Turn a hundred dollars into a Million

Todays Dilbert cartoon left me laughing but then in the second wave realised the practical lesson that was there to learn. Yes Dogbert is correct if you invested a hundred dollars in an investment that returned 5% in 190 days, well just over 188 to be exact you would have a million dollars. Our perception of money can sometimes be warped when you consider the time cost and then add on a risk component to get the interest rate up so that you can get to you goal in a shorter period of time.
Albert Einstein correctly made the comment

“The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”

Train…ing developers to write better code

While sitting on the train the other morning coming into work, I was suprised when I looked up at the Message board and saw the following announcement.

Arriving Camberwell change for Unknown LineID [15] services

My mind started spinning as to what was the architecture that resulted in the message. Are the messages sent to the train or stored on the train? Either way you would have thought that the requirements for such a service would not have specified the displayed message but something a bit more user friendly.

Indirect marketing

On the train the other day there was a lady reading the book Alphabet by a mjor Australian comedian Judith Lucy. I was fascinated because over the 40 odd minutes of the trip the lady did not change her serious facial expression. How could you read a book by Judith Lucy and not crack a smile or have a laugh to yourself. I know when I am sitting on the train listening to an episode of Monday’s that I have to contain myself.

Towards the end of the trip I was wondering if the person reading the book didn’t have a sense of humour, if the book wasn’t funny or if it was a serious book. Was this a form of indirect marketing?

Domain Architect the Movie

Watch out for Domain Architect the Movie coming soon…..

One Million Steps

I just clocked over a million steps as part of the Global Corporate Challenge, makes me feel pretty good and hopefully a little healthier.

Dire Prediction

With the recent forecasts about the effect of Global Warming on our environment I decided to do some research on the subject. After some extensive analysis I have reached the conclusion that 50 out of the next 100 years will have above average temperatures. The analysis is conclusive and irrefutable and definitely paints a dire picture for our planet over the next hundred years.

Optimists and snow skiers should read the article on the forcast that 50 out of the next 100 years will have below average temperatures.

Advice You Never Learned in School

Attributed to Bill Gates the following Life Lessons are invaluable if not blunt:

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

More than one way to open a door

At work we have security passes to get you through doors, you swipe your card to get in and then you swipe the card to get out. Everyone has been doing this for years but yesterday I was walking behind a lady who reached down to the door handle turned the lock on the handle then opened the door. As she was reaching down I was thinking how she didn’t realise you had to swipe to get out but as she opened the door I realise how conditioned I had become to swiping to get out. There really are many ways to solve a problem even was as simple as opening a door.

SOA Usability

As an organisation we are madly trying to define Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and get some traction so that it is incorporated into designs more than it is today. At the moment we are trying to build up a wiki site that embodies what SOA means within our organisation so that we capture what we have learnt but also provide somewhere people can discover the process. While reviewing the site I was a bit taken back by the inclusion of Usability and Accessibility as a section. In there I found links to suck things as:

User Experience Guide

Intranet Colour pallet

Terms like ‘Boiling the ocean’ and ‘Mountain out of a mole-hill’ spring to mind looking at this. Yes SOA is a cultural shift as well as a technical shift for an organisation but you need to have a clear defined message that you can lay out so people can follow adding noise to the message just reduces the chance of success.

Big Problems and Little Problems

Listening to an architecture presentation on InfoQ there was an interesting comment made about how an architect should prioritise decisions. An interesting point raised was around the impact of resolving big architecture decisions early in that these decisions allow smaller problems can be easier. The reverse of this is even more significant, in that making the easy architecture decisions before the big ones constrains what decisions you can make to solve you big problems.

This is one of those common sense type statements that is good to make a conscious decisions when creating an architecture.