The fall of Zavvi along with several other soon to be notable high street absentees and the troubles the banking system has been going through has got me thinking.

First I want to tackle failure of business processes. Zavvi's main reason for going out of business, according to the press was a domino affect from Woolworth's going into administration. Zavvi relied heavily on Woolworth's wholesale as a source of DVDs and CDs. From the outside in, it seems Zavvi operated with wholesale distributors of goods rather than dealing directly with manufactures. There's nothing wrong with that of course, however, if you deal with a middle man who goes out of business than you're left scrambling looking for a replacement at the same costs. No doubt, if you have one middle man, you've probably aligned prices closely (albeit probably a given percentage above) the distributor.

Why wasn't this adequately highlighted as a risk? Why only have one supplier? If you must have one supplier, at least have a good idea of alternatives at the drop of a hat if that risk is realised.

This comes nicely into my second point, it almost seems that Zavvi have suffered a misapplication of the Toyota Production System in that they pulled stock into their store as to minimise inventory, and therefore waste. Keeping the time between ordering from the wholesaler to getting into the customers hands is a worthy goal to aim for. After all, unsold stock is not money in the bank. But again, this raises the risk of only having one core supplier.

Moving onto Woolworth's itself, I find myself asking what Woolworth's actually sells and the only answer I can fathom is that it's a general store. They never specialised in anything, meaning that they never had the buying power to lower their prices and pass the savings onto their customers leaving them with a breadth of stock. In my opinion that stock wasn't a breadth of high end stock, it was a breadth of medium to low end goods, odds and ends and overly priced electrical/entertainment goods. If I needed a new set of tea towels, brilliant, but for the floorspace they wouldn't be able to justify just selling bits and bobs like that.

This leaves me asking, who are your customers, and what differentiates you from your competitors?

Finally, how can you expect to survive charging the prices both Zavvi and Woolworth's seemed happy to charge? In both stores I could find a product, say a DVD, from a fairly well known internet only business, play.com, cheaper that wasn't even on sale than on the highsteet in post Christmas/liquidation sales. Play.com does advertise nationally on TV, radio and in print, and although I won't argue the brand awareness between Woolworths and Play.com, it's not like people couldn't find Play.com.

I guess after all is said and done, as a business you need to know your customers, know your competitors, know your business processes and understand your risks and how to mitigate those risks. On top of that, I'd like to add you should always be asking these questions, always looking for improvements and changes.

Just look at Tesco, boy have they changed! They seem to know what their customers want, and are constantly changing, adding new product lines in store and online.

Doing the Right thing vs Doing it right

There was one lightening talk at XPDay that has stuck in my head, and I want to try to reproduce the discussion here. I'm sure I'll get some details wrong, but you'll just have to bare with me. The talk was on doing the right thing verses doing it right.

If you look at the image below, you'll see an XY graph, along the Y axis is doing the right thing, i.e. building the right solution. Along the X axis is doing it right, i.e. building the solution well. There was some studies into these metrics, but I don't know what it is, so I'm just going to use pseudo numbers.

In the lower left quadrant, you'll see doing the wrong thing, and doing it badly. The cost of the project is greater than the average IT project, and the revenue is lower than expected. In the upper left quadrant your doing the right thing, but you're doing it wrong. Your costs are still larger than average but you are making more revenue as you're building the required product. In the bottom right you're doing the wrong thing, but you're doing it well so your costs are lower than average, but your revenue isn't as good as expected. In the top right, you're doing the right thing and you're doing it well. Your costs are lower than average, and your revenue is higher than expected.

Now, of course, this is abstract and to be taken with a large pinch of salt, but there are some interesting deductions to be made. Firstly, we were told that according to the study, it's near impossible to go from building the right thing badly to building the right thing well. Looking at the rest, it seems intuitive that if you were doing the wrong thing badly, you'd want to do the right thing badly before doing the right thing well, but in actual fact, it's less costly and more efficient to do the wrong thing well and progress to building the right thing well.

So, where's your project on the quadrant, where do you want to be and how to you want to get there?

Software Development: By Way

I tend to think the way libraries and frameworks are made could easily be applied to teams and projects. When building an application, generally you focus on solving the business problem with the best tools available. When you move onto the next problem, you might have that eureka moment where you find that there are sub parts of the new problem which overlaps with the previous problem. The fact that you've already solved this problem, means you'd be silly not to reuse that. Thus, you have identified a common functionality, and if you extract that into a new library, you have reusable code across more than one project. Brilliant.

The other way that you'd come across common functionality is through conversation. In true water cooler mannerisms, this will often be coincidental, but again, if you can identify commonality and extract that, you are deriving business value. Not only are you reusing something, meaning time can be saved and all teams benefit from faster delivery, but with more eyes on the same code, the chances of that becoming more robust grow.

So far we mentioned code, but this could just as easily be process and tools, like build scripts, deployment practices, server provisioning and lots more too. The key is to make discovery, and sharing easy. I think the key here is relationships and communication.

I think this model can be applied to projects too, where new projects are spawned to develop/manage commonality, this team doesn't necessarily have to consist of full time staff, it could be part time or ad-hoc, but there should always be a project owner/lead even if the project is sleeping. Anyone should feel they can contribute to the project, for the benefit of all the teams, even if there are full timers on the project.

I think, over time, this will form a network of loosely joined teams surrounding a handful of core projects, almost like atoms around a nucleus. I see these core projects being things like:

* build scripts, including testing tools and reporting
* logging and monitoring scripts
* deployment processes
* network and hardware management and provisioning
* data access layers (especially if all projects share common relations like customers)
* service access layers, for accessing hosted services
* user interface asset management
* hosted tools support, e.g. source control, software repositories, wikis, mailing lists, story tracking, continuous integration boxes etc

There's probably a bunch more too. But as I mentioned earlier, relationships are probably the most important aspect here. Establishing a community between the project leads and another for the wider developer group across all the projects will help, but you have to support the community, let it flourish. The more the community collaborates and communicates the more they'll drive towards commonality and reuse. Of course, people will have different ideas and prefer different tools, and that should be supported as long as the principle of spinning out or contributing to projects carries on.

XPDay Review

On Thursday and Friday of last week I showed up at XPDay, and attended some cool sessions including:

Nat Pryce on TDD of async code: http://www.natpryce.com/articles/000755.html

Matt Wynne on Lean Engineering: http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/12/14/slides-from-xp-day-talk/

Had some interesting discussions with some cool people including:

http://gojko.net/tag/xpday08/

So, I was interested in Gojko Anzic's open space session on the new Fitnesse SLIM implemenation. It looks like it's much, much easier to wrap domain objects instead of creating fixture classes for testing. It's not quite ready yet, but I'm looking forward to a stable release.

There was also an interesting keynote from Marc Baker of LeanUK.org (http://www.leanuk.org/pages/about_team_marc_baker.htm) on his experiences of introducing lean principles into the NHS.

