A/B testing is all the rage in certain web development circles. Naturally, when something becomes popular the criticism starts. I’ve read some unconvincing attacks on A/B testing recently, as well as some good ones, so I want to lay down my thoughts on what A/B testing is and what it isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
Birmingham Events
posted on 20th July 2010 by Noel
Birmingham doesn’t have great visibility at the intersection of software development, design, and entrepreneurship in which Untyped operates, but in the last few months there has been a surge of events that suggest this is changing.
Open source libraries now on GitHub
posted on 18th July 2010 by Dave G
We are excited to announce that we’ve moved all of our open source code to Github!
Selenium client for Racket
posted on 10th June 2010 by Dave G
Acceptance testing is a must for any developer of complex web applications. Selenium is a suite of tools to help automate acceptance by recording user actions, turning them into code, and playing them back in a remote controlled web browser.
Now, thanks to a lazy Saturday afternoon and a rather nice bottle of ginger beer, the joys of Selenium are available to the Racket community by way of our new Selenium PLT library. Check it out on our Github page and let us know how you get on!
Covering the Election
posted on 6th May 2010 by Noel
Today is the closest and most interesting general election in the UK that I can remember. This blog isn’t the place to talk politics, but while reading the manifestos of the three major parties I was struck by their design, and particularly the design of their covers, and I’m going to share some thoughts today on this topic. I think it’s interesting to look at the message the each party is trying to convey with their design and in particular how they all, for me, got it wrong. In alphabetical order, here they are:
The Conservatives
Gold lettering on a blue cloth binding. I knew I’d seen this before but it took a while before I remembered where: my parent’s old textbooks, which I used to leaf through as a child, had this kind of binding beneath their dust jackets. I looked through all my and my wife’s textbooks and didn’t find any the same. Add in the stuffy “Invitation” and to me this says old. Very traditional, very establishment, and very much at odds with the image of David Cameron, with no tie and top button undone, presented in the Tory advertising.
Labour
This is not a subtle cover. The illustration benefits from the fact the UK is a small country and most places look more or the less the same, so the patchwork fields will look like “home” to almost everyone. I’m a bit surprised the couple looks so white; I’d expect Labour to embrace diversity a bit more. However the whole feel of the cover is quite retro. The style of illustration and the rural setting (the UK is very urbanised) both seem to looking backward to me. I like the alliteration in the text. That blazing hot sun disturbs me; it looks more like a nuke going off than the gentle British sun I’m used to.
Liberal Democrats
It’s hard to say much about this cover, as it doesn’t say much to me. The repetition of “fair” is effective, and this is continued inside. The colours are washed out. This cover doesn’t really inspire any emotion in me; it looks more like an annual report than a manifesto!
Of the three I like the Labour cover the most, but as you’ve seen none of them really worked for me. This isn’t too surprising; major political parties must paint with such a broad brush that they cannot really address any small demographic. Now enough about the manifestos; go out and vote!
Formalising Bonds with the Informal
posted on 20th April 2010 by Noel
There is an interesting move underway by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to more precisely define the meaning of certain asset backed securities (like the now infamous mortgage-backed securities that were central to the recent crash). The NY times has covered the story from a high level, but what of particular interest to me is the proposal to specify the meaning of the bonds in Python. This is a step is the right direction but Python is not the answer.
The core problem here is to give a clear and unambiguous meaning to a bond. This requires the language in which it is written is precisely defined. Python is not precisely defined. There is only a prose definition of the language, which is inadequate in the same way that the prose definitions of bonds are inadequate, and of course there are differences between various versions and implementation of Python. Since Python is not precisely defined the only meaning one can give to a program in Python is whatever the particular implementation one uses does with that program.
In contrast there are languages that are formally defined, such Standard ML and Scheme. These would make a sound basis for the formal definition of bonds. In turns out that functional languages also make a good (meaning expressive and convenient) basis for the formal definition of bonds. There is a great paper on expressing contracts in Haskell and at least one company has implemented this idea in a commercial system (in O’Caml, I believe). So my advice to the SEC: use an appropriate subset of Scheme or Standard ML, or hire someone to create a formally defined DSL, but don’t use a language without a formal definition if precision is your goal.
Hacking Motivation
posted on 12th March 2010 by Noel
Like most people there are parts of my job I don’t enjoy. Writing quotes, for example, is not my favourite activity. Recently I’ve been thinking about a way to “hack” my motivation, to make these parts of my job more interesting and enjoyable. Here are my ideas.
Self-determination theory posits that motivation derives from autonomy, relatedness, and competency. The first two are easy to come by in a small business. I’m my own boss and what I do is critical to the success of the business, and hence to my continued mortgage payments. So it seems the later is the limiting factor. This matches my experience; I can happily program for hours (days? years?) and I consider my pretty damn good at it. Writing quotes is painful and it takes me a long time to finish one. So perhaps if I can gain competency I’ll enjoy writing quotes more and thus become more motivated to complete them.
