SmartPhone not dead? Pity.

Apparently the SmartPhone isn't dead. As an owner of a Siemens SX1 and a friend of several Nokia 6600 owners, I can only express my dismay that those disasters were not sufficient to kill this technology stone dead.

I rejoiced the day my Siemens SX1 finally died.

Of course, it may not be all Symbian's fault: the SX1 was a shoddy product regardless of the software it was running.

However, as the first phone with a keypad that ran on either side of the screen, it is sure to be a collector's item. So why not buy one?!

As chance would have it, I have one for sale. As you will see, it is for sale as part of a bigger package. More on this later...

Internet Explorer 7

I've installed the IE7 beta and am quite impressed.... it looks nice, the tabbed browsing works well and some of the rethinking they've done (e.g. hiding some of the menus, etc) is ahead of Firefox.

However, I still don't like the search functionality - I much prefer firefox's "active" find that jumps around the page as you enter the text you're searching for.

I've encountered a few pages that don't load with IE7 (they check for IE6 and will only run on IE6). I found this patch very useful:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/support/default.mspx

The third question contains a link to a registry hack to make it switch between IE7 and IE6 modes.

Restaurant Menu Choice and Food Quality

Andrew Ferrier asks an interesting question: "Let's say you're setting up a restaurant. How large should the menu be to encourage potential clientele to believe in your food?".

How the restaurant business works is a fascinating subject. I guess we all learn several truths about restaurants as we grow up. For example:

• Chain restaurants offer consistency. When you're in a strange place, the neon sign of a familiar chain tells you: "Come here... it's safe... it's familiar.... it's not scary". That's valuable


• Restaurants in fantastic locations don't need to try very hard. And rarely do.


• Restaurants with large plastic or laminated menus are unlikely to specialise in seasonal or fresh produce :-)

But Andrew is asking something slightly different: how many items should be on the menu?

I think the extreme cases are easy to answer. Very posh restaurants typically prepare a new menu every day and there are only one or two choices for each part of the meal. They clearly want their customers to believe that everything has been prepared freshly that day. Restaurants with massive menus clearly cannot have bought all possible items freshly that day: they would go bust within the week. Therefore, you must assume there is a degree of reheating and freezing to be expected.

I guess the problem is: fresh doesn't mean better; frozen doesn't mean worse.

Therefore, contrary to what I thought I'd write at the beginning of this post, I no longer believe the size of a menu is a reliable predictor of restaurant quality. I guess relying on recommendation remains the best way to go.

Don Boudreaux is a genius of the highest order

I am extraordinarily grateful that I currently earn more than the minimum wage. I hope misfortune, ill-health or other calamities never conspire to lower my earnings potential but I'm ever-wary that they might.

However, if my earning power was to reduce to the extent that discussions of the minimum wage became directly relevant, I fervently hope that the minimum wage had been aboloshed by then.

Don Boudreaux explains why.

I was reminded of this post as a result of his recent discussion about the Doha Trade Round: Required Reading.

Unaccustomed as I am....

My blogging has been a little light of late as I was preparing for an old school friend's wedding, where I was best man.

The wedding was this weekend and, now that it's over, I can relax.

Chris asked me to be his best man over a year ago. I was on business in Saudi Arabia at the time and I remember the call very well indeed.

Of course, when the main responsibility lies a year in the future, it's very easy to say yes. I won't make that mistake again (only kidding, Chris.... I'll also be your best man next time if you want....) [I wanted to use this line in my speech but I was told that 1) it would make the bride cry and 2) it wasn't funny anyway. Shame]

What I hadn't grasped last year was that there was more to being best man than organising a few drinks a few weeks before and delivering a speech after dinner. It became vividly clear this year that my role would also need to include helping with the planning. Whenever I spoke to the groom, my head started spinning with the random things he was telling me so I took it upon myself to build a schedule for the day detailing what everybody needed to do at every time ("Ushers move ornamental trees from outside church and place on coach; take seats on front row"..... "19:30: First dance; Best man and chief bridesmaid to join Bride and Groom after one verse".... ). We were on version 1.7 by the time the big day came. This document came in for some mockery on the day. I can't think why...

