This year I figured I will join the masses of crazed Apple fans and add my two cents worth of predictions ahead of next week’s Macworld Expo. Here are my top 3 predictions for Macworld Expo.

• One more thing… This is a no brainer. Steve Jobs will no doubt say these three words followed by announcing some new product line. I reckon this new product will be a touchscreen tablet. Essentially a bigger version of the iPod touch, but with a focus on productivity.
• 3G iPhone: With Australia expecting to see an iPhone introduced this year then Apple really needs to release a 3G version of its iPhone so that it can compete in Australia. I am fairly confident that this will be announced at Macworld.
• Macbooks with Solid State Disks: The crowd would go nuts if Steve Jobs announces solid state disks across Apple’s Macbook range. Given that Sony was first to market with SSD laptops, then it is not unlikely that Apple will follow with their own range of SSD laptops.

Update
Looks like only one of the three predictions came true. The new Macbook Air comes with an optional solid state disk.

Today I sat an exam for a course on Financial Markets and Economics. I had spent my ThoughtWorks training budget on a finance course to increase my domain knowledge. My last three projects have all had something to do with the finance industry, so I thought it would be about time I freshened up on my understanding of securities, derivatives, debt financing, and monetary and fiscal policies. The course was quite demanding, especially since I underestimated how much spare time I actually have outside of office hours. I have therefore decided to ease back on my studies and focus on some chill-out time. I have accomplished a lot this year and I want to recharge the batteries for what will be a big year next year.

One of my photos that I took during a trip to Moreton Bay in Queensland was recently selected for a Schmap dynamic travel guide.

I was working in Brisbane earlier in the year and decided to spend one weekend sightseeing with Kimmy. Brett Dargan, a colleague at ThoughtWorks, recommended heading down to Moreton Bay as something to do. Kim and I caught the train down to Moreton Bay from Central station in Brisbane. We had coffee at one of the local cafes, then walked along the bay area taking photos. One of our photos (shown below) of the picturesque bay area was selected from our Flickr account by Schmaps for their Moreton Bay travel guide.

A couple of graduates recently started at ThoughtWorks Australia, and it was quite exciting to hear about their experiences at ThoughtWorks University in Bangalore. They spent the last 6 weeks in the Bangalore office learning about Agile software development, business analysis techniques, and object oriented programming. It brought back fond memories of my experiences at Immersion, which was not too long ago. There aren’t many companies that I know of that send their graduates overseas for induction, training, and an experience that will last a lifetime.

So it gives me great disappointment to find that there are not a lot of students in their final year of university in Australia that are aware of the opportunities on offer at ThoughtWorks. In fact I doubt many have even heard of ThoughtWorks. A couple weeks ago I accompanied a couple of my colleagues to UTS to give a presentation on what makes ThoughtWorks a great place to work, and to raise awareness of our graduate opportunities. We advertised the presentation, and even offered a chance to win a free iPod. We ticked all the right boxes according to Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. Guess how many students turned up? You are probably thinking the whole school of computer science right? Wrong. Would you believe zero, nudda, a big fat donut?!! Maybe university students in Australia have not heard of ThoughtWorks, or maybe they all have iPods.

So which companies will this year’s IT graduates be applying for? My guess is that they will be applying to the big 5 banks, Telstra, IBM, and HP, as they are all perceived to be safe career choices. Personally, I just don’t see the appeal of working for a big company, especially in the IT industry. If you want to improve your technical skills you have to work on a number of varying projects in different environments so that you can continually challenge yourself. Working for a consultancy like ThoughtWorks definitely exposes you to a lot of projects, and different technologies. I have worked at three different financial institutions in two different states so far this year, and each of these projects have given me the opportunity to further develop my technical capabilities. It would be hard to find this accelerated career development anywhere else.

If you want to be all you can be, then join the army. If you want to work for an exciting technology company and learn from the best in the IT industry then join ThoughtWorks. We have a number of awesome graduate opportunities on offer for developers and business analysts, so check them out.

I will be attending the Research Conversazione at my old Alma Mater, the University of Sydney at the end of the month to check out the best final year student projects. Hopefully the event will restore my faith in the next wave of IT graduates. I have high expectations given that most of the winners of the recent ACM computing challenge were from the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.

