On a plane flying back from Boston (Mass.), eaten second breakfast of the day, watched a bit of "Where the Wild Things Are", annoying, fractious kid who needs therapy (or a sharp slap) and a bunch of needy, fractious rather dopey creatures, disappointed, switched it off, didn't even care to see if he was reconciled with his poor benighted mother, bored, listening to Muse, need a coffee, some battery life in laptop, here goes...

Recently, I was working with a colleague who exclaimed "You've got to be a professor to understand that page" when looking at a consulting 2x2.   Indeed there are some great pages in the world that capture some key thoughts or concepts so concisely that they can be expressed just on one page, but need a voice-over to talk through the layers of meaning embedded, maybe like one of those pointillist paintings or a fractal montages that is made up of pictures that are made up of pictures...(but perhaps not a Dali-esque or Picassoid other world view?).

This diagram below (not the one being commented on, I hasten to add), captures the entire eco-system of outsourced application development on both technical & commercial dimensions, ranging from the narrow individual project up to the strategic vendor relationship level


Very clever, of course, but it really deserves to be supported by 20 following pages to unpeel the layers and break out the key concepts, etc., etc.

(oohh, a quick round of orange juice...)

But it looks like this when you morph it Dali-style...



...but that is just plain silly, of course. (but an excuse to try out the Virtual Plastic Surgery Software, why don't you give it a go on one of your favourite photos, and make your self look like your favourite film star, or the Bride of Wildenstein...)

Battery dying....break to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine, just another load of shouting and uber-angst

Down on the ground now...

However, there are some charts that are very easy to understand, but they do convey a message that is counter-intuitive, and so take a while to get your head round.

This chart is a good example



This shows the output of a model of software development productivity which paradoxically shows that total coding cost falls whilst the developer daily rate increases.  This is, of course, quite counter to the expectations of typical Aggressive Sourcing gigs which tend to focus on bashing down the daily rates.   The Old Wives and proverb writers of yore new about this since the principle of "Pay peanuts and get Monkeys" is well known.

This is what they used to say, but I do wonder if this phrase might be considered racist in these days of off-shoring, say maybe it should now be "Pay Peanuts, get Numpties" or something like that...

The twist in the tail on this analysis is that in the formula P x Q, where P is Daily Rate, and Q is the number of days needed to complete the project, some people (yes, them) are not aware that Q is inversely proportional to P.  This is the essence of the move to Agile development methods, which favours people over process (amongst other things).

Finally, I also offer you the 2x2 I wrote all by myself one day after an afternoon's presentation by one of my erstwhile colleagues, a quite (self) important and entitled sort of chap who gave a long presentation from which I came out reeling with "Framework overload", having survived the discourse from the evolution of Sailing Ships to Dell's policy build to order policy and positive cash to cash resulting...

So I drew this...



So there you go...

I recently had  to to go to Kent at short notice, and since I was heading into relatively unknown territory on a long journey, I zero'd my satnav trip details, a rare event.

When I got home, I flipped to the trip detail screen and was tickled to see this trip record shown below...



The distance looks right,  but behold,  my Max Speed was apparently 242 mph - was I driving a Bugatti Veyron (top speed 258 mph)?  - I think not!

This makes you think about how useful is GPS data as the foundation of a national road pricing system  - the answer is probably in chocolate teapot territory!

Many people think that a satellite based road pricing system would work roughly like this...


...with the satellites somehow detecting the position of your car and then transmitting the data to the Big Computer that adds up the price of the  the roads you have been sitting on, and then issuing a bill.

But of course the satellites don't detect the position of the car at all, it is the Black Box in the car that does all the work, and so a GPS-satellite based road pricing system would really work something like this....


...with the car working out where it thinks it is, and then (somehow, by mobile phone, maybe) sending the data to the Big Computer that...well, you get the picture, don't you...

If such a system were built, then once people twig the way things work, the little Black Boxes will be wearing tin-foil hats - to block the incoming satellite signal, and then to stop the mobile phone signal going out; result: No road travel data = no payment.

 So the Power-That-Be would have design some sort of method of enforcement.  What better way than using the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras that are sprouting all over the place.  

All you need to do is cross-relate the journey data received from the in-car black boxes with the location of sightings according to the cameras.   The system would look something like this...



Thinking a bit harder than maybe my satnav did, then you can imagine many points of error:

• confused satnav systems
• lost distances travelled in tunnels, city canyons, and inside little tin foil hats
• black box failures, including maybe "failures" induced by sharp, stabbling screwdrivers
• failed/partial uploads of trip records
• misrecognised number plates
• cars and drivers missing from the database
• and more...

Aaaaaaaaaagh, a merry feast of error compounding upon error, a veritable panoply of tainted data, a concatenation of absurdity!  

Multiplying up the error probabilities in this ordure-filled pipeline, and you will get a success probability in the mid-seventies percent.   Not good...

I have previously mentioned the risk profile of Government IT projects so I won't bang that particular drum again here, but you can always look here to remind yourself...