XP Day 2008

If you're attending, I'm presenting with Rags and Fabs on Friday morning. Hope to see you there.

Why I'm begining to dislike frameworks

I've been having discussions with David and Dr Pep over the last few days about the pros and cons of development frameworks. This is probably a measure a my increasing level of cynisium but I found myself looking at a framework that T4 was looking at and thought to myself "what is this framework going to stop me doing?"

David raises the point of the productivity curve; in most cases when picking up a new library or framework doing the 'hello world' stuff is easy and your productivity is high. As you come across issues or want to solve more complicated puzzles your productivity drops as you struggle with the design choices of others.

I think one way in which these frameworks can be assessed is asking how much will it cost you to remove it? We're currently using Symfony, a PHP MVC framework, and it follows this pattern exactly. It's easy to get started, and doing easy things is easy, but when we want to stray off the beaten path, we get beaten ourselves. The documentation is sparce, and if we decided to use something other that Symfony, we might as well re-write our project.

Now, I'm not trying to start a Symfony bashing dialog, I'm just using it as an example. In fact, Milan makes the point that this particular framework is Open Source, and if we have problems, we should commit something back to the project. Which is the right way to view this.

It still doesn't stop me from having second thoughts about using a framework again. Give me swapable libraries everytime.

How Sainsburys are Coming into the 21st Century

I was in my local Sainsburys the other day, doing my shopping (what else?). As I was at the checkout I noticed a few things.

First, you've probably noticed at the checkout gift cards for iTunes, or something similar, however what I'd noticed this time was what I want to call a "student food card". This is a two part card, one for topping up the account, one for using credit from the account. This is plainly aimed at the concerned parent who wants to make sure their kids are eating properly whilst at university. Those parents who do not want to put money into their kids account so they can spend it on nights out and pot noddles for dinner (though the flaw here being that Sainsburys sell booze too, but we'll brush over that). I did think though that this could be used the other way round too, what about someone with an aging parent or perhaps a lowly paid sibling. Wouldn't you want to make sure they were eating properly too?

So, I thought that was cool, but there was a little more to come.

Second, there were no bags at the checkout, I told the cashier who told me they'd stopped putting bags out. She pointed me to a sign which I'd ignored as an 'out of bags' sign, saying as much. Sainsburys in environmental awareness are trying to get their customers to reuse their bags, so you now have to ask for carrier bags. They've given store points away for ages for reusing bags but obviously isn't having the desired affect.

One of the things they're doing to help their customers is providing a free SMS reminder service. You send a message saying when you usually go shopping and it sends you a reminder a few hours before, saying not to forget your bags.

This could be a tentative first step, but I can see much more here. They're only providing this until the end of the year, but how about linking this to my store points card and instead of charging me for SMS, remove some of those points. Also, by combining your mobile to your store card just think of the data mining possibilities. You wouldn't have to tell them when you go shopping they have that data. Also, what better direct marketing would you like? Sainsburys have about ten years data on me, they have a pretty good idea what I buy and when and could send me special offers just for me, with some kind of code that a cashier could enter.

We'll see what happens. It's an odd combination of convenience and scariness.

Agile Software Development and Black Swans

Throughout reading the excellent book, Black Swan, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, I was trying to think of scenarios and examples I that I've seen that I could apply to what Taleb was talking about. Although I don't really follow economics, I did find myself thinking about agile software development.

I don't want to go into what Black Swans are, other than to say they represent a highly improbable event, if you want to know more, pick up a copy of the book. Essentially, Taleb says that when a Black Swan occurs the affects can be disastrous because they are often ignored when calculating risks. Of course, many Black Swans are unknown unknowns, so how can you measure something like that? Well, you can't, but as the saying goes, "it's better to be broadly right then precisely wrong".

So, how does this apply to agile? Well, the way I've practiced it, it's about drilling out uncertainty by planning a prioritised work stack for a limited scope (generally 3 months). This minimises risk by only addressing immediate and near term issues, allowing a project to be flexible (think broadly right rather than precisely wrong). The daily stand ups, acceptance demos and retrospectives are all forums for identifying risk early in the hope of lowering the overall risk to a project delivery. Finally, and above all, agile and it's practices of test driven design, continuous integration and burn down charts display empirical evidence of delivery, rather than anecdotal.

In todays software world where it's acceptable to delivery functional, if not complete, applications into service, why wouldn't you want to work with a limited prioritised stack with empirical evidence to demonstrate readiness?

Re-Developing an Application using TDD against an Establised API

The last few months have provided an interesting experiment to test our application testing. For several reasons that I won't go into, we decided to rebuild one of our web services, and we made the decision to try and keep as many of the tests we had as possible. We found out quite quickly that moving unit tests to a new project when you're redesigning a system just isn't feasible. Our unit tests were too tightly tied to the design (well, that's the point of test driven design right?). However, our acceptance tests which tests our API as a black box was a perfect candidate to measure our progress.

It turned out to be more useful then we'd realised. When you have working black box tests, you can do whatever you want to the internals of the application as you already have appropriate tests to validate the application. This is exactly what we did.

We could happily start turning on our acceptance tests as and when we felt a feature was implemented. By insisting that we should not change these tests, it gives a an excellent benchmark for completeness. Of course, this is quite a rare occurrence, but it goes to show that if you test at different layers of your application and regard APIs or interfaces as unchangeable, you can re-implement to your hearts content.

Convergence, Divergence, Convience and Quality

When I got my first job, I was really keen to get a great stereo. At the time the thinking was that to get quality music playback, hi-fi separates ware the way forward. Each component was stand alone, loosely joined by standard interconnects (phono, coaxial or fibre optics), and was easily replaced, upgraded or repaired without affecting the rest of the product. This was opposed to a hi-fi that when, say the CD player breaks, you need to replace the whole damm thing.

Now the trend is convergence, as Dr. Pep mentions, I have been tempting him, and myself, into buying an iPhone. The obvious comparison is the iPhone is convergence personified. It's a mobile phone, a 3G device, it's wifi enabled, a MP3 player, a GPS receiver and a pseudo computer that fits in your pocket.

What happens if one of those features breaks, or you need to change the battery? Well, it seems your in trouble. But that's the price for convenience. The alternative is a mobile phone (with or without 3G access), a laptop with wifi and a 3G dongle, a MP3 player and a GPS receiver. You can of course get other devices than the iPhone that do many of these things, but let's face it, they not an iPhone.

So here's the dilemma, I want to upgrade/get new features like GPS and 3G access. But I already have an iPod, a mobile phone and a wifi enabled laptop. If I were to buy the iPhone, do I throw this all away? If so, it becomes an expensive upgrade.

