Out of office autoreply

I'm on holiday this week so please leave a comment and I'll get back to you on my return.
If it's a more urgent matter then tough. Eagerly anticipated posts will resume next week, meanwhile burglars have a whole few nights to swing by ClickTowers unhindered by anything other than some highly trained houseplants and a forlorn basil.

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Are iSoft exclusively to blame for NHS delays?

It has been widely reported this week that a review of the readiness of iSoft's Lorenzo programme, which is intended for 3 out of 5 of the NPfIT regions and is therefore crucial to the running of the UK's National Health Service, has concluded that there is "no believeable plan" for completion. You can read more about this at the Guardian, E-health Insider and numerous blogs including Blogzilla.

The report was compiled by Accenture and CSC who are leading the Local Service Providers that include iSoft in their teams. Naturally, iSoft are being heavily criticised for major programme management failings but the question I've not seen raised is "Why have CSC and Accenture not reacted earlier?". Afterall, the Lorenzo problems were well known up to a year ago. Accenture say they will loose around £500million as a result of the delays in their LSPs caused by iSoft. When there is so much of their money on the line, surely they should have managed their risk appropriately. Were reviews like the one just conducted, not built into the relationships between Accenture, CSC and iSoft from the beginning? iSoft is rightly taking a pounding in the press, but the NPfIT LSP structure designs the risk to be managed, and carried, by the consortium leaders. Those leaders should be looking hard at themselves right now.

Tags: technology, IT, computing, Healthcare, HealthcareIT, HIT, hospital, NPfIT, iSoft, Accenture, CSC, Lorenzo, project, risk, LSP

Specific vs Agnostic- which is your Healthcare IT killer App?

I've worked in many sectors including manufacturing, retail, aviation and distribution... always on the technology side. Recently, I've been intensively working in Healthcare and already there are a life time of conversations we could all have about sector comparisons. In this post, I want to focus on the observation that I've never seen an industry so full of technologies that have been tweaked and tailored to be sector specific.

Some tweaks are hugely superficial, being a thin veneer of marketing whilst others are profoundly fundamental. For the sake of my legal team (which I'll be watering later) I'll not distinguish one from the other here. I've seen entire integration engines JUST for sharing EPR. I've been presented with video conferencing suites targetting telemedicine. I've used databases focussed on nothing but healthcare. I've been pitched phone circuits as healthcare backbones.

There are many possible reasons for this more extreme focussing of effort than in other sectors, a few of which here readers might be able to add to:

1. The healthcare sector is particularly unique
2. Healthcare sector procurement having a larger than average critical mass per programme
3. A revolution in healthcare delivery models driving a rapid pace of change
4. Low influx of technical expertise from other sectors

All might be appropriate on different days and when describing different technologies. Some are hugely value adding and some are little more than crackpot moonshine.

However, what is very interesting is when the reciprocal must also be true- that there are generic, industry-agnostic, technologies which you swear by as a Healthcare IT professional. Go on, spill the beans... which dull consumer products have grown to be the backbone of your organisation. MS Excel? Which technologies would see you suffer if you were to remove. Skype? Which technology could I stick the word "Care" in front of and masquerade it as £50m of development exclusively for the use of hospitals?

Get in touch and let me know.

Tags: technology, IT, computing, Healthcare, HealthcareIT, HIT, hospital, agnostic, EPR, telemedicine, Excel, Skype

500 Years saved by Ancestry.com Support

Many thanks to the folks at Ancestry.com support who kindly sent me the installs for Ancestry Family Tree and brought back to life, figuratively speaking, 500 years of ClickRich ancestors. I'll keep a closer eye on backwards compatibility in future.

Tags: genealogy, ancestry, family tree, Ancestry.com, Ancestry.co.uk, Family Tree Maker, Ancestry Family Tree, .aft, futureproof, compatibility, backwards compatibility, IT support

Raw, Amazing High Performance Computing

What is the most impressive IT demonstration you've ever seen? Almost everyone has something which springs to mind. Perhaps it was some time ago and has now become the norm, but back then it blew your socks off.

Well, I've just had one of those moments. It was a country mile ahead of the first time I saw ClickTowers on Google Earth. This, my beloved readers, was probably something I will never forget.

This was the next best thing to making time stand still or looking into the future.

