The future of MS in the SME…

My grand plan has been to write a nice web based accounting package that’s simple to use and effectively can replace my use of Microsoft Money. All it needs do is track the accounts and also on-line updates and share pricing would be handy too. It also needs to work from any computer, no matter what it is running. Sure, Flash is on most computers around the world but really it should be a nice combination of AJAX and a suitable back end. Immediately half the world is thinking PHP/MySQL sounds ideal for this kind of use. It’s no surprise that this combination has caught on being relatively simple to learn and quick. In general though PHP is coded with the Business Logic and the Presentation Layer in the same files. Basically having ruled out PHP for this purpose, that leaves me with the choice of ASP.NET or Java (Built on J2EE & EJB 3.0). The chosen solution also has to tie in with my intentions to have a Content Management System, Online Photo Album/Media server and calendaring.

Since I’m a bit of a geek and like my Mac as well as Windows, I thought I’d give the Java solution the shot first. I could use MySQL to host the database and TomCat to do the serving, the only thing being that TomCat doesn’t support EJB 3.0. It has never been in my nature to use something older when a newer shinier toy is on the market so I set about looking for alternates. At work we have a sizeable amount of WebLogic servers and Oracle databases. As it happens I’ve spent most of the weekend playing working to get Oracle 11g running. I have a MacBook Pro with too much Ram and VMWare Fusion, and the experiences were… varied.

Looking at Weblogic first, this is really rather impressive. Using an on-line guide I was able to get Weblogic up and running on Mac OS.X, an unsupported platform but as it’s Unix and Weblogic is at heart a Java program, it worked successfully. Next point to mention is that Weblogic is FAST, scary fast. On the same hardware running a sample Java app (Alfresco) the Weblogic server Alfesco instance was many times quicker to respond than the version hosted on Tomcat. Both were using the default HSQL database too. I can’t quantify the measurement, but everything just moved quicker with less stutters. Score one for Oracle/BEA on that. The only issue I have is when shutting down WebLogic my memory use stays high for a long time after.

I didn’t fancy trying to install Oracle 11g on OS.X too because it’s not a Java app it’s a proper hardcore database, possibly THE hardcore database right now. OK, yes I know DB2 hosts a lot of OLTP databases too and MS SQL Server is also in the market at the lower end but Oracle has held the majority of the mid-range/top-end market for a long time. My first inclination was Sun Solaris 10 but unfortunately Oracle 11gis not supported on Solaris unless you have SPARC processors. Nice and meaty but I have an X86_64 architecture. That meant Linux. I’ve never been a big fan of Linux so far in life. My main issue with it is that there are just so many different distributions it’s almost impossible to pick one that “should work” with everything you want to throw at it. If your intended use is LAMP then it will work beautifully. Likewise if you want to serve files off it, no problem at all. The established components work very well. When it comes to administration though, you’d better be liking your Terminal windows though. Just about all my Administration experience is on Windows, with a smattering of OS.X too. But as Clarkson says ‘how hard can it be?’. Well very as it happens. I picked a distro of Linux. I wanted Red Hat being the biggest player, but you have to pay for that, so I went for the next best thing – Oracle Enterprise Linux. In other words Red Hat with a different badge. The install is quick and painless (remember to install the developer tools to allow compiling of VMWare Tools) and I was fairly confident up to this point. Then I started to run 11g setup. This was less exciting as an experience. Doing the sensible novice thing, I accepted all the defaults, confident in the knowledge that Oracle know a lot more about their product that I do. First time around I hit an error, my chosen user was not in the sudoers file and therefore I couldn’t sudo some of the install scripts. Logging in as root and attempting to add myself using visudo was an experience of a lifetime. Easy to get in, not a clue how to save and exit after. visudo appears to work differently to pico and has no helpful hints. Using su to temporarily become root and run the scripts, I completed the setup. Boldly pointing my browser at the address given, I attempted to log in to the Oracle Administrator interface. This is given as https://localhost.localdomain:1158/em/ and a very nice link it is too. Except if you leave out the s in https then you get it wanting to download a binary in Firefox, that doesn’t work well. When you don’t spot this you make things even harder for yourself. When you restart Linux you now have to work out how the hell to get the instance running again. This in itself can be something of a challenge and to be honest I’ve spent a good few hours looking for how to do this. (Script here)

