tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83476382009-05-11T07:25:21.184+01:00A blog about my life, thoughts and work. This blog will consist of programming, philosophy, politics, poetry and anything else that I want to talk about.Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.comBlogger121125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-26677698595991191752009-05-07T07:21:00.004+01:002009-05-11T07:25:21.207+01:00

I've worked in a number of organisations over the years. These organisations were many and varied but one pattern seemed to be repeated without fail.The cycle of centralisation and de-centralisation.This seems to be a very disruptive and expensive cycle.. The time and effort wasted on reorganising must detract from the company bottom line. I've spent some time trying to work out why this cycle

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-8617153380118227432009-04-14T10:28:00.002+01:002009-04-14T10:45:15.245+01:00

I just thought that I would share with the world a little bit of my family history. I am a descendent of Samuel Boote (1844-1921) a reasonably well known Argentine photographer. One of our cousins kindly loaned me a copy of the genealogy tracing the descendents of Samuel's grandfather, also Samuel Boote (1788-1854). I've scanned the pages as images and felt that it would be a good idea to make

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-29020913073054151842009-02-10T07:09:00.003Z2009-02-10T18:23:14.768Z

My current project has undergone an highly protracted round of interviews due in part to the hiring freeze that for some strange reason started in September.This was my first set of interviews where I used pair programming as part of the interview process.It was extremely effective. We used a highly simplified 'story' to test the candidate's design and coding skills. The story defined an

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-37910723336762782672008-12-12T07:05:00.002Z2008-12-12T07:34:36.982Z

The project that I'm on is being run as a pure Scrum project. I'm still forming my thoughts, but I think it's still worth sharing my first impressions.I'm something of a reactionary old architect; I still instinctively like to design a lot up front. I'm fully aware that design still has a part to play in Scrum, but I do feel better with more up-front thought about the problems.I've been surprised

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-92072998742500846642008-12-09T06:58:00.002Z2008-12-09T07:18:36.304Z

As part of my recent contract with I've been working on a project that is likely to have a large rulebase requiring frequent change. As a result we've decided to use a rules engine to manage them. We won't necessarily be allowing real time changes to rules, but we may well allow some changes between releases.Jess was selected as it is already used within the organisation. It's not open source but

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-64756992028339866682008-12-08T17:32:00.005Z2008-12-08T18:04:15.358Z

In this weather one's mind turns to good sustaining food so here I present a couple of favourite recipes for this kind of weather. One is a proper recipe, the other is an out and out cheat...The first recipe is derived from a baked mushroom recipe that I first saw on 'The Victorian Kitchen' cooked by Ruth Mott. Her recipe was simply Portobello mushrooms baked with butter salt and pepper for about

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-58396744314369869252008-12-02T08:28:00.002Z2008-12-02T08:45:39.609Z

This is a question that I nowadays find myself asking very frequently; of myself and of my end clients. It's an important question as it frames the scope of the piece of work. The very technical versions of this question ('What percent Disaster Recovery do we need?' or 'What percent up time do we want to guaranteer?') tend to cause non-technical people to boggle and not come up with any useful

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-76258573218128410522008-11-26T07:45:00.004Z2008-12-02T08:45:46.803Z

Last night Henry, Neil and Dimple joined me to watch the newest feature length Futurama: Bender's Game.We all had similarly mixed feelings about it: We laughed at various points during the episode but on balance felt that it was not vintage Futurama.Afterwards we looked on IMDB and saw a mix of reviews that reflected our thoughts. The review that best expressed my feelings was by 'howTVshouldbe'.

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-84756389132644702842008-09-22T07:03:00.006+01:002008-09-22T07:22:08.390+01:00

I've been thinking a little about patterns recently as a result of having to interview far too many people in the past week. I've been asking them to tell me about patterns and their relationships.It's been interesting hearing people talk about the 'evil Singleton' pattern, get muddled over the Factory pattern and refer to the Pool pattern.The thing that these patterns all have in common is that

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-37174516977726813542008-08-29T08:19:00.002+01:002008-08-29T08:30:05.580+01:00

Hello, my name is Robert and I am a recovering motormouth...Spare a thought for those of use who are born with verbal diarrhea, we have to work very hard not to monopolize any conversation and are typically very uncomfortable with silence.My whole family seem to be motormouths, some recovering like me, other just keep talking. My father was famous in the family, he was late in learning to talk

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-44914851849938485482008-08-26T16:47:00.002+01:002008-09-22T07:22:08.391+01:00

One of the hardest things to design in distributed systems is the transactional behaviour.I am perpetually surprised at the naivety with which people approach this set of problems. There does not seem to be any formalism to approaching this kind of design. What I do is deliberately take as step back and design the 'transactional architecture':Identify parts of the architecture that may

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-56140964314790323452008-08-03T07:26:00.002+01:002008-08-03T07:40:45.678+01:00

The biggest problem with modern food production is that it is entirely dependent on oil. We've already seen food costs rise as a direct response to rising oil prices.Many farmers have profitably moved their food production over to organic methods, I wonder how long it will be before we see certified carbon-neutral foods on our supermarket shelves?I'd certainly be happy to pay a premium initially

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-72942371832853103282008-07-30T15:06:00.002+01:002008-08-03T07:40:56.227+01:00

