Rob's a blog gin'

Software As a Service is the new kid on the
block. But does it deliver everything that it
claims?


Are the savings real or illusory?

Why buy your own software when you can rent it from
someone else? Let's take a look and see if
it's that straightforward.

27th June 2008

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I used to love playing the game of
conkers.For those of you who dont have conker trees
(horse chestnut See UK
Safari) you are missing a treat) although it's questionable
whether its good for the tree itself. Every Autumn as a boy I would way
for the conkers
to fall from the trees.

Everyone would hoard them because they had a
sort of bartering value, especially if a conker had been
shown to be a winner or champion conker. These prized possessions would
be coveted and used to buy and sell goods (often without our parent's
approval), and the moer enterprising would set up a conker bank which
was used as a clearing house for conkers.

This last exploit did raise its own
problems. If you put your conkers in the conker bank you
did need to mark them in some way, and you were never sure that someone
else wouldn't get their hands on your valueable
prize. Indeed, the conker banker would sometimes go
absent, with your conkers, which meant that you would forfeit a game or
slide down the conker league!

Software As a Service falls quite neatly into
this category, especially since organisations are
finding that they need a diverse number of software tools to be
effective.

What SaaS aims to do it to provide you a
software service that removes the need for buying your own
applications. A free example of that is the venerableGmail which provides
anyone a mail account which can be accessed through a web browser
anywhere in the world. The argument seems compelling. After all you are
getting a service that you would otherwise pay for, together with the
convenience of no maintenance and the bonus of global access through a
simple web browser.

What could be simpler? Google
will go even further by offering Google docs and Google photos. The
offering seems too good to be true. On-demand services for absolutely
nothing!

But there are a couple of drawbacks.Some countries still operate their Internet servvices as
a dial-up service, especially away from the central city hubs. although
this problem is receding, you might be surprised to be orphaned from
the Internet in many Guest houses in the UK. I was in Stornoway last
week!

The biggest problem that busines sowners and
decision makers face, is that someone else is the banker
for their data. You might think that is a small deal. But consider all
of the sensitive information about clients and contracts that would be
managed by a third party if you were to use a third party Customer
Relations Management system. Wouldn't you be putting your valueable
information in the hands of a data banker,
in much the same way that I did with my conkers?

Some information may not be
sensitive, so for instance, I use Gmail for
non-sensitive e-mail, but never for business transactions.

I would never consider putting sensitive data in
the hands of a data banker, because no matter how high
their integrity, they will spill the beans if the authorities ask them
to, and also you would be very vulnerable if you chose to change
supplier

Choose Saas wisely, and never
allow your sensitive information into the hands of the 'conker
banker'.

Too many people these days avoid a direct answer to a question.

You only have to listen to the radio or TV to hear politicians the world over completely avoid the question they have been asked by answering in a positive but vague way.

So how can that affect your business?

20th June 2008

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Being a romantic, I wanted to treat my wife to a special meal at our local restaurant. We had been there before, and although they didn't know us too well , they would recognise us by sight.



I 'phoned up for an early evening table (we like to move on to other things) and was greeted by a charming lady who, by her voice, may have been of Italian extraction. I asked for 7:00 p.m. on the following Friday, and she said 'No problem', but didn't take my name.


I asked her if she wanted my name and a telephone number to confirm the booking, but she declined, telling me that at they don't take bookings that early in the evening because it wouldn't be busy.


In the event, when we arrived, you guessed it, they had a party in and although the evening wasn't spoilt it definitely took a downturn. It was sad to have to be politely insistent, and after a wait and a drink at the bar we did make that dinner date, although it wasn't what either of us expected.

What went wrong? Well I went wrong when I didn't make sure I got the booking before I rang off. I didn't get commitment.

Chatting to a client, the other day, it became clear to me that he was suffering the same fate. He had become used to asking his development team 'How's it going' in a casual way, because he felt that it conveyed unity and trust.

In fact he generally got the answer 'fine, its going fine', which he intimated to be just that. Of course it wasn't really fine, and in fact he suffered from delays and development problems that he hadn't expected, giving him sleepless nights and funding problems as the development budget got eaten up.

