Group conformity and whistling !

We all belong to groups, some of the groups to which we belong are obvious, some are obscure; Some of the groups are inherently good to belong to and some are not, obviously that judgement is somewhat subjective in its own right. Being identified as belonging is important to our self identity. On a larger scale, groups like political parties, professional organisations server their own purpose we might join them because they agree with our point of view or because it's a networking opportunity. I want to discuss the groups that we create ourselves, our social and professional groups each person's clique. It was once said Bill Gates, stop hissing in the back there, may not be the smartest man on the planet, but his strength is he knows this - and because he knows this he surrounds himself with some of the smartest people on the planet.

I once had the honour to head up a group of people that were developing a piece of pretty safety critical software, don't get me wrong we weren't controlling cooling rods or fly by wire spy planes (that was another team, only joking). It is valuable to note I am not the greatest programmer in the world, I think I'm good yeah, I can write elegant and cunning code some of the time but I'm not a pro. It is also important to note that I wasn't put in-charge of the team it was a role that evolved, some might say through charm and charisma, through vision and understanding, all honourable charges, personally I think I got it because no one else wanted it.

The final product was awesome, really it was fantastic. Solved the problem, our client was ecstatic all brilliant.

What we had in that group broke down in a very interesting way, we had some code that was truly superb, we had some code that was downright a complete honest to God kludge and we had some code that was OK. What our team had through wasn't just a programming mindset, this is where people go wrong, we had a researching mindset, a communicating mindset (with both our client ad internally), we had a team building mindset. I could go on and bring myself to a rapturous climax talking about our task division our scheduling our tenacity etc. Most of all I think we had a great group that had a truly diverse set of talents, all the cliches in our case worked.

We enjoyed being part of this group - where am I going ? Well in the end what set us up as a group was that one member had this noise, it was a whistle, he'd use it for when things went wrong, when attention was wanted, when someone was stupid when someone was truly geeky, when someone arrived, when we answered the phone. It was extremely annoying - but it caught on and the entire group picked it up. Only our group if anyone else would have tried to assimilate themselves to our group by using it we'd have thought "What a complete ass". Surly all the other people in our vicinity must have thought the same thing of all of us. We didn't notice and we didn't care if we did. This was what made our group unique. It bound us. Just like war vets. are united by a particularly horrific battle or competitors remember a specific event, I remember this group. Why do groups, pick up on certain things, is it to do with sucking up to a senior member ? Is it to do with imitating a popular member, is it simply a yearning to belong to a group any group. Even if it's simply a innocuous, insignificant group which to belong to. You could easily argue the other way that a group that is pushed together can sometimes look for a unifying factor, rather than having a unifying factor that causes them to gravitate together in the first place. Bill Gates' group, quiet there, were probably brought together because they were good they probably then invented a commonality other than that reason, some groups have the commonality first ?

James Surowiecki wrote in his book the wisdom of crowds about an experiment whereby a bunch of sociologists went out on the street and put a single person looking up at the sky in a street corner, after some time several others joined that one person no one really knew what they were looking at. Then they tried it with a larger starting number and more people joined the group quicker. Finally they had a whole bunch in the starting group and got a hit rate of, we're talking 85%+ here. Why because people like to belong to a group, they hate to think they're missing out on something. When you join a new school or office you wanna be one of the in kids. What defines the in kids no one knows, it certainly isn't whistling at random intervals I can't think of a less cool thing.

Think about it, do you have a saying that people pick up off you if you use it enough, do you pick up sayings of other people, other's idiosyncrasies ? Is this related to when ever I hear Susan Vaga's Tom's Diner music, I think back to my first year at Uni where I could never get that going out of my head and everyone in my dorm came to hate this tune because all you had to hear was those opening note to have the whole room flipping through that tune in their heads, over and over. One more example before I try to make point, there was this guy again from Uni who when asked to do something that he didn't want to do and it was obviously a no brian'er would proceed his refusal with mock consideration "Errrrr....... no" this "Err" noise could take from mere seconds to many tens of seconds, it was annoying but in the end a whole bunch of us ended up preceding the word no with very long "Errrrrrrrrrrrrrs"

So often when you think a group of people with a little in joke or a noise, or a whistle is a bunch of jerks consider why they do it, it can't simply be to annoy you personally. It could just be what makes them a group and a well formed group that has something that unifies them will, hands down, beat just any old well formed group.

http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.html is some quasi pseudo psychology stuff that might relate to stuff I've just said - you judge, it was like link 5 on google.
Until next time http://www.swaytech.com/Whistle.mp3 ... nope just doesn't work without the others there! OK Then for thsoe of you that the last didn't have a nostalgic effect on try this... http://www.swaytech.com/dadudada.mp3

The "it works for me" problem !

