Hello.

In 2005 a group of us working at IBM’s Hursley lab decided to start a blog about technology and what it was like to work here.

In the 11 years we’ve seen people join and leave, we’ve had weddings and babies, bought houses, had 120 breakfasts together and drunk many cups of tea. We’ve also seen the technology we work with span social media, virtual worlds, cloud, and AI. Some of it has been recorded here. We’ve had a few attempts to restart Eightbar but interest in reading and writing it has faded, so we decided to call it a day.

The content has all been archived and is accessible at: https://eightbar.eu-gb.mybluemix.net or you can download the whole thing at: https://github.com/shawdm/eightbar-static. In a few days we’ll redirect eightbar.co.uk and in a few weeks we’ll let the domain expire.

Most of the contributors are still writing their own blogs. All of them are on Twitter.

Alice Bartlett
http://alicebartlett.co.uk/

Andy Piper
https://andypiper.co.uk

Andy Stanford-Clark
http://stanford-clark.com

Ben Hardill
http://www.hardill.me.uk

Dale Lane
http://dalelane.co.uk

Darren Shaw
https://darrenshaw.org

Dave Braines

Gareth Jones
http://garethj.com

Graham White
http://gibbalog.blogspot.co.uk

Ian Hughes
http://www.feedingedge.co.uk

James Taylor
https://jtlog.wordpress.com

Jon Levell
http://www.coralbark.net

Josie Messa
https://josiemessa.wordpress.com

Laura Cowen
http://lauracowen.co.uk

Nick O’Leary
http://knolleary.net

Rob Smart
http://robsmart.co.uk

Roo Reynolds
http://rooreynolds.com

Thank you.
XOXO

Tackling Cancer with Machine Learning

For a recent Hack Day at work I spent some time working with one of my colleagues, Adrian Lee, on a little side project to see if we could detect cancer cells in a biopsy image.  We've only spent a couple of days on this so far but already the results are looking very promising with each of us working on a distinctly different part of the overall idea.

We held an open day in our department at work last month and I gave a lightening talk on the subject which you can see on YouTube:


There were a whole load of other talks given on the day that can be seen in the summary blog post over on the ETS (Emerging Technology Services) site.



Hursley 3D Printing Expo

D’oh, looks like I missed a swarm of 3d printers in Hursley recently! I wonder if anyone has printed a model of the house/site yet.

I’m still looking for even a vaguely plausible excuse to splash out on a 3d printer, but printing models or new 3d printers still isn’t quite enough to justify the money (or space these days)!


Highlights of Monki Gras 2013

At the end of January I was lucky enough to be given a ticket to a two day long software development conference called “Monki Gras” (named after the company that runs the event, Red Monk) in London.

The theme of the conference was “scaling craft”, a pretty ambiguous theme which over the next two days was nicely pinned down by the wide variety of speakers. This theme was roughly translated into answering the question: “how do we maintain quality when scaling up to mass production?”.

Some of the speakers invited included, most importantly, Phil Gilbert of Design@IBM fame, who discussed how he is trying to bring a culture of design into the company, and to name a few more: Rafe Colburn from Etsy, Chris Aniszczyk from Twitter, Shanley Kane from Basho, Steven Citron-Pousty from Redhat and Ted Nyman from Github.

The conference was more than just good speakers. Fantastic food (specifically Japanese and Vietnamese) was provided on both days for lunch, along with some craft beers; coffee was available all day from an artisan coffee company, and the evening entertainment was hosted at London Fields Brewery where we were given a five course meal cooked by a top London based street kitchen. Quality was a theme in every aspect of the conference that mattered, whereas the hall where most of the talks were given was quite plain and basic, but all attention was on the speakers.

The first question that was addressed by the speakers was that of “What is craft?”. Rafe Colburn did a great job of opening the conference by discussing the common misconceptions associated with “hand crafted treasures compared to mass produced crap”. Not everything that is made at home is high quality, and not everything that is massed produced is is low quality. There are benefits to both – craft maximises the skill and creativity of the individual artisan and mass production optimizes predictability and repeatability.

