Boardmad…still mad for it !

Social disorders

Two of my favourite subjects borg’d into one. Social Media and Data Visualisation…and yes I appear to be firmly in the heart of this so I’m kind of a mess :0)

The office has now (in it’s dubious wisdom) decided to block xkcd.com….my epitaph for a site that keeps me laughing every single day

Given the recent conversations in the office and our amusingly exotic mix of technologies one comes across during a brief review of even a small part of the architecture I’m responsible for this post really does make me laff (inside I’m crying)….sob!

Apparently Scott Kurtz (author of PVP Online) didn’t think this was much of a strip and kind of just tossed it out there. It’s one of the mysteries of ‘what makes funny’ – I nearly laughed my morning latte down my nose.

Think it’s as much to do with the attachment I have to the characters in this strip I’ve followed for a long time now, Skull’s naivety, Cole’s cynicism and world-weary realism and of course…well it’s a gag on Star Wars. Why wouldn’t you love it?

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

[Linus Torvalds]

Contrast this with the monumental effort needed to initiate, elaborate and get momentum behind big programmes…and we continually, year after year are surprised that flagship scaled projects have difficulty delivering. The eternal and utterly human triumph of optimism over experience.

Make the right, informed, smart and pragmatic changes to key functional components within your architecture. Publish the API’s to your solution, be utterly transparent to those that would leverage your product and be generous with your time and FR’s…’Field of Dreams’ stuff folks! If you build it – they will come.

Here endeth the lesson…off to watch footie and drink beer. Apparently someone’s scored and the ITV ad break made everyone in UK miss it.

RoFLMAO

Pay your goddamn license fees, get the Beeb funded properly and stop bitching people.

Cross post from Seth Godin’s blog

After a very annoying end of last week where a relatively simple BB upgrade turned into a bit of a snafu I’ve now got my nice, shiny new Linksys By Cisco N-Router fired up and connected…speeds were dire yesterday and I considered vaping the upgrade and reverting to my fixed speed 1Mbps service but I’m glad i didn’t – download speeds doubled over last 24hrs so the connection must be settling down. Will leave it for another couple of days.

So I’m a recidivist blogger…full of good intentions and I tend to blog in fits and starts as the mood, inspiration and time to do it is available !

However in true New Year’s resolution form I’ve signed up to Project52 a site that will maintain and track content updates and make sure I’m keeping my resolution. It’s kind of like a personal trainer for bloggers…someone to yell at you…”Come on ! Call that a pithy epithet…where’s the witty and cutty rejoinder ? Now drop and give me 20…reasons a Mac is better than a PC!?”

So given that I’ve no bloody excuses for having no content to discuss (my job has exploded in my face in the last 6 months in completely unexpected directions!) I’ll be doing my level best to make sure there’s at least one article per week uploaded here to Boardmad.

Come back soon for more…

Cheers
Scotty

Absolutely loving this piece of work !

Then clicking on these summaries takes you to a detail view

Not particularly groundbreaking you might think but the implications are significant…data (the bard’s poems in this case) reside in the Google App Engine ‘Cloud’ and the heavylifting gets done by a little python scripting to get the content down to the iPhone client.

For extreme programming or agile delivery prototyping the opportunities are considerable and not just limited to the iPhone client (which was picked in this instance) it could as easily have been leveraged in a silverlight RIA or an Adobe Air.

Two very interesting articles on teh interweb [sic!] show a serious change in the state and direction of internet…I wonder if in 20 years time we’ll look back and identify this as the tipping point  ?

Macs to get AV

Windows usage dips

Time will tell ;0)