Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

According to CNet News, the US Justice Department has indicted digital currency company E-Gold for allowing illegal transactions to be made in E-Gold currency:

The companies allegedly only required users to submit a valid e-mail account, enabling them to convert their country’s currency into E-Gold. Users could then buy and sell goods anonymously with other parties throughout the world.

“The E-Gold payment system has been a preferred means of payment for child pornography distributors, identity thieves, online scammers and other criminals around the world to launder their illegal income anonymously,” Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

The Justice Departments alleged motives for the indictment do sound noble, who wouldn’t want to stop child pornographers, online scammers and other criminals?
But there is one problem: For all intents and purposes E-Gold only intends to be a currency, nothing more, nothing less. To fulfill the criteria of being a credible currency, it is even 100% backed by gold.

So, it raises the question: If E-Gold can be held accountable, can the US Federal Reserve be held accountable for criminal transactions that are done in US Dollars? Can the Bank of England be held accountable for illegal transactions made in Pounds Sterling? I wouldn’t think so.
Even taking a less “extreme” example: I hardly believe Visa is held accountable for all the illegal goods bought with Visa cards by individuals.

Without going into a long digression on what money actually is, by any definition E-Gold is actually more of a proper currency than US Dollars or Pounds Sterling. Why? Simple, it is actually backed by something that has an intrinsic value. It is 100% backed in gold, something Dollars or Pounds haven’t been in a long time.
Dollars and Pounds (and most other legal tender) are by definition fiat currency, they are backed by nothing other than than expectations and promises of their respective governments and central banks, their real intrinsic value is exactly zero, it is just paper and unfulfilled promises. This is why you have inflation in the first place: since money has no intrinsic value or backing, its perceived value is volatile, and goes down as money supply is increased by a central bank (in most cases, central banks literally print as much more paper they can get away with).

So the fact remains, E-Gold is “just a currency”, it does not intend or purport to be anything else. If the organization behind it is held accountable for transactions made in its currency, what are the potential implications for other organizations and institutions such as Central Banks, that issue currencies or other means of conducting financial transactions? From a logical point of view, they ought to be treated equally in the eyes of the law.

I’ve been quite disillusioned with the state of Java web-frameworks so far, especially when it comes to the incomprehensibly pushed and backed JSF.

But, after a few recommendations from friends and former colleagues, I thought I’d take Wicket for a test spin. I’ve only been using it for a few hours, but so far it has been the most pleasant early web-development experience I’ve had with any Java-based framework..
Wicket is component-based (like Swing), rather than Action-based(like Struts), so it takes a few minutes (but not too many) to get used to it if you’ve been doing primarily Struts-development in the past (think the shift between Swing and Struts). But it definitely seems to be worth it, some of the highlights so far:

•  True separation between html and code. Many framework claim this separation, but none really achieve it. Wicket goes around 95% of the way: no need for scriptlets, custom tags or anything like that, just pure html with tags to be filled in by Wicket market with “wicket:id=’someId’”. The html can be purely a template, and not a part of the code.
• No XML-config! Everything is Java by default. Sure, if you want to add in your own configs, be my guest. But you don’t have to manage 2-3 different xml-files just to transition from one page to another.
• Component-based: You work with the UI in the form of Components, which makes sense. For instance you have Labels, Forms, TextFields etc that you can manipulate.
• Stateful and event-driven: Wicket manages the application state for you, so you don’t have to bend over backwards making an essentially stateless protocol (http) into semi-stateful. And for each component, you can define different types of events (depending on what the Component supports), and what will happen when they are triggered.

So far, Wicket seems to me like the way webapps really should be developed in Java: no tedious XML-configs, clear separation between html/template and Java-code, and a stateful, event-driven way of developing. It also seems Wicket has a large- and growing user-community, with the framework about to graduate from Apache incubation into a full-blown Apache top-level project.

I still have a few things to learn about the framework before I can conclusively make a final judgement, but so far it looks good. The things I am yet to look at, that will be critical is session-management, Ajax-support, creating custom components and integration with other frameworks (EJB3 and Spring most notably).

Picture courtesy of Reghardware’s excellent Blackberry review

For a geek, I am woefully behind when it comes to adoption of mobile stuff: for the past couple of years I have been using a Motorola Razr (which I reluctantly bought after my old Nokia broke down) with a Pay-As-You-Go SIM card. To cut a long story short: because the prices are so exorbitant, I have barely used a mobile phone for much else than receiving phone calls for the last couple of years.