Other speakers approached this topic too: Chris Thorpe has set up a company called The Flexiscale Company where he uses 3D-scanning technology to scan rare train engines so they can be forever preserved in their current state. Using these scans he is then able to 3D-print accurate models of the trains to any scale a model train enthusiast would desire. I personally have never seen the attraction to model trains, but his talk was one of the highlights of the conference as it honestly and unintentionally captured something really special about craft – the unashamed enthusiasm and passion for what you do. This same enthusiasm was displayed in the talk given by Diane Mueller (ActiveState) about a personal project to geotag Totem Poles in the Pacific Northwest (at the end of her talk she invited anyone interested to join her in tagging the totem pole in Virginia Waters). Manufacturers were given a good slogan for this mentality by Chris: “Make things people want, rather than make people want things”.

So how does a software company maintain this sense of passion, and craftsmanship, when it is scaled up to a company the size of IBM? Phil Gilbert’s talk was centred around design, but he touched on this idea when he asserted that developers can lose sight of the value, and ultimately the end result, when they only work on a small part of a huge product (and as part of a small team within Message Broker development I sympathise). His solution was something known as “Commander’s Intent”, the idea that in battle all soldiers are briefed on the overall goal of the mission before they are in the chaos of the battlefield. When they then enter the battlefield no further orders are given; it is the responsibility of the commander to ensure that everyone has understood their goal and how to reach it so they are able to make informed decisions themselves rather than have minute details dictated at every move.

To apply this to software development Phil suggests appointing someone to own the decision making process, and a trusted community of people reviewing (but not dictating) outcomes. But most of all, ensure that your staff prepare for (great) outcomes and understand the value of what they are working on. Cyndi Mitchell from ThoughtWorks expanded on this, adding an analogy from her experiences growing up on a hog farm (where the product is the hogs and the developers are the farmers), in particular she stated that “everyone in the system has to understand quality”.

In the most extreme example of this, Ted Nyman from Github discussed how their organisation has no managers. In response to this every employee must have a sense of ownership, and if this is effective everything the employee needs to get done will get done.

Although the conference was a technical one, it became clear that software development was only the medium in which people were discussing their ideas. Instead the conference was really about culture, and on this topic there was a lot of food for thought. In Heroku, a platform as a service company, the number of deploys a day are in the high hundreds. “Move fast and break [stuff]” was the (family friendly version of the) mantra for their organisation, and this was only possible if developers’ time became sacred. They introduced the headphone rule: headphones on means ‘do not disturb’, and the fantastic piece of advice “work in caves, dwell in commons”. This demonstrates the flip side to protecting developers time: when you’re not working, communicate! Coffee breaks become an important part of the working life (hence the title of their presentation “Coffee as collaboration”) as this is when ideas can be shared and discussed. Taking time to document your work to get the recognition you deserve and killing off projects that aren’t working can only happen if communication is just as important as the development.

This protection of the developer was also discussed by Rafe Colburn, whose advice for companies looking to scale was to automate everything that could be automated, leaving time for developers to work on their beloved craft. Phil Gilbert suggests using release hills with clear goals (three maximum) so that people can reclaim their craft, but also building in regular iterations of design and innovation to keep the craft fresh.

On the topic of iterations, Government Digital Services (GDS) discussed how in the space of two years they scaled their team from a handful of people to 200 employees. They attributed their success to constant iterations of processes, tools and people, avoiding the dreaded “single point of failure”. Understanding how to effectively do this comes down to understanding your “ecosystem” (a term commonly misused), as explained by Steven Citron-Pousty. He used his background in ecology to encourage people to think about nature’s ecosystems in comparison to those in their organisation, in particular identify the keystone developers as well as the day-to-day developers, and understand the sometimes unexpected relationships between them and their colleagues.

Another point of discussion (initially introduced by Mazz Mosely from GDS) was the issue of “rock star” developers. These can be the aforementioned “single point of failures”, but more importantly they are those mysterious developers that the entire success of the product is pinned onto. Other than not being what they may be hyped up to be, rock stars can also be disruptive to teams – feeling that only their opinions count and not using the shared knowledge of their colleagues. A better approach is to cultivate an environment where everyone is respectful and understands that the “users” of your product are not just the end-users, but also your colleagues.

In summary (some takeaway coffee if you will), culture is one of the most important aspects of a company. Culture, as asserted by Shanley Kane and Ted Nyman, is not the furniture in your office or the perks your company offers, but it is what eventually picks between two good ideas. With this in mind, it becomes increasingly important that the whole organisation has the same mentality behind their work. As software engineers we like to think of ourselves as craftspeople, and can easily become frustrated if our work becomes mindless, so how can we avoid this happening? Here are some top tips to avoid this kind of disappointment:

  • Teams should be honest about what they can achieve in an iteration, at the risk of losing faith in the product and only completing the easy tasks just to tick them off a list,
  • expect, encourage and respect feedback from your colleagues
  • and understand the quality and value of what they are working on.

