Team Banana

Tense and nervous, waiting for the start.

Racing

A well earned banana for everyone.

SOA still struggling

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

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

and

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

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

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

Playtime

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

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

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?

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

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

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...

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.