This brings me nicely round to just why for the foreseeable future, Microsoft will continue to be dominant in the SME. It’s pretty much a given that any company will have a majority of Windows Desktop machines. There may be a few Macs in there, maybe even a few Sun or Linux boxes, but without fail the overwhelming majority in business today will be Windows. The biggest thing that today has brought out for me is just how complete and cohesive the MS Solutions are. Large companies, the ones that use Oracle, Weblogic and Solaris etc pay people to admin such programs. They most likely have dedicated Oracle Database admins who know almost nothing about say Active Directory but everything about how to keep Oracle performing at its best. When you’re a small company you don’t have an army of specialists. Usually the IT support starts with the one person that ‘knows a bit’ and grows from there. When you’re trying to do a day job, ease of use is everything and while the command line offers you ‘ultimate control’, it’s just not as friendly as a nice GUI. So why should an SME bother to learn Oracle/Weblogic/*NIX when they have a perfectly function Windows network anyway? This is why MS remain and will remain dominant here. If you already admin a small network with Active Directory, it’s not too much of a step to bring Exchange on board for your email and Calendaring. Yes it’s complex and you won’t get the best out of it like an Exchange admin would, but for your SME you don’t need that last 20% of performance either. Then you need a database, why learn another when SQL Server is available and works almost the same as Windows in terms of how the commands operate? Lastly you need a decent snappy server to serve a proper Web App. Chances are you’ll be able to find equivalent apps based on ASP.NET and Java at this level, so why bother to spend thousands on Weblogic or Websphere when you have IIS already. When it comes to patching, updating and protecting such setups too, MS can centralise all that under one roof, rather than checking one place to keep your mail servers patched, another for your database and more for your software.

Someone that wants to play will willingly learn how to make the heavy iron programs work in a semi-skilled way. Microsoft Server technologies make it possible to get there one heck of a lot faster though, and with a less steep learning curve. If you’re a FTSE 100 company then the performance and results you’ll get from the heavy iron architecture is worth every penny, to the SME though, there is little compelling reason to move to the higher end technologies. As SQL Server moves to version 2008 too, there is even less reason to move on as it comes ever closer to the Oracle feature set. If I was Oracle I’d start being a little worried about my market share vs my cost of ownership to some extent. Companies growing organically with an SQL Sever base are going to be less likely to move to Oracle for larger installs in future, simply because the time and investment is not going to provide the benefit. Of course, what do I know really? I’m just an amateur playing with professional tools… kind of like the IT department in most small companies.

As for me? Well I’m going to spend another day or so playing with Oracle, then I may well end up with an ASP.NET solution. Heck it might even be marketable as a package as all people would need is SQL Express (free), IIS (free with Windows XP Pro and better) and that’s it – one simple server.

Christopher Hinds : 21 Sep 2008 22:42 |  Tags: Apple Aspnet Database Java Linux Microsoft Oracle Solaris Sql Sun |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The wage deal "everyone" is talking about

With today’s announcement that Shell have agreed a two year pay deal with their work force worth 14% overall there appears to be outrage in on the BBC’s “Have your say”. Mind you, Have Your Say has always been full of people moaning about everything left right and centre, with a slightly left lean because it is the BBC after all. The union can tell their members they got more than they asked for, the company can be thankful it will actually pay less than they were going to have to. The spin being of course two years worth of inflation at 3.3% (if you are dumb enough to believe the CPI), 4.3% (if you believe the RPI) and about 9% if unlike the people compiling the statistics you don’t buy a TV, VCR, Computer and iPod on a monthly basis. Realistically the deal isn’t actually for that much, and even worse for them, that increase will put them all in the 40% tax bracket (helpfully lowered by the 10p tax fiasco) and help Gordon that little bit more in taking money off us. So the drivers are better off in numbers terms and standing still in real terms.

The rest of us if you believe the comments are meanwhile falling behind dramatically, especially those poor public sector workers. Comments abound about nurses, teachers and police officers all being paid far less than the tanker drivers. I agree that people in these three professions (and lets include the fire service, armed forces and the highways agency in this too) all perform jobs that are essential for the function of society. These people do deserve to be rewarded appropriately for their work. They also need to be freed from filling in paperwork that adds no value. They are perhaps the only jobs I can think of though where the actual job is vital and does not involve the creation of intellectual property.

In order to actually MAKE money rather than create it, you have to have something tangible, something physical that you can pass on. That might be a product such as a car, it might be a piece of computer software or even a financial product from a bank. The crucial thing is that all of these things have a value to another person. You cannot establish an economy on selling things in shops (after all the internet allows companies to sell what they make directly far more effectively now) and pushing paper around. We need more engineers designing better, more effective and efficient products, more manually skilled people creating value in the economy and less creating money by guessing in hedge funds (though it is important) and public sector pen pushers. The trouble with a service economy is that while Accountancy and auditing is vital to a large company, the majority of the service economy consists of things people can do without quite effectively. Tangible products like food and fuel are far more vital and less likely to be cut back on.