But no more. I just ordered a Blackberry 8800, with a T-Mobile Web’n'Walk monthly plan. 300 something minutes a month included, and up to 1GB of e-mails and surfing included in the price. Should suit my needs, considering I am always checking my e-mail like an obsessive-compulsive person, and feel stressed out if I can’t check it at least every other hour. Well, my order and plan is obviously subject to a credit check, but if I can get a £350K mortgage approved, you’d think I should be able to get a £30 a month bill approved.

As a further bonus, T-Mobile seemed to have good deals on international calls and roaming: paying 20p a minute (which I presume I can take from the call allowance) for calls to Sweden and Finland are a far cry from the £1.50 I’ve been paying with O2 pay-as-you-go (or rather not paying, since I’ve avoided calling).

I’m an enthusiast by nature. Sure, I can sometimes be in a mood where I hide it well, but generally speaking I see a silver lining to most events in life, and endless opportunities in the future. This makes me prone to sometimes get into discussions with people who do not share my positive outlook, especially when it comes to economic growth, sometimes I am asked: “but how many trinkets, cars, TV’s and homes do you think people need?”.
It would be easy to assume that considering the unprecedented standard of living we enjoy in the developed world that the opportunities and room for further economic growth are limited.

I beg to differ. A friend of mine put it ever so well in a recent discussion:

Do you miss personal teleportation? Of course you don’t, it doesn’t exist yet. But I bet three hundred years from now people will, and being forced to use some traditional form of transportation like a high-speed airplane will seem to them like taking a horse and carriage to us.

That is exactly the point: Did you miss the Internet 20 years ago? Did your parents miss the Personal Computer 30 or 40 years ago? Do you think your grandparents missed affordable holidays to exotic places 80 years ago? Or did the people 300 years ago miss the airplane?
Of course not. At any given point in time, some people will think “everything that I want exists”, just because they do not know what is possible. I’m pretty sure 50 years from now we will use things in our daily life that we feel are indispensable and take for granted, that we couldn’t even have imagined in our wildest dreams today. It has always been that way.

For those very reasons, economic growth is infinite. The only limits we have are those of our imagination, and those that we put on ourselves. But as we progress, discover and invent, our imagination will expand and keep looking towards new horizons: in the long term, human imagination is unlimited.

Being an astronomy buff since around the time I learnt how to walk, I can’t help but be a bit excited about the recent discovery of Gliese 581c, a planet not much larger than the Earth, circling around a star only 20 light years away and that could possibly have both liquid water and a high possibility of conditions able to harbour life as we know it on Earth.

Combine this with the recent thoughts on actual hyperdrive engines, and you could see exciting things in the future:

According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds.
[snip]
Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say.

Oh, how I wish to still be alive the day all this becomes possible..

A former colleague that has a degree in maths stumbled across my previous post was kind enough to provide me with a formula for how the diminishing return on added personnel on a project works expressed in mathematical terms:

Project productivity = N*I - Comb(N,A)*C

Where N is the number of people on the project and I is the average individual productivity and A is the average number of communication lines that an individual maintains during the project and C is the loss in productivity due to one communication.

The above graph shows the output of the above formula given some arbitrary inputs (which doesn’t seem too far of a moderately sized software project..). As you can see, the first few people added will add a lot to productivity, after which the return diminishes to a point where the return is actually negative and growingly negative for each added person due to the communication and coordination overhead.
..and if someone wonders if it is actually possible to have negative progress as a result of overload of people and bureaucracy, the short answer is: yes it is.

The knee-jerk reaction to time pressure in orthodox project management tends to be adding personnel to a task. The theory goes that additional resources will help getting a task done quicker.

However, a lot of the time this tends to be a false assumption. It is especially true in software projects, but probably equally true for other types of projects of intellectual endevour.
Simply stated, there is a diminishing return to added resources to a task of a given size and scope. There is even a point where the return of added resources will actually become negative. In other words, for any given task there is an optimum number of people which will give the best end results.
This is such an obvious fact that it should really be taught at “project management ABC”, but it doesn’t seem to be taught anywhere. At all.

The reason for the diminishing return on adding resources is quite simple: the overhead in communication and coordination increases faster than the productivity of adding people.
If there are three people working on a task, there are three possible routes of communication. If you add a fourth there are six possible routes of communication. For each added person, the number of possible routes of communication increase by the number of total participants - 1. At some point the added effort in coordinating and communicating will surpass the actual productivity added to the effort of getting the task done, hardly an optimal solution.