Does it follow that, more convergence means less devices, means more time on a single device, means wearing that divice out sooner, means expensive upgrades more often? How does having one be and end all device affect my battery life, I don't want to be have to plug something in every four hours.

Pushing the Boundaries of Testing and Continuous Integration

At Agile2008, I had the opportunity to present an experience report with two colleague's Raghav and Fabrizio about bringing robustness and performance testing into your development cycle and continuous build. Below is the video, along with the slides. Enjoy.

The submission can also be read here.


Pushing the Boundaries of Testing and Continuous Integration from Robbie Clutton on Vimeo

Pushing The Boundaries Of Continuous Integration

View SlideShare presentation (tags: agile agile2008 testing performance)

Enterprise Agile vs Start Up Agile

Discussions in the office typically bring interesting conversation, and as I head to Agile2008 (I sit on the flight whilst writing this), I wanted to ask what's the difference between enterprise agile and start up agile, and how does that difference affect not just the maintainability of the products build, but also the innovation of the respective engineering group?

There is always the classic trade off between feature delivery and quality, but is it really the case that startups are generally exempt from these quality metrics? If this is the case, what other practices can be put in place instead of code metrics?

One of my memorably quotes from high school was my physics teacher, Mr Shave. He said to the class 'you can never prove anything, you can only disprove something'. This applies here with quality metrics. Code coverage, convention and duplication don't prove quality in code, even intergration testing or robustness and performance testing do not prove anything, they only dis-prove that your system doesn't fail under certain conditions. However, all of these steps do increase confidence in a product, and that is an integral part of any product development (confidence that is).

You can still not do any of this and be agile right? These practices are generally incoraged, but agile is about customer engagement and acceptance and if you're customer knows what they're getting and they accept your stories then it's OK right? What is enterprise agile anyway? Do enterprise developers build a product, deliver it into an in-life team and then move on? Does that require higher confidence as you're handing over? Is a start up developer likely to support that product in-life and as such be more likely to stick around, fix issues and add functionality?

GMail Log4J Appender

Application logging is vital for diagnostics on a server product, but there can be so much, how can you tell what to watch or follow? Through tools like Log4J, you can have separate logs for different levels (typically debug, info, error and fatal). In Log4J, these are called log appenders, they can be anything from console or file based, or custom log appenders. One of the custom appenders I've been playing with recently is email logging. Our team has some excellent scripts written by Senor DB which scan log files for patterns and send email reports based on it's findings. I wanted to see if I could add application logging directly into the application. I wanted an email based appender and here's how I got that.

Now, there is an SMTPAppender in the Log4J package, but I wanted to use GMail, and the Log4J appender doesn't quite set up properly for GMail. I used Spring implementation of JavaMail for sending emails and extended the SMTPAppender in the log4J package. The method you'll be most interested in overriding is 'append', this gets called when your log is called into action depending on the settings in your log4j configuration.

 public GmailAppender() {
  super();
  notifier = new JavaMailSenderImpl();
  notifier.setHost("smtp.gmail.com");
  notifier.setPort(587);
  notifier.setUsername(yourGmailEmailAddress);
  notifier.setPassword(yourGmailEmailPassword);
  Properties props = new Properties();
  props.setProperty("mail.smtp.auth", "true");
  props.setProperty("mail.smtp.starttls.enable", "true");
  notifier.setJavaMailProperties(props); 
  
     try {
         InetAddress addr = InetAddress.getLocalHost();
         hostname = addr.getHostName();
     } catch (UnknownHostException e) {
     }

 }

For brevity, I've used the constructor to build the notifier (JavaMailSenderImpl from Spring) with desired properties, you can just as easily use properties in the log4j config, and I'll do just that for the host name (which for me means which IP address the application is running on). You can see above we've set the STMP host for Gmail with the port, email address and password for the email to be sent from. The little extra bit of magic is the properties 'mail.smtp.auth' and 'mail.smpt.starttls.enable'. The last is to get the default machine name.

 
 @Override
 public void append(LoggingEvent event) {
  
  super.append(event);
  SimpleMailMessage message = new SimpleMailMessage();
  StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
  builder.append(getLayout().format(event));
  String[] stackTrace = event.getThrowableInformation().getThrowableStrRep();
  for(int i = 0; i < stackTrace.length; i++)
   builder.append(stackTrace[i] + "\n");
  message.setText(builder.toString());
  message.setTo(emailAddress);
  message.setSubject(event.getLevel().toString() + " on host " + hostname);
  try{
   notifier.send(message);
  } catch (MailException ex){
  }
 }

Using the SimpleMailMessage (again from Spring), we add the text, the address and subject. The parts to grasp here are the layout and the stack trace. The layout is derived from your configuration, this is where you'd typically set the log message/heading including timestamp, thread name and other supporting information. Passing the event to the 'getLayout().format(event)' method returns this nicely formatted string. Then to get the stack trace we grab the array (each element being a line in the stack trace) from the event throwable information method. Someone thought that a method name indicating that your getting a string should pass back that array instead of adding new line characters, so we have to fix that before setting the text as the message body. Finally, we construct a useful subject containing the log level and host/IP address.

log4j.appender.mail=com.iclutton.GmailAppender
log4j.appender.mail.Threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.mail.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.mail.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ISO8601} [%t] %-5p [%C{1}.%M() %L] - %m%n
log4j.appender.mail.hostname=important-live-server

I've mentioned the configuration a few times, and here is the basic one comprising the full path to the class, the threshold (meaning the lowest level to log at, I don't want an email for every debug log entry after all). There's the pattern I mentioned before, this pattern includes the date, threadname, level name, class, method and line number, then the message and a new line. Finally there's the host name. Each instance of my application has a different name to identify it, typically something development, staging, production. To enable that property in the class, simply add a Spring like named setter:

 public void setHostname(String hostname){
  this.hostname = hostname;
 }

Properties like this can be set if you want to have the username/password of your GMail account configurable or anything else for that matter, just don't forget to set it on the JavaMailSenderImpl object before sending the email in the append method.

Some Guiding Principles for Supporting Production Apps

I just finished a two week rotation supporting our production web services and wanted to jot down some thoughts. This coincided with being sent a link to a Scott Hanselman blog post about guiding principles of software development which really enjoyed reading. I thought I'd extend a few of those now I've come out of my support rotation an enlightened developer (I hope).

Although Scott's blog is for Windows/.NET development, there's lots of goodies in there which can be applied to any language or ported to any language. I'd like to narrow in on the support based principles: tracing (logging) and error handling.

Scott mentions that for critical/error/warn logging, your audience is not a developer. Well in this case, I am, however, I may not know the application, so I need as much information as I can get. This leads me onto my first extension; transaction IDs.

