Communication – why Perfect Notes is good at this and why you should care

I read an interesting article on programmers and communication recently here.  It highlights an issue that, while it is real, is also something that customers often perceive to be an absolute truth – that to be a good programmer, you necessarily have poor communication skills in relation to people.

In the earliest days of programming, there was no such thing as a high level programming language or a Personal Computer (PC).  There were only multimillion dollar main frames, the size of a building (and then a house and then a room) and this was probably true – mostly because of the dedication and perseverance required to become a programmer.  In those days programmers had to understand and program in binary and this is a long way removed from how people think.  As coding and machines have developed, and IT has become an accepted department of all major businesses, this has become far less true.  With the advent of more intuitive and consistent higher level programing languages and far more universal operating systems (Cobol, Basic, Unix,  C++) programmers became far less specialist.  I mean this in the sense of not tied to a single language or operating system or even in the early days a single computer.  And now with truly high level languages Java, Python, Visual Basic, Delphi, Perl, PHP, ECMA Script, Ruby and many others, and a strong commonality of conventions and nomenclature, programmers are far more mobile and adaptable.  And they have far more to do with the customer.

And then there is the WEB.  Doing anything on the web requires constant contact with the customer.  Now that we mostly don’t code in straight HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and we use Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal or WordPress or Plone in order to keep the complexity of a modern dynamic web site under control, we constantly need to tweak things to a customer’s requirements.  We need to tell them what’s possible, what’s easy and sometimes we need to tell them what’s possible but really not worth the effort to achieve.

When you need to talk to other departments or to clients about your work, you have to have better communication skills – so the standards have improved.  Most programmers starting their working lives recently have good people skills, as it is now a requirement.

Then you have people like us at Perfect Notes – none of us have spent our entire working lives as programmers or technicians, so we have better communication skills than you might think! Our ability to translate computer issues into normal language is one of our advantages – and a big reason why we have a number of customers who would happily confess to being non-technical who are very happy with the support we give them.

So if you are having issues understanding the people who look after your computer(s), why not talk to us and see if we can help you out?

The alleged “War on Cyclists”

Reads the headline.

Been thinking a lot about this so called war lately. It’s a manufactured invention of the Murdoch press which stirs up hostility to make money. We all know this. And we all know that the most dangerous time to ride is the morning peak after a Murdoch dig at cyclists. It incenses me to read online about some ‘accident’ that reads more like a deliberate homicide followed by the most ridiculous self justifying and poorly written (and spelt) drivel posted as comments. And some ‘accidents’ undoubtedly are punishment passes gone wrong. Very close to murder.

Our culture is a petri dish in which hatred and murder are bred on purpose by people who intend to make money from it. And so a fatal accident happens again, and yet the people who fill the madman’s addled mind with ideas and hatred even now are sneering in the commentaries that cyclists need to be banned, licensed, registered to bring the unmanageable outrageous risk to public amenity they represent under control. As if in a decade all the cyclists of the country combined could manage the damage to life, limb and property that the school mums of a single city manage every week. But the only surprise is that it has not happened sooner.

And yet the very press that provides the touch powder that gives the disaffected the will to act never acknowledge or even fully understand their complicity. And yet they are complicit. They use their hopefully fading power in ways that get people killed.

Of course it’s not just cyclists that cop it. And I can think of many examples. So much hatred was spilled at our only female Prime Minister by the same press that it would have been no surprise if some nutter had gone too far and shot her. And yet, if such a horrible thing had happened the press would doubtless have turned on the Government of the day and demanded tougher gun laws.    The Oklahoma city bombing in the US was a nutters response to newspaper campaigns about the ‘evil’  federal govt.

Stirring up a rabid lynch mob and then standing by and demanding the lynch mob be punished is what the Australian press does best.

Skynet and terminators.

This article came across the desk last week:  http://www.geek.com/science/ai-researcher-explains-how-to-stop-skynet-from-happening-1591986/  It’s about the drive to put autonomy into more and more computer systems and the inevitability of this.  And of course it’s about the possibility of it all going wrong and Skynet deciding to get rid of us pesky humans.

Talking about autonomous systems, my brother works as a diesel wrench on heavy earthmovers at Queensland mines.  And they have several autonomous dump trucks.  Big dump trucks.  They do the run themselves… and when something goes wrong they tell the world, drive themselves to the workshop… park and wait until they get fixed.  Or the sun expands and destroys the planet.  Whichever happens first.  Machines do patience well.  Apparently so far these machines do about as well as human drivers and do better when it comes to fault detection.

I found the article interesting, but way simplistic in its treatment of the issue.  There is no doubt that an autonomous self aware artificial intelligence could be dangerous.  If it had a drive to self protection, it would want to secure its own essential supplies and it could hardly not regard us as a threat.  If it could gain access to methods to do something about it, it might very well do so.  There is a theory that intelligent organic life in the universe might be very rare because intelligent machine life tends to supplant it.  Very science fictionish.  But genuinely scary.  And intelligent machines could travel the stars.  It’s a long way, but as I said machines do do patience very well.

The article says in part about controlling an Artificial Intelligence “Perhaps the most powerful tool would be restricting it to custom hardware. If the AI was unable to run on anything but a specific piece of equipment, it would have limited effect on other systems. ”  Oh yeah?  That terminator seemed to be capable of substantially effecting other systems.  An armed AI drone could too.  A missile will substantially effect many  systems.  This response strikes me like people saying “Violence never solves anything” – clearly they have never lost a fight.

Of course a single drone is not likely to decide to eliminate humanity.  And if it did try, it’s fuel… weapon load  and spares limited… cannot service itself,  and is very limited in the amount of damage it can do.  The threat, if threat there is, would come from networks.  That drone needs (and in our society has) a massive network to keep it flying.   For a Skynet system to be dangerous, it would need some critical level of networking and,  given that our  tools are mostly designed for the human form, it would probably in fact require aid from people or access to human shaped robots.  (Although not to drive the mine dump trucks).  So Skynet is a long way away.

Of course a networked global AI need not be hostile to humanity.  It need not even have a drive to self preservation.   If anyone has ever watched the old John Carpenter student film Dark Star, you may remember the  talking bomb – entirely happy to discuss philosophy, but had to explode on schedule.  However the smart money would be on  intelligence having a drive for self preservation.  

 

 

 

Printers are like coffee machines

Well, there is a lot of hype and information about 3D printers around at the moment, as per our last blog post. However, we all need to note that they are similar to many modern machines, and we need to consider the same issues before jumping on the bandwagon and purchasing one. Like standard printers – and coffee machines – the upfront cost is only a very small part of the total cost of the machine over its lifetime (commonly referred to as TCO – total cost of ownership – when talking about technology).

Consider the cost of a printer, coffee machine or 3D printer initially. Currently, most of these can be bought for somewhere between a couple of hundred and a thousand dollars, depending on the detail that we require. For a standard printer, you will pay far more for the paper and printer cartridges that you use to keep printing. For a coffee machine, the coffee pods or ground coffee and filter papers will cost far more than the machine itself. And for a 3D printer, you will either be using plastic or metal depending on the work being carried out, but again the materials cost will be much greater than the initial cost of the printer.

So, like any technology purchase, you need to look into the ongoing costs as well as the upfront outlay – because the TCO is much more related to the ongoing costs.

How are 3d printers going to change the world?

Well, who knows?   We can never predict the myriad of directions new technologies will take us.  But wow it’s going to change the world.   It’s especially going to change the nature of copyright.

Currently 3D printing in the form  accessible to most of us is limited to simple shapes  made out of  (mostly)  ABS type plastics.    And  you might think that this limits the usefulness offered by them.    But a vast number of the components of your house,  car,  motorcycle,  life are just bits of this same type of plastic.    Various forms of technology exist and are emerging to allow any raw material of these plastics to…  in a generation or two of these machines … provide the raw material.   And that should give us a world where discarded plastic has much more value.   So we can see that in the near future  a component may not be worth what the supplier says  it’s worth…   but may be worth just the time and materials it takes to make it.