If developers and their managers aren't asked directly and unambiguously what the situation is, then human nature dictates an answer that matches (read fuzzy).

So instead of stopping at the phrase 'how's it going', why not press on until you get a firm commitment.

'How's it going?'

'When will it be finished?'

'That's the 3rd July?'

'And you will have finished development and testing?'

'All the bugs will be ironed out?'

'Your committed to that date?'

Even if some of the answers you get are not what you want to hear, you will be in a much better situation to handle the situation than if you just accepted their fuzzy answers.

To get commitment plan to ask for it. Make sure that you don't accept an ambiguous reply and keep asking until you get confirmation.

If you fail to get commitment at every stage of your endeavour you leave everything to fate. By asking politely but persistently for a clear and unambiguous reply to your enquiry you will avoid the disaster that bunches up as your project progresses.

---

After a couple of years of absence it was strange to re-vist Oban airfield, especially since it has changed so much. An injection of £6Million of EU money has certaily transformed it and provided a brand new control tower and airport buildings, together with fire engines, emergency equipment and some 12 staff.
All of this has been created in the name of regional transport, so that outlying communities in the EU will be connected by at least an airfield.
On the face of it this seems quite laudible, but it does feel a little strange to have 12 people looking after an airport that has virtually no customers.

Scheduled services are promised, but this seems to be a bit optimistic. Although little sircraft are nimble enough to land over the giant caravan site at the end of the runway, it seems unlikely that any aviation authority would stick their neck out and approve scheduled services.
On the face of it, this seems to make the 'new oban' a dead duck in the water!
Meanwhile, the original airport opertaor, Paul Keegan, operates the fuel bowser, together witha friendly cup of tea and plenty of help for weary pilots.

As you can see from the picture, it provides some of the most wonderful views on a pictuesque loch

Arun is just one of those places that many people in the UK have an afinity for.

It may be because generations have been taken their on school holidays or just because it has the mystique of being a southerly island on the west coast of Scotland. Whatever the reason, it has its own attraction.
Alluring as it might be, on this trip we did little more than skirt by, taking a distant view of it with Lamlesh bay protected by its own micro-island. As you can see, we continued to be blessed with great weather.

It seems strange tp travel over a rugged landscape which is punctuated with outcrops of humanit. Whilst travelling to the end of Windemere in the Lake District made our way over mountains of scree and stark landscape which was full of anomolies.

Here, right in the middle of nowhere appeared a little village which seemed to provide the punctiation for the end of the trail. Must be pretty hardy people to live in this place.

After a brief interlude, fur a well earned trip to Stornoway, it's time to report on the said event.

A sunny day across britain is a rarety, but we were blessed with such a day for our trip from the depths of suburbia in the south to the wilds of the Hebrides. On the way we travelled across the centre of England with a short diversion to windemere in the Lake district.

Have you ever thought about who really drives

the Internet? The most important innovation

of our age is open to abuse by organisations who

want to make sure they control it.


13th June 2008

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I wonder if Sir Tim Berners-Lee really knew what he was getting when he set up W3C ? An entirely laudible aim was to provide a central focus for developing common standards for use across the Internet. Sadly, as history has shown, the major players in the industry have tended to coerce these standards for their own benefit.


An example of this is cross browser compatibility  which has see-sawed back and forth for almost a decade.


It's not surprising that most of the work at W3C is influenced by huge organisations, who offer effort and resources to 'keep the ball rolling' (most likely into their pocket:-)


However  even if there are a load of hugely powerful and influential organisations who wave their huge broadswords slowly and ineffectively at each other, maybe it leaves room for the nimble skirmisher to dive between their legs and give them a prompt jab in the varicose veins.


I'm prompted to think of the Open Source initiatives, who stoically fight aganst the odds to overturn the monopolies referred to here.


Sometimes they do this deliberately and in an organisaed manner, and in this I'm thinking about OpenOffice. In other cases one or two people get a burning desire to change the world and just decide to cut through the beurocracy and just go for what they think will work.