Now, there's two kinds of transaction IDs really, especially when dealing with a service based application. One is every invocation of your service should be given a unique ID and that should be passed around the code (and logged against) until the path returns to the client. Depending on your application, this could get really noisy, but a multi-threaded application could benefit from such information. Second is a resource/task based ID, if a service does something (let's call it A), but the execution path returns to the client before A is complete, the ID for A should be returned to the client and this ID should live through the execution of A and stored or achieved accordingly. In terms of logging, when ever you come across this ID, use it. This generally follows for all IDs, if you have an ID, use it when logging.

With error handling, it's accepted that catching a generic exception is bad, although permissible if at the boundary of your application. If you must catch 'Exception' or 'RuntimeException', log it and use at least a error condition. It's a generic exception for a reason and that reason is you don't know what happened.

AOP is a great technique for logging, don't be frightened (and this goes with all logging) to use it everywhere.

Moving onto a topic glanced upon, but not thoroughly explored; configuration. If building a server product, config is your friend. When things go bad and you need to re-wire your application, not having to do a code change is a massive benefit. If the config is dynamically read, that's even better as it won't require a restart to the server.

Lastly, think about your archive mechanism and think about what data you'll need to preserve and for how long. Ideally, from that data, execution paths should be interpretable, at least at a high level.

Oh, and please be kind to your support team, make it easy for them to gather information about your application. If an application is one of many, consider implementing a common health/management (and provisioning if you can) interface.

I think putting together a list of principles like this is a great idea, each engineering group should think about the ways they work and how to drive commonality across products. Teams shouldn't be scared of thinking about support throughout the development process either, although they've been hearing the same thing about security for years ;)

Scott Hansleman podcast with the Poppendieck's

A great podcast which deserves it's own post to comment on it. Mary Poppendieck really came out with some cracking soundbites including:

* product teams should be driven by profit and loss, not by on-time, on-budget, in-scope, customer satisfaction and quality.
* engineering and business - it's not them and us, it should be all of us
* no excuse for IT people to be separate (organisational) from the business if IT
* If IT it routine (email etc), outsourcing is fine, how innovate can your email be? If building core competencies, outsourcing is generally a bad idea
* leverage workers intelligence to deliver, management should be leaders, not micro managers

loads of good stuff, check it out!

A Day at OpenTech

I spent my Saturday at the OpenTech conference in London and it was a day well spent. I do have to learn to go and listen to new things though, although talks from Tom Morris (who I later met for the first time), Simon Willison and Gavin Bell were interesting, those were subjects I already knew about or were aware about to a fair degree. What did strike me however were some of the last sessions by Tom Loosemore and Chris Jackson.

Between them they told stories which included building a peer-to-peer TV network for persisted content, and a project to become 'the DNS for media'. I've always had an interest in home entertainment, and these talks made my eyes light up. I'm really pleased to see that Tom has posted his presentation.

Tom's 'impossibox' was capable of storing 1TBs worth of media data, roughly a months worth. If that were to be networked in a P2P fashion, you could have months of recorded TV, redundantly stored in every house on your street. I think this plays into the networks hands here as well. This isn't real time data and can be sync'd, or you can download a program or series at the networks leisure without breaking net neutrality. Throw in, if there were 100 such networked boxes with a mile's radius, chances are you could take care of the P2P sharing at the local exchange so you wouldn't even need to push large amounts of data all over the place.

Although this future is a 'slightly bonkers' version, it sparks the imagination. Just think of the social networking benefits of being able to capture this data, see friends recommendations, read comments, video mashups, trailers, directors (or other users) commentaries. So much potential.

Great talk.

Data, Data all around

I attended 2gether08 today for the afternoon and walked into a very interesting discussion on making data public. Now following the Free Our Data campaign from the Guardian I've had a keen interest on the subject. Many points were discussed from innovating on this newly available data, to cost savings for doing so through to privacy issues surrounding private data (such as medical records) and data which people seem to give away freely through social sites such as Facebook and finally data which people give away to serve a better experience (think supermarket club card, or Google search).

One of the interesting points raised was about who the public tend to put their trust in, and maybe not so surprisingly, it's not the government. There is a trend that people are giving or putting more data into corporate entities, be they your favoured supermarket, accountant or bank. An interesting point was raised by Paul Downey that although he does online banking, he doesn't have the same trust in Yahoo! to mashup his banking data through Pipes or some other such technology, this is mainly due to banks be regulated authorities.

The conversation moved on and touched upon escrow like accounts for personal data and this got me thinking about identity. As we move towards tools like OpenID and OAuth, the thought occurred to me, would you log into your bank with your OpenID? If your OpenID provider isn't regulated, or even in the same country as you, would you trust it enough with potential access to your online bank? Let me turn that question around a bit now, if you're OpenID provider was a regulated authority, perhaps the bank in question or even some government department - would that change your answer?

The final question left in my mind was, that with a few people thinking about decentralised escrow like data accounts, could you trust people to look after their own data? I know that when I carry my passport with me, I get slightly paranoid. I also know that after losing 2 or 3 hard discs over the last 10 years, I'm not sure I'd want that responsibility. What I do know is that I hate repeating myself, and if government bodies can share data easier between themselves, and if there's a way I can authorise companies to share my data in a way that makes my life easier to lead, I might just buy into that.

I suppose with the level of data that may become available, the responsibility may shift somewhat with who owns, maintains and secures that data.

Confusion and Patience

I find it interesting that, as a developer, I tend to have very low patience for poor user experience. I sometimes feel stupid if I fail to use a piece of technology, though these are often kiosk based applications like checking in at an airport.

Then conversely, it seems that some people go out of the way to make something more complicated. Earlier today I renewed my Arsenal membership. There are several levels of membership and several variations of each.

* Junior
* Red
* Silver
* Gold
* Platinum

I just want the cheap option is which priority booking for match tickets, now there are four payment options.

* Lite
* Lite DD
* Full
* Full DD

I couldn't find the difference between Lite and Full, and the DD stands for Direct Debit, which is a payment option, surely not a membership option.

I just can't stand stuff like this, why do people go out of their way to make it harder for me to go about my day? Too many options are bad, make it clear what I'm getting. As for the crappy kiosk applications, I'm impatient and as such am likely to make mistakes, be forgiving and make it transparent what's going on.

I have to say, I think the London Underground have got it right with their ticket machines (though this may be as I'm used to travelling on the system - I actually found San Francisco's train network fairly confusing even though the premise is very simple). They have big colourful buttons on a touch screen, where I can easily search for the ticket I need for my journey.

Bear vs Shark strikes again - TV Billboards

Driving to San Francisco today, I saw a disturbing site - a TV Billboard. This was not a revolving billboard with three rotating adverts, this was a twenty odd foot TV display on a major motorway.

I've always found billboards a distraction when driving, so I wonder how TV based versions will go down. I can just imagine these being indiscriminately targeted at their audience; coffee shops for morning commute, alcohol and restaurants for evening commutes, toys and games for the school runs and the list goes on.