This is one problem anyone who works with IT people has come up with. Many people think this only afflicts the IT illiterate. Often because those in the know follow it up with some gibberish that they hope will make the user go away. "Have you tried turning it off and on again" is the much touted reply. It doesn't.
Anyone who has to liaise with others like third party vendors, system administrators or fellow software developers will have hit this brick wall. Recently I was making a connection to a database stored on such a server administered by someone else. Suddenly I couldn't get a connection to said server. I hit refresh and tried again, this time a partial result but then the script couldn't reach a database on it's own local host. I persevered and tried some other long term systems that shouldn't be failing like this. They also had an intermittent error connecting to local host. This simply screams some kind of network problem, either the server in question or possibly a device somewhere in the stack is behaving erratically. Fortunately this isn't the first time this has happened on this server, every so often it starts mis-behaving, similar problems to this, can't connect to databases, local, remote - on mars where ever it can't connect. It's like a door that wont open every fifth time or so. So I e-mail the administrator of that machine and say hey the server is playing up again the usual thing, remedy usually is a cheeky reboot, clear out a gremlin or another. Then the infamous reply "I've looked and it seems fine." You've looked how ? Opened a log, maybe made a tcp connection, check for connectivity to other legacy systems running on local host, used a command line tool to check database latency to simply connection requests ? As it turns out, no, a remote desktop connection is, it appears, all that is required to prove a server is completely functional. Open it up move the mouse around maybe restart a non critical service, if all goes well the server is absolutely top notch 100% fine. Apparently.
Not to be discouraged I do try to continue my development, but no those intermittent errors are still there. So then and this is the kicker, after a further e-mail exchange - it's decided it is my fault, it's the mySQL server I installed that's the problem. Despite the fact I've got code that can't connect to a remote MS SQL server, it's still the mySQL server that's wrong. Or maybe the code, yes that's right code that I've used one hundred times before that run usually flawlessly on several other systems is to blame. Despite the fact that based on previous empirical evidence, a server reboot solves this problem it's my code. I'm not encouraging us developers to be arrogant here, a trait of our bread, because the first time this happened I did indeed comb through all my code and did in fact find several connections I wasn't closing, but even still after closing them all guess what still intermittent errors. Remembering of course that the technology we're talking about is scalable way beyond the 100 or so users I have using my stuff. We're talking about millions of suer and thousands and thousands of transactions a second in mySQL, similar fabulous statistics in MS SQL, so forgive me if I don't blame an entire inability to connect on a few unclosed connections in my code. OK what do I suggest in these situations, problem management, people skills, decorum, calm - DONT PANIC. Don't rant like I have above, or if you are going to rant do it on a pointless web page that no one looks at. From a normal users point of view it's more difficult, you can't fight fire with fire you can't throw technical definitions back at people of the action you've already taken to make something work. You simply want your scanner to scan and the tech support people are telling you that they can't replicate the error, or despite being connected to your machine remotely it all seems to be working to them. What this answer sounds like to a user is one, you [technical support] think they [the user] are stupid and not using something correctly. Two that you [technical support] might even think they [the user] are lying, speaking with forked tongue, misrepresenting the truth. Lets face it users as a rule don't invent a problem just so they can find an excuse to converse with us technical folk. I know in some circles the term [user] means the stupidest person on the planet that might ever come to sit in front of a terminal running your system. In a design sense that is a good thing, it's a great thing, from a support standpoint it's not so great.
Sometimes it is as if staff want to deny the problem because they see it as a fault not to a piece of equipment, a bunch of circuit boards, but to themselves. They [technical support] think the user thinks that it's their [technical support] fault, the server is broken and it's your [technical support] fault because you're [technical support] the maintainer - damn you [technical support] all to hell. It is simply not the case and certainly not the case from other technical brethren. We all know only too well how machines despite all the testing you care to throw at them will hide some bug or fault that just doesn't get picked up, or if it does would cost so much to fix given as it will only occur infrequently and it can so easily be fixed by a reboot, it's not worth it! Trust me it isn't, if something simply isn't working users just want to let you know, they'd like it fixed also but they don't think it's your fault.
Another system I'm privy to has intermittent faults, it works for some users and not for others, the solution at that institution is to sit a user down internally and have them user the system from inside, if that works the system is fine and it's the users set up at home. To this solution I say pha. Pointless waste of time, no one is disputing that it works internally the problem is that some users can't access their stuff from home / Barbados. My preferred solution is to completely scrap the system and move to a more universally accepted system like a proper VPN. Next time a user reports a problem or a colleague says they can't run your code, the problem isn't their fault, or yours, it is both your problem and a problem to be solved.

