My small business has grown to the point where the processes I started off with are getting annoyingly cumbersome. Manually copying information from our contacts database into our sales and accounts software for each sale, accessing product information from printed materials, supplier catalogues and online websites… the busier we get, the longer it takes.
So the search is on for a good, all-encompassing software system that will cover all area of our business operations - in short, an ERP system.
And what a revelation this process is to me. Business software is complex, difficult to install, takes a long time to customise to the needs of any particular business and, in the case of commercial packages, damned expensive.
Examples of failed ERP implementations are everywhere. $100 million law suits from major companies against their ERP vendors (such as SAP or Oracle) seem not uncommon, and smaller companies seem to be avoiding the whole area as much as possible.
When I said all this to a good friend (a software engineer) he simply replied, “Welcome to software”.
I’m proceeding very carefully.
- Sailing has started again. The opening regatta for the summer season was held last Saturday. A non-pointscore race, with a pursuit start. Our yacht, being known as fast, was given a crippling 54 minute handicap - in a 2 hour race! Needless to say, we didn’t do very well. Serious racing starts in two weeks time, Friday night twilight racing (for all those friends I’ve promised a ride to) starts in October.
- Business: software development is fun hell. Trying to create an integrated DB system for tracking my accounts, sales, stock, contacts, customers, payments and supplier stock information. Success is not assured. Grey hairs are.
- Motorbike: finally repaired, after 3 months in the workshop. Still being held by Aprilia as we are now in dispute over who should pay. Arguing over who pays for the damage - acceptable wear and tear or fundamental design fault? I say one, they say the other.
- Travel: Had a quick four days in Auckland two weeks ago, for a family birthday party. The Great-Aunt celebrated 95, so all and sundry attended. Nice to see family, also found time to wrangle two sails with boats at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. Photos will follow.
Saturday dawned clear and bright… which was a good thing too, as I had organised a motorcycling run down through the Royal National Park with two friends who had just gotten their L-plates.
It was a great day, the run through the park was fantastic - Gymea Lillies abounding, birds tweeting and the sun and shade making fantastic patterns on the road. Heaven!
The photos are of myself, Joanne and Andreas.
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We sailed well. We missed a mark. We were forced to administratively ‘retire’ after the race, just before we would have been disqualified anyway. Grrr.
Ah well, at least it was a nice day on the harbour. Grrr.
The Audi Winter Series run out of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia has begun. The first race was the 3rd of May, and this last Sunday was the second.
Race 1 proved a less than auspicious start. Tigger sailed very well, placing second out of about 16 boats. A great achievement, sullied only by the 3-boat collision that we were part of about half-way through.
Tigger was hit on the starboard quarter by another boat, which impact spun us around and forced our bow into the port quarter of another boat. The first contact caused little damage but unfortunately our bowsprit punched a hole clean through the side of the other boat in the second impact.
Protest flags all around, a hearing that went late into the night on Thursday, witnesses from other boats and a reserved decision while the protest committee worked through all the details with their decision not made until 5pm the following day. Tigger - disqualified. You don’t have to like the protest committee, you just have to accept their decision.
This is a post I’ve just put up on MacRumors website - it’s long enough to become a blog post as well. Here goes:
I’ve just read through this thread and the related one from a couple of days earlier Apple Personnel Moves: Former AMD Chip Executive Hired, Papermaster Finally Begins Work.
It seems to me that we’re all looking for justifications for Apple’s actions that involve current issues. Most suggestions revolve around Hackintosh/secrecy/iPhone ripoffs/power consumption etc. They’re all concerns, sure, but none of them are about looking ahead, to where the puck is going to be.
Almost certainly Apple want more control and better design over the chips in their mobile devices - iPhone, tablet, whatever. That category is growing and developing and Apple want to own it and dominate it, and the quality of the designers they’ve employed promises great improvements in these products. However, I’m going to suggest that this is only half their reason for bringing chip design in-house. Sticking my neck out, I reason that the other half is embedded devices.
Embedded devices are all around us and they are, at the moment, uniformly crap. The electronics in my car, the menus on my plasma TV and the electronics on my air conditioner are poorly designed, sometimes buggy and never pretty. The embedded electronics industry is crying out for the Apple touch of style and reliability.
We’re now moving into the era where we are ready for our personal machines to be properly networked and to share our personal data. The air conditioner needs to know what time we’ll be home so it can cool the house down in advance. The plasma tv wants to be able to play the second half of the podcast we half-watched at work during our lunch-break on our iPhone. And our car wants to integrate our music playlist, incoming phone calls and our list of contacts into its onboard GPS nav/audio system.
At the moment this is still a pipe dream. Most people consider themselves lucky if their car stereo has a 3.5mm input jack, and going from watching something on your iPod to finishing watching it on your plasma is hopeless. All the ways that have been tried to date are poor.
