Weeknote 2024/06: more playing with NFC; thoughts on QR code uses; and a trip to AWS’ UK HQ

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week’s weeknote taught me one of two things. Either I’m getting boring now; or AI fatigue has reached a level where people just read past anything with ChatGPT in the title. Or maybe it was just that the Clippy meme put people off…

Whilst engagement is always nice, I write these weeknotes for mindful reflection. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I’m writing them. There’s also a part of me that says “you’ve done six weeks now… don’t stop and undo all that work”. Hmm, Sunk Cost Fallacy anyone?

So, let’s get stuck into what’s been happening in week 6 of 2024… there seems to be quite a lot here (or at least it took me a few hours to write!)

This week at work

Even with the input from ChatGPT that I mentioned last week, I’m still struggling to write data sheets. Maybe this is me holding myself back with my own expectations around the output. It’s also become a task that I simply must complete – even in draft – and then hand over to others to critique. Perfection is the enemy of good, and all that!

I’m also preparing to engage with a new client to assist with their strategy and innovation. One challenge is balancing the expectations of key client stakeholders, the Account Director, and the Service Delivery Manager with my own capabilities. In part, this is because expectations have been based on the Technical Architect who is aligned to the account. He’s been great on the technical side but I’m less hands-on and the value I will add is more high-level. And this is a problem of our own making – everyone has a different definition of what an (IT) Architect is. I wrote about this previously:

What’s needed are two things – a really solid Technical Architect with domain expertise, and someone who can act as a client side “CTO”. Those are generally different skillsets.

My work week ended with a day at Amazon Web Services (AWS). I spend a lot of time talking about Microsoft Azure, but my AWS knowledge is more patchy. With a multi-cloud mindset (and not just hybrid with Node4), I wanted to explore what’s happening in the world of AWS. More on that in a bit…

This week in tech

Let’s break this up into sections as we look at a few different subjects…

More fun with NFC tags

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the NFC tags I’d been experimenting with. This week I took it a bit further with:

  1. Programming tags using the NFC Tools app. This means the tag action doesn’t rely on an iOS Shortcut and so isn’t limited to one user/device. Instead, the tag has a record stored in its memory that corresponds to an action – for example it might open a website. I was going to have a tag for guests to automatically connect to the guest Wi-Fi in our house but iOS doesn’t support reading Wi-Fi details from NFC (it’s fine with a QR code though… as I’ll discuss in a moment).
  2. Using a tag and an automation to help me work out which bins to put out each week. Others have said “why not just set a recurring reminder?” and that is what I do behind the scenes. The trouble with reminders is notifications. Instead of the phone reminding me because it’s the right day (but perhaps I’m in the wrong place), I can scan and check which actions are needed this week.

QR codes are not the answer to sharing every link…

Yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice how many QR codes featured in my day. Unlike most of my recent journeys, my train ticket didn’t have a code. This is because Thameslink (the train operating company for my train from Bedford to London) appears to be stuck on an old technology stack. Their app is pretty useless and sends me to their website to buy tickets, which I then have to collect from a machine at the station. If I need to collect a ticket I might as well buy it on the day from the same machine (there are no Advance discounts available on my journey). So, paper train tickets with magnetic stripes it was.

Then, I was networking with some of the other delegates at the AWS re:Invent re:Cap event and found that people share QR codes from the LinkedIn app now. How did I not know this was a thing? (And to think I am playing with programming NFC tags to do cool things.) To be fair, I haven’t got out much recently – far too much of my post-pandemic work for risual was online. I even have paper business cards in my work bag. I don’t think I’ve given one to anyone in a long time though…

But QR codes were everywhere at AWS. They were In every presentation for links to product information, feedback links, even for the Wi-Fi in the room. And that’s the problem – QR codes are wonderful on a mobile device. But all too often someone creates a code and says “let’s share this – it will be cool”, without thinking of the use case.