Imagine being able to play a piece of music into a microphone. Almost any piece of music. I chose the relatively obscure "Song of Life" by Leftfield on my mobile. Within 5 seconds, the supercomputer had identified the track from its databased catalogue, found the exact position we were listening to and then begun playing the music 5 seconds ahead of where my mobile phone was. Amazing. I must have tried 6 tracks and the system was faultless.

My hosts, who have interests in furthering raw unadulterated computing power, asked for their identity to be kept under wraps. This isn't something they're productising in anyway and don't want the publicity. It's simply a demonstration- a very impressive demonstration. Sadly, I can't see how this power, or concept, can be leveraged into anything useful (besides, Shazam has that covered), but it just goes to show what they mean when they talk about being able to process TeraFLOPS (floating point operations per second) of information. By way of comparison, Wikipedia rates a Pentium4 at a few GigaFLOPS. Also impressive is the database reads that process entailed. My mind is blown, I may post a more balanced view when I've settled down a touch.

Tags: technology, IT, supercomputing, HPC, FLOPS, TeraFLOPS, Wikipedia, demonstration, power computing, extreme computing, Shazam

Web Access Crippled by 'Downloader' Virus

I consider myself to have been fairly lucky (or solidly locked down) when it comes to PC viruses. However, at the weekend I was hit by the Downloader virus. I immediately started running updates on all 3 security products I use and began some full scans. The virus is embedded into a file called epl.exe and Symantec had trouble quarantining and/or deleting it.

I've not done much research on "Downloader"- mainly because Symantec eventually claimed to have deleted it. However, it looks like it is still there because Symantec told me again that it has deleted it. I very much doubt that I've been infected twice, but probably it never actually went away.

It's something I'll have to look into more seriously some time.

Surf safely kids. It's a jungle out there.

Tags: technology, IT, PC, virus, Downloader, Symantec, epl.exe, Norton, antivirus

Are Kids becoming Desensitised?

What do you have to do to excite kids these days? On Friday my lunch was pleasantly interrupted by the annual Bournemouth Red Arrows display. I'd have been gobsmacked as a child to see these daredevil antics. However, the children sat near my position on West Overcliff were seriously non-plussed, asking very practical questions such as "Why are they red?", "Where are they going?" and "Why are they smoking?". Good questions, but all the ooohs and ahhhs were coming from the parents.

Even when a lone jet surprised us by screaming right over our heads from behind, I swear that I saw nonchalant shrugs from some kids. Is this a symptom of modern life, or was it always like this?

I have to commend Camster Factor for their great photos posted on Flickr.

Tags: Bournemouth, Red Arrows, aerobatic, RAF, Royal Air Force, Dorset, UK, aviation, BAe, Hawk, kids, children

Oakenfold gets Grief

Thank goodness, it's not me getting old. I've been validated. I am young. Why?

Well, I was non too complimentary about Paul Oakenfold's latest Essential Mix on Radio1. Given that the three people who read this blog chose not to write in to me, I was thinking perhaps that I'd been harsh. Maybe that's how the kids mix these days? Afterall, those Radio1 producers have more fingers on the pulse than my small hands (it's all lies) permit.

How relieved I was, then, when I saw the Radio1 web page inviting comments with the headline "Worst Essential Mix Ever?". Following the link made me realise that I was relatively middle of the road. The militant branch of Anti-Perfecto was out in full force.

Tags: music, dance, DJ, clubbing, Paul Oakenfold, Perfecto, BBC, Radio1, Ibiza, Cream, Amnesia, Tiesto, Big Brother, Annie Mac

Whose problem- my network provider or my handset maker?

Ok, so today I decided that my long reported synchronisation problem between my Nokia N70 and PC should be nipped in the bud. It's become a major productivity problem. As I sit here typing this, I'm losing the battle and, after an hour on the phone with Orange, my grip on the will to live.

You can read more here, but to summarise, the phone synchronised fine for about 6 months. Now, Nokia PC Suite (version 6.6.16) says that it is connected to the phone (and indeed you can browse around it in File Manager), but when you select Synchronise > Synchronise Now (which isn't ghosted by the way) the system tray icon flashes for a while, but nothing otherwise happens. When you click Settings, you get no response at all.