We all know why this computing development is important - the first company to really make everything in our life seamless will dominate the computing industry for years to come. The question is how should a company go about it?
Many companies have tried the obvious - consumer entertainment electronics. Windows media centre PC’s, Apple TV, Sony products - all have been failures. Their crucial fault is that they aren’t truly integrated. Not really, not totally. You still have to play with a Sony TV that can’t talk to the Apple TV box, which can’t talk to the Yamaha amplifier. And so-on. Three remotes are still required. The wife is still confused.
Not until one company makes the software that drives all the devices in the cabinet will it become truly seamless, but getting to that position seems impossible. Sony, Panasonic, LG or Samsung aren’t going to invite Apple to design the systems that run their products - they see Apple as a potential competitor and doing so would reduce them to contract hardware manufacturers for Apple. Yet neither are they capable of taking over the computer side of the equation. A stand-off ensues and the result is that we all suffer from incompatible devices.
So what is Apple to do if it ultimately wants to be the dominant designer of computing across all the devices in our lives? Well, they could start with the car.
There is a rumour doing the rounds that Apple is designing a car electronics system for Mercedes. I think this makes a lot of sense. If Apple start offering embedded control systems to car manufacturers it would be the first step in expanding the iPod/iPhone lines into a true Apple ecosystem that involves all facets of your life.
Think about it: drop your iPhone into the slot on the dash and your car plays your music, puts the calls through the audio system and offers your list of contacts on the GPS nav screen. Seamlessly. Add the Apple design touch for the other functions (climate control, audio, etc.) and you’d have a winner.
For people without any Apple products the control system would still be nicer and cleaner than the abominations that most car companies currently provide. Add an iPod and they then get flawless audio integration. Buy an iPhone and the car suddenly becomes a seamless extension of your computing life. Suddenly, people who aren’t Apple users but have a new car have a compelling reason to buy an Apple mobile computing product.
The car systems would encourage iPhone uptake like iTunes encouraged iPod buying. It’s all about extending the eco-system and making people really want to buy-in to the Apple universe of devices.
There are many other areas of embedded-computing that Apple can and no doubt will pursue but I think cars would likely be the starting point. They’re high-value, so the systems will likely return a profit in and of themselves. They’re ubiquitous, so everyone will be exposed to the new offering. And we spend a lot of time in them, so we want them to work really well for us.
If Apple can get a stronghold in embedded systems in cars, and they continue to build the strength in mobile computing that is the iPhone then they might develop a linkage between the two that would allow them to dominate for decades. Apple’s embedded and mobile systems could become as ubiquitous in our lives as Windows was in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s.
If Jobs is looking into the future and trying to own the world of distributed computing then he needs custom chips with low power consumption as well as great software teams. Apple already had the latter and they’ve been busy buying the former.
Schwalbe Marathon Plus ‘Flatless’ tyres
It turns out that the Michelin tyres I bought for my bike in the previous post are not that good after all. In fact, they’re awful.
Being a novice I assumed that deep and funky-looking treads were a good thing, giving better grip and tracking. It turns out that I was wrong.
The Michelin Transworld tyres have a deep tread that just loves to scoop up rocks, twigs and pieces of broken beer bottle glass. These items get wedged into the deep grooves of the tread and, as the wheel rotates, hammered deeper and deeper with each revolution.
Then, because the treads are so deep, the thickness of rubber at the bottom of the tread groove is not actually very thick at all, so whatever has been picked up goes down, down, down, through the rubber and into the inner tube.
This happened on my very first ride with the new tyres, courtesy of some green beer bottle glass. When I finally got home, aside from the glass that caused the flat, there were half a dozen small rocks and other pieces of glass stuck in the tread grooves as well, all waiting their turn to give me an unpleasant 20 minutes on the roadside patching and changing a tyre. This clearly wasn’t going to work.
After some web research I found a better choice - the ‘Flatless’ range from specialist bike tyre maker Schwalbe. Their ‘Marathon Plus’ tyre has minimal tread (tread really isn’t necessary on push-bikes, so I’ve found out) and a thick belt of special rubber under the surface face. You can push a thumb-tack into these things and they don’t go flat.
$89 a tyre later, an hour of sweating and swearing (they’re a VERY tight fit) and I have a truly awesome set of tyres. They’ve been out four times now without so much as a mark from glass or rocks. The tread picks up nothing, they’re a nice balance of firmness whilst still shock-absorbing and they’re much quieter than the Michelins.
All I can hear when riding is the chain whirring over the cogs. Lovely.
There’s no getting away from it. The protuberance above the hips and below the chest is, sadly, not getting smaller. It was - in the second half of last year it shrank considerably. The last three months it’s not changed at all. It has to go.
