Time to change the social business model

As part of the Scottish Government Digital Scotland rollout, I would like the government to require companies over a certain size to offer a proportion of jobs on their books as distance working. This technology has been available for decades and for even longer companies have effectively outsourced work to different continents and had company subsidiaries that "remote work", so why not individuals?

Having more people work from home would relieve pressure on city housing markets, encourage the rural economy, help disabled people who have transport difficulties, encourage a development of digital technologies, make Scotland a leader in a social revolution away from the 19th century mentality of going to a factory for everyone to work in one place, encourage employment in rural areas, promote Scotland as a place of work in the global marketplace, reduce over congestion in cities, promote rural economies, assist parents and carers to balance childcare and work, decrease the need for transport (and hence be green), reduce the need for children to move when their parents change job and above all increase social stability.

All those advantages and more.

Yes we need a digital infrastructure although large parts of what we need have been in place for years, but we also need social change to go along with it. Can the government take a lead on enabling the social change to take advantage of the new digital infrastructure being created?

Craig.
West Lothian

Update 19/05/2014
I contributed to the Scottish Parliament Fathers and Parenting Inquiry, the report is now available. I am pleased to say my comments, ignored by The Scotsman, have been taken on board. Relevant extract below:


95. She highlighted the role of the parenting strategy in ensuring flexible working and other family-friendly policies were available to parents. That is a powerful tool that the Government has. We have the power to influence change in the national, top-level sense. Legislation is another powerful tool that the Government has to make further cultural change. We are also working with employers to support them in creating workplaces that encourage a better work-life balance for everyone. So that we can help dads to thrive at home and at work, we have formed a new partnership with Fathers Network Scotland, the parenting across Scotland group and Working Families to try to change the way that Scotland‘s parents live and work.

96. The Minister also brought attention to other approaches the Scottish Government was taking to encourage employers to offer flexible working. At the Institute of Directors awards tonight, we are sponsoring an award for companies that have shown excellence in providing family-friendly flexible working practices. This is the second year that we have sponsored the award, in order to work with a group of people who would not normally engage with this subject and to showcase the way in which businesses are doing their bit to allow families to have a better work-life balance.

Conclusion
97. We were not surprised to find that much of the evidence we heard on childcare and flexible working echoed what we heard during our Women and Work inquiry, but are concerned to find that not only do these issues keep women from actively participating in work, they keep fathers from actively participating in parenting. The imbalance in parental leave entitlements and access to flexible working arrangements are clearly a cause for concern. The Scottish Government has shown a drive towards improving the situation, and, as in our Women and Work inquiry we commend the Scottish Government on its approach and ask that such issues remain a priority in implementing the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and the national parenting strategy. In responding, we ask that the Minister include an update on progress made against the recommendations made in our Women and Work inquiry report.

Asus Transformer Prime TF201 available in the UK

The #2 tablet after the iPad, the Asus Transformer has been updated and many reviews of it are saying that this could be the game changer for Android tablets in the same way that Android phones are now outselling iPhones.

The replacement to the Transformer is the Transformer Prime and as of 17th December, it is available to order on Amazon.co.uk, see the following link:

Asus EeePad Transformer Prime TF201 10.1 inch Tablet with Keyboard/Dock


Where does this win over the iPad 2?

1. It has a bigger screen with higher resolution (1280 x 800) 
2. It's 5% thinner
3. The tablet without the keyboard is lighter than the iPad
4. For more or less the same price  as an iPad it comes with a proper (detachable) keyboard so you can use it like a netbook, if you want.
5. Without the keyboard, you get 12 hours of battery life. The keyboard gives you another 6. That's a whole day of constant use without needing a power supply, a first for a tablet.
6. It has a quad core 1.3GHz processor, as opposed to the iPad's dual core 1GHz.
7. It has 1Gb of memory, the iPad has 512Mb.
8. It has expandable memory, you can add another 64Gb to the base configuration of 32Gb or 64Gb. NO mobile Apple products have expandable memory.
9. It can play blu-ray quality video at 1080p (ten-eighty-pi)
10. It is the first tablet to support the Tegra 3 processor, with 12 GPU cores and hardware support for games consoles. This makes it around 1/3 faster than the Samsung Galaxy Tab
11. It has a standard USB socket (no need for adaptors)
12. It has an 8MP camera with flash and autofocus on the rear and a 1.3MP camera on the front.
13. The display is brighter than anything else on the market 584cd/m², so you can use it outdoors with ease and read it in sunlight
14. It's got gorilla glass, making it very resistant to scratches etc
15. It runs Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich really well.
16. It runs flash, if you want.
17. It has GPS. iPad doesn't.
18. And of course, it isn't made by Apple so you're not locked into their one size fits all ecosystem.

