gadget Archive
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Walking the Walk
May 05, 2009
This short series started with Planning the Plan, an article that tried to put into context some of the roadmap and planning activities that take place before projects get approved and started. I suggested using the McFarlan Matrix as a way of categorising potential projects so that they might be more likely to deliver benefits in line with whatever the business strategy is for that year. There are plenty of good ways of doing this, but the McFarlan Matrix is simple and quick, and forces conve ...
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Dijkstra's Shortest Path
January 15, 2008
By any measures, Edsgar Wybe Dijkstra was a remarkable man - one of the worlds undisputed leading computer scientist at the end of the 20th century, inventor of an operating system called “THE”, that could have come straight from the script of one of the Airplane movies (“does it run on THE? The what? The THE.”), long term chairman of his own fictional company that he described as the “most miserable business ever conceived” and originator of the meme-phrase “[insert pet hate here] considered har ...
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Frequency Analysis Decoder
September 27, 2007
This is a simple game to illustrate how basic frequency analysis (which letters occur most commonly in English words) can be used to decode an enrypted message where a basic alphabetic substitution has been used (swapping one letter for another). The source code is available on github Get Started First choose a random piece of enrypted text to work on Choose Text ...
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Amdahl's Law
June 28, 2007
Business software is generally used to optimise processes so that they run faster. Competitive advantage for companies can come from doing the boring stuff better as well as doing the new things other companies don’t do. But if we look at a process end-to-end it can rarely be optimised all the way through. Often what we find is that parts of the process cause disproportionate delays and so we focus on those. Other times it may be for good reason that some parts of the process simply cannot be add ...