Having recently joined English Heritage in an attempt to increase the number of interesting and child friendly places to take the kids I was surprised to find the effective application of technology, in particular, at the Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire. Upon entry to the venue we were supplied with small hand-held mobile phone style units to use as we wandered around the site; these came with handy little lanyards to stop them getting in the way.

Information posts were dotted around at various points around the site, pressing the relevant number on the keypad rewarded us with our own virtual tour guide so we could learn as much, or as little, as we liked about each particular point of interest based on our personal preference. This site is great with plenty of area for the kids to run around and a picnic area to settle down, eat, drink and watch the little dynamos running around with their seemingly abundant energy.

The use of technology was interesting for two reasons, firstly because the kids loved it, wandering about looking for posts, pushing buttons and trying to converse with the tour guide and secondly because I just finished my research project at Uni that looked into the area of mobile push applications. It struck me that if these audio information devices were made location aware, perhaps based on RFID or localised Bluetooth technology, then we would pretty much have a demonstration of exactly what I have been researching for all these months.

It is always exciting to see technology being usefully applied in unexpected places and even more so for its application to so naturally add value and complement the facilities which it supports.

After three long, hardworking and sometimes gruelling, years I have finally come to the end of my part time Computer Science Masters at University which I have to say I really, and surprisingly, enjoyed doing even though many a time I really struggled to find motivation. I had to give a Viva presentation as part of my final year report and an element of that involved some reflection on the course and naturally on how technology has moved on. I was looking forward to giving the presentation as, even though I work in IT, I work in the food manufacturing industry so I do not often get the opportunity to discuss, say, the inner workings of Bluetooth push applications in a mobile environment - with like-minded people. Usually, technological discussions get as far as something like “My home PC has stopped working, can you do me a favour and look at it for me?” or “I have upgraded to Vista and…”.

Back to the reflection, well, three years ago:

• I had a really advanced (for the time!) mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson T630 with integrated camera. Now I have a multipurpose entertainment device (a Nokia N95 8GB which I am loving so far! read about it here - with a 5 mega pixel snapper). A Sony Ericsson K800i filled the gap between these two devices.
• My computer was physically tied to the wall for a data connection and trying to get a reliable fast wireless connection was like pulling teeth. Now, I have so many devices connected wirelessly to the home broadband hub that I worry about the last mile and how I can get my house moved closer to the local exchange in the pursuit of more bandwidth.
• I was proudly driving around in my eight year old planet saving diesel car (the cost of fuel was so low then!) and I was happy to use printed maps for directions - now I have a choice of using my in car sat nav (which seems to have a mind of its own) or even my Nokia if I wanted to (though not whilst driving I hasten to add!). My car even tells me when I need to get it serviced. When I fill up at the pump I start to wonder if Moore’s law has started applying to fuel prices.
• I was thinking about getting Sky+ and now we often reflect that perhaps we watch a little too much TV and have recently dropped the Sky package for a Freeview box instead. It is amazing what you can get done with all those free hours that used to be spent watching television. Yep, now we can download and watch many of our favourite programmes when WE want to see them.
• I didn’t have children but now I could sing you the theme tune to Peppa Pig or In The Night Garden with no hesitation whatsoever - I could even sketch you a quick picture of Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy or Charlie and Lola. Mind you I am usually left to watch these programmes by myself as the kids push me off the computer. Childrens online websites with their various games and activities have a lot to answer for when Daddy is trying to remotely administer and maintain the company network.
• I used to laugh and tell people that one day everyone will be an IT Manager - of their home. Now, well, everyone seems to at least be familiar with level one technical support. The IT crowd sit-com have since driven this point home and even Peppa Pigs Daddy used this method successfully in several episodes. Seriously though, with computer security becoming a huge issue in the home including spam protection, phishing protection, anti-virus protection, intrusion prevention, parental controls, wireless security, copyright protection, and identity theft issues it seems that indeed everyone is needing to rapidly become a system manager of their home.
• I felt I knew most things there was to know about Microsoft Office and could probably navigate it blindfolded. Now, I struggle to find how to change the shape of Word Art and worry why my text style keeps changing when I accidentally hover over the Style ribbon.
• Our photo albums were dusty, out of date, bulky items that rarely saw the light of day except for maybe Christmas or when the relatives visited. Now, our photo albums cycle endlessly on our digital photo frame.
• I had an X-Box because everyone seemed to have one and it was the great thing to have but I never really bothered with it. Now I have a Wii and, well, I don’t really bother with it. No change there. Why does it ship with just one controller when all the fun seems to be in multiplayer games!? Maybe I will play it more when the kids get a bit older and interested in it.

