General

I’ve been in the IT industry a long, long time. One thing that I’ve never liked is case sensitivity in application development tools or in database languages.  And it’s creeping into more and more places.

I know that will offend some people but hear me out.

I think we’re stuck with case sensitivity in languages like C, C#, C++, Java, etc. because that was the easiest way to implement those languages in the first place. As soon as you decide that a language is case insensitive, you also have to decide the internal collation rules. For example, is the letter A the same as the letter a ? But then what about the letter á ?

2018-12-04

One of the real beauties of the Internet is its global nature. But ever since we’ve had it, people keep trying to ring-fence certain locations, and make applications location-aware. While geolocation can be useful, over-dependence upon it is a real pain in the neck.

The first situation where this is painful is in media restrictions. Companies are still trying to enforce country and region boundaries for media licensing.

We need to get past this.

2018-11-27

Banks, Councils, and Government Departments are often lecturing customers about protecting against identity theft, yet they often a indirect potential cause of that threat.

Sending to Old Addresses

This one really frustrates me. When we change the postal address for one of our accounts, they almost always send a letter to our old street address. I can imagine why they think that’s a sensible idea, but if we’ve already left that address, what they are doing is sending our private details to whoever now occupies the house.

2018-11-20

I spend a lot of time mentoring on client sites, and many of the clients are large organizations. Often these organizations require me to attend “training” on a regular basis, to satisfy their corporate compliance goals.

I don’t mind doing this at all, even though the course on conflicts of interest, or handling private or sensitive data, at company A is invariably almost word for word the equivalent course that I do at company B, and company C.

2018-11-13

I teach SQL Server, BI, Azure, and AI classes on a fairly regular basis, and one thing I love to do is to show attendees images (or photos) of where the application of the technology has gone very right or very wrong. Ever since I’d installed Windows 10 though, that became much harder.

The Photos app that’s installed with Windows 10 must have someone who loves it, but that’s not me. There seems to be no way to just have it automatically maximize the images, so I’m always showing them, then having to resize them.

2018-11-09

One thing that I see time and again on customer sites is staff who really don’t know what they’re doing in trying to solve a problem, or when they are trying to implement a new solution, yet their company just continues to pay them to stumble around while getting almost nowhere.

I’m not talking about someone who’s taking longer to achieve something than an expert. I’m talking about staff who are really out of their depth.

2018-11-06

I posted the other day about how the pricing of apps has become silly. Most apps are priced so low that there really isn’t much income but worse, most don’t have a business model for the authors.

I’m sure that many smartphone app developers just think they can offer an app and get a bunch of money in quickly. They don’t seem to have thought about what happens beyond that point.

2018-10-30

In a recent post, I talked about my use of SnagIt and how I think people should be prepared to pay a little for applications. I’m endlessly puzzled by people I see stumbling around using free alternatives that don’t do the job, when there are good options available.

I had some interesting feedback from that post and it got me thinking further though, about how much we should be prepared to pay for applications? Why is there an expectation that most apps that we use will be free?

2018-10-23

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