my last post. Well, summer's nearly gone so I guess I'd better get writing again.

Your fingerprints are everywhere

2005-06-16T13:13:00.000+01:00

"How Much do you trust your government?" is the question asked by Scott Granneman at Security Focus. He goes on to reflect on the way the US government has eroded liberties in the name of security. This prompted me to Google for "Star Wars This is how liberty dies" as I had a hunch that it would lead me to a few people who would draw parallels between Chancellor Palpatine and George Bush. I was not disappointed. Many people have noticed that the creation and hyping of threats to justify the restriction of liberty and the concentration of power in the state is happening in our world just as it happened (or not) long long ago in a galaxy far far away. Scott concludes his piece with a call to action, and he's right. Democracies like ours aren't lost, they are given away, and if we refuse to give it away the forces of the dark side will have to look out there. As citizens (or subjects if you are in the UK) we have a duty to be informed and to resist this gradual theft of our liberty.

The tyranny of choice

2005-05-05T23:35:00.000+01:00

In the early stages of the recent campaign, one of the things that the parties tried to outdo each other in promising was choice. Choice of school for the kids and choice of hospital for the sick. Who said we want a choice? Who is going to pick the 'worst' service? We just want the nearest service to our home to be good enough that we don't have to worry about it. Anything else simply creates a market in which the rich win out at the expense of the poor. As an example, consider schools. In my town, there is a school that is considered 'better' than the others. The difference in price between an equivalent house in the catchment area for the 'good' school and one in the catchment areas for the other schools is pretty much the same as the cost of a private secondary education. I don't think this is a coincidence, it is just the market working.

I've never been so insulted in my life

2005-05-05T23:26:00.000+01:00

Well, actually I have, but let's not discuss that now. What I'm talking about is the Conservative party's belief that they can get my vote by appealing to my xenophobia and greed. I'm not xenophobic, and I'm not greedy in the sense that the Tories seem to think I am. As I write this, the first results in the UK General Election are being announced and it seems that the Tories have done rather better than the polls had indicated they would. I hope that this does not indicate that my fellow citizens are impressed by Michael Howard's cynical attempt to encourage racism and the pusuit of personal gain. There aren't that many Daily Mail readers, are there?

Who should you vote for?

2005-04-17T21:39:00.000+01:00

Following a link I found in a post on uk.rec.cycling I took the test at Whoshouldyouvotefor.com, and my results are shown below. I think I misunderstood one of the questions - when they asked "Which result do you actually expect to get?", I thought they meant "who will win the election?", when what they thought they were asking was "For whom do you think you ought to vote?". Re-reading the questionnaire, I think it is they who were not clear rather than me who is dumb, but then I would say that wouldn't I? According to Google, the original post has provoked 75 replies so far. I can't help feeling that whoever you vote for, the government still gets in. Still, you've got to hope, haven't you?
Apologies for the formatting, the site provided some HTML to copy, but it was unreadable on my black background and I didn't have time to do anything more sophisticated than wrapping it in a DIV with a light background colour.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Labour

Your actual outcome:

Labour -20
Conservative -12
	Liberal Democrat 32
	UK Independence Party 10
	Green 23

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

If you are wavering, you can take the test yourself at Who Should You Vote For

Election Time

2005-04-15T23:35:00.000+01:00

As Sting, the great philosopher said:

You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

Head of NHS IT acknowledges severe shortages of skilled staff

2005-03-29T12:58:00.000+01:00

Computer Weekly announces the not particularly surprising news that attempting to resource a multi-billion IT programme when the industry has lost tens of thousands of people through redundancy tends to lead to a shortage of skills. Good news for those of us who are left as it will push salaries up. We are seeing contractor rates rising quite rapidly, and some of the not particularly inspiring candidates I interview are asking for silly money.

2005-03-24T21:52:00.000Z

Soon it will be spring...

