ia play

One of the themes I’m always interested is the way some things seem new but have clear echoes in the past. I was fascinated (and slightly horrified) to read this history of computing article: Factory concepts and practices in software development (Open Library).

Most of the examples are describing problems with IT projects in the 1960s but they could as easily be applied to the projects I’ve worked on over the last decade. The table summarising aspects of the  1968 Nato Report on Software Engineering Problems (PDF) is scarily applicable.

• Lack of understanding in system requirements on the part of customers and designers.
• Large gaps between estimates of costs and time with actual expenditures due to poor estimating techniques, failure to allow time for changes in requirements, and division of programming tasks into blocks before the divisions of the system are well-enough understood to do this properly.
• Large variations, as much as 26:1 in one study, in programmers’ productivity levels.
• Difficulty of dividing labor between design and production (coding), since design-type decisions must still be made in coding.
• Difficulty in monitoring progress in a software project, since “program construction is not always a simple progression in which each act of assembly represents a distinct forward step.”
• Rapid growth in the size of software systems.
• Poor communication among groups working on the same project, exacerbated by too much uncoordinated or unnecessary information, and a lack of automation to handle necessary information.
• Large expense of developing on-line production control tools.
• Difficulty of measuring key aspects of programmer and system performance.
• A tradition among software developers of not writing systems “for practical use,” but trying to write new and better systems, so that they are always combining research, development, and production in a single project, which then makes it difficult to predict and manage.
• Rapid growth in the need for programmers and insufficient numbers of adequately trained and skilled programmers.
• Difficulty of achieving sufficient reliability (reduced errors and error tolerance) in large software systems.
• Dependence of software on hardware, which makes standardization of software difficult across different machines.
• Lack of inventories of reusable software components to aid in the building of new programs.
• Software maintenance costs often exceeding the cost of the original system development.

Source: Naur and Randell.

Must remember to ask my dad about his  early programming experiences and see if this fits.

I like multi-tasking. Making bread during conference calls is one of my favourites. But I also like not multi-tasking. I came across this article about avoiding multi-tasking. These are a couple of the times mentioned when you need to stop your attempts to multi-task:

• Waiting for your PC to boot up. This can often give you a minute or two of staring out the window with your first cup of coffee warming the palms of your hand
• Waiting for the kettle to boil. You don’t need to click the button and rush off to do something else. You may wait there with the kettle and enjoy a few minutes of quiet contemplation.Tom Hodgkinson recommends making your tea with leaves rather than bags. This not only makes better tasting tea, but allows you the pleasure of walking into the garden afterwards to tip out the used leaves.

via Finding Stress-Reducing Idle Moments: The Anti Multi-tasking | LifeDev.

I’m not sure about the pleasure of tipping out tea leaves bit. I always find them frustratingly sticky. But you get the idea.

The Violent Highway is unusual for TV programmes about violent crime. Instead of an unquestioning “everything is getting worse” angle, the documentary instead looks at crime past and present, through the device of a single London street.

“the film recreates key incidents taken from 300 years of muggings, wife-beatings, pub brawls and serial killings. Historians, psychologists, residents of The Highway and former gang members discuss whether we are more or less violent than we used to be, and what this street can reveal about the violence in all of us.”

At one point the narrator starts the usual hackneyed point about how violent modern TV and video games are, but this only leads into Steven Pinker pointing out how we take pleasure in the violence in  Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and in murder mysteries too.

BBC Two Programmes – The Violent Highway.

A consultant I’m working with is loving Compendium. Weird to see something I’m used to in the Open University universe in such a commerical setting. Surely they ought to be forking out for some expensive sparkly software?

Anyway, that started me thinking about tools for organising your thoughts and the stuff I normally use:

1. A3 paper -  I swear I think differently off-line. Good pen, nice paper and lots of space. I don’t keep the paper though. It either goes in the compost (and eventually becomes tomatoes) when the thinking is done, or gets converted to electronic form for keeping. Short term management only.
2. Google Notebook – every unstructured thought gets dumped in Notebook, usually via the Firefox plug-in. When I’m online they go straight in but if I’ve been musing on paper in meetings then I upload later. Eventually they evolve into a loosely structured set of notebooks and sections. I tidy up a bit but my notebook has a shockingly mixed bag of categories and still has “my first notebook” aka the miscellaneous one. Which is an IA sin.
3. Delicious. ‘Only’ a bookmarking tool but actually a repository of half-formed thoughts and some more concrete ideas. I make notes against some of the bookmarks but everything gets tagged. Unformed ideas get big general tags but as ideas get beaten into submission the tagging gets more focused.  Again used mostly via Firefox plug-in.
4. FreeMind. For mindmapping software I’ve used Mindmapper and Inspiration in the past and I’d looked into Compendium. Visio will do at a pinch. But FreeMind came ready installed on my EEE so I’ve been using that lots recently. And quite happily so.  Some of the more useful A3 scribbles have ended up in Freemind.

Google Notebook in particular has helped me get to Desk Zero (well, almost). The scarily clear desk does help me stay organised and is also a bit of internal marketing. Everyone seems gob-smacked that I keep it clear and this seems to establish my credentials for sorting out our digital mess. And makes my colleagues think I’m a bit of a weirdo.

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes what people are searching for, bounce rates and spotting real opportunities.

Following on from yesterday’s post Spotting real opportunities in search logs I’ve been looking at what geography can add to the picture.

Anecdotely I’d heard that a lot of our Helen Keller referrals were “just American school children”. Google Analytics seems to validate this. From within the keywords report you can select a keyword and then set a dimension of continent or country. That then gives you the data about where geographically Google thinks those keywords are coming from.

Helen Keller:  mostly North American

Excel Shortcuts: mostly Asia and North America

Fundraising ideas:  largely European

Triathalons: more European

This changes some of my initial reactions to the opportunities each term represents. The non-UK traffic is still valuable to us, but this information could impact on what other kind of content we try and promote to these users  e.g. the volunteering opportunities are all UK based so we’re unlikely to be able to cross-promote to non-UK users.

(I’ve been trying to work out how to set up a custom report for keywords by continent but can’t quite crack it. Any suggestions?)