Saturday, July 21, 2012

Two Weeks To Go

The view from the home office is far better than the one from the portakabins at the day job

Definitely at the tail end of the countdown now. Really excited at the prospects both in the UK/EU and overseas and it's definitely looking like I'm doing this at the right time.


Decided to have a full-on geeko™ and architectural review weekend and just sorted out a WCF service to simulate an endpoint for clients to consume. Seems like ditching XMLSOAP and creating TCP endpoints for SOA would be a good way forward, using MVC to generate the JSON for any client-side / async calls. Should separate concerns more fully and seems far, far easier than good old WebForms.

After looking at the performance model, I'm not impressed with Entity Framework, but.... the aim here isn't the kind of performance needed back at my last job. This application will never have to deal with 10k-25k transactions per second. Pushing prototypes out on a relatively small time-box is, so RAD is the acronym of the day. I covered a small performance topic area in an earlier post which I'm sure I'll extend over coming months.

LINQ to entities is quite nice, although suspicious at first it seems to hang together well - VS 2010 Ultimate is amazing, the debug & trace tools are immensely useful - moving between stack frames whilst trying to debug multiple threads is such a time saver.

Also taking a look at AMD for some of the more complex web-focused implementation. It goes way further than anything we have available to us in the framework as-is and potentially cuts the payload right down. We'll see.

Although the day has been focused on newer technologies I found an old one. With online movie rentals, Sky Movies and music services I didn't realise that I've not bought any Blu Rays in ages - never mind DVD's or CD's...Until I accidentally hit the open button on the hi-fi this morning. Obviously hasn't been used in over a year....











Thursday, July 19, 2012

Outstanding Performance

I was stood outside a branch of [well-known high-street bank] this morning, waiting for my appointment with their business advisor.

As I walked up the steps five minutes before official opening time I noticed a guy in a high-vis [insert name of telecomms firm here] jacket tapping on the glass doors. He looked pretty annoyed and I didn't know what to expect but he simply shrugs at me and says, "I'm just here to fix the alarm line."

Er. Ok. So. What?

I wasn't sure whether he meant what I thought he meant so asked him. Apparently he was actually there to fix the comms line for the branch alarm. No kidding. The staff in the branch just looked up for a moment when he tapped on the glass door, then got on with their work.

They called him to fix an urgent problem but left him on the doorstep for 30 mins.

He was the alarm guy. This isn't Gotham City or anything, this is a backwater town in the West Midlands.

I'd phoned one of this banks competitors two weeks ago (Natwest), and even dropped into one of their branches when they hadn't got back to me. I still haven't heard from them.

All the fun & games you've read about in the news that financiers and brokes were / are [allegedly] having here in the UK and you literally can't give your money away. And even if you could they couldn't store it securely.

I look nothing like this
I picked the wrong month to quit smoking.


Progress

Things are beginning to come together a bit more now.

Working with a flying buddy to define and develop an avionics tool for Windows Phone 7, although it's moving the right direction I think it'll probably take 3-4 months to create v1. Flight planning and avionics integration for light aircraft such as hang-gliders isn't your average topic so I'm glad I've got Nick to help me understand it.

Toying with WCF RESTful services and some JSON clients this afternoon - Although I've got 2008 R2 running in some VirtualBox clients it's really just a simulation for cloud storage and SaaS. If I can work out whether there's actually any point to doing it; I don't think the weather and flight planning features should be restricted by device storage / capacity.

My knowledge experts fleshing out some more ideas from the prototype I sent him. We currently have techo-joy: Using my Nokia WP to edit Office docs on the fly, SkyDrive hosting the storage so that we're sharing the same OneNote notebooks for the brainstorming and storyboards. I've got him to install MS Expression Blend 4 so he can get involved with the prototyping a little.

Looking at my Microsoft subscription, I still can't believe they're offering you the choice of either Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure. I keep getting more and more impressed with their products and direction; .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 look like great productivity tools for developers and architects alike. After looking at the Windows 8 preview I can't wait for the WP 8 SDK and associated tools to come out.

It's just such a shame there hasn't been the market take up of this third ecosystem in the mobile market - For business purposes nothing else I've seen comes close. If Surface and W8 support the same app framework as WP 8 it's going to be very easy to port software between device platforms. Just look at WP7 apps, Windows 8's likely technical direction and existing PC applications like Zune. All appear to run from the same platform which could mean that we're about to see realistic convergence of development environments and even underlying platforms.

It's amazing how quickly you can get distracted working at home though. For example, whilst writing this blog post I had a sudden urge to see what amazing beards are out there on the internet.


