Zeros and Ones Zeros and Ones News and findings from programming applications using todays tools available. Articles
Why a lot of large corporation software projects fail
2008-01-18 16:51:00 I have worked with a lot of large corporations, and as a lot of others reading this might understand all too well, getting anything done always takes far longer than doing the same thing for a small business (SME)Usually the people who hold the purse strings don't talk to the people who want the system, and there are company procedures that have to be completed before a design is signed off as ready to implement. In fact I remember an old job where the pressure really came on (from the accounts department) to get the code written and delivered. Then once we spent all hours hitting the deadline, we found out that the IT department weren't ready for the system for another 4 months, and it sat on the shelf until they were ready. Aaah well, you have to laugh (or cry).Well very recently, I am working through another software house similar to mine, which in turn works for a very large corporation.Because my contact isn't the major company then I can sit back and laugh at the procedure ... More About: Software , Projects , Corporation , Large
Is it worth grabbing small website jobs any more?
2008-01-16 12:09:00 We've been doing small business websites, which used to be bread and butter work, especially when we were sole traders. But recently we've been making the decision to throw back some of these jobs, and give more of an advice role in the customer producing their own websites.More often than not, the customer doesn't appreciate the work involved in doing something like set up a simple website, with contacts page, and allowing to change content on a few pages. Perhaps adding a gallery for uploading previous work.By the time we tie down branding and logo, ease of use, navigation, and guiding the users eyes around the pages. Then building the structure and the admin side CMS, and making it SEO friendly (W3 standards, and all the Google toys set up) your looking at minimum 3 days work so over a grand and creeping up to 6K.The customers response might be:"Ooooph I only want a 6 page website, I was thinking more along the lines of 3 or 400 sheets?"So is the market coming to an end for th... More About: Website , Jobs , Small , Virtual
New Virtual Reality Headset
2007-12-13 11:55:00 Well I always swore by the Z800 headset back when I was thinking of writing software, tools and games for the Virtual Reality market.However a new bad boy has just come on the scene. The VR920 from eDimensional.Now I have always liked ED because they are reasonably priced for some pretty top end geeky gadgets. I have had the shutter glasses for years now, and although I have had to wear them upside down because I use a projector (Image coming from behind me rather than in front of me). It still made games absolutely awesome. Plus with me writing games for the Wiimote for the PC, it made it possible to have a 3D wall with wiimote inputs making for some pretty realistic emmersive environments on my PC. There were limitations however that you could only see it when looking forward. Well the Z800 for £500 fixed that, and now so does this little gadget for around £200.It contains pretty much the same stuff as the Z800 (Head tracking, dual visual displays allowing 1024x768 displays and su... More About: Virtual Reality , Headset , Ality
Mobile working
2007-11-08 13:09:00 Well I am seeing more and more now about how mobile devices are taking off and people are talking about how easy it is to work while on the move.I have seen recent success stories, and other not so successfuly stories.This is at the front of my mind at the moment because I have just finished writing a project for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 Devices.I have always liked the Microsoft Compact Framework, right back from when I was working with Windows Mobile 2002, and leaps forward with some of the frameworks communications tools and GUI controls have made recent projects very impressive for the end users. The latest application I have written is to tie in with a Server application written by us so that it can go out in the field and gather data.It connects to the network either by a Cradle to PC connection, or a CF card with a SIM card connected to a networks GPRS, or with WiFi hotspots.Thinking about 2 of these 3 ways of connecting (GPRS and WiFi) I thought I would write ... More About: Working , Workin
We are nearly 2 years old
2007-10-18 15:08:00 Well its been nearly 2 years since us 2 freelancers decided to club together and start up our IT Software Solutions company and things have progressively got better and better.We are still working on bread and butter websites and applications, as well as moving into some technologies that personally interest us.We should be rewriting our website soon. One thing that we had the website for was to innitially give us some web presence and give me something to test Search Engine Optimisation with. Over the time we have done loads of work and great things for other people's websites but alas we have left ours looking like a drab home made list of qualifications and customers (which hasnt been updated either).We have also gained some very artistic flash developers who have taught us a thing or two about making a website desireable to use.From all of this knowledge and understanding where we want to go we now have ideas to make us a super duper dedicated management server system that will... More About: Years , Earl
My dad said grow up stupid. So I did... Duuurr :)