  • A QR code for exchanging details in person. Yep, I get that.
  • A QR code on physical marketing materials to direct people to find out more. That works.
  • A QR code on an email. Get real. I’m reading it on one device – do you really want me to get another one to scan the code?
  • A QR code on the back of a van. Nice in principle but it’s a moving vehicle. Sometimes it won’t work so better to have a URL and phone number too. In which case what purpose does the QR code serve?
  • Multiple QR codes on a presentation slide. Hmm… tricky now. The camera app’s AI doesn’t know which one to use. What’s wrong with a short URL? Camera apps can usually recognise and scan URLs too.
  • QR codes for in-room Wi-Fi. Seems great at first, and worked flawlessly on my phone but I couldn’t get them to work on a Windows laptop. Well, I could read them in the camera app but it wouldn’t let me open the URL (or copy it to examine and find the password). For that I needed an app from the Microsoft Store. And I was offline. Catch 22. Luckily, someone wrote the password on a white board. Old skool. That works for me.

More of my tech life

  • I think Apple might have launched a VR headset. This is the meme that keeps on giving…

That visit to the AWS offices that I mentioned earlier…

I started writing this on the train home, thinking there’s a lot of information to share. So it’s a brief summary rather than trying to include all the details:

  • The AWS event I attended was a recap of the big re:Invent conference that took place a few months ago. It took place at AWS’s UK HQ in London (Holborn). I’ve missed events like this. I used to regularly be at Microsoft’s Thames Valley Park (Reading) campus, or at a regional Microsoft TechNet or MSDN event. They were really good, and I knew many of the evangelists personally. These days, I generally can’t get past the waitlist for Microsoft events and it seems much of their budget is for pre-recorded virtual events that have huge audiences (but terrible engagement).
  • It was a long day – good to remind me why I don’t regularly commute – let alone to London. But it was great to carve out the time and dedicate it to learning.
  • Most of the day was split into tracks. I could only be in one place at one time so I skipped a lot of the data topics and the dedicated AI/ML ones (though AI is in everything). I focused on the “Every App” track.
  • A lot of the future looking themes are similar to those I know with Microsoft. GenAI, Quantum. The product names are different, the implementation concepts vary a little. There may be some services that one has and the other doesn’t. But it’s all very relatable. AWS seems a little more mature on the cost control front. But maybe that’s just my perception from what I heard in the keynote.
  • The session on innovating faster with Generative AI was interesting – if only to understand some of the concepts around choosing models and the pitfalls to avoid.
  • AWS Step Functions seem useful and I liked the demo with entertaining a friend’s child by getting ChatGPT to write a story then asking Dall-E to illustrate it.
  • One particularly interesting session for me was about application modernisation for Microsoft workloads. I’m not a developer, but even I could appreciate the challenges (e.g. legacy .NET Framework apps), and the concepts and patterns that can help (e.g strangler fig to avoid big bang replacement of a monolith). Some of the tools that can help looked pretty cool to.
  • DeepRacer is something I’d previously ignored – I have enough hobbies without getting into using AI to drive cars. But I get it now. It’s a great way to learn about cloud, data analysis, programming and machine learning through play. (Some people doing like the idea of “play” at work, so let’s call it “experimentation”).
  • There’s some new stuff happening in containers. AWS has EKS and ECS. Microsoft has AKS and ACS. Kubernetes (K8s) is an orchestration framework for containers. Yawn. I mean, I get it, and I can see why they are transformative but it seems every time I meet someone who talks about K8s they are evangelical. Sometimes containers are the solution. Sometimes they are not. Many of my clients don’t even have a software development capability. Saying to an ISV “we’re going to containerise your app” is often not entertained. OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now.
  • One thing AWS has that I’ve never heard Azure folks talk about is the ability to deliberately inject chaos into your app or infrastructure – so the session on the AWS Fault Injection Service was very interesting. I particularly like the ideas of simulating an availability zone outage or a region outage to test how your app will really perform.
  • Amazon has a contact centre platform called Connect. I did not know that. Now I do. It sounds quite interesting, but I’m unlikely to need to do anything more with it at Node4 – Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx are our chosen platforms.
  • The security recap was… a load of security enhancements. I get it. And they seem to make sense but they are also exactly what I would expect to see.
  • Amazon Security Lake is an interesting concept, but I had to step out of that session. It did make me wonder if it’s just SIEM (like Microsoft Sentinel). Apparently not. ASL is a data lake/log management system not a SIEM service, so bring your own security analytics.

In all, it was a really worthwhile investment of a day. I will follow up on some of the concepts in more detail – and I plan to write about them here. But I think the summary above is enough, for now.

