Blog of Shaun McCran - Architecting robust, elegant technical and business solutions - Development

Can an Innovation lab fit into the classic Corporate model?

Tue, 12 May 2015 16:38:00 -0000

At a recent company event one of the leaders in my division presented his thoughts on designing and implementing an Innovation lab. The presenter, Daryl Wilkinson, Head of Group Innovation at Nationwide (Link: @DarylAndHobbes) put forward the idea of creating a digital Agency style innovation lab. This would allow a select group of Thinkers, Strategist and Developers to rapidly wireframe up services and applications/widgets and quickly prototype them into working, running applications. I think this is a very interesting opportunity, but I think the radically different approaches between operating an Innovation Lab and a large-scale UK Corporate company may pose some interesting issues. Having worked in a few smaller companies, particularly digital and marketing agencies I can see the value in this. The benefits of this sort of approach are many, including increased flexibility, ability to change direction quickly and a more open way of communicating and moving ideas around. A key principle that allows this way of working to be productive for smaller companies is the removal of barriers. These barriers might be Company rigidity, Governance rules, formulaic team structures and employee ego. By removing all of these things, you can take away, or minimise their impact on the way people think about opportunities and problems. By removing traditional working barriers, you encourage people to open up to new ways of thinking that is not constrained by traditional learnt behaviour. (This is often referred to as disruptive thinking). The two fold acts of giving them literal authority to become unconstrained in approach, and the removal of these business rules allows for a different, more agile operational model. This also results in the blurring of responsibilities and roles within the team. Team members are far more inclined to own their own space, and stretch out into other member's spaces, as the boundaries between them are blurred, in a far more collaborative working approach. Let us contrast that with the traditional UK corporate model. Typically, they have a far more rigid structure, with defined lines between departments and responsibilities. Employees have a role to play and generally, because of the luxury of scale, people are kept in that role, and find it difficult to venture too far into other roles without encountering resistance. Add into the corporate mix a defined, constrictive Governance model, security policies, hard-wired policies and processes and a corporate operating model, and the attitudes that brings with it. These elements are in direct conflict with the outline described above, that not only enables but also drives an Innovation lab. How this newfound Innovation lab will integrate into a corporate environment, working its way through the barriers described here, will either enable or contain its success. It will be a tricky journey implementing, then maturing a lab like this into a working state. It could become an interesting bubble of productivity, living inside the corporate structure, creating ripples that disrupt the usual state of thinking within traditional departments. What better way to introduce change into your organisation than by having a department like this forge new ways of thinking and approaches to solutions. I'll certainly keep an eye on how it develops, and see if any of these conflicts arise.

Adobe Flash / AIR large memory footprints on Android platforms

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 14:08:00 -0000

The Android market place is growing in popularity all the time, but does its rapid growth bring with it other issues about development best practices, and what sort of considerations should developers take into account when developing for mobile platforms.

This article examines how much memory footprint Adobe software needs to run on the Android platform, and the issue that arises because of it.

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What does the ANT message - 'Files was unexpected at this time' mean?

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 21:29:00 -0000

If you run an ANT installation and see the error message:

Files was unexpected at this time.

Or something similar you have probably installed ANT into a directory with a space in it. The default path when installing is "c:\program files\ant", but it's a lot more useful to install it into a more base directory, such as "c:\ant".

You cannot set your ANT_HOME to a directory with spaces or special characters in it, unless you use a windows compatibly format, such as:

ANT_HOME=c:\progra~1\ant

QRcfc released on RIAforge.org

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:05:00 -0000

I've released the first version of a ColdFusion QR barcode generator on http://qrcfc.riaforge.org/.

It is a CFC based wrapper for the Google ZXing barcode Java library http://code.google.com/p/zxing/.

There is a demo here: ColdFusion QR barcode generator

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Using ColdFusion to see Java server values

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:40:00 -0000

I've been dabbling in more and more Java recently as an accompaniment to my using ColdFusion development, and I've been finding more and more places where they support each other. I rolled out a new Application to a live server (this one) and it failed to launch. This was all down to it running an incompatible JVM. So how do you tell what JVM version your server is running? I don't have direct access to this box, so I needed to do it in code. [More]

Dynamically adding markers to Google maps

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:24:00 -0000

Following on from a previous article I wrote about (Google maps panning the next step in my Google mapping project is to be able to add markers to a Google map dynamically.