Nokia's FAQ troubleshooting is very limited- it says something along the lines of "make sure you are using a Nokia cable". I am. I'm using a CA-53. It came in the same box as the phone. So did PC Suite.

To check that is wasn't the cable, I purchased a Bluetooth USB and that brings me to the same problem. I have to therefore assume the cable wasn't the problem. Just to rub it in, a first time use of iSync on the Apple worked fine over Bluetooth. I have therefore to also assume that the phone is fine.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling PCSuite. No progress. Same problem.

Although I didn't buy the phone from Nokia, they obviously are more likely to have the knowledge to support me, so I went to their website. I posted my problem on their discussion boards where, it seems, there are many disgruntled users. In fact, what has solved the problem for some people hasn't helped others so there are clearly many causes of the problem. The attitude of the Nokia's moderator on these boards is not exactly 'can-do'. They steered me to the support page where I had to describe the problem all over again. Why the moderator couldn't flag it up on behalf struck me as lazy. So, after typing out the problem as helpfully as I could, what happened? The page wouldn't submit. There was a web site error.

OK, so I resorted to the phone number. After selecting the appropriate options I was invited to ring a premium rate number where I'd be charged 75p per minute to have the pleasure of reporting that my phone doesn't work. All is forgiven Microsoft- at least you guys listen, tell us when we're buying a beta and to expect flaky product and immature support.

At this point I decided that I'd tried everything reasonable under my own initiative and that I should take up my consumer rights with those whom my contract is with- I bought the phone from Orange. Orange say that they aren't trained to deal with problems relating to Nokia's PC Suite. I can understand that, but surely they have some responsibility, as the phone retailer, for the product being fit for purpose? Afterall, it was Orange that decided that they would help with the phone and not the associated products (which were all in the same box), not the consumer. Could they take up my grievance with their supplier, Nokia? Not according to them. Orange provide the network. Nokia supply the phone and accessories. I need to go to Nokia. I'm sure that my contract is with Orange- I bought the phone from Orange. Orange provided the phone.

I have to say that Orange graciously offered to credit £5 to my account so I could call Nokia. That really is a great offer on the part of the Orange employee but I was concerned that my accepting it would compromise my statutory rights.

If you have a problem with your TV, you take it back to the retailer. They would liase with the manufacturer. Obviously, not with phones.

So, I'm resolved to live out my lacklustre relationship with my N70 until my next upgrade is due. Nobody is interested in helping. And this, I believe, is why the take up of smartphones isn't what the industry had hoped for. They're simply not 'consumer' enough- as a product or service. I'm a tech nerd and still can't do it.

Tags: technology, telephony, mobile, 3G, Nokia, N70, productivity, synchronisation, Orange, problem, customer service, smartphone, support, PCSuite, PC Suite

Windows Live Early Impressions

I've been comparing Blogger to Windows Live for publishing posts to my Blog. The fact that I'm writing this review through the web interface of blogger sums up my experience so far.

After setting up a Test Blog, I posted once using each method. With more confidence, I made the first post to the ClickRich Blog with Windows Live but I'm still experiencing teething problems. I suspect that in making Blogger user friendly, much control has been taken away from tools such as Windows Live- such as editing the layout and adding images. I'll try persist and see if I can make it through the niggles because it would definitely be a more productive tool.

Windows Live Edited Post

This post was created with Windows Live.  I couldn't add the image I wanted to because apparently its not supported by Blogger.  I think the truth is in the detail on that one.  However, it did offer me the option of creating an FTP facility for the image which would have worked.

Bold

Italicised

and with links

Google buys Neven Vision... read why

In buying Neven Vision, Google is one step closer to my Visual Search Engine. The pieces of the jigsaw are coming together.

Tags: technology, search engine, IT, Neven, image recognition, visual search engine, visual, acquisition, Google, device, appliance, biometrics

Open Source Buildings

Crazy? Think about it...

Modularity. Reuse. Generic platform, customised configuration. Convergence. Increasing rate of change. Technology.

The Open Source Building Alliance is bringing this together and builds on MIT's work with PlaceLab.

Tags: technology, buildings, innovation, open source, MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, OSBA, Open Source Building Alliance, PlaceLab, experimental

Pocket Sized Projectors

I'm trying to think of quite what the benefits will be to the end user for small projectors built into portable devices like mobile phones and laptops, but I have to say that I'm very taken with the idea. I suppose this is probably one of those technologies, like SMS, that will just create its own demand. Like Henry Ford said- before the advent of the car, if you'd asked people what they want, they'd probably have asked for a faster horse.

