In this age of information inundation you must have a dashboard of some sort communicating ‘at-a-glance’ information about your daily work. There has been a lot of hype about software dashboards and all manner of tasteless devices have been implemented, often so they end up highlighting trivial information and hiding the vital statistics.

A software dashboard for your area of business is a critical top-level view on the health of your responsibilities providing key decision-making information and giving a context for passing information up to managers or clients. A well designed system will give you an edge, an X-Factor, over the competition, which will rapidly boost your reputation, effectiveness and productivity and may be something you have been missing up until now.

Much software is developed around an ever increasing feature list and whilst developers are working all-hours to satisfy this demand, very often the research necessary to make software truly effective goes amiss. This results in self-loathing users who moan bitterly about their computer illiteracy, when really the fault is in the bad design of the software.

Over the last decade or so, countless terabytes of data have been collected as industries began to understand the importance of accurate and reliable data. But much of this data, though correct and robust, is only accessible to those with the more esoteric tools of database access and programming techniques. But many Executives, who do not have the time nor inclination to learn these skills, are consequently in thrall to the right person who can mine the information from the data warehouse.

It is worth investing to ensure data is easily available to any stakeholder who needs it; in an effective, intuitive and memorable way.

We’ve installed Windows 7 on four machines here now. One on a big Opteron server and the rest on very desperate Toshiba Portege tablet PCs. By very desperate I mean they were barely usable. From new they ran so slowly and in such a cumbersome fashion that you could have forgiven the operators for taking a big hammer to them rather than using the more standard touch-screen interface.

I have heard some commentators alleging that the project managers for Windows Vista insisted that everything should be testable automatically rather than using people to test the programming. As a result, though Vista does not even pass the ’sniff’ test (i.e. as soon as you use it you can tell it’s off) it was released as if it were a great step forward for the industry. And in some ways it was, particularly in security and robustness. But you could tell it wasn’t built with human users in mind.

Things have changed philosophically with Windows 7. The name; nothing pretentious or romantic, just a minimalist number; and that, in some ways, tells us much about the new OS. They’ve tidied it up. Made it put the user first. Cleared out that sense of bloat so prevalent in Vista. Reduced the amount of resources it uses. The tablet PCs we installed it on now have new life, they are fast, responsive and are a pleasure to use. The Opteron server goes like a rocket.

After 10 years of amazing changes in hardware and software Microsoft have finally delivered for Windows; a sound OS which has been crafted with care.

At Terrabase we now offer PRINCE2:2009 Project Management in isolation of software development, meaning we will offer management of anything from house builds to the development of an international software solution.

In our newsletter, in order to give a brief example of a PRINCE2 principle, we gave this overview of Product Based Planning. Let us know if you have any comments:

1. Identify the products your project is going to make.

For example, if you are building a house, you may want some solar panels however you could split the ‘Product’ into three smaller products (e.g. List of Solar Panel suppliers, Delivered Solar Panels, Solar Panels fitted to house) which makes it easier to plan.

2. Work out the order you need to make your products.

In our example we would create ‘List of Solar Panel Suppliers’ first, then ‘Delivered Solar Panels’ then ‘Fitted Solar Panels’

3. Then you work out the activites required to create each product.

To make the ‘List of Solar Panel Suppliers’ you may do a web search and make some phone calls.

Using this approach of ‘Product Based Planning’ you can quickly work out what you need to make, how to split larger tasks into smaller ones, what order things need to be done in and what needs to be done to complete your project.

Included in your plans you should end up with two diagrams; a Product Breakdown Structure, and a Product Flow Diagram. Search for these terms online and you’ll find plenty more about them.

To an outside observer it must look like we all do pretty much the same job; sit in-front of screens with keyboard and mouse and move bits of data around.

This probably makes us all experts in some way for knowing what we want our computers to do, and what we don’t want them to do. The trouble is we don’t necessarily have a clear way of expressing that and making it a reality.

If you’re convinced you’ve got the perfect computer solution for you, your organisation or the world you can now quickly and easily bring that idea into reality, and the first step might be to follow our suggestion of using Balsamiq Mock-ups which allows even the most technophobic person to create the key beginnings of a software solution.

It’s not our software, nor do we make any money from plugging it, but we do hope that once you’ve made draft designs for your solution you’ll give us a chance to put in a bid for building it for you. Or if it’s a fantastic concept, perhaps we can come to an arrangement for how to partner up.

You can watch a video of Balsamiq Mock-ups in action here

Balsamiq is incredibly simple to use, like a very easy and prescriptive drawing program. You’ll be up and running designing interfaces almost immediately with the difficult work being creative rather than technical.

