The DOBlog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Quality of Information presentation

    I saw this link on the BBC this morning and it made me think of the potential implications for the quality of information presentation if MS Word docs begin to be localised not just to national languages but to regional dialects within those language families.

    The implication for the quality of information presentation, and the quality of communication, is quite significant. I have a large extended family with cousins in far flung regions of the world. From time to time we might meet up and chat face to face (often it co-incides with family holiday or business travel). I can remember going to visit my cousin Carrie in Birmingham when I was 18 (just after my leaving cert). Her friends all spoke in a strong Black Country dialect. I didn’t have a frikin’ clue what they were saying for the first few days.. It sounded like english, I could follow some of it but some of the idiom and dialect were frankly baffling.

    I got my own back when Carrie came to visit in Dublin. “Story bud?” in North Dublin patois roughly translates as “hail to thee and well met fine fellow”.

    Microsoft’s goal is to reduce the amount of ‘red ink’ that Office displays when people write emails or documents and insert local slang or words from their local dialect. For personal communication that may be fine, but for business or professional communication the red ink is a useful warning that perhaps you need to rethink your wording so that your message is better understood.

    I can remember learning about the Ems Telegraph Affair in school. In this historical incident the wording of a telegram was edited by Otto von Bismark and resulted in the Franco-Prussian War. The dialect and idioms were interpreted by the public in France as being an insult to the French king while in Germany/Prussia the feeling was that the communication was an insult to Germany.

  • Web2.0 Tools test

    I’m increasingly fond of the very powerful web2.0 tools that are available, including ThinkFree.com and suchlike.

    The attached document continues this post…
    Powered by ThinkFree Some rights reserved

  • Interesting post on Tuppenceworth

    There’s an interesting post on Tuppenceworth from Fergal reviewing “Inside the Emerald City”, which is an expose of the shenanigans in the Green Zone in Iraq. I like the term “Green Zone”. It reminds me of of the recorded PA you often hear in US airports:

    “The White Zone is for loading and unloading.”

    I wonder what the PA would be for the Green Zone?

    “The Green Zone is for hiding under you bed and praying they don’t come for you”

    But I digress… Fergal points out that much of the book is an expose of how the American Management Consulting ‘culture’ which has been exported to Iraq has contributed to the rolling disaster there. W.Edwards Deming described American management thinking as the most dangerous thing that America could export. It wasn’t until the Japanese took Deming seriously and started making inroads into automotive market share that Deming (and other manufacturing quality gurus) were taken seriously in the US… and even then the biggest problem with making quality management and quality improvement stick has been a failure to have a clear constancy of purpose…

    … for example, General Motors was one of the first US car makers to take quality of manufacturing seriously. Jack Welch famously told his staff that if they didn’t crack that challenge they’d all be out of work. Fast forward to 2007… GM is closing factories in the US while Toyota (whose CEO last year said that quality was his number one problem for the coming year) have opened four new plants.

    But again I digress…

    CelticTigger (who is that masked man?) has commented on the post – from the sounds of it he (or she) has been in the trenches with management consultants. Poor soul.

  • Crazy yanks

    Found this initially in Metro free newspaper and also on The Register.

    This man is clearly somewhat paranoid about ‘the man’ being able to recover data from his hard-drive. However, as pointed out by the Reg, the misguided belief that deleting any files on your computer removes them from existence is just plain wrong.

    In the past I worked as a LAN admin and occasionally we had to replace old PCs with newer models. The standard operating procedure for ensuring that data on the hard-drives could not be recovered did not involve deleting anything or even a format of the drive. No, we used a nailgun. Two nails into the drive meant it was unusable. Four was overkill but fun.

    The fact that HP, who own Compaq who sold the drive encryption software this gentleman used, seem to have settled tells me either two things:

    1. Either Compaq’s software was not as robust as its marketing claimed
    2. HP’s lawyers decided it was too expensive to litigate and just cut a cheque in full settlement – it is interesting that HP do not appear to have admitted liability

    Why would HP have settled? Perhaps the means by which authorities can circumvent their software represents a proprietary secret that would be come public record if aired in court. Imagine the fun hackers would have if they knew exactly how to get around drive-based security on your machine.

