Why we shouldn’t go back to normal after COVID-19 – let your cloud be the silver lining
With people imagining what life will be like following the current pandemic, you often see them quoted as expecting working life to ‘go back to normal’. For me, that won’t work.
Procurement – an enabler to change, not an obstacle to it
By Colin Wales Business Development Director MPs on the Science and Technology Committee recently heard from a range of experts on how attempts to open up Gov procurement to SMEs has progressed over the last three years. The gist of the discussions was that early success in shifting contracts to a more balanced portfolio of suppliers… Read more »
Better Connected Live – A View From the Back
The most telling session at the Better Connected Live event in Birmingham at the end of last month was the Q and A that ended the morning session on day one. The 20 minute Q and A drilled into the heart of the challenge and the problems of being a digital authority in 2016.
4 Causes of Legacy Systems Syndrome and Some Ways to Mitigate Them
Does your organisation have a system, which while critical to some business function is proving nearly impossible to update and change? Does every upgrade cycle take months and require serious effort and testing? Is the application starting to creak at the seams and proving occasionally unstable?
Data Quality Is A Design Problem
Many organisations have data quality problems. Some organisations have data quality problems so serious it stops them from using key systems in a meaningful way. When that happens, sometimes the consultants get called.
File System How-To
Introduction We’re presently developing a mobile application using Cordova and the whole process has been brilliant! Most recently we’ve been using the FileSystem of the mobile device we’re using (more often than not a virtual Android device using Genymotion) so we’ve had to get our heads around the File plugin. My team is comprised of… Read more »
Update SalesForce rich text area in a VisualForce page
I’ve just come across this post by Matt Lacey, a day too late as I discovered this yesterday! Basically the issue is that Salesforce has rich text fields which are not in the least bit easy to re-render. A colleague had a requirement to change the text within the rich text area depending upon the… Read more »
Barriers to digital change in Local Government
The Department for Communities and Local Government recently conducted an extensive study into the use of digital technologies by those in Local Government. The report discovered that for 72.7% of authorities, legacy systems and infrastructure is the biggest barrier to developing their digital offerings. This statistic was echoed by the suppliers taking part in the… Read more »
News from the Cloudfront – Application to Product
Forecast: ‘generally sunny with a distinct lack of a personnel’ now that everyone is taking their holidays. The theme of this month is most definitely productize – a word that filled me with architectural suspicion previously – but now I can say with some certainty that the road from application to product can be broken… Read more »
Are coders worth it? Hell yeah!
I’d like to talk about whether or not coders are worth it? My Dad was a structural engineer for his working life, he worked for various local governments around Yorkshire and worked very hard! He didn’t have a degree but he was ever so experienced and was often given the role of mentor to newly… Read more »
Android Emulator for Development
Identify a suitable Android Emulator for Development with Arcus Global. Introduction We have identified a requirement for an Android Emulator for an application we’re creating using data hosted by a 3rd party. The 3rd party is in the process of developing their own HTML5 offering so it is envisaged that within the year we will… Read more »
jQuery UI modal dialog and its data object
I don’t know how many times I’ve had to re-research this so this is the last time as I’m going to document it! I really like jQuery UI modal dialogs but I always have trouble getting them to do the proper thing when they’ve closed! Poor Alex is forever reminding me after I’ve spent 20… Read more »
Testing ElastiCache
We’ve come to use lots and lots of caching in order to optimise a web application that we’ve been developing for longer than a year now. It’s passed it’s prototype stage and is being used in anger so we needed to make sure that latency was reduced as much as we could. Caching was the… Read more »
GovCamp 2012 – public sector ‘unconference’
Last year as part of the G-cloud accreditation process I found myself in the hallowed Google offices in London attending an event where the Government Procurement Service (GPS) were trying to de-mystify the tendering process. A noble aim indeed but I was confused by their odd choice of name for the event, “ApplyCamp“, given the… Read more »
Smaller Projects = Fewer Failures
One of the most heartening things the current government has been doing on ICT policy is the attempt to reduce overall contract size and lifetime value of projects. When the government came into power it established a temporary moratorium on projects over £1M (see this report from the Audit Office for details on this initiative). The new… Read more »
Role of Developers in Organisations
As Cloud and especially SaaS and PaaS is quickly becoming reality, many internal IT pros working the public sector are asking themselves whether the skills and career paths are shifting. Is it required to have a development team to cater for “small” user requirements such as a DB here and there, or perhaps a complex… Read more »
Accessing RDS using HeidiSQL
Whilst looking at family-tree type things yesterday at work (it was for a work-based project, honest!) I remembered that my boss was looking at a way to administer our database on RDS. After reading shed loads of documentation, which said that it couldn’t be done or that you needed to jump through loads of hoops… Read more »
Nice JavaScript code snippet
Had the need to send a set of hex colour codes to a method which used them to create a chart using Google charts. The initial list was too short so that some of the colours ended up being repeated and the data became difficult to read. I pottered around the code base and “borrowed”… Read more »
It’s ALIVE!!
Virtualisation had been with us for a while now and it can generally be regarded as ‘a good thing’. It gives us more efficient utilisation of ‘real’ hardware and lets us do more with less – thereby realising cost efficiencies, which ultimately in this climate are very handy! These facts are all well-known and you’ll… Read more »
Tooth sucking isn’t helping
The IT Crowd premiered when I had no TV nor any interest in one, I still have no TV but I do get DVD box-sets every now and again to watch at home. After getting the The It Crowd I was really quite excited but the audience at home simply weren’t as in to it… Read more »
Getting Closer to the Dream
I have been a bit silly last week, and forgot to bring my laptop to work. Simply forgot that its on my desk in the study, just picked up an empty laptop bag and got in the car. I then drove for over 1 hour to client site, and upon arrival, realised that I dont… Read more »
IE6 needs to go! But we can ease it’s passage…
Please don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against the victor in the general sense! I’m not overly afflicted with that particular British meme which means that we always root for the underdog. It’s just that it’s so old now, so very, very old! My dissertation for my MSc was in AJAX techniques and, in the… Read more »
Clear as glass
There is a brilliant poem by Rudyard Kipling called “I Keep Six Honest Serving Men…” (I’m assuming that it is out of copyright – if not I’ll happily remove it) which was published in The Elephant’s Child: I Keep Six Honest Serving Men… Rudyard Kipling I KEEP six honest serving-men (They taught me all I… Read more »
30% energy savings?
The environmental benefits to cloud computing were recently highlighted in a post on publicTECHNOLOGY.NET and it’s a fascinating read. We’re all very happy with the financial savings offered by moving to the cloud but this new spin means we can get even more excited. I guess it makes a lot of sense – it has… Read more »
Arcus Persona
Recently the Mozilla project rolled out a new version of the Firefox browser which included the ability to utilise Personas, allowing users to change the appearance of their browser with a single click. We looked at our site design and just knew that the sky and ground would look brilliant as a Persona so please… Read more »
Evolution of the Cloud
Like Gas, Electricity or Water, Information Technology should be simple, ubiquitous, and cheap. Users / customers of the service should not enjoy or dislike using IT anymore that they do using the 220 volts of power from a socket. This is the key to Arcus’s methodology for advising and delivering cloud services to the public… Read more »