Apr 10 2013

A bottle of Magners Mr Bond?

An Aston Martin DB5 as seen in Goldfinger. Exp...

An Aston Martin DB5 as seen in Goldfinger. Expensive items are often part of a glamorous lifestyle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world has changed. Traditional business models which rely on advertising to keep them afloat have to evolve or die. When you could count the number of TV channels on Mickey Mouse’s left hand, it made sense for companies to pay lots of money to ply their goods over the airwaves. After all, you were guaranteed a decent share of viewers.

Nowadays, with satellite and cable TV, the audience is more fragmented. Not only that, but many households can now record their programs and watch them later, zipping past the adverts in the process. There are internet services available through which programs can be viewed on demand from most of the major channels. Companies like Netflix and Love Film carry a huge catalogue of advert free content available on demand. A growing number of people are not watching broadcast material at all.

To counter this, advertisers have turned to techniques like product placement. If you can persuade a film producer to feature your products, the viewer gets the subliminal message that he or she will be a bit more like the hero if they use a particular brand. I don’t have a problem with the technique per se, providing it’s subtly done and fits in with the overall film.

In the books, James Bond drove a Bentley. In the transition to screen, his steed of choice is an Aston Martin. I’m OK with that. I can understand that someone who likes Bentleys might also like Aston Martins. When I see him jump into a BMW, it stretches my belief. Would the quintessentially British spy really choose a Teutonic behemoth like a 7 series? When they turn Bond into a lager swilling Mondeo driver, something in my head says “hold on a minute…”

Today I learned that advertisers are experimenting with a new method of product placement. In post production, they digitally splice in the footage of the product they are trying to promote. Maybe they change an advertising hoarding in the background to reflect something suitable to the local audience or maybe they place a can of soft drink prominently on a table in the foreground. Because it is done after the fact, the film could be customised for different audiences.

I’m not sure I like this idea. It might mean that you never see the same film twice. The first time you watch the classic Ice Cold in Alex, you will see a very thirsty John Mills sink a Carlsberg. The next time you see it, he might be drinking a bottle of WKD Blue. Can we really trust the advertisers to splice in content that matches the film?

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Apr 8 2013

Cash or cheque?

Money Queen

Money Queen (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

I looked at my first full-time payslip in disbelief. More money in one month than it would take me all year to earn on my paper round. At that precise moment, I felt rich. What am I going to do with all that money?

It’s a shame that every payslip doesn’t come with that feeling. Unfortunately, as time goes on, we get mortgages and cars and other such commitments to mop up all that disposable income. Money felt very different to me back then.

It was more difficult to get at for starters. To make a withdrawal, you had to actually go to the branch. I can’t remember the last time I went to a bank branch. Once in the branch, you had to queue up to see a teller. Once you reached the front of the queue, you wrote out a cheque to yourself, handed it over and in return, they gave you some cash. You could only get cash during your bank’s extremely limited opening hours which meant that almost everyone went at lunchtime. That meant the queues were enormous.

Along came the ATM. Suddenly with your plastic card and a PIN number, you could get your cash when you liked. At first, you were limited to your bank’s own branches still, but it was progress. Mine had a weekly limit of £50 which was just too low to eliminate the tedious trips to the branch.

If you wanted to pay someone else some money, you would write them a cheque. For it to be worth the paper it was written on, it needed to be backed by a cheque guarantee card. I can’t remember the last cheque I wrote out but for some strange reason, my cheque book still lives in the back pocket of whichever trousers I happen to have on. Old habits die-hard.

I remember applying for my first loan. It was for the princely sum of £2,000 to buy a new car. I had to go down to the branch for an interview with the bank manager. I remember dressing up smartly and turning up early, eager to make a good impression. That was over 20 years ago and was probably one of the last times I ever saw a bank manager.

