The Sikh Geek

This is a recreation of the scene “The Rescue of the Chancellor” from Star Wars III, Revenge of the Sith. As you can see it is made using Lego and is the handy work of Jeevan, my son, and me (mostly Jeevan’s idea). You can see Chancellor Palpatine strapped in the chair in the foreground, with Anakin and Obi Wan Kenobe ready to take on Count Dooku at the top the stairs. Officinados of Star Wars will instantly realise that in the actual scene the stairs come down from either side! Obviously, we have used some artistic license here due to our limited resources compared with Lucas Films!

Thanks to Gordon Frazer, he reminded me of Dilbert and just had a quick look at the Scott Adams Blog, excellent stuff! Well, it is Friday! Any self respecting Techie should look at this.

I wonder if Gordon subscribes to the daily Dilbert? Can anyone at Microsoft check?!

I was looking at the IET website and saw this webcast by Gordon Frazer, Managing Director of Microsoft UK delivering a lecture entitled, “Leading from the Front”. He presents a personal perspective of what leadership means obviously within a context of his role in Microsoft. He used to run Microsoft South Africa and was recently appointed to this new role in the UK. Hey, he can’t be bad as he used a “Dilbert” reference and the “pointy headed” boss! Yes, we all know who they are!

I’ve just sent my SBSC re-enrollment form back and Small Business Specialists have until 28th February 2007 to do this. The requirements have been set at 2 customer references and attendance at 2 events, either online or in person. I’d submitted 3 references on the Microsoft Partner Portal as I’m trying to complete the Networking Infrastructure competency which involves having a second MCP. A colleague of mine who is a Microsoft Certified Developer registered his MCP with iQubed, so I thought I’d completed the competency. However, when I looked at the “Achievements & Assessments” section I realised his MCP wouldn’t count for the Networking Infrastructure competency, doh! It does make sense but is a little frustrating. Gaining the competency would mean iQubed has sufficient partner points to move to Certified Partner. This is one of the advantages of the SBSC programme in that it gives you a very achieveable route to Certified Partner Status.

Most of the arguments that I’ve heard is to make the re-enrollment criteria as tough as possible. The UK is the only place to be doing this and I’m sure this won’t be a static thing. There’s some interesting times ahead!

This is old news now, the announcement came out on 13th November that Sun was finally open sourcing Java. Sun has been under intense pressure for many years to do this but has always resisted. I don’t think this decision has come about just because Sun wants to be a good community member but also the increasing competition it is getting from .NET technologies. If you want some great cross platform applications then Java is hard to beat. It’s runtime will run on virtually any OS platform out there. This is one area that Java still leads .NET by quite a long way and it’s not surprising that many financial applications are developed using Java EE. It’s not surprising that Microsoft decided that this Java stuff was actually quite good and decided to develop C# and the CLR. I’ve done quite a bit of software development using Java and when I first looked at C#, I did a double take because I thought I was looking at Java! Now what’s that phrase we use with Microsoft? “Embrace and Extend”! At least this makes learning C# really easy from a syntatic and semantic point of view. Even programming in VB.NET is bearable now because what used to be thought of as a “mickey mouse” language (I know people will disagree with that!) has some sunstance to it because no matter whether you code in C#, VB.NET or C++ then this will all get compiled down in to the same IL bytecode to be executed by the CLR, all with the same runtime enforcements by the runtime environment. The point is that IL is flexible enough to support different languages, so maybe now Java is open source its bytecode representation will be extended to allow C# to be run on the Java Runtime Environment.

Interesting survey from CIO Insight site which has done a survey in the US as to what CIOs think of their most important IT vendors. Overall the news is not good as overall satisfaction is down both on reliability and loyalty. Microsoft makes it in to number 24 on the Top 40 list whereas Red Hat is at joint number 3. The figures are not pretty for Microsoft with 49% (rated as excellent or good) for meeting expectations for lowering costs and 49% for being flexible and responsive, although paradocially 80% would continue to do business with Microsoft. This is the strange thing about Microsoft, it can do relatively poorly in a survey such as this but it’s consolidated its market share in almost all areas and recently had financial figures which beat analyst forecasts. I think this highlights some frustation that CIOs feel that there is relatively little choice in certain key technology areas. Interesting that Red Hat is 3rd but was number 1 last year!

Honestly, I am not scouring Microsoft Blog sites to find the strangest/funniest postings but this one really did stick out. Mainly because Jo Carpenter seems such a sweet innocent person and I’ve listened to her on one of the Online Events and there was no indication of this desire for big guns! Here in Britain we just go out and have a few beers after work! Remind me not to upset anyone at Microsoft!!

What with the Partner Perspectives Team and this, they are all just crazy but in a good way! I think?

These were the questions that were asked of me by the nice man from Microsoft called Richard as part of the Small Business Specialist survey. So what were my answers? Well, hmm, may be, sort of, definitely, plans to rule the IT World by next Christmas at least! Doesn’t sound convincing does it? The reality is that there is no plan other than what exists in my head and in there exists some wonderful grand designs, beautifully and intricately interwoven. How could they fail? Quite easily is the answer and the harsh reality! Yes, I have the best intentions of getting those thoughts down on paper and developing a coherent strategy but there always seems to be something slightly more interesting to do. It’s all Microsoft’s fault, they keep sending details of all these new technologies and being a techy person you can’t help but want to play!

Now, it’s not that I can’t write a Business Plan or Marketing plan, in fact I’m rather good at doing stuff like that. When you look deep down, you realise, if you’re honest with yourself, that asking these questions might mean you get some answers that you don’t really like! It’s easier to submerge yourself in geekiness than to face reality!

But plans are afoot to rectify this but plans amount to nothing if there is no execution, so only time will tell!!

I think Captain Campaign should make a guest appearance at the Small Business Symposium! Who’d dress up in the outfit??

If you’re interested you can get the tender documents from its current website. You’ll have to act quickly as the date to register interest is not far away.