So what on earth do we do about the situation? Undoubtedly this mood in the country is damaging and likely to lead to more requests in both the public and private sectors for a raise, not that that helps because in order to fund wages companies increase their prices and so the cycle goes on. Consolidation in the market will also happen to a greater extent under these wage demands leaving fewer larger players and smaller niche companies but less “middle ground”. Increasing wages is a last resort and an admission that inflation is truly out of control. What the government should do, could do but won’t do is this:

Education

• Change performance standards for schools from an absolute figure to relative. A 5% improvement on sweet fa is more of an achievement than taking 88.5% clear up rate to 88.7%. If performance standards are based on improvement rather than target of pass rates then perhaps we can get back to teaching properly
• Remove forward visibility of exam papers from teachers so pupils actually have to learn the curriculum rather than learn how to answer an exam question. It makes the jobs harder for teachers but we can offset this by reducing the amount of paperwork they are made to deal with
• Emphasis on Science, Maths, English and practical skills in our schools… making these subjects fun is the key to helping us develop more people who are interested in them. Of course not everyone is cut out to work in these areas and vocational skills are just as important and not emphasised enough right now other than in lip service. People also need a grasp of the basics (like… you have to pay your credit card off). I’m not saying that all other courses should be abandoned, but the basics must be there behind everything and at a suitable level
• Stop dumbing down A-Levels and get rid of the 50% to have a degree target unless you wish to destroy the value of a degree
• Fund universities the same for a home student as for a foreign student with the government paying the balance over a predefined threshold
• Encourage University<=>Business partnerships
• Student loans to be reduced to a flat 2.5% APR in perpetuity, directly paid off by the student, boundary for payment to rise with income tax boundaries annually

Police, Fire

• Decreased bureaucracy for front line to deal with, emphasis on catching criminals not on paperwork
• Salaries to be linked to performance improvements, overall service pay bill to rise by half the rate of inflation each year, up to the service how to distribute this
• Streamline structure

NHS

• Streamline, end of story
• Funding to be based on value and merit of projects
• Increases in salary for front line care, static for administration
• Reduced administration
• Waste as a defined performance metric

Public Sector Pay and Pensions

• Just like the private sector you have to pay for the pension
• Final salary terms to be comparable to remaining open private schemes
• No public sector worker to be taxed, jobs to be advertised at equivalent salary but no channelling of money from A to B
• Public sector pay to be reasonable compared to private sector but to lower end of range instead of median or upper

Tax

• Abandon NI and roll it all into Income Tax
• Increase personal allowance to £10k
• Simplify tax system, two bands, no tax credits, everybody pays, around 30% for a basic band earner (same as now) and around 45% for a higher earner
• Reduce corporation tax but remove all exemptions every company pays
• DVLA Tax disc fee to be dropped to £10 if bought online, £20 to accommodate administration if paying by post/post office
• 2p/litre on fuel duty as a base point
• Fuel duty to be coupled to price of raw fuel, an increase in the cost of oil should have a corresponding decrease in the level of tax, equivalent to 50% of the rise e.g. if fuel cost increases 2p/l then tax should decrease 1p/l
• Fuel duty to rise annually, but fuel price should never be further the 10% from mean European cost
• Stealth taxes – just no. Plain and simple, VAT at 17.5% on everything bar food and 5% on domestic fuel, rising by 0.5% per annum until 17.5% is reached

Public Transport

• Mass investment in rail transport
• Regulation of rail fares to ensure it remains the most cost effective transport method
• Appropriate bus and rail routes for working economy

Energy

• Nuclear power for base load
• Renewable peaking loads
• Domestic CHP endorsed
• Community CHP/District heating encouraged

By streamlining the public sector and the tax system we can get people out and working to generate money again. As the fuel cost rises the economies of sending things to the far east for manufacture become less viable, we may yet see Britain begin to manufacture more.

Lastly if you believe you aren’t paid enough you do have options:

• If you think you are worth it and back it up, ask for that raise
• Go for promotion or another job elsewhere

We’d all like more money to make life easier, but just because someone else is getting it doesn’t mean we automatically deserve it.