Eben Upton Raspberry Pi Visit

Last week Eben Upton presented to a packed audience in Hursley. Luckily Stewart was taking notes and has kindly agreed to share his post on Eightbar.

by Stewart Addison (photo by Steve Haskey, who arranged the visit)

An introduction for those not familiar with the Pi …

Yesterday Eben Upton (the guy behind the Raspberry Pi foundation) took time out of his very busy schedule to give a talk in Hursley. For those who are not familiar with it, the Raspberry Pi (here is the FAQ) is basically a small credit-card sized computer circuit board with a Broadcom BCM2835 chipset and a 700MHz ARM CPU powered via a microUSB socket, HDMI+composite video output, stereo audio output, ethernet port, 2 USB ports, an SD slot used for booting the device, and another proprietary expansion port, and a high performance graphics subsystem that can decode video at full HD resolution with h.264 (MPEG-2 available at extra cost) hardware playback support in XBMC/OpenElec – all for $35 for the “model B” version. They were initially built in China, but much of the manufacturing is now in the UK and is therefore supporting the UK economy! Keyboard/mouse/power/screen/SD card are not included in that price, but many people will have suitable ones lying around to connect to it, which certainly suited me as the last thing I need is more of them cluttering the place up.

As someone who was interested in the project from some time prior to the launch it was great to see Eben in person, particularly as I’m someone who owned a BBC Micro and lost many hours to Elite (co-written by David Braben, who is also involved in the project). If that though is making any of you feel nostalgic, why not try the ZX Spectrum port of Elite running in a java applet!) The Pi as a project is trying to bring back a bit of that sense of “playing” that the BBC Micro probably did better than any other machine of its time.

(Quick disclaimer: This article is a mix of things that Eben spoke about from the notes I took, plus a few extra pieces of background information and external links that I have added myself)

The detailed background to the original idea was something I had not heard in detail before. A director of studies at St.John’s college in Cambridge, he was concerned by the declining numbers of applicants for computing university positions, as well as a drop in the quality of those applicants (basically changing from getting many people of the type who could likely already code in assembler for two different architectures to a smaller number who’s experience predominantly “I know HTML” – people who would need more time spent educating them to get to a suitable standard to teach them further) This meant that it would take longer to get them to an adequate standard on the low level aspects of computing – or by throwing them at Standard ML programming for 6 weeks to make them depressed (I remember going through that!)

 

BBC Micro comparisons

I mentioned the BBC Micro in the opening paragraphs – earlier this year there was a “Beeb@30” event to celebrate 30 years of that machine, and here is a BBC article looking back on it. It hass been well documented that they did try to get the BBC branding on the device, but the “unique way the BBC is funded” means that it was nowhere near as easy for the BBC to support such a commercially available device as happened in the 1980s. Having said that, the ARM-designed processor used in the Pi (and probably, your mobile/cell phone) had is roots in Acorn (here is a brief history of ARM) who built the BBC Micro. And there is a – possibly somewhat indulgent – project to port RISCOS (the OS designed for the BBC Micro’s successor – the Archimedes) to the Pi.

The other thing of note on the Pi is the GPIO port. Now one of the things that made the BBC Micro special was the inclusion of easy I/O on the device, through the “user port” and “parallel port”. In fact even the “joystick” port was marked as an “analogue in” to plant the suggestion it’s use could extend far beyond games. This allowed a good quality of control of external devices and responding to inputs, something that allows many more interesting control projects to be done with it. At school I did a prototype satellite tracking system using it! But I digress, the GPIO port on the Pi even looks superficially very similar to the user port on the BBC Micro. The most popular interface using it so far is the Gertboard. (I wish a could remember the name of the blue boards we used on the BBC Micro – anyone know?)

 

A squashed marketplace

Another good point raised by Eben was about where the previous marketplace for the BBC Micro and comparable machine has now in modern times. With the home computers of the 80s you powered them on and you got a command prompt for a programming language interpreter that almost begged you to start programming straight away – almost as though, as Eben said, you had to actively choose not to program! It was easy for anyone to go into their local computer store and make them display scrolling rude messages up the screen, and anyone owning one of those computers would have almost certainly had the knowledge to do so!

