General

I don’t normally do blog posts to just promote products from companies, but two weeks ago I was asked about tools that I use on a daily basis and that I really wouldn’t want to do without. Normally with a question like that, I have to think for a while. But this one’s easy: It’s SnagIt from TechSmith.

It’s the one tool that I use in nearly every part of my work. I use it all day long. If I didn’t have it, it would harm my productivity in a significant way.

2018-10-16

When government funding is tight, it gets harder and harder to get grants to perform fundamental research. The government always wants to see outcomes, and this means that the grants committees need to show outcomes. In turn, this often leads to research funding bodies doing one of three things:

• Only funding research that’s nearly complete
• Only funding well-known researchers with a track record of outcomes
• Only funding research in areas that are already showing promise

Now while at first glance, that might sound a reasonable way to proceed, it’s not.

2018-10-09

For a long time, passwords have troubled me conceptually. I now believe that, as a concept, they are beyond broken. As an industry, we need to do better.

I might well need to do with more identities, passwords, multi-factor authentication options, etc. than the average consumer but I know it’s beyond me to get this right, at least in the way that vendors, financial institutions, and source providers expect me to.

2018-09-25

It’s bad enough today that 90% of all online meetings seem to start with endless “can you all hear me?”, “can you see this?”, “I can hear you but I can’t see it”, “John’s trying to connect but can’t”, etc. etc.

But the one that annoys me most is:

Let’s give it a few more minutes for stragglers to connect in

Why exactly?

This often happened with in-person meetings too but it seems even more prevalent now with online meetings. In both cases, it’s inappropriate.

2018-09-18

I spend a lot of time consulting across a variety of companies. Often I’m there doing what we consider “mentoring” and that means I’m there on and off for longer periods. Because of that, I often have to do the same compliance “training” that their own employees do.

The first thing I’d comment on is that unfortunately this sort of compliance ends up being counted against the company’s training budgets. Let’s be clear:

2018-09-11

Just a short post today to call out something that I’m seeing again and again. It’s where organizations purchase all their hardware and software platforms before they start to carry out a proof of concept. This is a very poor option.

I was reading the data strategy for a global company that I was doing consulting work for. They were proudly introducing the new strategy yet I was sitting looking at it, trying to work out what they were thinking. The first step of their plan was to buy everything they needed. The second step was to carry out a proof of concept to see how it would all work (presuming it would work suitably at all).

2018-09-04

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, part of my time was spent as a lecturer and tech services manager at a university. I particularly loved working with final year students and their project work. At our regular meetings though, I also often got into discussion with the students about their career plans, as they were about to graduate. What amazed me was how many super-bright students were looking to take incredibly boring jobs working on ancient technologies, in what were basically programmer graveyards, and when I asked them why they were intending to go there, invariably they’d tell me that they thought those jobs would be long term and low risk.

2018-08-28

Yet again, a few days back, I received two invoices that showed I’d just paid (via PayPal fortunately) a pair of annual subscriptions. These are subscriptions that I thought were already cancelled, and we’d stopped using the products many months back.

The problem is that I’ve now spent quite a bit of my time, and quite a bit of the vendor’s time trying to work out how to cancel and reverse them. For days now we’ve had emails going backwards and forwards between ourselves and the 3rd party that they use for provisioning/charging.

2018-08-14

I spend a lot of time working in software houses. One of the nastiest things that I see again and again and again, is developers attempting to roll their own security and authentication mechanisms.

Spend a moment and think about how many security incidents the big companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) have had over the years. Now think about how much effort they’ve put into doing it right, yet they still have issues at times.

2018-07-17

One of the software houses that I’ve done some work for over the years has had a number of unexpected issues with their clients and had to shed quite a lot of their staff. This is always a concerning time and I’m seeing a lot of worried and unhappy people. Either they don’t think  their jobs will last, or they are upset at having been moved to roles that they don’t want.

2018-06-19