Windows 8.x /9 – Re-Start the “Start” Button

OK so did Frankenstein monster just start looking a little bit more human? If you read my earlier post “Windows 8.1 a Mary Shelly Novel” (http://technobable.org/2014/02/17/windows-88-1-a-mary-shelly-novel/)..it looks like Microsoft listened to the voice of a LOT of less than happy mouse and keyboard users and the START button seems to be coming back…Re-Start the START 🙂 Check out hour 2 minute 9 of the Microsoft \\Build conference and you will see that we may once again have our old friend the Start Button http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY01

Screenshot of the Start Button Menu….looks Fantastic!

Still think MS need to think through mode SWITCH.. I.e.. If I undock my tablet from Mouse, Keyboard and external monitor/s I want decent size (device display) and touch fully enabled. If I SWITCH back then I want the device I’m on to be smart enough to figure that out. Of course fundamentally WinRT/Metro/ARM based apps and classic apps need to behave, no one wants two ecosystems, they have to come together seamlessly when I SWITCH….that’s my Marketing slogan suggestion for Windows 9 by the way…

“Windows 9…SWITCH”

Few other things need to get sorted out so we have a rocking Windows OS that everyone will love:

Data Grids, yes they are actually useful for design, not allowing them in Metro style apps is a joke

Real on screen keyboard (OSK) re-sizing for the device your on, so it doesn’t take up all the screen real-estate

Intellisense where the word appears above what your typing, so you can read what is below the text

Windows Store Apps that let people download Classic Apps…I’m sure there is no money in that one Microsoft 🙂

If your interested in a really sensible UI design check out Jay Machalani’s Blog on “Fixing Windows 8” http://jaymachalani.com/blog/2013/12/12/fixing-windows-8

Microsoft please hire this guy!

Architecture Roles as explained to your mum

Some years ago there used to be a great Architecture web site called skyscrapr.net. Unfortunately the site is now deep in the dusty bowels of interweb (If your interested you can still find it here http://web.archive.org/20070205174052/www.skyscrapr.net/). Skyscrapr spawned a number of really great stuff including arcast, which Ron Jacobs looked after for a number of years and was great (if your interested in that check out http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/arcast.tv)

One of the things I most liked about Skyscrapr was a short video that helped to explain the roles of different kinds of Architects, called “Meet the architects”. As Marty puts it in his vision

“Does your mother not quite understand what you do?”

And here is some of the wisdom of the different Architect roles

Solution Architect Get it done
AKA: Application Architect, Software Architect, Data Architect, Integration Architect
The Solutions Architect is responsible for the design of one or more applications or services within an organisation, usually within the scope of a division. Examples of such applications are: Internet banking solution for a bank, company wide knowledge sharing portal for a law firm, distributed point of sales solution for a retailer etc. Some solutions architects specialise in certain areas of a solution such as a data or integration.
In short, Solution Architects decide which technologies to use. They work very closely with developers to ensure proper implementation. They are the link between the needs of the organisation and the developers.

Infrastructure Architect The answer? Stability and security
Infrastructure Architects design the cities in which business applications live and work. They make sure that the power is on, the environment is healthy, the buildings are secure, the streets are safe, and that the traffic flows. Ultimately, the organisation looks to them to keep the data safe and the business processes running. To meet these goals, the infrastructure architect must work with development to define mechanisms and standards that allow applications to achieve the security, reliability, manageability, transparency, and policy compliance essential to the modern business. With responsibilities that span every business process and every aspect of the organisation, Infrastructure Architects often have invaluable insight into what the organisation does well and poorly, and how it can improve.
In short, Infrastructure Architects find the pragmatic solutions to the requirements of the organisation as presented by the Strategic architect. They like to make things work. They know robust and secure systems keep everything running smoothly.

Enterprise or Strategic Architects A vision of how to put it all together
The job of Enterprise Architects is to keep the business and its IT systems in alignment. They strive to maximise the return on IT investment by making sure that IT spending is prioritised towards business opportunity, and by optimising the impact of investments across the organisation’s portfolios of services, resources, projects, and processes. Enterprise Architects must be a bridge between business leaders, development, and operations to ensure that mutual understanding is achieved, goals are realistic, and expectations are properly managed. Enterprise Architecture is about the big picture — how people and technology work together to produce world-class long-term results.
In short, Enterprise Architects create the master blueprint that guides their organisation’s business and IT systems. They have the vision and long-term perspective that gives an organisation direction.

