03.27.08
the sopranos continues to educate…
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true” : Nathaniel Hawthorne
Best quote of the week
Next heated meeting I have I’m rolling out…
“Take it easy. We’re not making a Western here”
Thank you The Sopranos.
A few more I might just throw out there
Tony: Think Christopher, think! The big f**king picture, huh…
“I don’t understand”
“Thats because I wasn’t fucking talking to you”
“She’s so fat, her blood type is Ragu.”
“They fucked him so had, he had two ass holes when they buried him…”
03.26.08
Brain dump/link trap version 0.1
My brain (and my rss feeds ) has been going into overdrive today.
Managing your time thought your calendar, diffiuclt to switch over to one imagines. Only works if people don’t expect instant responces to emails.
An interesting paradigm shift, not having a bad table, rather than having people thing ill of you (and websites having no excuse for the “bad table”).
Building an entire work life by dealing with crisises could be highly profitable, but might well not be doing what youy want or taking you where you want? If you can keep on top of the stress levels, there’s a lot of jobs to be had, but are the rewards for being the person who sorts out the root cause of the fires bigger? Maybe.
Hyperconnectedness V’s The danger of easy access, are these two sides of the same coin? Maybe twitters one-way-ness is the only reason it’s not a complete killer (and hasn’t caught on the way IM has to run large projects). Other people seem to be having the same thoughts.
The more I hear about muxtapes, the more I hear about muxtapes. muxtapes is everywhere. Internet makes tipping easier, if the product is good, and this reduces the need for advertising, which is can be evil. Speaking of evil marketting, I hovered over a targetted advert today on a site of which I am a memeber and noticed that embedded in the url was my name, my age, my sex, the last thing I searched for and the site this advert was being placed on. I’m sure thats breaking UK data protection acts, be aside, it gave me an evil idea.
A simple shell script calling curl repeatedly, and when they analyse their stats, they’ll find lots of people looking for unrelated subject (mostly very rude) with very silly names (all very rude) clicking on their adverts on some very rude sites (where they’re probably hoping their adverts are being placed). Karma?
03.21.08
How to think
I spent a lot of time (at the moment) thinking about how I think, and how I work, and how I can lear to think and work more efficiently. I really liked the advice on this list, called appropriately, how to think.
wiiPong (or, how to make a crappy games from exciting technology)
I bought a wiiMote a little while ago because, well, they looked fun. No other real reason. Here’s how I got it up and running with my favorite programming environment, processing.org
Firstly, you need to make your laptop have “blue teeth” luckily my iBook came with these coloured nashers, which I’ve not really used and now wouldn’t be without. The wiiMote talks via these blue teeth to the iBook, so long as it has something to connect to.
Step in Darwiin, which is a wiiMote client. Install it, turn on the teeth, and press 1 and 2 togehter on the wiiMote and it just connects. Wave the wiiMote around in the air and you’ll see the wavey coloured lines representing it’s 3D velocity. It just works out of the box, which is nice.
There is a Darwiin version which rolls in OSC. OpenSoundControl is a protocol for communicating with devices. One nice feature is communication via TCP/IP, so a device can be connected to one machine and controlling another.
This also means that if you get a library that talks OSC, it can communicate with devices it cannot natively speak to, and such is the way with processing. Get the OSCP5 library and processing can now commuicate with Darwiin.
So far so good. Add in the WiiController class (included in the oscp5 download), and you’re ready to rock (and roll, lets not forget pitch control). Now you can access what the wiiMote is doing simply with wiiController.x, wiiController.y, and wiiController.pitch.
This was a good start, but moving a dot around the screen wasn’t that exciting. Poing however, now there is an adrenaline rush. So, crack open the collision detection, switch all the mouseY’s for wiiController.pitch (with a scaling factor) and bobs you uncle, you have wiiPong.
Document reuse
I think everybody agrees that reuse is a good idea generally. Reusing
glass jam jars is vastly more efficient that recycling them into new
jars. Reusable templates are much more efficient that drawing the
damned thing ever time. Reusing code libraries is the only way the
majority of programs could ever be created. There are however limits.