Christopher Hinds : 18 Jun 2008 17:59 |  Tags: Public Sector Shell Union Wages |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Heartened and yet saddened too

We’re all supposed to be much better off using public transport apparently. For once it seems that a small miracle has happened and it is cheaper to use the train than the plane. In mid July, Emma and I will need to travel from Glasgow to Nottingham on a Saturday and back the following day. Obviously there are three options for this, Driving, Flying or the Train. It’s about a 300 mile journey each way give or take a mile.

Plane from Glasgow to Birmingham (no available flights to EMA) – £190.90 for two, then £48 for the train ride or £238 total
Train from Glasgow to Nottingham – £78 for me, £52 for Emma or £130 total
Car – 600 miles at 40mpg = 70l Petrol = £80 or so

Now fair enough there is the option of the bus on Megabus or National Express but both require being up at stupid-o-clock for a total cost of £50 and then we’ve somehow got to get to Brum on the Sunday for 5am – just not feasible.

There’s also all the other costs of running the car, but the thing is, it depreciates whether I drive it or not, just the amount varies slightly. It’s insured whether I drive it or not and it’s taxed just the same so the marginal cost of the journey is pretty much fuel because tire wear will be negligible on that journey.

It’s heartening that the Train costs less than the flight now, which is a good thing for the world in general but it’s still nearly 63% more expensive than private motoring. Surely something is desperately wrong with the world if the cleanest, greenest transport is also more expensive.

Christopher Hinds : 11 Jun 2008 21:32 |  Tags: Public Transport Travel |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Server I wish they made

Writing about web page http://www.apple.com/uk/xserve

While most houses are happy with a laptop or a desktop or perhaps both, I’m generally not. I don’t trust myself to always make regular backups (hence I think Apple’s Time Machine is a good invention for me), nor do I trust single hardware with all my life on it not to fail. In fact my Archive/Backup NAS just last week decided to fail and I may have lost all my work I did at uni. Fortunately I think I have a set of CDs stashed away with it on, but I can’t be sure until I get to Sussex to check. I also like the idea of shared things and things that I can access from anywhere. I like centralised redundant data storage and meaty appliances that let me share information at will. So my home will need a server. Not one of those Microsoft nancy home server jobbies but a proper, decent spec server that allows me to monitor things. Is it overkill? Probably. Is it fun? Of course it is. Does it allow me to do things I couldn’t otherwise? Of course.

So what is the ideal server for me? Well it’s got to be rack mounted and I’d like it to run OS X (File server and Web server), Windows (Exchange) and Solaris (Database Server). This of course points to an XServe as the only real option, and it’s a damn good 1u server at that. The only thing that I wish it had that it doesn’t is the use of 2.5” drives instead of 3.5” drives. I want to be able to have a RAID-1 pair of SAS drives running the operating systems with a nice 4 disk RAID-6 for the data. To do that on an HP DL380 G5 is easy and I’d even have a couple of bays spare. On a DL360 G5 I’d be ok too. On the XServe I only have three bays though and that limits my storage capability. I was happy with the idea of an XServe RAID but they discontinued it, and I’m not paying £7k for the Promise replacement idea because I just don’t need 16 drives. All I want is an XServe in 1u with 6 drive bays and 2.5” drives. Make it so Apple, make it so.

Christopher Hinds : 20 May 2008 21:31 |  Tags: Computers Data Mac Os X Servers Windows |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Way back when…

Having come back to the UK I have returned once again to the nomadic lifestyle that has been me since I joined the world of work. This time the movements have taken me to Bristol where I am to be based until the end of June. Fortunately this has given me the opportunity to live with Siggy and spend some time with a good mate. It has also given me the chance to remind myself what being in the south of the UK is like again.

Bristol itself seems to be a very nice city with a reasonable blend of the olde worlde and the modern. You can almost feel the “but” coming can’t you?! ...but, oh the TRAFFIC! Seriously where do all these people come from? No not the other motorists, I’m talking about the people who sequence traffic lights. It is a fact of life that theoretically the light sequences work perfectly, you can even see the theory: Three or four cars go in each direction and that way no road actually gets fully stopped up. The thing is though Mr Traffic Planner, sir, is that Doris doesn’t move off as soon as the light goes green, nor does Ben – he’s busy on his mobile. This means that one car gets through, and the person behind is so frustrated that they jump through on amber and pretty soon the whole system stops up and so does all of Bristol. So please Mr planner, take your estimates and then try them in the real world before you say it works.

Today though Emma and I took the opportunity to tour the SS Great Britain in dry dock in the heart of Bristol. This Iron leviathan takes you back to the time when most machines had more personality than they do now. Tucked away in the corner of the museum was a Rolls-Royce Olympus (from Concorde) which we’d loaned to them, and once again this reminds you of a great engineering achievement that genuinely had a personality too. I’m very proud to be part of the engineering company that created so many of our past achievements, I just hope that there are more for the country to come.

