Business SOA

Big Data - are you the house or the played?

2013-05-15T14:00:00.000+01:00

Coming back from the EMC World conference in Las Vegas I was looking at the people playing on the slots and making ridiculous bets at Craps and wondering 'don't these people know anything about statistics?'. Lets be clear I get the idea of it being fun, but when you sit next to someone on a blackjack table who twists when the dealer is showing a six and they've got 15 is just depressing. There

Federated Caching in the world of the 64GB mobile

2013-05-07T13:13:00.000+01:00

There is something that is beginning to irritate me, ok something else. Its mobile applications that don't cache. I'm fed up of travelling on a train or being on a plane and the end result being that my iPad or iPhone app doesn't work because I'm in an area that doesn't have reasonable network coverage. I was using the App earlier when it had WiFi and it was all fine but the app requires me

Software Developers are you ready for the cage fight with the BI guys?

2013-05-06T13:00:00.000+01:00

In all of my career to date in IT there really has been three clear worlds in IT, the software development guys who are the bespoke tailors, the package guys who deliver off the shelf and the BI guys. I'm going to admit a prejudice here. Until a couple of years ago my impression of BI guys was folks who were one step up from Excel guys. It was dead-data and done in batches, sure it had to be

IT is a fashion industry

2013-04-29T16:00:00.000+01:00

You know when people laugh at the fashion industry for saying that 'blue is the new black' and because of its ridiculous amount of fawning over models, designers and the like? Is that really different to IT? We've got our fashion houses - Google, Facebook, Apple. We've got the big bulk conglomerates IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and oh hell the fawning that goes around... I'd say the

The Hadoop hump - why enterprises struggle to move from Proof of Concept to Enterprise deployment

2013-04-25T10:54:00.001+01:00

At the recent Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam I noticed something that has been bothering me for a while. Lots of companies have done some great Proof of Concepts with Hadoop but they are rarely turning those into fully blown operational solutions. Being clear I'm not talking about the shiny, shiny web companies where the business is technology and the people who develop are the people who support,

Big Data, Fast Data, Orange Data, Blue Data - its decisions that count not data

2013-04-24T11:55:00.000+01:00

Oh the chanting is out, Big Data, Fast Data, the three 'V's and of course the ubiquitous elephant are roaming across the IT landscape as the next great hype monster. Its going the same way as pretty much every IT hype exercise. Yes this links to the hype cycle but the way it happens is sadly predictable in IT. Company has a business problem they think about it in an innovative way Company

The single eye of enterprise architecture

2013-04-22T16:26:00.000+01:00

There is a famous phrase In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king IT has always had a problem communicating with the business, and the business communicating with IT. To fix this IT created something called Enterprise Architecture which aimed to provide a framework around the internal IT estate in a manner that helped that conversation. We can argue how successful that was but

Why NoSQL became MORE SQL and why Hadoop will become the Big Data Virtual Machine

2013-03-22T09:27:00.000Z

A few years ago I wrote an article about "When Big Data is a Big Con" which talked about some of the hype issues around Big Data. One of the key points I raised was about how many folks were just slapping on Big Data badges to the same old same old, another was that Map Reduce really doesn't work they way traditional IT estates behave which was a significant barrier to entry for Hadoop as a new

BTVision iPlayer not working - and the excuses BT use

2013-03-12T16:26:00.002Z

I've had an experience in the last few months with the folks from BT that really brought home how bad support can be when they have a real issue and how they look to trot out excuses to fob you off when they dont actually have a fix. So in January iPlayer stopped working at my mother's house. She isn't a techy so I took over support. The first call went fine, and a secondary follow up call

Java needs to start again... from BEFORE JavaSE 6

2013-02-20T15:00:00.000Z

Back in 2006 I wrote a post on why JavaSE 6 wasn't for the Enterprise with all of the cruft that had been added and one comment I made around the inclusion of a Web Server was its potential impact on security. Well it appears that thanks to this bloatware approach and lack of focus on core stability Java is now one of the number 1 security threats out there. Apple have been hacked thanks to

Big Data and smart maths aren't new, that is the GOOD THING about it

2013-02-19T18:33:00.000Z

One of the things that annoys me sometimes, and its quite a long list, is when people proclaim something as 'new' when in fact its just a case that its gone mainstream. The problem I have with this is that it normally means that they've forgotten all of the learnings of previous generations of implementation and are starting from scratch and making the same old mistakes. We saw this with the

Train Delays - why context counts in Big Data

2013-02-15T17:40:00.001Z

Right now in the UK there are hundreds if not thousands of trains around the UK, all moving at different speeds and going on various routes across millions of rails, switches, points and other things. This gives billions of pieces of information. But right here, right now I just want to know why my train is stuck and when I'll get home. The key to remember in Big Data is that its not the

