The three simple rules of software development.

For anyone who doesn't really know, I'm a bass player. Not a bad one to boot according to others who want to use me on the odd album, tour or session. In 1987, or there abouts, I read an interview in Guitarist magazine. I'd not heard of the guy up until that point but he was just compelling to read about, the bassist was Doug Wimbish.

At the end of the article there's the usual end of article cop out of, "Doug do you have any advice to other bass players?". The response was pretty what I considered off the wall. "Share anything about your playing to anyone and don't go around thinking that your sh*t doesn't stink!".

In photography we now have the likes of Dave Hobby, Joe McNally and Chase Jarvis and a legion of other great photogs willing to share. They'll give you the whole nine yards on lighting techniques, shooting techniques the lot.

Lastly I've been busy organising the first Open Coffee Coleraine meeting. There's no real forum for businesses to get together and just share, so I created one and Starbucks willingly offered a venue. Networking never used to be an issue to me, my network was pretty much online but that technique has reduced vastly over the years. Showing your face and personality has become important again. It's not about programming, it's about branding, the brand called You!

So, the three rules of software development:

1. You are only as good as your network says you are.
2. Be willing to share anything with anyone.
3. Don't go around thinking that your sh*t doesn't stink! :)

JTwitter free download, last day today.

Just got a tweet from Anton Hutton at EyespyFX, their Twitter client for J2ME is available for free today. Point your mobile to http://www.jtwitter.com/wap and you can download it from there.

Twitter is not a newswire but the most wonderful idea virus.

The evening (I'm in the UK) when Michael Jackson died uncovered some startling truths about realtime shouting/twittering.

Everyone is happy to jump on a story whether it's true or not, without a smidgen of regard for following up the facts. When I logged on to Twitter at 11.50pm and I saw a handful of tweets telling me that MJ was dead, first things first check the valid news sources. Since the story was from TMZ and I'd never heard of TMZ, the site only half worked and looked like a bag of onions I was a little wary of it's content. Reuters were reporting nothing, PA and AP newswires had nothing, only reports that the emergency services had been called.

Back on Twitter though, if TMZ says it's true then it's worth saying he's dead anyway. Then that spilled over to Facebook and the same pre-news news had the same wildfire effect. It took another twenty minutes before the real confirmation in the LA Times came through, a trusted source, I can live with that. Poor chap RIP.

No matter, but in the same timeframe we learn of Jeff Goldblum's demise while filming in New Zealand. The Twitter sneezing army went to work just as quick and Jeff's death and it became a trending topic. All very well except he wasn't dead, or in New Zealand. Stephen Colbert summed led the tributes nicely on the Colbert Report with Jeff Goldblum paying tribute to himself on the same show.

Twitter is the perfect idea virus, put something out there and get some sneezers to shout about it even more. All very well when it's something like a cool website, a product or a hot boy/girl for example. Twitter is not a news feed, well certainly not a trusted one. It's an immediate news source which is great but the danger is that it's crowdsource and unchecked. Spells danger to me in every sense of the word.

Ticketmaster and ticketing in general - a cloud opportunity.

The obvious news from the last 48 hours was the death of Michael Jackson. The first thought that I gave was the obvious battering that the likes of Ticketmaster and Seatwave were going to get. Initially it was the purchase of tickets, now it's for the refunds.

Any large scale event will alway incur a spike at the time tickets go on sale. Something like:


(Apologies for my crude Google Chart example).

It stands to reason that an elastic system would be of benefit to any high volume ticketing system. Deploy n number of servers to cope with the demand. Michael Jackson's O2 shows were a good case in point. There in the region of 250,000 tickets on sale and they went in a matter of hours. If those 250,000 sales represented 1% of the hits the site was getting then you can easily estimate that the server could potentially get 25,000,000 hits in a short space of time.

There's also a maximum return on investment (ROI) from only having the servers you need available at peak times, instances then switched off during quieter periods. Saves having a server farm full of running servers.

Meeting: Open Coffee Coleraine networking event.

I've finally got the first of my Open Coffee Coleraine meetings sorted out. It will be held at Starbucks, Coleraine on Wednesday 22nd July 2009.

The Open Coffee meetings are informal get togethers for businesses, startups and creatives to network, have a coffee and even perhaps generate some new ideas.

Starbucks have kindly offered us their cafe after hours, the event will run from 7pm - 9pm, plus free filter coffee and tea if you are prepared to give a donation to their chosen charity (if you want a quad shot skinny latte then you'll have to pay :) ).

Last bonus is that from 1st July if you are a Starbucks card holder then you get Wifi for free.

The blog is at http://www.opencoffeecoleraine.com and there's also a Twitter page as well.

Hunch, if you want to learn about me you need to give some better option answers.

As Robert Fripp once said, "The quality of the question determines the quality of the answer".

I was just having a noodle around with the new startup Hunch. It was all going so well until....


Well, actually the answer is neither, I don't like chocolate full stop, it makes me barf huge amounts. Can I have a third option please, "Don't like chocolate". I'm fairly sure I'm not the only person in the world that doesn't like it (I know people don't eat it for a variety reasons).

The new Java Store and the main core of the problem.

Three cheers for the new Java Store (though I can't see as I'm in Northern Ireland, can't sign up, can't join, well not for the time being). From reading press releases and the rest it sounds good on paper but I'm far from convinced that Sun can actually deliver.

Eric Klein said,“We're building new business opportunities and are thrilled to launch the Java Store to connect developers with hundreds of millions of Java users. The Java Store will become the destination for the most interesting, useful and entertaining Java software and content.”

And here starts the main point of the issue. Not everyone with a Java runtime knows they have a Java runtime. It's all very well to say there's 2.4M mobile devices but out of those how many truely know they have Java on the phone and they can download stuff. Not 2.4 million for sure. Set top boxes are another good example, I don't know many who can download software for them, so it's all very well saying there's 800M of them.

At present the Java Store is a big marketing exercise from what I can see. It's a good idea and I desperately want to believe it will work. Everyone is looking at Nokia Ovi and a bit of a tramsmash launch. I'd hate to see the Java Store go the same way. We're going to end up with an app store deluge and the single one fact remains, Apple is doing it better than anyone else regardless of whether you like Apple or not.