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To Do
Add old VSJ articles as posts – Thanks Robin – In Progress
Add images to articles, talk to Bruce about this, can we have random images and/or fixed images in articles, aslo some need no images. ? Templates
Ability to embed a page within another page or post as text, i.e. Contact Us details could then be updated on that page and all relevant articles would automatically display the new details.
Review all content and rewrite/update as neccesary – Robin is going to look at this
Create a safe contact us/webmaster facility so Spam Bots cannot access
Build image library of logos, council, staff, article providers, etc.
Remove unrequired articles from main menu – Ian will be reviewing
Protected message Sending (Contact Us, Contact Webmaster, Report missing link)
Want to win an HTC Hero Android phone? Go to www.wiley.com/go/wroxHERO and try the quiz.
Testing the web site
the quick brown fox
We have now activated our Twitter account at twitter/iap_org_uk, we can now keep you updated with all the latest info and what is going on with the IAP and the industry.
See our site at www.iap.org.uk
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Employment Exchange
Craig Golby MCMI, MIAP is a Project Manager and Business Analyst with retained technical skills in Java and Database technologies working primarily in the Financial Services sector. He is currently looking for contract work. Contact Craig at craig.golby@dignitas.ltd.uk for further information and a detailed CV.
[Want your entry printed here? Email eo@iap.org.uk with the details.]
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Sounding Board
Robin Jones wonders why open source solutions appear to have lower acceptance in the UK than elsewhere.
“Nobody ever got fired”, the saying used to go, “for buying IBM.”
Well, no. But why not? What has the supplier got to do with it? This line of thinking smacks of getting one’s excuses in first. If the system falls over, at least the designer can say, “Well, I specified the best kit available. It can’t be my fault.” It certainly can, chum. And, by the way, what did you mean by ‘best’? Most expensive?
My thoughts were nudged in this direction by a recent Novell/IDC report on the worldwide state of open source software and Linux in particular. More than two-thirds of the IT executives surveyed for the study said that they were actively evaluating, or had already decided to adopt, Linux for the desktop. Over 70% said the same for servers. More than half were increasing Linux adoption during 2009. Definitive UK-specific data are difficult to come by, but a recent vnunet reader survey suggested that around 15% of installations are running Linux at present, not, by the looks of it, a world-leading performance.
So what are the pros and cons? On the plus side, initial costs are low and that may matter even more than usual in straitened economic circumstances. On the other hand, there’s the expense of staff retraining to factor in. Interestingly though, respondents to the Novell survey cited lower ongoing support costs as a reason for swapping to Linux. That suggests they’re seeing the current crop of distros as much more mature than their forebears.
Back on the debit side, there are understandable concerns about lack of application support and interoperability with Windows. But the trend towards cloud computing is chipping away at the former problem. Why? Because it has a lingua franca in the form of a Web browser as its default communication channel. Let me give you a personal example. I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory Linux application to synchronise my Palm Treo’s address and calendar data to my desktop. Then I discovered Goosync, which synchronises directly between my Google calendar and the Treo. That’s an even better method that a straight sync-to-desktop solution because now I can sync the Treo or the desktop to the cloud database any time I like, so neither need ever be out of date. And I get an extra backup copy into the bargain.
Why then the apparent reticence of UK companies to take the Linux route? I wonder if it’s at least partly a modern version of the IBM adage, with an extra twist. It isn’t just that you can’t be blamed for following the crowd. It’s that an open source solution is effectively offered by a huge community. So there’s no one specific to point your finger at, should that become necessary. What this ignores, as I hinted at to begin with, is that a finger-pointing exercise is very rarely productive anyway.
[Something you’d like to get off your chest? Email me (Robin Jones) at eo@iap.org.uk.]
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Members’ News
Paul Lynham, FIAP is standing for re-election to the IAP Council this year. He outlines his view of the IAP’s development here.
The Institution of Analysts and Programmers is an organisation that I am proud to be associated with. Our profession is continually changing and the services and products we provide have become deeply embedded in society. Many more people either use or are aware of systems our profession develops and maintains and there is a greater need than ever for a professional body to set standards and promote best practices. Since the Institution is the only specialised organisation for people who develop and maintain software, covering such skills as analysis, design, coding, testing, documentation and support, its role can only become more strategic. The services the IAP provides to its members and its flagship role in our profession is a cause I would like to continue to help with.
