28 Monday Feb 2011
Posted in Books, mindmap, Technology
I’ve been reading Beyond Software Architecture – although there is nothing particularly new here, it was useful in helping me distill all the different things that as an Architect I try to take into account. Given the process of distilling thoughts I ended up choosing to mind map my thoughts. The masp can be found here.
07 Tuesday Sep 2010
Posted in General, LinkedIn, Technology
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I attended Ovum’s briefing Information Privacy & Protection in London today. One of the presentations included the use of a rather effective video below, to help illustrate the data security considerations and numbers of channels data could now leak through.
In addition to that, there was a very good presentation from Alexander Hanff from Privacy International (http://www.privacyinternational.org/). Without any slides or other media to assist, Aexander’s presentation was very good, getting his points across about current privacy considerations going beyond just the Data Protection Act, but also what is likely to happen with the update, EA efforts, the impact of privacy concerns such as those around smart advertising by solutions such as Phorm (which may well end up filling for Chapter 11). Although Privacy International is very much a campaigning organisation in the vain of EFF, the presentation I thought was well balanced and not a ‘big corporate bashing’ view.
I think the only issue I had that Alexander mentioned is during a question and answer session, is that when recruiting you should not take into consideration any public posting potential job candidates have made on a social networking site, he is correct to say a case (in Germany I think) may have made a president. If the post is public, I would argue it is fair game (and comparable if questionable statement was printed in the traditional media). If Alexander’s view is to stand, then the value of LinkedIn for example is dead in the water as you can’t use such a site to assist in recruitment. Yet LinkedIn is a way of advertising yourself as potentially approachable for work.
It is a shame that there doesn’t appear to be a podcast of a similar style presentation – as it would serve well as a wake up call, to those complaicent about privacy.
16 Friday Jul 2010
Posted in App Ideas, Technology
There are nay reasons for wanting to reverse tether my iPhone to my laptop such as:
The answer to these problems is what is known as reverse tethering (where tethering is getting your laptop etc to use you phone’s internet access). to reverse tether you have to go into your laptop’s network settings and create an ad-hoc network. Depending on your laptop this can hamper it then using a wireless network at the same time.
Now everytime I move location, I really dont want to have to go in and start unnecessarily messing around with netowkr settings. even Microsoft have recognised this with a simplified means to connecting & disconnecting from wireless networks. So why is it that no one has created a little app that you can run creates an adhoc network for you, and then creates shortcuts for the desktop which can be used to quickly toggle the adhoc network on and off? That way when off running a presentation you can quickly toggle the adhoc network on – use the iPhone to manage the presentation (freeing you from carrying more devices and the laptop when presenting) and then at the end – toggle the network back off (after all you dont want to be announcing your machine as a network access point unnecessarily).
05 Saturday Jun 2010
Posted in Technology
Continuous Integration is a development best practice that you need to be using in your process; it is an essential part of an efficient Software Development Lifecycle (SLDC). If you aren’t using it already, then you should start, now. The main benefit of Continuous Integration is the ability to flag errors as they are introduced into a system instead of waiting multiple days for test failures and critical errors to be identified during the QA cycle. This post isn’t about the virtues of using CI, it’s about how to setup an optimal environment in a Maven shop. Here are seven tips for running Maven builds in a CI system such as Hudson.
via Sonatype Blog » Maven Continuous Integration Best Practices.
28 Wednesday Oct 2009
Posted in Technology
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This ia brilliant video of Stephen Fry discussing technology and how it has affected culture. A recommended 12 minutes.
28 Wednesday Oct 2009
Posted in Music, Technology
Despite a lot of opposition is looks like the current government are going to force the 3 strikes and your connection is cut off approach as an attempt to cut down piracy (more details at the NME). With ISPs reporting that the process is very difficult and costly to implement I can several scenarios playing out of a lot of incorrect cut offs, service pricesses increasing and/or service quality dropping as ISPs try to claw back the investment (and reduced revenue as they can’t earn from a cut off service).
Aside from what happens with ISPs I think the process is likely to stiffle media development, consider how the Arctic Monkey’s got going – a lot of buzz generated by allowing people to download live performances, and who easy that will be to mixup with illegal material. Those who are intent on sharing will find means to defeat the ISP checks – more sophisticated file hiding etc. The fact that technology will always run faster than legislation has been missed. What the industry needs to wake up to is to make it more attractive to people to pay for music. This doesn’t mean bigger and heavier prouncements about piracy, look at the anti taping campaigns of the 70s and 80s to see what that did, or didn’t do.
Fortunately a few artists have started to try and develop their approach such as the Nine Inch Nails. The record industry shoul look to develop the ‘long tail’ by supporting more smaller artists as the proportion of copyright theft drops as you move down the tail. So rather than pooring millions into a big ad campaign for one artist, whos ‘product’ is then panned by a fickle audience (to be a little more blunt – a poor quality product trying to cash in on a fad or fashion), costing lots and resulting in labels simply blaming piracy for dumb thinking.
We’ll see what happens in July 2011. I hope to be proven wrong, but I suspect it will all endup being a repeat of RIAA mess, and we’ll see court battles about being denied people’s inealiable right to surf the web etc.
17 Monday Aug 2009
Posted in General, mindmap, Technology
26 Tuesday May 2009
Posted in General, Technology
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The Sans Institute isn’t a place I would look for entertaining reading. I have to admit to tracking the site as my job requires that I have a handle on best practice for development including code security considerations and issues of PCI. But a new paper in the Institute’s reading room certainly got my attention – "Beer – The Key Ingredient to Team Development". As much as my team and I’m sure many others would love to use this as an excuse to head for the pub everyday on the company’s tab; it is actually an article about team development and the different stages a team goes through (Forming, Storming, Performing etc).
I have to admit I’ve not read the paper any further than to discern its key theme, but I’ll try to blog about it once I’ve read and digested it.
13 Friday Feb 2009
Posted in General, Technology
An interesting problem was highlighted the other day in conversation with colleagues in the IT industry. How do you take on a graduate or junior developer within a highly distributed development team, and how do you make Agile work well in a distributed team.
Often the argument is that distribution doesn’t matter, we have lots of technologies to overcome that. But, when we deal with new people, particularly those who haven’t had much or any experience there is a lot of contact needed – communicating large amounts of detail – not the clearly expressible things that we can read in a document, but all the nuances, the policy compared to the actual practices; seeing and feeling the tensions and people politics within a team and how they should be negotiated. It is this very reason that video conference is better than a phone call, and traveling to meet someone is better than a video conference.
With my new roll which involves running a team of individuals, it is easier for them and me that we now located in the office as group. I obviously will get to feel how they interact with external demands, and what the demands are – which in our case are many. But the team have a better sense that they can call on me to help easily. This cant translate to a distributed team.
This is not to say that there a good things for distributed teams. The staff will be content as they located in situations they should be happy with. The disruptions of a large office dont exist, so the chances of longer periods for clear thinking are there – which are important to developers.
11 Tuesday Nov 2008
Posted in Technology
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 
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