You know when you come across a piece of technology, that almost works and could be really useful if they just went that little bit further? No? Lucky you!

I was flying from Heathrow the other week, and being a good corporate citizen I booked my long-term parking in advance to save the company money. System is quite neat; you pay in advance and when you arrive it reads your number plate and knows who you are. The ticket it give you has your number plate on it, and when you come to leave you simply insert this ticket and it knows you have paid. 

So where's the problem? Ah, the problem is that it read my number plate wrong! It read the W as 11, and actually ended up with a registration that is not even possible on a UK car - in fact, I can't think of any country where the combination it produced would be valid. So, mistake number one is not putting some intelligence into the program to work out what a valid number plate would be. Not terribly tricky.

So, spotting the error, I drove round to the office and asked if they could exchange the ticket for an accurate one, so that I could drive out easily when I returned from my trip. I had the paperwork with me to prove I had paid, but this was when the people and process part, rather than the technology part, fell apart.

"Sorry, we can't do that."

"Why not?"

No logical reason came forwards, but the basic answer is because they never thought of this possibility, or the bloke hadn't been trained how to do it.

"Just come to this window when you return and we will sort you out."

"Why can't you sort it now - I did this to save time?"

etc. etc. etc.

Now, I wonder if that means the speed cameras are reading my number plate wrong? No chance!

I was sending an email to someone the other day on my whizzy new blackberry thing. I have to grudgingly admit that they have come on leaps and bounds in recent years. There are still some options missing - especially in Calendar - but at least you can do email, SMS, diary etc whilst on the road and the GPS works too!

The thing that amuses me though is the spellcheck. Yes, there is a spellcheck, so excuses for bad spelling are gone now, I am afraid. People still can't punctuate (and Americans can't spell, as we all know!) but we are getting there. However, its dictionary is a little basic - virtualisation comes out as fertilisation, which I rather like. In fact it made me think of a rather neat analogy.

I talked about the Technology Garden book a while back, where IT is likened to a garden - you need to fertilise some parts, prune others etc. Made me think about most data centres nowadays, which are running hundreds/thousands of underutilised servers - not their fault, the operating systems are just useless at running multiple workloads. Bit like having a garden with hundreds of flower-beds, each one of which has one plant in it. Unfortunately you still have to weed, edge, fertilise etc. each flower-bed, when what you actually wanted in the first place was a herbaceous border.

We have an event next week in London, where we will be looking at how to get to the herbaceous border as quickly, safely and "greenly" as possible. Hope to see you there.


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tags: Virtualisation |  Virtualization

For those of you who travel, I thought I would give you a handy little entry, which you can print out. Then you can simply highlight the relevant parts when asked this tedious question at checkout. They are all based on personal experience.

How was your stay?

• Excellent thanks

Dreadful

• The limo picked me up at the airport and delivered me very smoothly.
  

The shuttle bus wasn't running, so I had to persuade a taxi driver to take me the two miles after he had been in the queue for half an hour and he bloody nearly killed me.

• Your special checkin was fast and efficient - just what I needed after a long hard day.

(Actually the best ever was Dunk Island - the arrivals hall at the airport / resort is a bar, and as you arrive they serve you a drink and whisk your luggage off to the room)

I had to stand in line for bloody hours waiting for you to take a set of information from me that you already know - hopeless.

• The room was beautifuuly furnished, the desk was big enough for my laptop with a plug and free wireless internet connection.
  

I don't know how you managed to design a room with 10 lights and still everywhere is too dark to read. The TV is set at such an awkward angle that you can't watch it comfortably from either the chair or the bed, and by the way it doesn't work. 20€ a day for an Internet connection is daylight robbery, and where is the cable? 

• The bar and restaurant were excellent, and the executive lounge was a delightful haven.

Last week in the your hotel in Warsaw you invited me to the Executive Lounge as I am a silver/golf/platinum member. This week, you tell me I can't use it!?!? So I wandered down to your bar, which was full of loud drunks, smoking their brains out. The restaurant was totally dead and the menu was about as appealing as a vasectomy reversal.

• The bedroom was beautifully quiet and I slept like a log.