Nowadays it is less easy. Games consoles have taken over the high performance graphics market, with high barriers to development entry. It a similar story for the consumer tablets on the market at present – from a practical perspective the development needs to be done in another environment rather than on the device itself. Even most consumer PCs do not ship with any reasonable programming language out of the box. While that is less of an issue in the high download speed internet of today, during the 90s it took real will and effort to be able to program. The concept of having to choose not to program got completely lost. And that is some of the spirit that the Raspberry Pi is now trying to recreate. It does appear to be a bit of a gap in the market, even ignoring the Cambridge admission quality problem. There are real low-level boards around, but not so much of an all-in-one device like the Pi. And one interesting thought was that the aforementioned relatively simple bloat-free non-content-enriched RISCOS with the ease of switching to a traditional command line from the desktop, could rekindle some of the mentality from the 80s home computers.

 

Interest and getting to market

The amount of early interest in the Pi took the foundation by surprise – 600,000 views on Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Tech correspondent) brief video with Braben – could that really be an indication of how big the market was for such a device? And could they deliver that many at the target price point, which was pretty much set at $25 from the start (At the time of writing only the $35 model B mentioned in the first paragraph – which includes a 100Mbit ethernet port, 2 USB ports instead of one and the 512Mb upgrade recently announced – is shipping). But the foundation has kept to the target price point for the units, and the 512Mb upgrade for the model B has not resulted in a price change. The other remarkable thing was the number of downloads – in the tens of thousands – of the SD-card operating system image for the Pi that was released some time before the device was even on sale, so no-one could use it!

The vendor partnerships with Farnell/Element14 and RS were important as it allowed them to move from being a risk-averse charity to more of an IP licensing company to get the number of units they were going to need. And it was a good decision. The first day on sale, as those like me who were up at 6am to order will be aware, was a bit of a disaster (and I blogged to vent my frustration at the time, questioning the motives of many of those buying and how it was pitched by some parts of the media). 100,000 orders were placed by the lucky people who even managed to get to the manufacturing partners (Farnell/Element14 and RS) websites. Both crashed badly under the load, preventing people from buying their resistors or other electronics from those suppliers, not just Pis! A lesson in robust scalable web sites for those two companies.

Another interesting point for those who have been interested in the Pi is that although most of them used in relatively rich countries such as the UK and will therefore make use of the on-board HDMI output (HDMI-DVI-D adapters can be had for under £2 on ebay if needed – make sure you get male/female as required for your setup!), the Pi also has a composite analogue video output. For me, this is convenient as it allows me to attach it to my in-car screen, but as Eben pointed out it also allows it to be sold in much poorer/emerging countries in the world, where second hand analogue TVs are still in use, and the Pi can give them a new lease of life for a price point far less than, for example, a tablet.

So it was good to have the talk from Eben, and I chatted to him about some other things afterwards. Fantastic to get his time, and of course this blog has been written in a browser running on one of my Pis 🙂

 

Recent hacktivity

This time of year seems to be hacking season and over the last few days I’ve been along to two hackdays!

Friday was IBM’s internal Social Business Hackday. There was some MQTT hacking, a z/OS hack, hacks with Lotus Connections, hacks that could be the future of Lotus Connections, and I was attempting to hack a work around for a Jazz work item. And that was just at the Hursley local event! We were able to link up with a few other labs, but over two days there were IBMers hacking around the globe. There are going to be a lot of amazing projects to choose from when it comes to voting.

(There are a few more photos from HackDay X, and previous hackdays, on the IBM hackday group on flickr.)

For round two, today was the soutHACKton hack day. By the time I arrived the soldering and drilling had already begun!! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay long so I’m hoping there’ll me more of these in the future. I did just about have time to try out an idea I had to hack an old doorbell to sense people using the door knocker. A while ago I had accidentally created a touch sensor with a 555 timer while attempting to build another circuit. So my cunning plan was to deliberately create a 555 touch switch and connect it to the bolt on the inside of the front door. Unfortunately the best I could manage today was a two wire touch sensor, which isn’t going to work. At least not without leaving a wire hanging out of the letter box with some instructions attached! Unless someone who knows more about electronics can suggest a plan B, I may just resort to a boring doorbell button instead!!


Recent hacktivity

This time of year seems to be hacking season and over the last few days I’ve been along to two hackdays!

