simondelliott

A rainy day for cloud puns

You IT and Computer professionals out there better watch out, your land is about to be invaded … by the amazonians.

On Tuesday I went to the Amazon Web Services startup event in the wonderful British Museum, for a five hour cloud computing pun festival. Here are some of the shocking attempts at humor that I recorded, more out of a perverse curiosity rather than recording the humor for posterity
Where do you go after the Planet … the Cloud
The Sky is the limit
You’ve got Clouded vision
Flying through the Clouds

The event was excellent, well run, great content and good bunch to network with. And because there was no alcohol I didn’t make a complete chump of myself. What I think Amazon have done that truly amazes me is how they have hooked up everything you need to make a media product with the existing amazon market place and sales tools needed to derive a revenue from it. Whats more they have codified all the processed necessary to make it happen.

There was an interesting audience make up of around 1000 in total, I counted down my row and worked out these percentages.

• 20% Suits
• 20% Business casual
• 10% Casual
• 2% Female
• 3% Bald
• 5% Flamboyant media types

Whenever I try and make, or launch something I dread the endless conversations with the operational team (Luddites more resistive to change than a glacier) to persuade them to commission a new box or worse still … change an old one. Well amazon have really thought about this, and have provided both a web UI and an API to do it. This means that I can get development code into production faster, and If I can do that … it means that I can either demonstrate that an innovation fails or derive revenue from it with a smaller expense (my precious time).

I do have a concern that this inevitable migration to large cloud providers will ultimately create an even larger dependency on a shrinking set of suppliers. In the end this is anti consumer, maybe its time for a state run or even UN owned cloud?

Note:
For those of you who are into sustainability, when someone asked the question “Will Amazon be using renewable energy sources for its servers” there was a big laugh and a stumped speaker.

The Media industry is sick!

After just having got over a massive out break of boyles it seems that the swines in the media industry have gone and caught the flue.

New post on what a headend is

On the old blog I did a A brief explanation of a headend and why its so important It still seems to be a popular article (mainly because of the excellent comments). So Ive made it into a fully blown page … with a picture Whooo Hoooo!

How to make a cultural change happen to a large audience

Sometimes you need a large number of people to behave in a new way. This is called a cultural change. Just about the best example I can give of this is the recent campaigns to stop people smoking. The overall thing that the anti smoking lobby wanted to achieve was to make a culture where smoking was socially unacceptable.

Looking at this from a media and marketing point of view you can apply basic tools to the “non smoking” product. Let me introduce you to the adoption life cycle.

1. unawareness of the product
2. awareness of the product
3. belif in the product or solution
4. attitude to view product favourably
5. intension to commit to product
6. commitment to product

If you want people to do something new, then you have to help move them along the 6 point adoption cycle

What marketers do is segment their target demographic into these groups, Specific tactics can be employed to address each group. Target the bottle necks if most people dont know about the product then educate them (1 to 2), for those that know about it instill a belief in the products effect (2-3), and so on.

This method was used to make drink driving socially unacceptable, to increase sales of ipods and to rebrand the conservative party

The crazy thing about marketing the “non smoking” product is that exactly the same tactics were used to market somking to us in the first place.

Electronic paper, comments

Thanks for all your comments, Ill summarize them here for you
Good spotting … your right she does only have three fingers! Ive also had lots of mails saying “Ive got one of these”. In fact I do have one of these too.
If you are a serious book reader than you will probably also be a dab hand at putting up shelves. Ive had one of these since Christmas and the first thing I noticed was that the piles of books disappeared ! assuming that the power I use is green … epaper is future

Electronic Paper Sighted In london !

Do you remember the first computer game that you ever saw a computer game? (space invaders at the the railway club in Basingstoke).
Do you recall when you first saw a mobile phone (school trip to london)?
Well this is the first time I have seen someone out and about with electronic paper. Only this time I captured that moment on film.

The girl in this picture is in a buisness district of london and she is carrying the sony book reader.

CCTV posters, look at them through media eyes.

This poster reads “A bomb won’t go off here because weeks before a shopper reported somone studying the CCTV camerars”.

