robbie

wellitworkedlasttime.com

Jul 25

good people

there’s nothing wrong with project managers. nor even programme managers. not per se. good people matter. but there’s an unhealthy trend in IT, one even worse than thinking the term is interchangeable with ICT.

now, in no way do i mean to do anyone down, far from it. as i say – good people matter. but just to put this into perspective: in established professions, managers are not uber high status individuals. essential, yes, in the same way caffeine and chocolate are to a technical team, but never actually in charge of an engagement.

consider the legal profession. lawyers and barristers run their cases – it is they, not their clerks that engage with their clients and present in court. similarly with accountants, buildings architects and doctors.

there is simply no way anyone would accept that a project manager in those professions could just pitch up and do the job of the professional, never-mind front a professional engagement. but apparently when it comes to IT that’s okay..? Just imagine a PM pitching up before a judge or an operating table…

why? well clearly we technologists have yet to establish ourselves a credible profession. in fact, we’re not even close. but there’s another reason though… these days there are many managers in IT who were once (years ago) technologists.

in the other professions i mentioned, most managers are specialists in their field, not ex-technical professionals. i think this leads to a tendency to over-estimate the value such brings to a project and to expect these people can replace, if not actually lead an engagement. given that the state of our profession is so poor; risk averse organisations are more likely to place their trust in what they perceive to be experienced risk managers embedded within the traditional business structures of their organisations.

also, there is a prevalent view that technologists know shit about the business of technology… yet do we really think that GPs know less about the business of medicine than the practice administrators they employ?

good management is essential to any engagement, and brings huge value. no question. but consider the converse - under what circumstances could a technologist just jump right in and fulfil a professional manager’s role?

in my view, good technologists need to lead technical projects, and good managers need to manage those projects as directed by them in consultation with the client.

trouble is large IT companies – and their clients – being chock full of managers-cum-ex-technologists – present themselves via their ability to understand and manage the apparently difficult project or business issues that may be involved. which, apparently, their IT people don’t get…

really? get to fuck. with the right mix of good people, there’s no reason we cant have both.

Jul 24

plaisir du chocolate

stuff No Comments »

lovely, lovely chocolates

plaisir du chocolate, makers of the world’s best artisan chocolates – more lovely even than prestat, have closed, so the above is a pic (of my favourites) of the last box i’ll ever have shared. beautiful, tasty, if hugely expensive, they also did incredible pastries, teas, candied fruits and hot chili chocolate which i’ll also miss. must have happened very recently as their shop on Thistle Street hadn’t been open that long and earlier this month they were certainly still doing chocolate tastings, as i got an invite to one. Bertrand Espouy was clearly a passionate, brilliant and gifted chocolatier – and as they were charging a good £1 for each chocolate, its not like they were underselling themselves. also, i have nothing left to even salute their passing. very disappointing.

Jul 23

mobileme

reviews, technology 1 Comment »

exchange for the rest of us? i don’t think so. i signed up to try this out a couple of days ago and its disappointing. starting with email – this is simply an IMAP email account yourname@me.com. So it doesn’t work with existing accounts, and certainly doesn’t synchronise anything since the imap protocol manages messages on the server. the syncing software itself is actually provided as part of iTunes (why? this ought to be an explicit install surely?) and syncs calendar, contacts and bookmarks. Contact synchronisation suffers from the problem that on a target pc in outlook, though the contacts are in outlook, adding them as recipients in email messages results in an error and the message wont send. i’ve had to open the contact cards, and copy and paste the email addresses over one by one to get this to work. calendar synchronisation suffers from this hugely irritating and frequent message:

mobileme message

thing is, this happens even though i’ve not updated any calendar entries, yet every 15 minutes or so this pops up. which leads me to suspect that synchronisation does not occur automatically or is driven by changes – instead it must be on a timed interval basis. in addition, if you have another pc booted up, then you’ll also get this message too:

mobileme message

rubbish. especially for a £60 per year subscription. instead this looks much more promising…