Strangely enough, listening to to the couple next door have a flaming row, accompanied by an air-conditioning unit that was gasping its last breath didn't lead to a good night's sleep. The pillow appears to have been stuffed with ball bearings.

• A beautiful bathroom with everything I needed.

The shower was designed by an idiot, so that you couldn't turn it on without getting covered in ice-cold water. The shampoo and soap were impossible to open with wet hands and the shower poured all over the floor of the bathroom. Where was the hair-drier? Oh yes, miles from any mirror - bright. The shaving mirror? Designed for extremely vertically challenged people. Did anyone ever try the room out?

• One of the best breakfast buffets I have ever seen.

A sad collection of unappetising food, for which you wanted to charge me an unmitigated fortune when all I wanted was a cup of tea and a roll.

• A modern gym, a swimming pool and a golf course - magic.

A smelly little box room with a broken bike - yuck.

• The staff were extremely courteous and helpful.

I object to some rude git asking me for a tip every time I appear.

• Checkout - perfect, did it from my room and am already on my way.

I'm still standing here waiting to throw this at you, because it appears to be beyond your comprehension that lots of people will want to check out at the same time. There would be even more of us standing in the queue here, if the lifts worked.

Been all over the place recently talking to lots of people, so getting to blog has been tricky - sorry about that. Here's a summary of some of the thoughts I have gathered.

• Went to a thing called the Eden Project down in Cornwall. Basically a bunch of gardeners have taken a barren, exhausted china clay pit and created a mega "garden" with two massive Biomes (one of which is the biggest greenhouse in the world) and millions of plants. Technically brilliant, but no-one told me what was going on / the only explanations were in such small writing and such detail that you couldn't be bothered to read them. In other words, just like most IT systems from the business point of view, bloody clever but what's it do, and could I have the reports in a language I understand please?
• Had dinner/lunch with CIOs in Brussels, Warsaw and Frankfurt. We talked about issues like Time to Market and Aligining IT and business, because we recently commissioned a couple of independent reports, and we wanted to see customers' reactions. Here's one of them, I'll stick the URL in for the other one when it's finalised.  I've always been of the opinion that European IT managers try to squeeze every last drop out of their investments, whereas the US culture is a little more towards technology being the solution to verything in the world. Agree / disagree?
• Great new word I learnt - emetophobia - sufferers will go to any length to avoid encountering something that might cause them to be sick. In my case Big Brother, any TV soap, rotten service etc.
• I get very confused nowadays by what is politically correct and what isn't. For instance, I read that failure is incorrect - now it's a deferred success! Try that one with your boss / the business / the customer!!
  

Apologies for lack of blog and lack of replies - am on road sans laptop and writing entries on this raspberry is a total pain in the ****. Normal service should be resumed soon (unless I decide golf is more important!!)

So UserWorld has been and gone, and I can get back to my golf now!! Ho ho. Being serious, I was very happy with many parts of UserWorld and think the whole thing went well, but you can always spot ways that you can improve things next time round - which is planned to be May next year in Nice. One thing is that it will be a week later - week of 25th May - and hence won't clash with my birthday, so there's a major step forwards!

If you attended UserWorld and have some comments on what was good / what was bad, please contact me via this blog or direct via email (peter_armstrong@bmc.com). If you couldn't attend for some reason we can change, or didn't think the agenda was right or whatever, please let me know.

Now, let's talk about the really important stuff in life - golf. I am thinking of starting up a company called Golf bags that actually fit properly on golf trolleys.com. Why? I have a golf trolley from a very well-known company. I also bought a golf bag from the same company as my old one was falling apart (the zips always break - another complaint) and I had naively assumed that the bag would fit on the trolley. Nope. Wallows around like a jelly (jello for US readers I think). As an engineer, it really does not stirke me as particularly difficult to come up with a design that works. Anyone want to join in my new venture?

The other thing we would sell is personalised golf balls. You send us a picture of the person you most hate via the Internet and we send you back a dozen balls with their picture printed on them. Now go and have some fun. I'll take a box of the Blairs (they come in mixed his and hers), a box of the Gordon Browns, a box of the Mugabes, a box of the .....    