Take the early age of jet travel, where we had the DeHavilland Comet, a thing of beauty, albeit flawed in its original incarnation. Now we have the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787, both massively more technically impressive – carrying more with far less fuel use and emissions, but both far less emotionally exciting than the Comet. Likewise the F18 and Eurofighter are both great aircraft but far less evocative than a Spitfire or a Hunter. What is it that we have lost in our modern equipment? Perhaps our past achievements were amazing and had personality because we were exploring the unknown, the edge of ability, now we are refining the concepts and making them better. The sad thing about making the “perfect” plane though, is that it is no longer beautiful. Concorde, the Comet, the Hunter and the Spitfire were all beautiful and there was not one part that did not serve a purpose. The Airbus and Boeing likewise are marvels of engineering refinement but they don’t have the same beauty, they’ve become generic.

Going round the SS Great Britain you can see the desires of Brunel in the engineering and you can see the details that were there to last a hundred years and have lasted more. Somehow I doubt you get the same feeling going round P&O’s latest cruise liner. It will be very impressive, it’s decks not lacking for anything, but will it have the same feel as the SS in 100 years or will it have been returned to the parts from which it came? The same feeling is there with the train too – a Merchant Navy class locomotive requires skill and panache to drive and make a train move, a Virgin Voyager needs another skill set. Gone are the engineering needs to be replaced by understanding all of the safety systems and other technology.

The only area of transport where this isn’t really seen is the car, where it has to be said that recent cars are more impressive than their predecessors though of course there are exceptions. The Aston DB9 is in my view a more beautiful car than the DB7, while the new Jaguar XK is far more attractive than the old. You could happily make a case for the modern car being far better and in many cases prettier than the old. Equally though few have a personality to them.

Why is it that the soul is missing from our modern engineering creations? They are engineering achievements that are truly the limit of what is currently possible (for a given price point), so why do they lack the soul of the flawed past creations. Will people look back in fifty years and marvel at the Boeing 787 and A380? I really truly hope so, but fear that may not.

Christopher Hinds : 27 Apr 2008 20:07 |  Tags: Engineering Past Achievements Present Progress |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The sun is shining

Today in Indy it is a crisp spring morning, the temperature is around the freezing point, but the sun is bright and high in the sky. In the UK its the kind of day where you’d either go for a walk along the Surrey Hills or you might take a trip out into Derbyshire for a nice drive followed by a walk along a river. It’s just a nice day to be outside and enjoy the scenery, the only trouble is that Indiana is Flat. It’s as though when America was being formed a massive force flattened the entire eastern side of the country then got bored when it reached the Rockies. I honestly can’t think of a single thing to do within 30 miles of Indy. There are no rolling hills to go walking in, no Yorkshire dales or variety, just a patchwork of farmland as far as the eye can see, and trust me when the world is this flat you can see a fair way.

Having driven round this part of the USA a fair amount now I’m left with the feeling that you could be anywhere, each little place is more or less the same as every other little place. Villages are so spread out that there is not much sense of community and what was there is dominated by huge chains of stores offering fast food or out of town shopping centres offering the same options as the last. I’m sure the west coast of America where you have Yellowstone and some of the more forested areas would be stunning, as would being in someplace more connected to the big cities like Washington DC, Chicago or New York, but here in Indianapolis there is little to see.

In a sense this is a shame because undoubtedly I’m doing a disservice and I just don’t know where to look but at the same time its pretty hard to find things to do, even a quick google doesn’t pull up much outside unless you like golf… there is a lot of golf here.

Christopher Hinds : 23 Mar 2008 14:43 |  Tags: Indiana Indianapolis Uk Weather |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A little bit of a flashback

Over the last two nights I have woken up having had dreams of Warwick as I knew it, in spite of it approaching two years since I graduated and six years since I first started. Yesterday night I was dreaming of the Union and the Arts centre, mixed with a sprinkling of techie in there too. Of course this also include flashes of my current boss and other work related stuff in there too, which makes little sense. Tonight I’ve woken up dreaming of Arthur Vick, except the one I dreamt of was dramatically remodelled with a more open plan layout and many kitchens interlocked with the bedrooms. The strange thing is I was there with Emma and there was an Aga in one of the kitchen. I mean really… most people could barely cook pasta when they arrived at the time I did, how many of them could use an Aga?! The strange thing was all the names were on the rooms just as they were when I was there, every single one along the corridor was there and I was back in AV1, Kitchen 10 again in Room 220 just as before.