[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]
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Work in Progress
It’s exactly three years since we signed an agreement with the Institute of Continuing Professional Development that allows our members to apply for ICPD membership. Helen Nother of the CPD Foundation explained, in VSJ for July 2006, how the Institute of Continuing Professional Development aims to raise professional standards through individual recognition. We’re reprinting a revised version of her article here, as a reminder to members of the usefulness of the mechanism to them.
It is not enough in today’s world to gain a professional qualification and expect it to have lifetime currency. Professionals in all fields need to recognise the importance of lifelong learning, of which continuing professional development (CPD) is a vital part. Different professions have different ideas about what constitutes CPD, but one definition, adopted by the Institute of Continuing Professional Development is:
The systematic maintenance and improvement of knowledge, skills and competence, and enhancement of learning, undertaken by a person throughout his or her working life.
The key aspects to CPD are:
Provision: It is important for organisations to consider to what extent they are able to provide CPD themselves and to what extent they should work with other bodies on CPD provision. Many professional bodies in the engineering and technology fields, for example, are now collaborating to make available to their members access to various sources of CPD through a number of channels, not least the Internet.
Accreditation and Evaluation: The structures needed to accredit and evaluate CPD can be complex, and co-operation between professional bodies can save time and resources, helping to avoid duplication of effort. Computerised systems are being developed to ease the workload involved in these processes, ways of accrediting and evaluating CPD are being investigated, and joint mechanisms are being introduced. The Professional Associations Research Network (www.parn.org.uk) for example, is active in these areas.
Planning: General guidelines on CPD are being developed by professional bodies and companies to enable members and employees to plan their careers as effectively as possible. Individuals can profitably ask themselves five questions as part of a learning and development plan:
1. Where have I been in relation to CPD?
2. Where am I now?
3. Where do I want and need to be?
4. How will I get there?
5. How will I know when I have arrived?
Recording and Demonstrating: Various mechanisms exist to enable people to record and demonstrate their CPD in hard-copy form, on disk or on the Internet. Many engineering and technology organisations provide their members or employees with Web-based personal development records (PDRs), and diary-based planning and recording systems are available from various IT companies.
The Institute of Continuing Professional Development is committed to working with professional bodies and other organisations, including companies, colleges and universities, employers’ associations and trade unions, to promote CPD generally and make all professionals more aware of how it benefits them personally and the wider public.
It is a multi-disciplinary organisation that recognises individual achievement and commitment to the advancement of CPD. Its key objective is to raise standards for the long-term public good. It achieves this through the use of designatory letters, given to individuals who demonstrate a personal commitment to their own CPD.
All professionals, whatever their discipline, who are able to show that they carry out CPD significantly above the minimum required by their main professional body, can gain extra recognition by becoming members of the Institute. The letters FInstCPD are a distinguishing mark that demonstrates to clients, colleagues and the public in general an individual’s proven commitment to CPD and lifelong learning.
Fellowship of the Institute requires the annual submission of evidence of appropriate CPD activity. Individuals can also apply to become an Associate member. A number of professional bodies, including the Institution of Analysts and Programmers, recognising the potential benefit to both the individual and the public through higher professional, ethical and public service standards, have elected to assist the Institute with this validation process.
The Institute is part of the Continuing Professional Development Foundation, an educational charitable trust that has been a provider of CPD since 1981. Jonathan Harris, founder of both organisations, says, “Why not acknowledge those individuals who actively engage in continual learning and understand the importance of a structured approach to their study and training? Professional bodies and organisations face many practical difficulties in monitoring their members’ CPD, but if individuals who voluntarily do more than the minimum are properly rewarded, this may well encourage others to follow suit and help the professions themselves to raise standards.”
The Institute currently counts among its Fellows a cross-section of practising professionals, from barristers to surveyors, programmers to solicitors. Fellowship also facilitates networking and partnership among individual professions and the groups with which they are associated, serving as a platform for occasional events addressed by high-profile individuals of relevance to all professionals.
