Getting Technical

If you check the sylabus on most it ComSci degrees, it is unlikely that you will find a course or even a hat tip towards anything legal. Even the course that I took which included subjects on Communication, Managment and a full year project had no content on anything legal.

This is why my friend Thomas Otter is investigating in his efforts to become a Pointy Headed Doctor err… a Pretty Harmless Driver … err Purple Headless Dragon. Actually none of those. He is completing his PhD. Not to be confused with PHP which, I grant you, at some level is very similar but on others completely different.

Anway enough of the rambling.

I will let Thomas actually describe what he is doing:

Legal systems have evolved over centuries to codify rights and obligations in societies. Throughout history law and technology have interacted, modifying each other along the way.  It is often an uneasy relationship…

I want to ask as many software people as possible about what they understand of the law that can impact software, and what their attitudes are towards a couple of legal concepts in a software context.

It is designed to gather information about the knowledge, education and attitude of software developers towards the law related to software, and how law is or isn’t built into software. My goal is not to just have a small survey of a couple of hundred developers, but to really survey lots of them.

To do this, I want to tap as many of my readers  as I can to spread the news of the survey, and for as many of you to take the survey as possible. The more answers I can get from around the world, the richer the results will be. I will also be following up with telephone interviews with a much smaller sample group.

In this survey I have used the term software developer rather broadly. I define this to be anyone working professionally to design, build or maintain software (information technology). So if you are a product manager, solution manager, implementation consultant, systems architect, business analyst, or a systems tester, for instance, then we would be just as interested in your responses. The survey isn’t just aimed at those who code, but those who make a living from its construction and maintenance. Much of this group would fall under that definition. The Germans have a rather nice term,informatiker, but it doesn’t really translate very well.

You can access the survey here or use this link in twitter to get the word out to your friends social network, tribe or whatever the new word for friends is this week.  http://is.gd/eACI

In a world of SOX and Data Protection this is very timely research.

The goal is to get at least 1006 responses so that the data is statistically significant.  (You did stats 101 didn’t you?) I am reliably informed that it is progressing well but until you take 10 minutes of your precious time to add your response it will not be complete.

Happy New Year

Wishing my readers a Happy New Year.
I trust that this year brings you all you dream of and plan for.

Photo credit: Chanc

… you get on the front page of SDN

So I did a hasty screen grab.

SDN Frontpage

Thanks to @welshcathy for letting me know!

Advent Calendar

Last year the guys at OmniTI, primarily Chris Shiflett kicked off a PHP Advent calendar and while I was looking for it last week I was disappointed to not find one. At least not where I found it last year.

This year all your favourite PHP authors are back  at a shiny new domain with design assistance from Jon and Jon.

So count down the shopping days to Christmas with a great set of articles from some of the best authors around at PHPAdvent.org.

Photo Credit: *Regina*  used with permission.

How would you like to pay for that Sir?

I note, via a number of sources, that Zend Framework 1.7 is out. As we are close to going live on our project that is using ZF for the first time we will not be putting 1.7 into production just yet. The most interesting thing to me is the updated Dojo as we are finding those Dojo forms to be kinda funky. I am looking forward to playing with Zend_Amf though.

What would interest me most in a 2.0 release (if anyone is listening) is a Zend_Payment component. I am thinking a component with a nice abstract adaptor similar to Zend_Db that could have implemenations for Paypal, Google Checkout, SecPay (or is that Paypoint?), WorldPay, eWay etc etc.

I think that a payment component is a critical part of a web toolkit. On my project we are starting to build this out as we need to, refactoring old classes into a Company_Payment class and if I get really excited I may even sign the CLA and get involved in ZF myself. It would be great to have leadership from Zend on this get an awesome base abstract class to build off.

It would be great to bring everything together under one set of classes like Zend_Payment rather than the Zend_Service_Payment, Zend_Service_Linkpoint, Zend_Service_Paypal that are currently (languishing) in the Community Wiki.

This would be a great addition for a 2.0 release.

Any thoughts on this are welcome.

BTW if you are new here you might like to subscribe to the RSS feed for Getting Technical.

Photo credit: Roby72

Twitter was doing some maintenance today…

Twitter database maintenance

I like the ice-cream but where is the broccoli ?

It really doesn’t take much to change the world and today as part of blog action day I am going to challenge you to do something that will help someone out of poverty and maintain it.

Maybe you are already doing something to make poverty history. Fantastic – keep it up.

If you are reading this post you have the resources to make a difference in someone’s life.

I am not going to prescribe that you support the organisations that I support but I have found that Compassion is a champion of those in poverty and works well with children, their families and the whole community to bring change in a region.

Having supported and sponsored kids over several years it is evident to me that they do excellent work at getting families out of poverty by supporting education and health of kids and supporting whole regions where they operate.

So on this blog action day focussed on poverty give a thought to making a difference in a childs life. It really will make a difference. You can’t do everything, but you can do something.

I was mildly amused to see that open source analyst James Governor has put an SLA on his blogging activity.

In retrospect it is not such a bad thing. So here goes mine:

I will write at least one post a month on anything that mildly relates to SAP, PHP, Eclipse, Usability, Web Applications, HR, CRM, Cycling, Cricket or anything else under the banner of Life the Universe and Everything.

I am also over on twitter.

Thinking about Life, The Universe and Everything – this week is week 42 of the year.

Bicycle Belles,
originally uploaded by www.alastairhumphreys.com.

This week I have started to cycle to work again. My monthly train ticket had expired and at my clients office there is ample bike parking and showers. I had no excuse.

So last Monday I got my bike out, packed my bag, planned a route and went for it.

Seeing it was about 3 months since I had pulled my bike from storage and at that time I was only cycling a mere 3.5 miles to my client I wasn’t sure how I would find the new 8 mile trip.

I shouldn’t have worried. It is taking me about 35 minutes on the bike which is a good enough pace. I would like to get that under 30 minutes but the goal is to get to work not to beat Chris Hoy in 2012.

There is a great feel riding on the road in London. There are lots of people out there and while there is a little argy bargy most of the people I have seen have been pretty safe especially all the cyclists passing me. If there is anything that get my competitive edge going it is having someone pass me. I always want to jump on their wheel but most of the time they are much fitter than me and they leave me in their dust.

I am not sure how long I am going to be able to keep on cycling with the darkness and winter approaching but in the mean time when you are driving your car – watch for cyclists.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4]

Thanks to Alastair Humphreys for his great shot of the woman cycling entered in a competition to make cycling more accessable to women.

I didn’t expect to take this long to announce the winner of the caption competition. Thanks to all those who took part.

Congratulations to Johan who came up with the winner.  SFLIGHT is the be all and end all. What else would you need? I am sure that the SAP Airline Industry solution is build on the solid foundation of SFLIGHT. (For all of you who don’t know the SFLIGHT is a simple database model that many introductory ABAP courses use as a learning tool.)

I’m convinced now! SFLIGHT is better than their current system.

Thanks for playing along and next time I am sharing aproximate space time coordinates with Johan there’s I’ll get the first round.