Anyhow, this story amused me no end today.

As an ex developer and business analyst of some 20 years the story starts with he age old hatred of the sales guy, and I immediately sided with Gerald. The story continues with the (also age old) story of half a dozen workable solutions being shot down for some idiotic reason or other and then finally ending up with a massively complex and costly solution… and the sting in the tail.. for a single user.

This reminds me of a recent project I was partly involved in. We had spend the best part of a year redesigning our server infrastructure to reduce the complexity and remove the incompatibility of multiple software applications interfering with each other. I was very proud of the solution – it was almost beautiful in its simplicity and resilience. A month or so later my utopia was sullied…

The management had announced that they had reviewed many Management Information applications and decided on one, and now that all the hard work of decision making and procurement had been done, all we had to do now was to install it and implement the needs of the business – apparently this should only take us a couple of weeks.

Hmmm….

Systems – Ok, can we please see your requirements?
Business – Errrrrrm, what’s that then?

Systems – Can we see the systems specs you need to run the software?
Business – Errrrrrrm, We’ll give you the contact details of the vendor.

<Sigh>

The really niggling thing was that we already had an in-house reporting tool that could connect to ANY data source and report on it. All that was needed was a simple input front end and some graphics on the output, which could be done with some macros in excel – an entire process that could have been performed in 1 month by 2 people. Instead we ended up spending several dozens of thousands of pounds on licensing a product that only just kinda outputs the same mess that we previously had just not quite as fast, and several months by a cast of dozens to implement the underlying implementation that we had to coerce because the application didn’t support what we wanted anyway.

The only reason I can see that this was done was that one person wasn’t able to use Excel.

But it’s even worse than that… the existing system aside, there are several well trained and qualified people around that ‘one person’ that would have cherished the opportunity to update the excel version at no real cost and in a fraction of the time.

You have to love “business”.

10 marines died for this as well. This is truly sad. Who gives us the right to impose our so-called freedom on another state? What’s more depressing is that some stupid idiot thought that this might actually have a chance at working.

Should we not go in to free those enslaved by dictatorship, those who are being tortured for no reason… My personal opinion is that while this is really bad shit, NO we should not go in. Or if we do we need to do it because it is morally correct, and do it fairly and equally across the board, not just to those we have a bit of grudge against or those who’s country we need to be on our side because of it’s oil interests. Admittedly we have to prioritise, but I don’t see the atrocities in western and southern Africa being sorted any time soon… Oh, with the exception of Angola, whose government we are not attempting to demolish because of the mass genocide, but actually negotiating with because of the rich offshore oil fields.

Politics is two-faced there is no doubt, but in the end they are there to run the country in the best interests of the citizens that elected them. So just be honest. Allow the tree hugging hippies to demonstrate, and attempt to vote you out the next time round. Also honesty is the best policy because you can then feely admit that you are gonna go in, get the person that you want, destroy their ability to fight back just out of spite and it saves millions on spin doctors and trying to convert the country to a new religion… ah, the crusades… those were the good old days.

Anyhow, why you ask is the Doctor concerned by all this? Well doesn’t anybody wonder what happened to all those people after WWII and the crazy occult experiments conducted by the Nazi scientists… and the mind control experiments of the US “project Ultra”? Is this hidden level just preparation for the global population for a Zombie outbreak?

Just don’t buy a Microsoft XBox, firstly they are made by Microsoft, secondly they are crap, and finally they are for pussies, gays and lazy arse fucknuts. If you want to meet up with your mates then grow a pair, get off the couch, put some trousers on and just fuckin do it, don’t lie to your missus and do it behind her back “online”!

I thought about changing my name a while back, and not because of the law concerns. It turns out that in English law you cannot have anything that could be conceived as offensive or that contains a title of some description. This means that “Fugly the Love Doctor” is out. “McLovin” was o.k. though – it seems in the UK we don’t have issues with copyright.

For the lower class morons among us:

• Fawning: (verb) means to gain favour though flattery.
• Doggerel: (noun) means a comic verse of irregular measure.

Any clearer?

Fuck off Paxman.

Iain’s blog

BRING BACK THATCHER!!!

O.k. while she started the whole thing off with privatising everything, the iron lady would have put her foot well and truly down with a firm iron hand and would have had this nipped in the bud months/years ago. Oh, and if it was all her fault, then why has 12 years of labour government failed to address the issue.