The company behind this technology, Light Blue Optics, have been nurtured through the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a technology transfer unit of Cambridge University in the UK and MIT, Cambridge, US. Their website is something of a showcase for innovation so worth staying tuned to. The site is packed with articles, so would benefit from an RSS feed.

Tags: technology, display, innovation, Blue Light Optics, photonics, Cambridge University, MIT, projector, network, portable, Henry Ford

New Blogger in Beta

Blogger, the thing which provides the environment around, behind and under what you are reading now is going through a revamp. According to ZDNet the days of me having to manually code the tags in HTML will be over... and there was you thinking that ClickRich just sits there and does all of this from drop downs and forms.

Further searching found Blogger's own announcement where a tour showed other new features including locking posts for designated viewers, some drag and drop editing facilities, more feed options and information on blog activity. There is no mention of integrating Google Adsense (Google's online advertising service) which seems a missed opportunity given that Blogger is owned by the one and the same Google.

Unfortunately, only a few bloggers will be using the beta for a while yet, but progress on the horizon- that's good enough for me.

So, for hopefully one of the last times, here are those tags... enjoy:Tags: technology, Internet, web, blog, blogging, Blogger, beta, Google, tag, label, Adsense

Oakie- stick to Remixes and Producing

Paul Oakenfold is probably the biggest name DJ out there. Yes, he's the bloke who did the Big Brother theme. He even cropped up in the credits of the new Pink Panther film which I watched at the weekend. However, on the performance of the last two times I've heard him in a club, he should probably stick to what he's REALLY good at- remixing and producing.

Don't get me wrong, he's perfectly adequate at holding a crowd, but in a world rammed with talent, I find the big intros by the likes of BBC Radio 1 this last Saturday nauseous. I'm sorry Annie Mac, he's not the highlight of your week in Ibiza. You might need to justify that to your accountants but he was, at best, OK. Look past the legend. I don't mean to sound bitter but let someone else take to the stage-like DJ booth at Amnesia for Cream. Can they not hear that Paul dropped the beat in at least two mixes... you couldn't hear the euphoria of the crowd like you could with other DJs on the night.

Ironically, the last time I heard Oakie live was Cream @Amnesia in Ibiza too. We were lucky enough to be up in the gods, and I remember even on that night in 2004 we didn't have high expectations of his set- in fact, most people had turned out to see Tiesto who unfortunately had to cry off ill. An OK night, but not top drawer.

Tags: music, dance, DJ, clubbing, Paul Oakenfold, Perfecto, BBC, Radio1, Ibiza, Cream, Amnesia, Tiesto, Big Brother, Annie Mac

Google Desktop Lease of Life

I'm feeling that I'm some way behind the techno-masses on Google Desktop so I'm going to refrain from a protracted review. Instead I shall say that it has given a whole new lease of life to my Windowing. Ok, so the Gadgets are clearly lifted from Mac OS X Widgets, but who cares where the inspiration comes from?

The Google Desktop search is remarkable (a proper indexed search) and makes Microsoft's delay to introducing WinFS look bordering on the farcical. Possible room for consolation for Redmond is that in Google Desktop's indexing of my harddrive, it has neglected to pick up on keywords in MS Office file properties.

I'm still playing with the rest of Google Desktop like a kid in a sweetshop (not even started to test any of the other Gadgets on offer) so more to follow later.

Tags: technology, desktop, Google, search, Mac, OS X, Gadgets, Technorati, Widgets, Microsoft, Vista, WinFS, Office

Recruit a Geek- TODAY!

Well, this week has got off to a funny start. Some colleagues are actually asking what they need to do to become a geek. The answer- get blogging. The chat was even lubricated with a Starbucks Vente Latte so they're half way there.

The world is going blogging mad. It makes sense really, with David Sifry reporting that the Blogosphere doubles in size every 200 days, statistically, someone else in this company needs to join the melee if that growth is in anyway to continue. I'm one in about 30 of us at the moment. Plenty of increase still available then...

Hopefully, reading this blog won't put my colleagues off. By the end of the week, we'll be running an all night hacking session with more pizza than you can shake a dongle at.