When reviewing documentation of formal processes, be that performance
testing approaches, or client bids, or upgrade instructions it is
obvious many of them are reused from other projects. His is not a bad
thing, after all if you had to recreate these from scratch every time,
you’d spend three quarters of it re-inventing the wheel, re-finding the
things which caused you problems last time, but reused and reworked
documents have some major problems, the majority of which appear because
the document is a reused, recycled, reworked and reissued version of a
document which has been reused, recycled, reworked and reissued which
is a.. you get the message. Like a copy of a copy of a VHS tape, each
re-iteration introduces problems, not removes them.
Each iteration introduces document creep. Things are not removed
because “they were there already, and it must be for a reason, so we’ll
need one too” rather than being thought about logically. Each project
has it’s own quirks and just because a previous project manager wanted a
break down of the risk profile in it (because they understood that area
and wanted to feel like they were really adding some solid content)
doesn’t mean your document needs on necessarily.
Joel On Software has an excellent article about this explaining that
ever Microsoft document had an Internet section, because one of them
once did (cant find the damned link!). As well as not removing things, everybody adds something.
This is because otherwise they don’t feel like they’ve bought into this
document, it’s not really theirs until they’ve added the section about
refactoring SQL to run more efficiently, or the best method for counting
the spiders using toothpicks, or whatever their specialist subject is,
and thus the document gets a little bit bigger and a little bit less
manageable.
The other thing that people never ever want to remove, are the reviewers
and people who need to sign a document off. Often these people are very
senior, and really, honestly, they are not going to read it, so they get
somebody who works for them to be on the list as well and so on and so
forth. Nobody will ever remove a reviewer or signee (I’m not sure this
is a real word), for fear of the “Why the hell didn’t I see this
before!” conversation that will take place if something goes wrong. The
problem with this is too fold.
Firstly, it gets to be virtually impossible to get the documents
reviewed and signed off, because all 20 people who review it won’t
finish it on time, and then once you finally work in the 87,746 changes
they suggest (20,341 of which will be the same) you’ll never get to 47
senior people on the list to sign it off. Why, because they’ve not read
it. Why have they not read it brings me onto the second reason why this
is bad.
Secondly, people end up completely swamped. With everybody producing
documents wanting everybody else to review it and sign it off, people
stop doing it. They delegate it if they can, or they skim read it and
miss the critical points. They are snowed under with stuff, the content
of which they are interested in 6% of. There’s a greats story about
NASA crashing a probe into Mars which was caused by one group working in
inches and the other in metric units. Somebody actually had an email
about this in their inbox, but they missed it because it was 40 feet
down.
So how do you get round this? What’s the solution? Here’s what I
recommend.
- Do re-use documentation. Get a big stack of examples, not just one, and slice them up into bits.
- Work out which bits you need. Go back to first principles if you have to (I always fall back to who, what, where, when, why and how).
- Write a framework. If you are having to juggle layouts to get things to fit neatly, you’ve probably got too much in there (see my post on implicit feedback loops in PowerPoint)
- Do not review by committee. Get individual sections reviewed by single people who understand that area. Get a peer to review it over all to make sure the individual bits hang together.
- Consult people before picking a way forward, if the review is the first time they see it they will go in cold and be surprised by everything they don’t understand,
- Have a single overall reviewer. They need to be the person that is going to have to do this stuff or be responsible for it.
- Have a single overall sign off person, they might then delegate it, but do not add their delegate to the list. If Jeff nominates Steve to review it on his behalf, Jeff will sign if Steve does. So why have both? If Steve isn’t senior enough to be seen to shoulder the responsibility, just have Jeff (who’ll still get Steve to read it). If Steve is senior enough, why bother with Jeff.
- Be vicious with what you write. A diagram can save hundreds of words, if it’s the right diagram.
- Don’t add content just because you feel you should. Include what is needed eg. The approach, the steps to do it, the justification and the timescales. You do not need to include, other than as a single line, all the other options you discarded.
- Put a summary at the beginning. Each section of the document should be summerisable into a couple sentences. Having this allows a super busy person to glace it and see the things that they needed to glean from the 40 pages of fine detail included later. A 150 line details plan can be turned into “Starting on 19 of May, finishing on 25th of May, 5 daily check points, each server being brought online one at a time, approximately 2 every day, and this will give enough information to point out that there is a strike on the 20th.