Of course, it doesn't matter how well or badly a best man does the rest of their job, it's the speech that everyone judges you on. I started work on it several weeks before the wedding and went for a traditional approach (Respond to the groom's toast, introduce yourself, embarrass the groom, praise the groom, compliment the bride, read the telegrams, propose a toast to the bride and groom).

As I imagine is normal for such occasions, I rewrote my speech several times until I was happy with it and had a structure that flowed sufficiently well for me to be able to deliver it without notes, whilst still sounding spontaneous.

In the event, all the preparation paid off and the speech was very well received. I even got several laughs. Which was gratifying since those who know me know that I don't do funny. However, the success of the meal - and of the day itself - was down to the bride and groom, their wonderful famiilies, the bridesmaids and the ushers.

Chris, Jacintha: congratulations!

iTunes problem solved!

I have been pretty pleased with the new Lenovo ThinkPad T60p I was issued with a few weeks back. It's bigger and heavier than I would like but I'll live with that.

However, when tranferring my files and settings from my old laptop, I managed to mess up iTunes. About one track in two that I tried to play would fail and iTunes would issue a message that said: "[name of song] could not be used because the original file could not be found". The irritating thing was that the file was on the disk and, if I pointed iTunes at it, it would work. What was going on?

I ignored the problem for a while until I decided to fix it this morning (being crippled, there was not much else I was good for this morning).

A search for the error message turned up lots of scary postings on message boards suggesting my iTunes database was in some way corrupt.

Thankfully, it was nothing so serious: I store all my music in the "My Music" folder of "My Documents" and iTunes keeps track of all the files through its "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. A quick glance through this file showed the problem: I am using a different user ID on my new system and so the "My Documents" folder has a different location... iTunes was telling the truth after all!

My first inclination was to edit the file. So I pulled up the documentation for sed and did a global search and replace on the file. No joy.... iTunes was still complaining. A further search of the web provided the problem: iTunes actually reads a binary representation of the XML file ("iTunes Library.itl").

The recommendation was to corrupt this file so that iTunes is forced to rebuild it from its XML file. The side effects (lots of meta-data gets lost) were more than I was prepared to accept so I reinstated the original file and employed a hack:

I created the missing directory and copied all my music files into it so that they were now were iTunes was expecting. Result.

I can't walk

Being the weak man that I am, I allowed a friend to talk me into playing squash yesterday. I haven't played squash for about seven years. I played about as well as one would expect given the gap, and the fact that I wasn't very good back then anyway. Unfortunately, I woke this morning with a sense that there was something wrong..... when I tried to get out of bed - and couldn't - I assumed I had suffered some sort of stroke in the night.

Alas, nothing so respectable.

Listening to my body, I conclude that exercise is bad for me. It is a lesson I will not forget.

Diamond Geezer does the City

The always-fascinating "Diamond Geezer" is continuing his tour of London by documenting the wonder of the world that is the City of London.

Excellent stuff.

As convenient as it would be for me to find a long term engagement at a client in Canary Wharf (I could walk there), I'd much rather be working somewhere in the City. The closest I get at present is walking from Liverpool Street to Bank on a Thursday evening on the way back from my East Anglian client. Even though I only walk half a mile and go down the same road every time, I always spot something new... the place is just so astonishingly densely packed with interesting features.

Track-side advertisements

On the train back from Liverpool this afternoon, I went past several trucks parked in fields with large messages on display saying things like: "Your advert could be here!"

The fact that there was, in fact, no paid advertising on any of them made me think:

• Were I a company wanting to market my products or services, would such an advert persuade me to call the farmer and buy an ad? The advert didn't really give me any reason to call. Perhaps they'd have been better telling me how many trains go past each day or how many people would see it or what their demographics wee.



• Perhaps the farmer should be advertising to those who place ads rather than those whose products are being advertised.