Jul 18

iMac and Vista

technology 2 Comments »

after many months without a desktop pc (limited exclusively to my marvellous, but just too small for development, Tz laptop), i finally got round to purchasing this new toy. Having had a sony all-in-one previously, I knew this was just the sort of thing i was after – large screen, multi-media device that i can also use as a tv. And there simply isn’t anything nicer looking than the lovely, lovely new 24″ iMacs…

iMac

A 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD although slightly more expensive than the equivalent competition from Dell and Sony is better specified. Whilst the Sony comes ready equipped with twin tv tuners and acts as a PVR, this has its own annoyances as it means a) getting an ariel from tv/digibox to the pc (which isn’t in the same room) b) having recordings in multiple places. not major problems i admit. A reasonable alternative, it seems to me, is to use a slingbox from digibox/PVR, which negates the need for on-board tuners. Still, why the iMac doesn’t come with such is clearly remiss of apple given the excellent screen and graphics. in fact that, flash storage input and limited integrated connectivity (usb, firewire & mini-dvi out are essentially it) seem to be the only downsides so far. but then lack of basic connectivity is why i chose sony over the macbook air. time will tell.

now I exclusively run Vista on this, and it was truly easy to set such up, boot camp is brilliant - with all the vista drivers included on the leopard disks. And it’s not slow…

vista performance

the only problems I’ve had to date is getting used to the iMac keyboard layout, some shortcut keys dont seem to work within Office, but if i just cant get used to it, I can always replace it. For the hardcore mac user, i may have said several blasphemies in this post; but the iMac really is an excellent Vista PC…

Jul 13

ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ

security, site No Comments »

Admittedly 5 hours behind the curve on this one, but I just randomly stumbled on this on google trends. looks like someone’s got a new googlehack on the go - in the form of the clever upside down ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ. what is interesting is that this term doesn’t seem to have existed prior to today, so to get it into the top search spot in just a few hours is significant. a deliberate mass google search? would need an impressive bot-network to pull off the millions of hits required though (or a viral network of lots of people with time on their hands). perhaps a google trends vulnerability then? hmm. either way, having hit the top spot – i’d now expect blogs to punt the search frequency back up after this initial spike. which is perhaps the real hack…

today’s googlehack

Jul 12

vip vapourware

privacy, security, technology 2 Comments »

Sandisk TrustedSignins

So, back in 2006 Sandisk, RSA and Verisign together released something called TrustedSignins for U3. Instead of a dedicated token, a multipurpose U3 usb stick would do the same job, indeed it could securely manage multiple tokens, and it’d also be a usefully encrypted usb drive. ubiquitously and cheaply available at retail outlets everywhere, the advantages seem obvious. so when Verisign offer a free two-factor VIP for their OpenId PIP, I popped into town and bought a cruzer, since any SanDisk U3 drive will do the trick it seems:

Verisign supports SanDisk U3

Activation is simple, just plug in the cruzer, open the U3 LaunchPad and click on TrustedSignins:

Activate Verisign VIP on U3

Except the U3 LaunchPad doesn’t have a TrustedSignins option. I check the cruzer has the latest software installed, and spend a good couple of hours searching and finally emailing verisign, sandisk an u3 support. Now, the Sandisk doco says, “A benefit of TrustedSignins over dedicated tokens is that your company does not need to bear the expense of stocking and supplying them to your customers. After an employee or customer buys a standard SanDisk device at any of the 185,000 retail locations, it is registered with their account at your company. As an incentive, your company can even offer a rebate.”

But when I bought the cruzer, I just picked one off the shelf, I was neither asked to register nor offered a rebate. And it doesn’t work. So what is going on here? Turns out there are two types of SanDisk U3 – retail and OEM, and only the OEM version can be programmed with the TrustedSignins utility. also the OEM version is not available from retail outlets. This is certainly not what either Verisign or Sandisk are claiming though, is it? Why has Sandisk not made the TrustedSignins available on all its U3 devices? Why does Verisign not make it clear that only a very select few SanDisk U3 drives are actually compatible with their VIP. Am I really the only person in the last 2 years to try and activate a Verisign VIP on a SanDisk U3?

Jul 09

madrid

privacy, security No Comments »

that time of year, then, for the little known european data protection awards, otherwise known by the snappy ‘Prize to Data Protection Best Practices in European Public Services (fifth edition)‘. Scorchio! Last year the ICO supported the nomination of my current project, which was pretty well received. it’s awarded by Madrid’s regional data protection agency – not a European level body by any means, yet the awards have become the de-facto European honour in terms of data protection. partly, i suspect, as it has avoided becoming a nepotistic, bureaucratic back-slapping exercise.

