I remember my father

Today is Remembrance Day to pay tribute to all those who fought and died in the various World Wars as well as those involved in present day conflicts.

My father would've been 85 if he were still alive, alas he only made 73. But its amazing considering that he spent three and half years as a Japanese POW that he made it that far at all. He buried many of his friends with his own hands during those years and the affects lingered on well into his old age.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me was that of tolerance. While he had a hatred for the Japanese that he could never shake, he never once tried to instill this hatred into me, in fact he talked very little about what happened to him during his imprisonment. Just the odd awful fragment of stories such as one about a prisoner being beheaded in front of him for the crime of stealing food.

I strongly believe that if more people followed my fathers lead and didn't pass down what are sometimes centuries old hatreds onto their children and grandchildren, we wouldn't have so many intractable conflicts such as those in the Middle East.

Safety during hand to gland combat

So in my Sunday newspaper (The Observer) today there is an article about fertility clinics and in particular the 'mens room' where they get to provide a sample of the appropriate liquid.

What caught my eye, is a picture taken inside one of the rooms that shows a large orange toggle with a notice next to it proclaiming:

Only use this cord in the case of an emergency please.

So what exactly would constitute an emergency while you are engaged in such an activity? Possibly a hand slipping off the end and punching yourself in the nose, or perhaps 'shooting' yourself in the eye at the end of it or maybe trapping a key part of your anatomy in your zip ala Something About Mary.

I do know that nothing short of being in imminent mortal danger would encourage me to pull that toggle and suffer the humiliation of having a crash medical team descend on the room to find me with my trousers around my ankles, member in one hand and plastic cup in the other.

And the Beta goes on...

While I am big fan of some of Google's products such as Earth and Gmail, and I am fairly certain that they probably possess one of the largest concentrations of software talent to be found anywhere on earth, I have to take issue with one contribution they have made to the world of software development, namely the 'never ending' Beta.

In my 17+ years of professional experience of software development experience I had always been led to believe that there was a simple straightforward and common sense progression in the life of a software 'release'. First you have an Alpha version where you are still flushing out a final feature list, then you release the Beta version, feature complete but still buggy. You might then follow that with RC's or Release Candidates until you have the bugs down to a sufficient point that you are happy to ship the product.

Google have screwed this all up.

A case in point, at aSmallWorld (the company I work for) earlier in the year we replaced a search feature in our busiest area (the forums) with a dedicated search engine called Sphinx. Sphinx is a great product (I cant say enough good things about Andew Aksyonoff the developer who has been a great help) but at the time it was in 'Beta'. Of course this lead to discussions about whether we should use a 'Beta' product for such a key feature of the site. That meant that I had to understand what being Beta meant for Sphinx, a question that pre-Google would never have needed to be asked.

I now use Zooomr Beta, Gmail Beta and I am writing this blog on Blogger Beta.

So my message to Google and all you Beta lovers is at some point you have to get of the metaphorical 'pot' and ship your product. Either that or redefine what Alpha means....