Perhaps it's the time for these altrustic people to wade into the war of interoperability, and provide the glue to bind it all together.


They would be the 'first aiders' of the world of technology

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6th June 2008

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Are you sure that you are the only one who owns your data?

With the Internet the question is never quite that clear. This article

helps you to understand who has access to it.


Who owns your data?



Rob Wendes

6th June 2008

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A spark of energy pushes a packaged packet of data outwards, along the conduit from your business and into a vague and mysterious cloud that forms the Internet. 


But what happens to it then?


We all know that by a miracle of science the packet ends up at the right destination (generally), and that it arrives in the same form that you sent it. It does have some routing information added, and this is the clue to how it made its way around the Internet.


Jumping into my car this morning, I set off for the Doctor's surgery only to find that the road at Blackwell Hollow was closed for road works. There were traffic lights, but due to the proximity of the lights to a roundabout, the traffic moved very slowly. Some people couldn't wait, and not surprisingly, they took the road straight over the roundabout and found a way into the town another way.



This is a simple case of traffic overload, and it has similarities to the way data travels around networks.


At points throughout the Internet (and indeed any network) there are devices such as routers, which act like traffic roundabouts.



The data you are sending is wrapped up with information that helps the router to send it on its way, with the router holding enough information in a table to know which direction will be the most efficient.

Kids come home from school; parents check their e-mail, and enormous volumes of information are sent around the network. To improve the flow of traffic, your information is split up into packets, which are sent independently to their destination. Every router has to decide how it will deliver the current packet to the next one, and it clearly doesn't want a backlog that it can't clear.


Often a router will find that the next route is very busy, and just like my traffic problem, it will send it the long way around the internet just to make sure it isn't delayed too long.


At the destination, the packets are re-assembled into the message you sent, but it's important to remember that they will have had a different journey as they travelled. The reason this is important, is that all information is logged as it travels around the network, and it is these logs that hold the fragments of the information you send.



Since the data may be pretty sensitive, you might wonder to whom the information belongs to? For its entire life the Intellectual Property continues to belong to you, but that doesn't mean that it will be looked after and respected in the same way across the globe.


In a lot of countries it is illegal to snoop other peoples data, but if your data travels through a server in a country that doesn't have such a law, then it is vulnerable.  With the global reach of the Internet, snoopers don't have to live in the country that they operate from, so it's not surprising that all countries engage in cyber-espionage using these servers.


Don't be caught by the new espionage of the Internet. If your data is sensitive, then a little encryption goes a long way.

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Staying with Girona,

its possibly not that unusual to find the odd building here and there that has a date stamp on it, but in this case the mark has been left in a great
flourish of energetic pattern.
The chap who commisioned this was obviously trying to impress, but some might think it a bit over-the-top. As is happens I don't have to live there, so it's all nuts to me!

Pretty imposing Cathedral at Gi(rona that's Spain in case you didn't know), and when we were there the people were treating it with respect, which is a bit different to the way things are in the UK. As I said before, the bells do make a bit of a noise, but I guess you don't get one without the other. We also saw plenty of vicars dressed up in their gaily coloured robes.

All of this added to the wide and varied tapestry of life.

Alfred Hitchcock Directed 'The Birds' in 1963 and this picture brought it to mind.


It so happens that this is another Girona picture, and it was strange how all the birds rose up together to swam over the bridge at Girona. It looks as though there were a number of different species and that's what makes it unusual. You might have expected it if a single flock of birds exited en masse, since they do tend to react once one takes a fit to do something, so maybe there was a little more to it when they all flew off.

On second thoughts, perhaps they were fed up with the constant ringing of the bell from the local cathedral! :-{

Easy to get the spelling wrong, and even more easy to misplace it. Much to my friends amusement I mixed it up with Wil shakespeares' Verona in Italy

But there again Girona has still much to offer, with a mix of narrow cobbled streets and trendy bars it sits side by side with local restaurants where you can mix with the locals, at a price that's right for your pocket.
I thought I was in for culture and romance, and all I got was washing:-}

We have had the chance to taste the latest fruits of
Microsoft's software factory, and there are some reservations. If
Business Owners and decision makers don't want Vista, then is
there an alternative?