My trip would have earned me about 18-points on my licence, a big fine, a 5-year ban, and probably 6 months in chokey for apparently travelling at 182 mph faster than the National Speed limit.  

So if/when we end up with a GPS-powered road pricing system, expect the worst!

Footnote:  the charming and naively executed diagrams in this post where brought to you courtesy of a DigiScribble pen.  It calls itself " The Mobile Digital Note-Taker", but using it underlined for me the fatal flaw of all write-only devices...you can't see what it thinks you wrote until you upload - too late, way too late

The world of Information Technology overflows with its arcane jargon and acronyms, but it is by no means, the sole offender of creating inpenetrable and mysterious language.

I was recently driving along and saw this displayed on the dot-matrix on the back of a bus...



...and whilst admiring the rendition of the letters on the display and pondering dot densities and the like, I then spent precious minutes attempting to work out what it was actually trying to say, and where was the bus going?

There is a lot of talk about reducing street clutter at one moment, and then, again, increasing confusion within the driver's mind to make them slow down

coincidentally, Hans Monderman , the proponent of "Shared Space", died earlier this year, but that is another tangent

but this new FLA certainly did the latter, and none of the former for me!

As I overtook and looked in my mirror, Eureka, the bus was heading for the depot, and proudly displaying "Sorry, Not In Service" on the long display at the front.

Yes, the transport types have invented a new word-thing and foisted on us unsuspecting general public who really didn't need it and shouldn't be spending our time working out what it means. This particular word-thing should really only be used amongst consenting transport types and anoraks, and I don't really mind if the bus people use it as a verb,

"OK, guys, we'll SNIS this bus and bring on the relief"

just as long as they don't do it in front of the children.

In my humble opinion, this display below would have worked better, and would probably have meant more to a large part of the world that uses the Roman alphabet...

Over the weekend, I was very nearly forced to hand out an "Unhappy Voucher"  after a foray into Mobile madness.


Not quite in Norse saga territory, but after getting my daughter's mobile phone replaced three times (cracked keys, random turning-off, etc., etc..), I finally gave in, consigned the not so old phone to Silicon Heaven, bought a new model on some cute subsidised deal, put the SIM in the Box of Many Identities, and handed over the new toy.  

So imagine my surprise, when,  a week later, I was ambushed whilst staggering to the kettle for the first coffee of the day: "My phone's dead, the display has gone"..... I said "Hnnh"

So there I was, standing in the shop, bristling..........it had all kicked off after the Sales Slug had rejected  my reasonable replacement request, and I asked to see the Manager, and  Dismal turned up...

Me: ....phone broken.....screen blank......Slug......packaging......not necessary.....in the bin.  Please could you replace it for me?
Dismal: Sorry,  we can't replace the phone without all the original packaging
Me: ...gone in the bin ...
Dismal: Well we can't replace the phone without the original packaging
Me: Yes, you can
Dismal: No we can't
Me: Yes you can
..
Dismal: We could go on like this all day.  You're not listening to me
Me: Yes, I am, I just think you're wrong
Dismal: Are you calling me a liar?  - Great customer service, this, I thought
Me: No, just mistaken

(Dismal taps on keyboard)

Dismal: I've typed here - advised customer of policy, blah, blah, .no packaging, need to order a handset and battery - OK so they can replace the phone without the packaging, but he's going to make me wait a long  time

(Tapping, more tapping, grunt, much more tapping, visit to the stockroom, more tapping, another visit to the stockroom - comes back with new phone in box looking unhappy)

Dismal: We haven't any handsets and batteries in stock, so I will have to take a new phone out of its box and send back the old one...

Yesssss!

Humanity - 1, Forces of Customer Service Evil - Nil

First an earthquake, now a White Easter, if I were superstitious, I should be expecting some further meteoro- geo- or otherological event to be coming up soon.

The snowy countryside is certainly pretty...

..but maybe it could presage the inundation of the low-lying lands by the rising seas.

In that event, the Lincolnshire Wolds where I live (ringed in yellow on the map below), would become an island off the east coast of South Yorkshire.



Almost serendipitously, I read that the Met Office launched its new "traffic light" severe weather warning system, which was rushed out a day early to announce the snow-storms over the weekend.

I am sure that traffic light afficionados, highways engineers, and railway signalling engineers all over the country will be grinding their teeth because it really is nothing like a proper traffic light at all. It does have the good old red and green, which do not work for the one in 10 red-green colour blind men in the population, but bizarrely, it has both yellow and orange aspects, just to confuse the other 90% of the population. Very democratic, but not very ergnonomic.

My wife and I have been telling the neighbours for some time that we are going to build a jetty at the end of the lane and park a boat there ready for the floods. So in anticipation of the Deluge, and our future status as island dwellers, it seems an appropriate moment to take a leaf from the Met Office book and create a localised version of the Severe Weather Warning System, below. The legend is helpfully mostly coloured blue...