I don’t often review films, but I think someone has to cut through the sycophantic hype and say it: Quantum of Solace is c**p.
This isn’t a Bond film, it’s like a bad entry in the Bourne series. Where is the elegance, the charm we should expect of Bond? Bond films have always traditionally leavened the action with humour and beauty. Both were spectacularly missing from this episode.
If you’re lucky enough to own either a waterproof camera, or a waterproof housing for your digital camera, you’ll have experienced the problem of trying to correct for the extreme blue cast of shots taken underwater.
The problem is that there’s little reliable advice on how to correct this. There are a few articles on the web, but I haven’t found any to provide a reliable and repeatable process which can be applied to “casual” underwater photography.
After a fair amount of research and experimentation, here’s my analysis of the options available, and a suggested technique which I have developed and which I haven’t seen documented anywhere else.
I’ve now created a separate category for photography-related blog posts, so if you’re interested you can track these separately
I’ve just spent two days at the 2008 Enterprise Architecture Conference in London. It was a very high quality event, with a range of speakers covering topics from pragmatic analysis techniques to how to manage knowledge through the life of NASA’s Mars programme, more than any single working lifetime.
Overall there was much less focus on technology (read SOA and modelling tools) this year, and a vigorous and renewed focus on business alignment and business architecture, which, if we can deliver, potentially places architecture where it should be, as the business’s agent.
But there’s a problem. Good business analysis is fundamental to this, yet several delegates bemoaned the current lack of good business analysts. User organisations often struggle to articulate and abstract their needs, and this feeds into all downstream processes. Modelled requirements are an increasing rarity, poorly substituted by imprecise verbal statements in Word or PowerPoint.
The problem is, of course, not unique to analysts, and may have common cause with the equal lack of architects. Senior architects and analysts both tend to have several big birthdays under the belt, and many learned their trade as developers, gaining both practical method skills and the experience of turning ideas into working code. (The majority of exceptions have other “making it work” experience, such as building networks or running data centres.)
But in the current world of ERP packages and large-scale outsourcing, many organisations no longer build anything themselves. The live classroom has been thrown away.
I have worked with a number of good, keen young analysts, but most work for large supplier companies who still have both well-funded training programmes and the breadth of work to build experience and a broad skill set. These guys and girls can do a good job, but at the risk of higher costs and potential conflicts of interest.
We already know that this may reduce organisations’ ability to ensure the right solution to their needs, or assure its quality. Recent observations suggest that organisations who forgoe getting their hands dirty in IT will also suffer an increasing difficulty in creating a clear, concise and structured statement of those needs themselves.
This is a cracking thriller, which will draw you in quickly and keep you turning the pages through to the final resolution. At its heart, it’s an "innocent accused of great wrongdoing on the run" tale, reminiscent of The 39 Steps, but set solidly in the noughties against the background of international high finance. This background is what makes it so intriguing, as the author intelligently and clearly explains how we have created markets in which a few men, motivated mainly by greed, can harm currencies, whole economies, or even conceivably the whole banking system itself.
I’ve just added a new section to my photo gallery, and an article describing my recent “Grand Circle” tour of the Southwestern USA: what worked, what didn’t, and how to avoid sleep deprivation and scurvy!
The brain-dead backup function of Windows Vista is enormously annoying. There are known ways to get good old ntbackup working, but they have their limitations. Read this article about my attempts to get round some of those limitations.
I’ve always had a strong interest in photography, both as a practical tool to record our experiences in life, and as an art form. Fans of the Coppertrees Calendar will know how I’ve had great fun capturing friends, family and travel over the years.
I’ve also always had great admiration for those photographers whose work can really move the emotions, particularly the great landscape photographers like Ansel Adams. Taking good representational photographs is hard enough, but establishing a composition which can both emotionally inspire the viewer and satisfy the critics is even harder.
Over the last year or so I’ve been rediscovering photography with a Digital SLR, and on my new photography pages you’ll find some of my efforts, plus (in coming weeks) some hints, tips and tools for the D-SLR photographer.
I’ve been musing lately on why we in IT insist on forgetting so much valuable knowledge. I don’t know whether it’s because of our youth-obsessed culture and our focus on the newest and best, because of our tendency to prioritise on-the-job over traditional learning, or whether there’s simply too much in the “architect’s book of knowledge” (ABOK), and we all have to focus on the new to keep up.
I explore two very different examples: the value of understanding RS232 in this 3G+ world, and some recent discussions on service reliability, both of which can be resolved using some quite old knowledge…. (Read More…)
The accept/reject assessments of the Sarbanes-Oxley world are far too binary, as they don’t allow an architect to record his true feelings about a piece of work. I have therefore decided that in future I will record my assessments using what I have named the “Tevye Scale of Approval”
This book does two important things – it challenges the reader to really think about the causes of things, and it makes modern economic thinking interesting and accessible to the mass audience. It’s also a good, fun read, and for all these reasons it should be applauded.
In this book Steven Levitt develops ideas about a number of aspects of economic and social development which challenge received wisdom. He then both challenges traditional analyses, and offers solid support for his theories using detailed analysis of a number of unusual but highly reliable data sources.
It is historical fact that Sir Isaac Newton held senior positions at the royal mint from the late 1690s, and with his assistant Christopher Ellis he was involved in detecting and prosecuting numerous offences during a turbulent period in which Britain replaced its money.
Philip Kerr has taken this Newton and his assistant, and turned them into Holmes and Watson, placing them at the centre of a serious intrigue involving financial crimes, political battles and religious atrocities.
It’s a brilliant period piece which explains a great deal I didn’t understand about Restoration Europe. Like his other historical novels Kerr has also carefully used the language of the time, writing in a style reminiscent of Newton’s contemporaries such as Pepys, but always readily understandable.
Some of the period detail is quite gruesome, and can be little uncomfortable. This is not a book for the young or seriously squeamish. However the content is appropriate given the quite dark nature of the story.
I haven’t enjoyed all of Kerr’s more recent works. For example "The Shot", which was a similar kind of period piece, was just too complicated. I have no such complaints about "Dark Matter" – a brilliant historical thriller.
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