Who knows if this works, but once you’ve staggered through some of the 40 pages documents which say absolutely nothing, you’ll give anything a try.
03.18.08
Dear America, learn to cook
I am not Irish. Really. Not even slightly. And this is why I’m not out drinking myself to destruction tonight, on some vague claim to be decended from the people over the water. This however is a subject for another day, probably tomorrow, in all honesty.
No, tonights diatribe is reserved for American cooks mutilation of the world cuisine. I am sick to death of reading about habribo-lime pestos, lemon salsa, diary free fat free no Arabic style salt mayonnaise.
What joins these two subject? This vile collection of faux Irish food over on about.com which drives me insane with rage. The list looks about as Irish as my left foot. Irish Mint Flavored Coffee Creamer is not I feel authentic. Fudge Mint Pie probably falls into that catagory too. Making the food green, or worse still drowning it in Guinness does not make it Irish, just like adding whisky does not make it Scottish or garlic French, pasta Italian or rice Indian.
There are how ever some names on there that atleast fit. Colcannon for example, and Irish Stew, lamb shanks and Corned Beef and Cabbage Skillet Casserole. Lets have a look at these in turn.
The Irish stew contains garlic which is a travesty, but nothing compared te the included refrigerated potato wedges. Yes, you read correctly. Now hold your breath and wait to read…”16 oz. pkg. refrigerated prepared roast beef in gravy”. Yes, I kid you not. Now take a deep breath and venture into the horror that is Corned Beef and Cabbage Skillet Casserole.
Corned Beef casserole (or tattyhash as it is sometimes known) is a great meal. Boiled potatoes gone oversoft with onion and meaty goodness of cornbeef. It’ll even work ok with the tinned stuff (in fact some probably prefer it), but never ever should the instructions open with… (hold on tight now)
8 oz. egg noodles
NOODLES? IRISH? NO!
So here are the rules. America, you have some wonderful food. I’ve had wonderful hotdogs in Chicago. The best burgers I’ve ever eaten were in New York. The food tour of Greenwich Village I went on was simply brilliant. You’ve got some great cheeses and beers (yes - really - you don’t need to drink Bud!), Texas and the southern states do the best BBQ’d meat I’ve ever eaten, and I’ve eaten a lot, so can you please please please stop fucking around other countries food. No instructions that includes a whole ready meal is going to be remotely authentic.
03.12.08
National ID cards
Now I’ve got myself into a huff about nation id cards before now, but it would appear that the government is steaming ahead, regardless as to whether people want them, re interested in them, or would pay for them. I listened to a discussion on Radio4 as I drove into work this morning with an MP advocating them but saying that “people wouldn’t adopt them unless they were free and actually had a use”, which made a lot of sense. There would appear to be two ways to go here, either they are completely free and you have to carry them (a la ID cards in many other countries, and ID cards during the war) or you charge for them but they have a major benefit (like a passport or a driving license). I prefer the latter, but any ID system where your populous doesn’t have to take part is never going to work (NI numbers being voluntary - never going to happen) so unless the card made thing substantially easier, faster or cheaper, it’s probably a no go.
Anyway, what I wanted to bring up wasn’t anything to do with the politics or economics of these cards, its their development methods. What will happen (I guarantee it) is that a couple of large IT provider will be asked to bid for the work, and it will narrow down to two, the cheap one which should be ok and the expensive one which will be rock solid, and the contract will got to the cheap one who will then try and bolt on some of the expensive system.
The key to an ID card, like any security pass, is that it should be extremely difficult to copy, clone or modify. If somebody can know their own up, or change theirs so when it’s scanned it doesn’t show them up as Jeff Smith the bank robber, then they become virtually pointless. This presents many challenges, after all the process for making a fake passport is well documented, and the actual leather folders and paper seem to be being stolen left right and centre. I watched a reported filming one being made on the BBC a few year ago, and the guy started by opening up a big box of them and picking one at random. They are clearly not kept well under wraps.