Today, I can pay for my tube ticket with a swipe of my card. I can lend money out to other people without ever leaving my armchair. From that same armchair, I can place bets or invest in the stock market. Some would say that they are one and the same thing. I can also launch a project and ask strangers to invest in it. I can find almost anything I want on the Internet and pay for it there and then. I could probably list off half a dozen different ways to pay someone some money. I bought my last house without seeing a soul (apart from the estate agent).

And yet, despite all that, our financial system seems very antiquated. I still have a pocketful of change and a wallet full of paper money. If I go to a different country, I need to change those coins and notes for different ones. I have a number of plastic cards, each with their own provider, credit limit and statements. I probably have accounts with dozens of institutions, from Amazon and eBay, through to utility companies and banks.

If I want to work out exactly where I am with everything, it’s up to me to collate all the information and do so. I can’t wait for the day when all I carry is my phone and I’m able to see everything about my finances in one place without breaking sweat. Maybe one day.

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Apr 3 2013

The monk with no head, from Piccotts End Lane

Misty night (pattanaik00_mul_18.6978_cone_0.5_...

Misty night (pattanaik00_mul_18.6978_cone_0.5_rod_0.767677) (Photo credit: cosmonautirussi)

I can’t stand it here,
I’m going to the bar.
Spluttered my brother,
but the bar was too far.

I know a shortcut,
I’ll show you the way.
But when I saw where he meant,
I heard myself say…

My brother, you’re mad
Completely Insane.
Have you forgotten the legend
of Piccott’s End Lane?

You mean the monk
deprived of his head?
I’m telling you brother,
I don’t feel any dread.

So off to the Old Town
we went with a cheer,
For bawdy young ladies
and lashings of beer.

But as we returned,
loaded with drink,
the darkness closed in
and we started to think…

As I bounced off the hedge
from one side to the other,
I bumped into something
I prayed was my brother.

The more sounds we heard,
the more that we worried.
We heard a dog howl,
And onward we hurried.

Now and again,
we thought we were sunk.
How would we escape
that headless old Monk?

It took a long time,
to reach the top of the path.
My brother, relieved,
gave a nervous laugh.

You see my brother,
there was nothing to fear.
Aren’t you glad we went out
for a relaxing beer?

This is kind of based on a true story. For many years, my brother and I trekked up and down Piccotts End Lane in search of nocturnal entertainment. The ghost story is real. Allegedly, a headless monk has been seen along Piccotts End Lane many times and I have to say, it could be quite spooky along that lane, especially on a moonless night when the mist closed in.

Alas, we never saw the headless monk himself, thank goodness. But that long walk chilled my bones.

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Apr 1 2013

There’s no excuse for a crap presentation

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a fact of life that anyone who works in any kind of professional environment has a lifetime of powerpoint presentations ahead of them.

Some of them will be really good. Unfortunately, these will be in a minority. Most of them will be average and some of them will be absolutely atrocious. We forget the mediocre in a heartbeat, but the atrocious and the very best will stick in our minds.

There are many reasons for giving a powerpoint presentation. Some are given to inspire people. Some are to explain concepts or teach people. Some are to make people laugh. What they all have in common is communication. If you want people to remember your performance, you need to be either very good or very bad. The only way to get people to remember what you said is to be among the best – no pressure then.

The first thing to think about is the structure of your presentation. A lack of structure is one of the main reasons for poor presentations. If you don’t know what you want to say or how you want to say it, how on earth will your audience grasp your point. Remembering a poorly structured presentation is hard and difficult to prepare. You are also more likely to overrun or under run your time slot.

People like stories, so a structure that tells the audience where we are today, where we want to get to, how we’re going to get there and what it will be like at the end of a journey will naturally appeal. Another structure that works well is to tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them again. Then there is the old favourite that follows the PREP acronym; make your (P)oint, give them the (R)eason for the point, then show them the (E)vidence and then remake your (P)oint.

The exact structure you choose doesn’t matter so much as long as you’ve got one and it suits your subject material. As a rule of thumb, I spend most of my time thinking about the structure and what I want to say.