Making the technology invisible setting up wifi

Maybe it's me; I liked Steve Jobs' comment about taking a problem, solving it with technology and, here is the important bit, also making the technology that solves the problem. Recently I've been trying to explain various solutions to people. I think I'm pretty good at explanations, I'm not your average geek. So people say. Well. I have had the displeasure recently of setting up someone's WiFi. Well they'd attempted it for some, hours, days, weeks and then called me. When I walked in I was happy about the fact it happened to be the exact same wireless router that I have. I would at least be familiar with the settings. The router in question is a little Belkin number. When I set mine up I was pretty amazed, it's for use with NTL which uses a MAC list in your set top box to only allow your computer online. The router then must spoof your mac address to work on the set top box. Well that all sounds a little complex for your average user, but Belkin bless them provide an install disk that you pop into your current internet computer an install program runs, gets your MAC address, then has a nice chat with the router which it's asked you to connect and sends it all the settings, when I did it boom it just worked. To be fair they had gotten their shiny new laptop on the web, the connection was awful, dropped every two to three minutes, then since they had DHCP running it was taking then a further 30-seconds to a minute to re-establish it. First stop was to statically assign the IP to try and reduce that. No I know all your network people out there are scream right now - static IPs, unmanageable, you've gotta remember them, normal people can't do that. Yes you're right but given the network has, like 3 machines... it's not really an issue. I've got maybe 8 machines on my network 4 of which have defined rule, file server, music server, web server. All my machines have static IPs and I'm just beginning to struggle to remember which is which. That helped it meant the network connection once back worked immediately. Making e-mail work on the new laptop was a pain too. They didn't know their passwords, most people forget their e-mail has a password because every e-mail client under the sun, except the one I wrote some years ago in Java, remember your password. This summer I oversaw the migration to Outlook from OE of all senior staff here at the Convent and non of them knew their e-mail had a password, and ended up guessing it or having me reset it on the server. You know, using good solid strong passwords like, "password", "email" or their names... I swear our firewall must cry itself to sleep sometimes. Anyway I managed to glean most of the setting from their current machine except passwords which we then had an hour long game of guess the password, partially because the NTL web-site for password recovery is abysmal ! Once it was all working I set about a further problem of making the printer that used to work shared, work again, they'd put up with it not working for months, because "Well computer networks never work do they" so after a major eye rolling session, which by the way is being noticed at work. I set to the printer, after making Norton firewall believe me that the incoming request to share the printer wasn't a Serbian terrorist trying to gain control of air traffic control or alter the obstacle management system of major international airports, it let the shared printer be discovered. A further few minutes begging of Norton, which also they hadn't updated in a bout a decade; people, if you're not going to keep your firewall and virus definitions up to date, take them off... it's a waste of resources to have them getting in way while they are out of date. Begging Norton to then believe the actual print job wasn't one of Osama Bin Laden's cronies attempting to subvert the British Governments new bill on paper clip management and thus allow the forces of terror to gain control of a major international resource. Can you imagine if this happened, how would any bureaucracy succeed ? It's not like you can just use staples, remember staples are for the strong willed. Norton finally seemed convinced that the print job should be allowed and began printing... woohoo. It only took two hours. To try and explain my actions I drew them a little picture with all the ips on etc. After wrestling with their access point, and their printers I began to contemplate whether this is easier on my favourite new platform. Now I can't comment on setting airport express up for internet access. For air iTunes, it was great, I plugged it in and it joined my network and showed up in iTunes. Although I'm wondering if I can give a true view, I thought the Belkin router was easy. So then I set to thinking about this idea of technology being invisible, the telephone I discussed the other day, you don't even think about it you just use it. How much computer technology is truly invisible, ironically the only one I think people don't need to think about when setting up is the monitor. Keyboards now often require extra software as do mice. Network cards often set-up without intervention, the network won't but the card will. Then recently I've been trying to convert all my family's CDs to iTunes, however, the laptop in the dining room is old and has no storage. So despite wanting to sit in the dining room and control the music flowing the airports, I wanted to store the music on the network machine upstairs. I also though wanted the same music to be in both the iTunes library on the laptop and the desktop upstairs where it all resides. I think it's easy just set both iTunes to store music upstairs and rip away, don't tell the RIAA, then once you've ripped a lot of disks go to the other machine and drag the files from the explorer window into the iTunes on that machine. The library updates and all music is searchable from both machines, it's not complex is it. Apparently it is and this could feasibly be the wrong board to post this as I'm sure my 2 readers are both technically literate, I cannot get my father to understand the difference between the files, the library on the laptop, the library on the main machine. how the data flows from and to machines. I think apple has done a great job with iTunes, it's clearly not invisible. Maybe it's a generational thing, young people are walking round with their iPods and syncing podcasts with iTunes and understanding what they're doing. Maybe that's it. They have to understand how it works, which isn't what you want from technology, most people don't understand how the telephone works it just does. We've had telephones for what a hundred years, so we might be waiting another 80 years maybe for our modern technology to become invisible. Bob Cringley wrote in Triumph of the Nerds that the computer would take 30 years to become ubiquitous, a similar length of time that the television took, and the telephone and he's about write, other than say some socio-economic factors nearly every home has a computer and maybe in another 20 years they'll have a network. Bring on zeroconf !