Tags: technology, Internet, web, blog, blogging, David Sifry, blogosphere, Technorati, RSS, Starbucks, latte

500 years of Ancestry data up the swanny?

I've been storing up research on 500 years worth of hundreds of ancestors and related data using the Ancestry Family Tree software. I was running this software which I'd downloaded from Ancestry.com on a work PC. I no longer have access to that PC (it's been recycled), but I made sure that I'd grabbed the data file (.aft) and all the back ups (.afz) so I could set up the application at home and retrieve my information.

However, when I went to download the AFT software from the site, I saw that it had been succeeded by Family Tree Maker and a web based equivalent. The web based version I am hugely in favour of, but I though I'd stand more hope of handling any potential file format problems with an installed app in the first instance.

I installed Family Tree Maker at home and was relieved to see the promise that it can open an .aft file. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Even though .aft is one the Open file drop down list file types, when you try it, FTM says that it does not recognize the format of the file.

I welcome progress, but hope I have not lost years of research! I thought I'd made adequate provision for backups, but I'd not forseen this. So, I've asked in support from Ancestry.com, so fingers crossed.

In future I will save backups in a more open standard such as GEDCOM. I'd like to hear from anyone else who has come across this problem.

Tags: genealogy, ancestry, family tree, Ancestry.com, Ancestry.co.uk, Family Tree Maker, Ancestry Family Tree, .aft, futureproof, compatibility, backwards compatibility

What's happening to our phones? What's 21CN all about?

I met with a senior director of BT recently and he was really excited about something. He was falling over himself to tell me all about "21st Century Network" or 21CN as they call it. Working more at the application and systems levels, I found it hard to see what was so special. Sure, I can appreciate that £14billion will buy BT something very impressive, but at the end of the day don't telecom networks just get faster, more resiliant, higher bandwidth? We know that we've reached optical so surely nothing can be faster than that. So that leaves resiliant and higher bandwidth right?

Well, yes that is right. But I've been digging around on YOUR behalf and there is another dimension to this.

In essence 21CN is replacing the traditional phone network, PSTN, with an IP based solution. So what that first tells us is that BT will not just be interested in phones. Or rather, any IP-enabled device (which will be most things in a few years) will be able to be a phone given the appropriate software. BT will not be billing addresses. Accounts will not centre on the phone line. BT will be billing humans.

Services will be driven out of the core of the telecom network. What does this really mean? Well you might not realise it, but you're probably compartmentalising your life into your landline answerphone, your mobile answerphone, your email account etc. Well, this will unify all your services architecturally (although I'm sure the retail market will be competitive as ever). You will access your communications from any device at any time. You might feel that you have this already, but in reality it is being delivered by a mish-mash of technologies enabled by providers and applications that are a veneer across the top of many infrastructures. That costs. That costs alot. That's flaky.

That also has limitations. At the moment you cannot transfer your voice call between devices beyond a phone switch. And what if you want to continue your conversation as an Instant Message chat because you've stepped onto the bus? Seamless. No longer will your contacts need to be synched between different parts of your life. It isn't just stored centrally, at the deepest level, but it's everywhere- ubiquitous.

Bandwidth becomes unlimited.

Then things get really clever. Imagine if you buy your applications as services from your telco. A whole world of applications as yet unimagined is going to explode into out lives from 2007 and I, for one, can't wait. I think we forget how much of a chore it is to constantly log in and out of applications through our modern working lives. I'm going to start counting. But, 21CN holds the possibility of never having to log in ever again. Never will any consumer or SME ever need to buy data storage hardware again. You will pay per byte for storage. You will pay for data transfer in many different ways. Your application will decide how to route a packet of data. Sending a Petabyte of data from London to New York in the next minute will not only be possible, but it will be priced differently to if it doesn't need to be there until 24 hours later.

And it will be cheap. In the last 10 years the cost of calls has dropped by 80%. This will continue and, I believe, accelerate.

So, when you hear BT talking about 21CN, sit up and listen. So far, it takes some leap of imagination to picture what they are describing, but as the time approaches for services to launch the message will become clearer about what it means to us.

Tags: technology, telecoms, telco, phones, futurology, bandwidth, BT, British Telecom, 21st Century Network, 21CN, IP