As far as career paths go software developers often end up following the Solutions architect path. Infrastructure Admins often follow an Infrastructure architecture path. And people who have worked across both lines often end up as either Enterprise or Strategic architects, sometimes ending up being called “Chief Architect”, though there are no hard and fast rules here. The Chief Architect role is to keep the other architects in line and call on them when needed. Often the Chief Architect will be a trusted advisor to the organisation’s CIO. In most organisations the CIO will have a strong business management acumen (first and foremost), with a degree of Architecture and Programme management understanding. Typically the CIO will call on the Chief Architect and Programme manager as trusted advisors in decision making. Interestingly Bill Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft has always considered himself to be a chief architect. It’s also worth mentioning that depending on the size or complexity of your organisation technical staff will often fulfill multiple architecture roles.

So in conclusion all three of these architect roles are all fairly important to successful delivery of healthy, well governed ICT Services.

Kimball KungFu – let’s not loose it!

So doing a Kimball course this week in Sydney Australia and Bob and Ralph dropped a bit of a bombshell. In the next few years it’s likely that the 6 founders will all take a well earned retirement, when that happens they will role up the company and it will cease to exist. I find this very sad indeed and essentially end of an era. The Kimball group have contributed immensely to the subjects of data warehousing, dimensional modeling and ETL, over 3 decades. What’s great about the Kimball Group is that they have stayed true to being vendor independent, extremely rare in this day and age, especially in BI/DW space.

So what is too be done here? I propose they establish a Kimball community site and appoint a number of individual master practitioners to maintain and contribute to it. I’d suggest that these practitioners be limited to just 6 people at any one time and all be published and recognised book authors in the space of BI/DW. Think it makes sense to limit the numbers of core practitioners so that changes suggested by the community are distilled and tested before being added to the methodology. Practitioners should be vendor agnostic, a pretty hard ask but totally in line with the Kimball methodology. Of course community members could over time take on the roles of the 6 master practitioners if one of them wanted to step down, but would need to agree up front a willingness to spend time work with the new practitioner to help establish them.

Further the Kimball Group should start an exam certification program so as to insure that all practitioners using the Kimball method demonstrate their understanding of it. Monies for certification would go towards funding and keeping a vital community alive and well and ideally drum up new business in the space. Not to mention making the goodwill value of the company worth considerably more. Of course the worst possible thing that could happen would be for the Kimball Method to be owned by a vendor, that would of course spell a fairly quick kiss of death to an amazing and highly needed brand.

I’d love to hear thoughts from others on this as I really think it’s possible that we loose an extremely valuable practice over time. It’s a little like a Kimball KungFu school, you don’t want to loose the style or the history and contribution of a group of people that have spent their lives contributing to techniques that have saved our bacon countless times. Incidentally KungFu roughly translates to “Skill achieved through hard work”

ETL with Feedback

One of the things I’ve never really understood in data warehouse architectures is why there isn’t a feedback loop from Warehouse systems back to the operational source in other word Extract Transform Load and Feedback. Not saying the goal of most Warehouse projects isn’t to answer questions across the spectrum of operational systems. However data cleaning and profiling can detect many source system data issues and although validation reporting can pick up and address these issues it’s a pity there isn’t a feedback loop that provides source systems with fixes to their systems of considerable benefit to those sources. Of course this isn’t always possible for systems that are in archived state but for systems that are still active one would think that would be very beneficial.

I’m certain I’m not the only one to think this way so wondering if anyone has invented a system that provides updates back to sources so that issues can be addressed there?

Awestruck

The Biological Advantage of being Awestruck

and if you like this check out http://thisisjasonsilva.com/

Enterprise Architecture – Excellent Read

Best article to read if your interested in Enterprise Architecture http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466232.aspx

Windows 8/8.1 a Mary Shelly novel

Have to say I find Windows 8.1 to be little like the Mary Shelly novel “Frankenstein”

Microsoft honestly guys seems like if you want to make a touch/mobile OS while also allowing Desktop/Mouse/Keyboard OS, you need to TOGGLE!
If I detach the keyboard then I want a decent touch enabled OSK. The current OSK isn’t intuitive either, takes up half the screen real estate when looking at a web page and in word with the ribbon and navigation on, I’ve a tiny tiny line of actual document content, it needs to SCALE for the input/output mode.

