I’ve been very happy with my 15″ Toshiba Satellite Pro, new in early 2009, but recently it’s been showing some signs of reaching the end of its economic life, plus the way I now develop my photographs is very compute-intensive, and a faster device would speed that activity up considerably. I also find that the relatively slow single 2.5″ disk leads to very slow startup times and virtual machine operations, both of which slow down my professional use.

Thus my first decision was that my new device should support an Intel Core-i7 processor and 64-bit Windows, at least 8GB RAM and ideally have solid state disks, at least for the boot drive.

The next driver was forced on me by the vagaries of the market. Prior to 2007, most laptops had a 4:3 (=16:12) aspect ratio, but suddenly the market decided that all laptops should be “widescreen”, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. This was great for viewing movies, but meant that for a given diagonal size the new devices were more than 10% smaller than before. Not much good if you’re working on text documents (usually of vertical orientation), or digital images with <3:2 aspect ratio, which is most of them… That’s one reason why my next laptop went from 12″ to 15″, just to maintain the vertical size of the display.

Now they’ve done it again! Almost all new laptops have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means a further reduction of about 8% screen height for a given diagonal size. This is a right royal pain in the neck, particularly as it is typically accompanied by an increase in pixel resolution, which combine to make text and icons much smaller, just as I’m getting to that age where my eyes are starting to change, and slightly larger text would work better. There are other disadvantages too: a given laptop model is around 8% longer than it’s predecessor, so it may not even fit in the same bag.

This all appears to be driven by fashion, and targeted solely at those who watch movies on their laptops. The goal appears to be “true HD”, and hang the consequences. After some brainstorming, I can only think of three things short wide screens are good for:

1. Watching films
2. Browsing spreadsheets or other tables with lots of columns
3. Working on photographic panoramas

On the other hand, they are much worse for:

1. Reading and writing documents (most pages are portrait orientation, and the human eye has problems tracking across very long lines of text)
2. Developing – you want to see plenty of lines of code and diagnostics, and most lines of well-written code are quite short
3. Working on any normal image, especially if it’s portrait orientation
4. Working with any application which has multiple top and bottom toolbars, or a Microsoft “ribbon”
5. Everything else…

So where does this put my laptop choice? After rather more agonising than usual, I’ve gone for a desktop, or should that just be “desk”, replacement system , an Alienware M17x. This is very fast, has the usual stunning Alienware looks, and importantly supports dual disks, with a highly-rated quality screen. The screen is just slightly taller than the Toshiba, but the laptop is a full 5cm wider, and over 1kg heavier. It’s a good computer, but portability is definitely down a notch. The thing which makes it feasible, of course, is the iPad, which now fills the role of the portable, meeting-friendly launch to the Alienware cruiser. Admittedly carrying two devices increases the weight of my computer bag, but usually only until I have decanted the laptop into its base location for the day, and maybe it justifies the weight training…

Thus far, I’m impressed with the beast. CPU performance is certainly as expected, and I’m pleasantly surprised by battery life, at almost 5 hours in light usage. This makes up for the fact that the main power supply is about the size of a house brick, and although the laptop will run off a smaller Dell supply, it won’t charge the battery. On the disk side I’ve installed a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive as the secondary data drive, and that seems to be working well, but my first attempt to install the SSD for the boot drive didn’t work, so that’s still pending. What is annoying is that like all my previous laptops, the LCD panel is nowhere near correct colour calibration with the default profile, so I have to sort that out before serious photographic use. Further updates will follow…

To wrap up, here’s the potted history of my laptops since I started buying my own, and why:

• 1999-2001: Compaq Presario with 12″ screen. Worked for VB development and general office use, but slow
• 2001-4: Dell Latitude LS400 with  10″ screen. I got the “light, portable” bug, and this little laptop fitted the bill, even if I did have to haul a separate CD drive and floppy drive around. It was good on the move, but never quick and I worked off an external screen when I could.
• 2004-6: Toshiba Portege M200 with 12″ screen. The first decent convertible tablet, great in meetings (in tablet mode), and decent for development although you had to be patient…
• 2006-9: Toshiba Portege M400: The only time I’ve done a straight upgrade, this was basically the M200 with built in CD and a dual core processor. CPU performance was fine, I/O was very limited. However, the thing which really started to frustrate me was the difficulty of getting accurate colours on the screen.
• 2009-11: Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, 15″ screen. With the change of aspect ratios, I had to go to 15″ to get a screen as “tall” as the 12″ of the Porteges. This workhorse has served very well, it’s fairly light, and only the most extreme image processing or virtual machine work exceeded its abilities.
• 2011-: Alienware M17x. Fast, elegant, and just about preserves the important vertical dimenion of the screen! Also heavy and expensive… The jury’s out.

Has anyone else noticed or suffered from this odd trend?

A little research later, and it transpires that @DignitasLtd is the Twitter handle of a software consultancy in the West Midlands. I haven’t confirmed it yet, but I suspect it may be someone I work with, or have worked with, at National Grid.

Panic over, but I wonder who else has this problem. Is there an @BadLuckAndTrouble or an @DeathAndDestruction out there?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

OK, I know that not all films and plays involve trains, but enough do that this is a surprisingly powerful classification system.

A couple of years ago we went to see a performance of Chekov’s Three Sisters. While I may be oversimplifying things slightly, most of the second act is the sisters talking about getting on a train. I forget the details, I think one wants to move away from the family to Moscow. I can’t even remember whether she actually gets on the train or not. Despite the fact that it was a good performance by several famous British actors, many of whose other work I love, I was bored out of my skull. Frances and I were both so affected by this, that we now have an in-joke reaction to any mention of Chekov where one of us immediately says “just get on the —— train”.

But then I realised just how many of our favourite films do involve someone getting on a train. The key difference is that there is never any debate whatsoever about the need to do so. The challenge is how. You may have to drive your Audi off a bridge (Transporter 3), jump from a helicopter (Under Siege 2, Broken Arrow), shoot lots of bad guys first (3.10 to Yuma), jump from a camel (Sahara), talk the bad guys down (Pelham 123), jump from a car (Unstoppable), quietly murder some of the good guys (From Russia with Love), jump from another train (Unstoppable again), hide in a mailbag (Live and Let Die), run several Manhattan blocks (Die Hard with a Vengeance). You get the picture, and I haven’t mentioned Speed, Batman Begins, Goldeneye…

So do you like stories about talking about getting on a train? Or those about doing it?

On Barbados recently, we were trying without much success to find Fisher Ponds Great House, a widely-recommended ex plantation house, now dining experience. This was not well signposted, and although we knew we were probably less than a mile away, we were getting progressively more lost.

Deciding to swallow my male pride, I spotted a police car heading towards us, and flagged it down. My request for directions drew an unusual reply: “sorry sir, I’m looking for that myself”.

Fortunately at this point Tonto rode to the rescue, in the form of a young lad on a bicycle, who when asked did know the way. So I followed the lad, and the cop followed us. At least, he did up to the point where he saw a sign and took the initiative. We followed the youngster, who directed us to the proper gate and earned $2. We were amused to see the policeman waiting at the locked back gate.

So if you want to know the way, don’t ask a p’liceman – find a bright lad on a bike!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Beachy Head Dr,Bel Air,Barbados

Oddly, although the wonderful “Waterfall 2006” web site still exists, I couldn’t find DDD on it. So I checked with Google and found a couple of references to non-ironic (as far as I can tell) papers on the subject. Yes, some people seem to think that document-driven development is a good idea! Now I might be prepared to concede this for applications where documents are themselves the key business objects (some legal processes, for example), but as far as I can see this isn’t what those papers were referring to. If that’s the case, they really haven’t understood…

What I did find, however, was a wonderful blog post from a few years ago with the excellent title “Asshole Driven Development”, in which Scott Berkun has collected a wide variety of development and project management anti-patterns. It takes a while to read through all the comments, but doing so is quite rewarding, if mainly as a form of therapy. At least you know you’re not alone.