I can only imagine what the next three years may bring.

Silly me. I have been living under the illusion that I told the computer what to do but recently the balance of power has started to shift as machines start asserting their authority and take their first tentative steps in trying to communicate with their human peripherals.

Driving along yesterday I was “told” by the car that the Navigation CD-Rom was unreadable, “NAVIGATION CD UNREADABLE” and no further driving instructions would be offered until I sorted out the problem. I was then “told” to arrange a service for my car , “ARRANGE SERVICE” - the message appeared on the dashboard (with a flashing spanner icon just in case I was having trouble understanding the concept of a service) and refused to show any other information for a while. Then, shortly afterwards the car bleeped up and told me to fill up with diesel right away, “REFILL FUEL NOW”.

I stopped off at the petrol station and decided to get a few snacks for the kids but the credit card machine was on a break and refused to accept my card, “CARD REFUSED”, the cash machine outside told me it didn’t like the look of me and would not be issuing any cash to me today, “NO CASH” - fortunately I managed to scrabble some cash together and make the purchase.

This morning when I got to work, the computer would not let me logon telling me “ACCESS DENIED” - “You must change your password immediately, you have been warned previously to do this and have refused so now buddy I am withdrawing all your computing rights until you do something about it.” - I thought I managed the technology around here but apparently there is a higher virtual authority at work. Oh, and my email box is being filled with messages telling me tersely that my email is getting full, “Mailbox FULL” -  so I better get that sorted out too.

I badly need a coffee but the vending machine told me it was out of cups and refuses to give me a coffee, even though I could easily have manually placed a cup at the appropriate place. The machine now just says “REPLACE CUPS”. Even the printer has started sending me email communications saying “REPLACE TONER” and “PAPER EMPTY”.

My laptop and mobile phone are connected together using Bluetooth and every now and then I see a little blue flash between them - are they chatting? Perhaps they are getting fed up with me or planning a new set of simple instructions for me as I now seemingly act as their drone.

These short sequential sets of instructions I am starting to receive from computers telling me to “do this, then that, if this happens then do that otherwise do this” - sound frighteningly familiar. Twenty five years ago I was typing similar stuff into a computer using a language called Basic. The computer would do pretty much what it was told and follow my instructions without question (mostly) - now it feels as if the shoe is on the other foot.

All these years of technology development and humans are becoming peripherals - or should that be huripherals?

I posted an update recently on our ongoing virtualisation project Virtualising takes time but it is worth it which is moving along quite nicely now - albeit with a few hiccups along the way (and one or two long delays). One of the useful side effects of this project has been forcing us to review, rethink and address services that we were running. The old adage says “if it an’t broke don’t fix it” but setting time aside to look at what you are doing and more importantly why is proving quite refreshing - it’s almost like having a technological spring clean! Over time, programs, that are useful at the time, tend to get installed and used for a while then a new server gets put in and some of these older programs end up taking up valuable space and become their own problem areas. Time is not always available for looking at these small issues so they tend to get left so it handy to finally get to revisit them.

As an example, we used to host our own website and our own FTP server. Migrating the web site to a hosted service and using file transfer services such as sendspace instead of FTP have moved a lot of traffic (especially unwanted hack attempt traffic on the FTP connection!) away from our network. The side benefits of a less stressed firewall and a freeing up of bandwidth have been welcomed and with a number of other servers left to analyse it will be interesting to see what else turns up.

I recently talked about problems with Backing Up (and Restoring) XP Drivers and have been trying to find a reliable method for hardware driver management. With so many different configurations in the field and including those in the server room - managing a rebuild is a much more complex task than it really should be. Unless you are lucky enough to purchase all your machines and software at the same time and perform regular technology updates and refreshes then chances are you, like us, have lots of different driver requirements. Much of the time this isn’t a problem. After all, while the machine is running adequately we don’t need to worry about it right? Only when a server fails do we often realise that we don’t have driver ‘X’ at hand and the machine won’t operate properly without it.

