September 23, 2009
Random
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They have announced that we will be getting our broadband tax over here in the UK http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/23/broadband-tax-election
Which is great, so my 85 year old blind Gran will be paying extra for another of her essential services for no conceivable gain. She’ll be well pleased.
I should be for the tax as I live in an (semi rural) area with a poor Broadband connection and this tax is supposed to improve it. I just know that it won’t!
April 17, 2009
Books, Random
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The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wow! I would strongly recommend reading this, it will change the way you think and especially the way you look at data (especially predications/forecasts) which people give you.
The basic concept is that the future is complicated and uncertain yet we try (by looking at past events) make sense of it and create future predications based on our past assumptions. Think a turkey everything is going well until Christmas/Thanks giving, but as it has no idea it can never predict what happens next. There is a lot more to it than that obviously, and he even predicts the banking crash and its effects in an aside!
My main problem with the book was that the style of writing didn’t suit me and whilst I was very interested in the topics and the concepts I found it a very difficult book to read. The style is sort of a mix of egotistical (I’m rich and clever you must want to know that because you’re reading my book), academic (a lot of depth in backing up the arguements) , patronising (if this is too complicated for you skip to the end of the chapter), and a few other styles dropped in. Not easy to follow, but please persist, the concepts are great. I’m sure one day there will a concise ‘business’ version going over the main points without having to wade through the rest. (There is an overview on wikipedia which covers the main points.)
As I was reading this I also came across these sites which seemed to fit in with the theme.
Wrong tomorrow – a great site where you can add predictions made by pundits and politicians and the date at which they can be checked, to see how often they are actually right! and this page on the BBC new site How can a graph be so wrong.
February 23, 2009
Random, Strategy
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Regurgitate (definition 3 from TheFreeDictionary.com)
3. to reproduce (ideas or facts) without understanding them [Medieval Latin re- back + gurgitare to flood]
Please note… I had an idea here, but it ran in several threads and they didn’t all quite join up.
I read blogs, I read articles, I watch many RSS feeds.
Some people create new stuff but mostly they just regurgitate it. I get the same story from 4 or 5 sources and not one of them has added anything new or original, okay some may have re-written the words but they have not added to the story, they haven’t done any extra research and furthered the cause, they have just passed it on, and sometimes without even adding any attribution to where the story originated! I mean I’ve already read it three times so I know you didn’t write it.
I guess not everyone has a million RSS feeds they watch so some people will only see it once. Twitter seems to be the same, or in fact worse. As a few people post a story the rest clamour to show how up to date they are by passing it on as quickly as they can.
I am worried. Whilst I love the power people now have to create, edit and publish whatever they like whenever they like it I’m just finding more and more that the circle keeps closing. I think this circle will close up even more as everyone starts to ‘life stream’ we’ll end up with a big brother (TV show not 1984… or well both…) where all we do is watch someone watching someone else… until we get bored and stop watching and move up the chain, to watch what the other person was watching… but who’s at the top? and what happens to those that feel they can’t live without being followed. (Well it might not take off and the few that do will be Snowcrash style Gargoyles.)
Take on board other peoples ideas and opinions but don’t just copy! create something new, create something you can be proud of… yes, babies repeat words back when they are learning but they learn pretty quickly to talk for themselves. It’s about reaching that next level, push yourself, learn, read around a bit more, add something of yourself, express your opinion. Make everyone elses life more interesting and re-open the closed loop of inward looking story regurgitation, this is what Editors used to do at the newspapers but now you, dear reader are also the writer, the editor and the publisher you must think more about the other roles. I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it more in the long run if you create your own work and you’ll certainly have more people reading your work, as it will provide them with original insight.
February 13, 2009
Random
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I just read this post
Can’t afford to buy cheap and it really struck a chord with me.
I really liked this opinion but as always I read it with my own interpretation, for which I would add the following caveats.
- For cheap read ‘poor quality’ and for expensive read ‘good quality’
- Do not assume that expensive means good quality.
- I would also add the caveat ‘where you can’, pick strategically, as one commentator said ‘Buy the best you can afford’and in ceratin situations that maywell be the cheapest, in some situations it may be not buying anything! (now that’s sometimes very difficult to do!)
- In software there may well be a free alternative! (in some cases though the same holds true, no-one advertises a design job asking for a GIMP specialist!)
February 12, 2009
Random
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Why does everyone think they are a developer?
On one side I’m annoyed I have been programming for commercially for nearly 10 year (20-25 if you count BASIC on the ZX81 and Commodore PET). So when people come up and say ‘oh I’ll fix that bit of code I wrote a Macro once…’ or ‘I’ve done a bit of PHP I’ll fix your database…’ I can’t help but get riled. Half of me is annoyed, well basically out of egotism I guess, my years of training and effort have just been undermined by a simple,’ I’ll do it myself’. On the other side part of me is amazed at how easy and accessible programming had become and is really pleased to see people being able to do it themselves is great.
However I do wonder about the depth of understanding. In some cases not understanding doesn’t matter you get what you want done and it works, but in other these fundamentals are essential, as the systems get bigger ad have to interact with more other systems then you must understand, and I feel that sometimes the easy of entry to ‘programming’ lulls people into a false sense of security that it is all easy. These people make awful managers and are probably the reason most Government projects fail, they think they know because they wrote a macro once…
I’m not against people giving it a go and I don’t think that you have to be formally trained to be good, some people are naturally gifted (at whatever they do).
I realised last night that this isn’t me isolated as a programmer thinking this. Last night on ‘Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud had similar misgivings (although he expressed them much more eloquently!) about a client who wanted to do a lot of the work the architect would normally do themselves. He thought this was bad and undermined the learning’s of the architect…. but in the end the project went extremely well, perhaps because it meant so much to the client that they put their all into, perhaps because of natural talent… perhaps because these things aren’t as hard or inaccessible as we make out….?
So if you want to write code, go for it in fact whatever you want to do you can, just put your mind to it.