Now, to be fair, HRMC do say that this test should not be taken as definitive and freelancers should consider all their circumstances in coming to a decision about their IR35 status, so what I am saying here applies only to the usefulness of this test to me (and I consider myself fairly typical of freelance workers in the IT field).

Let’s take a look at this test.

Test 1, worth +10 points, ‘Business premises test’; Does your business own/rent separate business premises which are separate from your home & client’s premises?

No. I do have a very well equipped and comfortable office in my home though. It is a separate room that serves only as an office. I carry business insurance covering my business equipment because my normal household insurance would not cover it. But, apparently, none of this matters unless I pay an entirely unnecessary rent, or buy property, to house that same office. Because I am not a wasteful moron I rent office or meeting space WHEN I NEED IT. (Ironically, if I were wasteful or egomaniacal enough to rent a superfluous office I would score 10 points on this test and already put myself into ‘medium risk’, see below.)

Test 2, worth +2 points, ‘PII test’; Do you need professional indemnity insurance?

Yes. Most of my contracts demand it and my company would carry it anyway because I am not a moron and I realise that, should my company be responsible for direct damages I COULD BE SUED. I have no desire to lose my business. I also carry public liability insurance (for the same reason) and employers liability insurance (because as a company employing myself, I—or at least my company— has to).

Test 3, worth +10 points, ‘Efficiency test’; Has your business had the opportunity in the last 24 months to increase your business income by working more efficiently e.g by finishing the work/project earlier than projected but still receiving the full agreed payment?

Kinda. I work a professional day. If I get my work completed early I leave, otherwise I stay until it’s done. I’m not sure HRMC see this positively in the light of this test, but that’s the reality.

Test 4, worth +35 points, ‘Assistance test’; Does your business engage one or more workers who generate at least 25% of your business turnover annually?

No. I work alone. I have no desire to take on employees (have you seen the arse-breaking employment legislation?), although I would gladly subcontract work if the opportunity ever arose. However, that’s not the nature of what I do, nor is it something that especially enthrals me (I became freelance to get away from this sort of entanglement), so I fail on this test.

Test 5, worth -15 points (yes, that’s negative); Have you been engaged on PAYE employment terms by your current client/end user within the last financial year with no significant changes to your working arrangements?

No. That was an easy one. I wish they were all that straightforward and clear cut.

Test 6, worth +2 points, ‘Advertising test’; Has your business invested over £1,200 on advertising, excluding entertainment in the last 12 months?

No. That’s not the way my line of work tend to operate. That said, I do pay for the upkeep of a business website, although (again, not being a moron) I don’t pay anything like £1200 for that. I did explore advertising early on in my career and it proved to be uneconomical, why would a well run business pay for advertising that was ineffective?

That said, I do spend time promoting myself online (contributing to forums, writing a professional blog, maintaining several resource websites). Does that count? I’d call it advertising, not sure HMRC would agree and even if they did I’m nor sure how they’d value it. If I charged pro rata for my time doing these things I’d certainly be way over the £1200.

Test 7, worth +1 points, ‘Business plan test’; Does your business have a business plan with cash flow forecast that is regularly updated, and a business bank account which is separate from your personal account and identified as a business bank account by the bank?

Mixed bag on this one. No, I do not have a business plan with cash flow forecasts. I don’t need one, if I did, I’d write one. Yes, I do have a separate business bank account (actually my company has a bank account, not me) and yes it is identified as a business bank account by the bank.

Test 8, worth +4 points, ‘Repair at own expense test’; Would your business have to bear the cost of having to rectify any mistakes?

This is another muddy water one for me. Again, I work a professional day and as such if I screw up I have to work longer hours to correct things and so I make less per hour worked. In this sense I qualify for these points, but again, I doubt HMRC see things this way.

Even on contracts that do pay for additional hours worked outside a professional day, I don’t charge for corrective work (but that’s just me, it seems the right thing to do, it’s seldom a contractual obligation).

Test 9, worth +10 points, ‘Client risk test’; Has your business been unable to recover payment for work done during the last 24 months in excess of 10% of annual turnover?

