A new normal

If you went back to 1820 or even 1966, all the sudden changes would surprise you. And the same is true for someone who came forward to today.

We’ve got a deep-seated desire for things to go back to normal, the way we were used to. But this, this moment of ours is now normal.

For now. And later there will be another normal.

There is no “the new normal”.

There’s simply the normal of now.

A new normal. This too shall pass.

Keep on Dancing..

Joyce will be 13 this Friday, that got me thinking back to Silke at that age and remembering ..... 

"Keep on dancing
Like it was the last thing you did in your life
Keep on dancing
You're gonna have to sacrifice
Keep on dancing
And dance with a beautiful smile
Keep on dancing, dancing
Dance for the rest of your life."

Plenty of dancing, optimism and symbolism in this video from George Harrison. 

Leaving home for the first time (shrouded by fog), being off balance and wondering which direction to go (middle of the street on the double yellow lines), letting go of our childish ways (playground), growing in the sunshine (the garden), first love then lit by sunlight (forbidden forest), first real boyfriend and dancing into the future with optimism, idealism and hope.

(The video was made by fans and the Harrison estate selected the best of the entries. This was the one that won. Doesn't get much better than this down memory lane even if the hair colour is wrong and the dancing is not quite as good as Silke's in those days.)

Gall's Law

Reflections on perbit Insight before 2020.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

However he did add a qualifier "A simple system may or may not work."

-John Gall

See also Systemantics.

Work is a hobby

One of the reasons I still go into work every day is that I still want to try being a software developer in an artistic context. 
I've always seen software as a creative thing, like writing, painting or sculpting, but most of my friends can't seem to process this idea.

I've worked in Dublin, Trossingen, Altenberge and with customers all over Europe from Paris to Belgrade. Now when asked what I'm doing I get blank stares when I say I create software as an individual.

But why do you work?
I work for myself.
Who do you sell it to? I don't sell it.
I do make some money from time to time, by selling something I've created, but most of what I create doesn't make money, the opposite, it costs me money to make it.

I got lucky with Wolfgang and perbit, the company grew and our products were successful and we sold them for a long time to companies all over Germany. I enjoyed being a manager and was able to do the job, sort of, but now every day when I wake up, I'd rather create something than manage something. I don't like being responsible for other people's careers any more. So my manager days are over. It worked well for a long time and the money we made has made it possible for me to live a creative life, which is where I am most comfortable now.

I make software for others. More recently I've made products only for myself, with good results. Something new happens when you relax the assumption that software has to be easy to learn. People have a hard time understanding that you can do art with materials such as compilers, servers, editors, networks, display screens, etc. In general they have no idea what those things are but they're similar to the raw materials of writing (plot, character, story etc.).

In a sense I want to go back to the early 90s, when the internet was still a twinkle in the eye, and I had the feeling that if we created simpler networked software products, people would use them. We've been here before with the birth of the PC.

The Tortoise and the Rabbit

This has been my favorite internet discovery of the last few months. I’ve watched it many times and thought about it.
See, the rabbit doesn’t lose because he gets tired. He loses because he gets confused about which direction to go. Did you notice how he stops in the middle and stares blankly as everyone around yells loudly about things he doesn’t understand ? 




As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits!

Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as it's reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. (Always put the user first.)

Destiny is all

A video by Matt Mahurin.



“You start at the end. You start with emptiness. You start with nothing. You start with the void… I lost my mother when I was 14. I learned so much from her vanishing. I wish it had never happened. I wish that I had been older. But as a young teenager staring hard into that void, this is where a certain life-force gathered pace in me. Where a certain defiance began. To defy the odds. To defy people’s expectation. To defy death itself. To rob it of it’s power over me or anyone else…
-Bono.

perbit cloud

Stufe 1, Zukunftsvision Dezember 2009 und noch aktuell möchte ich behaupten. 

Toü 10 AWS-EC2 Customers 2018

Based on EC2 monthly spend, here are the top 10 Amazon AWS customers:

1. Netflix - $19 million
   
2. Twitch - $15 million
3. LinkedIn - $13 million
4. Facebook - $11 million
5. Turner Broadcasting - $10 million
6. BBC - $9 million
7. Baidu - $9 million
8. ESPN - $8 million
9. Adobe - $8 million
10. Twitter - $7 million

Jeff Bezos is very excited about the AWS business and he believes – like the rest of the leadership team does – that in the fullness of time - it is very possible that AWS could be the biggest business at Amazon.

Frohe Weihnachten!

Frohe Weihnachten an alle perbit'ler und einen guten Start ins neue Jahr mit der Cloud und Azure.

Customers 2017

Amazon’s energy internally comes from its desire to impress its customers. This means reinventing normal and delivering products before customers even know they want them. Some companies may rely on customer surveys and market research to understand their users. This is especially dangerous when designing and inventing new products. 

“Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition.”

“A remarkable customer experience starts with the heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.”

Überlebensstrategie für die digitale Transformation

Kleinere Unternehmen haben große Chancen in der digitalen Ära – vorausgesetzt sie gehen sie mit der richtigen Einstellung an. Gewinnen kann aber nur, wer das eigene Geschäft durch die Augen des Kunden betrachtet und versteht, dass hohes Innovationstempo der Schlüssel zu nachhaltigem Wachstum ist. 

Die digitale Ära hat längst begonnen. Unternehmen, die das noch nicht erkannt haben, werden zurückfallen. Wir haben gesehen, dass Startups oder Nischenanbieter in vielen Branchen eine Revolution losgetreten haben. Man braucht sich nur die Unterhaltungs- und die Musikindustrie anzusehen, wo Streaming Services den Produzenten physischer Produkte den Rang abgelaufen haben.

Die Digitalisierung ermöglicht es auch den Kleinsten, groß zu denken, weil sie ihnen Technologien in die Hände legt, die früher zu teuer und schwer zu bekommen waren. Der Einsatz moderner Technologien alleine differenziert jedoch noch nicht. Man muss sie mit der Leidenschaft kombinieren, die Interessen seiner Kunden konsequent in den Fokus zu rücken.

Digitalisierung beginnt mit der richtigen Einstellung – nämlich einer, die darauf abzielt, innovative digitale Erlebnisse zu schaffen. Im Interesse des Kunden kontinuierlich zu experimentieren war das Grundprinzip damals bei Pers-Info, als auch heute bei Insight.

 

Vision or Goal?

Almost everyone knows the importance of vision for a leader. The problem is most leaders don’t properly articulate a vision. “Unity,” “growth,” or “a brighter future” are not visions. Nor is some financial target to be delivered by the year 2020. The latter is a goal, the former is nothing more than nice words and will not inspire action.

A true vision paints a clear picture of what the future could look like if everything goes well. It is an ideal. And for it to inspire people to act, that vision has to describe a future that would benefit an outside population. It is not simply a reflection of a company’s aspirations (“to be the biggest,” “the best” or “the most respected,” for example).

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs talked about The Revolution, a time in which individuals would have the power to stand up to The Corporation. The personal computer was the tool to advance towards that vision. It was a vision for the people, the future users.

Too many leaders think the plan is more important than the vision. The reality however, is the complete opposite. A plan is uncertain, changeable and sometimes flawed. It is the vision that must be immovable, fixed and inspiring.

Planning for the Future

Planning for the future is not just some idea from the modern world, it is what Jesus tells his followers they must do in Saint Luke Chapter 14. He tells them they must be as sensible as a builder constructing a tower or a king facing a war.

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, "this fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.”

Like the builder and the king in Jesus’ teaching, we at perbit need to sit down and think.

Amazon AWS baut Vorsprung aus

Amazon owns the cloud computing market so thoroughly, and is so far ahead in market share and features, that it's "game over" for other contenders, much the same way that Google owns the internet search ad market today.

 

Most people see the cloud as a race between market leader Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, with other players like IBM also in the mix.

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO says the others are years behind.

 

"If you look at other cloud providers in the market, there's quite a few of them still sort of in the phase where AWS was five, six years ago — in 2010 — at the moment we were still much more focused on the infrastructure side of things than the sort of rich collection of services."

"This is not a winner-takes all market," Vogel says. "I think given the changes we've seen in the last 10 years it's hard to predict which are the players that will be left in 10 years from now, or who will be the main players in the market. I definitely think AWS will be there and have a prominent role in that world."

"Do I think there will be less and less data centers over time?" Vogels says. "Yes, absolutely."

Make AWS easier. please

Everyone says we should teach kids to code, what if instead we made it so that the machines they're using didn't need so much coding? Amazon really has something good with AWS, the way we should all be doing computing in the future, but now it requires people to know too much to get the simple result most people will want. 

I'm a longtime user/customer of Amazon Web Services, going all the way back to the 2006 when they rolled out S3, their basic storage system.

My websites are S3 buckets. I have an 3 EC2 instances that run my apps and Insight. I use Route 53 to manage domains. 

I probably would use more of their services, but they're so damned hard to get started with. Which is a shame because once you've climbed the hill, they're not that hard to use.


Typically I have to approach a product several times, often over a period of months, before the clutter gets out of the way, and the steps-to-start reveal themselves. When I look at the docs, I can tell right off that I now have to learn a lot of extra concepts before I get to Hello World. Usually it takes a few approaches over months before I break through and discover how to use one of these toolkits. There are so many concepts they use that I don't understand, that's why I have to approach and re-approach. Most of their competitors are no better, by thhe way.


They really ought to fix this. 

