Category technology

Aug 19 2013

Must focus… Ooh look! A butterfly.

“Facebook notifications iPad UX FAIL” $FB #iOS...

“Facebook notifications iPad UX FAIL” $FB #iOS #opinions / SML.20130111.SC.NET.Facebook.iOS.iPad.Notification.UX.FAIL.Opinions (Photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML)

I don’t know when the rot set in, but I do know it started happening a long time ago. In my first office job, we had two different types of computer. One was a fully fledged PC which sat in the middle of the office. Everyone in the office shared that one PC. When you needed to use it, you took your place, did what you needed to and left it.

You could only do one thing at a time and it was easy to focus.

The other kind of computer wasn’t really a computer at all. It was a dumb terminal, connected by cable to the massive beast of a mainframe in the basement. Again, you could only do one thing at a time and almost everything involved submitting a job that would get executed overnight. In the morning, you received a print out of the results. When things happen that slowly, you make damned sure you don’t make mistakes.

When I started programming, it was a similar story. At first, I wrote Adabas Natural programs on the mainframe. Everything I did took place on a terminal screen. Later, I moved on to program PCs, but they still ran DOS so there was little or no scope for multi-tasking.

Along came Windows with its promise of releasing the shackles of single-threading. When it first came out, it was so unstable that trying to do two things at once was like playing Russian roulette. On an operating system that crashed if you left it alone long enough, let alone loading it up with running applications, saving your work every 10 seconds became second nature.

But slowly and steadily, Windows improved and applications along with it. Instead of Single Document Interfaces (SDIs), now applications could have many windows open. The first web browsers could only show one website at a time. When tabbed browsers came out, you could have loads open.

Somewhere along the way came email. Then social networks. Somewhere in between came notifications. Most applications now have some sort of auto-update feature.

Someone’s sent me an email. Adobe Acrobat needs updating. Auntie Maud has posted on Facebook; she’s lost her cat. Ooh look, Stephen Fry‘s following me on Twitter. Ooh – another email. Windows needs to apply updates. A reminder – I have a meeting to go to. Another email. It’s OK, Auntie Maud’s found her cat.

Modern life can easily turn into a sea of distractions and it builds up over time. To start with, it’s nice to hear about something cool your friend’s found on Kickstarter. It’s great that you can read your email on the train. But it’s also very nice to sit down, relax and read a good book.

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Jul 29 2013

Ode to VB3

Custom controls on a Visual Basic form.

Custom controls on a Visual Basic form. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It became the norm’,
to fill up one’s form

With tons of controls
to avoid any holes

Add in some sex
with a VBX

Inside a frame,
controls all the same

The user went click.
The cursor would stick

An hourglass appeases,
as the progress bar wheezes

Although coding was sloppy,
it all fit on a floppy

How I miss thee, VB3,
Simplicity..

Jul 29 2013

Look and feel

English: This is a general-purpose alphanumeri...

English: This is a general-purpose alphanumeric LCD 한국어: 범용 액정 디스플레이 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The device itself was rudimentary. Nothing more than a cheap metal casing which housed a small two-line LCD display and a flat ZX81 style keyboard.

“Can you make it look exactly like that?”

The assignment was for a large national breakdown operator and the devices lived in drivers’ cabs. They allowed simple communication between the drivers and the operators in headquarters. The original manufacturers of the units was now bankrupt and the customer wanted to replace them with cheaper modern commodity hardware. Ultimately, they wanted to enhance the units to offer much more functionality, but for phase 1, they didn’t want to scare the horses. After all, training a huge fleet of breakdown truck drivers would take some time.

My colleague studied the unit whilst mentally appraising the effort involved in replicating the look and feel of the user interface.

“As long as you leave one with us.”

So how hard would it be? Seeing as the hardware dictated that the only realistic programming language was Microsoft Visual C++, the answer was very hard indeed. Almost everything in C++ takes a surprising amount of code but if my colleague stood any chance of replicating the finer nuances of the device, he would have to resort to the dreaded owner-draw control. For ordinary controls which come as part of the operating system, Windows does all the hard work of drawing them every time something on the screen changes. For an owner-draw control, you have to write code. Reams and reams of it.