The main drawback of the Asus versus the iPad is the lack of built in 3G. However, consider this.
1. It has Wi-Fi so with a Mi-Fi type device you can share your data connection across multiple devices rather than paying for a contract on each of them separately.
2. It has a USB port, people have got USB modems to work on the original transformer.

This page is also available via the memorable http://www.TF201.com or http://www.TF700.com

But DONT FORGET TO REMOVE THE RUBBER STOPPERS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXXOpmS8Tr8 as the instructions on doing this are non existent and they are very hard to remove.

Here's a link to the PDF of the English Transformer prime user manual as ironically the Asus site javascript doesn't support the Asus browser for downloading the manual
Once again, the Amazon.co.uk product link is at
Asus EeePad Transformer Prime TF201 10.1 inch Tablet with Keyboard/Dock

Enjoy!

Craig

Disclaimer re Apple: Apple once paid me some money when I won a top prize in their national UK competition "Young Programmer of the Year". That was back in the day when you could take Apples apart and mess about with them.

How to migrate Thunderbird mail and settings from one computer to another

Tested with Thunderbird 8 on Windows 7

On the old computer:

1. Menu option: Tools->Options->Import/Export Tools->Save All Profile Files.
(note: On Thunderbird 15 this is now Tools->Import Export Tools->Save All Profile Files)

2. Save it to your external drive/USB - recommended rather than using network as network may be slow - (mine was several Gigs)

3. rename the file folder to remove the date/time suffix on the file
i.e. the file should look something like .default instead of (example) .default-2011203-1014 

4. On the new Computer, install Thunderbird, don't set up anything. Exit Thunderbird

5. Copy from external drive/usb onto new computer into this folder:
C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles

6. Go to the C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird folder

7. Edit the profiles configuration setting file

8. Change the path setting to point at your migrated profile in the Profiles directory,
e.g. if your profile you copied was 72lotzvd then change the setting to
Path=Profiles/72lotzvd.default

9. Close and save the file

10. Start Thunderbird

If you had an alternative appearance installed (such as Silvermel) because frankly the default one is appalling then

11. goto Tools->AddOns->Appearance, click on the new one and restart


How Thunderbird should do it.

1. Step 1 above.
2. Step 2 above.
3. Install Thunderbird. 
4. Asks if I want to import a previous account. Click Yes
5. Browse for files on USB. Click Done.

Come on guys, this shouldn't be hard. Would also help if you defaulted the profile name to my windows login rather than 72lotzvd.


Additional info here:
http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/profiles

http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/how_to_transferemail_folders_address_book_from_old_computer_to_new

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and_exporting_your_mail

Hope you found this useful. Hope the Thunderbird developers did too. Please +1 if you like.

A note to Larry Page of Google

Hey Larry. In your recent earnings call you commented on Facebook and its lack of data portability. However, in the Google camp we have the disappointing Google data portability standpoint which states "In most cases, it's not possible to move products from one Google Account to another".

It is a constant source of annoyance that I have to log into one account to use most of my Google services and another one to use the Gmail I have had for ages because you can't port Gmail (and a lot of other things) onto my primary login which uses the domain I own. This is rather a fail. How about putting your own house in order first? Come on, this is just a foreign index in a table, how hard is that?

I'm not that impressed with Google search most of the time either. Try searching for a car service centre open on a Sunday in London within 15 mins walk of a tube station in zones 1 and 2 or 30 mins travelling time of a given postcode. I mean really, this is the sort of useful data driven search that people really need - it connects me with relevant services. Why is no-one apparently looking into this? Is anything happening with semantic search?

Can we also have links to individual comments in Google Plus (as I understand Sir Tim Berners-Lee called for on Facebook)

Why also can't we find things en-route? Like I'm going from A to B, show me the nearest service stations or restaurants etc

Can you also stop Google Chrome thinking that articles in Scots Gaelic (language code gd) are written in Irish (language code ga). Please fix the bug I logged. This is about as bad as thinking articles in Spanish are written in Italian. Gaelic and Irish are two related but different languages and offering to translate from Irish rather than Gaelic means the translations are hopeless!