Then you will need some slides. I’m fairly anal about slides. I try to keep text to a minimum and I have a special hatred for bullet points. Words are for manuscripts and blog posts, pictures are for presentations. Every slide should communicate a single concept. Once you have a concept – a Google image search or a chart should be enough to get that concept across. In the later versions of powerpoint, you can even recolour your images so that they all match.

Once you have your slide deck, go through it a few times. I guarantee you’ll see some mistakes. You will also see the best place to break up your presentation with some chapter heading slides. There will also be the occasional slide that appears in the wrong place. A good few passes through remove any howlers and to make the deck flow better.

Then practise. I’m not wildly passionate about practise because if you overdo it, you will lose any spontaneity. The first thing I do is go through the deck and count how many slides are in each section. I write out each slide title and write a bubble around each section of slides with the count next door. So for example, my list might look like this;

  • Intro (4 slides)
  • Where are we now (5 slides)
  • Where do we want to be (4 slides)
  • How we’re going to get there (6 slides)
  • What will it be like (3 slides)
  • Conclusion (3 slides)

I run through that a few times until I can write the section / slide counts out from memory. I then learn the slides at the end of every section so that I’m never taken by surprise when I switch from one chapter to another. Once you can remember that much, it’s only a short leap to being able to write out your entire 25 slide deck from memory.

If you can do that, the presentation itself will be a breeze.

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Mar 30 2013

I love it when a plan comes together…

The main cast of The A-Team. Clockwise from to...

The main cast of The A-Team. Clockwise from top: H. M. Murdock, B. A. Baracus, Hannibal Smith and Templeton “Face” Peck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Required viewing for children young and old used to be the A team. It was fairly formulaic. Within an hour, you knew that B. A. Barracus would refuse to get on a plane, only to be tricked or sedated by the others in the team.

Howling Mad Murdoch would get to jump into some kind of plane or helicopter and pilot it with ease. Faceman would use his charisma to acquire whatever the team needed at the time.

My favourite bit was where the team would be trapped somewhere in an old factory or barn with a clapped out vehicle of some sort. The iconic music would burst into life as they welded and bolted unlikely looking accoutrements onto their battle wagon of choice before going out and blitzing the bad guys. Zillions of bullets would fly off in every direction and miraculously, no-one would be killed.

And at the end of it all, Colonel Hannibal Smith would utter those immortal words “I love it when a plan comes together”. The irony of course was that he never, ever seemed to have a plan up front.

The truth is, however, that no endeavour of any substance is likely to succeed without a plan and the bedrock of any plan is formed by the estimates for each task.

I still remember the first programming estimate I ever made. It was for a survey that was to be sent out to loads of people on floppy disk. The recipients would put the disk into their computers and answer questions, saving the answers back onto the disk before returning it. I was young, overconfident and lacking experience. I sucked my breath through my teeth (because that’s what I thought people did when estimating) and came up with my answer; a day. One working day. Utter madness. The design alone would take longer than a day.

Her Majesty’s Royal Artillery know that their entire craft is based on estimation. The forward observer has to estimate where he is on a map. He radios in the grid co-ordinates of where he estimates he wants the barrage of artillery to land. The guy in charge of the battery has to estimate the atmospheric conditions and wind speed before the gun fires an initial sighting round.

If all goes to plan, the forward observer will see where the shot lands and radio back with feedback. Another shot follows and so it continues until the forward observer has seen sighting shots on both sides of the target, at which point he radios a single word; “bracketed”.

The battery fires another shot exactly between the two which is hopefully direct on target, at which point the forward observer radios back “fire for effect!” This innocuous three word command results in all hell being let loose on the poor target.

This protocol is the only way to get a programmer to give a good estimate. Programmers hate giving estimates because it creates an expectation. Understandably so, because the craft of computer programming is complex and you  don’t know everything up front. You need a couple of sighting rounds to get on target.

Firstly, ask them if they can think of a similar task that took less than the task in question and how long that took. Then a similar task that took longer. If the guy’s worth his salt, these two extremes won’t be too far apart. Bracketed! The estimate you’re looking for must lie between the two. Once you have these estimates from everyone in the project, fire for effect!

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Mar 24 2013

I wish I had a computer like they do in the movies

Jurassic Park (film)

Jurassic Park (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Depictions of technology in films and TV always make me either cringe or laugh out loud. Either they are so completely antiquated in their depiction or they exhibit properties so advanced that we can only dream of being able to do the same thing. I do feel sorry for the film directors because an awful lot of technology is fairly dull to look at. If you have a whole scene that revolves around your protagonist doing stuff on a computer, it’s going to look very dull indeed unless you spice it up somehow.

Sometimes the film makers do this by making the machine’s display ridiculously frenetic or by making the machine make noises. Often, they go completely over the top and exaggerate what today’s computers are capable of. How many times have you seen a computer which scrolls the characters onto the screen one at a time with a beep accompanying every letter? What about when a particularly grainy satellite image appears and someone says “enhance” and the machine crunches away, the pixels sharpen, the image zooms in and suddenly we can read the exact brand of cigarettes the bad guys smokes.

If someone wants to hack into a system in real life, they spend a long time cracking the defences of the target network. They might use social engineering techniques to unlock an initial chink in the armour. They might perform exacting research into who set up the security. They probably network with other individuals to share ideas. In short, it takes a fair amount of time and what appears on the screen is boring, mundane text. It’s not particularly cinematographic so I guess you can forgive the film makers for trying to jazz things up, but bars slamming shut across the screen or skull and crossbones appearing with some cheesy phrase seem faintly ridiculous.

Here are some of my favourite films and some of their technological howlers;

1. Superman III – Richard Pryor steals the pence from every transaction in his bank’s computer system. This one touches my heart, probably because I work for a banking software company. He manages to hack into the system by typing the command “OVERRIDE ALL SECURITY”.

2. Independence Day – Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith fly into a really advanced alien spaceship and kill it with a virus. Really? I would have thought that such an advanced civilization might have come across that kind of threat before and don’t get me started on how Jeff Goldblum’s kit could just be plugged in – maybe the U in USB really is universal.

3. Jurassic Park – when our heroes discover that the whole computer system has been hacked by the resident nerdy programmer and locked up as tight as the velociraptor should have been, the young girl taps a few keys on the keyboard before uttering those immortal words “This is Unix, I know this”. She then proceeds to unlock everything in the blink of an eye.

4. Weird Science – two teenage kids create a beautiful woman in their bedrooms using their computer, a modem and a pair of bras on their heads. We have just about got 3D printing, let alone creating anything as complex as a woman!

I look forward to the day when our computers catch up with the movies.

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Mar 21 2013

Lies, damn lies

statistics often lie

statistics often lie (Photo credit: mac steve)

According to Reuters, approximately, we produce 14 billion bullets annually. That’s enough to kill everyone on the planet twice over. Seeing as we are all still here, a statistician might tell you that bullets are a woefully inefficient way to kill someone.

According to the World Health Organisation, 1.2 million people are killed annually on the world’s roads. Seeing as there are a mere 60 million cars produced a year, choose a car if you want to off someone. Or you could just leave them be. They are 1,500x more likely to die from cancer or 3000x more likely to die from heart disease.

Every time my Grandad saw statistics on accidents caused by drunk drivers, he used to make a quip that all drivers should be drunk whilst behind the wheel. After all, if 20% of accidents are caused by drivers who are under the influence, we could eliminate the other 80% if everyone was drunk. I think even a statistician would spot the error in that analysis. Every day, newspapers are full of stories backed up by statistics but how do we know they haven’t just done the same analysis as my Grandad and got the complete wrong end of the stick?