Computers no advantage for education

2005-03-22T18:57:00.000Z

As reported in the Grauniad, recently published research seems to show that computers are a hindrance to education, rather than the unmitigated benefit that many have claimed. I'm pretty good with computers, and I've tried really hard to get my children to learn to do something useful with them, albeit without a lot of success. As far as I can tell, the schools make very little effort to teach useful computer skills (I'll admit my eldest is only 13, so perhaps they will get around to it later), and no attempt to even explain the basics of how a computer or its software work. There appears to be a belief that just by having computers around, children will learn by some weird cyber-osmosis process. This research seems to kill off that belief, so perhaps now we can start asking some searching questions about how to get some value for the huge sums of money spent on computers in education.
Edit:Having just listened to a government minister saying that if we wanted to raise the quality of school meals the money would have to come from elsewhere in the education budget, I think it is pretty clear what should be done. Stop spending billions on shiny computers, and increase the 37p spent on ingredients for a school meal to some more sensible figure. Better diets have actually been shown to improve learning, as well as health, and would represent a much better educational investment.

Blogging doesn't make you a better person

2005-03-21T22:18:00.000Z

The fundamental flaw.

Video games cause violence? I don't think so

2005-03-18T22:47:00.000Z

Nor does Charles Cooper, who in an article for CNET News asks "If video games kill, what about the Bible?". The so called religious right, who one could easily argue are neither, tend to lead the outcry against violent video games, but their own book contains quite enough violence. Even worse, it suggests that violence is OK if it is what God wants. Since there is absolutely no objective measure of God's desires, this pretty much gives them carte blanche to commit any violent atrocities they fancy. History clearly shows that they have taken full advantage of the opportunity.

Food-related karma improvement activites

2005-03-16T23:07:00.000Z

Two things you can do to increase the sum total of human happiness: Firstly, please visit http://www.thehungersite.com and click on the button. While you are there, think about supporting the advertisers, since that is what pays for the food. Once you've thought about it, give the money to charity directly, it's much more efficient.
Secondly, if you live in England, sign the petition at http://www.feedmebetter.com. Feedmebetter is a campaign to improve the quality of school meals in the UK - if you've seen Jamie Oliver's School Dinners TV programme you'll know what it is all about. For various low political reasons, we've been feeding our children on some pretty unpleasant stuff (Scrotum burgers, in Jamie's words), and it is time to do something about it.
Your karma will thank you for it.

Be careful out there

2005-03-16T22:04:00.000Z

There's some pretty reasonable advice at eWeek in Ten Not-So-Simple Rules for Using the Internet. I am increasingly concerned that the bad guys are winning and that the obvious potential for good that the internet has is being nullified by their activities. I've seen several wikis and even blogs where editing has been turned off because of abusive, obscene or spamming posts. I've seen blog comments being abused to manipulate search engine results. I've had to clean up PCs for several less IT-savvy victims when the burden of malware became so great that the PC barely functioned. The very openness and accessibility that makes the web so great is also its Achilles Heel, and as is usually the case the power of a bad guy to negatively affect others is greater than the inverse case.

Education - saying the unsayable

2005-03-14T22:22:00.000Z

Prince Charles got hammered when he suggested that our education systems were not delivering for the children or for society. In Peter Cochrane's Uncommon Sense: Can education be saved? on silicon.com a prominent futurologist makes a similar point. I'll restrict my comment on the issue to the observation that in my current attempts to recruit high tech workers, less than 25% of the CVs I see are from British nationals.

Strange...

2005-03-13T22:44:00.000Z

How weird is that? Blogger's spellchecker doesn't recognise 'Blog'.

Keep Him In Your Heart

2005-03-13T22:17:00.000Z

Nearly a week snce my last post. It isn't that I don't have anything to say, just not much time to say it. When Warren Zevon was told that he only had three months left to say his piece, his reaction was to book a studio and start recording his 14th album. VH1, the music channel, recorded the process for their (Inside)Out series and later released it on DVD. I saw the show when it was on TV before Christmas, but I only just got around to watching the DVD. I'd forgotten what a tearjerker (Inside) Out: Warren Zevon (Amazon UK list this as Warren Zevon - Keep Me In Your Heart, but they are wrong) was. It is quite casually shot, with excerpts from a wide range of Warren's music, and chronicles his dying and the making of The Wind". It is well worth seeing, even if you are in the majority and you've either never heard of Warren at all, or you've only ever heard 'Werewolves of London'. The DVD has a number of extras, as is the fashion, and some of them are worth a listen. I particularly like the footage of Bruce Springsteen recording his stuff for 'Disorder in the House'.
Stop Press: Jordan Zevon, Warren's son, has just released some footage not used in the film of Warren with Hunter S. Thompson. Read about it on the Warren Zevon Bulletin Board.