IT has made its self redundant through technology

2013-02-12T12:38:00.000Z

There are lots of stats out there about CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers), CFOs and COOs now spending more on IT than the IT department. Lots of this spend is on SaaS solutions and information centric solutions. The previously powerful IT department has dropped out of contention in many cases because its not seen as adding any value. And what is the main reason for that? Well the IT department

People are the problem can we stop pretending its technology

2013-02-04T12:00:00.000Z

A friend of mine the other day said an amazing thing I like coding in C++ I mean, seriously? The land of friends, of people writing C code and debugging nightmares, had things got that much better, I mean I know there are some good threading libraries now but seriously, C++ is nice? All of the idiots code in Java, they don't know C++ And there we have the point. Its not about what technology

Zero Day for Java - time to change strategy and kill JavaSE

2013-01-14T19:47:00.003Z

Hopefully Oracle will finally look at Java with this zero day exploit and realise that part of the reason for the issue is the kitchen sink approach taken by the Java leadership at Sun and now Oracle. It adds needless complexity and with that adds security risks. A better approach would be to recognise that Java is a platform in itself and that the core of Java is extremely small. Making this

Architectural Homeopathy

2012-12-13T19:00:00.002Z

Sometimes when you are in a meeting someone says something brilliant, I had that experience today when someone said 'We have a sick body, can we please stop pretending everyone is a surgeon'. Her point was simple, historically in the company they have had challenges of people having opinions and critically of decisions being made without data and whose implementation success isn't tracked. I

The internet was better before...

2012-11-28T19:16:00.000Z

Over the past few years I've heard lots of complaints about 'the internet was better before everyone used Facebook' and it got me thinking. That much like the strata in rocks you can determine your geological internet age based on the first thing you remember complaining about. So moving backwards Smartazoic - the modern era (2011 to present) If you haven't yet complained about the new entry

When to shout, the art of constructive destruction

2012-11-27T20:32:00.003Z

I've always believed that sometimes teaching is about the stick as well as the carrot but there are very clear rules on when to use the stick and how to use it. Its not good enough to start with shouting, that marks you down as an idiot and a prat. If someone has done something that you don't want but have never explained to them then its your fault as the person in authority. Rule 1: You

Java SE - could it be more pointless?

2012-08-14T12:00:00.000+01:00

Back in 2007 I gave a presentation on Java whose theme was that Java had won. On slide 12 I put forward a proposal that I'd talked about here before as well in that Java needs to be professional and critically reduce to having a small core on which people can innovate and develop whether that be in smartphones, desktops, servers, virtual machines, smart cards or anything else that people

How to weed out bluffers....

2012-08-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

Following up from the concept of thinking being dead I'd like to talk now about one of the biggest challenges in IT. How do you spot those people who are bluffing? And here I mean people who don't really think they are bluffing because they are rubbish, or those that are bluffing because they think you are rubbish, its related to the challenge of Terry Pratchett Architects (PArchitects?) where

Thinking is dead

2012-07-04T10:53:00.000+01:00

Anne wrote a reasonable blog a while ago on why SOA was and wasn't dead but I'd like to go a bit further today and say that generally the concept of thinking appears to be dead. The value of 'thought' and thinking in IT has diminished, in a way that mirrors society at large, to the stage where design, planning, architecture and anything else other than just banging away at a keyboard appear to

Carbon Travel Tracker

2012-05-09T09:00:00.000+01:00

Okay so now in the iTunes Store is my first attempt at an application that does something actually useful. Its the Carbon Travel Tracker. I travel a lot, not as much as some but quite a lot more than most, two questions always came to mind 1) Just how much do I really travel 2) What is the Carbon impact of that In the spirit of 'if you don't measure it you can't change it' this really was

Why coding isn't a 1 day thing and why the UK view on education has to change

2012-05-02T14:46:00.001+01:00

decoded.co have started quite the PR and education puff around the idea that they can teach you to code in a day. Or to be accurate on their site they say they To teach anyone code in a day. Now clearly that sentence doesn't make sense as coding is a task, something you do so it should be 'to code' not simply 'code'. Its like saying 'To teach anyone run in a day' so first off they clearly

Learn to be French in one day

2012-05-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

Ever listened to a French Art house film and thought 'I wish I could do that'? Ever walked through the streets of Paris listening to people and thought 'How do they do that?'. For too long being French has been thought of as something that you need education for, something that requires rigour, experience and actual learning to achieve. But no longer. I am now offering people the chance to

Learn to be an actor in one day

2012-05-02T13:00:00.000+01:00

Ever looked at a play and thought 'I wish I could do that'? Ever looked at the Oscar winner for best actor and thought 'How do they do that?'. For too long acting has been thought of as something that you need training for, something that requires rigour, experience and actual talent to achieve. But no longer. I am now offering people the chance to learn to be an actor in a single day. As