In the blog of Theandb (definition of blog), we share with our readers the personal view and insights we have on developments in the technology sector. And as that is nowadays quite a broad sector, we set our eyes on many diferent topics and questions facing society. We also post entries on recent developments of Theandb as a company. For us, it is a part of an ongoing collaboration and communication with colleagues, clients and friends.
I will not comment much on this article but i thought it was well worth posting a link to 'freakishly fast' Ruby coming to the Mac. We have been eyeing Ruby On Rails for a while now and will most likely launch our first product with it in June/July and it's great to see that we could leverage that gained experience to deploy actual desktop applications onto our beloved Mac's.!
Over the last couple of days, we have been quite busy on migrating our dedicated server to a new major operating system version. This was the reason - alongside being very busy on setting up a new agile outsourcing client - for the blog silence of the last week.
It has now been completed, all of the domains we host for our clients including all the different applications we support have been moved across, also in large parts thanks to the support of Warwick Hall whom we are indebted to for his wonderful Unix skills. Only transLucidonline remains to be set-up on the new instance (wish us well for it!).
Thanks to everyone for their understanding that we had some downtime even if only short during this period.
We have unfortunately received a negative response from the 'Commonwealth Copyright Administration' that will not grant us a license for the government funded project toiletmap.gov.au. Based on the reply, there do not seem to be any hard, conclusive reasons for not granting Pantha Corp with a license other than that information should be always "correct and up to date" within the iPhone application which i am sure we would have found ways to ensure both requirements would be met by 'Show the Loo'.
Instead of providing Australians with an alternate means of access to the data on toiletmap.gov.au - that the Department of Health and Ageing collects and a 3rd-party supplier manages on behalf of the government - whereby we could have integrated and made available information such as opening-hours, nearby parking places, whether there is access for disabled and if there are baby facilities available, we will switch over to integrating data from other countries such as the UK, Germany and the US.
We will continue to keep the Australian version of 'Show the Loo' free in the hope that the Department might re-consider their initial reply which i paste in here below in its entirety.
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Thank you for your interest in the National Continence Management Strategy and in particular the National Public Toilet Map (NPTM) project.
The National Public Toilet Map website aims to help people retain their freedom, independence and confidence by providing information on toilets throughout Australia. The main target groups for the website are older people with disabilities, carers and family members. The website shows the location of over 14,000 public toilets around Australia, with information on opening times and access for people with a disability. Public amenities data is provided through well established and supported networks, including local councils.
The Department of Health and Ageing is committed to maintaining the quality and integrity of the data and has contractual arrangements with a private third party provider in place until 30 June 2010.
As part of the contractual arrangement, a mobile phone application was developed in November 2008 which is now operational. Any mobile phone which has Internet capability can access the toilet map site via the normal website address www.toiletmap.gov.au. By entering the street address of your location, a mobile phone user will automatically be access information for up to five of the nearest public toilet locations, their opening hours and facilities.
In addition, an iPhone application is currently being developed by the contractor on behalf of the department.
The current arrangements ensure that people using the website and/or associated mobile phone application have, at all times, access to information which is correct and up to date. The department is therefore unable to provide you with access to the NPTM data requested.
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Throughout the last two years, starting with the development of the simple website publishing system transLucidonline, Pantha has built up a unique project management framework for agile outsourced development.
Since then, we have had the pleasure of supporting a range of clients from Europe and Australia (start-ups to large corporate), providing them with agile outsourcing teams that have launched and maintained many online applications with great success.
We have shared some of our stories in several blog entries here. One on 'agile software development for teams' and how this can be applied to start-ups and companies of all sizes.
At some point we wondered why it still seemed difficult to explain the benefits of agile development and its potential to change how outsourcing at this point in time is done. What if we could demonstrate it placidly somehow to new potential clients? What if it could be made much easier to engage with people interested in what Pantha offers and show how fast concrete outcomes could be delivered given a mini project? Almost like going to a car dealer and asking him for a test drive?
Which is exactly what we will do, starting now of course.
Following an overview of Pantha's agile outsourcing services. Interested parties can register their interest for a test drive of agile outsourcing here.
I have become a regular reader of 'The Future Of Things' that always contains something interesting for the Sci-Fi mind.
Today they linked to a study on a new drug called propranolol that "is usually used to control blood pressure" but has been found to have the possibility of reducing "strong fearful memories" for people suffering from traumatic events, xenophobia and so forth in a human study.
Read here in full, the article has the catchy title 'Drug banishes bad memories' which isn't really what it's about as the researchers themselves assert that one of the results was to confirm that the drug did not remove the memory itself but the fear to the object shown to the study participants (a spider). Quote: "the drug treatment didn't affect how well the participants remembered the link between the spiders and the shock. They could recall the link clearly, but the fear response had gone."
I wanted to share a message from someone here in Australia who is personally very exposed to the fires ravaging Victoria. If you can, please do donate with the Australian Red Cross for the thousands who have lost all they had and the countless others deeply affected.