The amount of CPD required will depend upon the individual’s own professional minimum requirement but, as a general guideline, any professional who can show that they complete at least 50 per cent more than their own professional body’s minimum CPD requirement annually, in hours or points, can become a Fellow and be rewarded with the right to use the letters FInstCPD. In the case of the IAP, members who have completed, and can demonstrate, no less than 20 points of qualifying CPD in the previous 12-month period can apply to the Institute for Fellowship. General guidelines on what constitutes qualifying CPD are available on the application form for Fellowship, and a full explanation of the Components, Categories and Boundaries of the IAP Points System can be found in section 2 of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers Membership Evaluation Scheme.
It is clear that individuals and organisations that ignore CPD and lifelong learning, or do not treat them seriously, will get left behind as patterns of work and leisure continue to change beyond our expectations.
For further information about the ICPD please contact the Institute on 020 7828 1965 or go to www.cpdinsitute.org. To discuss your application, email Robin Jones at eo@iap.org.uk.
[Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!]
Apply Now Test Link – please note this will not post currently.
Apply Now Test Link
A web tool that “could be as important as Google”, according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.
Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.
The “computational knowledge engine”, as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.
“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The tool computes many of the answers “on the fly” by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.
People can use the system to look up simple facts – such as the height of Mount Everest – or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country’s GDP.
Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.
“Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results,” said Dr Wolfram.
As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.
Dr Wolfram said the “trillions of pieces of data” were chosen and managed by a team of “experts” at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.
Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.
Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove ‘linguistic fluff’
“Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain,” he wrote earlier this year. “It computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”
Learning language
The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.
This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.
For example, a relatively simple search, such as “who was the president of Brazil in 1923?”, will return the answer “Artur da Silva Bernardes”.
This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.
Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people’s questions.
“We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case,” he said.
In addition, he said, the system had got “pretty good at removing linguistic fluff”, the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.
Searching for ‘Blair Bush’ could give a different result…
Simple text
However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.
“Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say ‘I don’t need all those extra words’.”
Instead they tended to use “concepts” similar to how most people use search engines today.
But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was “disappointed” by Dr Wolfram’s “dismissal of English syntax as ‘fluff”’.
For example, he said, suppose someone asks ”When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?”
“Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama,” he said.
…than searching for ‘Bush Blair’
“I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing.”
Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be “the world’s first web-based question answering system”. It has been on the web since December 1993.
Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.
Dr Katz said, it answers “millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world” on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.
It is also able to compute answers form several sources in a similar way to Alpha.
Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.
For example, Powerset, uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.
The company is attempting to build a similar search engine “that reads and understands every sentence on the Web”.
In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.
Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.
“In a sense we are at the beginning,” he said.
General Electric announce a 500GB optical disk.
Optical discs have been a leading storage solution for decades
A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.
The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry.
Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, rather than just pits on the surface of the disc.
The challenge for this area of technology has been to increase the reflectivity of the holograms that are stored on the discs so that players can be used to both read and write to the discs.
From the GE Research blog: “Very recently, the team at GE has made dramatic improvements in the materials enabling significant increases in the amount of light that can be reflected by the holograms.”
More capacity
The higher reflectivity that can be achieved, the more capacity for the disc. While the technology is still in the laboratory stage, GE believes it will take off because players can be built which are backwards compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray technologies.
In a statement the firm said: “The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.”
”GE’s breakthrough is a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer,” said Mr Lawrence in a statement.
Micro-holographic technology has been one of the leading areas of research for storage experts for decades. Discs are seen as a reliable and effective form of storage and are both consumer and retail friendly.
“This is truly a breakthrough in the development of the materials that are so critical to ultimately bringing holographic storage to the everyday consumer,” said Mr Lawrence.
 Visual Systems Journal Wireless and Mobile 09 is at Olympia Two, London on 20 and 21 May. There’s more at www.thewirelessevent.com.
[Got an activity or event coming up? Email eo@iap.org.uk with the details.]
Sounding Board
Robin Jones worries about our inability to foretell the future or, in the more extreme cases, the present.