One of the pain points of pair programming is having to use different IDEs, especially if your team doesn’t standardise on a particular IDE. On the last few projects that I worked on, I found myself constantly shifting between IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, and switching between the different key mappings became annoying and sometimes disruptive.

In the end I discovered shortcuts in IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse that would make pair programming a lot easier. So instead of asking your pair what the shortcut is for a particular action in an IDE that you are not familiar with, you can just type Ctrl+Shift+A in IntelliJ IDEA or Ctrl+3 in Eclipse. Both of these commands will bring up a Mac-like Quicksilver prompt for you to type in an action that you want to launch.

For example, if you wanted to organise all your imports in a class, and you don’t know that it is either Ctrl+Shift+O in Eclipse or Ctrl+Alt+O in IntelliJ, then you can just bring up the action prompts and type in “import”, select the organise/optimise imports from the list of import options and hit enter, and magically your imports are reorganised.

The action prompt works for most commands that you want to do in both IDEs, so it makes it easier for you and your pair to switch between each other’s preferred IDEs without too much hassle.

… and it’s a Nokia n95!

My Sony Ericsson stopped working yesterday and I still had 5 months left on my 2 year contract with 3. It caused me a lot of problems yesterday as nobody could contact me, and I was even stranded at the airport because of this. Luckily when I got home I found a leaflet from 3 notifying me of a free upgrade. The upgrade meant that I didn’t have to pay out the rest of my existing contract, but only if I sign on again for another 2 years with a new phone. Talk about perfect timing!

After a quick review of the latest and greatest phones in Australia, I made my way to a 3 store to check out the Nokia n95 and the e65. The e65 seemed to be a decent phone, and many of its features were targeted towards business users. It has a smaller form factor than the n95 and I think I would have been happy with the e65. The reason I went with the n95 was that it converges a number of different devices into a single package. It has a phone, a web browser, digital camera, video camera, voice recorder, music player, and GPS all in one.

The 5 MP camera in the n95 was what sealed the deal. I wanted a new camera to replace my aging Nikon Minolta, and having a decent camera built into the phone saves having to purchase another device. Also there have been many moments when I wished I had a camera with me, and at one point I started carrying around a camera, just in case I stumbled across something that was worth turning into a happy snap. This phase soon wore off when the extra baggage kept weighing down my pants so much so that I almost got caught flashing my budgy smugglers. So with the n95 I am glad that I don’t have to carry around a camera, mp3 player, video camera, along with my mobile phone anymore. Happy days!

I also feel at ease with the news that Australia won’t be seeing the iPhone until 2008. But if this comparison between the iPhone and the n95 at CNET is anything to go by, then I’m sure that I have a phone that is as good, if not better than the current iPhone. So now I can sit back until my current mobile contract expires in 2 years, and wait for a better iPhone to arrive. Hopefully the iPhone in two years will have a replaceable battery, a better camera, GPS; and can support IM, MMS, and 3G.

After updating my site to use a cool new theme I decided to remove all the Google ads. The ads just made my site look tacky, and I wasn’t making any money from them. I get a lot of visitors to this blog, and those visits don’t translate into ad revenue. Internet advertising just isn’t that effective anymore. I reckon most people have learned to ignore ads that appear on a web site and therefore do not click on them. I don’t click on ads anymore as they just don’t warrant any attention from me. When scanning a web page I tend to filter out the ads, and I am sure that many other people do the same. So I see no point in having them on my site, especially since the monetary benefits for having them is negligible.

Connecting the Nintendo Wii to the Internet is quite easy, especially if you are connecting to an Apple Airport Express. However, if you don’t properly configure the Airport Express, then you will suffer slow downloads and constant timeout errors on your Wii. All you really need to do is configure the Airport Express so that the Channel option is set to 1 instead of Automatic in the AirPort tabbed page, then update the configuration of your Airport Express. Simple as that.

If you want to add security, then use WEP. Either 40 bit WEP or 128 bit WEP works with the Wii. Remember that 40 bit WEP requires a 5 character password key and the 128 bit WEP requires a 13 character password key. If you want to lock down your wireless network to a list of MAC addresses, then retrieve the MAC address of your Wii from the Internet settings, and add it to the Access Control of your Airport Express.

