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Computing 10,000x more efficiently

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:35:00 +1100

When I read stories like this, it gives me great optimism about what technology can provide in the years to come. And I don’t just mean faster versions of Angry Birds.

Need a quick way to test your responsive web design? Try this!

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:32:13 +1100

Need a quick way to test your responsive web design? Try this!

designcloud: Helvertical by Brock Davis

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:16:25 +1100

designcloud:

Helvertical by Brock Davis

I'm almost certain that I'll never be "employed" again

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:41:00 +1100

The following pair of links came through my Twitter timeline today almost simultaneously, and they make me believe that I will never be “employed” again:

In Praise of Cheap Labor - Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all. Paul Krugman, New York Times

Labor Efficiency: The Next Great Internet Disruption. Nick Cronin, TechCrunch

They also reinforce ideas that I first heard during my MBA eight or so years ago that employment of the future will be all about the “portfolio career”.

I’m pretty sure the future is now.

Paper Prototyping

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:33:00 +1100

I have been using paper prototyping for a while now to help with the design of some of the web and smartphone apps that we have been building for Geodica.

There is something quite liberating about moving away from a computer and just using a simple pen and a piece of paper, and even though I am not particularly talented as an artist, it is still possible to produce meaningful and descriptive low-fidelity prototypes with very little hassle. I think the reason pen and paper work so well for prototyping comes down to the simple fact that the form factor and ease-of-use are yet to be exceeded by technology.

So in the interests of promoting the discipline of paper prototyping, here are some links to products and resources that I have found very useful:

Paper-based UX Workbooks

UXPin - I have been using the UXPin stuff since it first came out. It has gone through a couple of revisions, and the latest packs have a hard cover and come with lots of extras like personas and stick-on components for on-screen elements. I can thoroughly recommend these packs. It’s also worth following Marcin from UXPin on Twitter at @uxpin. He posts quite a few good links on paper prototyping.
App Sketchbook - I have not used this one personally, but the products listed on their web site look great. They are simpler than the UXPin versions, and might be useful if you wanted to carry around something more like a notebook.

Wireframe Template Libraries

Keynotopia - If you want to take your paper prototypes and move them into something more concrete, the Keynotopia template library for Keynote is brilliant. This library contains templates for iPhone, iPad and Android, as well as for MacOSX and Windows. I can’t quite put my finger on why this is true, but I find Keynote a lot easier for building higher-fidelity prototypes than PowerPoint, and this library is a great addition to my toolset.

Other Paper Prototyping Resources

Here are a couple of other paper prototyping and UX resources that you might find useful:

Good luck with pen and paper!

Footnote: I’ve also noticed lately that I spend less and less time using Microsoft Word, and more and more time using TextMate and simple text files, often with MarkDown. I think this is a change in behaviour related to the use of pen and paper for prototyping. When you remove all of the gratuitous visual distractions and the egregious bugs (such as the way bulleted lists and paragraph numbering still do not work properly after *14* releases of the app!), you have a lot more time to focus on *what* you are writing, and much less on *how* you are writing it.

thisistheverge: QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:21:28 +1100

thisistheverge:

QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of Advertising - Alexis Madrigal - The Atlantic

What technology stack would you use if you were going to build a retail bank from scratch?

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:45:00 +1100

As anyone who works inside a large, modern retail bank will attest, many technology systems are out-dated, poorly architected, littered with unfortunate and opportunistic compromises and generally sclerotic in a way that has a material effect on the activities of the businesses they allegedly support. The level of technical debt has crippled technology operations in the much same way that financial debt has crippled their owning organisation’s financial operations.

For example, core-banking systems are often 20 years old or more, run on large mainframes that whilst being generally performant today, can be costly to maintain and extend. Some have already reached or exceeded their performance limits. Supporting systems may run on more modern infrastructure, but even if they are built with good intentions, very quickly fall victim to the quarterly bonus cycle that favours the short-term fix and attendant accrual of further technical debt.