Keeping in touch

A revolution in human society has taken place with barely a word of comment. Older people might complain about young people inseparable from their smartphones, but the complaints are unheard, ineffectual. In ten years time, it will be hard to imagine what life was like before the smartphone revolution. Even now, there are moments when it is an effort for me to remember what life was like before the world became accessible from a device in my pocket.

It would demand a shift back fifty years for me to be sixteen or seventeen again, how did we stay in touch? It was difficult. Regular contact was with those from your own village or those you met at school; it was face to face conversation. Telephone calls were made from boxes and demanded penny and shilling coins. Many people did not have telephones, so they could only be called if they went to a public phonebox themselves, which meant the call had to be pre-arranged, and if pre-arrangement was necessary, it was much easier to say whatever needed to be said when you met someone, rather than trying to arrange a call, which, anyway, was expensive when you had only a few coins in your pocket. The other way of communicating was writing letters, but a letter posted on a Friday would probably receive no answer until Tuesday, it did not make for lively conversation.

To be honest, I would have loved to have grown up in the age of smartphones, in an age when the world’s information is only a google search away, in an age when conversations with friends need never end, in an age when no-one is cut off, when no-one has to be isolated.

In forty years time, Joyce will probably laugh remembering the primitive devices we had in 2016. We can no more imagine the world in 2056 than teenage boys with long hair and flared trousers could have imagined the smartphones we have now.

Maybe Handball...

... instead of Football? Got my official T-Shirt today anyway, the day before my 9th birthday. Looking good! 

Happy leap year day everybody!

I can see clearly now, or soon..

Here I am in the Augenklinik in Tuttlungen 20 minutes after my successfull eye operation last Tuesday. Thanks to the team that took such great care of me, especially to Dr. Mathey for his steady hands and June for the ambulance service. It's nice to have it over and done with. 

The official term for what took place is "pars plana vitrectomy with membrane peeling".
Sometimes, as a result of immune system response to protect the retina, cells converge in the macular area as the vitreous ages and pulls away in posterior vitreous detachment (PVD). Usually it occurs in one eye first, and may cause double vision if the image from one eye is too different from the image of the other eye. The distortions can make objects look different in size (usually larger = macropsia), especially in the central portion of the visual field, creating a localized or field dependent aniseikonia that cannot be fully corrected optically with glasses. Partial correction often improves the binocular vision considerably though. In the young (under 50 years of age), these cells occasionally pull free and disintegrate on their own; but in the majority of sufferers (over 60 years of age) the condition is permanent. The underlying photoreceptor cells, rod cells and cone cells, are usually not damaged unless the membrane becomes quite thick and hard; so usually there is no macular degeneration. Surgeons can remove or peel the membrane through the sclera and improve vision by 2 or more Snellen lines. Usually the vitreous is replaced at the same time with clear (BSS) fluid, in a vitrectomy. There is no good evidence for any preventive actions, since it appears this is a natural response to aging changes in the vitreous 

So make sure you have your eyes tested before you're 60 so that you can still climb trees with your grandchildren, right Joyce?

  

Selling Kunst again

Starting to work on a new Website for Gerhard Messner raises the old question of how much influence the customer should have on the design. There are few illustrators who have a more recognizable look (and a longer productive career) than Milton Glaser.

Here's the thing: When he started out, he wasn't THE Milton Glaser. He was some guy hoping for work. The best design rule, then, is that you can't give the client what he thinks he wants.

You have to give the client work that you want your name on. Work that reflects your vision, your contribution and your hand.That makes it really difficult at first. Almost impossible sometimes. But if I ignore this rule because the pressure is on, it will never get easier.

So, Bootstrap it is!

Browser compatability now

In 1994, when Netscape Navigator was the most popular web browser, Marc Andreessen declared the browser would replace the OS. Clearly aimed at Microsoft, who proved them wrong with Windows 95, it still was a sign of things to come.


Now, Chromebooks and web-based tools like Google Apps routinely put everything on the Web. Faster, smaller, much cheaper computers, twenty years of development plus routine access to broadband have made “everything on the web” (or in the cloud) routine for us.

Up to recently however browser compatibility was a big headache. Now Html5 has changed all that, browser + Html5 = new OS! 

Html5test.com measures Html5 compatibility and provides a point score. Today Firefox 39 scores 467 of 555 points; Chrome 44 scores 526; Safari 9.0, 400.) In general, the four main browsers have improved hugely in the last few years.

Better browsers were supposed to replace operating systems since 1994.

Instead, they’re slowly replacing local applications, especially for mobile. Today, companies write applications and apps for iOS and Android, which you download through the App Store. Over time, many apps will become HTML5 wrappers, using CSS3 or JavaScript for many functions, then most, then all.

When browsers become “all” HTML5 or 5.1 (due next year), then more complex programs like Insight can become an URL instead of an app? Maybe.