A geeky stream of consciousness follows, on the technological direction of enterprise software, that powers companies and corporations. Do not take these words too seriously, they are somewhat tongue-in-cheek and there is exaggeration, sensationalism and over-simplification, it's just a bit of fun.
When business systems grow in complexity you get new stuff. What's continually happening is that there is loads more data than ever before and more CPU cycles and cores to process it than ever before. And the old rules stop applying, So in some special cases of reporting (where "Big Data" is involved) even processes such as Software Coding to User Acceptance testing to Deploy to Production are no longer apt, which is almost unthinkable. You're having to develop against live data, a nightmare scenario.
The extra CPU and memory means that you have VMs all over the place, it's madness and this is changing how systems are developed. To put it flippantly, you don't give a tester an exe file any more, you give them a VM, and entire operating system :-)
All this is new, and it doesn't really have an analogue to before.
Yes, all runs on silicon and beneath it all, Linux is ticking away, but we have new levels of abstraction and we are seeing emergent behaviour where new structures are coming out of nowhere. Amazon, a book seller, is beating Microsoft at selling computing power and doing what Microsoft tried and failed to do, succeed with a rental computing model. MS are playing catch-up.
We have engineers talking about platforms as a service, and all that did not exist before. Yes you can map it, and say, well, it's not really new, it's like this, or its like that, but all this stuff doesn't really map any more, it's just going in new directions. It's a bit like the days of the Internet changed everything, and relatedly, "Web Services", like SOAP, where you could have all these different systems talking to each other in a standard way. All these new tools appeared to help build systems with these powers.
The web services hype was immense, but when people realised how clunky they are, the hype died, but the web services tick along in various systems in a more modest fashion than envisaged. The one thing that is constant is the need to write "business logic", the stuff that is the engine of how to do business.
When you can have an entire system zipped up as a file, including an OS, that's new. When you have terabytes of data, data so huge and so much flowing in real time. that's new. You cannot index that data fast enough, so a relational database is not the answer. All this is mind blowingly novel. Faster computers do not solve all our problems, (like, hey we now run our accounts so fast we can save money). No, they cause problems - (what can we do with these new powers?) - and complexity goes up and up and up.

Culica Game

Just a quickie post to say, I'm the inventor of the Culica. Culica (and the two cofounders, Chris and me) will be on a major BBC TV show on Monday at 9pm (Oct 3rd 2011). Follow this blog (If you have an account), and also see/follow Culica stuff:

Culica official website
Culica

Culica community - Twitter, Facebook etc. to follow
Culica community

Culica Games Store buy cool Culica products! Including Culica and computer games etc.
Culica Games Store

And see the main Culica Blog too!
Culica Blog

Get in touch and get involved!
James

Failure is not only an option, but can be a necessity

There is an experienced chess grandmaster who laments that he has lost many ELO points, which are the rating by which Grandmasters are measured.
He says his record in tournaments is: ‎54 wins and 86 draws - and here is the important thing - no losses! He lost many ELO points because he is drawing against, and not beating, chess players with low ELO.
It's quite fascinating that a man's downfall is so well correlated by his *not* losing ANY games. I've never seen anything so strongly scientific in support of the notion that one must take risks or one will, by not losing, lose!
Obviously, the grandmaster needs to take more risks and win more games. Though he will lose more games, his score will go up. It's an uplifting story because no one likes losing but by not losing you can be a greater failure yet!
And as Kasparov says, you learn more from your failures than your successes so a failure can be an investment in the future.
Blimey what a preachy post I've created :-)

Tourettes Phone

My (iphone) phone has Tourettes. It changed "xox" (short hand for, kiss hug kiss) into "Cox" and "Awwww" into "Sewers". Naturally I vomited at this filth belted out by my sweary phone. The "auto-corrects" happen at the very last moment just as one hits "send".
Oh, and the iPhone never learned - sometimes I sign my name as Jim and every single freaking time the damned iPhone wanted to correct "Jim" to "Him" or "Kim" aaargh! And the little x to get rid of the retarded suggestion is so tiny - why can't they make that X bigger so it's easier to get rid of the mental auto-correct? I know why, because trendy designers prefer form over function - a big X might be ugly - the Gods forbid. Designers/marketroids - the b*st8rds! Well here's some news marketroids, that was my last iPhone - little things mean a lot to me!
Actually the main reason for dumping iPhone is that Apple are control freaks and their ecosystem is closed, I prefer freedom - open systems, and Android is free-er. But kudos to Apple for single handedly making Microsoft irrelevant.

Trapped in a ghastly Search Engine bubble

Google and other search engines analyse what we do. And based on that, they hide stuff from us! Everybody only sees a little bubble of what search engines think we will like. It's like having eyesight, but the gods only allowing us to see south east and being oblivious to the rest of the world out there.

I'm a Zumba monkey

Went to my first Zumba dance class. It's a mashup of salsa and other foreign dance styles in a kind of keep-fit dance session, it's enormous fun, especially for a fitness class. Well it's fun unless you're unfortunate enough to see my comically bad imitations of zumba. I just jump about having fun and hope for the best
I'm also the scruffiest dressed in the room. Everyone (everyone else there were chicks) apart from me were wearing all this alien, extravagant multi-layered gym clothing that looks like they're equipped to go rock climbing on the moon, and here's me, shorts and t-shirt. Unreconstructed, unfashionable and unreformed.
I was the only bloke but it's not a gay thing to do. At least I hope not ha ha, well it makes a change from my occasional visit to the chess club which is 100% blokes.

Can a god really create an Adam?

As a software engineer, I'm amazed about the human body and brain. Non-software developers think that software works like magic, like a word processor or operating system or web or phones, somehow software is this spongy stuff that is soft and it works. They have no idea of the complexity, of the difficulty of creating it. Likewise they have no idea how miraculous the brain works or the body works, it just works.
Every year I work on software, my absolute astonishment at the working of a single biological cell, let alone a whole animal, gets deeper. To me software is not magic, I know roughly how it works, at least on certain levels of the stack. But biology???
Now I think about it, this is a powerful argument about god - a god or a committee of gods cannot possibly be smart enough to program an Adam from scratch.
Evolution over billions of years is somehow necessary to arrive at such a solution.