He took ages on those buttons. Firstly he studied the original, taking measurements and looking at everything through a magnifying glass to make sure he had the finer detail. The text on the buttons was not a standard Windows font either so on top of everything, he would have to create a custom font.

More than once I heard an “Aaaaaaaarrrgggh” from over the cubicle partition as he fought with the inner nuances of operating system libraries. After a month or so, he was ready for the first customer demonstration. I checked out his handiwork. It was an impeccable replica of the crude user interface. When the customer came in to see it, his brow wrinkled.

“Is there something wrong?”

“I was hoping you might smarten up the buttons to make them a bit more standard. You know, like the 3D look and feel you get with a Windows button?”

A quick look at my colleague’s face told me he was mentally counting to ten. A few moments clarifying what “exactly like” meant would have saved weeks of effort and considerable angst. Unfortunately, people specify things like this all the time and are usually disappointed with the result for some reason.

So why do they do it? They do it because it’s easy and requires little or no effort. Care and attention spent on requirements is seldom wasted.

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Jul 14 2013

Illumination

Diagram showing the major parts of a modern in...

Diagram showing the major parts of a modern incandescent light bulb. Glass bulb Inert gas Tungsten filament Contact wire (goes to foot) Contact wire (goes to base) Support wires Glass mount/support Base contact wire Screw threads Insulation Electrical foot contact (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lighting up your life used to be fairly simple. There was a ceiling rose in every room into which you plugged a standard incandescent bulb. You only really had two choices. Firstly, the brightness, so wherever you wanted a lot of light, you would go for a 100 watt bulb. If you wanted more subdued lighting, a 40 watt bulb would do. If you were looking for a halfway house between the two, there was always the 60 watt bulb. The only other choice you had was either a bayonet or a screw fitting.

Unless you lived in a chaotic household, the fitting was always the same so a stash of bulbs of various wattage beneath the sink was enough to keep the lights glowing.

Things have changed. The incandescent bulb is woefully inefficient, so greener bulbs are now in vogue. These come in a myriad of sizes, from the ones that are so tiny you almost need tweezers to get them into place right up to fairly butch bulbs with industrial fittings. Fashion has also changed. The single dangling rose from the ceiling has been replaced with lamps made up of a multiplicity of light sockets.

We have one in our hallway with 12 bulbs. In an idle moment in our local DIY store, I read the outside of the box containing the bulbs. A quick bit of mental arithmetic told me that I would be up on a ladder changing a bulb in that particular fitting every month. We only have a handful of bedrooms and yet, there are 40 or so bulbs in our property.

Who thought this would be a good idea? I can imagine that the lightbulb industry loves it. Buying a bulb used to be like buying a commodity. Buying a bulb now is a bit like buying a water filter for a 1940 Traction Avant. There are only so many places you can get them and there is a hefty price to pay.

All of the packaging of these bulbs screams out how energy-efficient they are, but I can’t help thinking that there is an awful lot more waste. Although each individual bulb is more energy-efficient than an equivalent incandescent bulb, we now have so many more of them, which means we throw many more away. Surely that has an environment impact. Not to mention the packaging and the transport costs.

Maybe we’ll go back to candles.

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Jul 2 2013

You can count on my support

homeralone5

As any engineer worth their salt will tell you, the right support can prevent untold damage. Although even the ancient Greeks had worn simple garments to cover and support the breast, it was only 100 years ago when a German by the name of Sigmund Lindauer patented the idea of a mass manufactured brassière. Thanks to him, ladies blessed with an ample dairy shelf can comfortably support their assets providing they have picked one out of the right size. Providing such support is big business and the brassière market is worth a staggering $16 billion worldwide.

Since Sigmund’s invention 100 years ago, we’ve seen bras to enhance, bras to reduce and pointy conical bras. We’ve seen a frequent flyer bra which eliminates all the metal so women can pass through airport metal detectors without inadvertently setting them off.

As fashions come and go, bras change to match. Backless dresses brought along the strapless bra. With one shoulder dresses came one shoulder bras. In case you don’t fancy carrying your mobile phone, there are bras with a perfect pocket built-in. For ladies who work in the espionage industry, there are bras with a built-in holster for your Walther PPK.