This week’s reading, writing, watching and listening

I enjoy Jono Hey’s Sketchplanations. Unfortunately. when I was looking for one to illustrate the Sunk Cost Fallacy at the top of this post, I couldn’t find one. I did see there’s I see he has a book coming out in a few months’ time though. You can pre-order it at the place that does everything from A-Z.

What I did find though, is a sketch that could help me use less passive voice in these blog posts:

Inspired by something I saw on the TV, and after I found my previous notes, some of my thoughts here grew into a post of their own: Anti-social media.

My wife and I finished watching Lessons In Chemistry on Apple TV this week. I commented previously that one of my observations was we still have a long way to go on diversity, inclusion and equality but we’ve come a long way since the 1950s. And then I read this, from the LA Times Archive, reporting on how a woman was jailed for contempt of court after the Judge took offence to her wearing “slacks”, in 1938.

This week in photos

  • Only one from my instragram this week:
  • This isn’t mine, but I love it…
  • Also:
  • And what about this?

This week at home

Putting home (and therefore family) at the end seems wrong, but the blog is about tech first, business second, and my personal life arguably shouldn’t feature so often.

The positive side of trying to be in the office at least a day or two a week is that I can do the school run. I may only have one “child” still at school but he’s learning to drive, so he can drive to school and I’ll continue to drive to work afterwards. He’s also driving to his hockey training and matches so its a good way to build experience before his driving test in a few months’ time.

Next week, my adult son (Matt) heads back to Greece for a couple of months’ cycle training. He’s also building new gravel/cyclocross bikes for later in the year, so “bits of bike” keep on appearing in the dining room… including some new wheels from one of the team sponsors, FFWD Wheels.

Meanwhile, my wife is very excited because Matt will be invited to Buckingham Palace to receive his Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. He can take a guest, hence Mrs W’s excitement. Let’s just hope he’s in the country at the time.

I really should try and use the time whilst he’s away to get out on my own bike as my own fitness is not where it should be.

That’s all for this week. See you all around the same time next week?

Featured image: author’s own.

Weeknote 2024/05: using ChatGPT to overcome writer’s block; and why do UK supermarkets use technology so badly?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This week’s weeknote is shorter. Just a few nuggets… but I did actually write some real, standalone blog posts:

I hope you enjoy them. There was another one I planned about anti-social media. I thought I had it in note form but I can’t find the notes now. Maybe that will follow soon. But there’s also a possibility it will go to the great list of unwritten or part-written blog posts…

Some artificial assistance from ChatGPT

For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to write some data sheets to describe some of the Node4 services that I’m responsible for. I’ve really struggled – not so much to understand what the service entails – but to generate lists of features and benefits.

One of my colleagues is a big fan of ChatGPT. I’m not – because I value quality writing – and I’m concerned it just churns out very formulaic text filled with buzzwords. (Sadly, in this case that might be exactly what I need!). In addition, I’ve probably mentioned previously that my wife is a copywriter so I am a little biased. Even so, ChatGPT 4’s content has at least allowed me to move past my writer’s block – it gave me a draft that I could refine.

Retail pricing inefficiencies

I started my career working in supermarkets (Bejam/Iceland, and then Safeway). It was the time when we saw the end of individual price ticketing and the start of barcode scanning. Back in those days (the late 1980s), it was someone’s job to make sure that the shelf edge tickets matched the store computer.

I’ve just got back from a trip to a major UK supermarket. I’m not going to name the chain, because I’ve had similar issues in others, but it was interesting to see, yet again, an advertised offer that didn’t match the scanned price. And the store’s reaction is almost always to remove the shelf edge ticket (not to correct the computer).

But we have technology that can keep these things aligned. e-ink displays are used on shelf edges in some other countries – it mystifies me that we don’t use them in the UK.

Retailers will argue that they work on small margins that that investment in systems is secondary to reducing prices. Except that right now they are doing it badly – and inefficiently too!

Not only would the use of e-ink displays allow a guaranteed match between the shelf edge and the point of sale systems, but they would remove an admin task of replacing tickets (something which is clearly not done well). They could also allow for demand-based pricing, though I’m less keen on that idea…

Plus “random” checks for self-scanning

Then, to add insult to injury, the store systems selected me for a “random” check. For a dozen items, totalling £12.69. And it seems to happen quite frequently (hence the quotes around the word random). Not long ago they were encouraging us to use an app and self-scan. Now they seem to be seeing self-scanners as potential criminals. Either innovate, use the technology, and take action when someone is abusing the system, or pay for more staff to run checkouts. The choice is yours Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Co-op, et al. But stop treating the customers that help you reduce your costs as potential shoplifters.

