Stuff

Fun things, templates, feel free..

I've created templates, calculators etc over the years and I'm porting them over to the new-look site during 2007. This list should grow fairly rapidly, as I find bits and bobs in my archives. I make no claims as to the accuracy of anything here, so use at your own risk etc.

Templates Interactive
  • Interface Catalogue - May, 2007
    This has proven itself useful more times than I can count. It's a simple spreadsheet that allows you to document important interfaces early in a project lifecycle, with the basic characteristics against each one, for various estimating activities etc. What tends to happen is that it then gets used as a reference point in future work. This might be fine for you, but remember it's not a replacement for a good documentation tool.
  • Non-functional Requirements - July, 2007
    A good architecture is all about getting these right. This is a summary of a check-list I've used a lot in the past (which will itself be up as soon as I find it).
  • The Decoder Game - September, 2007
    The product of a wet afternoon and nothing better to do. This game encrypts the opening from a randomly selected novel or well known text using a simple symmetric key. Then using frequency analysis you can try and decrypt it. Got the idea from reading my dog-eared but still excellent copy of The Code Book by Simon Singh.
  • Dijkstra's Shortest Path - January, 2008
    The algorithm that works out the shortest route from A to B. What's significant about Dijkstra's Algorithm is that it was one of the first modern computing problems to be solved, published and, eventually, taken seriously. It's not overly complicated, although coming up with such an elegant solution is, of course, a mark of genius in itself.
  • Amdahl's Law Calculator - June, 2007
    A fairly basic calculator that works out how much time you will save in a multi-step business process if you are able to apply speedups to one or more of those steps. If you're not familiar with the background to the law, best to have a look at the entry on Wikipedia first.