There are many suggested remedies for these problems, but for the purposes of this question, we can categorise them into:

Incrementalism - overlaying changes onto existing systems and processes
Reboot - trying something completely different

The perceived risks of incrementalism are lower, but technical debt piles up in the medium term in the form of ever-increasing complexity. Reboots are difficult to initiate because they appear too ambitious to management fatigued by previous failures, with the irony that previous failures are due in no small part to layers of unmanageable complexity built up by successive incremental changes and short-term fixes. At the centre of these problems is a profound mismatch between the short-term incentives of management and the much longer lifetime over which mission critical business systems operate.

But even though this mismatch is relatively easy to characterise, there is no evidence the situation is likely to change any time soon. The result is that for the majority of systems, businesses make incremental changes for as long as they possibly can. Businesses argue this is economically sound, technologists argue that it has hidden costs. Both are probably correct, depending on their context. However, there comes a time when a reboot of some form is simply unavoidable.

For example, three of the four big Australian retail banks have attempted massive core system replacement projects of one form or another over the last five years, with a view to replacing 15-20 year old production systems. In the online banking domain, some of our large banks have production systems first rolled out during the initial wave of online banking deployments in the late 1990s, and are now in the process of re-platforming.

Leaving aside the degree to which these programs have been or will be successful, there is no doubt that we exist in an environment where banks are making very big decisions about changes to their mission critical systems. Systems that have been incrementally updated to the point where it is no longer economically or technically viable to make changes to them at an appropriate level of risk.

Which brings us to the inevitable technology reboot: when presented with the chance to start from scratch, what should an enterprise architect do? What are the foundational pieces of a technology stack required to support a retail bank? How would the decisions made today be different from those made in the past? Is it possible to simplify the environment? Is batch relevant in 2012, or would it be possible to use technology to move to a completely real-time orientation? What is the role of next generation transaction switching systems such as Distra or Transacumen? How should the online platform interact with the back-end, should there even be a difference? Can a bank realistically deploy into cloud-based infrastructure, and what about the rise and rise of mobile?

We are already seeing new retail entrants such as Movenbank in Europe and BankSimple in the USA make very bold moves with their technology stacks. We are also seeing multiple potentially disruptive moves in the payments space with players such as Square, Dwolla and Stripe. As start-ups, these organisations have the advantage of zero technical legacy to work with, but they do have to operate within the confines of the banking environment.

So, as an enterprise architect, what would you do if you had the opportunity to rebuild the technology stack of a retail bank completely from scratch?

Comments on HackerNews

Every time I am forced to do this, a little part of me dies.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:15:41 +1100

Every time I am forced to do this, a little part of me dies.

A friend of mine holidaying in Byron Bay came back to their...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:16:22 +1100

A friend of mine holidaying in Byron Bay came back to their beach tent to find this little guy sleeping. It seems like all the rain lately has re-invigorated the iguana population.

A generation of Windows use has taught us that this is an...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:57:00 +1100

A generation of Windows use has taught us that this is an acceptable user interface. #itsnot

Lion, RVM and 1.8.7 - 1.8/timeout.rb:60

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:58:00 +1100

joshondevelopment:

I’ve just started a new project.. well an old project that uses ruby 1.8.7 and rails 2.3.5.

If you get this error:

1.8/timeout.rb:60: [BUG] Segmentation fault

Its a problem with lion and ruby. Uninstall any version of 1.8.7 you have with

rvm remove 1.8.7

and then run

CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 rvm install ruby-1.8.7 --force

This problem just cost me about 1.5 hours. The above solution works a treat. And this link:

Lion, RVM and Ruby 1.8.7 woes

Has some more details, including how to get the GCC 4.2 compiler installed if you’ve recently upgraded to the latest XCode.

"Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets, according to a detailed statistical..."

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:24:10 +1100

“Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets, according to a detailed statistical study based on the detection of three planets located outside our solar system, called exoplanets.”

- NASA. (via dbreunig)

Some King Parrots on the verandah (just outside Mudgee, NSW,...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:21:00 +1100

Some King Parrots on the verandah (just outside Mudgee, NSW, Australia). Photos taken by: @jennysinclair.

“Rabbit for dinner!” This photo was taken by my...

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:52:00 +1100

“Rabbit for dinner!” This photo was taken by my sister-in-law’s father at his home near Newcastle, NSW, Australia. It’s good to see the native wildlife striking back against introduced pests.

