RANT WARNING

Political spin particularly in corporations who should know better is something that always gets on my nerves, currently one of my clients is moving to an outsource model for everything , this has come with a new CIO and is expected as every director wants to stamp his mark on the enterprise, this time there are some bits that are new to me, the particular one that gets my goat is:

“High operational risk due to dependency on few individuals” errr that was because these were specialists that dealt with the products day in, day out for years and knew not only the products but the underlying business and can identify and fix issues in minutes, even seconds, as a business side colleague pointed out, if this was in brain surgery rather than high finance, the suggestion that there are too few proper brain surgeons and they cost a too much, so we should give the work to ordinary doctors, would cause an outcry,

It only works in a corporations because the people issuing them don’t actually understand what their business REALLY does, yes its bad for redundancy purposes and horrible for the day to day running cost to have specialists, but the reason it looks like an easy target is because there have been no problems so everyone thinks the work is simple to do,

This problem was exemplified by an issue in which a instance of Jboss on Redhat became ill during a end of day run and would not restart with the normal scripts we had written, the cause was not a code based one, it is a dedicated box that does nothing else, and we were in a time sensitive situation, the new support personnel (who have been in the role for 8+ months now), were completely at a loss as this scenario was not on their sheet of “how to do stuff”, a suggestion of “Restart the bloody box”, was treated with blank stares and a question of “which script is that”,

It took over an hour to even get them to mail the hardware administrators to get them to do a restart of the physical box (something they could have done them selves in 2 mins with a “sudo Reboot”) , all in all nearly 2 hours of run time was lost making the business very unhappy, this is not intelligent support!!, this is not an improvement!!!, I would say that we now have even higher operational risk than before as we have NO individuals that we can depend on .

To conclude, the support and growth of any business is a balancing act, if you only have 3-4 line people then day to day its very expensive (often unjustifiably so), but you most likely wont ever have a major disaster, if you only have 1-2 line people, then day to day it will be cheap as chips, but when a change is needed to fight off your competitors or deal with a major disaster you will face a sea of blank expressions all saying “that is not on my script sheet”

I will be going to ILUG in November and so will my wife, along with @HughsterRooster wife, @mattwhite girlfriend, and many other better half’s

why is this?, are they keeping an eye on us?…Nope!

Is it because ILUG is in a memorable historical location that has tons to do and try?, is it because of the advantages room rates?, or the fact its basically a holiday location?…nope Nope NOPE!!

Its because the best people in the lotus world will be there and its not a “conference” in the old fashioned sense, yes there are amazing speakers, tons to learn, corporate sponsors, stuff to take back to your client/employer, the chance of free beer and me trying to force grain alcohol down your throat while ranting at you but its not TOO geeky and very defiantly not too corporate. humans are welcome.

And that’s the point, its not a thing to get a “pass” to, its a thing to treat your family to while getting tons out of for your self, my main client wont pay for it, and I don’t care, on the flight back I will sit back, brain and belly full with a clear conscience.

ILUG, its not going to be a guilty pleasure, its going to be pure pleasure.

The following quote was in a clients internal quarterly director’s update on the subject of Client Wins:

“Winning this lead confirms **** as a major player in the US airline market. The aviation team cited the new Claims Online tracking system, as well as ” … “as some of the key reasons for this win.”

I and Mark Barton wrote the system and its really nice to make a difference to a companies bottom line, this will be the third big difference I helped make during my time at my current main client, it feels good, after all even contractors have pride in their work 🙂 .

Mark Barton, Duncan and myself attended the Flex London User Group last night (August meet), its been a while since its been run, so it was a perfect time to pile in, it was hosted at skillsmatter’s new place up near the barbican so the normal clean well appointed facilities (coffee/tea, wifi, etc etc) were provided.

The speaker was Mark Doherty who writes the http://www.flashmobileblog.com/ and unsurprisingly his talk was on the latest updates on the flash and air players with particular reference to mobile devices, all new stuff to me, if you head over to his site he has videos of all the stuff he demoed and you can even watch the podcast of it all here ,which saved me doing screen shots and writing loads of details, but some key point for me were:

• They now have remote debugging on the air platform on at least android.
• Multiple flash/flex instances now have a priority order so that when a CPU is pressed for power it can give all the effort to the in-focus app while lowering things like screen refresh (but not back ground stuff like audio).
• Due to different vendors using different chips, the accelerometer and geo locator functions vary from device to device.
• You can swap target runtime at anytime rather than only on project creation.and some little useful bits are:
• If you press and hold on a flash app in a browser on a mobile device, a mobile menu pops up with options like full screen.
• The new TFL (Text Framework Layout) is very heavy on mobiles, avoid if you can.
• 128 dithering in photoshop really helps make the image smaller and is good for mobile apps.Everyone was very friendly and I met some good people, unfortunately I left after the talk, next time I think I will do it properly and pop down the pup with the die hard’s as that is where the real learning and fun begins. but it was a good beginning.

  Oh, also discovered on the groups home page a comment from Bill Buchan and if thats not an endorsement I don’t know what is 🙂 .

The Adobe Flex London User Group (an evening starting at 18:30) is starting back up again, hosted by skillsmatter in central north London (next to the barbican) first meet on the 2nd of August, its free, you can register Here. I will be there, so I hope will Mark Barton and a few more Domino people

Note: This it not treacherous to Domino or false advertising (if you have reached here via planetlotus). I have long held the opinion that any thing that can be glued to Domino to make it look good or expand its functionality is something that should be pursued also I have learnt much from the Lotus LUGs I have attended and hope to learn the same from the pure flex boys ….so there