Virtual Server technology is started to provide some relief to this problem by layering the virtual drivers away from the physical drivers but where does the responsibility for driver management lie? It would be great to click a button and backup all the existing drivers and be able to utilise them during a rebuild but for this to work it needs the hardware vendors and the operating systems people to work together to implement an industry wide solution.

In the mean time I will continue my search but I wonder - how do you manage your drivers?

For some time now I’ve been working on a server consolidation project in our environment (Virtualisation Update … Web Server). This has been using virtualisation technology which seems to be in vogue at the moment. So, instead of a number of tower based servers we now have just a few HP DL380 64-bit servers running a virtual images which on the whole is working great. Rebooting machines is much quicker, allocating resources is easier, we are getting better value out of our machines and backing up virtual images gives us a sense of security that we could only dream of five years ago. It is also becoming easier to get all the machine images onto the same software release, see Upgrading Windows 2003 Server SP2 to R2.

One problem we have discovered however, especially being a 24 hour operation, is that when certain patches and updates have been installed on a host server it still needs rebooting which now takes down half a dozen servers at a time instead of just the one. The added trouble is that the virtual images receive updates too so now they often get rebooted twice, once for their own update and once for the host update. I imagine a good software and patch update methodology is the answer to this dilemma but it’s still surprising that with all this technology at hand - that a machine still needs to be switched off and on again in order to process an update.

Is Sharepoint worth the investment, effort and upheaval from simple shared folders?

I have been busy reducing the number of physical servers by utilising virtual server technology (which you can read about in this post on my other Blog: Slamming down the Virtualisation Gauntlet). But now I am looking at trying to improve the end user experience and in particular the way data files are stored and accessed.

For our user base, and we have worked this way for a very long time, user generated data has never really been actively managed in a way I would be comfortable with. We have issued two drive letters for file storage. The first is what we would call a personal drive (but I guess it’s really a user drive) where only the particular user can store and access their files (other than an administrator). The second is a mapping to a shared drive - the shared drive contains sub-folders that are locked down and accessible to specific groups of users. We used to have a third public read only drive but it never really got used that much as users preferred shared drives. That is about it - users have then been left to their own devices to create sub-folders, manage their files and think about which files to share with others. Some people might use the term KISS (Keep It Short and Simple) to describe this method of information management but as technology develops I keep thinking about the shortcomings of this way of working.

The problem is that these drives are filling up with information which isn’t particularly well organised or accessible. Users organise information differently leading to inconsistency when looking for information. Also, when a user changes department, or moves on, there is always great difficulty in ascertaining which information in their user folder should be retained or moved to another user. Common information is difficult to access due to it being in different places for different reasons: for example, if we need to find all user documents relating to Customer X or Product Y, it would be a huge and difficult challenge. There is also the management of information groups: if a user needs to be added or removed from a group this has to be done via Active Directory so requires some IT intervention.

I would really like to make more intelligent and structured use of this increasing amount of information rather than the old sub-folder structure that is currently in place. I keep looking with envy towards things like Wikis, Blogs, Document Management, Version Control, Newsgroups, Intranets, Image Directories, Search and the like that start to make some sense and organisation of information in a common and consistent way and I wonder if this would be a better mechanism for user generated information management. That leads me to SharePoint.

I have looked at it a few times but have yet to fully commit and drive it out to the user base as I feel the change would be quite dramatic and I guess the immediate uphill learning curve for the user base might be more of a concern than the long term benefits. However, SharePoint seemingly provides a much superior way of organising, accessing and searching information - but is this the right way to go? Will it give the huge advantages that I dream of or are there pitfalls to be aware of?

Do you ever get those times when you’re idling away time at the Google search bar trying to think of interesting things to look up ? Come on, admit it, we all do don’t we? Even my technology dis-interested partner does it - I have a feeling that it may become a national pastime - then maybe even a quiz show panel game.

I wondered if there is a name for it - I know about the word futzing which describes playful time interacting with a device such as a computer but I wondered if there is something particular to search engine input forms. They always seem so tempting with their little flashing cursors in the search box. So I typed into Google the following search phrase (without the quotes) “idling time searching google” which delivered around 1.8m results and didn’t seem to have the answer I was looking for. I then got a little more creative trying words like Goofling, Goggling and Gooping with no luck. It’s a shame because I really thought I was onto something with Gooping. I kept trying and couldn’t find anything but then real life kicked in - maybe next time!

I still haven’t found an answer but I did realise after a while that I was doing exactly what I was trying to find the name for! (for the employers out there, don’t panic - I am on a days holiday!)

