Category: Information Technology

Sitting on the floor outside the duty free shop, oh so long ago (two weeks ago, in fact), I paid my £4 wireless access to find out whether a Linux eeePC could network with a Mac. Instead, I found that a Linux eeePC could be transmogrified into a Mac, with what seemed like not much […]

Loyal readers, I take this opportunity to ignore you completely, and address myself to the Long Tail of Teh Google. I will resume normal frivolities shortly, and will flag these abnormal posts as [GEEK]. I have just come into possession of an eeePC, as regular readers will know­­—after a protracted period of temptation. I’m typing […]

In re: http://www.bpmn.org/ BPMN is something I’ll be spending more time on in the day job, and I’ve just started looking at it. Some notes: Looks a lot like UML activity diagrams. That’s a good thing. More expansive icon set for their activites and notifications, which is conceptually extremely helpful, although potentially just syntactic sugar […]

In re: http://ptsefton.com/blog/2006/11/08/self_preservation_1 Peter Sefton’s trying to recover his 1994 Word thesis into a sustainable document format, and migrating from 10 year old Word formats and media is no fun at all. He’s right: act now, while Mac Classic is still somewhat accessible. Been there, doing that again soon with my PhD (Word 5, 1998). […]

In re: http://ptsefton.com/blog/2006/11/01/repository-maintenance Some random thoughts on permanent identifiers (my day job), triggered from Peter Sefton’s post above. The HTTP proxy address to resolve a Handles (or whatever else) permanent identifier for a resource is binding the permanent identifier to a particular protocol (HTTP) and particular host ( hdl.handle.net, arrow.monash.edu.au, whatever). This has the advantage […]

In re: http://www.manning.com/pulier/ I understand it, enough already! The content of the first half of the book could have been done in twenty pages, and I’m not convinced there’s much in there that isn’t already in Wikipedia. The authors admit to having committed hype in their past, and their hyping of SOA is still more […]

In re: http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Requirements-Process-Suzanne-Robertson/dp/0201360462 A nicely methodical textbook, with overview, step-by-step breakdowns, and some needed contextualisation. The authors are sympathetic to agile development, and tailor their advice to analysts going down that path; but they recognise the tension between agile development and explicit requirements, and insist that requirements come from the whiteboard, not the keyboard, even […]

In re: http://www.cambridge.org/0521839750 This book was looking at Business Process Management (with Capital Letters, since it’s a distinct methodology), from a managerial rather than an IT perspective. Though it very occasionally got bogged down in detail of tactical approaches, overall it was a delight to read: judiciously cynical of everyone (especially IT, but also management […]