• Those travelling on peak-time weekday inter-city services are overwhelmingly business travellers (the price ensures that). Adverts that attract their attention will be different to ads that interest weekend leisure travellers. Some sort of targetted advert based on the nature of the traveller would seem useful



• Perhaps there's a role for technology here. Train schedules are known in advance and real-time train information feeds are also available. Perhaps targetting travellers by destination would be sensible. If a Glasgow-bound train was about to pass, perhaps a nice advert for a deep-fried Mars-bar would drive some extra sales at the chip shops in Scotland. Perhaps it would be profitable to advertise the virtues of M&S "Simply Food" to those travelling on a train scheduled to arrive at Euston on a long distance train around dinner time. Perhaps, even, trackside sensors could be profitably employed to display different ads to those in first class, standard and "quiet zone"

One thing's for sure.... writing "Your company could advertise here" clearly doesn't work...

Is Kangaroo Bustmeat?

I made a brief visit to Liverpool this weekend. One of my best friends is getting married in a couple of weeks and I will be best man. I wanted to sit down with him and his delightful fiancée and go through all the details and ensure nothing had been missed. They seem to be remarkably calm and on top of things. (Phew...)

After I was done, I visited my parents and we went out for a meal. The restaurant was pushing their "exotic trio" platter - which consisted of kangaroo, springbok and something else that I forget at present. It was a little over-meaty for my tastes (although I should, perhaps, have anticipated that...) but I enjoyed it.

I hope I'm not about to appear in the New Scientist's hall of shame....

When "Second Life" makes the Sunday Papers, you know it's time to take it seriously.

Today's Observer carries an article about "Second Life".

The eightbar boys won't stop talking about it and (who'd have guessed it) they might be on to something.

I have quite enough trouble keeping my first life under control so I don't intend to get involved just yet but I sense it may just be a matter of time....

Where's a physicist when you need one?

Given that I owe my first class degree in mathematics to a big bet on being able to master "dynamics", I shouldn't admit that I couldn't answer this question immediately. However, I thought I'd throw it open.

I was in a bar on Saturday afternoon watching the England vs Portugal match.

I say "watching". I was, for the most part, bored out of my mind. I find it very, very hard to get excited by football. I watched the penalties; they were fun. I grasped, correctly, that it was not appropriate to demonstrate my enjoyment of the penalties; everybody else there was taking them extraordinarily seriously.

I digress. My point is this: I found myself interested by the fan that was being used to circulate air in the warm bar.

It was one of those fans that moves about a vertical axis, hence blowing air across an arc.

I was sitting about three metres away.

I observed that it took four seconds for me to feel the rush of the cool air from the time the fan was directly pointing at me.

From this, I think it is safe to surmise that the air was being pushed across the room at 0.75 ms^-1.

My question is this: do we have enough information to calculate how fast the blades were spinning? And if so, what was that speed?

(Like I say, I was bored...)

There's got to be money to be made here somehow...

As I suffered the tyranny of the "premium" ringtone on the train on Monday morning, it occurred to me that there's a missed opportunity.

Those who inflict novelty ringtones on the rest of the world have paid good money for the privilege. I sat, open mouthed, through an advert on Sunday evening offering three "emergency service alarm sounds" per week, at a charge of £3 per tone!

However, once you have paid this money, you are not strongly incented to answer the phone as soon as it rings. You want to hear the tone you've paid so much money for - and, of course, you want to share your exquisite taste with those around you.

This means that the caller must wait longer for their call to be answered and the call is in "ringing" state for longer.

In the UK, callers don't pay for unanswered calls. Yet.... there must be some way to monetise all those phones that are ringing for several seconds longer than they need to.

• Adverts on the display of the callee? (What else are they going to do while they sit there, gormlessly, listening to the first verse of "Sweet Child of Mine" before answering it?)


• Some way of charging the caller from the second they hear the ringing tone?


• There has to be something....

SOA Anti-Patterns

Sandy Kemsley links to a great post on SOA anti-patterns.

