15th may 2008

This post is from from my other blog here

A few people mentioned that they really hated the live blogging that went on during Interesting South the other night. From their perspective it seemed rude that the audience was not totally focused on the speakers and 'in-the-moment' and visibly paying attention. I found this interesting because I cannot really just sit there and listen to someone without doing something else. For me to take in audio content I need to do some other physical activity (doodling or driving are great). So for me, live blogging an event is really helping me to lock into what the speaking is saying in a kinaesthetic way. Note: I have been diagnosed with ADHD and am advised that this kind of behaviour is quite 'normal'. Also many of my friends display the same kind of behaviour - they are also into live blogging stuff.But these comments made me realise that there is (perhaps) a new kind of gap rather than the old style generation gap. This new gap is between the parallel processor people and serial processor people - a gap between styles of attention and perspective. Realistically each group is going to drive the other nuts - should be interesting to watch!By Carruthers via Aide-mémoire

This post is from from my other blog here

My buddy Alec the Geek often makes very sensible and considered posts that get me thinking. Other times he just says stuff that I agree with because it is so simply obvious (and thus it is ridiculous that there should exist a need to comment at all). Thus Alec's recent post on Software development the Gordon Ramsay way got my head nodding in agreement and then got me cross that such basic concepts still seem so foreign to builders of software.I continue to be amazed of how many places just do not have the basic principles and practices of software development in place. Collectively we have killed forests of trees and wasted centuries of time writing systems development methodologies, software engineering standards, even a Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. Yet still we have the same poor practices and lack of discipline that often makes our industry look like a badly organised team of chimpanzees. Michael Krigsman cites a litany of examples over at his IT Project Failures blog. Almost without exception, each example shows how the failed project did not follow accepted and documented best practice.It is very strange to me that one definition of insanity (attributed to Albert Einstein) is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". What does this say about the IT industry?By Carruthers via Aide-mémoire