Friday was IBM’s internal Social Business Hackday. There was some MQTT hacking, a z/OS hack, hacks with Lotus Connections, hacks that could be the future of Lotus Connections, and I was attempting to hack a work around for a Jazz work item. And that was just at the Hursley local event! We were able to link up with a few other labs, but over two days there were IBMers hacking around the globe. There are going to be a lot of amazing projects to choose from when it comes to voting.

(There are a few more photos from HackDay X, and previous hackdays, on the IBM hackday group on flickr.)

For round two, today was the soutHACKton hack day. By the time I arrived the soldering and drilling had already begun!! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay long so I’m hoping there’ll me more of these in the future. I did just about have time to try out an idea I had to hack an old doorbell to sense people using the door knocker. A while ago I had accidentally created a touch sensor with a 555 timer while attempting to build another circuit. So my cunning plan was to deliberately create a 555 touch switch and connect it to the bolt on the inside of the front door. Unfortunately the best I could manage today was a two wire touch sensor, which isn’t going to work. At least not without leaving a wire hanging out of the letter box with some instructions attached! Unless someone who knows more about electronics can suggest a plan B, I may just resort to a boring doorbell button instead!!


Hursley Celebration

Today is one of those great days in Hursley when everyone lifts their head and gets away from their desk for a little while…

Car Fair

OK, so excuse the quality of that picture as it’s just a quick snap from my phone. Every few years we have a classic car fair on site, there seems to be no rhythm to when they’re held, possibly it’s just long enough since we’ve all forgotten about the cars we saw at the same show last time round – but I’m sure there are some different ones too.

Today’s celebration is under the guise of an Olympic celebration so in addition to the car show there’s a big quiz taking place, a careers fair, several different “sporting” events (such as egg and spoon race and the like) so it’s as much a summer fair as anything else; and it’s not raining which is always a bonus. The real draw of course is the free cookie or scone and drink of course, but however you look at it, to have these sorts of events on site (and such a lovely site on a summers day) is absolutely brilliant. It’s a great chance for us all to take a little time away from the desk in the afternoon, catch up with friends, see what’s going on while enjoying ourselves and having a bit of fun.

<edit>More pictures are coming in of the event on Twitter…</edit>
Reproduced with permission from Simon Maple
Delorean at Hursley by Simon Maple

Reproduced with permission from Peter Anghelides
Looks like the IBM Hursley car park is full again

Hursley Emerging Tech on the News

Kevin Brown who also featured in my previous eightbar post appears to be increasing his level of fame after appearing on Channel 4 news last night.

Kevin has done a lot of work with HCI (Human Computer Interfaces) and is leading the way in the Hursley Emerging Technology Services department. He has a huge interest and wealth of knowledge on the topic but the bleeding-edge HCI device catching people’s attention again at the moment is the brain reading headset from Emoviv Technologies. Kevin has been working with this device for quite some time already, having for example used it with hospital patients, and a wealth of other uses too including driving cars. This gives a good indicator to how far ahead of the curve our emerging tech team can be at times.

The Channel 4 news clip focuses on using the headset to drive cars and puts this in the context of Google’s self-drive car too, here’s the video:

Emerging Technology Services Interviews

The British Computer Society recently came to Hursley to interview some of the members of Emerging Technology Services about some of the work we’ve been doing recently. The results, as ever in ETS, are really interesting so here is the set of video interviews reposted for all you Eightbar subscribers out there.

To kick things off we have Bharat Bedi, IBM Master Inventor, talking about his work on the Universal Information Framework. This is an innovative idea that allows secure interactions that could benefit, for example, banks:

Another piece from Bharat Bedi but this time talking about his work on the Living Safe project which runs in Balzano, Italy to help older residents who live by themselves:

Now something a little different from Kevin Brown, IBM Senior Inventor, talking about his work using a mind-reading headset. Here he gets Brian Runciman from the BCS to drive a car with his brain and trains him to run a brain wave reading headset:

Next up we have Dominic Harries, IBM Emerging Technologies Specialist, talking about some of his work using a multi-user multi-touch surface. Here Dominic is demonstrating the use of a business application on the multi-touch table:

Last, but not least we have Helen Bowyer, Emerging Technologies Manager, talking about her work on Automatic Sign Language. Helen explains and demonstrates the Say It, Sign It (SiSi) project which uses an avatar to translate spoken English into sign language.

The original content can be found at http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/44430.