Just a few ideas, many more to come.

Craig

BBC fail - my correct name is not permitted

BBC displays another example of the Scunthorpe problem. I am no longer allowed to use my name on the BBC site. See the screendump (click to enlarge) and also my previous experience with Microsoft on this issue in 2004.

Password and PIN problems

An article on the relative security and insecurity of websites and banks

Why is it that websites deem a 6 character all lower case password to be "very weak" when there's 306million+ possibilities. Yet a 4 digit PIN (9999 possibilities) is secure enough for banks?

The website one is almost 31,000 times more secure yet is deemed "weak". Surely a rule for websites that if the incorrect password is used a certain number of times the account is locked would be sufficient to make the weak password 31,000 times stronger than the bank's security.

We have to be practical about this. In reality, any rules around requiring a password to have upper and lower case letter and special characters such as $,% etc simply make it much more likely people will write the passwords down. Just because this makes it the person's problem rather than the website's is no excuse - the overall security of the account is the issue, including the likelyhood that the account will be broken into because the password was so complicated it, together with the dozons of other passwords from other sites, all had to be written down somewhere because it was too much to remember.

Can we please have simpler password rules for websites and some way of having one strong security mechanism which ties them all together?

Craig

Web2.0, a definition

People ask me what Web2.0 is. This is my explanation, hope you find it useful. It's hopefully a bit more readable than the definition on wikipedia. I also follow this with some information about Web3.0.

You may have heard the term Web2.0, a term first used in 2004. If you ask an expert what it means you'll probably get differing answers depending on who you ask because there is no real clear definition of it. So this is my one.

There are two main feature of Web2.0 which distinguish it from sites that aren't Web2.0.

1. Web2.0 is about people creating their own content for publishing online
2. it is also about the supporting technology for this content

It is easier to explain Web2.0 if you set it in context of what there was previously.

In the early days of the web, despite it originally being conceived as a document sharing and editing environment, the editing part rarely happened. Early sites were generally about a company, organisation or individual producing content, publishing it on their website and then people reading that content or transacting with it, e.g. reading the news on-line or buying a book.

However, following the emergence of blogs it became easier for larger number of people to author their own content and have others comment on it, just as you can do here. Similarly, Amazon allowed others to post their own reviews. This activity, together with the very long standing Internet tradition of news groups, forums, bulletin boards and so on going back to the 1970's - all these came together to form the early implementation what we now call Web2.0.

When you consider that most people think of Web2.0 as twitter, facebook and other similar sites they think of it as a social platform which allows them to publish their own content easily and share it with their friends. However, this facility has been around on-line for almost 30 years. In 1979 with the invention of usenet groups it was possible to easily share content online and from my own personal experience I used to run a mailing list called Gaelic-L that was founded in 1989 and allowed people with similar interests to share content with their online connections even way back then. In 1990 I also proposed an early browser with user generated content and personalised news, based on the fact that many people were by that time doing much of that anyway.

Web2.0 is therefore more than just being able to publish content and share it with your friends, this has been possible for decades, it's about the types of technology that make it happen as well and how these combine together. In the early days if I wrote an article in a newsgroup, people might reply to it. With Web2.0 you can not only reply to it but you might be able to vote on it and even edit the original, this is how wikipedia works - people collaborate together using a wiki as a tool for sharing information. The articles in a wiki are often authored by several people rather than just one. Similarly it wasn't just that blogs made it easy for people to write their own content, the platforms they used to write their blogs held and published the content in a structured way and this allowed the content to be easily reused in other contexts using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). What this means is that you didn't have to go to the blog to read the post, you could pick up the notifications of new posts via an RSS reader or another website entirely. Sites can also publish a programming interface called an API which can support the same functionality as RSS and more besides. RSS feeds are particularly useful at following new content - e.g. new news article, new blog posts or more specialised searches such as new jobs matching your requirements on a job board. API calls are better for more generalised searches e.g. "how many twitter users are based in Edinburgh" or "Who posted the first tweet about Michael Jackson's death" or "give me the data to plot a graph of the number of times President Obama's Nobel prize was mentioned in the hours after the announcement was made", etc.

