Boardmad

Just a little bit of tinkering with the GoogleMaps API and some geocoding stuff…should show a googlemap centered on home on which you then search for other locations, get directions etc etc

Just arrived in Terminal5 on my way to Vancouver for a week’s workshops on a new project I’m taking on and other than the odd bit of hastily erected hoarding to shield one’s eye’s from unfinished partitioning the place seems pretty much done to me !

Firstly and of particular interest to me, is it’s internal scale. In a previous life I once bandied aesthetics and the troubles the human condition suffers in the urban fabric with architects and fellow planners. They (the architects) invariably felt this was of secondary importance to the nature of the architectural statement being made. I argued at length and vociferously in opposition :0) I can’t stand Stansted, it’s amuckle great modernist cowshed of a place with fragments of humanity sloshing about at the bottom of this great container like day old coffee dregs, there’s no sense of scale, you feel (and are in every sense) dwarfed my it’s grandeur and that irks me somewhere deep down inside ! Archtectural statements of this scale remind me of the great state rooms of the modernising Qin dynasty of China designed to awe and demand respect and obedience…maybe there’s something of the rebel in me that illicits these feelings

Back to Terminal 5 then…it’s light and airy with a ‘just new out the showroom’ smell to it still ! Good range of shops but definitely verging on the pricey side…I can’t recall the last time I felt compelled at an airport to by a £250 pair of Bulgari cufflinks but there you go…I am Scots ! Facilities that I’ve sampled are excellent (sat in the BA lounge atm!) and overall I’m much impressed and not surpried to find that the British press hysterical ramblings are largely unfounded. Having said that I’ll blog again once I get to Vancouver and I have my luggage in my hand !

More soon

Arrived safely in YVR and after a mahoosive wait in line to get through immigration there’s my luggage checked right through from Edinburgh. So much for all the hysteria !

Much of my day-to-day involves putting together solutions that do a bit of data extraction, transformation and loading somewhere else (That’s the ETL bit). So that’s the transactional bit, at then end of the production line, once we’ve speont all this time, money and effort loading and validating this info you then need to quantify and carry out analysis on the metrics derived from this data…this is the OLAP.

With the imminent release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 comes MDX or Multi Dimensional eXpressions. This article on ElReg does a better job of explaining than I ever would but I’m actually quite keen to get a better understanding of the ‘closing the loop’ power of the expressions language as increasingly our systems become ‘touchless’ and business processes need to be able to be run with minimal/zero intervention this sort of business intelligence becomes invaluable.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be having a few drinks with colleagues and friends I’ve known and worked with over the last 4 years at my current employers. My wife was asking me how I was feeling about it given that I was basically a week away from leaving my job for good…I had to admit that i wasn’t sorry at all !
Shame…I left my last banking role with a fair degree of sadness not only because I enjoyed the work but I was saying goodbye to such a good team there. They worked hard…very very hard, but being as this was the 90’s in London we played damn hard too…all topped off by the fact that in each of our respective project teams we were left alone to get on with things, managed at the top of the food chain by one of the most idiosyncratic managers I’d ever worked with. Anyone reading this…think ‘Tin tin’ haircut, boyish face, hyoooge and a surreal taste in suits !
Well I’ll shortly be back working for him again so we’ll see if age and experience have mellowed him any - given my last run-in with him over a breakfast meeting a month back when he clasped my head to his ample midriff and rattled his knuckles over my scalp shouting ‘Scotty…ye wee Scottish f##ker!’ loudly enough to startle every diner in the room - so no…probably not.
Roll on the end of the month and my startdate…can’t wait to get stuck in !

What’s better than working for the #2 UK Bank ? Why yes..! I believe it’s working for the #1 UK Bank <grins>

Well I’m finally saying goodbye to RBS after more than 4 years. It’s had it’s ups and downs but more of the former than the latter I’m happy to say. I’ve worked with a good bunch of technical people who’ve variably been grumpy, inspired, mad, inspiring, surly, ground-breaking and always challenging so thanks guys…you know who (which of) you are.Not over yet of course…I’ve a busy old notice period to get through and transitioning a lot of work and projects and processes over to the remainder of the team plus a couple of no doubt hectic days in London - probably my last with the team. Another chapter closes ;0)

Here’s the eternal question…how do you get technologists to intimately comprehend the business process and function in order that their finely-honed code can help do things quicker, cheaper and more accurately ?
This is largely the role of the Business Analyst. I’m getting heavily involved with my employer’s BA cadre grinding out a Best Practice bible in order to share experience.

I’m part of a larger group, looking at the nature of ‘Requirements’. In the broadest sense possible this covers everything from what is one, how do you define a good one, how do you get them, how do you test what you’ve got and what do you do with them once you got them, validated and tested them…so it’s all building into something a little more complex than one might think !

However this is where I tend to start sticking my oar in and muddying the waters a little. All this conjecture and academic analysis is useful and vital from the stated aim of the group - to share ‘Best Practice’…however my proximity to Business users, while staying intimately involved with the technology and infrastructure we reside upon makes me take a more measured and pragmatic view.

It’s going to be interesting to see how pragmatism and MoSCoW principles will sit alongside these plans, requirements-gathering methodologies, ellicitation tools etc !