History Lessons

2005-03-07T22:31:00.000Z

On the Developer Central Blog, Mike Gunderson asks "Where the heck is our institutional memory?", questioning why the software development business finds it so difficult to learn the lessons of history. As philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I've spent a large part of my working life trying to get these lessons accepted and institutionalised within the working practices of my employers. Sometimes I'm successful, but then I get assigned to a long project out of the office (or even go off and work for someone else for a while), and when I come back things have reverted. It really seems as if these are lessons that companies simply don't want to learn, and without someone constantly agitating and evangelising they gradually fade away. Why is this? I really don't know, when study after study shows that the end result can be lower costs, higher quality and a happier and more productivity workforce. Perhaps it is just that most of the best practices require management to take a slightly longer term view, and this is something that corporate culture does not encourage. Perhaps it is because it requires management to think of people as human beings, rather than resources, which is counter to the "management by Excel" methodology now employed by most large enterprises. Whatever the reason, as the body of evidence continues to build, it should become easier to persuade people to take notice. I'll cling to that hope, anyway, despite Aldous Huxley's opinion "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach"

Investment advice - avoid America

2005-03-03T21:22:00.000Z

Financial Decline and fall of the American Empire is an incredible (as in 'I found it hard to believe what I was reading') analysis of present day America. The author's conclusion is that America's decadence makes it a very risky place to invest. This plays to my prejudices, so I'm tempted to agree, but I am amazed to see an opinion like this on an investment site. I'm glad to see that for the moment at least the freedom of the press still exists in the UK.

Restrict freedom to preserve liberty

2005-03-02T20:00:00.000Z

Restrict freedom to preserve liberty is an well argued piece at The Register about the current UK government's illiberal instincts, about which I have written before. From the Magna Carta onwards, people have fought for the right not to be arbitrarily detained, tortured or executed by an executive. To suggest that we should give up this right because the current incumbents claim to be nice people who would only detain bad people is just barking.

Making a point about privacy

2005-02-28T22:18:00.000Z

Worth $30million and under 'regional arrest'. This article "Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy" is about John Gilmore's attempt to get the US government to come clean about the encroachment on civil liberty that is happening in the name of security in the post 9/11 world. As Bruce Schneier points out, many of the things we are asked to do in the name of 'security' often do nothing to make us more secure, yet do much to compromise our freedoms. I'm impressed by what Gilmore is doing - if he needed it I'd probably even send him money.

Public service announcement

2005-02-25T12:10:00.000Z

Firefox 1.0.1 has just been released. There are a bunch of security fixes in there, so it would probably be a good idea to install it and maintain your smug position as 'safer than an IE user'. The page describing the security updates has not yet been updated but they should get around to it in the next day or so. Firefox - YKIMS.

More subversion

2005-02-22T07:19:00.000Z

In Growth of Human Factors in Application Development, Alastair Coburn says:

"Projects succeed because people break out of the prescribed process to make sure the system delivers, or because the process is deliberately vague, allowing people to do whatever is necessary. The best modern processes are of the latter form. This is

(P1) Trust in people to do what is necessary."

I have always instinctively believed that organisations that attempted to use process as a compensation for a lack of ability were unlikely to succeed - software development cannot be reduced to a 'paint by numbers' exercise. I had not realised that so many others shared this belief.

Breaking the Rules

2005-02-22T07:09:00.000Z

There's a book out, called "Contagious Success" , and as part of the marketing for the book (and her company's consultancy services) the author Susan Lucia Annunzio was a guest blogger on Fast Company Now. The point she chose to emphasise in this post is that the leaders of high performance teams have to break the rules of their organisation to allow their teams to succeed. The interesting thing for me is the way this reinforces the Dilbertian view of the world, where you naturally assume that your employer is part of the problem. Is this inevitable? Is it not possible to build an organisation that actually works? Or is it true that the only way to quality is subversion?