Freedom of speech

I started thinking about this post before the sentencing of David Irving for Denying the Holocaust. I'd been wanting to write something about freedom of speech and the internet. In Europe they've having a spot of bother and civil unrest at the moment. A Danish newspaper republished a cartoon, originally published in the Egyptian paper some months ago, with no great problems. These reprinted images portrayed the Prophet Mohammed with a turban made in to a bomb on his head. I personally find the images rather distasteful. Mine was a minor reaction one of some disdain; however the reaction from some the second time around was one of vitriolic rage. Protests across Europe, European embassies destroyed in Middle East and North African missions, thousands of people marching through London carrying placards, ignoring the allegations of trouble making from some quarters, for whatever reason it's caused a fuss. Now I think freedom of speech is paramount, the cartoonist and the publications both clearly promoting freedom of speech, the protesters also demonstrating their own freedom of speech. Fantastic; two opposing opinions both putting across their points of view. Some journalists were on London streets, having their own protest handing out leaflets about freedom of speech, all adding to the discussion; parties speaking out about freedom of speech, parties trying to put across why they had been offended. The problem with some of these protests were the messages that were being displayed on some banners, proclaiming death or beheading to those who insult Islam. That was simply in London, in some cities violence erupted with mayhem, destruction, and in Nigeria multiple deaths, following in it's wake. There was an inconsistency during the policing of these events; the freedom of speech advocates found themselves arrested for breech of the peace offences. However where most people found the Metropolitan Policing Policy lacking, that weekend, was that those holding placards promoting death and beheading and even glorifying the terrorist acts of July in our Capital were allowed to continue unabated. There we have the two opposing points of view, discuss! I don't believe the cartoons were implying that Mohammed was a terrorist, maybe the cartoonist was hoping to promote a discussion just like the one we're having regarding freedom of speech, maybe they were make a low brow satirical point about people hijacking Islam for their own violent ends. I do believe in freedom of speech, I am a tremendous advocate that unless you're saying something untrue you may hold whatever opinion you like, I have a trust in the natural selection of ideas, that's why the like of the British National Party are, and always will be on the fringe of British Politics. People who vote for them don't believe in repatriation, or that ethnic minorities are inherently troublesome, they are I hope only voting for the BNP because no other mainstream party is having any part in a real discussion about immigration policy or integration, to be fair the BNP isn't actually having a discussion they're having rant an uninformed rant but at least they are saying something even if it is utter rubbish (and that's being polite about it). Everyone is too afraid of triggering such responses as we've seen recently and apparently rightly so if all the above can be caused by a mere cartoon. Not all Muslims agree with the actions of the extremists who have caused destruction across the world under the banner of defending their Prophet. Most, I like to think, Muslims believe that this row had become far to confrontational. Whilst they don't believe it is right according to their religion to have images of Mohammed. They, I assume, realise that not everyone is a believer in their religion and don't attach the same rules to images of the prophet. Just as some people drink alcohol, have sex before marriage and even have sex with people of the same sex, some might draw images of Mohammed. Catholics believe in the Immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, if a cartoon satirist wants to draw a cartoon depicting the Mary having an affair with some Roman Centurion, then whilst I would be offended I certainly wouldn't expect everyone to agree with my upset unless they're also Catholics and certainly wouldn't wish death upon those that printed such an image.
This country is currently considering a law regarding religious hatred; it is thought that since we have such a diverse population not everyone is protected by the current blasphemy laws which only protect Christian beliefs, as some might argue as a primarily Christian country they rightly should. We have some extra laws I think about Judaism though so why not everyone else. I don't know on this one. It's one of the few things I can't make my mind up on, like arming police officers or euthanasia.
We come to the events of recent days, which relate to comments made 18 years ago. A British "historian" claimed that the Nazis didn't have gas chambers and didn't execute millions of Jews. I have put historian in quotes because anyone who in the 80s was denying the existence of the Final Solution is clearly an idiot. However, it was his opinion and whilst obviously an unintelligent one, I believe that he has the freedom of speech to say these things, and the same common sense approach that keeps the likes of the BNP on the fringe will keep his ideas out of the main stream. What makes his case more interesting is that when further evidence came forward, the personal files and journal of Adolf Eichmann, he changed his opinion to a more sensible one, the charges were retrospective and more so he has been jailed for an opinion that he used to hold. I can understand why the 11 nations that have them, have laws against holocaust denial and promotion of Nazi ideals. They fear that the poison that allowed the atrocities to happen could flow again if left unchecked, there is a fringe right movement in most western countries that still believe Hitler was correct, that "He had the right idea". I am offended by these views, I don't believe we should ban them, legislate against them or decapitate those that hold them. I believe that my and everyone else's freedom of speech whilst not enshrined in constitution per se, like the French, is one of the most important things I have, even if I use it to talk rubbish. I don't believe I should be able to use it to pedal hatred, and indeed we, the UK, do have laws against certain racially intolerant language, which indeed are sometimes so feared that they too can be dangerous, taking Mark Twain off reading lists because it contains the word "nigger", I think is an infringement to far - the word is being used in context in a book telling a child's story from a past time. If I read this to my children I wouldn't hide the word I would use it, and I would explain that it's a bad word that they shouldn't use. The European countries with restrictions on freedom of speech are seen as a half way house between complete anarchy and hate and a completely controlled system, like the Chinese have where to speak out against the government is banned, illegal, imprisonable. A step to far obviously, but at least that is a government making the rules, who maybe can't be voted out in China but they certainly could here. However I didn't elect the Ayatollah, I didn't elect the Muslim leaders. I didn't elect the Pope, or the Arch Bishop of Canterbury and that is why I don't believe that any of those people should vet my speech or my reading list. The UK is not a secular country with a separation of Church and State, many of our laws are derived from religious beliefs, and even those can be wrong and need updating, i.e. laws about homosexuality, abortion or divorce have all been modernised. Despite that I still like the fact we are a Christian country, I do believe it is still the government's job, elected by everyone, to grant and remove my freedoms but that, government should also trust me to censor myself and explain to my kids that nigger whilst in a book from 1885 isn't a word we use anymore. Some argue that David Irving broke the laws of a particular country and those laws were made by an elected government, a valid argument, that makes me glad I do live in The United Kingdom of Great Briton and Northern Island. Where I can say pretty much anything... I can can't I.

Quick Sony, run rabbit

Ok I wanna post this quick, I'm shower fresh because I just heard this on the Radio, I've not read this elsewhere, at the same time I've not checked places like slashdot, or the slashdot podcast - but I think I'm pretty early with this. Sony have warned PS3 could be delayed ! That's gotta hurt, everyone who was holding off before Christmas to choose either XBox or PS3, might now be pushed into getting an Impatient XBox. We'll have to see.