It’s exactly 50 years since Arthur Koestler published ‘The Sleepwalkers’. For anyone unfamiliar with the book (and, if you are, I’d heartily recommend a quick trip to Amazon) it’s a fascinating history of Western science, especially astronomy, from a uniquely Koestlerian angle. His take, conveyed by the title, is that not only are important scientific discoveries frequently stumbled upon rather than logically arrived at but that the discoverer is often unaware that he has, so to speak, stubbed his toe at all.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if technologists are equally prone to metaphorical somnambulism. Take text messaging, for example. The SMS system, more or less as we know it today, was defined within the GSM specification in the early 80s. It was designed to use spare bandwidth within existing signalling formats and so was essentially cost-free from the suppliers’ point of view. Given that early cell phone adopters were almost exclusively business users and that their previous mobile communication device was probably the pager, it’s not too surprising that SMS was seen as a business add-on and a relatively unimportant one, given that you could now actually speak to people while on the move. This worked so well that by the mid-90s the average user was sending one text every two months. Then teenagers discovered texting and now we send over 200 million every day in the UK alone. So, Teenagers 1, Technologists 0.
The trigger for this train of thought was the way in which the netbook market appears to be going. It’s not two years since the Asus Eee PC701 was launched. Its target market was clearly defined by the term ‘netbook’.Using a Celeron M processor, it was fine for a bit of emailing and Web surfing and that was about it. Then Intel introduced the Atom and suddenly everyone and his dog has a netbook offer. Acer, Dell, Elonex, HP, Lenovo, MSI, they’re all represented. And the specifications have become suspiciously elastic. Screens are becoming bigger and so are keyboards, making them usable for more than the occasional hunt-and-peck. Early models all used Linux to minimise the operating system overhead. Now, plenty are running Windows XP and Microsoft are talking up Windows 7′s netbook credentials. So aren’t we now just looking at the bottom end (in size terms at least) of the ultra-portable market? Or is there some specific use for which netbooks are ideally suited that’ll take the world by storm? I don’t know. I’m waiting for a teenager to tell me.
[Something you’d like to get off your chest? Email me (Robin Jones) at eo@iap.org.uk.]
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Members’ News:
Dr Peter M Ashby, MB, BS, DRCOG, FIAP (Cmpn) is standing for re-election to the IAP Council this year. Here, he re-introduces himself to us.
I qualified in Medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, in London in 1960 and from 1980 worked on the writing and developing of medical databases for use in primary care and promoted the use of computer systems for General Practice. During this time I developed one of the earliest software programs for the linking of a Pathology service to General Practice.
I retired from full time NHS practice in 2005 after 45 years and continued in medical education until my full retirement from medicine in 2008. Since then I have worked on investigating system anomalies and in forensic work concentrating on the identification of fraud and the maintenance of accurate data. The need to maintain the security of medical databases and the personal information held on these has provoked a fresh approach into user interfaces and the control of access. It is in this area I have been developing new systems which are less vulnerable. I became a fellow of the IAP in 1987, joining the Council in 2007.
[Don’t forget to email eo@iap.org.uk with items of news about you or your company.]
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Work in Progress
Mike Ryan, the IAP’s Director General, has some very pertinent tips, given the current economic climate, for those considering starting their own businesses.
Being an employee is in many ways a sheltered existence. Coming out from under the umbrella and setting up in business on your own account means you have to start doing things for yourself that probably you have never had to consider before. From my own experience, and from speaking to many IAP members, I have concluded that the following points are the key to succeeding – or maybe even surviving – in business.
1. Getting work when you need it
2. Getting paid on time
3. Avoiding tax and cash flow problems
Finding work: You have professional skills, and there are thousands of potential clients out there with problems that you might be able to solve for them. But how are they to know? You have to market your skills, and though this doesn’t come easily to many IT professionals who are happier dealing with PCs than with people, it has to be done. You can’t get off first base in business until you’ve found a customer and got some work.
There are agents whose business it is to find work for professionals like you. Some of them are very good. It is worth paying the agent’s commission if he can keep you working and avoid downtime. But ultimately it is far better to cultivate your own circle of clients. Chat up friends who work in big companies. If you get too much work you can always subcontract it. Never turn work away if you can avoid it – particularly if it comes from an existing client. That client, who might otherwise have stuck with you forever, may not come back. I cannot overemphasize the importance of marketing.