I imagine what will happen is that the cards method of storing information and revealing it will be shrouded in mystery, with big words like “unbreakable encryption” being banded around. It won’t be unbreakable, nothing is given enough time, power and money, but it should at least be something other than a bit of bit flipping. There’s lot of good encryption technology out there already, and much of it would be applicable.
Technology aside, I have a development idea - why not open source the entire thing? And don’t mass produce version one, or three, or even version 47. How up with a hard and narrow set of requirements eg. Must store full name, birthday, eye colour and a lookup_id (for comparing against a list). Something super simple. Then get a first version out there, and offer up £10,000 to every person who can find a crack, a hole, a work round or a sneaky way of misusing or modifying the data. Get 10,000 cards out there to ever academic, highschool kid, sneak bastard and clever git. If they find a hole, just pay up. Don’t quibble, try and say it’s not a hole, just bit the bullet, hand over the cash, and fix it.
Once you’ve had the first 100 bugs (and there will be that many), issue a new card, and the same challenge. Repeat as required. Set up a fast feedback loop and make it worth peoples time to break the damned thing. A sharp team will find 4 or 5 good holes in the first week, and they can go buy a new car. They’re happy, and you’ve for a more secure card. It won’t take more than 8 or 10 generations of these cards before something really bomb proof starts to show.
The other thing about being completely open about your spec and technology stack is that people will have a much better idea of the card and what’s on it. At the moment, most people are pretty suspicious of everything around ID cards, but if you get it all out there people can go and understand everything involved. It won’t quash everything, but it might help.
Security through obsfucated details is no security at all.
03.06.08
The worst way to start a day…
Phoning somebody who’s left your office, about a minor point in a document they wrote which needs clarification, and finding out that they quit the whole company and really aren’t interested in talking to you. And it’s before 9:30am. And you’ve not had a coffee.
03.03.08
A Tescos Poem
I only popped in,
for five spice,
and cabbage,
and maybe a beer,
but you made me so angry,
wish your pushing and your grabbing and your lofty accents,
I will return,
with a stick. Fear me.
Why do I love trustedplaces.com?
I love trustedplaces.com, and because I love it, its the only site I spend time being active in really. I’m a passive user of hundreds of sites and numerous emialing lists, but there are a couple of sites I actually contribute content to, and trustedplaces.com is one of them. The big question is why.
Well, it’s a bloody good service is one answer, and I’ve used it to find places to eat, but I must have uploaded more articles than I’ve used, possibly even more than I’ve read really.
The answer is simple. I have a vague and distant connection to it, and this makes it seem just a little bit more “mine”. I’ll happily tell people about it, recommend it, and when I go somewhere that I’ve found through it I try to make sure they know thats why I’m there.
How do I have this connection? Nothing really. I once went out to dinner with Randomcat Chris whom I’ve know a very long time. He in invited Gareth, who know in passing and have a huge amount of respect for. Gareth brought with him Ian Forester, who at the time I didn’t know, but I was amazed by backstage.bbc.co.uk, and it turned out Ian headed it up. I started reading Ian’s blog, which is excellently written and well thought out unlike many of my rambles, and he mentioned trustedplace.com. I wandered across it, thought it looked interesting, quite liked the idea of writing for a different audience (learn by doing I guess) and so I signed up. I’d been there all of about 2 minutes before I recognised a name, and found that Tom Reynolds who writes the brilliant Random Acts of Reality was also a member, and I was hooked.
Now this is all pretty patchy. I’ve never me Tom Reynolds. I’ve only met Ian once. I suspect it’s at least a year since I’ve seen Garath. Really, these are all pretty tenuous links, but they got me started.
What’s held my interest is the love and time that the sites founders clearly have. I emailed them when I found a minor bug, and they got back to me in hours to say thanks. They’ve asked me to go along to some of their social events, all of which I’ve managed to miss, but their asking increased my connection to the site. I’ve even “friended” them on facebook (bah! spit! more on this another time) but the key thing is I’ve built a relationship to the trustedplaces brand, and I have customer loyalty. There are lots of ratings sites out there, and I won’t touch them.
Thats the kind of marketing that can’t be bought. I takes time, dedication and the sort of investment that big companies just won’t make, and I suspect it’s the real power of scial networks, be they digital or physical.