This article deals with how to translate a location into a latitude and longitude using Google, and how to send and add markers from a database into a Google maps via a remote service, using AJAX and JSON.

There is a full example of the finished application here: Demo of dynamically adding markers to Google maps

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How Android application memory works

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:45:00 -0000

A common theme with the Android software platform is memory usage. Googling 'Android memory' will return a load of hits on how to optimise your memory usage, or how to free up more memory.

With the growth of the Application markets for Android I've been encountering more and more memory issues. Users want more Apps, and those Apps are becoming bigger and bigger, or are using third party plugins to run.

To effectively develop for the Android platform you should really consider how the system memory works.

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How to find out the size of data in MS SQL databases

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:15:00 -0000

If you are running Microsoft SQL server you may already be familiar with how the database file system can enlarge itself to astronomical proportions. There are 'Auto shrink' and 'Auto grow' options, but these are really not recommended for production environments. So how do you go about determining how much space is being used by actual data IE records, and how much is being used by log files etc? This article will show you how to run a query that will return the size of all the tables in your database, and highlight a TSQL command that will clean up the file storage of a database. [More]

Flash Papervision error loading resource because of Mime type

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:27:00 -0000

I've been working on a flash project for a UK charity for the last few days, and one of the more random issues that the flash files have thrown up is being unable to load Papervision 3D resource files.

If your flash applications have issues loading .dae files, or you are seeing "HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found" error messages then this blog entry is for you.

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Flex webservices security error accessing url

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:24:00 -0000

I've been working with some client side flash developers recently and we came across an unusual error that was being thrown in a Flex application when we were sending a webservice request to a Coldfusion server. The error was "Security error accessing URL". I thought I'd overcome this a long time ago by using the cross-domain.xml file to allow server access to services. It appears that there is a security issue with Flash 9 that requires the following line to be added to the CrossDomain.xml file:

I'm guessing that it is enabling access for SOAP requests to any remote services on that server.

My handy custom font header building function

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:24:00 -0000

I've been putting together a personal site for a little while now, and one of the more common pieces of work I've had to do is creating the page headers from a custom font library in Photoshop. The site is 'comic' themed, and as such has an appropriate font (not comic sans!) . Rather than having to create a new image for each page, I thought I'd cut up the alphabet, and create a function to turn a string into a set of graphics. [More]

Xbox 360 Voice CFC released on RIAforge.org

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:11:00 -0000

Every time you turn on your Xbox 360 console and sign in with your Gamer profile your console records the data to an online server. www.360voice.com have written a service to consume the XML data. 360 Voice CFC http://360voice.riaforge.org is a Coldfusion based service layer that lets you consume the generated XML feeds from http://www.360voice.com. [More]

Building Intelligent sessions into your framework

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:52:00 -0000

Have you ever been logged into an application and had your session timeout, then when you log back in you are returned to a different place altogether? This article deals with a way to mark where a user was in your application and return them to that location when they log back in. It also allows a user to deep link into an application. IE when they have a bookmarked link instead of being passed to the home page, they are passed through to their original destination. [More]

Using Feedburner RSS feeds with your Blog and auto tweeting to your Twitter Account

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:29:00 -0000

Feed burner is a Google product that allows you to consume and distribute your RSS feeds in a much more in depth way than simply displaying the information in a raw XML format. It allows you to analyse the usage of a feed, add social links into feed articles and push the content onto other web platforms, like Twitter and Facebook. In this article I will display what I like to call the 'Distributed social circular'. This means that when you create a new Blog article feed burner will automatically consume it, update your RSS feed subscribers, and post a custom formatted Tweet to your Twitter account, hopefully driving more visitors to the original article. [More]

Flash content incompatibilities with lightbox’s and DHTML Div’s

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:50:00 -0000

I've seen the issue a few times in my travels where there is flash content on a page, and other content IE DHTML Div's has been triggered and the new content has slipped behind the flash in a really ugly way. I found myself in this position building an image gallery with YouTube videos in it. Clicking on a lightbox link caused a flash video to show through the new lighbox pop up. Like this: Test script showing flash messing up my lightbox. [More]