Archive for February, 2008

Managing Complexity

A recent article in Harvard Business Review (Feb 2008 issues, ‘The Experience Trap’) talks about how seasoned IT managers are just as useless at managing complex software projects as erm… everybody else. Apparently, veterans can’t seem to bring their years of experience to bear.
The article suggests that senior staff have cognitive models that were put [...]

Holistic design: planting software acorns – II

In my first post on holistic design, I talked about how designers are sometimes better positioned to approach a project with a holistic mindset (compared to software engineers / developers). This post covers some ideas about how to keep the ‘whole’ in mind even when, as software developers, we have the urge to “divide [...]

Flex 3 SDK + Eclipse : an encouraging union

On one of those rare occasions that I could be arsed to go out of my way to use precious “day-off” hours to tinker with software, I decided to find out how hard it would be to build flex apps without Adobe Flex Builder. With excellent (if outdated) starting points such as Darren Schall’s post [...]

Holistic design: Planting software acorns – I

The acorn seed: a tiny thing, with the enormous potential to become a mighty oak tree. The realisation of this potential is often used as a metaphor for evolutionary design – but this leads to several unhelpful perceptions.
The acorn doesn’t ‘evolve’, in the Darwnian sense, into an oak tree… far better to realise that the [...]

Knights of the software realm

In my previous articles about the Guardians of the realm and the Servants of the realm, I talked about different types of roles within the software development life-cycle. This time, I’m going to talk about a different breed of people: the ones who innovate and implement the ideas that move an entire organisation forward…

It’s not your grandmother’s planet

Is it just me, or is the pop science world finally starting to tune in to the earth sciences?
It isn’t all high-school geography fodder either: forget about lava cones and knowing your stalagtites from your stalagmites – media on the hip new earth touches on everything from geohazards to lithospheric insights about our evolutionary past [...]

Utility computing vs the electricity grid

I was watching Steve Paikin’s Agenda the other day and they had a panel discussing ‘the cloud’ which seemed to the buzzword for what the internet presumably becomes once utility computing becomes the norm. They had several panelists on the show – Jesse Hirsh, Nicholas Carr, Shane Shick and Mathew Ingram.
Adoption of ‘The Cloud’ was [...]

Left brain vs right brain test

I know it’s old, but this silly right-brain vs left-brain test was making me go bonkers…  My advice: just keep staring! You too will achieve enlightenment (of how it is possible to see it differently).
I am kinda curious how the swap is possible… I’ve decided it has something to do with how the leg is [...]

Memes: biochemical feedback loops, not viral ads.

There is a lot of mildly conflicting information about memes. They have been categorised as everything from viral ideas (from folks in the marketing / advertising camp) to copied behaviour that spreads through a culture (the behaviourist / socio-anthropologist camp).
The basic idea is that genes do for biological evolution what memes do for cultural evolution. [...]