As an example of RSS in action, my posts here automatically feed out to twitter and friendfeed. My friendfeed is then published on my facebook pages. This sharing of data across many sites and applications and interpreting the content in different ways is one of the key distinguishing features of web2.0 over web1.0. This is quite a long post, too long for the 140 character limit for twitter, but the connection between my blog and twitter takes care of that. Similarly when I post something new to the photo sharing platform Flickr, it also appears via a link on Twitter even though twitter doesn't directly support photos - the sites all interact with the same content but in different ways.

Taking this example of data sharing further you can combine (mash) information from different sites to produce something new, this is called a mashup. An example might be pulling in data from Google maps, geotagged photos from Flickr, public rights of way information from the government or council and accommodation information and reviews from a hotel booking site. Combining this information together using the publicly available data would allow you to show walks overlaid on a map together with examples of the views you could expect to see along the way and recommended places to stay en-route.

So Web2.0 is about people creating content (blogs, photos, statuses) together with the supporting technology (facebook, wikis, twitter) allowing this content to be shared, connected and reused in many different ways. It isn't really about endless "beta", rounded graphics, pastel shades and large fonts although these are incidental elements of the Web2.0 scene.

Just as there's no single definition of Web2.0, there is even less clarity about what might come next for Web3.0. The leading consensus is this will be about the semantic web. This represents a bigger challenge than web2.0 because it is about taking the largely unstructured and often ambiguous content on the web and tagging it in ways that allow it to be more clearly defined and reused. For instance if I type London Bridge into Google, there is no way at present to distinguish if I meant the actual bridge itself, the railway station with the same name, the underground station with the same name, the hospital with the same name or the bridge that got shipped to Arizona. Another example is differentiating text with a particular meaning from the same text that occurs by coincidence - e.g. a Digital Will is a type of Will (a legal document for when someone dies) that covers digital assets such as your emails, photos, MP3s, on-line contacts, etc. However, if you search for this term in Google you get some references to both the legal document but also the same phrase occurring in entirely different contexts such as "Digital will overtake print" and "Western Digital will move to Irvine". The semantic web will not only help to classify how words are used from a linguistic point of view but it will also allow content to be queried as data - for instance on a restaurant website you could mark-up your opening hours and this would allow people to search using a semantic search engine for restaurants open at a particular time of day. The biggest challenges faced by Web3.0 are in agreeing the common vocabularies and then deploying them effectively across the billions of web pages that already exist.

As you can see, although Google is quite good at being able to find pages containing certain terms it is currently very poor at making sense of the data in a structured way. This is because without the data being marked up in a semantic way (either through the use of markup directly or by attempting to deduce the context), it is an exceptionally difficult task for a search engine to provide this functionality. Web3.0 will make this job a lot easier but the means by which Web3.0 will emerge is still unclear. What we do know though it that it should make searching for information a lot more powerful and specific. Google is also exceptionally poor at searching sites that already have structure - for instance if I wanted to find a hotel room for tonight I would use an accommodation search engine and Google would find me the site which listed the accommodation rather than the accommodation itself. Google can't tell me what rooms are available tonight but it can point me towards sites that are likely to have this information. This will all change with Web3.0 and the use of intermediary sites will significantly decline as the information they hold begins to open up to more generalised search engines.

I hope this has been helpful. If anyone is looking for a Web2.0 or Web3.0 specialist, please get in touch via craig@siliconglen.com, twitter, facebook or linkedin.

Craig
I do Internet things, manage large websites, play around with language, campaign for good causes, try to explain things and have fun singing along the way (not all at the same time!).

Cheap printer cartridge replacements

I'm switching to MoreInks for my replacement printer cartridges as they are by far the cheapest I have found so far, and importantly the replacements they sell include the necessary chip in the compatible cartridges so you don't need to mess around for ages trying to pry the chip off the standard cartridge and onto the clone.

£3.99 for a replacement black cartridge (with chip) for a Canon printer, can't complain at that price, or a whole set of 4 chipped cartridges for £12.99

many thanks!

Craig

Web accessibility guidelines updated - WCAG 2.0 comes into force

The de facto standard for web accessibility was updated for the first time since 1999 today. Version two of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG 2.0, has been published following several years of development and debate.

One wonders when all the website owners who didn't think WCAG 1.0 applied to them or pretended the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (affected websites from 1999) didn't apply to them either might start paying attention.