I was listening to some podcasts recently where the contributors were talking about recruitment and how so many of us have got it wrong. The gist of the argument was that, in his company, everyone was paid the same amount for the same job. He did not allow people to negotiate better rates, or employ people merely because they sold themselves better at interview.

He was saying that so much of the interview process meant companies hired good negotiators rather than people who were good for the job being considered.

This particularly applies in software. The best programmers, for lots of reasons, seem to find human relationships far more trying than the relationships they hold through their computers, and an employer who takes someone on because they sell themselves well at interview, may not get the best programmer.

This would apply to other professionals and certainly anything technical, yet we’ve all experienced those technical companies full of smart looking young people, who can talk a good patter and use all the right sales terms, but cannot make the systems work. Whereas some truly creative individuals may be left in their bedrooms, hacking away merrily, to subsequently come up with the next Google, Facebook or Microsoft. That geek could have been yours.

As it says in the good book (well, on a T-shirt anyway); The Geek shall inherit the Earth

You’re passionate about your work! So are all your colleagues! And all your staff!

Well crafted software can take lessons from the games industry to bring out the passion lurking within you for the more mundane parts of your day. Games are designed to be instantly usable and to bring the player up to speed automatically. They give feedback to let you know you’re doing well and that you’re learning as a competent and capable human being might. They give you trophies to reassure you that you’re the best, that you do indeed ‘kick *ss’.

Well designed business software can learn many lessons from the gaming industry to enhance its productivity. Some key aspects of excellent software include:

* it understands your level of expertise and gives you feedback to let you know when you’ve improved
* as soon as you use it you’re able to take advantage of its main features and not get caught up in configuration minutiae
* it has a simple, practical and considerate process for getting novice users up to speed
* rewards (badges, credibility points, global score tables) to keep reminding people that one day everyone will realise just how good they are
* a responsive, fun-to-use and familiar user interface

An example: Stackoverflow, which we have mentioned in previous articles, use a combination of credibility points and ‘badges’ which you earn by interacting with the software. Obviously, you never need motivating(!?) but your staff, or colleagues will find this kind of feature a powerful driver.

Software systems such as these are becoming less exclusive and available for the more discerning organisation, and when you consider the amount of expensive wasted hours they can reduce, the pay-back time can be very small indeed.

So, you’re looking at your computer. You may well be skim reading this blog just to see if anything interests you. You are clearly the brightest part of the relationship between you and your computer. Will this annoying, humming Orac-like box eventually become more intelligent than you? What is the Singularity, why should I know about it and what’s it got to do with Black Holes?

The theory goes, that once computers have greater intelligence than you, they will conceive of better computer systems than we could ever imagine, and those better systems could in turn conceive of even more power. A self-re-enforcing cycle will have begun, an event horizon which we cannot see beyond because of our limited, mere-human understanding!

Now for some skepticism. Just like some software developers will always say 6-8 weeks when they don’t know how to do something, the ‘Singularity’ is always some 30 years away. I do not believe in the Singularity.

Here’s why:

1. Human intelligence and creative ability is understood far less than that in computer systems, by a huge factor. We glibly talk about computers being more intelligent than man without knowing what man’s intelligence is. Computers have for decades been better at manipulating numbers than us, so in that test, they have been more intelligent for years. To be more intelligent must they be more intelligent in all things? Or, are there some key things they must be better at?

2. Artificial Intelligence has made no real improvement for years. If artificial intelligence programmers were just about to create a system more intelligent than you, then the simple application of voice recognition on your phone would work, right? I suspect the big gains in AI have already been made and AI does not produce machines that can in any way think like you. The closest we programmers get is clippy(!), surely the AI proponents have learnt their lesson.

3. AI believers will often talk about the Turing Test and point to this as to whether we should treat the computer as alive or not. We have AI systems which have greater intelligence than certain insects, or certainly bacteria. Are these systems alive in the same sense as the insects? Clearly not. Then, if such an unfeasible thing as a computer that is more intelligent than a human, were possible, would it somehow become alive where the less capable AI system is not? Is this purely a judgement call? No, the computer is not alive and nor is the software. Less intelligent people are not less alive than more intelligent ones. To say so is to denigrate humanity and try to fit it into a rather inhumane little box.

There could be some fundamental reason why AI will never exceed human intelligence, or perhaps the Singularity will always remain 30 years away; or perhaps the AI proponants are right, but they’ve got a heck of a lot of work to do to convince me.