Another often stated statistic at least within software development is that the best people can be up to ten times as productive as someone of average skill (I would presume this again applies almost equally well to other intellectual pursuits).
Considering this, and the stated relationship between adding people and increased communication complexity and overhead, there should be an extremely strong case for opting for smaller, highly skilled teams rather than large teams of average- to low skill.

When it comes to inherently “intellectual” work, such as software development, the preference of having lots of cheap, lower skilled personnel rather than fewer more expensive and skilled people can turn out to be an expensive mistake to make.
Given the already comparable low productivity of lowly skilled people, combined with the further drag on productivity of high coordination and communication overhead, having fewer and more highly skilled people will end up being cheaper by leaps and bounds, even if you pay them twice or three times what you pay a “cheap” employee!

When it comes to intellectual work, the blind pursuit of cutting cost and timelines by having large teams of lower skilled people in preference of smaller teams of higher skilled people can best be described as blind folly.

Its about that time again: my current contract is up next Monday, and I have declined to extend it. After some 3+ hours of commuting everyday for the last 18 months (two different contracts), I am starting to feel it. I need a bit of time to relax. That means I won’t be rushing back into another contract, but on the other hand if something attractive where to fall into my lap I might consider it, but I wont be searching very hard at least for the next few weeks.

I am considering taking the whole summer of, May ’til the end of July as I am currently sitting on a comfortable pile of cash, since I took myself out of the property market. If it ends up that way I don’t know, but if it did that is ok: it will give me some time to visit relatives, go to some place warm for a few weeks, and perhaps visit New York and some other major city. It is the last summer of my twenties, so I might as well enjoy it.

Although being impatient as I am, I doubt I will be sitting on my laurels the whole summer (I doubt I’ll last a week): I might work on some of my own little projects, and/or take up some project and freelance work that would allow me to do a bit of traveling in between over the summer (and you never know, if someone dangles something sufficiently interesting in front of me, I might cancel my summer plans).
So, if anyone has any need for a dynamic, entrepreneurial and very senior Java/J2EE and integration guy, feel free to contact me (my background can be seen on my LinkedIn profile)! I’m open to most things, including short assignments and remote projects.
However, I have to warn you, unless there is some very interesting opportunity for shared risk/reward and a joint-venture, I might not come very cheap. But on the other hand, you get what you pay for: the very top-end of the market, and someone who lives, breathes and eats what he does..

Throughout the history of the Internet, it has mostly been “really really great for porn” (to quote the musical Avenue Q).

But according to the Economist that is all changing: chat sites and community sites are about to overtake porn as the greatest attraction of the Internet.

However that doesn’t mean the Internet has suddenly become more wholesome and clean: a lot of the chat- and community sites are used by people for.. you guessed it, hooking up with other people to have sex.. According to a recent article in Wired (not on the Internet) the sex oriented “dating”-site “Adult Friend Finder” has already overtaken the largest “non sexual” dating site, Match.com in terms of traffic..

Apparently HP, Sun Microsystems and Accenture have been implicated for improprieties in relation to payments around various government contracts. I’m a bit surprised to see Sun Microsystems there, as I have experience of them as a contractor and thought they seemed reasonably ethical in their practices.

As for the others, unfortunately, I am not particularly surprised.
The IT consultancy industry is ripe with unethical people up to bad practices, especially when it comes to some of the big companies. Why? First of all, they are in bad company: there are only a handful of companies able to take on projects of the sizes they take on. If one company acts badly or just incompetently, the client doesn’t have much choice in terms of competitors. Otherwise I would assume it is the same old causes of corruption and general incompetence: large bureaucracies, no personal accountability and people looking after short term gain rather than long term relationships. All those things can conspire to push some people to make some very very bad decisions in certain circumstances.
Furthermore, in my experience government projects have all the problems that can make people think they can get away with unethical behaviour: public servants are less skilled and more hands-off in their approach to IT projects, so transparency suffers. They also have no clear profit motive, in fact for government projects to be perceived as worthwhile and be “doing something” they have to spend bucketloads of money whether it is needed or not. Unethical managers will only be so happy to oblige in wasting money to boost their own bonuses. It is basically easy pickings for people who want to do improper things with other peoples money.

Lack of hands-on oversight, low level of skill of the buyer, no profit motive resulting in money wasting and unclear objectives. It is basically the stuff of nightmares of anyone wanting to actually get something useful done, but also a dream for anyone who wants to do unethical things with minimal risk of getting caught.
Personally, after experiencing a couple of government projects, I will be very vary of doing one again: my initial hunch will always be “no”, and if I where to be persuaded to do one in spite of my hesitations it would take bucketloads of money and firm reassurances that it is done differently from all other projects.