Craig

Microsoft project rubbish

I attach a dump from the hated Microsoft Project.

This is the start of a plan, i.e. the top line is task #1. Why does project insist on taking tasks which are a round number of days or zero for a milestone and then rolling them up into fractional days? For the two rolled up tasks in the image, one is a whole number of days and the other isn't. Why is this?! All the tasks are using the same standard calendar.

thanks

Craig

Problem with Iprofile: Contact details to log faults

I use Iprofile which is the online CV designed to make life easier for recruiters.

However, the system is extremely buggy, insecure and worse that that it's next to impossible to contact iprofile as they seem to ignore support requests sent through their webform and like so many user-hostile websites fail to publish a support phone number. Non existent customer service? Time for them to "read my blog"!

If you are experiencing similar difficulties with iProfile and want their customer service phone number it is available on the parent group website and just in case you missed it, here it is: 020 7025 0555 (I will also post the variant 02070250555) just to ensure it is picked up by search engines.

I was thinking of launching a startup website where people could log faults and see what faults had been logged, a bit like bugzilla but just as you can search for bugs in bugzilla by project, my idea would be that you could search and log bugs on other people's websites irrespective of whether they used bugzilla or not. Users could then vote on the bugs they wanted fixed first and if the company had any sense, they would look at the lists and do something about it. Here is this morning's batch of iprofile issues:

iprofile.org, bug 1. When I apply for a job, the acknowledgement I get back has someone else's email address in the candidate username link. This is a security risk as it exposes someone else's details (they work at barclaycard). I told you about this bug in May, you eventually responded in May saying the only way to fix it was the rather poor cop out of rebuilding my profile. I reluctantly agreed, however the bug is still present. Why?

iprofile.org, bug 2. My available from date has to be today or a date in the future. I have set it to today's date and I do this whenever I go into iprofile. However, several hours later I find it reset to a date 6 weeks ago in June which means I have to go in and manually change it again. Please fix this bug as it presents misleading information to prospective employers. I see you have also fixed the related bug which changes my jobseeker status from "actively looking" to "not actively looking", however other related problems persist.

I am aware of similar sites such as suggestion box but what I'm after here is more along the lines of a cross between that and utest.

Irrespective of your issues with iprofile, you might like to vote for this idea on reddit, maybe it will get some investors my way and we can start to use crowdsourcing to shame buggy websites into fixing their problems - satisfied users might actually help such sites to make more money?

Craig

Sorting out UK Government data privacy

Please view this idea I posted on the Better Regulation website to attempt to sort out the conflicts in UK privacy laws. Comments welcome. Following my posting here, this letter was published in this week's computing magazine.

Craig

Using twitter as a free trade platform

Buy and sell anything online using Twitter for free.

I thought this was worth a try. Twitter has taken off because it is short, simple, easy to use and readily accessible from a number of different platforms. It's so easy to post a short tweet when that's all you want to say rather than a long blog article. It's more immediate and like SMS is particularly useful when you have a short message or series of short messages to put out quickly. Microblogging is taking off, even the Prime Minister uses it. Having received a twitter message from a government minister earlier today, it seems to be an effective way to reach people.

However, rather than considering Twitter as the SMS equivalent of blogging, what about using the Twitter API via sites such as tweetscan to scan the entire twittersphere for anything of interest? Twitter needn't just replace blogging - the free posting to a large audience via Tweetscan and others could rival other free advertising platforms such as Craigslist (ugh) and Gumtree (also ugh), both owned in part by Ebay. It needn't stop there - if enough people set up twitter wanted feeds you could list for free on Twitter rather than paying to list on Ebay.

Paying for such a service is a problem with no feedback mechanism but it's no worse than currently exists with Craigslist and Gumtree.

However, let me suggest a format. This is based loosely on the XML content I receive in RSS feeds for jobs etc and seems to work well enough for that.

