Archive for March, 2006
… for being excited by something I got told about a couple of days ago… and by some stuff from today.
Can’t really talk about any of it 
The remainder of Blue Fusion was a total success. The scores were really impressive, I think that teams of IBMers would struggle to do much better. Thanks to everyone who helped out (comments from one helper on eightbar). It was really good to be involved, to meet and talk to the teachers, children and hosts, all of whom had interesting perspectives on the activities and talks.
One of the speakers brought along a few Vocera devices and we had a play with them after the talk. Very impressive technology and I look forward to seeing it built in to other systems.
Back to my desk tomorrow to deal with rumblings from the WS-Addressing WG and see what other work has appeared in the last week.
What’s wrong with this sign?
Originally uploaded by davidillsley.
4 days to go….
I am, of course, talking about my 5 days of hosting local school children at work. The aim is to try and get them a bit more enthusiastic about science and technology and learn through a selection of fun activities. Friday was very successful, going off without a hitch. We had 8 fun activities which the children seemed to really respond to, and I’m sure things will only get better over the next few days as polish is added. Hopefully we’ll get some photos of the event up in the next few days so all my effort in purchasing balloons can be appreciated. More seriously, the activity teams have done a great job of turning the rooms we’ve given them into engaging experiences which make everyone who sees them say wow.
Speaking to one of the children who attended on Friday I asked what she is good at at school and the answer backs up the idea that events like his could encourage greater numbers of people into science and technology… “Um, English, Drama, Maths, Science….”
Last night saw the final marathon session of WS-Addressing CR Testing. We had to provide 4 interoperable implementations and we have that. On top of that we have a couple of other implementations which have only implemented the server side of the equation and just haven’t implemented a client (the server side is the tough one by the way).
If you’re interested, you can have a look at the report. Hopefully it won’t change too much over the next couple of weeks… maybe those last little bits of red will vanish… and maybe a few more green boxes for Tim Berners-Lee to look at
It’s been a really interesting few months working on this with Paul, Jonathan, Mike, Arun, Glen, Dims, Kevin and others. Thanks to everyone for their hard work and attitude. We’ve done some rigorous testing that will genuinely boost interoperability and help all our customers (and services teams) have easier lives. I look forward to working with everyone again… though next time we should think of a celebration for the end not at the end on IRC… it makes it much harder for people to do anything but a ’small happy dance’!
I hear from reliable sources that the price of tea may rocket 20% this year.
I’ve been pondering offline webapps recently, and it seems I’m not the only one
I’m not sure that I agree with mnot, I think something more substantial is necessary but that’s a gut feeling, not really a considered opinion. (As an aside I should probably think more deeply before posts like this and I can they are increasing in number and don’t really offer much)
One example that I played with for 10 mins today is wikiCalc which is a web publishing tool based on the spreadsheet metaphor. The use of the metaphor is really clear and is an easy way of introducing lightweight server side programming to business types who today don’t venture outside Excel.
The bit relevant to this post is that it is distributed as a perl script which can either be run on the desktop or a server with publishing between client and server. When running on the client it is still accessed through a web browser. This is very simplistic way of thinking about the problem but people keep telling me that IBM solutions are too complex so I’m open to starting with simple solutions.
On Friday 5 days of fun Science/Tech related activites with Kids starts in Hursley. Friday is Bright Sparks, with Blue Fusion running for the first 4 days of the following week. 9 different activites thought up and developed over the last 4 months will be run over the 5 days for 78 teams of 6 children from local schools. I could list a few more statistics but they probably aren’t that interesting… though I do remember being startled by the number of litres of orange juice we’re expecting to go through. Some of the things covered by the activites: communications, the environment, space, robotics, genetics, optics and more.
All I have left to do is allocate the many, many IBMers who have volunteered to host an activity for a day. One of the things I like about Hursley is the fact that in addition to being a high performance culture there are opportunities to do these extra things and that they are encouraged by management.