I understand wanting to be able to go support ARM and other mobile processors but you need to build an OS that can SWITCH (there is a good marketing term Windows 9 Switch OS) E.g two versions of IE that pretty yuck as is switching between RT Metro style apps and traditional windows Apps.

On the store front perhaps you should make traditional apps available also. How about you buy Office “Mobile” professional Office “Desktop” Professional, same code base, just let’s you TOGGLE. But yeah get those traditional apps into the Store, then you will have the same number of apps as Apple, but better, in many regards, e.g. Full version of Adobe products like Photoshop or things like AutoCAD, try running those on an iPad. Go have a chat with game companies so you can resell all the desktop games all over again, perhaps for a reduced price. Maybe consider offering vendor convert their license keys to Windows Store Licence Keys….that should earn you guys some extra clams and be great for resellers. Who knows it might be possible for resellers to see who is licensed and for what, great marketing statistics and potentially and could also reduction software piracy, that should be worth something! Finally make sure you add a routines to the store to check if a device will run software before downloading so as to guarantee the hardware and OS will support it …..anyway there are some off the cusp ideas

SQL Server Claims Based Logins would be Great

So would be great to see SQL Server 2014 Support Claims Based Identities in SAML…or does it already I don’t know. Do we have to wait for SQL 2018 perhaps

Performance Point Services – where are you!

Random thought of the day but what has happened to SharePoint Performance Point Services in SP2013, seems like the SQL guys should jump in and spruce it up a little again…maybe PowerView with decomposition tree …but yeah needs a facelift, annotation information in the dashboards is something SharePoint BI badly needs…not everything in Excel…though mostly 🙂

MTG Assassin Rules

Assassin is a Magic the Gathering (MTG) multiplayer variant that attempts to remove some of the politics from MTG multiplayer games. Assassin rules are able to be applied to any MTG play format: Commander (EDH), Highlander, Pauper, Standard, Extended and Legacy formats.

One of the biggest issues in free for all multiplayer MTG is favoritism where players feel that other players are unfairly ganging up on them. In Assassin players are given a target at the start of the game and their goal is to defeat or “assassinate” their target. Following are the rules for the assassin game:

Setup

At the start of a game each player writes their name on the back of a common land card. These cards are referred to as “target” cards for the rest of the game. The goal of assassin is to “assassinate” the target player you have been assigned; doing so scores you a single “hit” point, at the end of the game the player with the most “hit” points wins. The target cards are shuffled and dealt out to each player. Players then look at the “target” card they have been dealt; if a player has been dealt a target card with their own name all target cards are reshuffled and re-dealt, until all players have a valid target. In order to keep things fun and interesting and in-line with the assassin theme players don’t reveal who their targets are. Play then proceeds as usual with players rolling a die to see who goes first and the turn sequence moving in clockwise direction.

Play

Initially players may only attack their assigned targets. The initial attack a player makes on their target opponent is known as first-blood. The following constitute a first-blood attack:

· The player attacks their target opponent or a plainswalker that opponent controls with any number of creatures they have in play.

· The player cast a spell that targets their assigned opponent or a permanent they control at any point in the game. Note sacrifice and destroy all type spells that do not specifically target a player are not considered a first-blood attack.

When a player makes a first-blood attack they must immediately reveal their assigned target card to all players.

Once a player has been attacked they may then attack their attacker from that point forward, but only after they have been attacked. However although a player may attack their attacker they do not score a “hit” point unless that attacker is their assigned target. This essentially means that any player in the game will only ever have to defend against two opponents. Players may not cast spells that target a player other than their assigned target or the player who has made a first-blood attack on them.

New Targets

The final rule of assassin is that the moment an opponent has been defeated new targets are assigned, immediately. Remaining players hand back their target cards and those cards are re-dealt to each of the remaining players. As at the start of the game target cards are re-shuffled and re-dealt until each player has a valid target, not themselves. This is very important as although players may not have a second attack phase they may be able to cast spells that target their new target in their second main phase of their turn if they wish to. Of course new targets do not need to be chosen when only two players remain in the game.

Assistance

A player may only ever cast spells against their assigned target or the player who has already attacked then, first-blood. It is therefore NOT possible for another player to directly assist or attack a player more than 2 players at any point in the game. Global effects that do not target a specific player, such as “howling mine” still apply to all players.

Winning

Once all players have been eliminated the player with the highest number of hit points is declared the winner. This means that its also possible that the game will conclude in a draw.

Example Play