This poster has been made by a professional media company, and has been placed in public places throughtout Britian. The chosen image is deliberatly amature and familiar so that you the viewer will engage with it. Quite simply it feels like you are in the image, doing an every day thing. The CCTV camera and the lamp post have an equal placement in the photo. Both objects are shown as depicted as benevolent helpers to our society. This poster is designed to invoke an emotional reaction. You look at the picture, not noticing the physical environment. Then as you read the text you realise that our society is at risk, and you feel fear, then as the cerebral message is delivered you realise that its safe because of CCTV … phew!

This poster reads “Secure beneth watchfull eyes”. Again this poster is very clever. The image shows an eye with the london transport logo in it floating above a typical london city scape. The design is in the style of art deco and suggests some kind of modern shiney metroland. The floating right eyes hover over us like friendly flying saucers.

Whether you believe CCTV is a natural progression for the bureaucratic need to protect our society from groups that have marginal interests or a state sponsored invasion of privacy is not important. What is clear is that state funded organizations are spending considerable money trying to show you that CCTV is being deployed to make you safe.

Tips and Tricks to help you get started with the LAMP stack

Recently I have been getting into PHP, linux, mysql … .the works. It been a pretty good experience. However after discussing it with some friends I found that we all had the same paintfull experiences getting started. In the interestes of making the world a better place here are 5 tips that will help to get you going.

1. Install your development environment into a virtual box
   Getting the Dev environment is tricky and takes time. If you install it into a virtual box then you can share it with others easily and you take a snapshot (and revert if you muck it up)
2. Use xampp
   Don’t  waste time mucking about installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL seperatly then try to configure them.  Instead use XAMPP which comes pre configured for a developers use.
3. When your ready to deploy to live – read the Xampp docs
   They are really good and give you a big head start, its also loads easier to follow some of the examples that are described. If you are feeling really brave you could even script it.
4. Create unit test cases with phpunit
   This software is simply awsome, and I have to thank sebastian for bring such a great tool into the world. This is very easy to get going, but watch out for pathing issues.
5. Create functional tests with selinium
   Installing selinium is like falling off a log, and its a really hard core test automation tool. Sebastian has also written a cool article on how to get going with selinium and  php unit

Enjoy !

The very very latest sam the architect

Developer test – How to interview a developer – Part 1

Have you interviewed any developers for your team?

If you have you will know how incredibly difficult it is to find good people and how insanely difficult it is to find great people.  I used to use the traditional method, of asking a few questions about their experiences and asked them to describe how they would break down a complex problem etc … however I found that this method did not always get the people I wanted.

Whilst working with the liberate platform I used the “Show your name on the screen test”. This worked really well I was amazed at how manny people could not do this

<table><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table>
document.tables.cells(0,0).write("Simon Elliott");

When I came to test OpenTV A good friend of mine developed a very very simple technical test. The candidate had to look at a single 10 fine function and spot the bugs … easy. There were only three, a syntax bug, adding a value instead of a pointer when looping and an incorrect centinal on a loop.

With a rudimentary understabnding of the language anyone could get the answer.

However while these tests were great at finding bad developers,
they were not so good at finding great developers.

My new tests are, better they test language fundamentals, ability to communicate, how to problem solve the works …

“Imagine that you have made a Clock class, and you are writing the functions to draw the big hand and the little hand.  You already have member functions to draw the clock face, and to draw the hands all you need to do is write 2 functions

get_big_hand_rotation ( hours, mins)

and

get_little_hand_rotation ( hours, mins)

What would the code for these functions be?“

This test is great, the candidate gets to think his way out of a problem, the things to look for are

• Is the candidate professional in approach, i.e. do they qualify the question with you, do they take care to understand what you want from them.
• Is the code that they make good?
• How quickly do they do the test?
• Are they good communicators?
• Does the candidate teach you something?

Here is a some code that does this … but the important thing is how the candidate answers the question.

class Clock {
public static void main(String argc[]){
System.out.println("Welcome to Clock");

int hour = new Integer(argc[0]);
int minet = new Integer(argc[1]);

System.out.println(” big hand rotation = ” + get_big_hand_rotation( hour, minet ));
System.out.println(” little hand rotation = ” + get_little_hand_rotation( hour, minet ));
}
private static float get_big_hand_rotation( int hour, int minet ){
return minet * 6;
}
private static int get_little_hand_rotation( int hour, int minet ){
return ((hour * 60) + minet) / 2;
}
}