No. I’m not a fucking idiot. I work for large companies with sound records, or I do a credit check on companies I am concerned about. Sure, it’s still possible to get burned, by I don’t see how running a business badly, or being unlucky, is any indicator of being a business (it’s more an indicator that perhaps you shouldn’t be in business).

Test 10, worth +2 points, ‘Billing test’; Do you invoice for work carried out prior to being paid & negotiate payment terms?

Yes on both counts, although I seldom have a need to negotiate payment terms as their fairly standard across my industry. Sometimes clients, or agents, self-bill, but I still review and check invoices so generated.

Test 11, worth +2 points, ‘Personal service test’; Does your business have the right to send a substitute?

Yes. Always.

Test 12, worth +20 points, ‘Substitution test’; Has your business hired anyone in the last 24 months to do the contracted work you have taken on? This could be demonstrated by sending a substitute in your place or by sub-contracting, but in both cases your business remains responsible for the work & for paying the substitute or sub-contractor.

No. I’m in good health and have never needed to provide a substitute. Again, it’s hard to see how this goes to demonstrating you’re a business. All it does is demonstrate that the substitution clause in any contract worked as it should.

Anyway, after all that I reckon I score a sound 6 (tests 2, 10, 11). A questionable additional 7 points (tests 6, 7, 8), if HRMC accept that; maintaining a website and contributing to other professional forums (accounting my time on a rate pro rata with my clients) is advertising; barring a business plan I meet the rest of test 7; working a professional day means I lose money recovering from my mistakes.  And another 10 points (test 3), if HMRC accept that; working professional days provides opportunity to increase income (work shorter hours for same payment). I could even squeeze another 10 it they accept that a dedicated office in my home makes more sense economically than renting the same space elsewhere, but since when has good business sense mattered in this debate?

This puts me, on the first assessment (6 points) in the high risk category (0–10 points), on the second assessment (13 points) in the medium risk category (10–20 points), and on the third assessment (23 points) in the low risk category (20+ points).

So, all-in-all, not much help in this test. There are still too many ambiguities, too many issues where I would argue one way but I could see HMRC arguing the other.

I continue to maintain that I am in business on my own account. I control, so far is practicable, my own time and my own work. I provide to my clients skills that they do not necessarily have. I employ an accountant, pay for business insurance to cover my home office and equipment, operate a company according to legal requirements, pay for professional indemnity, public and employers liability insurance, I have a home office dedicated as a working space. I select my clients, negotiate my rate and payment terms. There is no mutuality of obligation between my clients and myself. I maintain a right of substitution on all work because, although I am often a named consultant (a common enough arrangement) my clients are employing my company to carry out work, not me.

I get no pension, no paid holidays (bank holidays suck), no sick-pay, no training (other than that mandated by them, e.g. ‘orientation’ or health and safety), no insurance cover, no car, nor any other ‘employee’ perks from my clients (nor do I expect them I’M NOT THEIR EMPLOYEE!).

Yet, despite all this, I still face uncertainty about IR35, uncertainty that, although I’ve learned to live with it, does cost me time, money, and just enough stress to make life ‘interesting’ every year.

Both Maven and OSGi support the idea of repositories to distribute packages (or bundles in OSGi-land). These repositories are not directly available between the two systems and several people are working on making packages available across the two systems (i.e. allowing OSGi to access Maven packages as if they are already prepared as OSGi bundles and vice versa).

The principal issue in doing this cross repository work is being able to construct the relevant meta data describing the package/bundle and tracking down all dependencies to ensure that they are made available in a suitable form. The dependency problem is a non-trivial problem, especially when considering the dependency resolution used in OSGi frameworks (where it is possible, but not necessarily desirable, to have two different versions of a library in use simultaneously).

Part of objectives for Omneity is to help address this universal problem (the dependency issue extends way beyond just Maven and OSGi) by providing a consolidated view across all repository technologies. This is a very difficult problem (and for the general case is NP-complete), especially as systems increasingly extend the dependency problem into the run-time of systems where frameworks like OSGi allow complex configurations to be resolved at run-time (a situation potentially exacerbated by remote infrastructure solution such as cloud computing, where some configuration decisions may be taken out of the client’s hands in preference for managed service/platform solutions).

Being a difficult problem means that too many organisations simply ignore it, which is unfortunate because the dependency resolution issue is vitally important to both diagnosing and predicting system behaviour (as anyone who has tried diagnosing even relatively trivial class loader issues in J2EE installations). Ignoring the increasingly complex and dynamic configuration of IT systems is a recipe for disaster. I believe configuration management needs a unified dashboard approach that will allow the whole of a development or run-time system configuration to be viewed and analysed, this is the objective behind Omneity.

Firstly there is the main ITSLM site. This will support articles, blogs, forums, and will, hopefully, develop into a community area where practitioners can share ideas and information free from any commercialism.

The ITSLM wiki will replace the ITSLM Body of Knowledge and I will be making an effort to put up much more information on this site (there is already a lot more on this site than there ever was on the old ITSLM BoK site—I’ve brought across content from the ITSLM BoK site, so nothing has been lost). Hopefully this will encourage others. (Lead by example I guess.)

The wiki will be a sort of open engineers log book containing all manner of notes and information relating to IT system life cycle management. This information will eventually be converted into more formal documentation, but for now I’m just aiming at collecting information in one place and making it available to the community as a whole.

I’ve already started a number of incubator projects on the wiki and I’m looking for people to help drive these forward; through either contributing or taking up the reins.

One other idea I’m toying with is providing some online training courses (and providing tools for the community to create others). I’m not sure how much time I will have available to do this, so don’t expect much any time soon.

All materials on the site will be free and open for use under either an open source license or the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

The aim of these facilities is to provide a useful facility to the community and hopefully encourage people to contribute their own ideas, skills and expertise to the common good. Don’t wait for other people to contribute. Get on and contribute yourself.

The argument for short messages is that they encourage creativity and thought. The counter argument is that, in a conversation, it is often not possible to summarise a complex idea or argument into a short message. It’s a common enough adage that brevity and clarity are bedfellows, but enforced brevity can be a barrier to clarity when u r forced 2 resort 2 txtspk.

The solution seems simple enough. Why not let each user set their own limit? When another user posts an unsolicited long message it appears truncated to my personal limit in my view with a ‘read more’ link (or perhaps I can choose to ignore long posts completely). When another user replies to my messages they are told that I have set a specific character reply limit. Of course my posts are subject to my own imposed limit too, and when I reply I am subject to the originators limit.

It’s important that each user is limited to their own imposed limit to avoid a situation in which users set very low limits on replies while allowing themselves all the room they want. Such an imbalance would not lead to fair exchanges and would soon frustrate the system into silence.

In order to keep things simple for people who do not want to set their own limits each account would have a default limit, say 500 characters (although that’s entirely arbitrary on my part), and a lower limit of 100 characters to prevent people setting silly lower limits (although I say ‘why not’ if you want to lock down to single character conversations, that’s your prerogative, stupid though it might be. But, we do have to consider the possibility that people are idiots and need to be protected from themselves).

Self imposed limits, or should we just let people write what they want and use the old fashioned method of ignoring long boring replies?

This effort has been prompted by a number of things, not least my continue frustration at having to deal with many ALM components (different ALM suites, version control tools, issue trackers, and so on) and the singular lack of any consistent approach to federating these solutions. Another driver has been my increasing interest in testing some theoretical ideas that have been bouncing around in my head. To try these I need a testbed of some sort.

I have therefore started a new open source effort that I am calling Omneity (meaning ‘allness’, the condition of being all).

This project is, as you might imagine, very much in its early stages. In fact, as I write this, not one line of code has been written. Yeah, its that early.

That said, a few things have been set up.

1. I’ve create a wiki for the project and have started putting up various notes and pieces of information useful to anyone who want to get involved.
2. I’ve create a GitHub repository to hold the code as it is produced.
3. The GitHub area also hosts the project’s main issue tracker and plan (at least it will once I have one).

I am currently in the process of working out how the project’s development environment will be organised. I’ve made this interesting for myself by introducing many technologies that I have, in the past, only encountered superficially (I’ve never had to use them from scratch on a project of my own devising—it’s one thing to diagnose and fix someone else’s system, quite another to set up your own from scratch). These technologies are as follows.

1. Java — I’ve been involved with Java projects for many years as a build and configuration manager, but actually coding something, from scratch, is somewhat different to building and debugging someone else’s code.
2. Maven — I’ve used Maven only briefly and many, many years ago (or at least it seems that way). I guess it’s moved on a lot from when I used it. Now’s my chance to find out.
3. Git — I’ve played around with Git, now it’s time to use it on a real project and as a developer.
4. Eclipse — Okay, I’ve used this a fair bit, but usually for editing Perl scripts or XML files. I’ve only used it for editing Java in projects that other people have set up (fixing pesky build problems mainly). Now it’s time to get my hands dirty setting up a project from scratch.
   1. Mylyn — I’m using the Mylyn plugin in Eclipse for task management, hooked up to the GitHub issue tracker through the Mylyn/GitHub connector.
   2. m2e — Although I intend to mess with Maven on the command line, I’m trying the m2e Maven plugin to save some time using Maven with Eclipse.
   3. EGit — Although I intend to use the Git command line most of the time, I’m also using the EGit team provider with Eclipse.
5. MediaWiki — The Omneity wiki is built using MediaWiki.
   1. SemanticMediaWiki — For reasons that should be obvious once you read the project’s wiki, I’ve added the Semantic Web extension to the basic media wiki.

There will probably be others as time goes by, but that’s the main ones for now.

At the moment I’m not setting up a formal build server, but in the fullness of time I’m sure this will happen (as will the setting up of a continuous integration build server for the project).

For now though, many manuals to be read, many websites to be visited and much tinkering to be done.

Gargh!

Okay. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against you telling me how your tool addresses the problem at hand. In fact I really want to know how your tool address the specific problem being posed. If it takes too long for a short post, link to a white paper or an article or post on your website/blog. But please, please, please, make sure that whatever you point to really does address the problem being asked about. Don’t just link to some random marketing bullshit about your product. The person asking the question wants to know how to solve a specific problem, at least do them the curtesy of answering with something more enlightening than ‘buy our product’.

What if the question is more general? Well, again, add to the conversation. Answering with ‘take a look at my tool’ just makes you look like one. The only question that should be answered ‘take a look at my tool’ (unless you’re in a dodgy ’70s porno) is ‘can you please list tools in the X category’, and only then if your tool is firmly in the X category (not in the ‘could be used in the X category, if you have a really good imagination or are willing to invest an additional one billion dollars in customising our tool’).

Vendor input on forums is, at its best, very useful and helpful. Sadly it is too often lazy, irritating, and unhelpful.

Here’s an example of what I mean, posts on forums where claims like the following are made.

Eliminate the number of potential risks threatening database development and deployment by 60% and reduce deployment costs by 95%.[sic]

What does this even mean? Reduce what deployment costs? Against what baseline? Is this an average observable saving, if so, where’s your supporting data?

Which development and deployment risks are you talking about? Which of these risks does your tool mitigate? How much effort is required to mitigate those risks? Is it really worth it?

In this particular case a link was provided to a press release. Still no sign of any substantiating data. What about their web site. Nope. Not a thing.

Or how about this one,

AccuRev will eliminate up to 90% of normal merge activity.

What is ‘normal merge activity’? On what basis does this person (who was a representative of the company) make this claim? 90%? At first blush this is a remarkably specific claim (read it carefully and they’ve included those marketing weasel words ‘up to’), it must be based on some pretty sound data. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just one of those made up statistics again. Yeah. That’s what it was. I contacted the person involved and they continued to be vague and push out marketing speak, but failed to come up with anything more substantial than ‘Our customers have typically seen between 70-90% reduction in merging activity.’ Another unsubstantiated claim, and even if it’s true is still seems to be based on perception and hearsay rather than hard numbers. (Oh, and 70-90% is a heck of a wide range and boldly claiming 90% in the original statement is misleading even if you accept the more qualified range.)

Ah, you say, but it claims ‘up to 90%’. Well that’s BS too. I can save up to 100% by not doing any parallel development at all. No merging, no merging costs. Alternatively, if your merges are normally done by a bunch of alcoholic monkeys, then I guess saving 90% is possible by using properly trained software engineers and following good branch and merge practices.

And if they save you 0%, well, that’s up to 90% too. 90% is just a made up number plucked out of some marketing guy’s butt.

Now, I understand that marketing people like to make these claims, they look impressive on paper, but they’re absolutely useless to anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size who is trying to evaluate tools. Frankly, if you’re going to make ridiculous, unsubstantiated claims then I for one don’t want to be doing business with you. I mean, if you can’t be up-front and straighforward at the beginning of our relationship, how trustworthy are you going to be when it matters? (I’m tired of hearing people say things like, ‘but the sales guys said this tool would solve this problem’. Really? The sales guys said that did he? And you didn’t think to verify that before you bought the damned tool?)

The stock reply of course is, ‘but everyone does it and if we don’t make these claims no one will pay any attention.’ Really? You’re falling back on the ‘everyone else does it’ defence? If that’s the best you have then, once again, I’m not sure I want to do business with you. (As my old Mum says, ‘if everyone else stuck their head in an oven, would you?’)

Another justification goes along the lines, ‘but there is no good way to measure X’. Now that may be true, but that doesn’t give you license to just make shit up. If there’s no good way to measure something then claiming to reduce that something by a specific quantity is… well, bullshit. ‘Oh yes, I can reduce your unspecified cost by 53%.’ How the hell can you say that with a straight face?

These sort of unfounded claims really make my blood boil. So I’ve decided that whenever I see unsubstantiated claims I’m going to call them on their BS. It’s simple enough, just reply to their post asking, ‘I am interested in your claim that X will say me Y%. I wonder if you could provide us with the data on which this claim is based, I’m sure the community will be interested to see the methodology and metrics you used to gather this data, as well as the data itself. In an industry where such benchmark studies are rare, or at least seldom published, your data will be most useful.’

I bet not one will reply with anything remotely like an independent data set that substantiates the marketing claim. And if they do, all the better because I for one would love to see this sort of data collected and published.

Remember, marketing statistics and claims are generally worth exactly what you paid for them. Zero. And I have data to support that.

E-mail. It’s a nightmare. Too much spam. Too much irrelevant crud. We should all be cursing the day e-mail was invented.

Strangely I suspect most of you would agree wholeheartedly with both of these statements. I know I do.

So which is it; angel or demon? Well, both. And neither. When it comes to e-mail and projects though it is too often the demon and too seldom the angel.

I’ve noticed on many occasions that projects can be killed, or at least severely wounded, by e-mail. Things progress something like this.

E-mail is used to communicate among the various team members. Person A asks person B for some information. Person B is slow to respond, so person A e-mails them again but this time CC’s in their own boss and person B’s boss. Now, neither boss has the solution to the problem or the information A wants from B. The intention is obviously to prod B into action by making the bosses aware of the request. The problem is, now three people are receiving the e-mail instead of just one.

The bosses have to read the e-mail, just in case it’s important (after all, they don’t want to be the cause of delays, nor do they want to be overlooking important decisions). Sure, it only takes a few seconds to open the e-mail and scan it, but that’s a few valuable seconds that could be used productively instead of filtering irrelevant e-mail.

Person B responds to A asking for clarification. Of course B uses Reply All because they want the bosses to know that it’s not their fault there’s a delay. More CC-mail.

On any substantial sized project this ridiculous CC-mail game leads to a huge amount of CC-mail in the system.

CC-mail is like cholesterol, it clogs up the project communication arteries making it harder to keep useful information flowing around the system. I’ve seen e-mails exchanged, ostensibly between two engineers, that have ten or more people CC’d in to the conversation. None of those people are directly relevant to the exchange they are CC’d in purely as a defensive measure, ‘sure, I told you this was a problem in that e-mail’.

It drives me nuts and some projects just grind to a halt as people either overlook important details in the maelstrom of irrelevant CC-mail or they spend so much time each day wading through e-mail that there’s no time for productive work.

So, what’s the solution?

One productive alternative is the project wiki. Carry out ‘public’ conversations on a project wiki. If you really feel you need to draw your bosses attention to an exchange then e-mail them once indicating the relevant wiki page/discussion. If they feel it’s important they can add themselves to a watch list on that page and receive notifications, or they can drop in when they have a few moments to see how things are progressing. The wiki provides a complete trail of the discussion (assuming you’re sensible and use a wiki that maintains a history of page edits), so if things do turn nasty each party has a good record of what happened —although if your project suffers from that level of mistrust it’s probably already in decline to oblivion.

Wikis also make the exchange public, meaning anyone can jump in and help solve the problems, and that’s what everyone really wants.

Keep e-mail for very specific communications and cut out CC-mail cholesterol from your project’s diet. Trust me, you’ll feel better for it.

Mark – you contact Patrick and I directly on a regular basis. I was in the middle of conducting live interviews and did not have time to follow up with Patrick to see why your IP was blocked. You also know that we have been getting spammed daily and we are trying to resolve that problem. Completely untrue that you cannot contact CM Crossroads and you know that.

Fair enough. It seems Bob thinks I was being unfair. The tone of the comment even suggests I was lying with malicious intent. It certainly contains some misleading information and factual inaccuracies itself.

Okay. I had written a rather long response defending my position. However, rather than post that I’ve decided to simply write the original post but with more content; a full account of proceedings and full disclosure (this seems to be what Bob is complaining is missing from the original). I’ve left the original so you can see the difference.

Before getting stuck in, I should just say that the original was simply a quickly dashed of blog post expressing my frustration. This one is much longer (I have some time to write it, unlike the original) and it is a slightly more thorough treatment of the topic.

To be honest, I’m not sure Bob’s going to be any happier with this account, but it is a complete account this time so I don’t think he can complain I’ve concealed any material facts (well, none that I know about. Bob seems to know better than I what I actually know, so perhaps he’ll tell you what I know, even though I don’t, or at least I’m not aware I do). [That last parenthetical minefield will become more meaningful by the end of this post.]

I’ve been receiving e-mails from CM Crossroads for some time telling me about the upcoming ALM Expo. They’re free. I don’t need to travel to attend. So, I don’t much care that presentations are basically product demonstrations. Hey, it’s an Expo, what were you expecting. It’s good to keep an eye on the various ALM tools and their noteworthy capabilities and this is as good a way as any of covering a lot of ground quickly.

So, November 8th I receive the following e-mail (characteristic of all the e-mails, it just happens to be the one that arrived to remind me that the Expo started the following day):

ALM Expo 2011 – Starts Tomorrow!

Dear Registrant,
Don’t forget – you’ve registered for the ALM Expo Virtual Show,
which starts tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. ET!  Start your day off by
viewing the Better Software keynotes, streamed live from Orlando, FL.
You’ll also be able to choose from up to 11 hours of presentations
and chat with colleagues and peers. Take a moment to view the
schedule and set your Outlook reminders now! We are looking
forward to seeing you at the event!

The ALM Expo Team

Day 1 Agenda:
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/day-1-agenda

Day 2 Agenda:
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/day-2-agenda

We’ll see you November 9 and 10, 2011!
The ALM Expo Team

Login Info: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/component/user/remind
Password Reminder link: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/component/user/reset

–
Software Quality Engineering
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300
Orange Park, FL 32073 USA

——————————

This is a one time email. But If you wish to update your profile
please use the following link

http://app.streamsend.com/private/Odst/srk/CXUGJyC/unsubscribe/15006423

I duly clicked the link the following day and received a message informing me that my IP address was blocked.

Hm! Perhaps my mistake? Perhaps the link was somehow bad. So I try the simpler http://cmcrossroads.com Nope. Same result.

You will, I hope, notice that nowhere on the e-mail does it warn me this might happen. Nor are there any contact details (other then a handy postal address, I guess I could have posted via snail-mail) that would allow me to ask for help.

At this point I dashed-off my original post.

Bob complains that I could have contacted him directly. And this is true. Had I been in a frame of mind suited to thinking it through, I could have e-mailed him at this point. But I didn’t. I was just pissed that the e-mail didn’t tell me anything useful about who to contact if I had any difficulties. (*SPOILER ALERT* Hang in there though, I DO contact Bob directly in just a short while.)

I received several other e-mails from the ALM Expo over the next couple of days. Each one announcing some highlight presentation and telling me how to log in and find out all this great stuff. The following is typical.

ALM Expo 2011: Orchestrating Agility – Now Showing!

Dear Registrant,
ALM Expo 2011 is now open!

Please join us to view our next presentation, Orchestrating
Agility: Four Steps to Make a Truly Agile Enterprise, sponsored by
Serena: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/day-1-agenda/14219

Please view today’s full schedule: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/day-1-agenda
and bookmark your favorite events.
Don’t forget to set your reminders for day 2, as well:
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/day-2-agenda.

We hope you enjoy the live presentations, interviews and networking
opportunities available.

See you there!
The ALM Expo Team

–
Software Quality Engineering
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300
Orange Park, FL 32073 USA

——————————

This is a one time email. But If you wish to update your profile
please use the following link

http://app.streamsend.com/private/Odst/srk/CXUGJyC/unsubscribe/15014379

See all those links telling me how to get in contact with the organisers if I have difficulties? No. Me neither.

Anyway, around 22:00 GMT on the 9th November (okay, 22:11:49) I sent the following e-mail to editor@cmcrossroads.com (this is the e-mail address that was sending the e-mails out. I completely failed to register the fact that this is also Bob Aiello’s e-mail address as editor on the site).

Would have loved to join you but you’re blocking my IP address, making it impossible.

To his credit, Bob replied with the following about an hour later (okay, 1 hour, 3 minutes and 40 seconds later—I know how Bob is a stickler for details).

Just want to cc Patrick
Sent from my Windows Phone From: Mark Bools
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 17:11
To: CM Crossroads
Subject: Re: Now Showing at ALM Expo: Is DevOps Practical For Real
World Enterprises?
Would have loved to join you but you’re blocking my IP address, making
it impossible.

(Time discrepancies in the e-mails are due to server time differences, I’m always using the timestamps as they appear on my e-mail headers.)

And that’s the last I heard of it.

So, to recap:

• Got e-mail invite.
• Clicked on link to attend—IP address blocked.
• Went direct to site home page—IP address blocked.
• Wrote brief blog post.
• Sent e-mail to editor (Bob Aiello)
• Received CC message that Bob had forwarded this on to someone else (maybe Patrick Egan)

And that’s all I heard until 11:33 this morning (14th November) when Bob left his comment on my LinkedIn cross-post of the original blog post.

In the interests of full disclosure, I also received, at 11:59  today (14th November) the following CC’d in to a message to Patrick Egan (for sure this time).

Mark’s IP is blocked and Mark claims on a linkedin posting that he cannot contact us.

Bob

Between receiving Bob’s comment (11:33) and just now (17:20) it seems my IP address is now free to contact http://cmcrossroads.com (I checked at lunch time and was still one of the disenfranchised then.)

That then is the full account of what happened. I leave it to you to decide what to make of it.

As for Bob’s comment.

It is absolutely true that the hyperbolic statement ‘completely unable to contact’ was an exaggeration (it’s in the nature of hyperbole) and one that might appear disingenuous or even malicious on my part. I intended neither. I was frustrated and reflecting how I saw the dearth of information in the e-mails regarding remedial action available to users wanting to attend who found themselves blocked. It’s like being sent an invitation to a party, turning up to find not just the door locked by the gates to the entrance of the property locked and no note saying ‘call me on my mobile 0555 1657343′. Instead you leave me to guess how to contact you.

You knew…

Despite Bob’s statement that I ‘knew’ the site was experiencing a spammer attack, I knew no such thing (I don’t even recognise the term ‘spammer attack’ in this context), and am surprised that Bob thinks he knows what I know with sufficient insight to be able to make such a statement.

Sorry Bob, but asserting that someone ‘knows’ something, not matter how assertively you say it, does not actually make it true.

I did suspect (suspect, not know. There’s an important distinction) I was caught up in some sort of DoS attach and a range of IP addresses were blocked from accessing the server (a range that included mine). Okay, a brutal, unsophisticated but ultimately quick, easy to implement and effective means of slowing or stopping such an attack. But one that ultimately creates significant collateral damage.

Quite what me ‘knowing’ this has to do with the issue at hand escapes me anyway. I can see that had I known about the situation then I would have to be a special kind of asshole to subsequently blog negatively abou… Oh! Is that what Bob was trying to imply? I hope not because that would be very unpleasant. I shall assume Bob simply mis-spoke, or that he thought I did know (although it says a lot about his opinion of me if he thought I would write that unqualified post when I knew).

Understand, CM Crossroads actively blocked IP addresses. Going from Bob’s fallacious claim that I ‘knew’ this was going on, I can only assume that they knew they were doing this. It was not something done to them. It’s not something of which they were unaware during the ALM Expo. A simple note on the e-mails explaining that

Some users may experience problems while we combat a denial of service attack. If your IP address is blocked, please e-mail your IP address to blah.blah@whatever.com and we’ll try to get you access as soon as practicable.

Too much to ask?

Evidently.

You’re always contacting us…

I don’t think I contact either Bob or Patrick directly ‘regularly’. In fact I have never directly initiated contact, I always use the CM Crossroads site, which, as we’ve been discussing, I could not use this time.

I’ve looked over all the e-mails I’ve sent to Bob directly over the past four years (yes, I’m one of ‘those’ people who archive everything) and the most recent sent e-mail to Bob was 7th March this year, and that was a reply to an e-mail he sent to me. One e-mail response in eight months is not what I would characterise as ‘regularly’. And certainly not me contacting him. Perhaps Bob means something else when he says ‘regularly’.

Even accounting for my contact and interaction on the CM Crossroads website, I would hardly say I contacted either Bob or Patrick ‘regularly’. In fact, the more accurate adjective I would use is ‘rarely’. Both begin with an ‘r’. Easy mistake I guess. I communicate with them maybe two or three times a year, if that. And then most often in response rather than initiating.

I accept that Bob was busy. In fact so busy that it has taken nearly five days to restore access. Fair enough. It’s really not a problem. I don’t care that much about access to the site or the Expo for that matter. I was not complaining or badgering them about access, more about the complete lack of helpfulness to anyone unable to access the ALM Expo after being caught in the IP blockade. If I had not been privy to information about contacting Bob then I really would have had no way to resolve my issue, and that has to be bad. Doesn’t it?

The weird thing with Bob’s comment is the way it seems to imply that I was being unfair in the original post. That I did have a means of contacting them and as such it was unfair of me to post about being denied access after receiving the invites. As I hope I have illustrated in the preceding account, having direct contact available did nothing to actually resolve the core issue. Nothing. Bob’s comment is akin to  a banker complaining that his name was misspelled in the coverage of the collapse of his bank. Me? I think the mismanagement is the important feature.

Anyway, hopefully, now I have given a full, open account of proceedings Bob will be happier.

On balance, I think I’d prefer the original post myself.

I certainly feel better knowing that I didn’t conceal the heinous truth about my secret, if useless, knowledge of e-mail addresses a moment longer.

A constant stream of emails telling me how cool the ALM expo is and how I am invited to attend.

Shame then that they’ve block my IP address and I cannot contact CM Crossroads. At all.

I assume I’ve been caught in some broad IP address blocking campaign, but this does not make the fact of the matter any less annoying.