Slight change in posting policy

I have opened a second blog, part of my informal; non-business persona. That means that this blog, Alec the Geek, will no longer will play host to my occasional personal posts and will be solely a place for me to talk about software and related business issues.

If you want to know the location of the new blog drop me a line.

What does the phrase “IT Value” mean?

It’s very current and cool to talk about IT providing the business sponsors with value and IT being aligned to the business and it’s initiatives.

What does that actually mean?

• Transparency in costs and benefits. This means that business sponsors need to understand how much something is going to cost and how the estimate was arrived at
• A clear demonstration of ROI, perhaps a suitable target might be 30%, i.e for every dollar of IT spend we need $1.30 back. Sometimes that is easy to measure because there is a known saving or additional revenue opportunity directly linked to our IT investment. However it is usually much harder to quantify our ROI

This means that IT processes, both operational and project based, must be clearly instrumented to show costs and variances. This information is important for two reasons

• Historical information can be the basis for more accurate estimates
• Business can be clearly shown where their precious funds are being spent as it happens

Once we can see such information (costs and benefits) it becomes much easier to make choices based on which initiatives provide the business with the ROI it needs to address it current and future initiatives.

Are Gen Y spoiled brats or just a bit different?

Managers unhappy with Gen Y – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

An independent survey of more than 240 Australian business managers concludes that Generation Y are the most difficult employees to manage.

I attended an internal conference recently where a CIO I work with suggested that Gen-Y would present new challenges for management because of their need to be:

1. Always networked
2. Continually stimulated and keep interested

This survey would seem to bear this out.

I think I have already seen this affect. Over the last couple of years I have seen recent graduates with delusions of grandeur (in one particular example raw 23 years expecting to be project managers) in terms of job interest. I am pleased to say that after a few weeks of my acid tongue their ego was sufficiently damaged for them to take on more mundane jobs such as documenting and managing the backup cycle.

However I am one of the more continually connected ones. I always have Meebo open, to get around the IM blocks in the firewall, and use Google many, many, times a day — and I only just qualify as Gen-X

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OSDC 2007 has 99 proposals

Well the proposal count for OSDC 07 seems to be at 99 (their web site is not very secure!)

Assuming eight papers a day (which is probably too many) in three streams plus keynotes they would appear to have more papers than they need — which is very good news. Perhaps we will get a fourth stream?

I have not looked at how many of the 99 are tutorials, which take place on a fourth day so my numbers are slightly askew.

Wonder if I will be accepted…

Wow! Japanese

After discovering that my blog is being translated into Arabic

http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/another-blog-than-is-not-ashamed-to-say-application-lifecycle-management/ の翻訳版

恥じていない「適用ライフサイクル管理」を言うためにより別のblog 敏捷なソフトウェア工程改善 敏捷なソフトウェア工程改善

Now someone is reading my blog in Japanese. I wonder How Application Lifeycle Management gets translated by Google?

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I read this and thought of Peter

Business of Software Blog: From project sluts to strawmen: An interview with Tim Lister

Cramblitt: What do you think about the reliance on best practices?

Lister: I get chills when I hear that phrase. From my point of view there are some pretty good practices, but no best practices because that implies generic software development.

A intresting piece on patterns for project management. Makes me want to get the book.

The reference to my old friend Peter is because he said this to me many years ago and still I cringe every time I use the phrase. Unfortunately I still use phrase because it has such a cachet. so I must be a marketing tart (when I’m not being a Geek of course)

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Low Cost Desktop Collaboration

Free Conference Calling and Web Collaboration – One Man’s Blog
For freelancers on a budget John provides a list of free web collaboration services. Wish I had this information 12 months ago

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Spam will no longer be checked here

Ever since I migrated to WordPress (about 12 months now) I’ve been reviewing spam comments to make sure there were no false positives. Out of over 3,200 pieces of spam there were three flagged in error by Askimet and none at all in the last few months.

So from now on I am no longer going to check the spam queue. If your post does not show up straight away then you will have to email me (it’s easy to find my address) to get me to check the spam queue for your comment.

Some of the problems of Social Networking

I have got involved in a thread over on Jaiku about social networking, which I started by asking how people used it. It’s made me crystallise some of my thoughts about the subject as I have never felt the whole Web 2.0 thing can live up to it’s hype (oh — that is such a surprise!)

The discussion was specifically about sites such as MySpace and facebook.

