February 2012
1 post
Hello
Hello, World!
January 2012
3 posts
Digital Economy Network Meetings
EPSRC and several of the other UK research councils have been funding “Digital Economy“ themed research for two or three years now – the general aim being to “rapidly realise the transformational impact of digital technologies on aspects of community life, cultural experiences, future society, and the economy”. The Digital Economy theme has four sub-themes 1: Communities and culture, 2:...
A paper on collaborative design
I’ve written a little paper with Nozomi Ikeya describing some of the ways in which software developers interact with each other as they brainstorm ideas at a whiteboard. Its online here.
John Rooksby, Nozomi Ikeya, “Collaboration in Formative Design: Working Together at a Whiteboard,” IEEE Software, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 56-60, Jan./Feb. 2012, doi:10.1109/MS.2011.123
To...
A paper on social network sites in government
I’ve written a paper with Ian Sommerville about how social network sites are used in a Government department (The Home Office). The paper is online here.
John Rooksby & Ian Sommerville (2012) The Management and Use of Social Network Sites in a Government Department. The Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (in press).
In this paper we report findings from a study of social...
December 2011
2 posts
Did the Computer Cause the Crash? (1988)
Almost 25 years ago, Lester Thurow wrote an article in Technology Review (February-March 1988) called Did the Computer Cause the Crash? This article was later included in a collection called Panic! by Micheal Lewis - which is where I found it. In the article, Thurow points out that to blame computerisation for the 1987 crash is to blame a tool.
Computers make program trading possible because...
Work and Automation in Financial Trading
Since the May 2010 Flash Crash there has been much interest in algorithmic and high frequency trading. In particular, a Foresight Review was commissioned by the UK Government to investigate the future of computer trading in financial markets. I’ve been reading through their working papers and driver reviews, and - while there is clearly some fantastic research being done in this area...
November 2011
4 posts
Testing and Demonstrating
Volvo has been working on an automated braking system. This YouTube video shows a test in which the system fails, and the car plows into the back of a truck. I’m told (by a thoroughly unreliable source - one of my colleagues) that the problem was with the car battery - it had been put on “quick charge” before the test, and for some reason this led the battery to fail. Volvo...
Notes on "ultra-large-scale systems"
The term “ultra-large-scale system (ULSS)” was introduced in a 2006 report produced by Linda Northrop and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute. The ULSS report explains that systems are reaching unprecedented scales (by measures including lines of code; numbers of users and stakeholders; purposes the system is put to; amounts of data stored,...
Tumblr blog
I’m switching from using customised Tumblr pages for my blogs, to using the API. I’ve found writing and managing my own Tumblr themes too fiddly. The Javascript below is a modification of something written by @stuaart . It uses version 1 of the API. Tumblr released API V2 last July - I’ll write/modify something using that when I have time.
<head>
…
<script...
June 2011
2 posts
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual...”
– John Maynard Keynes
April 2011
2 posts
RT @Werner: The AWS Service Disruption Post Mortem is available http://wv.ly/PostMort #aws
I like this ethnography of an aircraft carrier very much http://t.co/2oscJAw Using it in HRO lecture today.
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
1 post
My report on Social Network Site use in UK Government has been cleared for publication - its online here: http://bit.ly/cYLhcM (pdf)
May 2009
1 post
February 2009
4 posts
John Rooksby →
Computer Science at the University of St Andrews →
“hello, world!”
– Brian Kernighan
