Entrepreneurial Geekiness

Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
Coaching
Training
Jobs
Products
Consulting

Visible Quality of Service Polls?

I’ve just taken a look at a bunch of web hosting providers (for Python and Plone), and I’m having trouble deciding which of them offer a high level of service.

If I visit five hosting providers websites I get nicely marketed homepages – but this doesn’t tell me how reliable they are, how much downtime I’d suffer or how flexible and helpful they are.

I can research forums and google the company names, but this all takes time – wouldn’t it be nicer if I could regularly see genuine customer feedback? Maybe you get your customers to vote about the quality of the service every month, perhaps in exchange for a discount (regardless of how they vote). All the results are shown in a little ticker on the front page. If the company gets an average 93% positive vote – isn’t that something worth shouting about?

Maybe then I’d go to these five hosting providers and several would have historic results on their homepage. You’d see hiccups when the service went down – I’d expect to see occasional failures, and I’d expect to see customers feeling happy very soon after if they were really being looked after.

Good providers wouldn’t be scared of the downside of occasional negative voting – they’d know that their long-term average was the main selling point. So why don’t we see this on the web?

Read More

Kingdom of Heaven is rubbish

I went, I saw and I wasn’t that impressed. And this silly person even says

Orlando Bloom, actually surprisingly, was able to carry the movie as a lead. I was surprised he had the heft to do it, but I agree with the critic who said that the beard helped. He was a man, not a boy.

No, he’s an elf. And a very thing young one at that. Pity, because I was in Morocco whilst they were filming around the battlements of Essaouira and I’d rather expected more, ho hum.

Read More

Selling Time to Spammers

I like it – cost spammers some money if you don’t like what they’re selling. The model is nice, can be applied to any sort of contact – you attach a ‘bounty’ to your mail, and if the recipient feels you’re wasting their time then they can claim the bounty, else they leave it. If you don’t trust your audience, you’d give a small bounty if they might claim it, but then as a recipient I see that you think I might take your bounty so I might choose to ignore your mail. You’d have to get it right to make money…spam squashed.

Read More

Hungarian Notation

Joel on Software writes about the Wrong interpretation of (the Hungarian) Charles Simonyi’s markup ideas for programming languages. Instead of the mess that Microsoft has put foward in MFC for so long (lspwzwotsit), it turns out he had a much simpler idea. And the idea rocks, it’s just the kind of thing that good programmers find themselves doing (or am I talking baloney?). Twenty years to come full circle – funny how long silly interpretations can last for.

Read More