..and now, a message from our sponsor...

2005-02-19T20:09:00.000Z

If you are into neoprene related water sports, you will be familiar with the problem of wetsuits that ming. Use Mingaway and your problems will be over. A natural product, it de-mings your rubber leisurewear in minutes.

Giving and taking offence

2005-02-17T19:25:00.000Z

There's been a media row in the UK over the last week about some insults the London mayor, Ken Livingston, aimed at a journalist. Various people have chimed in saying that Ken should apologise, but now Tory MP Boris Johnson has weighed in with the opposite view. As Boris has pointed out, nothing Ken said was anti-semitic, it was just rude and offensive. And since it was meant to be rude and offensive, and Ken feels that he had reason to behave in this way, he really doesn't want to apologise and I can't see why he should. So called 'political correctness' has us thinking twice before we say anything, but it is worth remembering that being rude is a perfectly natural thing to do - it is part of the way we communicate, and sometimes we need to let the other person know that we are really pissed off. Those who would sanitise our language to the point that rudeness becomes impossible are mealy-mouthed weasels and they should sod off, right now.

Lessons on how to fight terror

2005-02-17T09:22:00.000Z

I came across this article, written only a couple of days after September 11th 2001, while following a chain of links from the Register. I was struck by how prescient it was, and sadly by how many of lessons listed here that the Americans (and British to some extent) have ignored and must learn again. As the article points out, the British have spent more time fighting terrorists than just about anybody else. You could speculate why that was, and what the two current greatest victims of terrorist tactics, the US and Israel, have in common with the Britain that aroused such hatred. The question you have to ask is not 'how can we stop the terrorists', but 'what is it we are doing that makes these people feel that they would rather die than share this world with us?'. Only when you understand that can you start to stop the killing.

Case Study: A Billion Dollar Boondoggle

2005-02-16T18:58:00.000Z

If there weren't enough warnings for the proponents of ID cards close to home, perhaps they should look at this Expert Project Management - Case Study: A Billion Dollar Boondoggle
The article discusses the fiasco of the Canadian gun registration scheme. The paragraph that particularly caught my eye is this one:

Aside from monumental fiscal waste, this is ultra-bad law. "It's designed to operate on the law-abiding, without touching the outlaw. People who register their firearms rarely use them for crimes, and people who use their firearms for crimes rarely register them. The law's net effect is to diminish public safety rather than enhance it, first because it consumes financial resources and manpower that could be more usefully employed in other areas of law enforcement, and second because it reduces people's own ability to fight crime."

Very similar arguments could be applied to ID cards. In fact, if ID cards are accepted, they will become a powerful weapon for the criminal, as he will be able to 'prove' his lawful status by presenting his card (forged, stolen, or illicitly acquired) and thus lull the suspicions of his victims.

Another blog victim - or is there more to it?

2005-02-15T18:03:00.000Z

Mark Jen lasted 11 days at Google before he was sacked, probably for reasons related to his blog. Mark puts his side of the story in ninetyninezeros: the official story, straight from the source , although it is a bit light on detail.
The comments are interesting - a sort of 'all human life is here' experience. There are the 'hello mother!' types, who just want to get their name in lights, the people trying to hijack an event to generate publicity for whatever they are selling, conspiracy theorists, reactionary 'serves you right' posters and plenty more.
For my part, it has always seemed a bit daft to clearly identify ones employer and then bitch about them without a fairly thick cloak of anonymity. My economic well-being depends on my employer's success, and doing stuff designed to undermine that would be, well, just stupid. If there is stuff you don't like, do your best to make the changes from the inside. If you really don't like it, then leave. Or perhaps I've missed something?

The Cuddly Menace

2005-02-09T17:33:00.000Z

This is absolutely what the internet is for. Forget all this blogging, e-commerce, education and stuff, this kind of thing is all the justification I need.