It's just another step.

How .Net is becoming more like Java everyday

I've noticed that the .Net community appears to becoming more like Java everyday, and it's nothing to do with the language. I haven't built any commercial .Net applications in over a year, but I have been using Java a lot of the last 6 months or so. While I don't rate Java as a language above or below any others (they all have plus/minus points after all), the most powerful thing about Java , in my opinion, is the community.

The amount of tools around the language is amazing, with arguably the best product being the Spring Framework. What I've noticed in the .Net community is a movement they're calling Alt.Net, which is embracing broad terms like agile and open source. The way I see it is that, whatever you think of the .Net Framework, it'll never do everything that everyone wants, just like the Java runtime will never be. These are people who have ideas and are moving towards community based development and moving away from reliance on Mircosoft.

This moves the discussion on somewhat, with all the new languages available on top of Java and .Net, the next arguments won't be Java vs .Net, it'll be JRE (Java Runtime Environment) vs CLR/DLR (Common/Dynamic Language Runtime). Both have a Ruby implementation, JRuby on the JRE and IronRuby on the DLR among a whole bunch of others. The only thing holding .Net back is Linux deployment, but the Mono Project is trying to solve that problem, and as they come more mature, it'll be interesting to see what runtime people will be deploying on. Will the amount of runtimes get smaller while the choice of language on each grows? I'm not sure, but I'll be watching.

Latest Scores Makes The Guardian

I was randomly following up on one of my new followers for a latest score tweeter when I found this link to the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/08/socialnetworking.twitter

Towards the bottom under miscellaneous tools is a link off to http://www.code.google.com/p/latestscorestwitter

AWESOME!

Open Sourcing Twitter Apps

I know it's only a tiny app, but I've had people ask me about how I created the Twitter apps to post the latest football scores (e.g. http://twitter.com/arsenal_scores) so having a bit of extra time (no pun intented) this week I decided to grab the latest copy and put in on Google Code. It serves another purpose as I hadn't backed it up, so now it's in source control and I can point people to it who are interested.

Tuck in - all 3kb of it.

http://code.google.com/p/latestscorestwitter/

Databse Migrations using Rake without Rails

Database migrations can be a pain, it is for me anyway when I have to fire up an SQL window and execute commands (I'm lazy). Having used Ruby on Rails for a previous project I came across the command 'rake db:migrate' and loved how the creating of tables, columns and altering of those were reduced to Ruby code which is much easier to read and execute. I wanted to find a way to use that command on a project that wasn't using Rails. I found an excellent post on the subject, but I tweaked it slightly.

Open Source Call Control and Text to Speech Makes CallFlow Release

It's an exciting time at work, we've 'officially' released Aloha, our Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Application Server as an open source project. We also released text to speech as a feature of CallFlow into our sandbox environment. Why do I think this is exciting? Well, several months ago I blogged about 'is it good enough to consume open source without contributing?', and I think this shows where we stand on that discussion.

Now, SIP servers may not mean a lot to many people, but it really should be a comodoity piece of software and this goes back to a blog I mentioned in the link above from JP, Build vs Buy vs Open Source. I think it's great to share so here is out effort, I don't know if it will get any uptake, but it'll be fun finding out.

In other news, there was some cool new features added to CallFlow during the Web21C release today. It's been pretty fun working on such a novel voice application with text to speech the obvious highlight. In fact, I wrote about it on my work blog.

Finally, I've been putting together a paper based on experiences developing Aloha with Rags and Fab. If you're interested, you can read the submission.

It's a Mac Mini Adventure

It certainly has been a mini adventure, but one that spans several years in a quest for home entertainment. I think I may even be finally happy with that. With my new home I've been able to do some things I've always wanted to do. Since I left school I started to build my collection of stereos, TVs and other goodies. Recently I added two pairs of Mordaunt Short Genies with a matching centre to add to my 32" Samsung LCD TV.

I had a dilemma where I'd moved my PC away from close proximity to the TV which I was using to view videos with the VGA port on my TV and amp for my MP3s from the PC.

I had tried streaming to my xBox 360 using the Media Centre Extender, and although this works quite nicely for audio it can't cope with DivX movies even though the xBox has been given DivX support. There were a few products on the market which might have done the job, but then I thought "what is the most configurable, most likely to work how I want it work solution?" - the answer. A computer.

It needed to be small, be able to handle videos and music which all computers can. Be able to support DivX and other formats and ideally have a Media Centre like application with remote. The Mac Mini was my answer to that question.

Having a computer as a media centre is both a great thing and a bad thing. It's great as it's flexible but it's bad because it needs input through keyboard and mouse. There may be a way to disable this from the Mac I'm unaware of, but I added a wireless keyboard and mouse that works really nicely. The mouse even works on the material of my sofa.

See, for the smallness of the remote, the small keyboard and mouse are more powerful and easily stashed under the sofa.

All in all, I'm very happy with the purchase, a small media centre hooked up to my TV and amp for £500 that can also be used as a full on computer from the sofa. Throw in a 750GB external hard disc and I'm laughing.

URI as Contract

When working on Mojo, one of the first things we did was to come to an agreement on the API that the application would use. I think we went in this direction early as we had always intended for the Mojo to be used as an 'widget' platform to access the Web21C SDK Services. I think it was a great move, and I'd certainly recommend this, even if you don't intend your web app to have an API.

With modern REST based web apps, we tend to think about the URI a lot more along with what to POST or GET to that URI. There are no real rules, and as such - toolkits, to help the developer with building REST-friendly URIs, it's more of a mind set. I won't repeat those rules here, but it essentially boils down to cool URIs and being mindful of resources.

The part where can come stuck is thinking in terms of actions or methods, it's something we all have to get used to, but I truely believe that if you invest a little time to agree URI as contract, it'll save headaches later on.

Enterprise computing for non-geeks

Hello, and welcome to your new laptop from your employer, Enterprise X. We know that you're old laptop didn't need replacing, but this way we'll be able to ensure that you're up to date with all of our corporate policies and the applications that support them.

Firstly, you'll notice that although you have a 'mobile' computer, if you do take it out of the office you'll have to use your secure token to VPN (or dial-in) to use the internet. It's a big bad world out there, and we like to look after you.

You'll also notice that we've kindly given you 'admin' access, although you have to request this through our control panel and explain why you need it. Although your new laptop is capable of using the latest 'mainstream' applications, we've decided to give you the old versions, after all, that's what you're familiar with.

We've also done some great work to enable automated syncronisation of your 'My Documents' folder to the tune of two whole gigabytes, how you'll use that, we'll never know! We also have this great way of saving email space, instead of giving you standardised email access through POP or IMAP, we've used a series of vendor products to safeguard your email by only showing you the subject and the sentence or two until you really need it. Neat huh? We've recently increased the email storage size to 40MB to take advantage of this space saving. Who really needs 6GB indexed and search-able web mail anyway?

