Putting things in context
T: “Lizzzzzzz, what do ye mean by context?” (I ignore the question as I become automatically deaf to people calling me Liz)
T: “Oy!!, bird in red sitting beside MY fireside drinking MY tea, context, what’s that?”.
T is a best bestie mate from the homeland was reading the KnowledgeMill website as our sons lay belly down on his huge living room rug making up the rules of draughts as they went along.
‘What is context’ is one of those questions like ‘what is algebra’. The concept is simple enough but the application of that simple concept can get very [...]

This is a post born out of the fact I had been musing on the sheer amount of friends, relations and ex-colleagues having babies lately. I work as a software tester so am in the habit of creating tenuous links where no sane person would see one existing. Please bear with me.
 
It occurred to me during this musing that babies are quite like software.
 
Think about the planning for a prospective project. Ideally the planning for a software development project should always be done during the time that the developers are writing the code, so that once the first iteration of development is completed, the next [...]

I’ve already told you how I described to my Mother, who specialises in growing prize-roses, what I do. This post is about how I describe my role to other people in IT.
The best way that I can do this is in general terms using the sequence of events in a typical software development lifecycle. I hope you enjoy my account and cannot relate to it too much in your everyday working life.
The role of a tester is to identify what is wrong, analyse the impact and flag that issue to be fixed. However, sometimes the problem is not something that is [...]

Just when you thought you couldn’t take the pain of reading another blog entry around cloud computing, here comes another one. Please bear with it – I promise it’s not the same as the rest – and could hopefully save you a few pennies by avoiding a costly mistake.
Many companies are considering a move to a cloud-based service (or in reality a hosted-service) for their messaging platforms. For those companies with the correct risk profile this can make a lot of sense. It can significantly reduce cost and for a lot of organizations, particularly smaller ones with limited in-house IT, [...]

We’re half way through the KnowledgeMill code camp for this year. An annual event that sees us take the development and testing teams off-site for 3 days in order to get away from it all, think of wacky innovative ideas that we can deliver into the product suite. This year we’re down in Rock in Cornwall. It’s off-season down here – but it’s an amazing place to be. The weather has been fantastic and the monstrous house we’ve hired is pretty spectacular with a huge terrace overlooking the Camel Estuary.
This year we’re focussing on some awesome document management features [...]

There’s a fantastic buzz in the office today here at KnowledgeMill – we’ve just learned that we’ve been made a Microsoft Certified Partner. We’ve been working with Microsoft since the beginning through the BizSpark programme. BizSpark has been massively helpful, giving us unparalleled exposure to technology and business resources. By moving to a fully certified status, we continue this journey with Microsoft providing innovative products and solutions that enable customers to drive increased value from their MS investments.
The fully certified status comes with a huge number benefits for a company like ours. The obvious benefits are large amounts of free [...]

Here’s a really interesting post on newscientist.com.
The article itself discusses the potential of using email data to predict a business crisis within an Enterprise. The example used is Enron. After the demise of the company in 2001, federal agents gained access to the email records for 150 senior staff during the last 18 months. Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne identified key events in Enron’s demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the [...]