You have 140 characters. I suggest the "tweet trade format" as follows (illustrated by examples)

<WANT|BUY|SELL|LIST>:<ITEM NAME> :<PRICE> <Tiny:ITEM URL> <CITY/LOCALITY/COUNTRY> <EXPIRY>

• Want: Wanting to use a service (e.g. a plumber sought)


• Buy: Wanting to buy a physical product (e.g. a PC)


• Sell: Wanting to sell a physical product (e.g. a PC)


• List: Listing offering a service (e.g. I am a plumber, I am listing a job on offer, etc)

Supposing you have a mobile phone for sale in Mt View California. The listing would look like this:
SELL: Nokia E61 (Used) :$50 http://tinyurl.com/siliconglen Mountain View/CA/US 2008-07-20

Maybe you want to buy a house?
BUY: House 4 bed :$500000 http://www.example.com/moredetailshere Sunnyvale/CA/US 2008-08-31
The price here being the maximum

Supposing you have a job listing, this is a service listing so comes under the LIST category. Contract Project Manager in London, UK for £500 per day.

e.g. LIST: Contract Project Manager Agile PRINCE2 :£500pd http://tinyurl.com/siliconglen London/UK 2008-07-20

The "where" would end with the 2 letter ISO country code (ISO3166). If the item is relevant to a global audience then WW could be used (world-wide) as in WWW (world-wide web).

e.g. WANT: Domain for Web2.0 startup :$10000 http://www.example.com/contactme 2008-08-21
The price here being the maximum price willing to be paid.

Dates would be in international ISO8601 format. That way Americans and Europeans will have the same format and we don't get confused over 04/07/2008 being the 4th of July or the 7th of April.

The URL could of course point to a page on your own site, your blog, a listing on Ebay, a listing on Craigslist or Gumtree or for an item wanted, you could give more detail about what is you want by linking to a similar item on Ebay, Amazon, whatever. It could also link to an openID page for people to contact you, mine is https://getopenid.com/siliconglen

If you think this is a great idea, drop me an email - I'm compiling a mailing list of interested parties who think being able to list products and services on the internet and sell them /effectively/ for as much as it costs to list a webpage in Google (ie nothing) is the way to go and I'm keen to build up a userbase to convince prospective investors that this will take off. It has a long way to go past twitter listings, this is just an early toe in the water.

If anyone wants to build a tool to build up the listing in the standard format via a webform, then drop me a line.

Then with these listings, you can search for them simply using http://www.tweetscan.com or use Tweetscan to sign up for email alerts when something matches what you are looking for (just like eBay favourite search notifications). You can also use tweetscan to search up a search and associated RSS feed for it.

I can see this format evolving over time, but that seems enough for a starter. Comments welcome.

Company directors at high risk of ID theft due to government data loss

Letter to Computing:

Following the recent string of data losses by HM Government, no-one seems to have taken on board the institutionalised data leaks which HM Government practices as part of its statutory liability and the implication for openly publishing tens of thousands of names, addresses and dates of birth free of charge on the Internet for any ID thief to easily pick up on and make use of.

If this was the general public there would be a national scandal, as there was with the HMRC data loss. If the general public had their names, addresses and dates of birth openly accessible online with no restrictions on who could access them, no payment required and no traceability on who had downloaded them then heads would roll.

Yet this is the exact practice which goes on at Companies House if you are a company director, something that increasing numbers of people are doing to find work as contractors in a shrinking employment market. Whilst it may be a statutory duty to gather such information and whilst it may be perfectly valid to have such information to validate people's IDs in the same way the same information is used to apply for credit cards, I can see no compelling reason why the entire database needs to be dumped uncontrolled for anyone on the web to access unrestricted. We need to move to a model where such private and confidential data is treated the same way irrespective of whether it is a private individual's data on the HMRC computer or a Company Director's data at Company's House - it's the same data after all. The forthcoming changes in the Companies Act only allow the address to be withheld, so even after these changes the director's full name and date of birth will be public and can still easily be tied up with historic electoral registers before the edited versions were introduced. Simply publishing the age is also not enough since the data of birth can be deduced by querying the site once per day for a year, a task easily automated.

You reported on 3rd July, front page, that one person had accessed the name, address and phone number of another businesses' details on-line at the PAYE site. The scale of openly publishing the private details of the directors of 2 million limited companies in the UK is surely much more significant.

Company Directors are not immune from ID theft, yet the government does nothing to protect the ID of over 2 million company directors. Why not?

End of the website login

The future looks bright for those who struggle to remember their password as they log in to a particular website thanks to a rare tie-up between Microsoft and Google.

On Friday, the duo set aside their rivalry to join Oracle, Equifax and PayPal to become the founding members of the aptly-named Information Card Foundation.

