Where are the new developers coming from?

My final note from the Water’s Power:09 Conference; Robert Johnson, a development manager at one of the London based banks stated that of the people he’s looked at in recruitment,

Many… developers don’t have a computer science background…

which makes it hard for them to write code for both distributed computing platforms and multi-threaded CPU systems.

It seems this is a reflection of the trends I have written about at on my old sun blog, tagged ‘university’ and more importantly at this site, in an article called British Higher Education. Given a choice between studying something easy or something hard, now that they have to pay a lot, students and their families choose the easy route. A further cause is the dead hands on the school IT curriculum design and the gestation period to make changes. …

Data Centre Economies of Scale

Data Centre Economies of Scale

At the Waters:Power09, last week, Bob Giffords argued there are three ‘gravitational’ forces leading to the mega data centres and cloud computing.

  • There’s too much data to move, it needs to stay where its created.
  • Intra system & total latency is still a problem, and hence systems are best co-located with the data.
  • He argues that energy management is a gravitational issue.
 …

Some insights into managing the cloud

Dave Cliff, Professor of Computer Sci at Bristol spoke to Waters Power:09 in Canary Wharf yesterday. It is clear from many sources that IT is changing and he examined some of these changes. He woke me up by quoting Carlota Perez  who argues that there are five transformational changes since the industrial revolution, Steam, Railways, Electricity, internal combustion and IT. She also argues that the adoption and maturity cycles are similar, and Cliff argues that “money’s out of IT now”. Her book is called “Technological Revolutions and Finance Capital:The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages”, which gives on an idea of where she’s coming from. Cliff also pointed his audience at Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch”, another pundit that argues that IT is done! …

Plazes

So, having started a new job, I have registered the new office at Plazes and can now use both the web site and the ipodtouch, using the iplazer app, to update my plazes atom feed with my location. My recent travels can still be seen at my i’m here page, and I am now likely to keep this more up to date than over the summer.

The Plazer seems to have disappeared from the internet, so I have put one of my windows installer copies on my downloads page. (I expect I’ll move it to a mirror page at some point, but I was in a hurry as I expect to ‘need’ to install it soon).

I wonder how much longer I’ll bother with this, they seem to have lost interest since being bought by Nokia.

ooOOOoo

I have no idea why I brought this forward to the wordpress blog; all the links are broken since Plazes died in 2012. …

Some good news from BT

Did you know that if you authorise your BT Home Hub as a BT FON server, you get 500 BT Openzone minutes/month and the hub will throttle any external users if you need the bandwidth yourself. 500 minutes is more than I buy for my phone, and my phone can connect to it using WiFi, to extend my internet minutes. That’s a piece of good news, although it was harder than I’d want to find it out. …

Spain again

It’s always the way. I have been planning a holiday trip to Valencia, and flying directly there, without using Easyjet is not easy. I don’t want to use EasyJet because watching “Airline” has put me off for life. I don’t want to use Ryan Air because their UK airports are too far from where I live. They’re both owned and run by greedy entreprenuers with a zero customer service ethic. And beyond all these principled factors, I have never found a £10 ticket offer. Unsurprisingly, they’re not that much more inexpensive.

I looked at traveling via Alicante or Barcelona. Again, not easy synching with trains etc, almost worked out how to do it via Alicante, but the flights out were at appalling times. So I had just booked a return trip to Barcelona when I had the Fly Be site pointed out to me. Doh! I had checked that there were no flights to Valencia from Southampton and Bournmouth, but forgot to go around again when I changed my plans. …

An afternoon in Faerun

Another afternoon in Faerun, this time wth my Druid who’s reached the ancient city of Undrentide. I really am unsure about Druids. They ought to be really buff, but I am having some difficulty with this one. He certainly is no match for the Golems in the City so I was going to have to get the Butler’s ring. Even this wasn’t that easy. However once I set Dorna up to help me open doors when I can’t, we got into the Butler’s chambers having run past the two Golems with enough time to talk to the Butler and retreive the ring  before the Golems turned up to spoil the party. They were easy enough to deal with then. …