Everyone fills in surveys. In the UK, we are required to fill one in by law every 10 years – the census. I’m always amazed at how banal the questions seem. As I think it’s important for the government to have good information about the population, I take it quite seriously. I take care over my answers to make sure they are correct. Many people don’t. Everyone should, as there are harsh penalties for those who provide incorrect information and yet the 4th most popular religion in England and Wales in the 2001 census was Jedi.

If I fill in surveys other than the census, I tend to start with good intentions but then halfway through, there will be a question that seems utterly ridiculous or invasive and from that point on I either give up, or it becomes a box ticking exercise that I don’t take much care over. And yet, it is precisely these surveys that form the bedrock of many of the statistics we are bombarded with. It’s worth remembering that when you read some exhaustive analysis on why people who play Angry Birds are more likely to drink strawberry milkshakes.

After all, 78.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.

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Mar 20 2013

Secrets

Paddington station, still a mainline station, ...

Paddington station, still a mainline station, was the London terminus of the Great Western Railway. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a deep, dark secret. I try to keep it quiet, but occasionally I make an almost involuntary utterance that gives the game away. It is a secret shared with my Dad. When Nan and Grandad were alive, we often used to stay with them.

One evening, Nan gave me a pile of books to read. They used to belong to my Dad. Most of them were unremarkable; the sort of reading material you might expect an adolescent boy to read. In among the smattering of comics and adventure books was the evidence that he shared my secret.

It was about an inch thick and the cover was missing. The binding and the pages showed signs of heavy use. Inside, every page was crammed with listings. I took a sharp intake of breath once I realised what they were. They were listings of locomotives. Many of them had been underlined in blue biro. My dad was a trainspotter. Swindon was a good place to be one because it was pretty much the heart of the Western railways. Many locomotives ended up there for maintenance, so there was a good chance of seeing a wide range of rolling stock.

I’m not a card-carrying, anorak wearing trainspotter, but I do like trains. Occasionally, when we are doing the crossword, I let on that I know that the foldy thing on top of the train that connects to the power lines is a pantograph and that an electric train made up of a small number of motorised carriages is called an EMU (or Electric Multiple Unit). There is a diesel equivalent too, but DMU is not a word.

Sometimes I can’t help myself. Before I know it, I tell people that the train gauge in the UK is 4 feet 8 and a half inches because of Stephenson, but if Isambard Kingdom Brunel had won the gauge wars, our trains would be bigger, faster and more comfortable because the gauge would have been 7 feet and a quarter-inch.

At its peak, the UK’s railway network had 37,000 kilometres of track. It must have been fantastic to have the freedom to travel from almost any town in the country to almost any other and trains used to always be on time. Thanks mainly to the axe of Dr Richard Beeching, today we have about 16,000 kilometres.

For reasons that make sense to someone, we have a separate company responsible for track and train operating companies responsible for trains. Our trains are the most expensive in Europe and they seldom run on time.

I guess that’s progress, but I still like trains. Just don’t tell anyone.

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Mar 19 2013

In the cloud

IBM Cloud Computing

IBM Cloud Computing (Photo credit: IvanWalsh.com)

One of the more interesting areas I have been lucky enough to work with is cloud. We run some banks live in the public cloud. The scale of the cloud offerings is simply staggering. There are three main big players; Microsoft, Google & Amazon. Between them, they bought 31% of the world’s CPUs in the last two years and Microsoft alone is pumping a billion dollars a year into the initiative.

I was surprised to learn that the datacenters that make up the cloud are not stocked with the latest generation machines, because slightly older stock makes much more sense on a dollar per CPU cycle basis. Also, the economics are quite surprising. CPU power accounts for less than 1% of the overall cost of the data centre. Between 50 – 90% of power that feeds into the datacenter is eaten up by lighting, cooling, transforming etc. and a sizable proportion is taken up by the storage arrays.