Reading Davey Winders Blog post regarding Brainstorm and its 24th Birthday got me thinking about legacy applications and in particular our in-house bespoke ERP system that I am currently caretaker and developer of. It is too easy these days to consider an application useful only if it has a graphical user interface but I imagine that there are many older applications still in active and essential use today – that is certainly the case in our business.

Originally our ERP system was an MRP package (before ERP became an all encompassing term) and started out life serving the automotive industry – until we bought the rights to develop the source code when the original development company moved on to other projects. This software was and still is developed in COBOL, originally Ace COBOL then RM COBOL and now Microfocus COBOL on AIX. The back-end file system isn’t even a database - it still utilises C-ISAM indexed files and very few are simple sequential files. File and record locking problems still occur (though less frequently these days) and new report programs have to be hard coded by hand – I sometimes still use those sheets of 80×25 grid paper for laying out screens and reports!

The thing I discovered whilst looking through some of the code recently is that quite a few of the older programs in our ERP date back to 1978 which means that this year our ERP will be celebrating its 30th birthday! Obviously parts of the software have changed a lot since those days and I’ve completely rewritten the front end and the majority of the everyday programs and added all sorts of bells and whistles to others. But not all of the code has changed and there are still programs that are relatively untouched bar minor updates to make them compile using modern compilers – there is no windows front end – in fact no graphical user interface at all - just a text based interface (though we do use colour now), no mouse control and no WYSIWYG print preview options. New users are sometimes surprised that they can’t click on menu options with the mouse and often quiz me why they have to keep CAPS LOCK on when entering data into input fields.

However, one of the strengths of our business over the years has always been quoted as being our strong ERP software which has worked with us and for us for all these years and just goes to show that legacy applications are still alive and well - after all ‘if it ain’t broke…’ – so to our ERP system I wish a very happy 30th birthday.

I wonder how many other so called ‘legacy’ applications are still out there and serving their business partners faithfully?

So thinksecret.com will no longer be published according to their post Apple, Think Secret settle lawsuit. An amicable settlement? Is this a win for the big Apple or for the lowly Blogger – may be will never know. John Naughton from the Observer talks about this short but sweet statement in his article User-friendly Apple shows a blogger its ruthless core. For something like a Blog to really catch the attention of a huge corporate only re-inforces my point that Blogging is a worthwhile activity and not, as some naysayers might have you believe, a complete waste of time. Personally I find Blogging a great addition to my everyday activities and it has certainly improved my life in a number of areas, both at work and socially. If you are thinking of starting a Blog yourself, but have reservations, you should read Why Blogging is not a waste of time.

Doing the job I do - sometimes I get sent some odd things but imagine my surprise when A missile launcher arrived in the post this morning. Mind you, on the flip side, I am still waiting for my prize to arrive from the Adobe Creative License Tour ‘Prize Draw’ back in November but as the months slowly tick by I am running out of people to contact at Adobe as well as any enthusiasm I had for the prize at the beginning – I just hope the book arrives before the next major release of Creative Suite otherwise the book is going to be out of date – and there was I hoping to give it a good read over the Christmas break. Now I may have to try and re-install Windows Vista instead!

While we’re all tucking into our turkey dinner this year and snoozing after the Christmas pud, spare a thought for all those heroes whose work and efforts often go unrecognised. The skeleton staff’ support staff, call centre staff, field engineers, shop staff, petrol pump attendants, media people (especially the writers), emergency services, and public servants who are all there trying to make our lives a little bit easier while we lay around on the sofa waiting for the Queens big speech. Talking of those public servants who have been taking a hammering recently: I missed the post on Saturday and the Postman left a missed delivery card - this was an important present that I had been working on for ages (courtesy of Snapfish who managed to get my late order out before the big day) but to my surprise the Postman redelivered the package on Sunday morning. If someone you know falls ill over Christmas or New Year, or has one too many ales, and ends up in the waiting area of a hospital somewhere think of all the people that are making that happen - the ones you see and the ones you don’t. There is all this ubiquitous technology around us that is put to great use and that we take for granted every single day - but behind that technology are people - people who are working hard and whose work is often also taken for granted.

So to all those who may be at work on Christmas day and those whose work often goes unacknowledged but is so important especially at this time year - thank you for making my Christmas merry.

Best wishes to you all and Merry Christmas.