I can see a variety of issues with this type of online social networking:

1. As one of the posters said, it becomes self selecting. You only make new friends with other members of the network or people you already know from other networks.
2. Currently it’s an issue for us grey beards as few of our social contemporaries are on-board. It significantly reduces how useful this type of service is
3. How can you separate your personnel profile and professional profiles? For instance I have my ‘professional’ persona at LinkedIn. I also have personnel information on facebook and it’s easy to think about types of information, or comments, that you would not want to pass from one to the other. With geographic separateness it’s easier to keep what goes on at the pub away from the office for instance. However with Google it’s easy to find all the information about someone, personal and professional.
   I guess it’s fortunate that my personal life is pretty boring .
4. The social sites are balkanised in the same way that IM networks are. I guess that’s an opportunity for the current generation of net entrepreneurs.

On a slightly different note, I am really struggling to find something worthwhile to do with services like Jaiku and Twitter — although I use them just to see what is going on (I may be grey, but that’s no reason not to keep up).

My blog in Arabic

نسخة مترجمة من عنوان الموقع Using an HP Deskjet-640c on Mac OS/X 1.0.4 Tiger/

الوصول غمايل متعددة من العملاء البو

This is so cool! I found someone has been using the Google Arabic translation service to view my blog. I asked my wife how good the translation is, but her Arabic has become very rusty, although apparently my name is correct.

I’m guessing if you don’t have the correct fonts installed then the above quote will not appear correctly – sorry.

(Updated: I’ve also discovered I’m linked from a Spanish language site at http://www.taquiones.net/perl/blogs.html, along with a bunch of other people who can actually program in Perl and have written books to prove it)

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Accessing Gmail from multiple pop clients

Gmail: Help Center – How should I use POP on mobile or multiple devices?

If you’re accessing your Gmail using POP from multiple clients, Gmail’s recent mode makes sure that all messages are made available to each client

Update Nov/2007: Gmail now supports imap, which would be a better choice than POP for most purposes. Use imap in preference to POP if you can and ignore the information in this post

In Gmail default POP setup once a POP client has downloaded a message is no longer available to other clients . I currently use my laptop, smartphone and occasionally an iMac for POP access to Gmail.

I recently found this very brief documentation on using Gmail recent mode, which is claimed to fix this issue

The documentation is not clear so my initial, experimental, set-up will be as follows:

1) Set my main laptop mail client to be in recent mode (Evolution), this has made it download 800 email again. I assume that is the only the first time
2) I will leave my smarphone in default mode so it only gets new email
3) I will probably make Mac mail start in recent mode as well.

UpdatedAugust 2007: I ‘ve made all my email clients use the recent:account@gmail.com format and it works well.

Top tip. Delete all the gmail pop email from your client before you make the change as it all gets marked for download again and you end up with loads of duplicates.

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In the hall of fame

Growing Blogs « WordPress.com

January 29, 2007: Growing Blogs

The Internet has a long memory. Someone recently got to my blog by finding this old entry

Working on my paper for OSDC 2006

Originally uploaded by Richard Jones

I was trawling through the flickr photos for last year’s OSDC and discovered that I had been caught red handed writing my material at the last minute.

I was a late fill in and had spend all my time writing a flashy demo, the slides then had to be written at the last minute so I missed a lot of the papers.

What was really frustrating was that laptop dual head mode did not work when I got to the presentation room and I had only my slides to present using a borrowed Mac, so no flashy demo.

I don’t intend for any of that to happen this year!

Looks like a good conference should be in the offing

OSDC 2007 « Alec the Geek

The Open Source Developers Conference 2007 call for papers has gone out

Well in theory the call for papers has closed. It appears that there are over eighty papers submitted, across a large range of subjects, from around Australia and the rest of the world.

Book you flights and hotel soon!

(PS Still waiting to hear if I have been accepted)

(PPS In the offing)

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Posting from a Jabber client

This seems to be a really cool feature (thanks to IMified) , but it seems like a total waste for time

I have a Spock account

In my current quest to understand more about the world of Web 2.0 I have scored a Spock account and I have three invites to give away. If you want one please leave a comment

A pleasant time at the pub

A pleasant time at the pub

Originally uploaded by alecclews
Nothing much to do with software, except we did talk about software, however today I got to drink at the Malt and Shovel brew pub (famous for their James Squire beers) for the first time. Most enjoyable, thanks to Michael, Ferdi and Dom.

This suprised me

Facebook | Do you prefer PC or Mac?

People who have no facebook accounts probably can’t see this page. In summary, 500 people responded and the ratio was PC 64% and Mac 39%. I can believe that Mac had such a large share, was the sample self-selecting?

Or is there really a shift in the personnel computer market?

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