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tags: Golf |  UserWorld

I have to admit that this new BlackBerry is a great improvement on the old one. Now that I have actually got it working, it is doing email, calendar, SMS, phone calls and GPS. I found a neat bit of geocaching software called Geocache Navigator, but it appears to be only for monthly subsciption on US-based contracts - shame.  

Anyway, as it also appears to support Java, I thought I would try checking in for my flight back to the UK from Lisbon. First few page were fine, but then unfortunately when I clicked the "check in now" box it just died completely. So I went to the nearest laptop in the Internet Cafe here at UserWorld and checked in there.

The airline I fly with allows me to check in 24 hours before departure. So you click on the "Departing in next 24 hours? Click here to check in" button and you would think it was intelligent enough to look up which flight you had booked with them in the next 24 hours and take you there. NO, sorry, it actually gives you a list of every flight you have booked (in my case, quite a few) going out over the next few weeks / months and has a "Check in now" button against each of them. Clicking on any of these apart form the flight you want gives you a message saying that it is longer than 24 hours away, and hence you can't check in yet. So, why give me the option then you idiots?

I also buy tickets on this website every month, but it still asks me every time what my address is, and what my credit card details are. DOOH! A CIO of a large Insurance company once said to me "Peter, I will give you data once and never again - I expect your systems to remember it." Spot on. 

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tags: BlackBerry |  User interface

Listened to Paul McCartneys' new album on the way to the airport (it was given away free in the Sunday Mail). Awful. Tuneless, and he can't sing any more IMHO. I can only assume that this is part of the divorce settlement, and he has made an album where Heather gets all the royalties! 

Why doesn't someone tell the old wrinklies that they can't sing any more. Sinatra was painful at the end. Elton John - ouch. Pink Floyd - never could sing in the first place, but Gilmour still plays sublime guitar, so they are forgiven. Etcetera, etcetera.

Made me think about old bits of hardware and software you have lying around. Should we keep using them, or is it time for them to retire gracefully? All depends on whether they still do a good job or not, and what the replacement would cost of course. I still love mainframes, and I asked myself whether this was nostalgia or stupidity, but then I looked at what is going in the world of IT with virtualisation, and the parlous state of modern oeprating systems and then I realised they are still wonderful, and definitely have a vital role to play in today's data centre.

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tags: Data Center |  Data Center Consolidation |  Data Center Cooling |  Data Center Power |  Mainframe

Tomorrow is my birthday, which of course I am celebrating in wonderful style by attending BMC UserWorld in Lisbon - ho ho!

First off, to help you with your choice of suitable present for me, here is a list of the things I definitely do not want:

• A copy of Cherie Blair's book 
• A copy of John Prescott's book
• A copy of Lord Levy's book
• Anything endorsed by, or written by a celebrity
• Anything non-alcoholic!

Hope to see you here at UserWorld over the next few days!

After many years of faithful service, our oven decided to shuffle off its mortal coil - that means it died, if you didn't study Shakespeare or Monty Python!
My daughter, of course, immediately found me a load of Internet sites selling built-in ovens, and pointed me at them. The initial prices looked attractive, but as I delved deeper I realised the total cost was  much higher. You see, I want someone to remove the old one (it's heavy and wired in), take it away, deliver the new one and fit it. Preferably all in one go, rather than the usual five visits you have to organise, because no-one can ever tell you when something is going to be delivered.
Down in Spain, when our washing-machine decided to wash the floor rather than the clothes in it, the local electrical goods company delivered the  new one and refused to leave until they had fitted it and proved it was working. Here in the UK, you normally have to ring up several different people and get things coordinated (never works) or do it yourself. Fitting a washing-machine is easy. Lifting a bloody great oven into the cupboard is not something I particularly fancy doing with a dodgy back.
So, what was the solution? The cheapo internet option plus assorted phone calls - no. The local shop, which has organised everything  and actually works out a wee bit more expensive, but a darned sight more convenient  - yes.
Now, that's what I mena by a service mentality - look at what the end-user wants and deliver it - all of it.