Month: February 2009

Categories
politics

More muppetry

So Dick Roche thinks the Minister for Finance owns Anglo. He’s the only shareholder after all as he told the Irish Times. Like the Tanaiste, clever Dick believes that

“It would completely undermine the confidence of customers generally in Anglo Irish Bank if the Minister as shareholder could obtain access to confidential customer information,”

Can they please find something more intelligent for ministers to say when asked about the “Anglo golden circle” Confidence in Anglo is obviously sky high at the moment so it would take a lot to undermine it!
I guess we should all stop worrying about Anglo now that it’s entirely B Lenihan’s problem. I wonder do the ECB ask you to sign a personal guarantee when they loan you a few billion. It’s not our problem anymore. Our Euribor rates will improve when those pesky Europeans realise our brilliant strategy. We didn’t nationalise Anglo, we transferred ownership of all assets and liabilities to our Minister for Finance. It’s known in the industry as “containing the problem”. When he realises it himself he might cancel the pension levy, before skipping off to some South American country without an Irish extradition treaty. He can form a double act with Bertie.
One “created” an economic miracle while the other took on the debt of a (relatively) small South American country “in the national interest”.

Categories
economics

The Rolls Royce of Pensions

I’m in the public sector and have one of these Rolls Royce pensions you’ve heard about.The only problem is that it’s complete shite and I’m trying to get out of it. I realise this goes against the orthodox teaching of the Irish media, the public sector unions, the private sector and pretty much everyone else. The problem is that they don’t have a sausage what they’re talking about.
Rollers are jolly nice cars and to compare them to this pension is nonsensical. The civil service pension assumes you’ll retire after 40 years. At this time you’ll get

Annual Pension = Base Salary x Years of Service / 80

You’ll also get a one off payment of

One off payment = Base Salary x 3 x Years of Service / 80

However, your annual pension is paid as an excess above the PRSI-funded “state pension”. Effectively, you’ll have to contribute for around 15 years before there’s any annual benefit beyond the state pension.
Ah, but the public sector is full of permanent and effectively undismissable workers I hear you say. Actually this is not the full story at all. There are many workers in the public sector who are on fixed-term contracts or whose jobs are subject to funding. The state is happy to keep things this way. They lost a court case taken by IMPACT on behalf of 91 Irish workers who were denied equal rights with their permanent public sector colleagues.
What’s the point in having a pension entirely based on time served when it is highly unlikely you’ll serve that time.
The Irish
http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1015439.shtml
Also, Minister Lenihan doesn’t seem to understand that one of the main reasons why the cost of providing a public sector pension has increased is the diabolical performance of the Irish stock market. An issue which the financial regulator and the dept. of finance are partially responsible for. Some would say more than partially…
http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1015969.shtml

Categories
technology

using twitter to tweak the dev process

I’ve been thinking about an interesting (nuts) social experiment to understand the software development process in your organisation. Software team managers are often surrpised as to how the actual work gets done (or doesn’t) in their development team. With 10 plus people on your team it can be extremely difficult to understand the dynamics involved. Who is actually coding? Who has got the great ideas? Who is preempting future problems and who is firefighting current ones. How does a bottleneck get created and what could solve the problem.
As twitter posting is so scriptable I thought it would be cool to create a random project spec which would constitute a two week iteration (including some test time) and hand it over to a dev team. An agile “customer” would be provided to own and clarify the specification on request.
To capture data you could setup some twitter gateways from jabber/xmpp, http proxy, source control and project management tool (trac, mingle, etc.). To provide some privacy you could have some anonymised logins like
The purpose of having a two week project of reasonable complexity is that it would make it difficult for a team member to behave in a completely unnatural way. I.e. they’ll need some thinking time. They’ll need some respite & chat. But not so much that they’ll delay the development schedule (hopefully).
At the end of the iteration the team would review the twittering to try and understand how the software engineering process worked. What worked well? What could be improved?
When I started working as a software developer at the end of the 90s agile was just taking off and the development process felt highly structured. It wasn’t of course and many projects suffered from the false security of weighty yet incorrect up-front documentation. I’ve noticed that as agile has become more prevalent we’re trying to move from analysis/design/implementation blobs into every smaller chunks of development time which can be reasonably documented while not unreasonably impeding the development process. Where once documented functional specifications were passed around, now it’s many smaller and looser tasks which are collected on web based tools like mingle. Email is still important but more informal instant messaging has become an important part of smoothing the dev process. Collleagues share little nuggets of information or query eachother to clarify issues or solve problems. A big question I have is how informal has it become? Are major design decisions now being made mostly using informal IM and retro-documented? What are the pros/cons of this? Part of understanding this is looking at all design and dev interactions under a microscope.

Categories
science

The pleasure of finding things out

R asked me recently to recommend a book on physics and science. I’m not really sure why. I think perhaps she feels she’s missing out on something although, tautologically, she doesn’t actually know what it is. I recommended she read Hawking’s “Brief History of Time” as I felt it had some great attributes. Clarity, reasonable depth, breadth and memorable writing. Everything you want from a great popular science book.
I made the wrong recommendation however. No disrespect at all to Dr. Hawking but the best communicator of scientific ideas was probably Richard Feynman. What he communicates better than any other is the enthusiasm required for great scientific endeavour, or as he aphoristically put it “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”. I’d find it difficult to recommend anyone who hasn’t studied physics or at least mathematics in college to buy the Feynmann lectures but his collection of short essays “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” is marvellous for even the uninitiated.
Reading Feynman is an antidote to the general dullness of much of what we now describe as knowledge. His science is as much swashbuckling adventure as dry machination. In particular the observation of Parallel computing pioneer Danny Hillis regarding collaboration with Feynman sticks in my memory. Feynman volunteered his services to Hillis when he was creating the original connection machine. Seeing that Hillis was about to tackle what’s known as a BIG problem and sure they needed some assistance, Feynman showed up for work. Feyman wasn’t a computist so when he was asked to analyse the router design for the Connection Machine 1, he produced a set of differential equations as a result. Hillis account is available here
His seminal essay on what’s now described as nano-tech “There’s room at the Bottom” has inspired a new science which will undoubtedly lead to revolutions, “good” and “bad”.
If you were to compare science to magic most publications are created b y prestidigitation (literally “fast hands”). Some are more profound, the work of conjurers. By contrast Feynman was a magician.

“There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians’. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.” – Mark Kac, Feynman collaborator and mathematician

Feynman’s work isn’t faceless. Physicists like Paul Dirac or Neils Bohr were brilliant yet impossible for the ordinary joe to empathise with. With Feynman you get an exuberant character who lived life with zest and mixed light anecdote with grave fact, and sometimes vice versa. If reading “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman” doesn’t inspire someone to learn more about the world they live in then they’re brain is probably not wired for physical curiosity or skepticism. Now that would be sad!