I'm only partially through the article because I'm reading it through my fingers, in the agonizing way one tends to behave when you're reading unpalatable truths and you know you've been guilty of the crimes.... Well worth reading.

What he said...

Andrew Ferrier (yet another Hursley-ite) has sprung up on the scary side of the firewall.

Welcome, Andrew.

He has a great post on the wonders of trade and specialisation.

Not even Alan Partridge stayed in a hotel that was also a nightclub

Accordingly to an intriguingly anonymous poster, my discussions of the "top five best things about a laptop" mean I am walking along the wrong side of Alan Partridge.

Such an observation is probably justified.

I thought about Alan Partridge when I checked into my hotel this evening. I was informed that a "little disco" would be taking place "but that it would be over my midnight". Fair enough, I thought; I don't tend to go to bed much before then anyway.

What I didn't count on was the noise being so deafeningly loud - and my room so close to the source - that I am finding it hard to sustain a chain of thought for long enough to compose a sentence.

In the blissful three-second peace between two tracks, I did ask myself "What Would Alan Do?" However, I realised that going to an all-night garage and striking up a friendship with the assistant would not be a optimal long term strategy.

So, instead, I'm blogging about it.

I can't help thinking I'm not progressing very far back towards the right side of the line....

"Collaborate on the spec; compete on the implementation"

It's an oft-repeated mantra. Billy Newport isn't convinced it's always appropriate.

He is, of course, right. I guess it comes down to the degree to which the entity in question can be written purely on top of other standardised APIs (versus requiring knowledge of internals) and the amount of value that can be added by different implementations.

For example, not all JMS implementations are created equal.....

If top-down has failed for health, education and nationalised industries...

... why should we expect it to work for mega-IT projects?

James Governor posted a couple of weeks ago about the goings on on the UK government's massive National Health Service project. (Disclaimer: I have no inside knowledge on what's going on there... I don't even know if any of my colleagues in other teams are tangentially involved)

The problems of the omniscient, benevolent central planner are well understood in politics and economics. In anything other than trivial situations, it simply isn't possible for some entity to know all the information necessary to make a perfectly correct decision. You absolutely have to work on the basis that you don't know everything, that actions will have unintended consequences and that it is better to start small, iterate and learn from your mistakes. Whenever this lesson is ignored, failure occurs. Consider "planned" town centres versus ones that grew organically (I'd rather live in London than one of the UK's "planned" towns). Consider "planned" economies versus market economies. The Mythical Man Month is as much

So, what makes IT projects different? Of course, the answer is nothing. They are subject to all the same problems that every other top-down project faces.

This is why agile programming, iterative development techniques, extreme programming and all that good stuff has sprung up.

So, I guess I have two questions:

1) Is the NHS project as much of a disaster as the press suggest? (My take: I suspect it is running broadly to plan but that it is the objectives for the programme that are broken.... are huge swathes of it even needed?)
2) Do we have any good example of government (or other large-scale) projects where agile techniques have been used to prototype solutions, get participant buy-in and demonstrate value quickly? (My take: there are probably examples everywhere but I'm too lazy to dig them out :-p)

NHS Government jgovernor redmonk economics

New ThinkPad

I've just been issued with a replacement for my ageing ThinkPad T41p. I now have a shiny new Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad T60p.

Shiny... Check. New... Check... What more could you want?

Here are the five best and five worst things about it

Five Best

• 1600x1200 screen


• 2Gb RAM, expandable to 4Gb


• Feels pretty solidly built (unlike some other laptops I've had in the past, mentioning no model numbers...)


• Has a fingerprint scanner.... nice little gimmick. Seems to work quite well if your fingers are dry


• Feels fast

Five Worst

• Comes with a tool that thinks it knows how to configure the network settings better than I do. It doesn't.


• It's a little too big for a travelling user but I'd rather big and robust than small and broken.


• Lenovo have changed the standard ThinkPad power plug. Arghhh!!!! Apparently it's because the new models need a higher voltage but still...... gone are the days when I could swan along to a meeting without power, knowing I could borrow somebody else's adapter.