    For the record – this is person sold modified weapons that caused even American eye-brows to raise (a rifle with a silencer – so you don’t wake Bambi while taking out his mother obviously).

  • Side effects of the Blog Awards?

    It would seem that the IT thought police in my employer were paying attention to the Blog awards. For a long time our web filters only blocked tools like blogger.com and typepad. Sites like Tuppenceworth who operated their blog on their own domain (like the DoBlog too) flew beneath the radar.

    Not any longer.

    As of today I’ve noticed that the venerable Tuppenceworth has been blocked, as have all incarnations of Twenty Major. It is possible that it is just a co-incidence that this has happened a week after the Irish Blog Awards, but I’m far to cynical to think that. I’m donning the TinFoil Hat of Conspiracy as I suspect that the media profile given to some of the former ‘stealth blogs’ in the run up to the Blog Awards may have alerted some policy makers to the fact that there’s more than one way to blog.

    Hopefully I’ll be able to keep updating the DoBlog and the IQNetwork site after hours from the office. Failing that I’ll just have to trawl for some wireless broadband connectivity.

    In the mean time…

    ###Updated###
    Tupp’worth isn’t blocked anymore… looks like a random burp from the web filters. Twenty is still barred though, more’s the pity.

  • Sorry I’ve been away

    the DobBlog has been neglected of late. I have been busy upgrading and tweaking the website of the IQ Network (www.iqnetwork.org), a Community of Practice of the IAIDQ run in partnership with the IAIDQ (www.iaidq.org).

    Please toddle over there to take a look – the IQ Network has a very full calendar of events for 2007 in the pipeline and we’re looking forward to another year of delivering value to our members.

    Our first event is on the 22nd of February in DCU… see www.iqnetwork.org for details!

  • Tuppenceworth…

    Simon over at Tuppenceworth is getting a bee in his bonnet about the standard of Irish journalism. I have to agree. I am a Director of publicity for an international association for Information Quality professionals. Over the past year I have submitted a number of commentaries on issues such as the Electoral Register.
    Not ONCE has there been a journalist who has contacted me back on any topic, not even to say thanks but no thanks. It seems to be easier to trot out the easy soundbite than to actually research a topic (such as the Electoral Register issue – despite what Dick Roche says it is still an unmitigated disaster area and will NOT be clean come election because the fundamental root causes have not been addressed) and be in a position to ask hard questions.

    For example – with Electronic voting, journalists have swallowed the line that the e-voting systems have been fully tested because that was the response to a Parlimentary Question (dail reportage). Of course, the question was badly put… if didn’t ask how many machines actually passed the tests… (answer is approximately none of them).

    Furthermore, no newspaper I’ve seen in the last month has picked up on the link between the State Claims Agency report on Injuries arising from Treatment errors in the Irish Healthcare system and the number of articles that appeared in Oct and Nov of this year about people who’d had horrendous harm inflicted on them by unnecessary surgery because their patient information had been mixed up with someone elses… I’ve got an article on that drafted that links to the situation in the US… any takers?

    I look forward to a day when I can pick up a respected newspaper and not be accosted by obvious press-release fodder, commercial features or limp-wristed reporting. Hopefully some journalist will pick up on the story at Tuppenceworth and run with it…

    …now wouldn’t that be ironic?

    Update….. Indo picked up on the Tuppenceworth story but not in the way you’d like. Apparently if you don’t like the message and can’t directly attack the messenger you should attack the credibility of the medium the message travels in. Which is ironic given that it is the credibility of print journalism that the Tuppenceworth Paper Round calls into such stark question.

  • So long away…

    the DOB Blog has been on an unintended hiatus in recent months. This was due to a total breakdown in customer service from the american company that I had registered my old domain (www.obriend.com – rip) through.

    I have had this new domain (obriend.info) for a couple of months, but haven’t had the time to plan and implement the data migration from the old blog to the new blog. Luckily tonight I’ve a touch of insomina so at 3:40am on the 15th November, DOB Blog was reborn with all the old content (and user names for those of you who have posted previously).

