While working on my last Open University course we were asked to talk about different software development methods with a focus on agile. I may have gone a little over the top and the post ended up being about 1000 words,so i thought I’d put it up here.
I meant to post this last week as a follow up to the list of things to learn but got a little distracted but jukesie’s tweet earlier prompted me to finish it up.
All very much a work in progress, all archived on delicious under the diymasters tag.
After @jukesie posted on twitter about his a few things I want to learn list inspired by @pipstar‘s 100 things list, I sort of got bullied (in a nice way) into posting mine.
So here it is, just a brain dump as I thought of them:
I’ll probably think of dozen more once I click publish but that what I can remember off to the top of my head but I really should get back to work, so that will have to wait.
So I first learnt about Ada Lovelace day on del.icio.us and signed the pledge, and then spent a long time thinking about who I should write about, Ada Lovelace seems a little like the safe option. Being a hardware architect in a former life and still working on embedded platforms, Lynn Conway seem to be the perfect choice to for me to write about.
I’m guessing many people will not have heard of her, but nearly everyone will have benefited from her work. She worked on out of order execution at IBM, is used in most CPU today. Not to get too technical but exploiting the parallelism of the units inside a CPU, you can get a much greater throughput, so programs run faster and you do more ‘stuff’ done.
Another large contribution was her work in VLSI design, taking the technology from a handful of companies and giving smaller companies and universities access to the toolbox and a structured method to use them, giving much cheaper and faster prototype, leading to an explosion of companies producing ASICs which powers many consumer electronics products.
She was also at Xerox PARC when the foundations of current personal computers were being developed and was part of that hive of creativity.
Part of reason for picking Lynn was that people who work in the more ‘hardcore’ side of technology, tend be less visible than people working in the web,games or the more user facing part of technology. Not to take anything away from people who work in those areas (I’ve also worked on web projects and games in the past), partly I guess this is because these deeply technical subjects are harder to explain, less visual and well less interesting to most people (or perhaps were telling the stories wrong). So all of this is to say don’t feel limited to ‘acceptable’ career options, if your interested in an area go for it.
So finish off here’s a few other people I could have written about: Wendy Carlos, Delia Derbyshire, Grace Hopper , Aleks Krotoski, Kathy Sierra, Alice Taylor , Sophie Wilson
So another brain dump about startups in various place. Back in 2001 I had an interview in Helsinki for Bitboys. In the end I did not take the job but it did give an interesting look inside the local start up scene when we went out for drinks in the evening.
The big names in the local scene were Bitboys (graphics hardware), Futuremark ( benchmarking software) and Remedy Entertainment ( games), all of which came from the core members of Future Crew. Alot of the other people were friends or at least other people from the demoscene.
The attitude was very different everyone seem to have the same idea that if one of the companies made it big, then they would all make it in some way. They also had very low burn rates, Bitboys only used around two million over five or six years, which when production cost for a test chip (which they made more than one) can be in the $100,000, is very good. They used cheap simple office without any fancy furniture, took good but not huge salaries, very different to the dotcom silicon valley big office, lots of money approach. All very low key, very little management. Assembly acted as the big yearly event where everyone caught up. Lots of the other guys played Salibandy each week with other companies and also out drinking on the weekends, all very sociable. Finland also great for cheap places to live with fast broadband for compared to the UK very cheap prices and such a good public transport system you really did not need a car. It had a real buzz about the place.
Just is mostly just a brain dump of some extra bits and bob that I thought of after a big thread about startups in Bristol and the UK this afternoon.
In a lot of way the Uk seems to be better at being the best in a niche not in the mass market. If you take cars as an example, lots of racing cars are developed here or use British staff, Prodrive in rallying and endurance racing and Mclaren in F1, plus all the various small sports car people, Lotus and TVR.
Should we in Bristol, the UK or elsewhere be aiming to create a few blockbuster startups to sell out to some large company a few years down the line or instead working to produce an good environment for a much larger number of smaller lower key businesses. Having a nice, say 5 to 10 person business. That gives everyone a nice lifestyle good work life balance as the goal. With maybe the chance one of these smaller companies does end up going huge.
I guess this is the movie industry model, the big studios with the blockbusters, only a few of which pay off vs. the indie films which cost less, so need to sell less tickets/DVD/downloads to make a profit.
If you only define success as making million of pounds then you have the blockbuster high risk route, but if you define success as being paid decent money to work on interesting problems then you many be happier taking a lower risk route with still the chance of the millions and a profile that seem a better fit for what the Uk is good at.