What will the next 100 years bring?

Certainly more wearable technology. We’ve already seen bras that deliver a taser-like shock to would be attackers, which sounds a bit scary if your wife develops Alzheimer’s and forgets to switch it off one day.

I imagine there will be bras that change colour and texture on demand. One day, you could be scanned by a 3D scanner and print your perfect bra on a 3D printer all from the comfort of your own home. It can only be a matter of time before someone comes up with a virtual reality bra for long distance lovers.

With breast cancer one of the most prevalent causes of death among women, I like the idea of a bra which constantly monitors the shape and consistency of the wearer’s breasts. Using tiny sensors, they could detect the slightest change long before it became detectable by touch alone. Maybe such a garment could transmit the data to your doctor so that he could look for any danger signs. Not only that, but it could monitor your heart rate and rhythm at the same time. it would only take a slight tweak to the taser bra and it could become an on demand defibrillator.

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Jun 30 2013

What’s that coming over the hill, is it a monster?

British Mark IV Female Tank, taken during trai...

British Mark IV Female Tank, taken during training at Bovington Camp in 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can’t imagine how terrifying they were as they relentlessly lumbered through the mud, the blood and the smoke towards the enemy. Larger than any such machine before, these riveted behemoths trundled towards the Germans. Traditional warfare in the trenches normally happened at a snail’s pace and the British secretly developed tanks as a means to break the deadlock. Not wanting to alert the enemy, they used the word “tank” in order to obscure their real purpose. I guess “armoured fighting vehicle” would be a give away.

They had high hopes for the new machine, but they were slow, unreliable and vulnerable to artillery. However, they were impervious to small arms fire and could ignore most trenches and barbed wire. Although there were serious shortcomings in the early models, they showed promise. I’ve always loved tanks. The ancient armies had their chariots and the knights had their horses, but for me, the tank is the most noble steed of all. After that first indecisive battle, the British persisted and just about everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. The worst thing about trench warfare was the lack of movement, so what’s not to like about a moveable trench? Especially one bristling with guns?

By the time WW2 broke out, tanks were more reliable, much faster and they had turret mounted guns giving a 360 degree arc of fire. They also packed more of a punch. In response to bigger guns, tank armour became thicker but as in any arms race, there are always losers. Someone trundling round in an older tank facing an enemy in a brand new model could look forward to a short and very bad day. Tanks have their limitations. Cut off from infantry support, they are quickly overwhelmed. Their lack of manoeuvrability makes them vulnerable in an urban setting. However, on an open battlefield, they are masters of their craft.

Alas, I think the tank will soon go the way of the chariot and the knight. There are helicopters that can sneak over the horizon and nail a tank before the crew even know about it. Drones are in regular use and it won’t be long before there are swarms of them on every battlefield seeking out armoured vehicles. Infantry anti-tank weapons grow ever more sophisticated. There are only three conflicting ways to counter these threats; stealth, mobility and armour. A heavily armoured tank won’t be that mobile and will be easy to spot. A lighter tank, although fleet of foot and harder to spot will be easy pickings.

It may all be irrelevant, because future wars will probably be fought in cyberspace. Those that aren’t will probably be fought at a much smaller, possibly biological scale.

Maybe someone will develop a “nanotank”.

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Jun 17 2013

Home sweet home

English: The interior of a migrant ship to Ame...

English: The interior of a migrant ship to America At the Ulster American Folk Park, the transition from the Irish display to the New World is made by boarding a (static) ship and emerging in America. This is the interior. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a unique museum just outside Omagh in Northern Ireland called the Ulster American Folk Park. Set in delightful countryside, the museum aims to tell the story of how the natives used to live and follows those that emigrated overseas to seek new opportunities in the new land of America.

As you walk through the park, the buildings start from the simplest of hovels and progress along the evolutionary scale until you come to a wooden sailing ship in the centre of the park. All the buildings before the ship reflect what life was like through the ages in Northern Ireland. The buildings that follow the ship reflect the lives of those who chose to settle on the other side of the Atlantic.