The list is pretty comprehensive, but despite over 300 contributions, I couldn’t see my own bête noir. A lot of large corporate organisations now seem to follow a governance methodology I term IAKOM (the “It’s A Knock Out Method”), known on the continent as la Methode Jeux Sans Frontieres (MJSF). Those of a certain age will remember a series of hilarious television games in which relatively simple tasks (such as carrying a bucket of water) were rendered impossible by the imposition of progressive handicaps and obstacles (such as carrying the bucket up a greased slope against a rubber bungy while wearing clown shoes and being pelted with wet sponges).

Some IT governance is like that. Just when you think you might have a fair run at doing something, a new governance hurdle or document check is inserted into the process. It wouldn’t be so bad if it all made sense, but sometimes it feels almost capricious. Some organisations are more enlightened than others, but as a general industry trend it’s inescapable.

I don’t know what the answer is. If you do, let me know!

In the words of the Tao of Lao-Tsu, “If you want to control something, you must first let it go free”. Big organisations just don’t get this, because too many people want to hold onto their favourite control mechanism. Agility is a culture, and trying to do it inside a culture of formal control is very difficult. Occasionally you can succeed in spite of the controllers, and that’s a real achievement.

Now, I think there’s a danger they are swinging the opposite way. Yesterday, in the manual for my new Canon 7D, I found a word I never expected to find in a camera user manual: “hereinafter”. Correctly used as well, but is this quite the language we expect of a user manual for the masses?

I remember the grand old days of Windows 3.0. This was Microsoft’s third attempt to deliver a window-based environment on the PC, and had a load of technical innovations which showed that this could at last be a reality. In practice, it was a bit flaky, with some enormous frustrations (does anyone else remember the old File manager?!!)

Then came Windows 3.1. This was solid, fast, and worked so well that some people are still using it.

Windows 95 introduced a radically overhauled architecture, with the object-oriented user interface we all know and love, and a much cleverer structure for common components like drivers and communication components. In practice, it was a bit flaky, with the odd enormous frustration.

Then came Windows 98. This was solid, fast, and worked so well that some people are still using it.

Is anyone else spotting a pattern here?

Windows 2000 introduced a load of technical innovations, merging the “NT” and “9x” code bases into a single workstation line and a separate server stream based on the same core. Interestingly, although this worked pretty well, I even caught Microsoft salesmen saying to corporate clients “there’ will be an update out next year – wait for that”.

That was Windows XP. This was solid, fast, and worked so well that some people are still using it. I still run it on my laptops, although the big beast now runs Windows 7 (and Frances’ laptop manages on Vista).

If you look at the history of other Microsoft products (Word, for example), you see the same pattern: an “architectural innovation” release, followed by two or three consolidation releases which build on the new architecture and make it stable. Any the reality is that the same is equally true for many other software suppliers – see my recent postings on Bibble for another example.

So here’s my threefold confident prediction:

1. Windows 8 will introduce a load of new technology, which will move the world of computing on. It will also be full of frustrations and most people will hate it. The critics will pan it and explain that it’s the end of Microsoft and computing as we know it. There will generally be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
2. As a result, some people will still be using Windows 7 in 2020. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few are still also using XP, 98 and 3.1!
3. Windows 8.1/9 will be solid, fast and people will love it.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you!

Even better, “I and I own comments here man” is also deemed fine!

I may explore this further – be afraid, be very afraid…

A few years ago I toyed with replacing my trusty PDA, phone and digital camera with a combined unit. That was not a success, and I ended up with a second hand SmartPhone, an iPaq 4700 PDA, and the T-Mobile MDA as my car satnav (a job it does acceptably). You can read an analysis of my trials and tribulations, entitled “Annoyance-Based Technology Selection”.

Last year, with my old mobile phone wearing out, I tried again, with depressingly similar results. Someone once said “Those who do not learn from History are condemned to repeat it.” Why didn’t I follow this excellent advice?

Why you need architects, in song and dance.

Enjoy!

This rather tongue in cheek piece was inspired by a “group therapy” session at the IRM/Meta group Enterprise Architecture Conference 2004.