Posts by Rhys Parsons

Tory Grandee puts boot into NHS Google plans

Clueless Tories

The Tories are clueless about this.

Let's be frank: any IT project in the NHS is likely to fail: too many organisations that work in different ways; too many people in an organisation that want different things. It's a mine field.

However, what the Tories are suggesting is not necessarily Google / MS solutions. Somehow, Cameron went out to see Google and got the impression that distributed patient records was better than the centralised approach of NPfIT. Moreover, he wants to create a 'market' within the NHS so that the 'best' solution wins.

I've seen this in the Fire Service, where you could make a fair living by re-implementing systems slightly differently for individual brigades. No centralisation meant that communications equipment in each brigade was different, the software was different and that meant lots of money for contractors and ISVs. This is despite the GD-92 communications specification, which aimed at inter-operability and meant, in principle, you could re-use the same system in different brigades; somehow, it never ended up like that, however.

What the Tories are planning is even worse. Imagine a company where if you went from one office to another you had to re-learn how to use the software that it is now essential you use to do your job. It's not just essential: lives are at risk. Well, the Tories want to create the situation. And the call it 'the market'.

Any IT project in the NHS is going to be hard. But the problem with government is that they will only deal with big contractors (EDS, eg). Smaller, more agile teams would probably solve these problems better. Software on this scale should be a living, ever-changing thing, with very small changes on a regular basis. What the big boys will produce is large, functional systems that will do what it's supposed to on paper. But not in practice.

Sun's JavaFX consumer pitch falls on confused ears

Java + RIA

The exciting thing for me (as Java developer who has been forced down the Flex route for the last year) is that Sun have provided a modern mechanism for building GUIs that finally match what Adobe and Microsoft are doing.

Sun-bashing seems to be fashionable, but there is not doubt that they have developed an exciting contender for the RIA market. Will it succeed? What most of the articles I've read have ignored is Java developer push on using new technologies that more closely match their skill set. Existing Java developers will want to use JavaFX because it is Java - in a few years, a developer's CV may well look incomplete without some JavaFX experience. And that alone is a powerful force for JavaFX adoption in SMEs (what do managers know about technology?).

Delivering video has greatly increased the install base for Flash Player; I expect Sun are hoping it will do the same for the Java VM.

In terms of the enterprise...well, we have some banking customers who are still using Java 1.5 and Flash Player 7 as standard. Some of these machines are re-built every night, so it it's not in the standard machine image, the user isn't going to use it. That means that not only is the latest Java not usable, neither is the latest Adobe Flex offering. Silverlight doesn't even appear on the radar.

The Google-isation of all the net's access points

Java?

Surely that's a JavaScript engine!

Dreamer calls for revolution of the algorithm

Communist Manifesto

Having read this a few years ago, I seem to remember it was less about people 'being nice to each other' and more about how the bourgeoisie had better look out because the proletariat were in the ascendancy. Quite an entertaining rant.

AVG fake traffic spares Google AdWords

Referral URL?

In terms of web analytics, there are several factors to take into account.

1. If the request has no referral URL, then it's going to appear as a direct hit on the site.

2. Presumably all cookies are ignored so no Visitor matching can be done.

This leads to an increase of bounces of unknown Visitors. Given a decent web analytics package (e.g. VBIS from Site Intelligence), this would be easy to discount by segmenting the data appropriately.

How to counter premature optimisation

Optimization vs understanding technologies...

To add my own stories...

I once started work at a small company where the lead developer was a somewhat inexperienced Java developer. I went in at the same level (by title, rather than experience) and eventually replaced him. The code I inherited had many bizarre 'workarounds', such as synchrornizing on the application variable in JSPs.

In this application, reports produced XML output and used XSLT to display in the browser. The XML was built using concatenated String objects. I knew this was probably bad, but only did something about it when there was a complaint by a customer that the HTTP request timed out before a report was displayed. I wasn't sure there was much that could be done, thinking most of the time was probably taken up by processing the query rather than by concatenating the strings. But, I reasoned, since I'm looking at this code, I might as well convert all of the string concatenation into appending to a StringBuilder.

Having finished the task, the 30 minutes it took to process the report was reduced to 3 seconds.

In a similar vein, a colleague of mine once used DOM and XPath to parse an XML document and return the values he needed. It was dog slow, unacceptably so. A member of my team re-wrote it using a SAX parser and some POJOs. Performance was improved dramatically and became acceptable.

The moral is: you can't ignore peformance when writing code.Both of these situations were avoidable with a little bit of knowledge and some good advice. People need to understand how the way they solve a problem might impact performance. They need to understand the performance issues of the technology choices they make when they make them, not wait till there's a problem, then deal with it.

TalkTalk slams slamming charges

They've just done it to me!

Talk Talk have just changed my broadband without my permission and without a Migration Access Code. In fact, my wife specifically told them we already had a broadband provider and we weren't interested in changing immediately and was told they couldn't migrate our broadband until they had an access code anyway, so the ball was in our court.

I noticed that my broadband modem wasn't managing to log in after coming back from a week's holiday in Italy. I'd been sent login details (which I assumed were for my online account but which I knew would work as an ADSL login/password beacause I'd set up my mother-in-law's), so I changed the login details in the modem, and hey presto! I had broadband again.

My former ISP (Force9, owned by PlusNet) were very helpful and didn't complain or try to offer me a special deal that would end up costing me more money (which is what Bulldog tried to do in the past) and have behaved like a paragon of service providers.

If it wasn't for the fact that I'm saving £22 per month, I'd have stayed with Force9. And if Talk Talk provide me with a rubbish service, I might just go back to them.

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

localisation algorithm (keeping .co.uk)

www.theregister.com -

check localisation header: if it matches an el reg localisation, re-direct to that (us.theregister.co.uk or www.theregister.co.uk), if not display an international version (world.theregister.co.uk)

that makes .com both international and national without assuming it's US-specific and keeps the British stamp of excellence (.co.uk)