The other week I went back to uni to give an introductory presentation on Agile Software Development in an IT related course. From experience I knew that it was quite difficult to attract an audience of students to listen to a presentation from a guest presenter, especially since most of the content in the presentation would not be assesssable. So I informed the course coordinator that I would be bringing the recruiter from ThoughtWorks along so students can find out more about the job opportunities available. This worked out quite well given it was Careers Week at the University of Sydney.

I used to be involved in this particular course about two years ago, and at that time there were 250 students in the course. I had assumed that there would be as many students in the course this time around, and had convinced the recuiter that it would be worth her time to come along and speak to students that have an interest in an IT related career.

To my surprise there were no more than thirty students sitting in the lecture theatre, and this was a good turn out, as there were only about forty students enrolled in the course. So over the space of two years, enrollments in this course have reduced by roughly 80%! Furthermore, first year enrolments have dropped to only forty students across all Electrical, Computer, Software, Power, and Telecommunications degrees. So it begs the question, why aren’t students interested in an IT career anymore? Is this a lag effect from the Tech Wreck of 2002? It is hard not to link a decrease in enrolments to a lagging fallout from the dotcom bubble.

Year 12 leavers have probably been cautioned by their parents and older siblings that got burnt during the Dot Com bubble that a career in IT is not a lucrative or safe career. They could not be further from the truth. There is so much work out there that most companies are trying very hard to ramp up their IT business units. Technology is so much more ubiquitous today than it was 5 years ago, and it will only increase over the coming years. Businesses will always need to rely on technology going forward as consumers have become accustomed to buying books and Segways online. COnsumers and businesses today have a greater dependency on technology that there will always be a demand for people to staff IT related projects.

There is the concern that many IT projects in Australia are heading overseas to countries like India where labour is cheaper by comparison. The potential cost savings in offshoring an IT project is very tempting for many CIOs, and so many jobs are being lost to offshoring. However, there are a few switched on CIOs that are realising that offshoring IT projects is not the answer to delivering value to the business. The reason is that these projects are locked into the Waterfall model where all the specifications and design documents are drawn up in Australia, then shipped to India for development. Many of these projects fail when it comes to testing in the later stages, and projects run over time to address these defects, and costs blow out as a result. So the business doesn’t realise any value from these projects for up to two years, and the longer these projects get drawn out the greater the risk that the project becomes out of sync with the needs of the business. This would mean either scrapping the project or throwing more money at it to address changing requirements, both of these options are incredibly painful for any CIO to make.

As I mentioned before there are a few CIOs that are realising that offshoring is not the cost effective strategy that they first thought it would be. They are now looking into new ways of delivering IT projects, and are becoming very interested in Agile and Lean. Both methodologies allow the business to eliminate waste and reduce costs, and business value is realised earlier through shorter development cycles. Agile in particular works well when the development team works closely with the business, ideally in the same office, which means Agile projects are more successful when staffed by local developers. So over the next few years you’ll see a lot of work returning to Australia as businesses adopt a different approach to developing custom software solutions, as oppose to using a flawed methodology staffed by cheap offshore labour.

If I were a CIO working on a five year strategy I would definitely be looking at the state of the IT labour market, and the number of IT students coming through uni. I would be very concerned of a skills shortage in the coming years, especially when there are so few students that want to study IT courses at Universities.

Eventually the fundamental rules of economics will kick in when there is a high demand for local IT projects and a shortage of skilled professionals. This is good news for current IT professionals, as it would mean higher wages. Conversely this is bad for CIOs, as it would mean higher costs for the business to finance local projects, and a greater tendency to revert back to the offshore model of delivering software.

All this makes for an interesting conversation over a few schooners of beer, but the message needs to get out there: IT is back baby!

Damn this site is looking old! I’m going to have to change the theme one of these days. Hopefully I will have time after I submit my thesis in January next year. I will no doubt start working in late February, which will give me a month to work on a few little projects of my own, or to just have a good long holiday before I start full-time work in industry.

I am undecided as to whether I will use another blogging system, or continue to use Wordpress, but with a different theme. There is nothing wrong with Wordpress, except that I would like to start hacking my own blog, and I really don’t want to do that in PHP. Now that my hosting is with TextDrive, I am restricted to PHP, python, and ruby on rails apps. This rules out any possibility of using OpenACS, which is a web application framework that I’ve been using for the last 5 years. So it might be a good opportunity to do something different with rails or django.