Following her message which speaks best by itself.
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[...] in relation to the horrific Bushfire situation in Victoria, Australia.
I live in the rebuilt township of Cockatoo, Victoria; the worst hit town, obliterated in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in which 75 people died and 2,545 homes were lost, total land area burnt was approximately 2,100 km².
On the weekend I evacuated my young family ahead of the warnings that the fire conditions on Saturday 7th January 2009 would be worse than those on Ash Wednesday, and they were.
Thankfully our area was spared this time around, however many areas weren't.
The current situation is that there are 25 fires still burning out of control and a total 152 fires burning in Victoria yet to be declared safe, 173 people are confirmed dead and over 750 homes lost, 3,218 km² of land burnt, and still more to come.
I personally have dear friends still missing in Kinglake and Narbethong, including two children aged 6 and 3, and several other friends are thankfully safe, but without homes.
It cost $1.3 billion (in today's adjusted terms) to rebuild after Ash Wednesday. Victorian citizens, Corporate and Government have already raised $26 Million, however it will take much more to rebuild after this devastating event.
I am making a heartfelt appeal to anyone who can spare a few dollars to please make a donation to the Australian Red Cross, Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009 on this link, every single dollar counts.
Please could you also share this email with your professional networks.
Thank you for your consideration and for sparing a thought for all who have lost beloved ones, pets, homes and memories.
Kind regards,
[...]
PS: Here are two pictures that show how close the fires are to me.
Cockatoo
The view from my home this morning; as you can see there are still fires burning, so a wind change in our direction would mean we too would lose our home.
As a first degree connection, you now know someone personally affected by this tragedy.
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I thought this article, entitled "Future Watch: A.I. comes of age" from ComputerWorld might be worth posting that i found on Slashdot.
Reading how the robot would understand a natural language query, move about in the real-world to look for an object, pick it up, bring it back to the person who had requested it in the first place with the words ""Here is your stapler," says Stair, handing it to the man. "Have a nice day." might not sound like such a big deal at first glance as this would be something that any human (from the age of 4+ :) ) would consider to be a mundane task. However the fact that this robot can understand, learn and adapt to his environment have been formidable challenges that have gone unsolved for a very long time and it is encouraging to see strong progress being made.
What really reminded me of the book "The Singularity Is Near" from Ray Kurzweil was a quote from one of the researchers Tom Mitchell from Carnegie Mellon saying: "Suddenly, we have ways of observing what the brain is really doing, via brain imaging methods like functional MRI. It's a way to look into the brain while you are thinking and see, once a second, a movie of your brain's activity with a resolution of 1mm."
It's been exactly those sort of trends that Ray says have exponential qualities to them as in the discoveries and advancements we make in important fields such as genetic or robotic research and this will ultimately lead to an ever increasing speed of evolution. There might be hope that he could be right and we could end up getting the 'benefit' of for example drastically increased lifespans.
I recently came across an interesting article written a few years ago, still, illustrating perfectly the benefits of an agile approach to outsourcing as we practice and advocate so actively at Pantha Corporation:
Everything You Know About Offshore Outsourcing is Wrong
As you can read, one of the largest European bank (ABN Amro) found satisfaction with this model a while ago. This corporation undertook a major strategic change a few years later, fully embracing outsourcing and restructuring accordingly. They also ended up working with multiple suppliers rather than one large one.
Several aspects spoke about in the article syncs amazingly with our experience at Pantha and lessons learned found their way into our framework documentation. Here are some snippets matching the Pantha way:
Agile methodology works best for fast paced application development:
"... the bank [ABN AMRO] 's North American technical architecture group deliberately sought out offshore providers who were not focused on the traditional development processes."
Iteration period needs to be defined on a case by case basis, depending on the context. Success can only be found if the entire project team (client, offshore supplier and Pantha) conforms to our framework:
"We use iterative development in two-week intervals. While one iteration is underway, we start on the next one,"
"It turns out that just because you use short iterations it doesn't mean you have no process."
The client's in-house liaison needs to be dedicated and have authority:
"You must have a local liaison, no question," said Matthias Autrata, senior vice president of IT Architecture. "This person participates in one- or two-day design sessions during which 'stories' are written that describe the user interaction with the system."
"Of course, the local liaison also has to acclimate to our culture," said Autrata. "Often they must learn to be more aggressive, to go and get what they need."
Requirements made of user stories including technical solutions, are to be signed-off on the client side:
"Another [lesson learned] was that the ABN AMRO team had to get its own requirements agreed to before communicating with the liaison; working through conflicting or inconsistent needs real-time was not efficient "
etc.
The article also strikes the importance of understanding the culture (both on the supplier's and on the client's sides) which we have put focus on from the beginning and worked through with our long-term-relationship offshore partner in India.
Here below a slide that summarizes our solution to some common issues in an offshore setup:
