Author Archives: Wayne Horkan

About Wayne Horkan

I’m a technologist and engineer, typically working in enterprise architecture and systems engineering.

Updating PRINCE2

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Recently I was talking with Andy Murray about the evolution and update of PRINCE2 – he’s been appointed the Lead Author for the “PRINCE2™ Refresh Project” by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the owners of the PRINCE2 copyright and standard, and The Stationery Office (TSO), the publishers.

PRINCE2, by the way, is a project management methodology, and stands for “PRojects IN Controlled Environments (version 2)” – it covers the management, control and organisation of a project.

I, and Sun, have worked with Andy, both on individual engagements and regarding the use of PRINCE2 at Sun in the UK, for a number of years, and he’s easily the best person to perform this role – I wish him the best of luck.

Andy’s first task as Lead Author is to produce a Consultation Report summarising all the feedback received from a review that’s just taken place.

I was asked to contribute, and this is the data that Andy has been collecting:

  • 3 things you like about PRINCE2
  • 3 things you dislike
  • What do you consider the essential elements (i.e. without them it would not be PRINCE2) ?
  • What changes would you like to see in the next version ?

My responses were:

  • Things I like about PRINCE2:
    1. Ubiquity – loads of people are practitioners, and so communication and understanding between practitioners is faster then would be if a common understanding & dictionary of terms would need to be created
    2. product focus versus task focus (although I’ve seen this be dependent on the PM involved)
  • Things I dislike about PRINCE2
    1. too much documentation
    2. not enough “natural English” or is that “plain speaking, common English”
    3. used as a raison d’etre / justification – either to manipulate a situation or because the person in question is process bound
    4. previously lack of examples and documentation on integrating other methods into a PRINCE2 framework. Specifically RUP, RAD, DSDM, and now XP / Scrum, but I suppose SSADM might still apply. When we come to running software projects our PRINCE2 accredited PM’s would often get upset when trying to integrate XP like methods into there PRINCE2 frameworks they were trying to implement.
  • Essential elements:
    1. A PM
    2. A sponsor / sponsoring board
    3. Discret timeboxes of deliverables
    4. Milestones
    5. Product Focus versus Task Focus
    6. A PID
  • What changes would you like to see in the next version ?
    1. Simplification – where possible
    2. Better integration with other Project Management techniques – especially those from a re-iterative background (RUP, RAD, SCRUM, DSDM, XP, etc.)

    • The report should be out in the near future (it’s due to be published in June or July), and once approved, Andy will be busy working on a Scoping Document defining the proposed changes to the method.

    Andy’s started a weblog at www.prince2author.com to keep everyone up to date with progress and to gather further input.

    If you’re interested in PRINCE2, are an individual practitioner, or are using in your organisation, and either want to influence it’s evolution, or even just learn more, I’d recommend getting in touch with Andy at his site.

    Right – best be off – Donna and I go to Karate with our boys every Sunday, and I need to get our kit ready.

    Relevant Links and where you can learn more:

    Stabilising Look and Feel

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    Since my first post I’ve been working on getting the look and feel that I want, and although I haven’t quite finished here’s an update.

    I started with the Sun Pacifico Theme, which at the time I liked a lot. However the more I looked at my blog, the more I wanted something that was, if not unique, at least “mine” – and not just in terms of the content.

    Look and feel / web design was the most obvious area to change, but, to an extent I had held back a little, because I knew that it would likely mean delving into a host of technologies – only some of which I was up to date & familiar with.

    Wanting something that was very minimal, similar to the Blogger Template Style “Minima” by Douglas Bowman (here) of Stopdesign (here), and as used by my friend Alan Mather on his blog (here).

    I feel that the content needs to stand for itself without too many distractions calling the eye’s attention. I find that very busy websites, with lots of “eye candy“, lose detail amongst the noise. I know lots of people are enjoying using technologies like Snap (here), but I wish they would include some mechanism for the user to turn it off – as it can easily get confusing for with so many link page pop-ups appearing.

    As to the banner, I had previously been impressed with Damien Hirst’s Pharmaceuticals (2005), an example of which is here, an installation he had done as part of his show at the Tate Modern, New York.

    But instead of tablets and pills, I thought it would be effective to use small web site logos & icons instead (mainly the favicon). After getting a version working on that premise I very quickly realised that there would be a variety of copyright issues involved, as well as issues in loading a banner comprised of 300 (5 rows by 60 columns) of 16×16 pixelated images. Just too many calls to the web server, meaning page load time was very slow.

    So this is pretty much the finalised look and feel for the time being. I’m much more pleased with the banner now – and having utilised CSS Sprites, reduced the calls to two images – both of which I cache using JavaScript at the start of the page too.

    Now that I’m happy with the overall look and feel – I’m going to focus on Site Navigation, followed by a code cleanup, and then, maybe, back to the Design aesthetic.

    There might even be time for the odd post or two.

    Happy Mondays on Channel 4’s Transmission

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    The Mondays have just played a blinding version of Kinky Afro on Channel 4’s Transmission music show.

    It’s great to see the lads doing some gigs together again. I’m looking forward to getting to see them live – they’re playing at JB’s Dudley on Friday the 1st of June – so hopefully I’ll see them there.

    Obligatory links and more info…

    Channel 4’s Transmission site: https://www.channel4.com/music/transmission/index.html

    Stuff on the Happy Mondays.

    Home site: https://www.happymondaysonline.com

    MySpace page: https://www.myspace.com/happymondaysonline

    Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Mondays

    JB’s Dudley site: https://www.jbsdudley.co.uk/

    Why I work for Sun Microsystems – I

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    I aspired to join Sun Microsystems – in part because of Scott (you know, McNealy). ….. 1 Trackback

    Good luck and all the best to all of those involved in the search for Madeleine McCann. Here’s hoping that Madeleine is found safe and well very soon.

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    Tim Bray in the UK

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    Yesterday (Thursday the 3rd of May) we were lucky enough to have Tim Bray – Sun’s Director for Web Technologies – in the London City office.

    Tim’s been over to the UK to make some customer visits, mainly amongst the Finance Sector in the City, where the rapid development of applications to reduce time to market for systems is a principal topic. Lucky for us he had a free afternoon to present, at very short notice, to a number of the Sun UK Customer Engineering team (UK Field Operations).

    Tim’s famous for a whole host of web related innovations and notable contributions to the Internet Age, not least being a co-inventor of XML (along with Jon Bosak, the “Father of XML”, Sun “Contrarian Minds” entry here).

    You can find Tim’s blog here, his Sun Bio. here, some more from Sun here, and his Wikipedia entry over here.

    Tim gave a great talk on his views on Web 2.0, the state of of Dynamic Languages, Atom (Tim’s Chairman of the IETF working group – link to the Atom Standard Wikipedia entry here) and about REST.

    REST stands for Representational State Transfer – basically the fashion for lightweight and extremely scalable web services based around XML & HTTP. It’s use is actually endemic across the Internet, and it’s an application architectural model which I fully support and champion, especially as I’ve used it in implementation a number of times (does this make me a “RESTafarian” ?).

    As I’m such a technology fan-boy I was extremely pleased to find Tim was very approachable and friendly (don’t get me onto the time I met Andy Bechtolsheim, and got so starstruck I couldn’t speak).

    Tim’s got some really valid things to say especially regarding time to market and the rapid development of applications – I’d recommend having a look at his site, and getting in touch with him if you’d like to know more.

    P.S.

    Apologies for the title – I couldn’t resist.

    P.P.S.

    Updated with some Tim Bray links (on 04/05/2025)…

    Weblog language translator – beta

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    I’ve just implemented a weblog language translator, based on Google Translator.

    It’s very rough and ready, deserving of the title “beta”, and very simple, but it appears to do quite a nice job of translating into the majority of the World’s most used languages.

    I had just been reading The Aquarium (over here), and I was very impressed with it’s multi-lingual support.  I don’t know how the guys are doing this, but I’m presuming that they are actually translating the text manually (i.e. with human editors), after searching on the topic of blog translation.

    The languages that I’ve included are: Mandarin (Simplified Chinese), Chinese (Traditional Chinese), English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Korean, French and Italian. 

    I wanted to do the fifteen or so most used languages – however the sources I found disagreed slightly on actual numbers and rankings.  The sources I used to understand the breakdown of percentage of languages spoken by the World population were:

    1) Dr. Dennis O’Neil’s website (here) at the Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California.

    2) The “Languages of the World” article (here) at The National Virtual Translation Center.

    3) The “List of languages by number of native speakers” article (here) at Wikipedia. 

    Unfortunately it suffers from two major issues. Firstly it’s limited to the languages supported by the Google Translator service, which unfortunatly does not cover a number of the World’s most used languages (notably Hindi and Bengali).  Secondly the Google Translation service modifies the page links so that the “Language” links I’ve implemented are translated twice, which fails in the service at runtime. 

    Other issues include: maximum text amount that can be translated is limited (or appears to be, so that part of the page doesn’t get translated), the banner I’ve implemented goes awry in some of the translations, the sidebar isn’t getting translated (might be due to the text length limit issue, as the sidebar is written after the content), and, as I don’t speak the majority of these languages, I’m presuming the translation that it does is no means as good as an actual, professional, human translator. 

    I’m going to tweak the code and look at how (and if) I can use the service to perhaps translate individual components, plus I’m going to see if the Google API can provide a more succint and elegant dynamic solution.  I had tried to implement in both Google Translator and Yahoo Babelfish, but the Babelfish service was erroring out, thus the use of Google – I might try it again later though.

    I have a other requirements for this functionality too: ideally it should produce pages which can be indexed by the major search engines and it should translate feeds – both RSS and Atom. 

    Have a look and see what you think – any opinion would be good, especially from those who aren’t native English speakers.

    May Day, 2007

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    So Happy Beltaine to those of you of a Celtic persuasion, and Happy May Day to everyone !

    May Day’s always been very dear to me – I really enjoy Mythology, and the Celtic Mythology is one of my favourites – especially the Táin Bó Cúailnge (or the “The Cattle Raid of Cooley” to give a rough english translation). The Táin makes up the the majority of the Ulster Cycle, or Red Branch Cycle as it’s also known (it’s one of the four Irish Mythological Cycles, along with the Mythological Cycle, the Fenian Cycle and the Historical Cycle), and at the heart of the story is the Irish hero, Cúchulainn. For those of you who enjoy the Comic Book Sláine (initially appearing in 200AD), it’s based heavily on Cúchulainn, and the description of his feats in the Tain.

    I have a couple of versions, but my favourite is the Thomas Kinsella (more here) translation, which my Mom and Dad brought me back from a visit to our family in Ireland just over 20 years ago. It’s in hardback (black cloth cover and silver leaf embossing), with brush drawings by Louis le Brocquy (more here). The drawings are very evocative, and reflect the passion, anguish and energy of the text extremely well (for instance, the Morrígan here, and of Cúchulainn in “Warp-Spasm” here).

    May the 1st marks the beginning of Summer, the month of May and Bealtaine. Every year I promise myself that next year I’m going to go to Padstow, in Cornwall, for the May Day ‘Obby ‘Oss celebrations (more here, with a video of the ‘Obby ‘Oss here), and I’m going to try hard to get there for the 2008 celebrations.

    In later times the 1st of May has come to represent both the the Act of Union, joining inexplicably the fortunes of England and Scotland (which came into force 300 years ago today, 1707) and of the labour movement (or Eight-hour day movement as was). Also known as International Workers’ Day or Labour Day, it marked the execution of the Haymarket martyrs – arrested after the Haymarket Riot, 1886, in Chicago, Illinois (which actually occurred on the 4th of May, but was the result of unrest which had began on the 1st).

    Nicely seguing into today’s breaking news: after exactly ten years of the labour parliament being in power, having started their government on the 1st of May, 1997, our Prime Minister Tony Blair has committed that he will be relinquishing his position in a week’s time, and that he expects “in all probability” that Chancellor Gordon Brown will succeed him as Prime Minister (PM) “in the next few weeks”. This will be the first time that our PM will have openly endorsed Mr Brown – and is being seen as very significant across the UK press.

    I happened to meet Gordon Brown, whilst representing Sun, a couple of years ago at the 2006 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Conference, held that year at the National Indoor Arena (NIA), in Birmingham, my home city. He came across as a much warmer character than is often portrayed in the press, being both friendly and open. He was accompanied by Sir Digby Jones, the recently retired Chairman of the CBI (and I’m glad to say a fellow Aston Villa fan).

    During the conference I was also lucky enough to meet Nicolas Sarkozy at the event (currently running for the Presidency of the Republic of France), and to hear him speak – I was extremely impressed by his presence – his public speaking in English was very good, and the topic matter, English, French and EU trade was also interesting.

    With the PM going there is very little likelihood of a serious contender to the PM-ship emerging – and it’s probable that Mr Brown will come into office very soon.

    From between 1997 and 2000 May the 1st also marked the Anti-Capitalism marches and protest’s taking place world-wide, with large protests in London.

    During the demonstrations of 1999, part of the protest had gone online, with hacking of a number of web sites, including some members of the Royal Family’s websites and some of the UK Government’s websites (with some defacements and denial of service attacks having been successful).

    The number one tourist attraction in London, not including Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament for a long time had been, and still is Harrods. At the time I was working at Harrods as Head of Internet Development, and that year I, a couple of the guys from my team, and the Head of Networks at Harrods, implemented Firewalls for Harrods and the other business which are part of the Harrods group (from a design & security policy I had delivered earlier).

    The Harrods sites, and Internet links were also attacked, but that none of them were successful at all (although we had some “deep breath” moments during the day). I still have the very nicely written Chairman’s Award I received from Mohammed Al Fayed for helping to protect his businesses online.

    The next update will definitely be my update on the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference 2007 – it’s taking a bit of time to get my speakers notes typed up I’m afraid – but I’ll get it online very soon.

    About me…

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    Hi, my name is Wayne Horkan and I’m the Chief Technologist for the UK and Ireland at Sun Microsystems.

    I’ve been at Sun for almost eight years and in my current role for just over two years.

    The role I have covers three main areas: Customer and Partner engagements (helping develop systems), Awareness and Adoption (helping to make people more aware of Sun and Sun technologies), and Architectural and Solution Quality (help to ensure we reduce risk by using Standardization).

    Before being assigned my current role I spent most of my time at Sun in Sun’s delivery organization, directly delivering systems and helping people in the adoption of technology. Whilst I’ve been at Sun I’ve always been part of what Sun call Customer Engineering (CE, although it also gets called Field Engineering or FE), this is the field organization which works directly with customers, in comparison to Product Engineering (PE) who innovatively develop our new technologies.

    Being at Sun has given me wonderful opportunities to work at a senior level on some of the largest, most diverse and interesting, systems in the world, with some of the best technologists, business people and consultants, including:

    • SOA Design and ‘transformation roadmap’ for one of the largest UK Government organisations.
    • Identity system for an early SOA at one of the worlds largest investment banks (over 42,000 users across over 30 major systems).
    • Consolidation of 5000+ servers at another large investment bank (based out of Canary Wharf).
    • A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) engagement with a very large ISP.
    • Technical Design Authority (TDA) and Technology Leader brought in as a White Kinght at a Data Centre build out which up until then had gotten eight months behind schedule.
    • The Governance design for Sun’s largest customer engagement.

    Before working at Sun I spent almost three years as the Chief Architect for Harrods, building amongst other things Harrods Online (v1 and v2, v1 was MS Commerce Server based if you remember that, whilst v2 was Sun and Vignette based).

    Prior to Harrods I worked at Keane Inc., a Systems Integrator (SI), as a Technical Consultant. I spent time at Sun Life Assurance (now AXA) building a workflow and document imaging (scanning) solution, and at East Midlands Electricity (EME, followed by PowerGen, currently E.On) developing messaging subsystems and front end applications as part of the deregulation of the Gas and Electricity industries (the 19M programme as it was called).

    I also spent a couple of years at Touch Systems, writing software to improve manufacturing process quality and cost, utilizing hand held data collectors, a shop floor network application environment and Statistical Process Control (SPC).

    Outside of Sun I also work with a CDFI charity called Street UK, and I give (limited) advice to a CDFI collective called the Fair Finance Consortium.

    I’m a supporter of professional membership organisations, and am a member of the British Computer Society (BCS), the Institue of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Insitute of Directors (IoD), the Lunar Society and the Information Technologists Company (ITC).

    Contact details

    You can get in touch with me here: wayne.horkan-AT-sun-DOT-com

    About this site

    This site is my personal weblog, hosted and provided by Sun Microsystems, my employer.