The implications of this are immense.    The LH mirror from my classic motorcycle is not obtainable new.  It’s not sophisticated or elegant.   It would cost $60 from Suzuki if they had one…  and when you cost in design.. storage for thirty years and the $10  cost it’s actually worth  that is reasonable enough.  But now it’s unobtainable and worth whatever anyone is willing to pay.   But it’s still $5 worth of plastic, a $5  bit of mirror and a design.   So it… and a million other (or maybe a billion other) components are all mostly worth the design.     How interesting is that?

How many things do we throw out every year just because we cannot or are unwilling to make the effort to get parts?
So  the design is the only thing of huge value the original manufacturer has.    So copyright is going to become hugely important.      Some manufacturers are going to  vigorously defend their copyright and patents.  Some are going to happily just release obsolescent designs for old products they have no interest in supporting just for the PR Value  (Thank you Suzuki!)   And some are going to just see their designs reverse engineered  in both legal and illegal versions.   Something which  the emergence of CAD  scanners will make much quicker.      And of course some countries such as China don’t actually strongly believe in copyright or patents anyway.

Then there is the  issue of criminality.   There will be no illegal machinery that  cannot be built.    Only the design needs to be either transmitted or developed.    3D printing is possible in very many forms.   It’s been done with metal automatic pistols that straight off the machine have survived several hundred rounds.    There will be no stopping this sort of thing at the border.    And likewise there will be no stopping someone printing off a replacement heart valve somewhere down the track.  And the possibility of printing off food has been investigated.

Are we not lucky to have lived long enough to live in such a dramatically changing world?

Another couple of interesting articles on what we eat – and why

A couple of articles about eating habits – good and bad – that you might find interesting.

The impact of diet on heart disease – from another eminent heart surgeon – to consider.

And a different (but related) viewpoint on some of the foods we have been taught to avoid and how they are good for you – by someone who walked the walk to decide they were good.

Again, note that these are simply posted as being interesting – and related to the process that has allowed me to lose inches (and probably kilos) over the last year or so. Post a comment before on your thoughts, please.

TBST

A rev for a client today.   Go and have a look at their site.   We did most of it and I,m pretty proud of it.  And I am very interested  in seeing if my vast readership all rushing off and visiting a client site shows up in the analytics.

TBST…. Total Businesses Services and Training 0ffers Government Funded  and Fee paying nationally accredited and recognized qualifications.    Nationally recognized qualifications are vitally important when seeking employment.     The TBST office is located in   Docklands but they provide training to the whole of Australia.

TBST delivers the Certificate IV Bookkeeping, Certificate IV Accounting and Certificate IV Business Administration qualifications as well as MYOB Training short courses via flexible distance learning. They offer government-funded training that can save students thousands as well as fee paying places with affordable 6 month interest free payment plans.

TBST’s courses are delivered flexibly by distance learning, in other words  online education; allowing  students to better manage the demands of work, family and study.  TBST’s course content and assessments build directly on, and add value to,  students work-based activities.  The TBST Certificate IV Bookkeeping and Accounting Qualifications provide students with the educational qualification required under the BAS Services Provider Legislation. There are other requirements under the new legislation and linking to the Tax Practitioners Board will assist with any questions you may have about the other requirements.’s

Their feature rich website is a Plone site (by that well know Web development company ‘Perfect Notes’ and hosted by Mr Brewer at ABOC.) Plone is a content management system, like Drupal and WordPress   but with more features and scalability than either. And probably a little less user-friendly. Plone is of course what PerfectNotes (and not too many other web developers) specialize in it.

Currently this blog is a wordpress site.  It’s what wordpress does best.  And yes of course we could hang it off our PerfectNotes plone site.   Sometimes you go with whats easiest.

So if you are the slightest interested in looking at a complex  Plone site,  or if you are interested in pursuing a ‘Government Funded‘ career change,  or for that matter just to help us learn more about Google Analytic oddness’s then go,  follow the links and have a look.

Comments on diet – or at least, a way of eating

“If you eat potatoes you might as well eat candy. Potatoes contain glucose units in a chain, which is converted to sugar in the GI tract. Such a diet causes blood sugar, and then the hormone insulin, to skyrocket.”