2007-10-01 10:58:00 Well we are growing at a good pace now, and I can see that there are some things you have to really make sure you keep a control of as a company before they get out of hand.I guess you have to decide how large you want to get as a company and where your 5 year plan will take you.Do you want an office with permanent employees?Do you want to spend all your time on the golf course making the deals?Do you want to remain a code monkey?It started off that we, like most other small companies didn?t want to refuse any work, because why would you turn down business if it is coming in?It then gets to the stage where you find out you are spending a good 50% of your time on the phone and in meetings procuring new work, and a lot of the remaining time project leading teams to carry out the work on jobs you have mapped out.It then dawns on you that you are now spending less and less time doing the thing you love, using tools to solve problems. I love sitting down at a machine, and I have a langua... More About: System , Stupid , Grow , Cambridge
Business is booming
2007-06-15 16:35:00 Well the IT industry seems to have taken off recently.I was getting right into the Virtual Reality research and where it could go when all of a sudden tons of work came in.I have been carrying on with search engine optimisation for a customer, which I may as well mention here: Ahem! (advert coming up.)For all your CIM, Marketing qualifications, and Chartered Institute of Marketing courses, we offer Distance learning to get your diploma. Check out our corporate deals.Anyway now thats out of the way, yeah I have also been having to take on employees. That is a change. All of a sudden I am trying to be my usual recluse code monkey, and now I am having to be in contact to get some others up to speed with us.It's going great and after a few late nights and strong coffees I think we have come through it fairly unscathed.We are still writing software applications and most of our customers are still based in the Anglia region, but we seem to be moving a lot more onto flash work now and int... More About: Business , Boom , Ming , Sine
Virtual Reality is coming to a PC near you.
2007-04-12 14:14:00 Hi again. A quick update to my blog now to show some of what I have been playing with since I wrote my first game to use the Wiimote and nunchuk.It is obvious that the main intention of the Wiimote and Nunchuk is to provide the gamer with an input device that is a little more realistic than just a joypad with buttons. Part of the Wii's huge popularity at the moment is the fact that you can swing, punch and swoosh the control about and it reacts. People at the moment dont really care that the tennis game doesnt allow you to position your player on the court and tactically read what the other player is doing, as long as it hits the ball when you swing your Wiimote then that is enough for now.So I had a play around with Wiimote and Nunchuk, and it brought back all of the memories of going to the sea front with my dad when I was a nipper and putting £2.00 (which was a fortune in them days) into the VR machines on the sea front arcades and playing a Dogfighting game with the huge Virtua... More About: Reality , Virtual Reality , Near , Virtual , Real
My first PC Wiimote and Nunchuk Game
2007-04-11 18:24:00 I have done it.I am so proud.To be honest anybody looking at it may think that it looks like a load of old pants, but I dont care. There was a fair bit of work involved, but I have completed my first game using a Wii mote and a Nunchuk to control it.At the moment I havent sorted out the 3D engine license to mass release it so it is playable for people who have a license for the TV3D engine only.I intend to let anybody have the source code who wants it and who wants to play around with it and make their own additions to it. If you do make any changes then could you please let me know either in this blog or on my website to let me know what other people want from wiimote games.Anyway the game:It is basically a punching game. I thought along the lines of the punching games at an arcade where you punch as hard as you can and see the results on the screen.When you start up the game you will see a smiley face and a couple of boxing gloves and you punch using the Wiimote and the Nunchuk to ... More About: Game , First , Chuk
Wiimote PC 3d Games controller motion logger
2007-03-31 01:36:00 This is an update for where I am with writing PC Game s that utilise the Wii mote and Nunchuk.I firstly got a blank 3D world going in TrueVision3D which I have mentioned on the previous post. Once I had this world with a wiimote and my banana I realised that it is actually a difficult task to study the acceleration outputs of the wiimote and nunchuk and to translate them into motions in a 3D world. I decided to implement the C# WiimoteLib version 1.0.1.0 from Brian Peek (thanks Brian). There is a test program that comes with his driver that displays all of the outputs of the Wiimote and Nunchuk in a nice little windows application. I have taken that test program and edited it a bit to give me some reuslts that I want to find useful and use for motion translations with my 3D games. The outputs displayed that I am interested in are straight forward float numbers showing the X,Y, and Z axis accelerations of the Wiimote and Nunchuk (-0.5 to +0.5 in strength). I figured that there would be... More About: Roll , Motion
Wiimote and Nunchuk applications on the PC
2007-03-16 11:12:00 I have had a couple of days spare between jobs and I thought about some viral marketing for our sister website for fun and useful applications to experiment with. Partly because it is always good for a company, but also because it gives me a chance to write something funky and fun.Games are always a passion of mine, and I have gained some skills recently with the Truevision 3D games engine, specifically to do with First Person Shooter (FPS) style gameplay. While looking around I became amazed by the breakthrough that has been made with getting the nintendo wii controls to work on a PC. There seems to be a few drivers emerging now and I have had a look at them to see what would aid me the best in a C# set of PC 3D games.The best used wiimote driver has to be the GlovePIE set up.I have found problems with this, in that you have to run the GlovePIE program and run a script before you can run your own program. This is too fidly for me. I then saw that somebody had embedded a wiimote dri... More About: Applications , Wii , Cat , Application , Wiimote
altFusion is now running on other domain names.