With support from other A-list internet players, the non-profit group will push virtual replacements of physical ID cards, like a driving licence, towards the mainstream.

Unlike cards in their wallets, consumers would be able to amend the details on their on-screen cards though; like the offline world, would have multiple cards.

Central to this is the e-wallet, which would let users choose an icon for the card they want for a specific website, bypassing the need to type and remember any password.

As the wallet is online, consumers could select their ‘i-cards’ from anywhere in the world, with enhanced security and interoperability with major sites as standard, the ICF hopes.

“Rather than logging into web sites with usernames and passwords, Information Cards let people ‘click-in’ using a secure digital identity that carries only the specific information needed to enable a transaction,” said Charles Andres, its executive director.

Read the full article here.

Thank goodness for that, I was writing about this multiple login username nonsense back in 2003. Why does it take the IT industry so long to solve these problems?

Craig

Internet top level domain for Scotland

Following the news today that Internet overhaul wins approval, perhaps now is the time to move ahead with a campaign for a top level domain for Scotland.

Government CIO demands Green best practice

Government CIO, John Suffolk, demands Green best practice for IT.

That being the case, why is it that all the government jobs I go for, not one has suggested that the interview is held via webcam (which I could do from my house) or even via hi-def video link (which you think I ought to be able to do from a government office in Edinburgh for an interview in London.

Come to think of it, why have none of the dot.com companies I've interviewed for suggested this either? OK to be a trendy dot com Web2.0 company using people on the Internet from all over the world to make your company a success, but still stuck in the mindset that employees all need to be in the same room?

Is it acceptable to have a day trip in a plane to physically attend an interview when the technology is adequate to see what I look like?

Besides the environmental impact, it would save me approx £200 in costs. I'm sure if the government were paying these costs for a permanent position, the tax payer would save in terms of reduced government costs and the environment would also benefit.

So why does noone seem to want to offer video interviews? Surely this is an easy first step to Green IT as the technology has already been around for years.

Craig

The three rules of test driven development

A useful first step in proving the functionality of software, websites etc. Now all we need is a link up to ensure that the unit tests ensure what is being tested is actually what the end-user (as opposed to the customer) actually wants to use.

Craig

Scottish IT consultation with Enterprise minister

At an industry consultation earlier this week, ScotlandIS Members, including myself, met with the Enterprise Minister, Jim Mather. Issues raised included the increasing difficulty in accessing public sector contracts, the contribution the industry can make in helping to grow the economy, and the skills challenges the industry faces.

For more details including the White Paper prepared for the Industry Consultation see the page on the ScotlandIS site.

Craig

PRINCE2 + AGILE = Common sense?

An article on how Agile can sit alongside PRINCE2 and where DSDM Atern fits in.

In 2007, I put "used an Agile/PRINCE2 development strategy" on my CV. It's been quite the conversation starter at interviews. So I thought it would be of interest to blog about it here and gauge the reaction/feedback.

First off PRINCE2 is an acronym for "PRojects IN Controlled Environments" (version 2). PRINCE2 is a generic project management method for exercising control over a project's startup through to closure (SU1 to DP5 for all you who enjoy punch card like references). It's a generic project management method that had its origins in IT but which now makes no reference to IT and could be used from anything from building a ship to planning your summer holiday. Whether you would want to use it on the latter is entirely up to you. The same flexibility of choice is not however accorded to the large number of public (and increasingly private) sector projects that use it since it is seen as the de-facto project management method and its use is frequently mandated, despite there being other methods that may be more relevant for the task in hand. There have also been a large number of complex and extensive government IT project failures recently many of which would have used PRINCE2 and which highlight that even a refined method such as PRINCE2 can run aground on large scale, long running projects that are subject to considerable change.

On paper, PRINCE2 is logical, reasonable and linear. However, as experience suggests - for example in the long series of failed UK Government IT projects where PRINCE2 is the mandated method - simply being logical, reasonable and linear, is not sufficient. It is not sufficient to make it the effective project management method business and public sector organisations really need."
From PRINCE2 problems by Business Transition Technologies

PRINCE2 is based around project control. Control is clearly a Good Thing, however being a generic method with no reference to IT, the closest IT development method would be the waterfall method, which is very well lampooned on the Waterfall2006 site. It is just these shortcomings of the waterfall method which seem to cause the biggest problems with PRINCE2 projects, especially those which due to their complexity and length of development are prone to large amounts of change. PRINCE2 also does not account for software projects comprising multiple versions and how these are handled, nor for website development and deployment which can be an almost continuous process.

