Imagine if your neighbourhood was one where criminals blatantly plied their trade down your street, banging on your door at all hours of the day and night and extorting money from you, breaking into houses and taking credit cards, stealing… Read More
Still the same old flux capacitor
‘Back To The Future’ was recently on TV again. According to the movie, I should now be driving a fusion powered flying car. Oh well. In another example of how things change more slowly than we may think, I just… Read More
The Hotel California of Cyberspace
The Hotel California of Cyberspace A great article from the New Zealand Listener web site about how the British science fiction writer J.G.Ballard predicted social media back in 1977. He didn’t make it sound very appealing. we are all just… Read More
The future of the Performance Based Research Fund
The future of the Performance Based Research Fund An interesting article on the Tertiary Education Union web site about the future of PBRF, and comments made by Jonathan Boston, one of its original architects. Among other negative effects of continuing… Read More
Great new IT systems (not) Part 2
As editor of an international journal I have to manage submitted papers, authors, reviewers, reviews, editorial decisions, final materials and publication schedules. Doing this manually is very tedious so I was pleased when the publisher announced a new on-line submission… Read More
How the web saved my life
Well, OK, gross exaggeration, but not entirely untrue. I regularly receive those email offers from ‘daily deal’ web sites, where you get 24 hours to pick up a deal. I must confess some of these have been a bit dodgy.… Read More
Do you show the customer a class diagram?
I had an interesting email exchange with one of our extramural students who works as a Business Analyst. He was recently told by a developer that class diagram modelling should only be done by developers, not by the BA. However, I… Read More
Great new IT systems (not) Part 1
For many years we had a very workable timetabling system at the university, with local input and control. Now we have a new expensive centralised system that is not only determined to ensure our classes start at 8 and finish… Read More
Novopay – this year’s case study
With new classes about to start at Massey University in Systems Analysis and Design, and System Management and Testing, I could not have wished for a more topical local software systems disaster than the the New Zealand Novopay debacle. What… Read More