Reflections on the Post PC era

There has been much speculation about the Post PC era. A recent article in IEEE Computing Now by Joshua Greenbaum iPads, Consumption and Creation, and the Future of Enterprise Software claimed that the consumption only model of the iPad and the strength of the web browser on the Windows 8 tablet were nigh on the death nell of the iPad in the enterprise. The article seems to have forgotten both the history of iOS and their ability to access virtual machines. Read More...

Getting on to Technorati

As part of the claim process for getting this blog accepted by technorati.com I need to create a blog post containing the following claim code:

RPK4PRUFEXXJ

Why sysadmins hate it when it rains …

It rained today … and rain equals pain in the world of systems administration and telecommunications. Bad things happen when it rains ... Read More...

Reflections on Expert Systems

About a week ago I was asked for the right to use a comment I made on expert systems on the I, Cringley Blog. I observed:

Once again we confuse “Expert” with “Expert System”. These two things are almost diametrically opposed.

Experts understand exceptions, learn and focus on the unusual.

Expert Systems codify knowledge and focuses on the common.

In fact the economic incentives for expert systems reward handling the common cases first and returns tend to decrease as the more uncommon cases are added. IBM isn’t reproducing and storing real experts, just finding a way to stamp out repeatable workers and miss labelling them.

This thought developed over a number of years as I hoped between the disciplines of management and computer science and for the sake of completeness I thought to expand upon the idea here. Read More...

Range Inputs and Events

The range input looked perfect for writing a web interface to control volume levels on a batch of play out boxes. However, the initial choice of the onChange Javascript event turned out to be both naive and unworkable when tested on an iPad under Mobile Safari although it appeared to work well enough for a mouse driven interface. The better solution was to use two events: onMouseUp and onTouchEnd. Read More...