Business SOA

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

Learn to be a writer in one day

2012-05-02T12:30:00.000+01:00

Ever read Shakespeare and thought 'I wish I could do that'? Ever read Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, Pratchett or Proust and thought 'How do they do that?'. For too long literature has been thought of as something that requires rigour, experience and actual talent to achieve. But no longer. I am now offering people the chance to learn to be a writer in a single day. As part of this course you

Learn to be an artist in one day

2012-05-02T12:00:00.000+01:00

Ever looked at the Mona Lisa and thought 'I wish I could do that'? Ever looked at the Turner Prize and thought 'How do they do that?'. For too long art 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 artist in a single day. As part of

Bling and ignorance - how cloudy thinking will screw up IT

2012-04-25T15:03:00.001+01:00

Today it was annouced that Progress Software are going to 'divest' their BPM and SOA technologies and instead are going to focus on cloud technologies that don't really exist yet. This is indicative of a mentality I see around so first lets start with some credentials: 1) I worked with Google around a SaaS partnership in 2007 around Google Apps 2) I delivered an SFDC solution in 2008 3) I've

Why Silicon Valley is bad for Enterprise IT

2012-04-23T17:31:00.001+01:00

99% of IT is done outside of Silicon Valley in Enterprises. I like the valley and San Francisco is my second favourite 'new' city (Sydney comes first, London, Rome and Paris remain... well London, Rome and Paris). The problem is that 99% of the media about IT is about what happens in Silicon Valley. This is the equivalent of all coverage of the global car market being about Ferrari. Its not

Information the next Trade War? Data Privacy v CISPA

2012-04-19T15:56:00.002+01:00

Why you should Unit Test - an example by MS Office

2012-03-26T22:17:00.000+01:00

I'll admit it, when I'm writing code just for myself to learn stuff I tend not to unit test. When I'm in a team environment I insist on it as the person coding isn't going to be the person maintaining. Unit Testing has lots of benefits in terms of project success, code quality and longevity. If you think testing first then you tend to think about the solution to the problem a bit more and

Dear Google you've patented my published idea...

2012-03-22T17:45:00.002Z

Okay so a while ago I had an idea, that people should blog about ideas they had and tag them as 'prior art' as a way to defeat patents. Well today I read an article about Google patenting a location specific ad service which takes in local information (the weather) to give people targeted adverts. Well back in 2008 I had an idea, where I talked about temporal information including the phrase:

Why the iPad is temporary but the screen is forever

2012-03-22T12:17:00.002Z

Just thinking about the old MSFT case with the DoJ where a split up of Windows and Office divisions was muted (but abandoned), with current rumours that Office will be on the iPad later this year there is a question on the post-PC revolution... Will I be able to code? If I've got Office then that covers 90% of everything I do in my current role. 10% requires some sort of virtualisation

SaaS v cloud, its a licensing thing

2012-03-12T10:44:00.002Z

One of the things I get asked quite a bit is what is the difference between SaaS and cloud solutions and while there are lots of options for me it comes down to a simple question: How are you licensing it? Your SaaS vendors license via users or other capacity metrics. Things go up, things go down but you license based on those 'things'. So for SFDC its the connected users for instance,

FUD Farming

2012-03-05T15:45:00.002Z

FUD Farming: the practice of selling expertise based, primarily or solely, on negative (or FUD) based messaging. I'd like to include a new term into the lexicon: FUD Farming. Over the years I've seen the following attempt to sell used over and over again X is a complete and utter disaster, X will lead to the destruction of modern society and ultimately Armageddon. X doesn't work like it

WebSockets v REST (v WS-*) more pointless than eclipse v Emacs (v vi)

2012-03-01T16:38:00.004Z

Well the shiny kids have a new toy... its WebSockets and by jiminy if it isn't just the best thing ever. Actually to be fair to people promoting WebSockets they do appear to be taking a more rational, and less religious, stance than the REST area but this discussion remains pointless. Mark Little's recent InfoQ post was a good pitch on the debate. Just as REST v WS-* is pointless so the

Has cloud lost its buzz?

