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Comment on Personal Ethics by Bec

Bec — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:44:34 +0000

I think this sort of “lifting” is quite common. I’ve seen it a few times and normally the alarm bells start ringing when, as you say, the tone of the document chops and changes.
Lazy, pushed for time…is it also a matter of education – that people don’t know that they should reference material copied from another source?
I think that IT managers also have a responsibility to set standards, and that if they fail to insist on quality, then they are partly to blame. As I am on my way to a tech writing qualification, I recently reviewed some IT policies produced by an expensive consultant. These were critical policies (DR, service continuity) and had been signed off by the two IT managers and the CIO. I was amazed the document had passed muster – the first sentence of the first paragraph wasn’t complete, and the rest of the document was not a policy, just a collection of random ambiguous statements that literally didn’t make any sense at all, syntactically or contextually. The docs were scanned and up on the intranet (sharepoint of course and mentioned in the Annual report.
Sigh.
One word springs to mind… accountability.

Comment on Optus sucks – by DanielleLopes

DanielleLopes — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:42:54 +0000

Optus TOTALLY SUCKS. My husband is an IT Guru from San Jose CA USA, we now live in Australia….l’m aussie Out Internet drops out 20+ times a day, in-between BIG emaisl to my clients, losing everything everytime, we are currently a 56k right now and that is NOT what we pay for….if you try to talk to them you get a heaily accented Indian usually who ells you it is ALL YOUR FAULT. The excuses are out and out lies as the hubby can clearly see it is them…it is NOT our modem as they always say…LIARS, CHEATS…this is called failure to supply services with is ILLEGAL, if they promise 256 you should get 256. They have cost me jobs as a Photographer as my interner is so bad clients haven’t gotten emails in a timely manner…oh don’t even get me started.
BURN IN HELL OPTUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is what happens when you outsource everything to India you pathetic wankers!!!!!! Your IT staff know half of what l do and l am not even qualified!!!!!!
Oh and to make matters worse…..my hubby can’t get a job here in the IT field an is more qualified than obviously the IDIOTS at Optus….they all have a ID 10 T issue……IDIOTSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Comment on XML – its not bad, it’s just used that way. by anon_anon

anon_anon — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:48:11 +0000

You may want to look at vtd-xml as the state of the art in XML processing, consuming far less memory than DOM

http://vtd-xml.sf.net

Comment on How much Architecture do you need? by Jeremy Ross

Jeremy Ross — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:55:22 +0000

Every time I work on a project in your Enterprise scenario, it feels like a death march right out of the gates. These projects tend to be full of pain, politics and atrocious project management. I avoid these like the plague. Life’s too short.

Comment on How much Architecture do you need? by Steven

Steven — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:50:39 +0000

I agree with most of your points and I’d like to pick up the “learned the rules” comment in another blog.

But the comment “These organisations are dead” I have to disagree with. The company I referred to regularly makes Billion dollar profits and is very financially secure, indeed its core business is risk aversion (It’s Insurance). I think they will roll on just fine. But I wouldn’t necessarily want to work there

Comment on How much Architecture do you need? by rainwebs

rainwebs — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:21:51 +0000

Creative people should leave such environments immediately. It isn’t worth to invest life time in a zero fault tolerance environment. These organizations are dead, because they lost the ability to learn: the more faults the better you learn.

If you have a look at architecture from the risk management point of view it is a system of rules that assures that the developers work with a certain farsightedness. If all developers have learned the rules you don’t have to write them down. But, experience shows that it is easier for new team members to have something written down.

I don’t think it makes sense to develop an architecture without direct contact to the development team. In times of agile teams this became pretty absurd .

Comment on Personal Ethics by Steven

Steven — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:20:10 +0000

Well, you are right, SharePoint is a terrible wiki.

I guess it depends. It’s far, far more complicated than wiki solutions like MediaWiki or Confluence, but its a lot cheaper and empowers uses much more than ECM tools like TRIM.

I’m not a huge fan, I don’t find SharePoint sites particularly easy to work with, but its integration with Office/Windows for document management and version control is better than ‘yet another network drive’, and it does put a lot of power into users hands.

Comment on Personal Ethics by Greg Knox

Greg Knox — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:24:33 +0000

What differentiates sharepoint from other, more functional, wikis ?

Comment on The National Broadband Network – my thoughts (#nbn) by Craig Thomler

Craig Thomler — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:33:00 +0000

I agree.

There’s also been another concern raised: Is fibre-optic the right technology to use? Won’t there be something better in a few years?

This question is generally asked by people with no understanding of what fibre-optic cables delivery – information at almost the speed of light. The main constraints on network speed are not the cables themselves, but the bits that connect from these cables to peoples’ homes – and these can be reasonably cheaply upgraded (even just as software uploads across the network) to faster speeds.

Comment on The National Broadband Network – my thoughts (#nbn) by Michael Wyres

Michael Wyres — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:16:05 +0000

Spot on! I have concerns about whether Rudd/Conroy are the right people to be doing this, but there is more to the NBN than just pure internet data. It opens many, many possibilities for services that without it we could only dream of. I’m not a fan of Conroy – but if they can pull this off properly – all kudos to him and his cronies.