More “coffees”

Last week’s weeknote featured the concept of “coffees”, as meeting people without an agenda, to catch-up and to learn. No sooner had I hit publish, then I met up with another old colleague and friend, David Saxon (@DMSaxon). David and I worked together for many years and he’s now at Microsoft so we still have a lot in common. He was staying near me last weekend, so it was a great opportunity for dinner and a chat.

I didn’t line anything up during the work week but as we roll into a new month there will be another pairing in the WB-40 podcast coffee club, plus I’ve got a couple of former team members that I really must check in with. And, in a few weeks, I’m due to catch up with my former colleague then manager, and long-time mentor, Mark Locke.

Things that caught my eye this week

At home

I’m at the stage of life where frequently at least one of my sons is away from home. Last weekend my wife was too – so there was just me, my youngest son, and the dog. Since Sunday evening, we’ve been a complete family again – which has been good. Matt’s back from two weeks skiing (which he referred to as altitude training) and is quite pleased (and surprised) to have been taking Strava segments on skis (he’s used to it on his bike). I need to make the most of it though before he goes back to Greece for a training camp. He’s racing next weekend, so I have one more trip away to support him before he disappears for a couple of months.

I’ve also booked the exam for my RSGB Foundation Licence (as promised at the last Milton Keynes Geek Night), so I have some revision to do.

Finally, I’m giving myself a gold star, because today, I restrained my “inner chimp”. I received a text message from my son’s school, advising me that he will soon be held back for a detention. That’s fine. He needs to learn. But it niggled me that the message contained a glaring grammatical error. This is a school which is very proud of its history and standards for students but doesn’t always follow through with its own communications. The pedantic side of me was desperate to reply and point out the mistake but I managed to restrain myself!

That’s all for now

No tech projects, no new TV, no podcasts of note, no photos. I’ll be back next week with another weeknote – and hopefully soon I’ll be able to shout about a cool new service I’ve been working on for Node4.

Featured image created using the Clippy Meme Generator at Imgflip.

Remembering Dad

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 5 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Today is Fathers’ Day. It’s a day when I get a little spoiled by my sons; when my wife can spend some time with her Dad (thankfully fit and well in his 80s); and when I can remember mine, who left us 11 years ago.

This blog post would probably not meet with my Dad’s approval. Firstly, he didn’t really think much of Fathers’ Day – he would have seen it as a modern invention, pure commercialism – and Mothers’ Day (or Mothering Sunday, as my Mum prefers) is much more important. Secondly, my Dad didn’t want us to be sad about his passing. He knew he was ill and kept just how ill he was from us until nearly the end, in order to avoid any fuss. And finally, my Dad would probably have been confused by my public (possibly slightly narcissistic) presence on social media – why would one possibly blog about their feelings? (The truth is, that I find the writing cathartic – and if it helps anyone else, then it might as well be here to see.)

Growing up, the biggest thing I remember about my Dad was his love of railways. That interest persisted through his entire life (and beyond – some of Dad’s ashes were placed in the firebox of a steam locomotive – “Battle of Britain” class, 34070 Manston – as it blasted away from Norden towards Corfe Castle on the Swanage Railway). Whilst my Mum might not have been enthralled at the visits to steam railways and track-side car parks when I was growing up, it was an interest he was later able to share with his second wife and he had a role within the Railway Correspondence and Travel Society (RCTS), who ran an obituary for him in their July 2009 magazine, the Railway Observer. Railways were something my Dad and I shared (just like cycling is for me and my eldest son) and, whilst I may have hidden my interest in order find my place socially, it’s still something I can use to remember the sorts of things I would have done with Dad.

Another thing about Dad – he didn’t do anything by halves. If it was worth doing, then it was worth doing right. And that shone through after he got involved in Scouting – initially because the Cub Scout Pack that I had just joined was short of leaders (I now know that all Scout Groups are always short of leaders, not just the 29th Northampton Sunnyside) – but Dad’s involvement with Scouting continued for many years after my brother and I had progressed through the movement.