2007-03-12 10:56:00 We have recently registered some other domain names. I know that this doesn?t help out with Search Engine Optimisation for our main Cambridge and Peterborough Software IT website, but it does stop anybody else buying up the domains and hurting our web presence. Each domain also has their own page ranking for the pages inside them, and although I am not actively going to promote the other domains, they might bring more traffic in just by being there and allowing indexing over time.Domain s we have now registered and a brief description about that type of domain top level extension are:1/http://www.altfusion.biz/ - A general online business extension and altFusion is an IT online business.2/http://www.altfusion.net/ - A general extension to say we are on the Internet. 3/http://www.altfusion.org/ - A worldwide organisation domain. As long as it isn?t postfixed with the uk subdomain then there aren?t restrictions on it like it having to be a charity organisation.4/http://www.altfusion.eu... More About: Running , Domain Names , Domain Name , Other
Google Apps.
2007-03-06 18:40:02 It was brought to my attention recently that Googl e Apps had re-branded and are now trying out different tools to help people with their web presence.We wanted to register a new domain to have a play around with this, so I joined up and registered a test domain here: Cambridge and Peterborough software developers test partner website.So I signed up at the Google Apps pages, and registered the domain.From the front menu there is a bit of confusion with 2 categories of pages to sort out. There is a link to sort out the start pages, and there is a link to sort out the web pages.I didn?t know the difference, so I thought I would sort out the start pages seeing as it makes sense to start at the start.What happened then was I sorted out the content, and put on a couple of blogs, a weather report, and a calendar. I then waited to see this start page turn up at the http://www.altfuzion.com and after about a week, it still never turned up. It always stayed at start.altfuzion.comSo I went bac...
Problems with small software house businesses trying to get those larger co
2007-03-03 00:37:01 I don?t want this post to be a rant, because it is a serious question that I want to explore and invite comments on, to really try and find an answer to this problem.The main underlying question is:Why should we have to charge £1000+ a day to get the big contracts?It's not a bad thing I guess if you can keep getting those contracts, but consider the following scenario:Buying a car.When buying a car you don?t go for the cheapest because you perhaps want a little bit of luxury (say an air bag and an alarm).You wouldn?t buy the most expensive car because you know that in this industry you can sometimes pay a lot for essentially the badge on the bonnet.So you would read reviews, and take test drives and weigh it up and try and find something in the middle that offers good value for money.So there is a massive difference between the car (and other) industry and the software industry that I would like to try and highlight.After spending my time in the saddle getting experience work... More About: Software , Business , House , Businesse , With
Successful search engine optimisation
2007-02-26 18:33:06 While trying to learn something about Search Engine Optimisation, I had a customer that wanted their website promoting.This was great as it gave me the opportunity to hone my skills while earning a little bit of money from it. This opportunity would hopefully allow me to get some experience and reputation to say that our company can now offer successful search engine optimisation and a solid online marketing plan for other small businesses that want to raise their web presence.My task:The main search engines to optimise for were the main 3 for the UK and .COM so that was:www.google.comwww.google.co.ukwww.yah oo.comwww.yaho.co.ukwww.msn.comwww.msn.co .ukand I was optimising mainly for the following 3 search terms:CIM, CMI, ISMMWith a view to secondary optimisation for the following search terms:marketing course, Marketing qualification, Marketing course London, CIM Course, CIM London, and CIM qualificationI think I have come into this at the right time because things are changing, espe... More About: Search Engine , Success , Sati
Anglia software developers - how far afield do we go.