News beard Hunter beard Tolkien beard

N.B. I have nothing against beards or 'taches, it was just a distraction from problems with the WP emulator load sequence.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

See What You Can Do

Joined o2 as a business customer yesterday around 1pm.


o2 started having major network issues yesterday around 1pm.

I ended up missing calls from agents, prospective clients and Audi. As well as the customer forums and support pages timing out the customer service line was busy all night....Then they seemed to clock off at 9pm. I think we're all expecting a kick-ass apology.

Let's see what they can do.


Update 13th July

Phoned o2 business support (which seems to be the same as their regular support number) only to be told that the complaints department cannot be connected to directly. They don't have a phone number. It says a lot about a company if you can't directly speak to the complaints teams.

The woman taking my call told me she couldn't do anything to help me even after I asked what sort of compensation I could expect for the loss of phone and data connectivity for 24 hours. She also mentioned that the complaints team would be evaluating the level of compensation across all the complaints they're receiving.

She simply said that there was nothing she could do - I pointed out the level of support I used to get on Vodafone and the rough potential loss of earnings figure from just one day.... She then offered me a free months line rental. £17.50. I can understand her position and it's not her fault - there really is nothing she can do directly, and she'll have had many difficult conversations in the last 48 hours.

I just asked who I'd have to speak to in order to get my PAC code - I haven't put a nicotine patch on yet this morning but after I do that, I'm going to have a think about going back to the reliability and network coverage of Vodafone.

It's not just the problems with the network, it's the way that they've apparently dealt with their customers at o2 that really annoys me.

Update 19th July

Nicotine patch helped. This whole o2 situation is a one-off, I should know better as someone who works in a high-availability, high-pressure and low latency environment how difficult the job is start with.

The response from the complaints team was fairly defensive but neutral, which is to be expected - although hiding behind reasonable service clauses in the T's and C's is likely to annoy many customers.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Wings

A mate invited me to RIAT last weekend, I saw an old friend I hadn't seen in about 15 years.



It was the first aircraft I ever did aerobatics in and the first time I flew a light aircraft. It went out of  service the following year to be replaced by bulldog (also a lot of fun to fly). Prince Philip learnt to fly in one back in 1952 so it did pretty well for itself. I'll always remember AEF days in the chippy.

Couldn't see any of the stealth aircraft. They must be pretty clever.


Crackers

I've got this problem to solve from a crypto / maths problem solving website where they give you a simple black GIF image and tell you there's a message within it, concealed using steganography.

Spent a few hours writing a quick app to re-process the least significant bits of each pixel and run some tests in what I thought was the right direction.

Just realised it's a GIF, not a bitmap, so this is route is completely ineffective. 

That's all. Carry on.

Science-Fact

Picture the scene: We've all had a few and are sitting in a pub garden in Cheltenham, talking about everything from Formula 1 and business to fish tanks. We've all done it.

Just bear in mind the Guinness-science Influence Scale™ ... After about 2 pints, having a wild stab at some scientific solution or how some new technology works is a must. After four pints, you've got your honourary doctorate in your pocket amongst the subway loyalty cards, odd five dollar bills and Irish Punts. You're just not wearing your labcoat today.

After eight pints you're practically giving lectures to lesser minds at CERN and need not be bothered with actual sober facts.

So eventually conversation turns to the Higgs-Boson 'god' particle, detours off into socio-political discussion about the theocracy of the southern United States, eventually meandering back to this new particle discovery.

Now the explanations start; we're all firing wildly - [please imagine a vodka induced slur on top of commentary] "It's like, it's like, when you're building a house, and the fire department turn up. No. Wait. Mortar. Yeh. That's it."

One of our group points out that her dad is a retired particle physicist and may possibly know better than us mere mortals.

Asking an actual expert is a long shot, granted, but worth a punt. So to the question "Can you explain what  this higgs-boson god particle is in only one text message?"

He replies:

"As I haven't kept up with particle physics I can only give you a few basic principals and guess about the Higgs boson. All matter is made up of fermions and bosons. You can only have one fermion in any one energy state but you can have multiple bosons, so fermions (e.g. a proton) provide the structure and bosons provide the forces of nature (eg photons are the agent of electromagnetic force which is responsible for most of what we perceive in the world...chemistry, light, electronics, etc). Most particles have a mass which can be converted to energy (E=mc squared) and their conglomerate mass makes them subject to gravity, a very weak force but obviously effective on cosmological scales. The big question is where does mass come from and the Higgs boson was postulated as being responsible for giving particles their mass. Hope that helps.
Love Dad xx
Can I get back to cooking my risotto now?"

Every single person in the conversation then exclaims that they were right all along.

That avenue of conversation securely closed, we resolved grand unified theory and the definitive history of life itself over chasers.

Thanks to Sezzle and Das Fletchenberger for the great night out (and lack of hangover this time).