Before Scouting, my Dad had served in the Territorial Army (TA) – initially with 52 Transit Co. RAOC, later transferring to 118 Recovery Co. REME – after having been an Army Cadet in his teens. As a small boy, I recall him marching for Remembrance Sunday, as well as occasional visits to “The Drill Hall” in Northampton. I also remember Dad going away to attend two-week training camps each year (the only time he ever left the British Isles was to Germany “on camp”). Regretfully, I later learned that I was the reason Dad left the TA – after a particularly fraught period for my Mum when a 7- or 8-year-old me had obviously caused trouble at home. I don’t have it any more but I do remember a postcard from my Dad, featuring a steam locomotive on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, saying something like “I hope you’re behaving better for your Mum now”. Aah.

For a while, after Dad’s passing, I thought of him every day. Over the years, it’s been less frequent – but there are still moments when I wish I could seek his opinion on something (though we would certainly have disagreed on Brexit).

There are moments of serendipity too – like when I was on my way to a job interview for a role in the Office of the CITO at Fujitsu, and I noticed a nearby street name – Kenrick Place in Marylebone (my Dad’s name was Kenrick). After that, everything seemed to click into place: I got the job; and it is still one of the most enjoyable roles in my career so far, one which I only left after a succession of management changes.

More recently, I discovered that, after school, my Dad had started a student apprenticeship with English Electric, whilst studying for a Diploma in Technology, Electrical Engineering at Staffordshire College of Technology, on Beaconside in Stafford. These days I work for a company called risual, whose offices are on a Technology Park at… yes, Beaconside in Stafford. This seems to me to be an amazing coincidence, considering that my Dad grew up in Shrewsbury and I live near Milton Keynes – neither of us has any real link to Stafford that I know of, apart from this!

These days, I think less often about Dad – but I do often find myself examining my eldest son’s personality traits, which are very similar to mine, which is similarly close to my Dad’s. Until redundancy came in his 50s, Dad was an Internal Auditor for Nationwide Building Society (which was previously the Anglia Building Society, and before that the Northampton Town and County Building Society). Auditing fitted with my Dad’s desire for order and structure – some may even say pedantry. The same attention to detail is something that my colleagues suffer from in my documentation reviews. It’s also helped me over the years in working through technical problems, though it took me time to learn how to deal with ambiguity and a lack of precision (for example when writing bid responses).

As for my own Fathering abilities, I’ve grown into the role over the years. As much as I said I didn’t want to miss my children growing up, I don’t remember a lot about the early days – it was all a bit of a blur. I do know that my boys getting older was a big factor in my decision to work part-time though. It’s great to be able to disappear to the woods on a Friday afternoon to do some mountain-biking. It also gives me a bit more time free over the weekend to take part in the boys’ activities; or even just to watch a film together – my 13-year-old is enjoying working through all the James Bond films with me (though I do cringe at some of the “social” elements, which have not stood up well to the passing of time).

My boys are growing into two fantastic young men – of whom I’m extremely proud. I love the bottom-left picture in this tweet – taken on Fathers’ Day 2019 – with the customary cake that they bake for me each year:

And this was taken earlier today, as I was part-way through writing this post:

Hopefully, they will have good memories of me when they grow up and I’m gone. Though I intend to be around for a while longer yet – Dad’s passing was one of the drivers for me to increase my own fitness with my “Fit at 40” challenge – I’m still very active and I’m pleased to be getting rid of the last few years’ excess weight and pushing to reduce it down even further as I approach 50. Only this morning I managed to put on a “one day I’ll fit into this” t-shirt that I bought 2-3 years ago, which is a great mental boost.

So, wherever you are Dad – and I know you weren’t religious but you thought there must be some higher being responsible for this world – I hope you are looking down on me and smiling. I’m pretty sure you’d approve of the life I’ve carved out. A good job, a nice house, a wife, two sons and a dog. Well, maybe not the dog… but I think you’d have warmed to her too…

Kenrick Wilson: 12/9/1945-9/5/2009. Riding on a heritage railway somewhere, in his RCTS Polo Shirt.
Kenrick Wilson: 12/9/1945-9/5/2009.
Riding on a heritage railway somewhere, in his RCTS Polo Shirt.