I encountered a new problem recently when an anonymous non-spam comment was made on a blog post I made.

The commenter was asking a sensible question but had chosen to conceal their identity - this made me suspect their motives, which may have been honest, and so I deleted the comment.

If you do comment on anything I post here please bear this in mind.

It’s not all hard work at the SPA conference and tonight we had a chance to relax and enjoy ourselves.

After a number of sound thrashings on the Xbox race game - some of them at the hands of a woman! -  I joined Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Portia Tung who were having fun with South Park Studio.

After some experimentation I decided that this would most closely resemble my condition after a further three days working behind the scenes at the conference:

More on SPA 2008 later…

OK, maybe the post title is slightly over-dramatic but I had an interesting problem with the Bad Behavior Wordpress spam-blocking plug-in today.

When I logged into Wordpress I got the following page:

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Error 403

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-login.php on this server.

Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.

Your technical support key is: 5368-2572-1366-73cd

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact blog at software-acumen.com and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

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I was slightly nervous on seeing this as we had a brief intrusion at one of our other web sites recently and I imagined the worst. However, it turns out to have been a problem with the otherwise excellent Bad Behavior plug-in itself. See Michael Hampton’s post on this and get yourself a copy of Bad Behavior 2.0.11 to fix the problem.

A survey by Which has concluded that UK broadband speeds rarely reach the speeds claimed by broadband providers. Subscribers with an 8Mbps line achieved on average 2.7Mbps and at minimum a shocking 0.09Mbps. Although the survey notes that many factors are outside of the ISP’s control Which wants to ensure that broadband providers aren’t taking advantage of customers by promising maximum speeds they cannot possibly get.

A BT spokesman, quoted on the BBC, notes that “Virtually no-one will get it [8Mbps]. The laws of physics start applying as soon as it leaves the exchange and you would have to live on top of the exchange to get the full 8 megabits.”

Our graphics designer has come up with a trendy new logo and colour scheme  for next year’s Code Generation 2008 event. So, we’ve spent the last day or so updating the site in line with the new look. See below for the ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots or check it out for yourself here.

	Before
	After

We’ve put a number of variants of the logo on the web site so if you’re overwhelmed with the desire to put them on your site then you can find them here. Thanks

A BBC article today notes that a group of Canadian researchers has programmed a computer so that it never loses the game of draughts (chequers) .

The researchers, based at the University of Alberta, began working on a program (Chinook) in the nineties using a heuristic approach with rules derived from expert draughts players.

This approach was successful - in that the Chinook program won the World Checkers Championship in 1994 - however it did still occassionally lose games.

So, they switched to a brute-force approach whereby they analyzed billions of possible game variations to calculate the best move in every situation. With this new approach the program can always play the best move in every situation and so are guaranteed to win - or draw if their opponent also plays perfectly.

Unless you’re a gamer you may not have noticed that the BBC missed a couple of the important aspects of the story.

The first of these is that draughts is a drawn game if played perfectly by both sides. This means that the advantage of moving first is insufficient to guarantee a win.

A second, related issue is that no one seems to have asked draughts players how they feel about this. Doesn’t it somehow take something away from their game by knowing that it has been ’solved’? And what of chess players whose game will now come under greater investigation?

At miniSPA2007 on Monday I joined Mike Hill’s session on “Designing Collaborative Workspaces”. Mike asked us to consider, from our experience, what made specific workspaces good or bad. We were then asked to consider a scenario in which we first designed an inappropriate workspace for our team and then an appropriate workspace for our team according to a predefined scenario.

This process was aided by copious amounts of lego, plasticine, straws, pipecleaners etc - but no sticky-backed plastic as far as I could see. Peter Marks and Nat Pryce particularly impressed with their artistic skills.

In terms of badly designed workspaces some of the following problems seemed to crop up frequently:

• Failure to locate people who work closely near each other
• Furniture that was inappropriate to the task e.g. desks you can’t pair-program at, furniture that’s difficult to rearrange, massive filing cabinets for team’s working with little documentation
• Noisy atmospheres e.g. having piped music
• Having to swipe out / in to visit the toilet
• Lack of communal (meeting) areas
• Lack of whiteboards, wall space for charts etc.

My own personal bugbears include

• workspaces with powerful smells e.g. strong perfume or cooking smells,
• workspaces that are miles from any useful non-work facility,
• workspaces which are through-routes for all sorts of other company traffic,
• workspaces with insufficient storage,
• workspaces which are taken over by others outside the team,
• workspaces that are used as a dumping ground by others and
• workspaces with inadequate heating / cooling,
• on an environmental point, workspaces that are also lengthy or unsafe to cycle to get my thumbs down.

The appropriate workspaces addressed most of these problems - in some cases people had adopted tactics such as cannibalising other items or shifting stuff into other people’s areas surreptitiously. There was a pretty strong consensus for the most part on what made a good workspace including space, plants, windows, wall space for posters/charts, whiteboards and a communal space.

It was a fun session as the photos below (courtesy of Andy Moorley’s mobile phone camera) should show. However it had a serious message behind it. If you have a say in how your workspace is laid out then make sure your team’s needs are being catered for.

Rachel Davies, with whom Mike had run the session at SPA 2007, keeps a track of workspace stories through the Informative Workspace web site. Send her your good and bad workspace pictures and stories.

I’m hoping to get Mike to run the session again for SPA Cambridge. It will be interesting to compare results…

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, according to Natalie Keeney the chief executive of the UK National Archives notes a BBC article today.

Apparently some of the digital documents held at the archives have already been ‘lost’ due to the loss of programs that read them. Natalie puts the problem down to the plethora of proprietary file formats that were around at the start of the digital age.

I first came across this issue when I’d heard that the data from the BBC’s Domesday Project’s Laser Discs , created in 1986 was being recovered in 2002. (For more on this see an article in Aridane).

Microsoft are now working with the National Archives to ensure that old formats can be read in the future.

Lord Bhattacharayya was scheduled to make yesterday’s Lord Austin Lecture on the theme of The Challenges of the 21st Century: Revolutions in Global Markets, Regulation and Customisation.

In his synopsis he notes three challenges facing manufacturers:

• The scale of global markets means that corporations will have to be more flexible while providing total quality in manufacturing and processes and increasing R&D spend. Time-to-market will become increasingly critical.
• Manufacturers will be faced with differing needs from different societies responding to global warming and safety in different ways.
• Increasing technological sophistication and consumer purchasing power will lead to increasing demands for more tailored products.

The lecture was at the 3rd IET Automotive Electronics Conference where I was yesterday to give a talk on Automotive Variant Management - more on this later…

We’re working with Nativebrand on sprucing up our image.

This is still at an early stage but one thing we found useful was preparation of a detailed brief in advance of approaching companies who might be able to help us.

To help us do this we used the Art Department’s handy guides to Briefing and Choosing a graphics designer. Might be of use to others in a similar position…