Hysteria, psychology and ethos

I’ve missed a couple of days, several things have happened. Mainly is this hysteria of this “first mac” virus. Since I’ve become a mac zealot I’ve vowed to change the institution where I work to macs one machine at a time. I’m no fan boy, and I am the first to point out I couldn’t do my job without a PC, mainly for the window into SQL server with MS access, secondly the rest of the institution is PC based so I have to do some testing. When I first start badgering people into looking at the mac platform the first question I have to reassure them about is “Will all my documents work on a mac” Well with work’s MS license they can pick up mac office from stores and boom it just works. The second thing possible converts ask is “Why bother ?” Along with the snazzy interface and the stability is the following very powerful argument. “There hasn’t been a virus that has propagated and survived in the wild for the mac OS X.” Now that sentence is somewhat guilty of the technical speech I’ve decried in previous blogs, I then explain what that means to the laypeople. Firstly you end up explaining what a virus actually is; malicious code followed by the fact that a computer virus like a natural one is an interloper it attacks you without knowing living insidiously off your resources and then uses you as a host to get to other people. So is this, Umpa lumpa, a virus, well it’s malicious code certainly, do you know about it, according to the accounts from people who’ve got it no – it sits there pretending to be a picture archive that needs your password, alarm bells should be ringing, do you know of it’s presence – yes you’ve had to accept the file, run it, not notice it’s a picture then give it your password. So is it by all accounts a virus, I don’t think so – it just doesn’t tick enough boxes so for all the apocryphal predictions lets just see how long it survives in the wild – which I doubt is gonna be long. Does my statement still hold, yes, Yes, YES. Should we consider ourselves immune ? No, hence I feel my statement is truer than that I’ve heard coming from the mouths of Apple Store employees, they don’t put anywhere near as many caveats into their sales pitch, “Macs don’t get viruses, viruses don’t exist for macs” They do but they can’t propagate, linux has viruses, everyone has viruses but given the in built security you really have to help them along to do any real damage.
Next excitement for me was the fact MBP, mac book pro for those with a problem with it’s name… SO WHAT? Have begun shipping with upped specs, it’s not newsworthy anymore but still exciting so I ran, neigh sped, 33 MPH all the way to my apple store to see the demo model they’d claimed they were getting in, but to no avail it’s still not there – but they do have a fookin’ massive poster introducing it, but I was asked to leave after stroking it for a period of time.
One of my converts, lets call her Shirley, had their mac arrive yesterday 20” of glorious apple plastic with inbuilt iSight and Intel Core Duos. After some confussion with mounting drives and installing applications was over with I convinced them to get an iChat login. We use skype all the time but to see the quality of iChat to iChat with dual iSights was a joy to behold. Smooth, quiet, and pretty decent effective noise cancellation. OK Now I’m not a big iChat convert – small user base, limited functionality slightly prone to crashing, but it was nice to use. We had it on again this am and were discussing the sociological and psychological implications of video conferencing. Which could when the other prime online VOip user I chat to gets their mac… SOON could come into play. Firstly with voice it’s fine we have a model for that that we’ve been using for hundreds (?) of years, the lowly old telephone. We don’t see the person we only hear them so we judge their reactions of other metrics, response time, volumes, pitch etc. It’s a perfect fit other than a bit of latency with online voice chat. Initially you try to compare video conferencing to a model, and you immediately think of the second word, conferencing. It’s not accurate though, interesting things happen like a lack of eye contact, cameras are off centre, the new iMac with built in iSight tries to combat this it’s not that much better, and you’ve lost 60 pixels for the pleasure to, to be honest I think that is a good trade off. Network latencies play a part even with the slickest phat 8 megs a second you still can’t interrupt like in real life. Probably says a lot about my conversational ability than it does about video conferencing. We recently did a substantial amount of testing of video conferencing systems at work, and one company supplies a document titled “Pushing forward change.” It is an attempt to mitigate the shortfalls I’ve described and suggests strategies for working round them. I thought that was useful of them to publish. Video conferencing is ok for an online chat, it’s ok for disseminating information in a lecture format, and you could possibly get some interactivity in an online learning situation for small groups. Can it replace real meetings, no. Not without spending hundreds possible thousands on a large room sized suite with multiple camera etc, even then it’s only second best to the honest a god face to face. It’s a human things I’m sure small signals that we emit during conversation and interaction, that can’t be picked up by a camera or a mic and certainly can’t be transmitted electronically. Interestingly I heard of a study this week on one of my multitude of podcasts about a group of students who took 20 emails and had to send them with either a “sarcastic” or “serious” tone and the recipient had to state what the tone was, and apparently we have only a 50/50 chance of getting it correct. This I think is to do with the casual attitude we give to electronic written communications in this day and age. In the age of the letter it had repercussions, it was taken more seriously because it took time to arrive so you had to write it with more care and less frivolity an attitude we should maybe consider when we ‘pen’ e-mails. We believe we can recover a misunderstanding within moments an e-mail doesn’t carry as much weight, we believe people treat the words in an e-mail with less seriousness, how often have friends been caught out with a misaddressed e-mail find one and ask them if an e-mail is taken less seriously ? Be warned.

End of week, e-mail ethos.