Anyway this is just a quick brain dump of what popped into my head after the twitter thread, I’m sure I’ll have more thought in the future and probably end up changing my mind.
This is just an archived version of a thread on twitter a few people had about startups in the UK and Bristol in particular. This mostly is so I have an easy to link to version for a braindump of some more links and thought on the subject.
johnbradford: Giant Were-Rabbit to convince commuters to set up business in the South West http://tinyurl.com/4cfkj2 *sigh* marketing gone mad?
t1mmyb: @johnbradford there’s a bigger issue of London-centricity throughout politics and business that a marketing gimmick won’t solve
Z303: @t1mmyb @johnbradford Reminded me of a post by Tom Coates that in part asked why Bristol did not have more startups http://moourl.com/iv1r9
t1mmyb: @Z303 😕 at comment by kawt “Bristol thinks too much of itself and is too arrogant to survive in a business that changes hour by hour.”
paparatti: @Z303 – hasn’t the UK only really just started producing great start ups now? And those were in London.
johnbradford: @t1mmyb not sure I’d agree with kawt on that – if anything Bristol needs be a bit more self-promoting and joined up
Z303: @t1mmyb Just read it, Bristol being right wing! most people I meet are left wing or centrist, maybe if I moved in different circles
Z303 @paparatti I guess the big one is last.fm, Someone had a good post about how the BBC should be helping like it did with the BBC Micro
mikedunn: @paparatti Hence I’m always surprised Twitter hasn’t taken off more in the UK- we’ve been obesessed with our mobiles for years here.
paparatti: @Z303 – re: right wing, I think it’s a 50/50 split between racist bigots and hippies in this city.
johnbradford: have to agree with @z303 perhaps if we were *more* right wing and bolshi we’d have more Valley style start-ups 🙂
johnbradford: or at least commercially minded rather than hippy lifestyle – commercial hippies?
Z303: @paparatti That would explain why we get strange mixes
Z303: @johnbradford Should have used quotes, I was saying that find kawt’s comment does not ring true of the people I know here
Z303: @johnbradford And being bolshi is nothing to do with being left or right wing, more to believing in something
johnbradford: @z303 do you find Brizzol folks collaborative or commercially driven enough (ignoring political leanings) to start-up business rather than lifestyles?
johnbradford: @Z303 I know some very cool and creative Bristol companies but they’re aren’t putting themselves on the growth curve you see in the US
Z303: @johnbradford commercial but things like fairtrade/green issues being a larger driver
johnbradford: @Z303 FrankWater being a great example I guess
Z303: @johnbradford Another thought UK has always been better a small bespoke places, more 37 signals than yahoo!
samharding: @johnbradford that’s bonkers
johnbradford: @Z303 true, but can you build a bespoke service that scales? Ning? Mobile apps?
johnbradford: It’ll be interesting to see if the Pervasive Studio delivers anything scalable/sustainable
Z303: @johnbradford perhaps niche would have been a better word, I was also thinking about race car vs. road cars, lots of F1 work is UK based
I was getting this on my server, so I did what anyone would do and googled it.
So to hopefully stop other searching for a solution, when moving from one authentication module to another they changed how spaces in passwords were handled, whatever the new modules is does not like them, so you may find you just need to change your password.
As twittered back in December, I got a new PC, so my mother got my old system, which left her old system spare.
It seems so simple, get a big hard drive and rip all my CDs, at last, I mean its not like its was a 286. Its a 900MHz AMD Athlon with a 120Gb ATA100 drive, 512Mb RAM, two extra ATA133 ports, 1 ethernet port, so more than fine for a bit of file server.
I now got around to getting the drives and ripping out the modem, floppy drive, CDR and slapped Ubuntu server on the main drive. Which was super minimal, even the ssh server is an extra package.
Its still very much up in the air what I’m going to use it for, but so far I have Music server (no idea which one but maybe SqueezeCenter), so form of IMAP email to get all that data off my desktop, a bit torrent client so I can just leave them running and I’ve really wanted to play with Asterisk for a while now.
I can see this taking lots of time and having a learning curve but I’ve been admining my Ubuntu laptop for a few years now and a few of the servers at work, so I should be fine and anyway not knowing what I’m doing has never stopped me in the past.
I wonder how many time I end up reinstalling stuff?
via Spyblog, NO2ID are calling in their pledges from 2005. I just did mine.
A lots has happened since then, the costs have risen, the one database has become a merged view of the existing data, and no reason has been given, again you can see all the good work they have done and if you can help them out.
