General

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.

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.

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

I have many friends who would have checked the calendar when they first heard that Microsoft was buying Github. They would have guessed it was April 1st. I think it’s another pretty bold strategic move by Satya Nadella. It’s been interesting to see all the naysayers coming out of the woodwork to beat up on the idea of Microsoft owning Github, as though it was going to be the death of Github.

2018-06-15

The industry is clearly trending quite quickly towards Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Rather than building monolithic chunks of code, new applications are often constructed by combining a variety of platform services, themselves usually delivered as Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. Any application layers that you build above these services though, are only as good as the underlying services. And that’s where things can go very, very wrong quite quickly.

2018-05-29

For many years, I was blogging at sqlblog.com and I was a big fan of what Adam Machanic and Peter DeBetta had done there. Eventually though, community server was on its last legs, and WordPress seemed the obvious platform for a blog. Fellow MVP Adam Machanic made it really easy for me to migrate to a WordPress site with a tool that he had created. I headed off to BlueHost with high hopes, but those hopes just haven’t been fulfilled.

2018-05-15

The other day, I joined a Skype for Business call from the Microsoft Regional Director program that I’m part of. I was using my iPhone and I chose to use the web option to connect. I’d say it must have flipped me across to using Skype for Business anyway. (It is installed on my phone). I thought there would be a large number of people in the meeting, and that we’d be muted the whole time, so when it asked if it was OK for the app to use the microphone, I said “no”.

2018-05-08

Today, we were having trouble saving a PowerPoint slide deck as a set of PNG files. The error message said: Sorry we couldn’t find slide1.PNG. Is it possible that it was moved, renamed, or deleted? After trying to copy the slides into another deck to replace the original deck, the same problem existed. Saving in PPTX format was fine. Curiously, saving individual slides was also fine. I found a few blog posts online that said it might be to do with an embedded period in the filename.

2018-04-16