• Err... that's about it.... there's not much not to like

Summary
It's great. I just wish it didn't have that network configuration tool whose name I'd better not mention. (I should mention that most of my colleagues swear by that tool so perhaps it's just me).

Anybody hold stock in Scandinavian Airlines?

It's amazing what turns up in the logs of my blog....

The US Department of Justice are googling them...



I'm sure it was just an employee booking a trip to Sweden and nothing at all related to BA's little predicament but would you want to bet on it?

More on "zeconomics"

I pointed out an interesting testimonial about the mainframe. James Governor also has something to say on the matter. Not sure if "zeconomics" is his (probably is...) but it's good whoever thought of it :-)

Mainframe cheaper than distributed shocker

The mainframe blog has a testimonial from a user of an IBM mainframe to do tasks most commonly associated with "distributed" (i.e. "normal" :-p) systems.

I have less exposure to system/z than perhaps I should but I try to keep up to date with what's going on in that space. Good to see articles like this with concrete details.

Technorati

mainframe
system/z
zseries

Did I mention I was selling an iTrip?

Not long to go now.... still looking cheap! (As of 21:53 on June 27).

Technorati:
itrip
ebay
gendal

How to greet someone without admitting you don't know who they are....

... at a conference, it's easy.... you just quickly look at their badge when you hope they're not looking and then pretend you knew their name all along.

But, as Raymond Chen demonstrates there are so many usability problems with conference name badges that it's a miracle anybody gets to meet anybody else.

It's not just conference badges. At my current client, the ID badges are designed to be hung from the neck on a string with a single clip. Surprise, surprise.... half of the people walking around the site are displaying the blank side of their badge. it would be funny if this wasn't a moderately sensitive site :-(

The Station Supervisor says it better than I

A friend was having a birthday party in Kingston last night. Major faults on South West Trains meant we didn't even attempt to get to Waterloo to begin the journey.

Judging by this and this, I suspect not using the tube may have been a good choice.

I know revenge is a dish best served cold...

... but waiting fourteen years is taking things a bit far :-)

I choose Virgin over BA whenever I get the opportunity so it's nice to see this little situation.

However, I do hope BA aren't crippled or broken by this little problem... strong competition is good.

Much needed inventions

Madsen Pirie is running a series on inventions he'd like to see.

I wish I had half his imagination.

He ranges from the borderline-trivial:

11. Something to pulverize fish bones into fine powder without damaging the soft fish. The lithotripter uses ultrasonics to do this to kidney stones, but I want a commercial one to do this to fish bones in supermarkets, restaurants, and even homes. Gone will be the unpleasantness of finding bones in one's mouth, with the attendant risk of choking. Instead the bone powder will add nourishment to the meal.

to the profound:

14. Something that makes mining easier, less life-threatening to its participants, and with less environmental impact bugs specially tailored to gobble up the coal, copper, manganese or whatever, and sent down to extract the stuff. They are flushed out, the desired resource extracted, and all organized by guys in white coats who are not exposed to the hazards associated with conventional mining.

I love the idea of little microbes in hard hats :-)

First batch (1-5)
Second batch (6-10)
Third batch (11-15)

Hazelnut Coffee

What's the problem? That's the best bit about travel!

I was in IBM's Burlingame lab several times last year in the run up to the release of WebSphere Process Server. I remember lots of things I enjoyed about those trips (Upper Class on VS20, being commuting distance from San Francisco, the weather...) but the thing I remember most is the little stall at the base of the building where there was a really friendly guy who sold delicious muffins and some excellent hazelnut coffee.

I won't hear a bad word said about it...

"What's the right way to include human tasks in a BPEL process, and why?"

Bruce Silver points to my qualified defence of BPEL4People and asks what the best way to include human tasks in a BPEL process is.

I'm not going to attempt a full answer, and I'm not even going to refer to BPEL4People. Rather, I'm just going to make an argument for why human task support inside a process is useful and why human task support outside a process is useful.