    I am playing around (again) with templates and my favourite of the day is this one… I will probably make some minor mods to it but it is clean and simple (but needs to be checked for accessibility).

    Well, here’s looking forward to some more heavy blog activity….

  • Please buy Expedia an Atlas…

    Following on from Michel Neylon’s on-going battle with Amazon, it looks like the illness has begun to affect Expedia (who may need to buy an atlas from Amazon).

    A colleague of mine just tried to book a hotel room in London for a weekend away. She got her itinerary number and had confirmed availability and price and was trying to give her credit card details to pay for the booking.

    On Expedia, you have to tell them if you are a UK address or a non-UK address (I suspect that this is to present different address format templates). My colleague selected “Non-UK” and proceeded to fill in her address details.

    Until she got to the part where they wanted to capture Country. Ireland wasn’t listed. Neither was Éire, Republic of Ireland, Irish Republic or Southern Ireland (all common alternatives that are sometimes used).

    Nepal and the South Mariana Islands were available options though. Lucky for them.

    Let me put it another way… the drop down list of countries was significantly incomplete for a company that is operating within the European Union (25 states and counting). Ireland hasn’t been part of the UK since 1922.

    My colleague rang Expedia to find out what was going on and to see if the order could be completed over the phone. To her surprise she was told that “expedia can’t take orders from Ireland”. Which is the equivalent of “the computer says no” from Little Britain.

    I wonder if the legal eagles who hang out over at tuppenceworth would have an opinion on the legality of Expedia’s business model, which to my mind smacks of an unjustified (and unjustifiable) restriction on free movement of services within the European Union and the European Free Trade Area.

    In the mean time, my colleague will be using a different site to book her accomodation in London. Until, of course, “the computer says no”.

    (editor’s note: I’ll stick the links ‘n’ stuff into this later).

  • Phone company not employing psychic dog – shock!

    I heard about this piece of bother on RTE Radio 1 news today.

    Apparently a Fianna Fail TD is up in arms that people who had been renting a phone handset from eircom and subsequently bought a new one and didn’t return the rented phone or alert eircom that they were no longer using it have continued to be charged for the phone.

    So the reasoning seems to be that if you have finished with something you’ve rented and you don’t hand it back the company you rented it from should know through some Jedi mind trick that you are no longer using it and stop charging you rent.

    Applying that logic…

    1. That Library book that I finished when I was 12 and never returned… Dublin corporation shouldn’t have kept charging me late fees, they should have just wished me well with my new book that I bough in Easons.
    2. The rent I paid my land-lord while i was on holidays should be returned to me (b*stard land-lord)
    3. Xtravision should clear my account of outstanding charges for that copy of Kill Bill that I took out because I didn’t like it and bought Yo Jimbo from play.com instead.

    The electoral register is in a shambles and a Fianna Fail TD is taking up valuable airspace, column inches and interweb bits and bytes effectively telling us that we should have absolutely no personal accountability for ensuring that we follow simple processes in life (such as telling our local authorities when we move house so our old electoral register entry can be deleted and a new one created at our new address or contacting a service provider we’re renting something off when we decide we want to exit the rental agreement).

    Short of placing a monitoring device in your house or ringing you every month to see if you’re still using your oatmeal slaney phone from 1996 or hiring a psychic dog to sniff out changes, there is nothing that a provider of any service can do to identify if you have changed your equipment. The only way that they know is if you ring up and tell them so that they can change your contract, remove the charge and make arrangements for the phones to be returned for recycling.

    I’d be more impressed if the good deputy took up the issue raised over on Michele Neylon’s blog re: Amazon’s decision not to sell certain categories of goods to people resident in Ireland

    If you find you are paying phone rental, check out www.eircom.ie and you should be able to find out how to get the charge cancelled and get your phone recycled.

    To Fianna Fail – please stop wasting our media space with innanities! We know that there is an election looming and backbenchers need to remind people that they exist, but there are far too many important issues to be debated in this nation of ours.

    Now, I’m off to see if I can buy a psychic dog and go into consultancy with a phone company (just to keep Deputy McGuinness happy)….

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