So what is going on in my head that is dragging me back to University? Is it that I’m ready to come home and it’s a reminder of familiar surroundings? Is it that I miss having a formalised learning program? Or is it just reminding me where so much of what my life is today was formed and not to forget it?

Christopher Hinds : 22 Mar 2008 10:13 |  Tags: Dreams History Life Past People University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

7–Speed S–Tronic Gearbox

Writing about web page http://www.eurocarblog.com/post/677/the-new-audi-s-tronic-7-speed-gearbox

Today VAG announced they will be launching a 7 speed S-Tronic box suitable for use in longitudinal installations (think A4, A5, A6, A8, Q7), presumably as an alternative to the current Tiptronic offerings. Thinking about this a little, it is not really surprising, given that we’ve had the A5 for over a year now and we still have not seen any models featuring the ZF HP26 gearbox as used in all the other Audi Quattro cars with longitudinal engines. It would appear that VAG intend to replace the ZF box with the S-Tronic, rather than alongside it as the marginal cost of offering both would surely be prohibitive for the number of people in the motoring public who could tell the difference.

I feel however this would be something of a shame, because for a start the ZF HP26 is one of the finest automatic gearboxes you can buy today – its list of clients includes Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Jaguar, Land Rover, Audi, BMW and even Aston Martin. It’s a very smooth box with no perceptible changes whatsoever and fantastically responsive, it’s not even a very thirsty box thanks to lock up in each gear. OK if you are fussy then when you flick a downshift using the paddles then it does take a couple of moments but nothing terrible at all.

If you read (and believe) the motoring press, they will tell you the DSG/S-Tronic box is gods gift to motoring, they’ll spend hours extolling the way that a Golf R32 DSG shifts like lightning as you battle round Brands Hatch and how the GTI is the same but more agile. Clearly what none of them do is what people actually buy automatic cars for – they don’t sit in traffic on the M25 going from 0 – 15 – 0 again in three hundred yards. It is here that one of the DSG boxes least pleasant features becomes obvious, when moving off from rest there is more lag than with a conventional auto as the torque convertor is missing. That’s ok in most circumstances because the newer ones apparently creep at idle (link) now.

The second big issue I have with DSG boxes is the lag when accelerating. DSG works by guessing which gear the driver is going to want next and getting it right more than it gets it wrong. The trouble is when you are coming to a roundabout and want to squeeze into a gap, a DSG car reacts somewhat differently to a conventional auto. In a conventional auto as you apply lots of power to get into the gap, the transmission senses the increased flow and slips the torque convertor long enough to allow the downshift. In a DSG in the same situation (say 2nd gear is active), the transmission will have preselected 3rd already anticipating a nice smooth transition through. When you ask for lots of power from low (coasting) rpm there is a long delay while the gearbox works out that you actually might be better off with 1st. Meanwhile the car has picked up just enough power in 2nd to be accelerating somewhat, so by the time it shifts down to first all you succeed in doing is launching too fast into the gap because you suddenly got way more acceleration. The problem is especially bad with a 2.0TDI because the turbo lag means you accelerate slow slow slow downshift FAST, it is not progressive. This can lead to some really nasty situations as you wait for the gearbox to make up its mind what the heck it wants to do. For me this is the major one because it can be a safety issue though you could argue if your gap is that small you shouldn’t be trying to take it. I would return by saying that you need to be able to respond quickly to maintain a smooth drive too. Note you can confuse a DSG box in the same way with roundabouts and the like on hills… you know motorway junctions, that kind of thing.

Lastly, a DSG just is not as smooth as a ZF box no matter what they say and at the top end when shifting “on the red line”, the DSG holds fractionally too long with the diesel engines because it seems to be set to change at a specific rev that the governor may not necessarily agree with.

Now I really hope that Audi have managed to correct the second issue in particular, because what you don’t want to do when introducing a gearbox to your key model (and rest assured if it’s designed for longitudinal installs that means it will be in the A4) what you don’t want is a series of drivers who avoid your high end models because they aren’t as smooth and predictable as the others. Of course the motoring press will love them, but then they don’t have to live with them every day for the lifetime of the lease.