In the past I have found out the hard way what a problem it can be when a machine dies. You’ve dutifully backed-up all the data and think you’ll be laughing happy if the worst happens, then the worst does happen. So you think yikes, better get hold of another machine and restore all my data, or, as is often the case, the hard drive has failed on an otherwise perfectly good machine, so you reload Windows and get ready to do the restore. The restore works perfectly, as you knew it would. But hang on, there’s a problem. Of course, that little tool I use for tweaking those particular type of files is missing, better re-install. Argh, the settings are all wrong on this piece of software. This shortcut is always here, where is it now? I always organise my mail like this, how can I find anything?

I have found, in the past, it’s easily the equivalent of 2 days work to get a machine reconfigured the way you want it, and this process takes weeks of discovery. And, you discover the missing configurations and tools just when the pressure is on for a deadline or when the workload is too great, so you end up pulling out hair in clumps.

One solution to this is, of course, to image your system drive. I use DIXML, an excellent little tool which I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. This is great if the hard drive fails and you merely want to restore your OS on the same machine. If you want to use another machine then imaging is not an ideal solution and restoring an image onto a different machine creates all sorts of hidden little problems.

So what I have done is, after setting up and working on one machine for a good few weeks/months, I move over to another machine and get working on that, all looking at the same set of data. Again, the same configuration issues occur, but, if I am under pressure I can return to the first machine to get the job done quickly, and I know I’m likely to have all the software available to hand. It costs a bit more to have the extra licenses, but not a great deal as we tend to need the extra machines at some point anyway, and the time and frustration saved in the event of a disaster is well worth it.

This happened over the summer. Water got into my development laptop and killed it completely. Deadlines were looming and my current development projects were on it; IDE all configured to how I like it. No problem, swing out another machine, previously configured and tweaked, restore the data, and hey presto, cost me less than 15 minutes and no hair pulling.

I’ve got to get another machine configured now, but I’ll be able to do that in my own time.

Here at Terrabase towers we have long been looking for a development environment which will allow us to create rich user interfaces across all platforms and which does not require an Internet connection. Flash seemed to offer us all we needed but we have found the programming side of Flash rather clunky and frustrating meaning applications took far to long to create. We concluded that Flash must have been built by designers, with the programming aspect strapped on as a side thought. However, Silverlight might offer us everything that Flash does without the clunky programming environment, and we’d be able to leverage (there’s that word) our existing .NET programming skill base into it. We’re going to start this investigation by building a beta of DevApp 3.0 in Silverlight.

DevApp is a self-contained application which has very little interaction with the platform it’s hosted on. However, what will really interest me is how well Silverlight can interact with physical hardware within the environment in which it is being used. For example scanners, local databases, links to other office software on the network. I am hoping Silverlight is not merely another way of putting slick animations on the web. At this point it seems that Silverlight is fairly well sandboxed into the web type environment, but if we can easily overcome the security risks of being able to write to the local file system etc Silverlight could become our platform of choice.

Our ideal solution would be if Silverlight can let us manage versions remotely so no more does the user have to do installs or copy over updates, whenever an update is available I would like that update to appear without any effort on the part of the user. I would like to be able to break the security rules separating the browser from the local machine, but in a way that does not compromise the use of Silverlight as a web-based content delivery system. I will keep you posted as I discover more.

Terrabase recently presented the Exonet exotic fuels retailer network concept to; the bio-fuel producers of Wales, DEFRA and various industry bodies at the invite of the Welsh Assembly Government. Many thanks to them and the Cardiff Hilton for their hospitality.

The Exonet is a way to accumulate the wisdom and expertise of the exotic fuel producers into an Internet based computer system so that the whole market can operate as smoothly as possible.

What does this mean in reality?

Well, here’s an example, the production of biodiesel creates an abundance of ‘waste’ plastic from the containers the oil is shipped around in. Many producers do not know there are companies who will take that waste plastic from them as a raw material for other production processes. The Exonet, however, does know this, so once a delivery of oil comes in, the companies who want plastic are instantly notified. Without further ado, the biodiesel producer has a buyer for their waste plastic.

This kind of knowledge is stored by the system so that the people involved in the various parts do not need to keep up with the best ways of dealing with the issues. The system is self-tuning, so as new innovations come along they can be programmed into it and everyone signed up to the network benefits.

With the right funding we hope to see Exonet implemented across the UK, linking together retailers, fuel producers, waste processors, waste oil producers etc. We will also apply an independently assessed quality and ethical standard so customers know the fuel will work well in their vehicles and is sourced in such a way as to minimise harm to people and the environment.

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