I spent some time at work organising my inboxes. All staff were taken off time table to concentrate on ethos, it’s a catholic and very much linked to our pastoral values. Which given my personal situation has been invaluable at the moment. The staff meet people from similar departments in other institutions and discuss ethos and good practice. Well I thought I’d look at my e-mail ethos. When I got the mac, it was an experiment, so I set up my mail and had a couple of folders. Since then I have become a big mac geek and use it as my prime machine only turning on the PC either for Napster or to keep the mail archive complete. As such my inbox had appx 2300 emails just flat no structure. Well given my now work wide famous anal retentiveness it was making me feel ill just having them all strewn about to be honest it’s a testament both my own memory / spotlight finding the ones that I couldn’t. I made folders for people and folders for projects and systems. All in all it took a couple of hours. Now I have a multitude of rules siphoning off mails as they come in into folders based on sender mainly. Though I was wondering how healthy that is, having both project folders and people folders ? If x sends me email about y I think I want it in the folder y, but unless they always have some keywords in a subject it’s difficult to make a rule about this. I do now have like 20 rules, 6 smart mailboxes, and folders for family friends, work, projects etc. Then there are sensitivities people who are friends but only e-mail from work don’t want to be lumped under the work banner. Now it’s becoming slightly OCD that I must clear any inbox mails immediately, quite worrying, with all those rules and filters e-mails struggle to stay in my inbox. Will it benefit my productivity, initially no, as I’m finding I’m now searching a bit harder for e-mails or when I don’t want to write another inbox rule and I must drag it somewhere and I have to scroll a bit and drill down etc.
I’m currently writing an app that will output to pdf and I have a quandary, the text the users enters on a web form must fit on a single side of A4. This is difficult to do as if I put a limit on the text box for say 35 lines then the on screen text box must be the exact same width which is a pain to do, even more so as the users have a summary screen that they can alter the text on that has to have thirty such text boxes all really tiny on the single screen. I can’t limit by number of characters as if a member of staff writes really short lines then they could be within the character count but be on line 72.
Mrs. Goat Trader isn’t in for some of next week and I’m funeral’ing on Thursday but when Mrs. Goat Trader is in we’re having power lunches each day and she’s going to be using Justin, her iBook, in work. So I’ll have to put in some serious indoctrination time with her. I was discussing with one of my converts, lets call her Margaret, whether pages is a desktop publisher or a word processor ? I argued for the latter. I still maintain it look and feels more like DTP than it does a word processor, however apple’s own literature claiming it’s a Word Processor, yes it can do contents pages and mail merges, but look at the templates, far more publishing stuff than word processing, discuss !

Alliance in business

Everyone is upset suddenly about this link that’s sprung up between Skype and Intel. The story that’s running is that the new version of Skype due out will be able to handle a 10 way voice call. Only, and here is the kicker, if it is running on an Intel processor. This outrages the freedom geeks. To be honest I personally don’t have 10 friends online at any one time and if I did they certainly wouldn’t want to speak to each other about anything. So I doubt the limit is ever gonna cause me a problem. Is it fair though ? I’m a free market economist, businesses can, I believe; take action to benefit mutually conducive aims and goals and yes profits. I don’t have total confidence in the altruism of business if left to it’s own devices however this action is not particularly destructive to the fabric of society. Even if taken to an extreme this might help re-enforce market dominance of Intel, is this though going to run AMD out of the market ? Until a month there was an alternative, iChat could do multi voice and multi video and had nothing to do with Intel. Now however that is running on the Intel core duos. Do I believe there should some kind of anti trust investigation, or legislation ? This is hardly the market domination we’ve seen from Apple or Microsoft. No. If I want to make a product that will only run on mac, or windows should I be punished ? No. This isn’t even that extreme the new Skype still runs on AMD, just it’s missing a feature. No word from Skype about whether there is a real technical issue as to this limitation as yet. It is a deal between a hardware manufacturer and a software vendor – nothing new. If users are that bothered, I say what I always say, vote with your feet. Don’t like it then don’t use it. There are alternatives, for the mac brigade iChat with multiple video. I’m sure multi voice isn’t that far off on MSN. Until then those popular users who want an orgy of conversation will have to wait the matter of hours it will take for the community to remove the hardware verification checks.
I was considering this AM in light of this Skype revelation and the alliance with Apple, is Intel in an ascendance again despite by all accounts not being necessarily the best processor ? What am I about to buy into, when I finally pony up the money, when I get my MacBook Pro ordered ? It is an Intel machine, no longer are mac users getting something completely different from standard PCs. It used to be the entire architecture that was superior, a technical advancement. You used to be able to easily argue back at ignorant PC users who preached the MHz myth. Despite the fact that on paper the macs had less RAM and slower processors. The retort was “Well it’s a completely different processor so the number doesn’t need to be as big because the mac uses it differently”. Originally I thought Apple had co created the specification docs for the first Apple Intel processor ever. Hence when Steve launched the machines the clock speed was a bit lower still than PC machines, it still didn’t matter because I thought they’d co-created the architecture, like they had done with IBM previously. Then I saw reports that someone had taken their new iMac and swapped out the processor supplied with the iMac and put a new standard Intel core duo in and it worked no problem. So what are we getting when we buy apple now that is different to your average computer Joe ? Still plenty; stability, ease of use, security, iLife suite and of course macs have that legitimate coolness factor that they’ve always used to justify the elevated cost. You are getting two cores - of only 32 bits a piece, what is that about ? From a marketting point of view apple hammered home the numbers when they had 64 bits for addressin, how is the Jobs reality distortion gonna sweep this one under the carpet ? Well by all accounts it's faster, much faster. Is it enough ? I think so; I am about to sink a large amount of resource in to the newest member of my mac family.

