Luckily, we’re not that far away from iRepair, a College Street shop that repairs a bevy of Apple products. They replaced the keyboard for $180 plux tax ($20 off because they offered me a slightly dented keyboard after I explained how cheap I am), and were speedy and friendly.

What presenters Fowler and Scott Shaw, Director of Services for ThoughtWorks Australia, were talking about was essentially the inefficiencies and poor communication fostered by traditional IT-business relationships, and how we should, in the words of Fowler, “get rid of IT” — a trend he says is already underway. The way to thrive in such an atmosphere, says Fowler, is to move IT closer to the business people.

Key messages:

• Over time, IT projects have become more predictable and a greater percentage finish on time (according to Standish reports) but they are consequently slower to get to market, and slower to respond to feedback.
• Bloatware has been on the increase: software products increase greatly in size, but not so greatly in useful features (about 65% of features are rarely or never used, according to figures they cited–possibly also from a Standish report).
• The talent wars have become more prevalent — not as many people want to work in IT, which they see as stifling and uncreative — “IT workers are the new accountants”.
• Programming is a craft, a form of design. And like other crafts, apprenticeship and learning relationships are crucial.
• Bring user experience into the iterative design process. Too often, people operate on a model of “Bring in the UX people, have them do their stuff, maybe some user research and interviews, then pass the findings off to the development team, who never actually gets to interact with real users or be engaged in user experience research.”

Fowler and Shaw also had some interesting things to say about domain-driven design (a concept I gather Fowler has some expertise with) and domain-specific languages, in which terminology and conceptual models are built directly into software code; in other words, the outside (product interaction, user experience) is reflected on the inside.

Really interesting stuff. I wanted to ask Fowler about how he saw RDF playing into this, but didn’t have the time.

Amazon Web Services invites you (founders and leaders of start-up/early-stage companies and VCs) to join us on the upcoming AWS Start-Up Tour. Learn how to cut fixed infrastructure costs while increasing reliability and scalability by using the AWS cloud and hear from other successful start-ups about their use of AWS. The half-day event lasts from 2-5pm ending with a cocktail/networking reception from 5-7pm.

I was at the last official AWS presentation in Toronto (last fall, maybe?) and it was decent, though I didn’t stick around for the thing as it was mostly typical “this is why you need to worry about scaling” big picture stuff without a lot of the technical details, but I’m betting that this session will go deeper into solutions and architecture, so I’m looking forward to it.

It’s especially good timing as I’m justing starting to dig into EC2, though I’ve been working with S3 for more than a year.

I wonder if Peterborough, ON would make the top 10 list for Canada. Apparently our the air quality in my hometown is regularly worse than in Toronto, and I know for a fact that Little Lake, which sits in the heart of Peterborough, is at least one if not two orders of magnitude more PCB-contaminated than Lake Ontario.

I thoroughly recommend the place, and disagree in the strongest terms possible with this NOW review.

First it was the Youtube video about how Facebook owns everything you put on it, and is (somewhat loosely) connected to all sort of people/agencies involved in various intelligence gathering initiatives and operations.

That aside, what was somewhat disturbing during the event today was the way no one seemed to have any qualms about Facebook’s gleeful blurring of the “advertisement / editorial” distinction that is sacred to reputable journalism (not to claim that Facebook is engaged in journalism, per se, but the analogy holds).

Facebook proudly promotes as a “best practice” that people using their ad system link up their ads to users’ social actions, so that when I see a news feed item that, for instance, shows my buddy has gone to some event, the event organizers who may have posted an ad for that same event can have their advertising content automatically incorporated into the news feed item, piggybacking their paid advertising onto legitimate news about what my friends are up to.

The other thing that bugged me…

was how the redesigned facebook profile page (due to come out next week, and currently viewable at http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php, though it’s pretty buggy) was being touted as a way to enable more/better “self-expression.”

I think we need to wonder about the degree to which trivial and largely superficial changes to our Facebook profile constitute an enhanced venue for self-expression. It’s a form of 21st century dandyism; I’m sorry, but if the way you express your “self” is by resizing certain boxes on your Facebook profile, your self is in dire straits.

The last thing that bugged me…

was the way we talk about addiction today, and how the goal of a Facebook developer (or of the creator of a new cookie, a new song, whatever) is to create something addictive. And, in the case of Facebook, not just addictive, but simple and pared down enough that it doesn’t actually involve any serious engagement. The goal of the creator is to create something that people will feel uncontrollably pulled to use, but only for short, intermittent periods of time with no purpose other than continued, addictive use. Consciously setting out to create things that are addictive is fairly ethically questionable.

I will take off my curmudgeon hat now.