Proximity versus location

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:23:00 +1100

Why do we need to know an exact location, when it is really proximity that matters?

It is not a big leap to suggest that the use of location information in modern web and smartphone apps is a Pretty Big Thing. It should also be obvious to anyone paying attention that users give up significant personally identifying information (PII) when they participate in these services. In general, the payoff for users is that they are rewarded with utility, but there is always the risk of unintended consequences. How can a user be certain that their PII will not be used for purposes other than those originally intended? The simple fact is that you cannot.

However, if you break down what happens in most location-based transactions you can see that it is actually proximity that is important, in the sense that the transaction typically compares two or more locations to see if they are near each other. If they are, then the service can make some inference such as recording the fact that two people have met, or that a person was near enough to a venue of some kind to recoup a reward. In many situations the actual underlying physical location is more information than is necessary to complete the transaction.

So if a service records the exact physical location of a person persistently, then there is a risk that this sensitive PII can leak and perhaps be used for purposes other than what the user intended or was aware of. But if the service just records evidence of proximity - and importantly, anonymises or throws away the underlying physical address information - then the risk of misuse of their physical location information is greatly reduced. For example, it would still be possible to know that two people met, but it would not be possible for some nefarious third party to know where they met.

I think that we are probably some way away from this distinction becoming mainstream, mainly because a lot of services making use of location today are doing so precisely so that they can exploit the underlying physical location data in other contexts, with or without the informed consent of the user.

Sadly, until we see some high-profile misuse of end-user physical location data via a compromise or a change in terms and conditions, it may not be front of mind.

The Restart Page

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:21:00 +1100

The Restart Page:

Just in case you need to waste 20 minutes watching old computer operating systems reboot.

What the heck is Responsive Web Design?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:01:00 +1100

I have heard this term bandied about at least two or three times in the last month. Each time I’ve asked myself the above question, and made a mental note to go and look it up. Well, lucky for me, @johnpolacek has gone to the trouble of explaining with a brilliant scrolldeck.js presentation which can you find here:

What the heck is Responsive Web Design?

I feel much beter informed now.

On motivation

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:08:00 +1100

Over the last week or so, I’ve been sent a number of links on the topic of motivation. Two involve Dan Pink, and are well worth a viewing, the other is from Dan Ostlund from Fog Creek Software:

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation, Dan Pink @ TEDGlobal
The Science of motivation, Dan Pink
Why do we pay sales commissions? Dan Ostlund, Fog Creek Software

The overwhelming theme here is that extrinsic motivation factors such as financial compensation really only work in a very narrow band where tasks are mechanical or automatic, and that intrinsic motivation is necessary for engagement and innovation. These are not new ideas - motivational theorists (Hertzberg et al) suggested the same concepts in the 1960s with data to back them up.

However, what I think is interesting here is captured in a quote from Dan Pink in the TED video above:

There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

Exactly. A whole lot of management “science” is actually just voodoo, with very little (if any) data fed back to test whether or not the newest fad, or even the conventual wisdom, actually works. That’s why it’s great to see academics and writers like Dan Pink pitching the - often counterintuitive - hard science to the management mainstream.

I hope we see a lot more of it in 2012 and I wonder if it it might be possible to kick-start a “Science-Based Management” discipline, along the same lines as Steven Novella’s Science-Based Medicine?

Update: Perhaps motivation isn’t the real problem. Could it be follow-through?

Ever tire of Religionists prosthelytizing about morals? This is...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:13:00 +1100

Ever tire of Religionists prosthelytizing about morals? This is a must watch. Here’s a link to part 2.

Do epic shit

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:07:00 +1100

I read what I thought was some very good advice the other day: instead of just incessantly reading what people are saying on the Internet, try to ignore it for a while and create something of your own. So whilst I think Twitter serves the purpose of providing access to the Web’s stream of consciousness - allowing me to contribute to it on occasion - perhaps Tumblr can serve a way of focussing my attention on creating something, rather than just continually consuming stuff produced by others.

To inspire me, I’ll use this photo that I took of the Ideas Wall at TEDxSydney 2011:

Let’s see how it goes, 2012.