Jul 08

wordpress ‘pretty’ permalinks

site 1 Comment »

one thing about brinkster that cannot be criticised is their support. over the last 7 years i’ve had nothing but responsive - 24/7 – usually within minutes by email and now instantly via their live support. not only is it quick, its also technically knowledgeable – even at the first line. when there are issues, they get escalated very quickly to technical specialists who, in my experience, sort things out there and then. having wasted a good hour searching for how to make wordpress permalinks pretty on brinkster’s IIS, i asked them the question. you cant…

Hello, For security reasons on iis we do not install a url re – write engine.

Thank you

Really? Ah, that’d be why then.

Jul 08

ocup

certifications 3 Comments »

after several years of meaning to, i finally sat the OMG Certified UML Professional fundamental (OM0-100) exam. Although the UML is now a large and gratuitously complex language, there is actually a dearth of material available for this exam, so i thought i’d jot down what i found useful.

A trusty copy of Fowler’s UML Distilled is always a good place to start with UML. However, for this exam, which tests fundamental knowledge of the UML language, rather than how to model OO concepts, it is not particularly useful I’m afraid. Instead, you’ll need:

The UML Reference Manual - a dictionary. This is to UML what the Oxford is to the English language. Hugely useful to disambiguate - and even occasionally clarify – the particular meaning of UML words and concepts. A reasonable number of questions in the exam test vocabulary (often by way of “which of the following statements is true of x“, where x might be a term such as ‘constraint’ or ‘namespace’, for example).

The UML User Guide - a grammar. Whereas Fowler brilliantly provides the 20% you need to know to model 80% of everything you’ll ever need to model; the User Guide presents the other 80%. ahem. that is, the official, more complete and more syntax focused coverage of the usage of the UML you’ll need to pass the exam. Hugely useful in describing, illustrating and coordinating the concepts presented in the Reference Manual. These books are certainly not cheap, however i justified the cost to myself in that these are the two primary reference sources needed for all three levels of the exam. Google will, of course, provide you with pdfs of these e.g. here and here; though i personally don’t find such usable as reference materials.

Finally, the entirely essential UML 2 Certification Guide, without which a pass is unlikely. Even though i have 10 or so years practical UML modelling experience, I wouldn’t have passed without this, and that’s because the exam simply doesn’t test modelling ability or knowledge of vernacular UML. It’s testing understanding of the grammar, syntax and core concepts of the language – the UML metamodel - as described by the UML Specification itself, not its everyday use. So, unless you want to wade through the version of the specification used in the exam, using only the awful coverage maps as your guide to what to focus on; you need this. Its translated from the German, certainly written by a German at least, as every once in a while the English used makes it unclear as to what is meant (that’s where the Reference Manual and User Guide are lifesavers). Over at SlideShare you’ll find a series of presentations that appear to be a summary of the certification guide pretty much verbatim:

OMG UML 1 : OMG UML 2 : OMG UML 3 : OMG UML 4 : OMG UML 5

As for the exam? Well, there is plenty of time, I was done in just under an hour and managed 78/80; though i admit to being hugely, hugely overprepared. apologies to everyone during the week prior to the exam, and especially my partner for waking her, and child, up at 5am in the morning during last minute cramming. Now for the Intermediate…

Jul 07

new site

site No Comments »

well now, first post in almost 5 years – and no, I’m not between contracts! I’ve just finished migrating the both the company site and my blog over to use Expression and WordPress respectively. Previously, I’d hand-crafted both myself, which partly explains why I’d only ever update/blog on those rare occasions I had the time. in a previous post i complained about lack of standards compliance in tools, and that was the primary why (in 2001) I chose to do it myself. Luckily things have moved on since then, and I’m impressed by Expression which is a perfectly nice little tool that permits full control over the output. indeed it sells itself on its standards support and, as it’s available via msdn subscription, i thought I’d give it a try. Remarkably, it generates output identical to that previously, but provides simplified management via templates and master pages. i use a single .dht (dynamic html template) in which one defines static content (which applies to all pages associated with the template) and then those areas where each instance page can override template content. it works with .aspx also, meaning dynamic and static content can share the same html basis, without recourse to using master pages just for textual layout. clearly designed for non-programmers - it’s a doddle to use.

As for WordPress, my choice was admittedly made for me by my hosting provider, who support it, but it seems perfectly adequate after a days use. It imported the rss output from my old handcrafted blog without any problem, and I’m sure I could style the output to closely match the look and feel of my old blog and current company site. if I had the time and inclination. but hopefully i’ll have time to blog, rather than write xhtml and css in future though…