Category Archives: Life

I just discovered Technorati – so enough of the shameless self promotion?

Oh, and 3D33AQPFD9BY

We are living in exciting times. Have we reached a point where enterprise – and from this I mean everyone from the one-man-band to the fricking spaceship – can suddenly start to do what all the real IT experts* have been banging on about for all these years? I’m seeing it for myself inside organisations – changes in the way that departments interract with each, a general ennui that says “Listen, I don’t want to do this stuff the hard way any more – let’s do it easy and save money”. This comes however is coming from both vendors and customers – shaping these organisations up and shaking them out has made them realise that they both need to become tougher and leaner – both of them need to find common, cheaper interfaces and ways of working. For the vendor this is a turning point which might knock them out – for the client things can only improve. There is also ample opportunity for those good ol’ disruptive technologies to slide in between the cracks.

This has been driven out of necessity of course. IT departments need to be more flexible and that means operating on less budget. Creative solutions have to be found – and whaddya know the experts (*) have been banging on about this stuff for years already so why not give it a whirl? Perhaps some of this will turn around and hit Apple in the face – perhaps this is why they’ve cleverly stayed away from the business market?

(* – and by “experts” I mean people who really know what they’re talking about – independents who tout lowest common denominator and open source technology rather than proprietary and inflexible solutions)

I’m scratching my head over trees again. Rendering trees. It’s really the fun bit when you’re thinking hardest about a problem and really chiselling the code to get the essence of what you’re trying to do expressed on the page. I think there are a lot of similarities with writing – but much of coding is just teasing the ideas into life once they have been expressed in a usable form whereas with writing it’s continuous ideas and how they play against each other.

Having discovered the C# functional lambda stuff in IEnumerators I now can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not. Changing the programming context just for the sake of it being cool or whizzy sacrifices readability of course and with the complex stuff you don’t want to bury it in flashy language just because you think it’s the new(ish) thing to do.

And then of course you do actually write something edgy because you’re buried up to your neck in a problem and almost as soon as you’ve written it and tested that it does indeed miraculously do what you want it to .. you can’t work out if what you’re written is actually right or if it’s just some horrible fluke or if it will break with different test data. And rather than testing it to destruction there and then you just wander off and do something else and will have to spend a long time getting to grips with it all again the next time you come back.

So you can feel your brain muscles working.

Anyway I’ve had one of those kind of days today – edgy, brain working, things working, code coming out just looking right. It doesn’t happen all the time but when it does it makes me want to stop immediately and go and drink beer to a long lost scintilla of genius.

The Indian Premier League is a professional cricket tournament that takes place in India over two months (usually April and May). It pays big money for the cricketing world’s superstars to form franchise teams for this period. The franchises are based in some of India’s biggest cities and the games draw huge numbers of dedicated fans. This is 21st Century cricket!

Thanks to ESPNcricinfo for the coverage.

There is so much to read:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics_(Bookshelf)

I should really get started.