Inside the ship itself, the exhibit tells the story of what the emigrants went through during their long sea voyage. As if the voyage wasn’t hard enough, they were ensured a frosty reception at the other end with many sent back because of suspected disease. It seems even back then, the Americans were particularly choosy about who they let in.

The park is very interesting and well worth a visit. One of the things I find most interesting about the place is how housing technology changes over time. In the space of a few hundred years, the humble abode evolved from little more than a cave through a single room hut right up to multi-storeyed, multi-roomed, stone built dwellings. At the end of the park, although the timeline hasn’t moved beyond the 19th century, the technology used is not that different from brand new houses being built today.

Sure, there have been advances in glazing technology which means windows are no longer single glazed, they’re double or even triple glazed. Homes are built with more advanced materials with less environmental impact, but the majority of new houses today still have four walls and a pitched, tiled roof. Modern heating means less chimneys, but the silhouette of a modern dwelling is broadly the same.

When I was young, I used to think that we would all be living in space or under the sea. Or maybe a troglodytic existence in an underground labyrinth of tunnels. I assumed that we would use far more advanced materials than merely bricks. Houses would have a fusion reactor to provide energy. Windows would be extra-dimensional spaces which would have whatever you wanted on the other side of them. Fancy looking out on Lake Geneva – no problem.

There would be no need to clean or even decorate. Drones would wake up now and then and take care of the dusty corners and usher out the occasional rogue spider that breached the laser defences. Instead, we all live in houses that our Great-grandparents would feel right at home in.

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Jun 9 2013

My data – it’s just so big!

Regional ship on the amazon river

Regional ship on the amazon river (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every day we produce 2.5 Exabytes of data. How big is an exabyte? It’s a quintillion bytes. How many in a quintillion? 1 followed by 18 zeroes. Still struggling to visualise it? A quintillion pennies, if laid edge to edge, would cover the Earth two deep. If arranged in a cube, would measure 5 miles a side.

You can’t go to a conference these days without someone telling you that we produce more data today in the blink of a gnat’s eye than we did from the dawn of creation up to when something happened a long time ago. Every day, more people start using the Internet. More people join social networks. More social networks are created. More connected devices are manufactured. They all produce data.

Despite the soundbites, I doubt anyone really knows how much data we produce now, let alone how much we produced 10 or 20 years ago. Any figures you hear must be based on estimates on top of estimates, but no-one doubts we are producing a lot and over time the amount of data we produce increases at an ever-growing pace.

When it’s growing this fast and when we have this much, coping with it becomes a challenge. It’s a bit like trying to analyse the Amazon river. Every second, the Amazon spits out roughly 55 million gallons. Even the largest tank in the world would fill in less than a heartbeat. We have to use a different strategy. Either we sample the water every so often and extrapolate or we find a way whereby when something we’re interested in passes by – we get a message.

It’s no surprise that the software industry recognises the need to process and analyse all this data and it’s even less of a surprise that buzzwords have come about to describe the process. Big data is big business and it’s easy to see why. By analysing weather patterns, large retail chains can make a good guess about what’s going to sell and stock their shops accordingly. By analysing web searches, astonishingly accurate predictions can be made about election results or the potential success of a film or a music artist.

However clever all this seems, I can’t help thinking that we are like toddlers discovering our first toy. The potential in all this data is enormous. Who knows, we may be able to predict earthquakes, volcano eruptions, traffic jams, epidemics and murders by analysing everything from how many big macs are eaten in Bolton through to the water temperature in Tahiti.

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May 31 2013

Happy birthday to you

Happy Birthday to You!

Happy Birthday to You! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you saw a sign above the door of a shop announcing that the proprietor established the business in 1993, you would probably shrug your shoulders and say so what? After all, 20 years is not a long time for a shop in the scheme of things.

In technology terms though, 2 decades is an eternity. Although Apple and Microsoft can trace their roots back nearly 40 years, there are not many tech firms that can. Amazon, eBay, Google & Facebook were just a twinkle in someone’s eye 20 years ago.