    This blog is governed by the Sun’s blogging policy, or the Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse as it’s called.

    Many thanks to Linda Skrocki who recently wrote about Sun’s Revised Blogging Policy (AKA Guidelines on Public Discourse).

    Disclaimer

    This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer, Sun Microsystems (or Sun Microsystems UK).

    Copyright

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

    Copyright 2007-2008, Wayne T. Horkan (wayne dot horkan at sun dot com).

    FAQ

    “I’d like you to come and present to my organisation on…”

    • Sun’s product portfolio, strategy, etc.
    • Futurology.
    • Enterprise Architecture.

    Get in touch (see above) and lets talk.

    Another profitable quarter of growth at Sun Microsystems

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    Nice to see that Sun have achieved another profitable quarter of growth. ….. 1 Trackback

    Just back from speaking at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007

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    Just got back from the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007. What an absolutely great day, I’ll get a better update out tomorrow now, along with my slides. I got my best reception ever today, everybody clapped for what seemed to be a good while, with over half the room standing in ovation. It felt brilliant that they all appreciated my retelling of Sun’s experiences in Enterprise Architecture. Have to type the speaker notes up to go with the slides though – this year I went with a very minimal slide set, but twenty-six A5 pages of speaking notes (just making the 30 minute slot), whereas last year I went for very busy slides with less speaking content.

    I met some lovely people, and especially my hosts from the Open Group, spending some time with Allen Brown, the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Open Group (short bio here), and briefly with Mike Lambert, the ex-CTO of the Open Group.

    Then as I was just coming home I bumped into Chris Loughran, the head of the Technology Integration Consultancy at Deloitte in the UK, and a friend from when we did a large Government Department IT / IS system review a couple of years ago. It was good to see him and a nice bit of serendipity to finish off the day.

    Like I said earlier – my full conference update and slides tomorrow !

    It took a lot longer than ‘tomorrow’ – so apologies – however it is all online now.

    Related Links:

    Goodbye President Yeltsin

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    President Yeltsin passed away today – Monday, the 23rd of April, also known as Saint George’s Day, 2007. …..

    Presenting at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007

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    Pleased to say that I’m due to speak next Tuesday (the 24th of April) at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, 2007. ….. 4 Trackbacks

    I w końcu…

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    … po tym jak dużo komentarz – od workmates, kolega, przyjaciel i znajomość (ale nie, I można, od członek rodziny) – jeśli chodzi the brak blog jakaś rodzaj, i gdy the szczyt the blogging zjawisko najwyraźniej przyjeżdżać na the wspólny horyzont, I decydować i początek jeden. …..

    そして最終的に…

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    … blogging現象のピーク外見上着いた後多くのコメントが- workmates、同僚、友人および知人から(しかしない、私は家族から、加えるかもしれない)集合的な地平線に-あらゆる種類のブログの欠乏に関する…、そしてと同時に、私はおよび開始1行くことにした。 Gartnerに従って( ここに )、ニュースが( ここに 、記録で、および ここに 、尋問者で、例えば) bloggingの成長の土地を選定する何人かの私の好みによって報告されて最終的に2007年までに100,000,000のブログ頃最高になり。. …..

    Och slutligen…,

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    …, efter mycket kommentar – från jobbarkompisar, kollegor, vänner och bekantar (men inte, jag kan tillfogar, från familjemedlemmar) – om bristen av en blog av några har sorterat, och som det maximalt av det blogging fenomen ankommer som synes på den kollektiva horisonten, har jag avgjort att gå och. …..

    И окончательно…

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    … после того как много комментарий – от workmates, коллегаов, друзей и знакомцев (но не, я мог добавить, от членов семьи) – о отсутсвии блога любого вида, и по мере того как пик blogging явления явно приезжает на собирательный горизонт, я решал пойти и старт одно. …..

    E finalmente…

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    … depois que muito comentário – dos workmates, dos colegas, dos amigos e dos conhecimentos (mas não, eu pude adicionar, dos membros da família) – a respeito da falta de um blogue de toda a sorte, e enquanto o pico do fenômeno blogging chega aparentemente no horizonte coletivo, eu decidi ir e o. …..