Business SOA

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

RESTs marketing problem and how Facebook solved it

2011-12-22T14:41:00.000Z

Earlier in the year I commented on REST being still born in the enterprise and now Facebook have now deprecated the REST API in favour of a Graph API now I could choose to say this is 'proof' that REST doesn't work for the Web either. That would be silly for a couple of reasons The new API appears to be RESTful anyway REST clearly can work on the web No, what this really shows is that you

Wasting the time of a PPI scammer

2011-12-17T21:04:00.001Z

There are a number of scams going around today which really demonstrate how mainstream outsourcing has become. There is the current one around the 'unique' number that proves the scammer is from Microsoft and today I got a new one. This time it was someone claiming to be from 'iClaims' (another Steve Jobs legacy, 'i' is the new 'e') telling me that I was entitled to a PPI or bank charges

Cloud in a box: Life on Mars in Hardware or an empty glass of water?

2011-12-13T16:22:00.002Z

There are some phrases that are just plain funny and for me 'Cloud in a Box' which is available from multiple vendors is probably just about the best. The idea here is that you can buy a box - a box that looks and acts like a 1970s Mainframe: virtualisation, big power consumption, vendor lock in - and joy of joys you've now got a 'cloud'. So: Do you pay for this cloud on demand? Nope Do

Why thinking counts and development doesn't

2011-12-05T21:42:00.001Z

I'm having one of those interviewing streaks at the moment. The sort of interviews where after 2 minutes the only question is how to politely wrap the interview up but where secretly you want to scream 'DO YOU SERIOUSLY THINK YOU ARE ANY GOOD?'. You know the sort, where you ask a simple question like 'Explain the difference between EJB and SCA' and you get an explanation of the different

Five reasons why Facebook is dying and Email is king

2011-12-01T15:14:00.001Z

Mark Zuckerberg tried to pull a Steve Jobs the other day by announcing that a new product of his was going to kill off a competitor. Now there have been articles on the fact that email use is still rising and I'll give five reasons why Facebook is dying and five reasons why email will remain king Why Facebook is dying Facebook is at near saturation point, this makes it valuable through the

SOA Anti-Pattern: Sharing data like Candy

2011-11-14T09:33:00.001Z

Back in 2006 I wrote a bunch of SOA Anti-patterns, with some additional help, and these are pretty much as valid then as now. I'd like to add a new one though that I've seen over and over again its related to the canonical model problem and its pretty easy to solve. Name: Sharing Data like candy Description This anti-pattern comes from a desire to 'share' all the information between areas but

How Microsoft missed the cloud....

2011-11-09T19:11:00.001Z

Back in 2007 I posted about a research leader (who retired this year) at Microsoft who made some predictions on the future which could be summarised as the following Single processing is an old school idea - this was pointing out the obvious in 2007 and indeed obvious in 1990 and before if you know anything about decent scale systems. This was a prediction of the future being the same as the

When Big Data is a Big Con

2011-11-09T19:10:00.003Z

I'm seeing a lot of 'Big Data' washing going on in the market. Some companies are looking at this volume explosion as part of a continuation of history, new technologies, new approaches but evolution not revolution. Yes Map Reduce is cool but its technically much harder than SQL and database design this means that it is far from a business panacea. Yes the link between structured and

Soylent Green is Facebook - People as a Product

2011-11-08T07:39:00.000Z

As everyone knows 'Soylent Green is People' and indeed its taken nearly 30 years for people to really make a product whose only ability is to sell the value of people, people cut into cross sections, relationships and information. This is what all social media companies are really selling, they aren't selling TO people they are selling people TO companies. This is the only way they make money

The 'Natural Platform' - Why people matter more than performance in picking hardware

2011-10-24T18:17:00.000+01:00

One of the things that I get asked is 'what hardware should we run this on?'. I've said for years that I don't care about the tin and the tin is irrelevant from a differentiation perspective. Now before people leap up and say 'but X is 2x faster than Y' let me make a couple of points Software tuning and performance will have miles more than a 2x impact The software licenses will probably cost

Improvised Explosive Consultants - neutralising a bad consultant

2011-10-17T10:34:00.000+01:00

One of the challenges I often have is where a company employs a consultant to give 'independent' advice and the individual employed is a total snake-oil salesperson. They've read a couple of books and websites and see their only job to lob in a 'bomb' in a meeting and sit back. I categorise a bomb as a piece of input that is Completely and utterly wrong Contains a grain of truth that has been

NFC - What Apple does next? Buy Amex?