This year, my employer celebrates their 20th birthday and after working for them for 13 years, I can’t help but feel a certain pride in the achievement. It hasn’t always been plain sailing. The world collectively held its breath after 9/11 which meant that sales of banking software (among other things) fell off a cliff. The latest banking crisis (followed by the sovereign debt crisis) also meant that banks were a bit preoccupied. Still, we have emerged from these crises and the future looks bright for Temenos.

When any tech company first sets out, they’re going to need some IT. Assuming they went for the state of the art, then their machines  would have been powered by Pentiums – probably with a 60 MHz clock speed. Windows NT came out in 1993 so perhaps that would be the operating system of choice. If they waited until the end of the year, Windows 3.11 (or Windows for Workgroups) might be an option.

If they wanted to do some research on the internet, they would have found it fairly barren with only 50 World Wide Web servers. Just about every page would have a cute “Under Construction” graphic and their browser of choice would probably have been Mosaic (the Granddaddy of Netscape Navigator).

If they wanted to stay in touch with each other whilst out on the road, they would need some mobile phones. They would be fairly chunky, have terrible battery life and be analogue in nature. The mobile operators were still building their networks so the chances of holding a complete conversation free of interference were fairly slim.

No-0ne had heard of Big Data – after all – we transmit more data round the internet in a single second than we did in the whole of 1993. If people talked about clouds, they were the white, fluffy sort that float around in the sky. The words “Service Oriented Architecture” had yet to be uttered by overpaid consultants.

Today – a startup company has unbelievable resources at their fingertips. The internet is chock full of useful information. Social media makes it easy to build a network and get your message out. Cloud means a startup can commission a sophisticated network of IT for no capital outlay. It has never been so easy to start a company. Unfortunately, your competition also have all these resources at their disposal.

Temenos had none of these resources at their disposal and yet they have grown from nothing to a half a billion dollar company. They employ 4,000 people of which I am one. Happy birthday Temenos. Here’s to many more.

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May 12 2013

The monster

Public domain image of an explosive device.

Public domain image of an explosive device. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There was something bestial about it. As the man pulled down the switch, the machine shuddered and groaned whilst emitting an unholy noise. Although the switch was electrical in nature, the cacophony suggested something much more primal. Internal combustion maybe, or perhaps steam.

Either way, there was an enormous deafening construction in front of me. I never would have thought such a thing would have existed under a modern office block and yet, down here in the bowels of the building, it lived.

As well as being noisy, the room was dark and dusty. The sign on the side of the machine declared it a bomb scanner. My companion looked bored. I helped him load the heavy mailbags onto the conveyer belt so that they could be ingested by the gigantic machine. I felt so important. Here I was, heroically scanning the incoming mail for terrorist devices, risking my life to make sure that the employees of BP Oil (UK) Ltd were safe.

“Have you ever found anything?” I shouted expectantly above the incessant roar of the machine. He fixed me with a look and slowly shook his head. His movements suggested that this was a well trodden path. He told me that any modern bomb would be set off by the scanner anyway. My shoulders involuntarily sank.

So what was the point? There was probably a risk analysis somewhere that said that our company might be a target for terrorism. In the mitigation column, it would say that the incoming post would be scanned before delivery. Everyone could relax, safe in the knowledge that we had all bases covered. Except, as my grisly colleague pointed out, the terrorists were smarter than that.

It’s difficult to find reliable statistics, but several sites seem to suggest that there are roughly 3Bn air passenger journeys per year. Every one of these passengers will spend roughly half an hour of their life passing through security. All of them will have to separate out their liquids and many of them will need to take off their shoes. Not because of our advanced x-ray scanning machines, but because in the past terrorists have been foiled attempted to blow up planes using either liquid explosive or the contents of their shoes.

I’m glad these guys were caught, but we left it a bit late. I look forward to the day when the machines at the airport are so sophisticated, that you don’t even notice them. They just happen to scan you when you’re least expecting it. Maybe while you get out of the taxi or as you walk past the newsagents buying your reading material for the flight. They’re probably not even looking for bombs. They will examine behaviour, looking for anything remotely out of the ordinary.

Surely that must be more effective than lining everyone up and marching them through the obvious (and not particularly effective) bomb scanner.

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