Personal Post (PP) about MD (Meidcal Doctor) systolic pressure

When I decided to restart this blog I had to make a decision as to whether I'd allow it or not to be personal. Obviously my personal life, readings and opinions will inform the take I put on articles I talk about, but would I directly talk about my life ? What if I want to whinge about the guy I work with that can't make decent coffee without putting me in fear for the safety of my coffee machine ?
I could keep it anonymous but that's kind of blown out of the water since it's called cornescast.
We've had a bereavement in the family, and I want to make this blog related to technology and not a personal counselling / whining / ranting platform. I'm not going to talk about the past 48 hours directly but rather the experience it's given me. Not the person who died or how upset I was, it's all kinda a given. Needless to say I'd never actually watched a person die. There was a protocol that demanded my presence today at the bedside, twice I acknowledged my want to leave and go away from this problem, it wasn’t nice seeing life ebb away, although I’m glad I was there at the end but I don’t know why, and certainly don’t know whether I’d do it again.
Of the varying devices and monitors hooked up the primary focus was one CRT that represented, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and saturation levels. These each had a trace and numerical data, you don’t need to be a physician to know as the numbers go down so does TTL.
Where am I going with this ? Well I could have a discussion about the fact that the system looked java’esque (cheers ajf) and whether that's appropriate but I’d rather do some more research into that one, other than a cursory lecture I attended into RTJ; as part of a real time course.
I think though I’m going to discuss the amount or jargon we use. As a member of a club, an elite group we can say phrases like “Pipelining”, “Stack trace” and “RTJ”, “TLA” etc. and expect those we use them at to understand them and have a conversational flow incorporating these phrases without missing a beat. Unless we’re using them to make people go away by scaring them – which I never do honest… and NEVER to my boss. I remember a scene from Good morning Vietnam (sorry rwad) in which Robin Williams delivers a short monologue consisting of every military acronym, “Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P. shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T. 'cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could become a M.I.A. and then we'd all be put out on K.P.” Sportsmen do it, “Rowing bow side, catch a crab, feather, love, off side”. When does it become ok to use them indiscriminately ? I heard a program on Radio 4 last week about why legalese is all still in Latin ? Some lawyers argue it’s because the Latin conveys in the truest sense every nuance of the words. That’s why we pay them so much they spend x years learning what they all mean and how to use them to win or case. Computing is similar I walk into a meeting and I must prove I know what I’m talking about in some sense this can be done in verbal jousting. Similar in principal to playing Mornington crescent from the outside it sounds like you’re talking in depth about a serious and fundamental piece of theory whereas sometimes it’s all complete rubbish. This is fine if incorporated into a game, like MC, or if you are in an environment where truly everyone knows what you mean. However it can too easily be allowed to slip into a situation whereby nobody would like to be the first to admit they don’t know why the “Pole is on the left side of the map and has an even number of zeros”. A level of abstraction is created and this then propagates outwards and we forget that at some point we might need to break through them all and say it in plain English. So when I asked a medical professional what the two blood pressure numbers mean, rather than answering “Well the top number is the systolic pressure and the number underneath is the diastolic measurement.” I’d get something along the lines of “The upper number is the pressure of the blood against the artery walls when the heart contracts the lower number is the pressure against the artery walls when the heart relaxes between beats”. Enough of the rant, what do I propose, what is my answer ? Consider thy audience. Just as the likes of presentation Zen say, consider to whom you are speaking. If the people you are with understand what a pipeline cache burst is, a term I am reliably informed one of my associates came out with the other day, then that’s fine. If you are pitching to your client or non technical manager then don’t use it. Never try to show how much you know by throwing words around. Don’t try to win arguments by using terms that are superfluous. You don’t win, you just let the person know you’re panicking and trying to scare then. Explain in language they understand. That is the mark of intelligence; know when to be technical and when to be ‘normal’. Look at the most persuasive people you know, the natural leaders, they can judge this balance well. They are persuasive speakers because they tailor their speech to the people to whom they’re speaking. I hope this article is aimed at an audience and I hope I write to that audience well… all 4 of them !

Dark days

Personally I'm having a tough time of it at the moment. I've had cause to be frequenting the local hospital and was considering today during a rather traumatic time how much electronics is used during intensive care of patients. Obviously we've all heard the horror stories regarding the good ole Therac-25 cancer machine and the smoking patients who received massively high doses of "treatment". An inquiry pondered how it happened and concluded that some unknown scapegoat was to blame that their model of the problem had been wrong, assumptions had been Wrong the safety precautions had been WRONG. My question is; Could it happen again ? We have these elaborate systems for testing software and exercising code paths, but in electronics I still feel there could be “ghosts in the machine”. I remember a hardware lecture once, when discussing hardware fault checking / discovery, said you can't design complete test coverage because of time / money / scale. If you design a few latch big system or even an encoding device designed in software for an FPGA that's small yeah you can you can test it, just. Given all these large systems that monitor so much can analysing the small units that make it up really confirm the safety of the overall, massive, system. I also remember once a friend being horrified that critical systems safety / fault fixing was judged one a monitory basis. I took the view that this was acceptable given that the alternative was not to have any product and then loose all the benefits that do exist despite of possible problems. However recently I’ve been looking at how the patients are now so very nearly “plugged into” the machines. That sensors, measures, valves and dials informed the care teams decisions so directly. Is monitory considerations acceptable as a prime indicator of risk ?
There is ofcouse a sliding scale in these things; if another colleague of mine messes up maybe my new phone will crash – annoying but no biggie. If a different colleague of mine messes up – a patient might get incorrect dose, which they can, hopefully, notice quickly and correct. If data I am curator of breaks someone might loose 30 quid for a week, again it’s no biggie it can be fixed. If someone so far back down a chain of design messes up a no one notices and that system then tries to fix the problem it’s caused no one notices until it can be too late a dangerous loop develops – think HAL in 2001; Frank dies because HAL is trying to fix the mistake it had been told it couldn’t make. Was Arthur C Clarke right then ? Apparently. Therac-25 shows this, the machine was believed to be infalable. Is he still right now ? Are the risks any worse than the ones that human nurses can make under pressure ? A bit short and I’ve missed a few I know, like I said it’s all a little bit tough right now.