Human tasks outside a process

The idea of being able to "invoke a human as a service" is such a good idea that the process people shouldn't be allowed to keep it for themselves. I can think of hundreds of applications where being able to put a piece of work on someone's worklist - and know when they've done it - would be brilliant. Imagine a banking application that allowed you to leave a message for your bank manager, know when they've read it and which allows them to give their answer directly.

An external human task manager lets you do this and it's really, really useful. WebSphere Process Server has one of these things and it works really well. Once you have it, you keep on thinking of new uses for it.

The obvious next thought, however, is to think that we've succeeded in some unstated goal of abstracting humans into (expensive) web services.

The problem is that, as great as an external task manager component is, a human is not a machine and there are aspects of human behaviour that are qualitatively different. That is: there are behaviours that one would like to model that are not best expressed through a simple (e.g. WSDL) interface.

These behaviours become particularly apparent when developing a solution that automates part of a business process

Human tasks inside a process

BPEL is the industry's current attempt to define an executable language for describing a business process. I think that's a little ambitious - although I do think it is more than just a web services scripting language.

In BPEL, we are encouraged to think about the concept of an "invoke". This is an entity in BPEL that says; "At this point, we need to invoke some functionality that exists elsewhere. Here is the input data and this is where we should store the data that comes back". At execution, the BPEL engine turns this into a web services call (most usually, at least).

This model can be thought of as the archetypal command-and-control approach. "Do this!". "Now do that!". "Did it work? Good! Now do this!"

Many processes are like this and many applications can be built on this model. In such cases, "invoking" a human in this manner is reasonable.

However, many other classes of process can be thought of in terms of a flow. Somebody does something, then a bit of automation happens, then somebody else does something. Such processes are often typified by a collective knowledge of what needs to happen next. People just seem to "know" when they are required.

When trying to model such processes, it is far more productive to model the human interactions inline. The interplay of the various people in the process is intrinsic to the process. "Swapping out" a human for a machine (as could be done in the "invoke" case) just doesn't make sense. Instead, it is useful to be able to say things like: "This step is done by a human. It can't be the one who did the previous step but it must be a manager. If they haven't done it within a day, escalate it to their boss".

Sure... this could be configured external to the process in the external human task manager but the enforced separation seems unnatural to me in such a case.

Conclusion

My claim, therefore, is that we need support for human tasks both inside a process and outside a process. It may well be that BPEL4People is over-complicated (I'm not qualified to say) but I do suspect that it will prove to be on the right lines.

Diet Coke for Men

I stumbled upon a new drink in Ipswich last week.... "Coca Cola Zero". I'd never seen it before and it appears to be new.

It tastes far more like "normal" coke than Diet Coke but shares Diet Coke's sugar-free status.

Presumably it's Coke's belated answer to Pepsi Max?

SOA 2.0 Backlash hits the Register

The criticism of Gartner's and Oracle's bizarre coining of the term SOA 2.0 has hit the Register.

With retrospect, I was perhaps a little too generous to the 2.0 camp when I penned this posting,

WebSphere Mashup Server?

James Governor points to an IBM press release about how we're getting into "mashups" in a big way. (As an aside, I'm sure putting "mashup" in scare-quotes will probably seem as quaint as spelling "internet" with quotes in a year or so... but I'm sticking with the quotes for now :-) )

Looks like I have yet another reason to get round to learning some PHP.

Sametime 7.5

Ed Brill posts about a public demo of Lotus Sametime 7.5.

This is beta code, not feature complete, things are going to change before release and the back-end server isn't guaranteed to be up 24/7, but it's still worth taking a look.

I am a big fan of IBM Community Tools (ICT) - which is the internal tool that Sametime 7.5 is heavily influence by.... good to see it'll soon escape into the wider world.

Just as you should never buy a lottery ticket with numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6....

... you probably shouldn't bet on the advice of a fortune cookie.

When your chances of winning are so low, choosing the same numbers as everybody else is just a recipe for misery!