Change is inevitable in projects. In response to this Agile development methods arose to deal with this change more effectively, particularly from a software engineering perspective and unlike PRINCE2, cover in detail the more day to day activities such as sprint planning, daily meeting structure etc. Agile does not have comprehensive cover for project management, however the Agile DSDM development method was developed with PRINCE in mind, as detailed in the paper using DSDM with PRINCE2 [PDF]. Thus the combination of Agile and PRINCE2 is not as contradictory as it might at first seem. One is a development method for managing change, the other is a project management method for exercising control, so the two compliment one another and should result in a management method for control in a changing environment. One can see from this white paper on integrating DSDM into a PRINCE2 environment [PDF] that at the actual delivery level the focus is much more on the agile processes rather than PRINCE2.

Alistair Cockburn (no relation) and others have produced a set of agile management methods however this has grown out of the agile community and consists of a set of principles rather than the sort of detailed how-to that would make it easy to sell to the PRINCE2 diehards.

The most complete agile project management method I have come across is DSDM Atern which is described as follows:

What is DSDM Atern?

Atern is an agile project delivery framework that delivers the right solution at the right time.

Importantly, Atern harnesses the knowledge, experience and creativity of end users. It uses an iterative lifecycle to evolve the most appropriate solution to satisfy project objectives.

Using planned, visible timeboxes with clearly-specified outcomes control is exercised throughout by the project manager and the team members themselves.

Roles are clearly defined and work is divided into timeboxes with immoveable deadlines and agreed outcomes.

Atern Agility
Atern’s agile approach avoids the cumbersome rigidity of ‘big design up-front’ without the inevitable risks of ‘no design up front’.

Since it is worth spending some early time examining the structure of the overall solution before building any components, Atern advocates that projects should do just ‘enough design up front’.

Atern flexibility
Atern can be used to complement other project management disciplines such as PRINCE2 ™ and PMI without duplication of effort.

The description of DSDM Atern on amazon.co.uk explains further:

Atern is the leading, proven, agile approach providing the governance and rigour along with the agility and flexibility organisations demand today. It is also ideal as a wrapper for more limited agile approaches to ensure that the whole project lifecycle is addressed. Atern is a proven 'battle hardened approach' and has been responsible for the successful delivery of innumerable projects around the world. Its provenance across both IT and non-IT contexts goes back to 1994 with substantial productivity gains independently verified by the UK Software Metrics Association.

Making PRINCE2 Agile

So it seems to me that you could use PRINCE2 for the high level governance of a project, Atern for the structure of how the project development is to be organised and prioritised and scrum techniques for the day to day elements of effectively organising the software engineer's time and daily priorities. Although for a true DSDM Atern approach, PRINCE2 isn't needed at all - whilst it is possible to combine DSDM and PRINCE2, DSDM Atern by itself is actually enough and also embodies from the outset the Agile principles which are completely absent from PRINCE2. The particular challenge for Atern lies in integrating Atern projects within a waterfall corporate culture and of DSDM takeup and experience generally, which is unfortunately quite low.

This is just intended as an overview to illustrate that PRINCE2 and Agile are not necessarily contradictory and that is possible to combine elements of both successfully, particularly when it comes to the managing a stage part of PRINCE2 - Agile turns this into many small stages comprising stable components of work suitable for release. However, what remains a mystery to me is why government departments have been so reluctant in the face of the number of IT failures I have blogged about to promote an agile implementation of PRINCE2 and how it can best be delivered for complex IT projects running into billions of pounds. DSDM Atern isn't necessarily suitable for all projects, but certainy for iteratively deployed projects which are happy to embrace change, it should be considered as a more suitable alternative to PRINCE2.

This whole sense approach to software development from project governance to day to day management would seem to be the holy grail for minimising such failures. Perhaps it is time to encourage those who mandate PRINCE2 to understand this in order to minimise further wastage.

Further reading on DSDM is available on the DSDM website and for discussions with the authors of DSDM, I would recommend the DSDM group on LinkedIn.

Craig

Update: in June 2011 I wrote an update covering Agile and PRINCE2.