I've been thinking a little about the documentation of a system.I think that there are two sorts:DescriptiveTransformativeDescriptive documentation describes a system at a given state of time.Transformative documentation describes the transformation of a system as a result of change.Transformative documentation is only maintained for the duration of the change and is thereafter left as a record

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-39167508918783118482008-07-21T17:08:00.004+01:002008-08-03T07:40:56.228+01:00

I've been working on defining development processes for NHSBT and have been discussing useful forms of prototypes.The way I see it there are two main classifications:User Interface PrototypeTechnology PrototypeOne typically prototypes to communicate concepts to a user or to prove a technology.I tend to use two types of User Interface Prototype:WireframeGhost TownA wireframe prototype is used in

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-86526838854702732332008-07-17T07:59:00.002+01:002008-07-17T08:06:01.986+01:00

I've been working and thinking about my encrypted zip framework and in the process of refactoring and abstracting I find myself teetering on the brink of creating a grand unified storage framework for Java, where one defines 'entries' and those can be stored to filesystem, database, zip file, etc.I think that a Grand Unified Storage Framework would not be a bad thing as I have long been

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-15536385635091368042008-07-16T16:10:00.002+01:002008-07-16T16:21:31.979+01:00

Well I've taken the plunge and have got mobile broadband from T-Mobile.I'm still trying to work out how to get access the the wireless hotspots as I need to send a text using my SIM card to get a username and password.I think that I'm just going to have to stick the SIM card in my normal phone, send the text and see what happens.I've been working on the Encrypted Zip on the train to and from work

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-3381167991056162092008-06-30T21:19:00.002+01:002008-06-30T21:34:35.833+01:00

I'm a big fan of the implementations of OutputStreams in Java - a very good example of the decorator pattern. It is great to be able to add capabilities by simple composition.I'm using various OutputStream implementations to create an API to encrypt files within a Zip file. Unfortunately there are some maddening inconsistencies.The one that is giving me the biggest headache is the fact that the

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-35704579175790334482008-04-01T20:27:00.001+01:002008-06-30T21:19:24.074+01:00

Been a bit busy of late, landing a role as the Enterprise Architect for NHSBT. As usual I intend to work myself out of the role, but for now my day is filled with learning a whole new business domain and fleshing out my skills with a few new ones.I'm having to pinch myself, realising that Enterprise Architect is only one step down from board level. My self-belief and arrogance will really be put

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-25258559879298014502008-02-26T19:18:00.002Z2008-02-26T19:34:44.036Z

That's it. The End...I'm really glad that I got this out and shared it. This is the final part of the tale as I have it."The Standard", June 10th., 1881The Corrientes Murder-With much pleasure I make room for the following papers, which speak for themselves. We shall be only too glad to lend our poor aid to the object expressed in Mr. Budge's letter and receive subscriptions to help so merited a

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-25861659085332755912008-02-21T20:03:00.003Z2008-02-26T19:34:57.779Z

News of the murderers."The Standard", May 28th., 1881The Murder in Corrientes-Naranjito, May 23rd., 1881To the Editor of "The Standard"Dear Sir,I am happy to inform you that the last of the murderers of Macdonald and Guthrie passed up, well secured in the train to-day to Monte Caseros; he had the watch and ring of Macdonald, and also the recado of Guthrie, so that now the whole thing will come

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-10884154045629599582008-02-03T10:39:00.001Z2008-02-21T20:26:26.907Z

A slightly shorter update this time - The response from the Governor of Corrientes and a Mr. McCorquodale gives some details on the murderers.Buenos Aires "Standard", April 26th, 1881The Naranjito Murder-With much pleasure we publish the following telegram from the Governor of Corrientes to the President of the Republic, in reply to the President's message sent the moment His Excellency

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-5250942642969318512008-01-24T11:56:00.000Z2008-01-24T12:04:59.376Z

Quick little post to share the results of a day's worth of wasted effort. I was creating a tracer bullet prototype of a web application for a customer and was configuring the security using an LDAP server (Apache Directory Server and Apache Directory Studio - a very good combo). Having configured the LDAP server I set up form based security and pointed a browser at the web application. I first

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-8754545097615980062008-01-22T21:03:00.001Z2008-02-21T20:26:13.774Z

One of the murderers is caught in a very long piece.The Corrientes Murder-One Assassin Caught.-One of the best proofs of the generally improved state of affairs in this country, is the very decided action taken by the authorities in the case of the murder of the two Scotch farmers at Naranjito, Corrientes.The very day the news reached this city, and the matter was brought to the attention of the

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-46921726120662964482008-01-13T11:33:00.001Z2008-02-21T20:17:07.154Z

With this posting it is revealed that Corrientes is in fact the province where the murders occurred so I've retitled the posts to date. I believe that this confusion is due to the high rate of immigration and settlement leading to some difficulties in administrating the country.From the Buenos Aires Standard, April 21st, 1881.The Murder of Messrs. Macdonald & GuthriePresident Roca received

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347638.post-58343104352559991022007-12-30T19:32:00.001Z2008-02-21T20:16:50.576Z

From the 'Buenos Aires Standard' April 20th 1881.Abolition of Capital PunishmentWith much pleasure we state that the announcement in one of the city papers of the intention of President Roca to propose to Congress the Abolition of Capital Punishment is utterly incorrect, and we are fully authorised to say that the President, so far from being in favour of any such measure, views with regret that

Bob Boothbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13504207507405859169noreply@blogger.com0