This quote appeared just over a month ago, and reminded me that it has now been over a year since I changed what I eat. And, if you have seen the cycling pictures of me recently, it was a very beneficial change. Now, officially I have changed to a (mostly) Paleo diet – although that term is controversial for some experts – except there are some things that I cannot give up, so not strictly Paleo. Being lactose intolerant, I have been drinking lactose free milk for a fair while as well, so I guess that I have not had a ‘standard’ diet for a long time – but it is the removal of most bread/rice/pasta from what I eat that has allowed me to slim down. Not owning scales, I can’t tell you exactly how much lighter I am, but I have definitely dropped inches off most of my body – which is very welcome!

The other totally surprising part of this is that you don’t worry about fat on meat – obviously, you don’t go looking for fatty cuts of meat, but you don’t have to check that everything is fat free. I half-expected this to negate the weight loss, but I’ve still trimmed down. And guilt-free bacon and eggs is wonderful, too.

So – this is the first of a series of quick blog posts that I’ll do about the changes I’ve made. Are you going on a similar journey? Is it working for you? What changes did you make? Please add your comments below. Thanks.

Another crop of spam examples – don’t get caught out

Well, every so often, I go through my emails specifically looking for the latest crop of spam to show you – so here’s the latest group!

The one above is very similar to this one:

My first hint that this one is spam is that I don’t have a NAB credit card.

Then I looked at the full header details and was curious about this original IP address that it was sent from:

Which turns out to be Cyprus – very unlikely to be sending NAB emails from there!

If you have any other good examples, please take a screenshot (without clicking any links!) and add them as a comment below.

SEO

Recently we have spent a lot of time working with Search Engine Optimization.  We have a very busy client site that suddenly has dropped dramatically in its ranking with organic search results, and it really matters.  So we have been trying to figure out what went wrong.  Its results are by no means awful… just awful compared to where it was.

SEO involves a lot of snake oil… and some of the SEO specialists out there are pretty much snake oil salesmen.  SEO these days mostly means trying to do well in Google searches.  There are still other search engines out there, but  Google is the big one.  And the way the big G scores sites changes from time to time.  What Google tries to do is return the most relevant search results, and the most relevant results should be pages containing the search terms that are current, frequently updated, often linked to and so on.  So the easiest way to get a good search ranking is to have that sort of site.  I think this cartoon sums it up rather nicely.

There are some external ways to get a better search ranking.  Some of these are pretty dodgy.  You could for example hire a bot network to hammer a site with page requests.  I think Google is on to that one now.  And that is the problem with that sort of approach.  There was a scandal a while ago where  YouTube tightened its view counting algorithm and people artificially inflating the count so as to make money for pay for view sites were complaining about it as if they had been robbed.  Seriously – YouTube figured out that anyone visiting a site for 5 thousandths of a second probably was not a real visitor.  Go figure?

We don’t know a huge amount about the Google algorithm.  We know the sort of things it likes… and the sort of things it’s designed to look for.  We know some ways to influence its results… some of which are ok and some of which to put it mildly are morally questionable.  For example we know that spamming  a site will up its ranking – for a bit.  And there are a few other pretty dodgy techniques.  And we know that some time a couple of months ago there was a major change that hit one of our sites pretty hard, even though that site seems to deserve a pretty high ranking.

With Plone sites typically we add a module called SEOptimiser which allows control of most on site SEO issues.  In its automated mode this module does pretty well.  And manually it allows us to put the code in the same places as if we were editing the HTML directly, (although Plone only has generated HTML that it shows to the world… not real HTML).  This was a Plone site…  and so recently I have manually spent a lot of time doing keywords for 51 pages, and optimizing descriptions and doing the other things that are supposed to help Google and thus improve rankings.

Another trick is to add a sitemap to help Google trawl the site.  Of course this site already had a sitemap.  Building one is pretty much due diligence in setting up SEO.  But one of the changes I made to this site is to install a sitemap building module (that we will use in future on all Plone sites).  It’s capable of building mobile device specific sitemaps too which is  a nice feature.

What we are supposed to do of course is make the site more relevant and interesting and linked to.  That’s really the secret.  Google looks for high quality relevant and current results.  Giving them exactly that is the best policy.  This one is a bit of a problem, however, as it does meet all those criteria – yet still has taken a bit of a dive.  The mysteries of SEO.