To that end I put on a dust mask and delved into the far end of my father’s garage yesterday afternoon, trusting to a vague memory I had of once having owned a push-bike. A few hours and several metres later it appeared - dusty, ever so slightly rusty and not a little perished. But there it was, my faithful steed, bought with the proceeds of a forced redundancy payout from a truck-driving job ten years ago, at the ripe old age of 20. (God bless the Qantas branch of the Transport Worker’s Union.)
A quick assessment showed perished tyres and tubes, a barely working rear light, dry cogs and gears and a helmet whose inner lining had decayed to the point where a heavy shower of rotted foam rained down upon my shoulders every time I took a step. It was clearly time for an overhaul.
I wandered into Ron Bates Cycles at Hurstville and asked for some chain grease and tyres, little realising how I had just betrayed my age to the 16 year old behind the counter. Apparently chain grease was replaced by aerosol teflon compound years ago and my old tyres are worthy of inclusion in a museum.
So, having got that out of the way, I took home a new pair of Michelin road tyres (narrower for less rolling resistance) and the aforementioned can of aerosol.
The aerosol I can handle but, never having actually changed a bike tyre before, a good 30 minutes of swearing and sweating followed. However, I now know how to insert an inner tube, how to get a tyre onto a rim and how to get it all off again when you realise that the inner tube isn’t seated properly after all. At least I was careful enough to get the tyres on the right way for their rolling direction.
Next I attached the new lights. It’s amazing how much lights have improved in the last ten years. My old 3-LED rear light cost $80 in 1999 and has about the brightness of three candles. The one I bought today cost $40 and should be visible from the International Space Station.
With a copious squirt of teflon spray it was time for a test tide.
Ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Enough said.
Post test ride it was obvious that the blizzard of decaying foam from the old helmet was not bearable so another visit to the bike shop secured a new helmet, a puncture repair kit and a bag to carry it in.
Finally, it’s all done and the bike is fit for daily riding again. If only I was…
Michelin Transworld City road tyres
Last weekend was the Sydney Audi Regatta for 2009 - two days of hardcore racing, with several hundred yachts racing across 15 different divisions and courses. Fun!
Tigger was entered into the general sports boat division (our skipper is having an argument with the Flying Tiger 10m class association and declined to enter the special Flying Tiger one-design division) so were up 18 other hot sports boats with experienced crews.
Saturday was sunny with moderate breezes and we made a series of dreadful errors that saw us consistently in the last few boats across the line. It was a shocker - stuffed up spinnaker drops, slow on sail trim, steering issues. We stank. The less said the better really.
And then, come Sunday, everything seemed to miraculously come together! Sunday was much windier, dark rain clouds threatened all morning, the wind was heading towards 20 knots.
Our first race we sailed smooth, we reacted like lightning to tack calls, the downwind spinnaker runs went smooth as silk and we placed 3rd!
The second race, into a freshening breeze, was going fairly well too until, on out last downwind run to the finish line, the spinnaker failed to properly gybe across - on the very last gybe, of course - and the halyard ended up wrapped out the fore-stay - no way to drop the damned thing down, with a rocky lee shore advancing very quickly! Happily, team work came out, the kite was quickly gathered into a sausage on the foredeck, tied up, and then the unwinding was worked out before it could be dropped. We went from placing in the top 5 boats in the race to finishing stone cold last, under mainsail only (not the recommended sail configuration for racing), but finish we did, and the starting vessel was very complimentary to us for making the effort to get across the line!
Final race went pretty smoothly too - our fatigue was really kicking in now. Muscles tired, everyone that little bit slower to get off the rail for each tack call. To top it off, the rain kicked in and wet weather gear made an appearance. However, the race was done, the spinnakers hoisted and no major problems occurred.
Well, except for nearly losing our fore-deck hand overboard… we copped a gust just coming out of gybe under spinnaker, the boat rounded up and over she went - deck angle 70 degrees! Craig, who was standing one moment in the middle of the cockpit, next was pitching through the life-lines on the low side of the boat, which were themselves already three inches under water. With all credit, he wrapped his feet and arms around the lifelines and held on, much like a money on a trapeze, one the outside(!) of the lines as the boat dragged through the water! After sticking his head up to breathe a few times we managed to drag him back on board, just as the boat righted herself.
What was really encouraging was how well we reacted as a crew. We calmly rode out the round-up, Craig hung on, two crew members managed to pull him back on as we righted and the other trimmer & I were already filling the spinnaker and getting us back in the race as he came back on board. No time lost, no crew lost and no panic! That’s a nice feeling.
The intensity of the regatta was far above a normal Saturday’s racing, and led to a great deal of crew improvement - and it was great fun! Now, Sail Port Stephens is only a month or two…
The storm clouds gather late on day 2 of the 2009 Sydney Audi Regatta.
Tigger beating to windward