2012-03-01T14:04:00.000Z

After doing a presentation the other day I joked to someone from IBM that the WebSphere 'Cloudburst' appliance was one of the silliest names I'd heard. An appliance that was tagged as cloud. He then informed me that its not called that anymore but is now called the much duller, but more accurate, Workload Deployer. Now I'm still not sure as to why this is a piece of physical kit rather than a

How Skype treat me as a transaction not an individual

2012-02-27T12:30:00.000Z

I blogged at work on how the challenge of Omnichannel engagement means you need to treat the customer as an individual not as a transaction. Well here is an example of a company doing the exact opposite. First some background. At work I tend to use a VPN that takes me out through the Netherlands but regularly I'm in different countries and I tend to use Skype. Now Skype know a lot of

How politicians could kill SaaS with stupidity

2012-02-24T13:21:00.001Z

Back when I was doing SaaS a few years ago I raised the issue of the Patriot act as being a reason why cloud providers would be setting up in Europe. The rule however appears even worse than I knew so now the Patriot Act impact US cloud sales directly as the hosting location doesn't matter its the rules. With the US Congress seeming to view China and the rest of the world with concern and

42 - Or do you understand your Big Data question?

2012-02-24T11:05:00.001Z

What is the ultimate Big Data question? Well it is of course the Biggest Question... the question... of Life, the Universe and Everything.... but that poses a problem: in an analytical world do you really understand the question? (or in short form if you are in a rush) The point here is that one of the major challenges with Big Data is that we are moving away from simple SQL driven

How Apple will beat Facebook

2012-02-16T20:50:00.000Z

Looking at the extension of iMessage to the desktop made me think about how Apple can take on Facebook and win. Lets see what Facebook have over Apple technically... Multiple people in one conversation Broadcast conversations with 'followers' Now Apple have already integrated Twitter into the iPhone but lets assume that long term the folks from Cupertino want total control. What do they

Why Broadband, Apps and Moore's law will beat Server based HTML 5

2012-02-13T15:33:00.002Z

The browser is about to have its day... Apps are going to win. Now these Apps could be like the Chrome store pieces and developed in HTML5 but with local storage and offline access added but they will fundamentally be local things. Why? Moore's Law isn't going away any time soon. In a couple of years we will have Smartphones with quad or even octo cores, 8GB of main RAM and 256 GB of

Why I rewrite rather than re-factor

2012-02-13T14:47:00.003Z

Refactoring is one of those terms in IT that gets bandied about as a good thing. Refactoring is meant to be the small incremental cleaning up of code to restructure it while leaving it functionally the same(1). Some folks say that re-writing is different as it changes this functional contract. What happens in the field however is different... Refactoring tends to be done in small chunks and

Controlling what kids access - VPN to the Home - the next big thing in Mobile security

2012-01-27T15:03:00.002Z

I've got kids, currently they are under the age where they get Smartphones and unfettered internet access but such a day is coming. Now at home I can set it up so on the WiFi there is a proxy and all content has to be routed via that proxy or it doesn't go out and I can lock down the proxy so they can't go where I don't want. However on a Smartphone they get good internet access without me

IT going backwards - Objective C is 90s retro

2012-01-18T14:00:00.000Z

I've ranted quite regularly on how Enterprise IT just hasn't really developed in the last 5 years and my personal task for 2012... learning Objective C and programming for iOS has taken my disbelief to another level. Back in 2008 I learnt Python and for me it sucked. Its 'advantage' over scripting languages of the 80s and 90s was minimal and it had the most hated (for me) of things... indent

iPads on planes during takeoff? Hell I'd like to use it in the airport!

2012-01-16T17:00:00.000Z

People have been asking for iPads, and Kindles, to be used during takeoff and landing (like Pilots can) but for me that isn't a massive deal, yes I'd like to read my online Economist from the iPad when I'm travelling and sure it can be a bit of a pain to have to use old style paper... but I've got a bigger gripe. The CBP (Customers and Border Protection) and their mental policies at immigration