Christopher Hinds : 20 Mar 2008 00:22 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Software in the Enterprise

A while back when I first started work in the (c) “Real World”, I was surprised at some of the restrictions made on corporate computer use, for example users were not allowed use of Microsoft Access for reasons that I could not at the time comprehend. Now I’m working in an environment full of people using an Access Database for this and an Access Database for that, I now fully understand the need to prevent such custom systems wandering around a company. Put simply any time you have a custom system you end up with a group of people manually linking together many systems instead of relying on the corporate solution, for example SAP or another large ERP system. So what? So some companies use small systems manually linked while others use large homogeneous applications, what difference does it make? Well custom systems are so much easier to break than a corporate supported solution. If the person that created the system architecture moves on then it is less understood and when (not if) it breaks then it becomes that much harder to fix. Plus most custom solutions are based in Access or Excel and these are resolutely one user at a time tools. Whatever people say about Access being able to cope with up to ten users at a time, it’s simply not true because it’s wayyyyy too easy to corrupt the data. Excel sheets, though they can be shared between many users, don’t offer appropriate control either for the same reason. Many people in a company will email a “file” out to everyone, unaware of the logistical nightmare they are about to create when getting said file back. How do you know which version of the dozens you got back is the latest? Have they all had changes etc etc etc.

So what many companies do is implement a sensible strategy of centralised systems that all talk to each other appropriately. Of course the difficulty with any centralised solution is that with the number of users in an organisation, many have their own personal tweaks that make their job that bit easier, while central solutions have to cater to everyone. As a result companies like SAP make applications that allow people to customise the view of their data but not necessarily how it works. It doesn’t satisfy everyone and often they will use a few local sheets for their own use on the whole. If you like this is the “second” stage of three in the progress to good enterprise architecture.

1. In the first stage you have many custom systems all held together by people
2. In the second stage you have the centralised systems and a few custom parts around the edge, contributing to the whole
3. The third stage is the end goal, almost all of the data within a centralised system. That doesn’t mean there is no room for the local applications, the Word document associated with a job or the PDF preferably since they are a more open, continuous standard than the MS custom formats.

Reaching that third stage is very difficult, because of the number of different areas that must be covered. Of course in general terms you need to know what those are and broadly speaking many are similar for any company that deals with a physical object e.g. retail, manufacture, frieght haulage, transport etc. Requirements in some industries like Financial or other data based organisations would of course differ somewhat.

At the heart of the company you need a system to keep track of what is going where, in many cases this will be an ERP system such as SAP/ERP or Oracle Peoplesoft. These systems are the crucial to the overall running of the company and often control their financial accounting too. More recently customer and supply chain management can often be part of this ERP solution too, or at the very least managed within the same package of applications.

You also need a system to control the design of your products, for example if you are making a car you need to be able to store all the information, whether technical drawings or documentation to do with the parts, it all needs to be joined together. Some of the leading solutions for this are PTC’s Windchill or UGS TeamCenter. These allow the attachment of local documentation such as Word Documents or Excel sheets to go with the core drawings and are known as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) products.

Next in a manufacturing or assembly organisation you may need a system to control how you execute the manufacture of parts. These execution systems are the vital link between the planning in the ERP solution and the technical information in the CAD solution. There’s a few of these execution systems available but most now rely on delivery via a simple Web Application interface and many are specific to an industry due to the level of complexity that each has at a raw level.

That might seem to be all you need, after all you can now plan something, create it and make it. There are two other angles to consider though, firstly the reporting of information from this system to the end users in a suitable format. Some companies might choose to use SAP Business Warehouse (in more recent times this has become SAP Business Intelligence) but others may prefer Crystal Reports or Cognos. It is a sign of the issue we are coming to that despite most ERP and PLM solutions coming with reporting tools, these large companies are able to create a market selling tools that report from the reports.

The final angle and perhaps the neglected one is the control of information that is neither to do with the core products or the execution of the core information stream. Information such as this is often usefully held together on an Intranet or local file servers. Realistically a content management system should be used to hold it together though so that it can be accessed in an appropriate manner with version control and reduced chance of data being overwritten.

If you consider that on top of these core parts you may also need a search engine to index all of the information, a copious number of application servers to distribute the information, and a method of access control then you come up with a total of some half dozen centralised systems that are used to control the company data and cover pretty much all users and in some cases there can be as many as ten.

That’s a lot of systems for people to get to grips with how each of them works. Some (SAP) will have their own desktop front end, while CAD systems require a interface for PLM and also the core CAD application. Manufacturing Execution and CMS usually rely on web interfaces, while some reporting apps borrow Excel for presentation and others use their own front end. What we are getting at is the very crux of why this third stage is so hard to reach… Enterprise Software user interfaces SUCK. A good example of why can be found in this article on why Macs are rare in the Enterprise. Enterprises provide feature lists, they provide performance targets, they provide requirements. They don’t provide the intangible “Must be easy to use”.