Finally, we've added the ultra secure 802.1X network authentication to your offices, but don't worry, as you're using approved hardware this will all be taken care of...

*stops*

*installs ubuntu*

FOAF me up!

After reading this blog about adding Friend of a Friend (FOAF) to a web page, and I did this but I wasn't happy with the result. I then found the FOAF project page and used the FOAF-a-matic to create an RDF that's now embedded ins this blog. Yes, I supposed to publish a file called foaf.rdf but you can't have it all.

If you have FOAF, let me know - and I might add you as a friend ;)

- edited back to the original - thanks Tom

Test and Test Again

There has been some discussion of the application of agile principles including test driven development in the office recently. Having been working on a highly concurrent, scalable SIP application server my feet are firmly in the test first, test often camp.

Our testing strategy includes:

* unit testing, usually using mocks and dependency injection
* acceptance testing, using FitNesse
* robustness testing, using custom scenario handlers
* performance testing

These practices are dependent on the type of project, but we've found that although unit testing is done before the functional code is written, the other tests are usually written afterwards. I like to think that acceptance tests demonstrate completed user stories and robustness tests exercise common scenarios, concurrently.

A robust application comes with time, but through concurrent testing, issues can be drawn out earlier and the confidence you have in your application grows.

More Thoughts on Future of TV and Movies

I've read another great article on 'Hollywood vs the internet' thanks to the excellent newspapper, The Economist.

The article discusses how the Hollywood companies have missed out on using the web to leverage distribution of their media. It cites some companies which have spouted up offering films at reasonable prices is a range of formats, awesome! Thing is, these sites are illegal. Bummer. It's not for want of trying to get some stuff out there, there are some companies offering limited titles, but no one company seems fully driven to use the web yet.

I wanted to write something about this, but it wasn't until I read San1t1's excellent post on ownership and 20th century mass media that my thoughts stirred once again.

If we ignore worrying stories about ISP bloodbaths about broadband providers not being able to handle the web as a platform for one moment... I really don't want to buy another CD or DVD disc again. What I would like is purchase rights (paid or free - free is the best price) to view/listen content where ever and when-ever the hell I want!

Would I pay £10 for an 'on-demand' movie that I could watch as many times as I wanted, and could watch on my cable box, laptop or iPod? Probably yes. Would I pay that for being able to listen to my music through my cable box, through a web site or my ipod? Probably yes.

As an interesting aside, San1t1 also published another post along similar lines.

Where does this leave us all? While both Hollywood and the music industry innovate on what they think their customers need, I for one certainly continue to push for zero touch, high-definition, highly accessible content, music, films and TV.

Big Trouble in Little China

You have to listen for the last bang and the alarm it starts, like everything else doesn't matter. So the reason for the noise was Pawel, Yannis, Nigel and myself going into San Francisco for Chinese New Year. We ate at the Empress of China, which was really good and well priced. After that we walked through China Town to see events like the one above, some with fireworks as well as firecrackers to boot. We also checked Vesuvio which was alright, watching Tom and Jerry and drinking Sierra Nevada.

Let's talk about: working environments

Working out in California this week, I've had the chance to think about the difference in working environments of my workplace and whats on offer here at the Microsoft Research Campus. It's not all one way traffic either, just my thoughts on where I work and where I'd like to work.

A few weeks ago I twittered that I hated the uninspiring building I work in. Now hate is a strong word, but I'm not changing it for now. What I like about the offices out here is the effort taken to make it easy for people to work. There is wireless everywhere, and it's reliable. Wireless is both public (with username/password) and private for employees. Our office is covered with wires, and I've noticed how nice it is to move my laptop (for portable working) from one side of the room to the other, or even to another room entirely and not have to worry about what I'm downloading/uploading or any remote connections I've got open, or authenticating against the network.

There are loads of informal meeting areas scattered around in these offices too. It's great, in any sizable space you'll find a few sofas, maybe some comfy chairs and a coffee table. You may find some white boards and even TVs in these areas. Now I think these areas are nessasary in this office as the day to day working is done in cubicles as opposed to our office in London which is a massive open space with social inward facing desks. I prefer our open space (although I do wish it was physically seperated from different teams - open team space perhaps) to cubicles, but the informal meeting area's are great. We do have one such area which is proving popular, and I'd love to see more.

I can't even begin to compare the dining facilities though. With several kitchen area per floor here at Microsoft, some small, some with dining tables - all with free tea, coffee and soft drinks compared to our crook with an old kettle and boiler. Add to that a wide ranging cafeteria with fresh foods at decent prices, compared to our limited £3/$6 cheese sandwich range.

I'm still undecided about the city vs country thing though. London offers so much on it's doorstep, and while the country-side is peaceful and spacious, I'd still miss the choice of the city.

It's the little things which count right? And none of this is going to make me work harder or enjoy my job more right? Maybe, maybe not. But it'd sure make me feel happier about the working conditions and environment.

Load Balancing and High Availablity with Ultra Monkey

This post is heavily borrowed from the following sources:

• http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/topologies/ha-lb-eg.html


• http://linux-ha.org/GettingStarted


• http://linux-ha.org/ha.cf


• http://linux-ha.org/haresources


• http://linux-ha.org/authkeys

For instructions on installing the pre-requisites: http://linux-ha.org/download

Introduction

One of the wonders of working with a server product is answering the questions: How do we load balance? How can we make the server highly available? How can we make the load balancers highly available? After some investigation, we settled on a set of Linux utility wrappers collectively called 'Ultra Monkey'. First thing is first, what is Ultra Monkey?

Ultra Monkey reduces the complexity of using these utilities to configuration through two packages: LDirectorD (Linux Director Daemon) and Heartbeat. In essence, Ultra Monkey gives a software based way of achieving load balancing and high availability without needing to configure switches and routers, which pleases me no end.

Time for a little background; we are trying to get to a state where Spring Ring can be run with multiple nodes. Spring Ring is essentially a high level API for SIP protocols, so when deployed will include the application built on top of the APIs. The first problem to solve is to get the nodes load balanced, the first image shows the overview for how we set up our servers.

Before we start, the application nodes need to have their default gateway stated as the load balancer IP or the virtual IP, depending on single load balance or high availability solution. This may hinder some set ups, as essentially the nodes need to be on the same subnetwork mask as the default gateway.

Kernel Interaction

To get some fundamentals working, some kernel options need to be set. Edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following options to the file:


# Enables packet forwarding

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

# Stops stickiness being an issue

net.ipv4.vs.expire_nodest_conn = 1



Running the following command will boot strap these options:

/sbin/sysctl -p

We'll also want to make sure this is run when booting up the OS, so edit /etc/init.d/boot.local and add the '/sbin/sysctl -p' command to the bottom of the file. This will ensure this state is restored after a restart.