Is Linux the answer?


Rob Wendes

23rd May 2008

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A lot of people have heard about Linux, mainly because it has
a very large presence in the server market, and because of its
stability, speed and maturity. But it's rare to hear about it on the
desktop. Is there a reason for this, or are we all missing an
opportunity to capitalise on no cost software?

Although Angus Kidman  demonstrates that there is s surge in the sales of the MacOs
it is clearly still a way behind Vista. Despite its apparent success IT
directors have given it a lukewarm reception,  according to the TIF report

Clearly somebody is buying Vista, and that somebody isn't industry!

The consensus is that Vista has a long way to go, and is
unlikely to be the platform of choice before at least Service Pack 2,
if at all. It consumes vast amounts of processing and memory resources,
whilst only delivering more or less a better graphical experience. Not
enough there for IT Directors to sink their hard earned cash upgrading
hardware for little or no benefit in performance.

So what about the Cinderella of operating systems, Linux,
which you can get at no charge in many different flavours, such as
Ubuntu , Damn Small Linux, Lindows, Puppy Linux and the list goes on.

Linux has been around since the seventies (yes the last century) and has (deservedly) won a reputation for high performance
..in a server environment. It's pretty likely that your web site will be
running on some form of Linux, although XP has been fighting back.

Bear in mind that MacOs was developed from a flavour of UNIX, which
is bedfellow to Linux, and you might wonder why it is that it's the
paid for MacOs that is stealing the limelight!

Linux has great potential, and in fact there are quite a number of desktop solutions out there humming away on Linux, but you never hear much about them. This can be summarised quite simply, because Linux on the desktop just hasn't arrived yet.

By that I mean that despite a huge amount of energy, not one of these Linux contenders seamlessly installs and runs on pretty much any Intel and AMD hardware, and this is because many devices that are poorly supported on Linux.

When you consider that there is little or no value to a vendor to
develop their hardware for an operating system that yields little
financial reward, it is not surprising that devices are only supported as people from across the world give up their expertise for nothing.


If you test-drive one of the flavours of Linux, there is a real possibility that something will not work first time.
Favourite problems are with modems and wireless networks, and although
it's possible to find solutions to your problems, you will have to dig
a lot and rely on gratuitous help from forums.

Given enough effort, the right Linux will come around, but for it
to compete it needs to have an effortless installation and improved
performance. (Why on earth they stay with the X server I don't
know, because I've never seen it exploited properly, and it just slows
the whole show down).

In answer to the original question, Linux hasn't made it yet and it clearly isn't the answer for everyone.
I'll hold back, and stay with XP until I know that my next operating
system (Vista, MacOs, Linux) is truly ready for the desktop.

A trackback to winter with this picture.
It's surprising to some how good the weather can be in winter, and although cold outside, there are heaters inside the aeroplane.
This picture could have been categrised in flying or in photos, but flying won becuase I can remember how great it was to punch through the clear blue sky with views out to the horizons. The Mulberry Harbour that was abandoned in 1944 at the time of the D-Day landings can be clearly seen in the bottom left of the photo.

Whilst I completely support new drives and initiatives that contribute to the wellbeing of the human race, I do sometimes cock an eyebrow at the reasoning behind some of thrusts that technology takes. Meet Nexi, the Media Lab's latest robot and Internet star

I am slightly at a loss to understand, for instance, what advantage may be gained by humankind if a robot has the ability to move an eyebrow, or otherwise mimic human characteristic, but that might just be a hole in the MIt newsletter's delivery. I am also not really all that sure why a human form is that much of an advantage.

After all, humans, so I understand from Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD , evolved to the erect position in order to adapt to climatic changes
The Evolution of Intelligence
and this might not be the best form for robots. Who can tell?

It also leaves open the thorny question about whether this means that jobs at the bottom of the job scale will eventually disappear. Does this mean that every human has to become well educated? I doubt that is a realistic possibility!