2007-02-19 00:30:02 I thought I would write a little something about my marketing findings and the way that standard search engine optimisation (SEO) seems to be pulling solutions away from geographic locations. This is also generating new problems for customers who are looking for a bespoke I.T. solutions provider and would prefer to find one near to them.altFusion is based in Anglia (offices in Cambridge and Peterborough). I would say that only about twenty five percent of our customers are actually based in the Anglia region however. Currently there's the Cambridge Professional Academy based in Cambridge, The Edge Agency based in Elseworth, BEA building and clay products based in Huntingdon, and St Edmundsbury and Uttlesford Councils.This doesn?t usually produce a problem in that we can work remotely, and would only need to meet the customer once to gain their trust and then we can be left to work and communicate through the internet to build their bespoke applications.Some solutions do require mor... More About: Software , Developer , War , Ware , Soft
Sitemaps - What is ROR and should we use it
2007-02-15 00:27:02 I have been hearing a lot of buzzwords lately about ROR sitemaps.I want to write a little something here about my findings with it.I thought I was well up with promoting websites by having a normal XML sitemap, and submitting it to Google webmaster tools, and Yahoo sitemaps, and then the search engines would know all about it and that would be it.I tend to keep sitemaps simple with a list of pages in the site, and usually I keep all priorities at 0.5.an example of one of these sitemaps is here:altFusion software website sitemapAlthough I have also spent a little more time over sitemaps and given each page a different priority and painstakingly gone through it by hand to try and optimise it.An example of one of these sitemaps is here:marketing course sitemapRecently however I have been hearing that the sitemaps I have got are now old hat, and I want to be looking at ROR (Resources of a Resource) Format.In short - ROR should be a form of sitemap that can tell search engines a lot more... More About: Site , What , Hat , Item , Sitemap
My First Blog
2007-02-13 12:25:01 Hi there, I have just signed up for this and I am not sure what to write here so I will just introduce meself.I am co founder of a UK software house. At the moment I am upgrading a web site and application for a CIM ISMM and CMI training company. I wont run on too long about that. Other jobs and interests I have are writing 3D games. I have come up through the ranks of poking pixels and writing games for the C64 and have recently completed a nice 3D far cry style game on the PC using the TV3D engine. I am looking forward to getting to grips wth the XNA and seeing what I can write cross platform for the 360 and PC.Although I am also very excited about the new Wii, my GF keeps running around saying I want a Wii. I think there is a lot of scope for them allowing homebrew flash games to be written for it and I wouldnt mind seeing a conversion of the Yeti Sports put on there, but I guess that will come with time.Anyway that is my first post.This is me.I will speak more in future and find... More About: Blog , First
Tecnorati account activation
2007-02-13 12:25:01 Technorati Profile More About: Nora , Count , Tecno , Account , Activation
wow SEO tools are vast out there
2007-02-13 12:25:01 Well I thought I knew a fair bit about SEO, and I am on a mission at a minute to see what I can do for these Marketing course trainers, and of course my own software company.I signed up to Google analytics, and webmasters tools and google base, and all other things I could think of to help me out, and I have now started to take a look at what Yahoo has to offer.It is pretty fantastic with its API. I am at present using it to write a testing tool for me where I can enter a search string and then go through the results to see what position the website I am interested in comes up at.I did see ready made tools to do this, but they tend to only go up to the first 50 results which isnt very good when you are starting out for a company and their results start at 350+.Anyway I will try and figure out what Yahoo has got to offer, and how it compares to Google tools, and finally I want to see what msn has to bring to the SEO table.I will write up my thoughts here as I get them. More About: Tools , Wow , Tool , Out There , Here
It seems that writing testing tools arent really going to work
2007-02-13 12:25:01 I have spent a week trying to see if I can write a nifty little DotNet site to help test out some of the SEO things I am doing.One thing that I found out that was taking ages was to see where a web site is coming in the search results.To give an example, Google analytics gives a wealth of information, and lets you know where people are coming to your site from, and all manner of things you can analyse. Also the Google webmaster tools are a fantastic wealth of information about how the bots are analysing the site, and what is right and wrong. Of course this isn't what the customer cares about though. What the customer wants to know is when I type in "XXX" where does my site come up in the results? and when will it be in the top 10? This took a while to test.I have already mentioned that one customer was http://www.professionalacademy.com and they wanted to be coming higher in the searches for CIM, CIM course, and marketing course so that they dont have to rely on Adwords.Now to test... More About: Tools , Writing , Work , Testing , Tool
Working with a new graphics man
2007-02-13 12:25:01 altFusion are pleased to announce bringing on board the graphical skills of Dave Rendle to help with the styling and graphics of phase 2 of a 3D Game for the PC.The game is a new area of development for altfusion, and phase 1 was accepted back in November which proved to be a successful transition from current applications that altfusion have tackled.We look forward to what the team can present for the next phase, and hopefully we can continue to provide this kind of solution with a view to move into the Console market as well as PC. More About: Graphics , Work , With , King , Graphic |
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