Fixing stuff

2005-01-30T01:03:00.000Z

I've been working in IT for the last 20 years and to my contemporaries and I it sometimes seems that problem solving skills are not what they were. I've been wondering why this might be, when it is alleged that modern educational methods emphasise teaching children to reason and think, rather than learn by rote. I got a clue when I was helping my son set up the Scalextric , and as usual the track didn't quite make a good electrical contact, and the cars were full of fluff so they didn't run so well. I remember being really interested in how things worked, and my friends and I would disassemble all sorts of things, Scalextric cars included, in the search for knowledge. Some of them we even managed to re-assemble, occasionally so that they worked. Most of the technology we used was relatively simple and understandable - lift the lid on a 60's car and you'd see things that a village blacksmith could fix. An SU carburettor was basic, an Amal even more so, ignition systems were mechanical and very easy to comprehend. Even looking at a radio, you could imagine the electrons flowing from anode to cathode. There were also plenty of books that described these technological wonders and their workings. I think that this was useful in shaping our world view and teaching basic problem solving and diagnostic skills. Our mental abilities were further honed by having to cope with imperial measures and pre-decimal currency, without the benefit of electronic calculators!
Today, the technology we use is vastly superior, but more importantly, far less transparent. As Arthur C. Clarke said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', and my suggestion is that to the vast majority of people the things they use every day might as well be magic. This gives rise to a new irrationalism which hinders rather than encourages the development of engineering skills. Despite the huge increase in the number of people going on to higher education, the number studying mathematics and physical sciences is actually declining. Those of us who must work in fields that require these skills find ourselves increasingly isolated. Perhaps it is a race to perfect Artificial Intelligence before the skills we need to do it die out.

So much to choose from today

2005-01-27T21:55:00.000Z

But it has to be this :BBC NEWS | UK | Terror plan may spark fresh outcry

I listened to Charles Clark on the BBC today, trying to justify why we had to give up civil rights to save our society from these shadowy people who want to destroy it. I'm sorry, but it really doesn't work like that. You can't give up a fundamental principle and pretend that no damage has been done. Principles are like that, they are either wholly intact, or completely broken. Governments that say 'trust us, we won't misuse this power' must be treated with the deepest suspicion. Ironically, I think the Tories understand this, but Labour clearly doesn't (I suppose Stalin claimed to be a socialist too). It reminds me of this possibly apocryphal story, which I always thought was attributable to Winston Churchill, but which a quick Google reveals an equal number of people think was by George Bernard Shaw, with a minority claiming Mark Twain as the source. Anyway:

Mark Twain/Winston Churchill/George Bernard Shaw is at a party, mingling with the upper crust, and he's talking to an obviously rich matron who is busy lamenting the death of morality. Shaw/Churchill/Mr. Twain interrupts her to ask, "My dear madam, your complaints are well-grounded, but I wonder if you would sleep with me for one million dollars?" The woman replied, a bit flustered, "For one million dollars Well, who wouldn't?" "Unfortunately," Churchill/Mr. Twain/Shaw continued, "I don't have one million dollars. Will you sleep with me for twenty?" The woman became offended and said indignantly, "Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!" To which Churchill/Shaw/Mr. Twain replied, "We've already established that; now we're just haggling over the price."

The point being, regardless of attribution, that principles are absolute, and once given up, they are gone.

Do they want my business?

2005-01-26T21:50:00.000Z

Last night, I tried to buy a digital camera over the net. I buy thousands of pounds worth of stuff online every year, but I'd never used this particular company before. The price was OK, and they had the camera in stock, allegedly. I was a bit put off when the checkout process kept adding extras to the bill without asking (a loyalty card for £14?!!) but I removed them and completed the checkout. All seemed well, until I checked my mail this morning and found the following:

Dear Mr X

In our bid to reduce fraud on the internet, we have issued new measures of security.
To proceed with your order we will need some extra details from you.

If you are opting for delivery to the same address as your invoice address, please send us something that has your name and address on it from the following :

A copy of your driving licence, OR
A copy of your social security card, OR
A copy of your bank statement, OR
A copy of your council tax bill, OR
A copy of a recent utility bill.

If you are opting for delivery to a work address, please send us :

A copy of your passport, driving licence or recent utility bill, AND
Company letterhead or business card, with switchboard number that we can call to verify that you work there.