Getting paid: The reason for going into business is to make money. You have to get this bit right. The cornerstone of successful business is to have a clear contract with your client. A contract is an agreement between two parties, one to provide services and the other to pay for them. Verbal contracts are legal – but it is safer to commit the key points to paper or at least email. Contracts need not contain pages of legal jargon; an exchange of letters will usually do.
Contractors or consultants are normally employed to work on projects: parcels of work that finish when a certain target has been achieved. You may be asked to quote a price for the entire job, or the client may propose to pay you by the day until it is complete. The Lump Sum option is tempting – you feel that once you have signed the contract there’s nothing to prevent that large amount of money from hitting your bank account. But in my experience it is often difficult to agree when milestones for payment have been reached, or when the project can be considered complete, particularly with new IT systems where commissioning may be followed by a tail of bugs and problems. Often at this point the client realizes that the instructions he gave you at the outset were inadequate and he has not got what he was expecting. He wants you to change work you feel you have completed.
These problems can all be avoided if you work on a daily rate. The rate you charge will need to vary according to circumstances. For example a year’s contract in a comfortable office around the corner from your home would be very convenient, so it would be sensible to quote a keen rate to secure the job. Short-term work or jobs in very inconvenient places are much less attractive because you tend to get a lot of downtime when you are not earning. Rates have to allow for this, consequently they can substantially exceed £1,000 a day.
Clients are only interested in getting the job done. If you can convince them you understand what’s needed and can fix it, they will try to pay the rate you are asking. But sometimes clients are genuinely unable to pay that much. It is very important the discussion doesn’t end at that point – you want to keep the door open for negotiation. When the client asks how much you charge, instead of saying “£500 per day” you say “Well, taking into account everything we’ve discussed , in normal circumstances I would expect to charge around £500″. This gives the client the opportunity to say “Is there any give in that figure?”, then you say “Possibly – how much do you think you could pay?”
Your contract should also cover points such as where you will be working, working hours, who you will get your instructions from, any other entitlements such as holiday and sick pay. But most important is when and how you get paid. You may, for example, plan to invoice the client at the end of every month, for payment within 30 days. Find out who you should give the invoice to, who will authorize payment, and how the payment procedure works. Then if you don’t get paid on time you know how to follow it up. Don’t be afraid to discuss the arrangements for getting paid before you start the job. That way you avoid misunderstandings and nip problems in the bud.
Avoiding tax and cash flow problems: Suppose you get a contract worth £10,000 a month, and that you employ someone who will do the work for half as much. This could be a very profitable contract, but only if you can finance it in the short term. At the end of the first month you will have to find £5,000 to pay your employee’s salary. You can invoice your client for £10,000 but he won’t have to pay until the end of month two. By that time you will have had to find a second £5000 salary payment. Then if, as often happens in the real world, your client doesn’t actually pay in 30 days, or even 60 days, instead of making money you will find yourself slipping further and further into the red. What happens when you reach the limit of your overdraft? Don’t wait to find out; don’t work for people who don’t pay promptly.
This simplified scenario ignores factors such as administration costs, National Insurance, tax, VAT and bank interest, all of which create cash flow problems of their own. But it illustrates the essential point that before you take on work, no matter how profitable it might turn out to be, you must be sure you can handle the cash flow. That is why it is so important to have a clear understanding with your clients about prompt payment.
In real life there are costs to running any business, and until the cheques start coming in you will stack up a pile of liabilities. Some of your suppliers, being in business themselves, may have some sympathy if you are slow paying their invoices. If you explain the situation to them honestly, they may be willing to be patient for quite a long time. In reality there is not a lot else they can do. Starting legal proceedings costs money, and anyway they don’t want to lose a client. Unfortunately this does not apply with the Inland Revenue or the VAT man, who don’t care if you go broke. Being funded by the taxpayer, they can afford to pursue you to the ends of the earth, regardless of the time and money it wastes. So it is very important to comply with the laws governing business and to pay your tax bills promptly. Taxation can be complex, but members of the Institution can get free advice on tax and accounting matters over the telephone. This service is provided by a top firm of accountants.
Interested IAP members should call or email the Office (0208 567 2118 or admin@iap.org.uk) to be put in touch with our accountants. Free legal advice is also available in the same way.
[Interesting project or development? Let us know at eo@iap.org.uk!]
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