Starting with Load Balancing

The only change required on the application node is setting the default gateway to be that of the load balancer, we used YAST for this. We also needed to change the contact header on our SIP messages to that of the load balancer as well, so our non-transactional SIP messages go through the load balancer instead of being 'sticky'. This results in us now being in a position to send HTTP and SIP requests to the load balancer instead of the nodes themselves and for them to be able to respond. As we're also using shared state we can now also take a node out of the cluster and still see the application as a whole still continue to run.

Configuring Linux Director Daemon

Both single node and multinode rely on ldirectord to do it's stuff. ldirectord is essentially a wrap for Linux Virtual Services utilities and allows IP routing. It can be run as a resource (we'll use this later through Heartbeat), or on the command line itself. For a single node environment, we'll be using the command line. Our configuration is set up as such. Two application nodes, each with a HTTP and SIP service. The HTTP service will do a HTTP GET on the given URI and do a regular expression to validate the status of the node. HTTP is set up as TCP on round robin. The SIP service is sent a SIP OPTIONS messge to validate the status, and is also set up as round robin although this time using UDP protocol. This configuration file is located in /etc/ha.d/ldirectord.cf

# timeout for real server response. if expired the server is considered not available
checktimeout=1
# how often to check the real server for availability
checkinterval=1
# set to 'yes' will reload cf file after change
autoreload=yes
# where to log files (only if started in non deamon mode)
logfile="/var/log/ldirectord.log"
# set to yes to set the virtual server weight to 0 for non available servers
# (as opposite to deleting them from the lvs virtual table) - see man
# for side effect on client connection persistency
quiescent=no
# http virtual service
virtual=10.0.0.150:9072
        # first real server ip address, port, forwarding mecahnism, weight. masq -> NAT
        real=10.0.0.147:9072 masq 1
        # second real server ip address, port, forwarding mecahnism, weight. masq -> NAT
        real=10.0.0.146:9072 masq 1
        # type of service
        service=http
        # where to send http request for checking availability
        request="/SpringRing/status"
        # what to match on the response to verify the server to be available
        receive="Sample SpringRing web application"
        # type of scheduling - rr: round robin
        scheduler=rr
        # type of protocol for this service
        protocol=tcp
        # type of check: negotiate means send request and verify response (see man for others)
        checktype=negotiate
# udp/sip virtual service
virtual=10.0.0.150:7072
        # first real server ip address, port, forwarding mecahnism, weight. masq -> NAT
        real=10.0.0.147:7072 masq 1
        # second real server ip address, port, forwarding mecahnism, weight. masq -> NAT
        real=10.0.0.146:7072 masq 1
        # type of service
        service=sip
        # type of shceduling
        scheduler=rr
        # type of protocol
        protocol=udp
        # type of check
        checktype=negotiate
        # client connection pesistency timeout
        persistent=1

Getting a single node to work now requires starting ldirectord by using the following command:

/etc/init.d/ldirectord start

Now any requests sent to the load balancer will be forwarded, round robin, to the application nodes. The status messages happen automatically and any removal of an application node will change the routing table which can be viewed by the following command:

ipvsadm -L -n

IP Virtual Server version 1.2.1 (size=4096)
Prot LocalAddress:Port Scheduler Flags
  -> RemoteAddress:Port           Forward Weight ActiveConn InActConn
UDP  10.0.0.150:7072 rr persistent 1
  -> 10.0.0.147:7072           Masq    1      0          0         
  -> 10.0.0.146:7072           Masq    1      0          0         
TCP  10.0.0.150:9072 rr
  -> 10.0.0.147:9072           Masq    1      0          0         
  -> 10.0.0.146:9072           Masq    1      0          0  

High Availability

Moving on to high availability for the load balancers themselves, this is where the heartbeat comes in. We have to turn ldirectord off and turn heartbeat on, on both load balancers. In the configuration, one of the load balancers will be set as the primary. Each application node will need to set it's default gateway to the virtual IP address, as both load balancers will use this whilst being the master load balancer.

To check which node is currently running as master you can type the following command.

# On the master linux-director
/etc/ha.d/resource.d/LVSSyncDaemonSwap master status
master running

# On the stand-by linux-director
/etc/ha.d/resource.d/LVSSyncDaemonSwap master status
master stopped

Our ha.cf file looks like this:

# What interfaces to broadcast heartbeats over?
mcast eth0 225.0.0.1 694 1 0
# auto_failback:  determines whether a resource will
# automatically fail back to its "primary" node, or remain
# on whatever node is serving it until that node fails, or
# an administrator intervenes.
auto_failback off
# Tell what machines are in the cluster
# node nodename ... -- must match uname -n
node AppNode1
node AppNode2

Our /etc/ha.d/haresources looks like this:

AppNode1 \
 LVSSyncDaemonSwap::master \
 ldirectord::ldirectord.cf \
 IPaddr2::10.0.0.154/25/eth0

It is paramount that the /etc/ha.d/haresouces file is identical on each load balancer. This identifies the master load balancer, but you can see in our /etc/ha.d/ha.cf file we have configured auto failback to false. This ensures when the master load balancer goes down, it will not re-take the master status unless over ridden by an administrator. You would most likely want this behaviour so any investigations could be carried out to the failure.

We also use the example /etc/ha.d/authkeys file from the Ultra Monkey site. The authkeys file will also need to be protected, and this can be achieved through the following command:

chmod 600 /etc/ha.d/authkeys

We now also have to change the ldirectord config to point to the virtual IP address mentioned in the ha.cf configuration. Change the virtual IP address line to reflect the change.

Having a Play

Now everything is set up. Start heartbeat on each load balancer by using the following commands, making sure ldirectord has also stopped.


/etc/init.d/ldirectord stop

/etc/init.d/heartbeat start

After a few moments you can run the "who's the master?" command to see which load balancer is active.

/etc/ha.d/resource.d/LVSSyncDaemonSwap master status

The load balancer will also have started ldirectord, which you can see if you use the following commands:

ps -ef|grep ldirectord

The above to see the process running and the below to see what routes the load balancer is currently letting through.

/sbin/ipvsadm -L -n

This command will display what protocols and servers packets are being forwarded too. In our example here you will see two TCP and two UDP connections, one each to each application node.

If you now 'take down' an application node, you will that the master load balancer will update it's packet forwarding table, again you can see this by using the following command.

/sbin/ipvsadm -L -n

Failover of high availability can also be simulated by stopping heartbeat on the master load balancer.

/etc/init.d/heartbeat stop

This will result in the secondary load balancer taking ownership of the virtual IP address. This can be monitored through the following command:

ip addr sh

Looking back

What does this achieve exactly? It's a fairly easy to configure, software based load balancing and high availability solution. I won't hold back, it took a few of us more then a few hours to get this all right and if you try this, your environment will almost certainly be different. Hopefully this will guide you in the right direction though.

The Ubuntu Problem

...is that I think I've accepted it as my default OS now days but it'd causing me problems that I don't want to have, and they are mainly work ones.

I've been using Ubuntu at home now for several months and am very happy with it. The only exception is that I can't watch Arsenal highlights on http://tv.arsenal.com, damm content protection + WMV crap! That means my 'media' machine is Windows; it's the computer with my video and music which is also hooked into my living room TV (sweet!).

However work is another problem. My work machine is a HP Compaq NW9440, a monster of a laptop, and these are the issues I'm facing:

1) Graphics card seems unsupported - this results in the computer freezing from time to time, resulting in the need for a restart (feels like Windows 95 again sometimes). This isn't a problem on my personal Ubuntu based laptop.

2) Microsoft Exchange, mail server - this is used at work, and let's be honest, Outlook is the best companion for Exchange, and the webmail through Firefox sucks. It requires a mixture of Evolution mail client, web mail and Outlook in a virtual. All compromises. No GMail for work unfortunately.

3) No Linux VPN client - means I have to use a virtual to VPN into my work network, again sucks.

4) When I plug a projector/monitor into the laptop, the whole thing barfs, needing a restart. I need to give a presentation next week and I can't do it using this machine - will I need to partition and install Windows just to do a presentation?

5) Livemeeting and Windows Conferencing - both heavily used amongst peers, neither work on Linux.

I want Ubuntu to work for me at work, but I'm struggling at the moment.

Using custom rake tasks in your Rails build

With Rails you can create custom Rake tasks (I recommend reading RailsEnvy for a tutorial for rake tasks).

Once you've got your task you can use it in your Rails build by adding the following line to your Rakefile in the Rails base directory:

Rake::Task['namespace:your_rake_task'].invoke

Easy enough, but took me long enough to find it! Now when you run 'rake' in your rails projects, your custom tasks will be executed. Cool eh? Good for copying dependences and such.

My New Years Resolutions

I know it's a little late, but better late then never eh?

My new years resolution is simple really: be more selfish. In the nicest possible way of course. Over the last few months I've found myself being online a lot, in a sort of attached-to-the-hip sort of way.

It really came to me on Saturday when I was sitting on the sofa, enjoying a cup of tea and reading the Guardian. I paused and thought to myself, "this is nice, it's been too long since I just sat and thoroughly read the paper". I went on to think about when I used to go away for the weekend hiking, or mountain biking, or how I used to actually go to the gym regularly, play football and generally be a lot fitter then I am now.

I kept found myself wanting to check my email, Twitter and my RSS reader to see what was going on and thinking back, it seems nothing that I didn't miss that much after all.

Here's an interesting twittersation for you, which left me thinking my new years resolution is to spend less time online, and spend more time doing stuff I used to like doing. (This coming from a man who just wrote four blog posts in an hour!)

To do that, I may have to cull my RSS reader and unfollow people on Twitter, so sorry about that in advance. Please add me to your Google address book though if you use Google Reader, the shared items is a great filter of information.

http://twitter.com/robb1e/statuses/572002322
http://twitter.com/FND/statuses/572157652
http://twitter.com/jayfresh/statuses/572158492
http://twitter.com/FND/statuses/572238092
http://twitter.com/robb1e/statuses/572686122

Battle for your TV - Round 2

*ding ding*

A very interesting development in the battle for your TV, BT and Microsoft jointly announce that BT will provide content through xBox Live, check out the press release. It's a funny old world, only last month I wrote up some thoughts on the battle for your TV, BT are playing an interesting game. There is a bit of a - however - moment though...

Here it comes...

However, a resident has to be a BT Broadband customer, and I assume a BT Total Broadband customer so that the resident is using a BT Home Hub (the snazzy Apple looking router) as it guarantees some quality of the line. I can only assume this means that the payment still appears on the bill you get from BT. There doesn't appear to be the 'roaming' option of being signed into any xBox using your Live account. So you couldn't be round a buddies house who uses broadband X rather then BT and opt in for a movie if they've got an xBox. They could however purchase movies from xBox Lives own pay per view service.

All in all, this only suggests that you don't need to get the BT Vision set top box (or you could use it in another room if you've got a long enough network cable) if you have the xBox. That would still leave you needing to buy a hard disc based DVRif you don't already have one.

It's interesting reading some of the comments about this. It's certainly an interesting move, still a bit restrictive but it could open up to thousands more people using the BT Vision 'platform' or what ever it is at the local exchange. It does feel fairly cosmetic though.

Why is eGovernment not working?

I'm simply amazed at the quote that £2bn have been wasted on binned IT government projects. Working for a large company, I get the whole red-tape, binned projects thing, but this to me cries out of people who think that IT can solve all problems. Any lack of understanding of the issues combined with the big bang approached that is suggested in implemented and deploying these applications is doomed to fail.

I find it quite a difficult pill to swallow. I want to believe in the government, and I know technology has it's place to make things easier and more efficient. If the government were a technology company, it would surely have gone bust by now.

I think the answer may lay in a series of changes, namely: stop the big budget projects, go for small wins, build up with lots of small decoupled applications and learn from OpenID, O-Auth and all the small start ups who develop lean applications and get early adoption to have a short feedback/improvement cycle.

How can I trust the national ID card, the database nation we're becoming when the government can't build or buy IT systems?

Quote of the Day

"You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose"
- Mario Cuomo, Democratic Governor, New York, 1983 - 1995

I love this quote, I read it in the weekend's Guardian relating to Barack Obama's use of words in his speeches leading up to the recent Iowa cacus.

For me, this is saying there is a time for poetry, inspiration, and a time for leadership and pragmatism. Or: get people excited, and then deliver!

Spamming on Facebook

I thought I'd do my good deed for the day and post on the 'Arsenal Football Club' group on Facebook about the Twitter app/user I created to update according to the latest scores and final result.

I started a discussion, trying to share the app, explaining about Twitter and how everyone could benefit from free SMS updates. That was my good deed.

The first response was telling me that I shouldn't be spamming. I was somewhat shocked at this and of course, sent a Tweat. I thought I was sharing not spamming, and a little later the discussion was deleted.

I looked at the definition of Forum Spam on Wikipedia, certainly I may be guilty of trying to raise awareness of something away from the group/discussion, but I'm certainly no spambot and I thought I'd be doing some people a favour to highlight a really useful free product.

It made me think about Facebook, advertising and spamming in general. There's 20 odd thousand members on this Arsenal group and I presume most of them don't mind that Facebook puts ads on every page, or that their friends send them loads of crappy vampire bites, but they mind if a stranger posts something.

I just find it disappointing. When someone offers something for free and they are paying out of their own pocket (hosting isn't free people) that they get tainted with the word 'spam' when they feel like sharing something they think people may find useful.