Siting the datacenters is extremely important. The first consideration is power. You need a lot of it and it needs to be reliable & cheap. You also need good internet links. There’s no point siting your fledgling data centre next to a nice shiny power station if people can’t connect into it. Climate is another consideration. Obviously, the hotter the country, the more your cooling costs will be. The last consideration is security. Obviously, the more the customer base builds up, the more attractive a cloud data centre becomes as a terrorist target. The ideal site for datacenters is Iceland. The climate is cool, there is plenty of cheap geothermal energy and all transatlantic internet links pass through Iceland. The UK is a very expensive place for a datacenter due to high land and labour costs.

The datacentres are populated using pre-fabricated containers containing 5,000 CPUs in readymade racks, preconfigured with storage. When the container is delivered, they plug in power, network & water (for cooling) and the container starts initializing. Not all the servers in the container can start up at the same time as the thing would melt, so they start up in waves equally spaced around the container. A typical datacenter will have many of these containers with typically 2 – 3 being added every week.

With this many machines, hardware failure is a fact of life. Anything up to a 3% failure rate is business as usual. If the failure rate hits 10%, the machine vendor dials in and performs remote diagnostics on the container. If the failure rate hits 30%, the machine vendor sends out an engineer to inspect the container and perform any remedial action necessary. If the failure rate hits 50%, the container is powered down and replaced.

I was surprised by how flexible the Azure cloud is. There are three ways you can use it. The first is what they call the “web role”, which allows any kind of web-based activity (web pages, active server pages, web services etc). The second is what they call the “worker role” which allows you to do pretty much anything providing the software you want to run does not require installation (i.e. it can be copied across) and does not need to access the registry.

There were big challenges to overcome. Because you never really know which machine your application is running on or where your data is, it gives regulators a heart attack. There is also the fact that the database is what they call “eventually consistent”. Because your data is spread around and copied onto different machines, there is no real backup as we would normally consider it. You can back up your data to a local backup, but if your database is big, you may want to take advantage of the service they offer whereby they post you a tape once a day. There is no such thing as a printer connected to the cloud so if you want a hard copy of anything, you have to get creative.

The costs of a cloud based solution are *very* compelling, especially when you consider that you are effectively getting a fully managed, fault tolerant data centre. There are a number of pricing options depending on how much you want to commit to. There is everything from pay as you go, right through to volume licensing. If I had my way, I’d put every server in the cloud.

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Mar 17 2013

My to do list

174x108

174×108 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I try to be organised, really I do. I work from a list. Occasionally, I rewrite my to-do list because many of the items can be scrubbed. I’m sure I’m not alone with some stubborn items that sit at the bottom of my to do list which get transcribed again and again. Well, enough’s enough. I can’t procrastinate forever. Each week, one of these items will get crossed off.

  1. Make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs
  2. Buy a clapped out DeLorean, restore it, get it up to 88 miles per hour on a dark and stormy night and go back in time to tell my first girlfriend to get over herself
  3. Run into a petrol station wearing a crazed expression and sporting a Zippo lighter. Flick on the lighter and shout “Yippee Kayey m***** f*****”
  4. Successfully face the Kobayashi Maru
  5. Cross the beams for a laugh
  6. Make my boss an offer he can’t refuse
  7. Buy a bigger boat
  8. Try defying gravity
  9. Say “I’ll be back” in a menacing voice and be taken seriously
  10. Shout “Get away from her you bitch” whilst toting a pulse rifle inside a power lifter
  11. Take some gremlins to the drive through and then throw them into the sea after midnight
  12. Put everything I own on 17 black and order a Martini, shaken, not stirred
  13. The next time I’m in a meeting where we dissect something that’s gone wrong – shout “Inconceivable!”
  14. Tell everyone I know about the fight club
  15. Poke Sauron in the eye
  16. Eat three shredded wheat and observe the consequences
  17. Cut the blue wire even though everyone is screaming at me to cut the red one
  18. Check out of, and leave the Hotel California
  19. Push an Oompa-Loompa into the chocolate river
  20. Turn my stereo up to 11
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