First off, I’d ban the national lottery. Having never won myself, I think that if you have a few quid a week to play 44 million to 1 odds, then either you should be committed and any assets you have shared with the people, or shut the fuck up and put that money toward a jumper.

Next un-privatise the key industries in the UK – power, transport and Sky TV. If these are basic human rights, then they should be run by the government.

Finally sack 78.4% (some random statistic I just invented) of the employees of local council and make all the MP’s work cuz they love it. They get a huge holiday over summer, get paid shed loads of money and just seem to seriously annoy everyone they are supposed to represent. You could put in a bonus incentive where the constituency get to decide how much their MP gets paid, that’d make them work for the people and not for a peerage.

Here is the article:

CNET article

Now in my experience and prior to a few days ago, I would still have disagreed slightly with this stand point, however mr CTO has not done his research.  Amazon now supply persistent storage that you can attach to your server… nice. This means that you can store all your mission critical data persistently, rebuild an instance of your server from a backup inside 10 minutes, and then reattach the storage.

Even before this revelation in technology, mr Chief Officer, a good backup policy would have saved any data from your point case, and just an outage is hardly the end of the world.

Now I’m not suggesting we run out and put mission critical stuff in ‘the cloud’, what I am suggesting is that the solution can be as stable as, say, a £1,000,000 service contract with IBM. If you are that worried about a server failing and seriously cannot handle an outage of an hour in a year, or don’t have the ability to use separate server zones, or cannot put together a load balancing cluster then possibly you might want to look outside the IT area for a career.

This chap seems to have a similar perspective, but again, I cannot believe that a company does not have a decent backup procedure, that’s just plain stoooooopidity! The P2P cloud discussed is to distributed services what “Web 2.0″ was to the internet – a rehash of an old technology that worked really well all the way back then, and they finally find a use for it. Way-to-go guys, My commodore 64 may be usefull again!!!

I would suggest that the reason it is being suggested that the cloud is not ready yet, is because companies like Citrix and IBM have not yet found a way to use this really cheap service, completely destroy it and charge a fortune for it… Dunno, just a thought.

BBC NEWS | Changes in murder laws proposed.

Damn we are getting liberal. At least this currently rules out “He pulled out at the junction and I felt ’seriously wronged’ so I axe manslaughtered his arse Milud”

This does open up one really interesting possibility though… Should the law be passed, Aquila should seriously worry about retribution from all their client base… It may be worth 7 years with probation.

There is a superb drama on TV at the moment “Criminal Justice” that puts the British justice system in an interesting light when you compare it to the TV interpretations of the US version of ‘law’. I’m up to episode 3 where the defence tried to argue self defence against the wishes of the defendant.

Given the brief exposure I have had to the British Justice System I think it may be scarily accurate. It should be enough to stop idiots offending in the first place.

• inmates wear pink underwear – possibly cuz its imasculating but also becuase they get stolen less.
• Joe doesn’t want to spend $70 million dollars on new accommodation for inmates instead army tents. “You won’t get early release for overcrowding,” Jo states, “just more tents”
• Joe took away cable TV in his jails before he was ordered to put it back by the state. When he did he only allowed things like the disney channel and the weather channel and other ‘educational’ channels. “Inmates are here to serve a debt to society not to live with luxuries most law abiding citizens cant even afford.”
• Joe cut off coffee because it has zero nutritional value and is therefore a waste of taxpayer money. When the inmates complained, he told them, “This isn’t  the Ritz/Carlton. If you don’t like it, don’t come back.” Other things were also removed like porn, smoking and weight lifting equipment.
• Joe has introduced mandatory English classes for the non-english speaking inmates. “These inmates happen to be incarcerated in the United States of America and in Maricopa County where I run the jails. We speak English here, not foreign languages.”
• Joe has introduced chain-gangs for female inmates. “Crime knows no gender and I won’t allow discrimination in my jails.”

Of course there are the namby-pamby, freaks who claim that human rights are being eroded. But my point of view is – what about the victims of crime that have been completely violated.

Joe is right, these guys are in jail to be punished. They chose to forfeit their human rights afforded them by the community the day the broke the law and chose to opt out of the community.

Joe for President of the US.

 I investigated a few things and I fould out that the orange jump suit and font used on it are copyrighted by the US Department of Corrections.

So instead, mostly my own work (some small print about coming up with it on work time over lunch involving other people, but hey) I will be investigating a line of orange wear with my new logo:

Don’t try stealing it or I’ll have to send the boys round. No-one wants a bunch of deviant boys coming round… it’ll be like public school all over again.