How does one gain competency? Deliberate practice is how. It may take 10000 hours to become an expert but I don’t need to be an expert quote writer, just a better one than I am today. Luckily the learning curve suggests that I can get to a good level of competency with relatively little effort. So this is my hack for improving motivation: pick something I do often that I’m bad at and practice it in a fun way. For quote writing that might mean trying to write a good quote for a preposterous imagined product. If you enjoy the ridiculous like I do you’d probably find that fun.
I’m not actually going to practice quote writing right now as I have other big projects occupying me, but I intend to try this technique out in the future. I’ll let you all know how this turns out for me. Finally, if you try my technique I’d love to hear how it works out for you.
Is the iPad the beginning of the end for Intel?
posted on 2nd February 2010 by Noel
Much has been written about the iPad since its launch. I’m sympathetic to the concerns about the closed nature of the iPad, and I think the iBookStore (along with the Kindle) is going to have a big effect on the book market, but I want to focus on something I haven’t seen much discussed: the A4 chip powering the iPad.
What you need to know about the A4 is this: at its core is an ARM Cortex-A9 MP CPU. ARM cores also power the iPhone and about every other smartphone out there. Intel just can’t compete in this market as their chips require too much power. This weakness is, paradoxically, a result of their greatest strength: the Intel instruction set. Even the most modern Intel chip still retains the ability to execute code for the ancient 8086. This ensures you can run just about any program ever written for an Intel machine on the latest CPU, giving Intel an enormous software base to leverage. However supporting this instruction set comes at a cost. The 8086 instruction set is not a good fit for modern CPU designs, and the instruction set has accreted decades of cruft to try and wedge modern features into it. To get acceptable performance all modern Intel chips have vast amounts of silicon devoted to instruction decoding; that is, the process of turning instructions into so-called micro-ops, which are what the CPU actually executes. All this silicon takes power, which is why ARM handily beats Intel on performance-per-Watt.
Now this wasn’t an issue for Intel even a few years ago. But we’re seeing three things that ought to make them worried. The first is the iPad, showing that little devices can grow bigger and perhaps move into the PC market, in much the same way PCs took over from the scientific workstations of Apollo, DEC, Sun and others. The second is the increasing concern for performance-per-Watt from people like Google and Amazon whose huge server farms power the major Internet services. The third is open source software, and particularly GCC’s support for just about every CPU on the market. This means the software can be easily recompiled for a new architecture. Suddenly Intel’s dominance doesn’t seem so assured.
So perhaps in a few years ARM will become the dominant architecture, rather than Intel. Apple have already shown that switching architecture (twice!) isn’t so painful. And as someone who has been writing an Intel assembler for fun I can’t say I see this as a bad thing.
Kahupdate 2
posted on 31st January 2010 by Dave G
We’ve just uploaded another weekly update to Kahu, including a few bug fixes and the following new features:
Automatic closure of tickets
We had a lot of requests for this feature from support teams. Tickets in the resolved state are now automatically closed after a week. An email is sent to the person who raised the ticket, just in case there is still a problem.
Better navigation on booking pages
Each of the booking pages gets five new navigation buttons to make it easier to move around. In left-to-right order these are previous week, previous day, next day, next week, and jump to today. The selected day is also highlighted in week views, making it easier to see where you’re looking.
Delete and deactivate people
Last week we added the ability to delete teams and resources; this week we’re adding the ability to delete people. To avoid confusion, we’ve made it so you can’t delete a person if they own any bookings, have raised any tickets, or have authored any ticket comments. Instead, we’ve added the option to deactivate a person’s account.
Inactive people cannot log in, and they don’t show up on the People page unless you are an administrator. However, they still appear on bookings, tickets and the like.
What are we currently working on? Well, it’s a biggie. We’re updating our in-house tools for doing mass-imports bookings, resources and people. This should make it far easier for schools to do bulk imports of data from Management Information Systems such as SIMS and Facility.
The tools should be available in the next week or so. In the meantime, as ever, please get in touch if you need help with your data.
Kahupdate
posted on 24th January 2010 by Dave G
It’s been a week since BETT and already we’re seeing lots of sign-ups to Kahu. We decided to start this news feed to keep everyone up-to-date with the new features we’re adding and with our plans for the future.
Today we launched an update with a number of new features:
Fortnightly repeating events
We had a lot of interest at BETT from schools with fortnightly repeating timetables. So much interest, in fact, that we added this feature on the train on the way back to the office. Timetable managers and booking coordinators now have access to this repeat type when creating/editing a booking series.
Delete resources and teams
Administrators can now see little trash can icons next to each item on the resource and team lists. Clicking on the icon takes you to a confirmation page where the consequences of deleting the item are laid out in plain English.
Speed improvements on all booking pages
We’ve been working hard on our database queries, optimising things here and there to make bookings pages between 20 and 30% faster. There’s more to come in this department too.
This news feed on the dashboard!
News on features and bug fixes, delivered straight to your door!
We’re already working on our next update, which we plan to release in the next couple of weeks. Watch this space for more information!