Software, research, and leadership
At the drinks after Ivar Jacobson’s talk, I was speaking with a project manager from Honeywell who’s about to adopt a more agile development approach. Honeywell is in the industrial automation business – they do systems engineering to deliver solutions for things like building automation and factory process control. Their business context is one of …
A couple of weeks ago I caught up with the 20th century and got my first mobile phone. I also leaped into the future because my phone is the Google Dev Phone 1 – an unbranded HTC Dream running Google’s Android operating system. There aren’t many Android phones available on the market right now, but …
I said I’d report back on an experiment I started last November. For the Chilli Lager I made with a 3kg malt kit, I primed half the batch in the normal way, and didn’t prime the remaining bottles. The theory is that when using a full malt kit, after primary fermentation and bottling, there should …
The classic picture of augmented reality is having a large helmet on your head, wearing funny glasses, and carrying around massive laptop computers and batteries in a backpack. Your view of the real world is continually overlayed with rich and complex digital information. But I’ve started to see augmented reality appear in other ways. The …
On Monday I saw an entertaining and thought-provoking talk in Sydney by Ivar Jacobson, one of the inventors of UML. The talk was about agile development – what they don’t teach you in school. Ivar discussed the eternal problem of developing good software, quickly, at low cost. There’s a convergence happening between software engineering and …
Work has presented me with a small data manipulation exercise. That’s another opportunity to do some more scripting in F#! This time I’m processing some Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files. CSV files are one of the lowest forms of semi-structured data, used for representing a simple table of data textually. The basic idea is easy – …
A new brew on the last weekend of my short summer holidays – trying a Cooper’s Mexican Cerveza, with their Brew Enhancer Type 1. OG surprisingly high at 1.054! Sweet, light wort.
The discussion earlier this year about the death of the blogosphere is surely exaggerated. OK, my blog was “resting” for most of this year. My excuse is general busy-ness – moving house, moving office, and changing roles at NICTA. But recently I had the enthusiasm and time to write a flurry of blog entries. (I’ve …
I had to miss the second day of ICSOC, but was back for the morning of the third, and another great keynote, on Web-Scale Computing, from Peter Vosshall – a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon. Amazon needs a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure internally to run its retail business, but has also been selling …
The 6th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing is on in Sydney this week. NICTA is a sponsor, and I managed to score a registration to attend. Ian Foster opened with an interesting keynote. (Preceded by a 30 minute delay fussing with Mac technology issues!) He spoke on “Services for Science” – how SOA is …