Aqua Data Studio

Ok I'll confirm the name later, you see I'm posting from downstairs off my windows laptop. I looked when I first got my mac for something to use to view our SQL server DBMS at work instead of access. Nothing was forthcoming that let me see the structure and the data easily, except maybe one, but it was expensive. Well today I found Nevada, http://www.aquafold.com/ and I've gotta say I found it marvelous. It looked good, nice layout; good functionality, groovy little drag and drop query builder. View into the data, if your user has permissions editing the data, and table structures. Supports MS SQL Server, MySQL and about a dozen others. I thought well how much is this gonna cost... Well for me, not, nada, zip... A big fat 0. I love working in education I really do. So that is one of the 5 icons left on my dock for now.

Contradictions

Well I convinced 1 colleague to take the plunge, Mrs. Goat Trader purchased a nice new shiny iBook eventually, after spending quite a bit of time trying to barter like a Maltese market trader she took out the magical piece of plastic and boom it just worked, well after a quick call to a credit check agency then confirmation of eligibility for educational discount. So I spent some of my lunch hour configuring some of the niceties of Mac OS X. To be fair she had done some of the stuff already, like moving the dock to the right hand side, what is that about ??? I've been analyzing recently what people have on their docks, let me know what's on yours, send me a picture ? So I installed quicksilver for her, and was explaining what that's for I decided I would try something new on my machine, so I cropped my 20-30 icons down to 5 icons, Finder, Safari, Dreamweaver, Aqua Data & Trash. Something amazing happened, to be honest Quicksilver can launch all my applications and has done so all night. However the most interesting thing wasn't how damn small my dock got physically but rather how much my computer speeded up. Then I started to think about it, it wasn't my mind the machine was getting faster, dashboard was opening quicker... pah I hear you cry - don't be silly a discernible increase from just knock a bunch of icons off. I first noticed when I was minimizing applications they were doing so faster. When you minimize either with genie or just scale every time the dock must be redrawn all those gorgeous 48 x 48 pixel icons being - moved, animated, resized to make way for their new companion... must use up tones of graphics power and given the mini isn't that well endowed in that area a hit is clearly visible. Then I was think about how sleek the apple interfaces are, iPod, OS X, .mac etc. We hold St. Steve up as a bastion of efficiency, as apple users we claim we work better on a mac. We tell those we wish to convert that we get more done on our macs that their PC. Steve's presentations are a shining example of presentation Zen, Coca applications are efficient in layout and style. For years apple resisted the urge to use context menus, refused to stock a two button mouse. All this is a lie, a contradiction when you look at high definition icons, animated expose with real time video rendering on thumbnail, all the screen relegated used by the Dock (When you don't use damn autohide). All the memory used by those pesky widgets hiding on the dashboard (ps don't ever try the sunlight trackers it just drinks juice). Think about all those .app files surely some of them share functions or files but with a .app bundle it's all duplicated, where as windows uses dlls to share runtime functions. When you switch to mac you spend time learning where new stuff is, the fact the menu bar doesn't move, the close minimize and maximize buttons have moved - yet somehow we forget these because apple to us have managed to strike this cord in us whereby they've abused our resources but have looked good doing it. To be fair no one can argue that shared dynamic link libraries are a necessary compromise anymore with hard disk space being gigantic and cheap - in real terms the fact the excel used to fit on a floppy doesn't mean it's any less efficient because we've got space coming out of our ears now. You can now spec a home PC with a TB of HD - CRAZY I know. So I know there are those who believe apple are like gods amoungst men and microsoft is the evil empire; there are those who believe apple is to pretty to a decent OS that all those graphical niceties are not worth the resource cost, in the end it is all about balence, I think apple have the balence right, mostly. (caveat'ing like mad)

Developers who don't talk to customers

If they did, software, may take longer and be more expensive - according to the tri-angle but it would be right. Attention would be paid to the areas that the customer cares about. I'm not saying software should all be pretty interfaces and no back end, but it should encompass the features the users will find useful. This isn't a new idea or particularly insightful but it's one that developers seem unwilling to accept. Spolski wrote a great quote, "Stop expecting customers to know what they want" Which is true, I often develop an idea then go to the user and see if it's on the right line. Customers can't express the right technical ideas regarding their requirements and since engineers loath the opportunity to write decent specs. More importantly nobody refers to them after writing two sides of drivel sans any diagrammatic expression of the problem. Without understanding system they are modelling it ends up the model is wrong. Users believe it is the system's fault, to anthropomorphise for a moment, the system isn't wrong and it's not fair to accuse it. It's the designer that was wrong, the coder, the person who wrote the spec the person who thought up the model. Now you can expect some paradigm shift from clients, they will accept some change but you can't re-write their understanding of the problem to make your 'incorrect' system is the solution. This vitriolic rage comes from an online testing system I am currently involved in. The designers have given all manner of useful elements on the interface, how many computers are connected how many tests are taking place how many results are left to be sent to the marking server. However the board who have designed / spec'd this haven't considered the whole exam process, nowhere is there a mechanism to allow extra time, basic principles forgotten. They've assumed the servers infallible and assumed a 100% up time, which given that their servers are running on goat power, in a field, in Bosnia - and it's winter, it isn't a great assumption. I feel this sometimes comes from a lack of passion. You can't be passionate about everything but if you can't even fake it in a "Harry met Sally" kind of way you won't produce a good product. If you can't get it into your head that you want this product to be good, neigh great or better than great it won't be and the users will know this and see this. Then the users won't use it and it will all be pointless. So my call to you all echos someone who is passionate about his products; make your software "Insanely GREAT", get inside your user's head and listen to them.

Well....about time

This was a New Year's resolution so it's a bit late.