In our private lives we would not buy a Ssangyong Rodius without a gun to our heads in most cases because while it is cheap it looks like it was cobbled together with sellotape and the bits of metal that were left over from making cans of tuna. When someone uses a Mac day to day, we don’t think it does anything intrinsically better than a Windows box, but we feel better because things are a little better laid out and a little smoother. Vista brings things a bit closer but it’s still got that level of complexity that the Mac hides, and worse the ways of getting to that complexity are more difficult for the enterprise admins used to Windows 2000 and XP. So the question is why do we tolerate such incredibly poor design in Enterprise applications?

Most of the centralised solutions are based on one of two technologies, Java or .NET and I think it would be fair to say that in most cases, Java has the edge because of its platform agnostic nature. Most companies have Windows, Linux, Solaris and Macs floating about somewhere and so this ability to host on anything is beneficial. Interestingly though, many of the applications are also only certified with Internet Explorer, despite all of its flaws and limited platform availability.

What we need to see from Enterprise applications is user interfaces designed for ease of use and able to be used with minimal local installations. There is no reason why anything in the collaborative working cannot be achieved using a web browser to access the information. This gives the user interface familiarity and gives the developer a nice friendly rendering engine making the design easier for the UI too. Whether the application is Java or .NET based does not matter – it should run in any web browser. Sure most desktops run Internet Explorer, but a growing number will be running Mozilla based browsers too, so consider those users next time you certify a product. I know for sure I’d rather my ten thousand seats of web based execution system stations that only display web pages were thin client linux boxes with Firefox than Thick Client Windows XP boxes with IE. Just think of the licensing savings, the power savings and the maintenance savings that could offer an enterprise.

Ultimately though, SAP, Unigraphics et al, your goal should be to make an application that is as easy to use as a CD Player and as beautiful to look at as an Aston Martin while having the technical features of a Lexus. Stop giving us applications that have the technical features of the Lexus with the looks of a Rodius and the ease of use that is known only to government tax offices.

Christopher Hinds : 10 Feb 2008 02:15 |  Tags: Centralised Systems Enterprises Interface Design |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reflections

About an hour ago I was motivated to start reading through my blog from the very beginning. I’m very concious of the way the number of entries I’ve made since leaving Warwick has tailed off significantly. I never intended to “stop” commenting on the world because frankly I have too many opinions for it to be good for me. I guess the amount of time and impetus for blogging has gone away. Whereas when within the Warwick bubble you have a small community within the world, a group of 15000 people united by a common factor, in the outside world everything is a much bigger place, with many more “grown up” calls on your time. I assume my award for stating the bleeding obvious should be on the way shortly at this point…

So anyway, I’ve been reading through my entries from the very beginning and what’s really interesting is that reading through all of the posts I can pick out a history of my last two years at Warwick but in much more detail than expected. I can see where I was spending a lot of time with one group of friends or another. The sheer variety in what I was doing every day at uni is incredible, as is the articulation in my posts. I honestly think my quality of English has degraded significantly in comparison. Early posts talk about philosophy (Is the world black and white, or is there a grey area?), about music (I’m also enjoying listening to all the random music tracks that I referenced my life to), work with societies and of course friends. I always remembered that my blog was pathetically self serving and worryingly emotional. Surprisingly it’s not anywhere near as bad as I remembered… either this means I remember it being far worse, or else I blocked out whole sections of my mind when blogging.

When the events you blog about involve more people than just yourself, it’s much easier to get two way communication happening again. I particularly like comments like this on:

Do you speak in code for security reasons or just for fun?
Laura.

This is of course something I still do today and it’s mostly because I’ve learned a whole new language of code (Rolls-Royce) and therefore I am able to be geeky on a whole new level. It’s great just to go back and laugh at everything that’s gone before, and the best bit about all of it? I don’t regret a moment, not even those self pitying moments, or the times when I was less happy. I truly loved Warwick, especially the last two years, and I respect it for the education it gave me. Through my blog I can see my development and understanding in so many different ways, in music, in sound, in computer technology in people. Interesting then that my writing abilities have gone the opposite direction…

Trips down memory lane can be fun, and shouldn’t be indulged too often, but I will be making much of the early blog available to signed in readers only. I can’t help feeling a corporate blogging system might help companies develop more of a community atmosphere inside though, because that diversity and bit beyond “every day” is so rewarding. I’m going to read the rest of my blog now…

Christopher Hinds : 02 Feb 2008 14:38 |  Tags: Blogging Life Past Music |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem