Software has no borders

Tom Watson MP tweeted to congratulate us on the Rewired State event last Saturday: “want to see British talent? Look at the list of projects created at Rewired State. Simply extraordinary. Thanks all.” I felt a bit uncomfortable about the ‘British talent’ remark, and at first I wasn’t sure why it affected me so. On [...]

TDD – it’s all about the concrete.

A recent thread on the LRUG mailing list got me thinking again about Test-Driven Development. Actually, more accurately, it made me furious and a bit depressed – macho posturing, regurgitated nonsense, deliberate misunderstandings. All creating the impression that there’s a debate about whether TDD works, and that that debate should be about individual developer competency. [...]

Stop describing advertising as ‘free’

As if by magic, Russell Davies writes: We need to stop describing ad-supported things as ‘free’. Their might be no exchange of cash but there’s an exchange of attention and cognition. The marketing business justifies a lot of crap on the basis that it’s giving things away for free. If we paused and recognised that [...]

To the death of piggy spiv advertising.

Everything is wrong with advertising, and that will become clear over the next few years. Almost all business plans based on advertising will fail. The amount of money being spent on advertising will decrease. The number of spivs that the advertising industry can find meaningless work for will plummet. And this is a damn good [...]

Mashed08 – Team Bob

What a lovely time we had at Mashed08. By any rational measures it should have been awful – I had my wallet and my mobile phone nicked by someone on the tube, and struggled through Saturday with a mild hangover and a dodgy back. But all that faded away. I had the lucky chance to [...]

Who watches the Policemen?

Under what circumstances would it be acceptable for a Police Officer to make a V-sign at someone? And that’s not the worst of it. Let me tell you what happened on my way home tonight. I was waiting at the Bus Stop, just East of New Cross Station. As it happened, I’d been out for [...]

Gas-meter reading.

Some chap just turned up at my door, asking to read my gas meter. I’ve taken to asking these meter readers a few questions: who’s my gas supplier? what’s my account number? Not one of these questions could he answer though, bless him, he did guess at British Gas for my supplier. Wrong answer, of [...]

Lying for points.

Tomorrow, I intend dishonestly to obtain a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages certificate. I’ve sat through the required 100-hours of ‘input sessions’ (lessons); scraped through six hours of ‘class-work’ (lessons); my ‘elicitation’ (asking) skills have had the required ‘appropriacy’ (appropriateness); I’ve allowed students to ‘practise communicatively’ (speak); I’ve supplemented my lesson plans with [...]

Christmas heroes and villains

Extremely poor marks for Skype and Philips this year, a bit of advice for Virgin, and a surprisingly good experience returning something to Comet. We wanted to buy the mother-in-law a simple-to-use Skype phone so that she can more cheaply call my various brothers- and sisters-in-law who are in far-flung places. BT’s overseas call charges [...]

How to mend a broken survey.

So, you’ve run out of ideas and have no good news to tell, but you want to push out a marketing release (it’s not by mishap I’m being scatological here). Hmm, well we could do a survey… Oh yes, that’s a good idea. But, what happens when your survey, filled as it must be with [...]