2011-09-19T11:50:00.000+01:00

Chatting around on the iPhone 5 I have to say its all rather dull, yes they'll fix the antenna, yes the camera might get better and the processor faster. But really is that a big deal? So what could Apple announce either now or next year that would really blow people away. I travel a lot, and one thing I see around Europe is the rise of NFC, so the use of 'smart'cards on the Underground,

Java 7 SE approved... Meh

2011-07-19T20:47:00.000+01:00

Hey Java SE 7 has been approved... now that is spectacularly quickly. You'd almost think that the normal Java Community Process had been ignored and instead the spec lead had taken an externally created spec straight to approval... What is most depressing in reading the various Oracle (mainly ex-Sun employee) releases on this is that not a single one actually commented on the fact that of the

Dumb IT: We've already got some licenses for this

2011-07-19T19:45:00.000+01:00

There are certain phrases that fill me with dread. 'We are using Agile so we don't need to have a vision, we'll just iterate', 'there are no data quality issues', 'We're the first people to use this' and 'The vendors roadmap says they'll do X in 2 years so it will be fine by the time we need that'. One however is completely variable in the fear it introduces because it comes in three clear

Hackgate and what it teaches us about responsibility

2011-07-18T09:00:00.001+01:00

The ongoing Hackgate scandal, we can call it that as people in the US are now interested rather than just the dull old 'phone hacking scandal', teaches us some very interesting lessons about corporate politics and the meaning of the term responsibility. I see quite a few projects where the issue is that someone somewhere hasn't taken control or responsibility and therefore things have gone off

Preaching to the Choir: the bane of IT

2011-07-15T13:00:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I get asked why I bother debating with people who clearly have a different opinion with me and are unlikely to change their mind. The reason is that sometimes, rarely I'll admit, that sometimes I will change my mind and occasionally I will change theirs. The other reason is what is the point of debating with someone who agrees with you? Unfortunately in a lot of IT we have two types

SaaS integration - making the ERP mistakes on a bigger scale

2011-07-11T15:45:00.000+01:00

One of the most frustrating things in IT is the totally amazing ability of people not to learn from past experiences. The following are all the sorts of things I've recently heard at conferences, vendor presentations, business presentations and in company architecture practices. "We don't need an MDM solution as Salesforce is going to be our only customer repository" "Integration is simple, its

Microsoft's Eastern Front: the iPad and mobility

2011-07-04T11:06:00.000+01:00

For those who study European Wars the decision to invade Russia consistently stands as one of the dumbest that any individual can attempt. Not because Russia as an army was consistently brilliant or strong but because the Russian country is just too big and the winters too harsh to defeat via an invasion. For years this has been the challenge of those taking on Microsoft, they've attacked the

Why Google Apps plus Google+ would change the market

2011-07-04T10:05:00.000+01:00

Okay I managed to get into Google+... so what did I find? Well first off I found something with an unusual view on privacy and security. I can send a message to a specific Circle and then anyone in that Circle can then share that information with anyone they want. So the ability for private information to go viral is absolutely straight there... this is something that needs to be changed for

Geo-Privacy bubbles: controlling smart phone features based on location

2011-07-04T07:47:00.001+01:00

The new iOS 5 integration with Twitter is great and the ability to geo-tag posts is fine and dandy. But there is a problem, when I get home and tweet I don't want to send the location, nor do I want to send the location when I pick the kids up from school or do any number of stalker/burglar friendly things. These elements are almost always related to specific physical locations that I don't

The problem of mobile places in a geo-social world

2011-07-04T07:18:00.000+01:00

I'm sitting writing this on a train, a specific train, the 06:37(ish) leaving St Austell Station and heading to London Paddington. Later in the week I'm going to take a specific train to Paris from London and then probably another to get back to the UK. A few weeks ago I took a specific flight to get to the US. When considering the current state of the Geo-Social world its clear that movement

Has de-normalisation had its day?

2011-07-01T14:47:00.000+01:00

Ever since the relational database became king there has been a mantra in IT and information design. De-normalisation is critical to the effective use of information in both transactional and, particularly, analytical systems. The reason for de-normalisation is to do with the issues around read performance in relational models. De-normalisation is always an increase in complexity over the