(Of course, 1/110 of a large amount is still a large amount... so perhaps I'm the fool).

Perhaps I should read my own product's documentation...

I took a swipe at Bruce Silver a few days ago and implied he didn't know anything about WebSphere Process Server. Somewhat embarrassingly, it turns out that he has written a 28 page report on it and that it appears as the first link on the Integration Developer documentation homepage. Oops...... Sorry, Bruce. (Given that he also hints at the existence of such an article in the post I referenced, I think an apology is the least I owe him).

When a new specification is proposed - especially a revision to an existing one - it is incumbent upon the proposer to justify the need it. I think the various "Human Task" use cases that Bruce outlines are pretty important but it's easy to see how this could be construed as an attempt to make it harder for other vendors to conform to the spec.

My view is that the problem is actually the other way round: I'm increasingly of the opinion that standardisation often occurs too soon and that major revisions are a reflection that the initial specs fail to anticipate potential problems or extended use cases. Unfortunately, if vendors choose to delay standardisation, they're accused of being proprietary or risk finding themselves with no influence amongst those who decide to standardise earlier. When the incentives are so strongly stacked in favour of early standardisation, it's not surprising that those who gain the most experience with a spec discover its deficiencies and seek to remedy them.

What I suspect has raised suspicions around BPEL in particular is that there have been plenty of attempts to describe business processes in the past... this is hardly a brand new field (FDL, FDML, BPML, etc, etc).... I don't have a good come-back to that yet. I'm working on it :-)

Now, now, Ronan

Just spotted Ronan Bradley (formerly of PolarLake) taking a dig at IBM's apparent fondness for announcing lots of new products at once.

I was surprised by his claim that we don't already brand our consultants with the WebSphere brand...... I've been a part of the "IBM Software Services for WebSphere" for several years now....

Maybe I've just worked in IT for too long...

... but there's absolutely no way on earth I'll be flying on an A380 until they've been around for at least a year...

Tim Worstall's at Nightcap Syndication seems to believe the problems in getting it launched are worse than have been publicly admitted... so I guess I have a few years before I have to worry about going on one :-)

On opening a PMR

Mainframe Blog recounts a sorry tale of raising a PMR (Problem Management Report) with a vendor for support on z/OS. (Given only IBM uses the term "PMR", I can only assume the author is trying to protect us from the shame....)

Level 1 support (the job of checking a customer's entitlement to support, capturing the abstract of the problem and routing it to the appropriate level 2 team) has always struck me as one of the roles most suitable for automation.

I long ago realised the importance of having chosen an abstract for my PMRs in advance of calling up - and spelling out every word. As frustrating as dealing with a level 1 support organisation is, I don't think the pain is necessarily a reflection on the quality of the staff: it's just not reasonable to expect a single person to be familiar with every product we support and to be familiar with every technical term unique to each of those products.

Still.... it doesn't mean I have to like dealing with level 1.

Sick of lugging multiple chargers every time you go away on business?

Last year, I finally got sick of carrying my laptop charger, my phone charger and my iPod charger every time I went anywhere and I bought an iGo Juice 70 when I was in the US.

It's a very clever device and I'm surprised more people don't know about them.

Well.... I'm on a long term project now and find I'm not using the iGo any more (my phone doesn't need charging while I'm away as I'm never away from home for more than three nights in a row). So, I've put it up for sale.

It's my first ever venture onto eBay as a seller.... and I'm rather hoping it doesn't go for £1... it cost me somewhat more than that.

So, readers, if you or anyone you know wants one of these, bids, wins the auction and mentions that they saw it on my blog when they contact me, then I'll throw in an adapter for free (it comes with a US plug, you see). Can't say fairer than that....

Lazy weekend

This weekend was the first one I've spent in London for several weeks... so I was very glad that the weather was so good. Nothing beats a lazy Saturday afternoon relaxing in Regent's Park, picnicng with friends, drinking wine and eating snacks - before heading into town in the evening.