If you are opting for delivery to a private address that differs to your billing address, please send us:

A copy of your passport, driving license or recent utility bill, AND
A copy of a driving licence, recent utility bill, or something else that has the name and address of the person who will accept delivery.

This can be sent to us either by fax on 00 33 1 nnnn nnnn, or by replying to this email with either jpeg, pdf or gif attachments.
We do not accept mobile phone bills or online statements. If you have not already done so, please provide us a daytime landline contact number.
We are sorry about the inconvenience this may cause you. These measures are intended for our customer's protection, due to the large amount of credit card fraud on the internet, and to allow us to quickly reimburse anyone who has been a victim of a fraudulent transaction.

Since I don't own a scanner, fax machine or photocopier, this was going to be inconvenient to say the least. I was also uncomfortable about the security implications of sending all this stuff to some firm I'd never done business with before. That fax number was also an international call (I'm in the UK, that's a French number). So, I emailed them back and told them to cancel the order, I'll go somewhere else that doesn't give me so much hassle. I can't believe that they'll stay in business if they go on behaving like this.

Why is Software Development Difficult?

2005-01-25T07:13:00.000Z

Bloody good question. For those of you with an interest in software and who live in the antipodes, this might be worth attending. For the rest of us, just read the session description.

When inspiration fails, wibble

2005-01-24T22:27:00.000Z

In my CD autochanger today, making the M40 bearable:

Who Killed The Zutons, The Zutons
Vertigo, Groove Armada
My Aim Is True, Elvis Costello
Into the Great Wide Open, Tom Petty
Well Kept Secret, John Martyn
Use Your Illusion Vol. 2, Guns'n'Roses

More than usually eclectic, though I say so myself. The Zutons are the only new band in there. Slightly reminiscent of Talking Heads, which can't be a bad thing. I was introduced to Groove Armada by a friend, I'd never have considered picking it up if he hadn't suggested it, but I'm glad I did. Elvis' debut album was an incredible piece of work, still sounds fresh all these years later. Killishandra calls Tom Petty 'jangly American rubbish', but whatever I think of their president I am rather partial to a number of their musicians. John Martyn, almost as grumpy as Van Morrison, almost as good a songwriter. Guns'n'Roses, possibly the ultimate hard rock band - they had the look, the attitude, the substance abuse and that sound. They really understood what it was all about. Not their best album by a long way, but still worth a listen.

More on US hypocrisy

2005-01-23T23:13:00.000Z

So, this country that is so God-fearing that it re-elected an idiot simply because he was against gay marriage spends three times more on porn than it does on its other passion, baseball. Actually, I think this points to the reason that they are so successful - the ability to hold two completely contradictory positions simultaneously is incredibly useful. It enables you not to worry about whether what you are doing is right or not, and just lets you get on with it. From this simple beginning comes world domination.
Perhaps I should start to refer to Bush as the Red Queen...
'Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one CAN'T believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."'- Lewis Carrol

Jonathan Meades

2005-01-21T22:54:00.000Z

As I was reading Rageboy's latest missive (subscribe, why don't you?) when it struck me that when he is in his more rational moods, his writing reminded me of someone. So I googled for Jonathan Meades and came up with this.
Then flicking through the paper this morning, I discovered that Mr Meades was on television tonight, with another of his discourses on architecture. It was his first architecture series, Secret Architecture, that first introduced me to his rather eclectic style. Mr Meades is a little smaller than he was then, but the programmes are none the less interesting. Both visually and aurally poetic, with wide-ranging comments on social history, art, politics and of course the architecture. He wanders around his subjects, dressed in a dark suit and Ray-Bans, delivering his theses with style and a few well aimed swipes at politicians and religion. I particularly liked his description of the C of E as 'The First Church of the Obese Adulterer, currently trading as the Anglican Church'. There are two more in the series, don't miss them.

Bendy buses - why?

2005-01-15T17:47:00.000Z

What exactly is the advantage of a bendy bus over a double decker? As an engineering solution the double decker looks better - smaller footprint, simpler mechanism and so on - so why has it been abandoned in favour of the elongated single deck bus? Just curious, that's all.