A report released in the last few days by the University of New Mexico has recommended that a two hour per day limit on web access should be enforced by parents, on children.

The problem with this report is that it is let down by its traditional view on internet usage, and thus data consumption. The report has a central theme, and its findings also align to this theme, despite pointing out new device usage patterns within the report.

The traditional (historic) view of internet usage is that consumers require specific devices or workstations to access the internet. This lead to a 'resource' measuring model. Data and speed became the measurements for how fast your access is, or how much you are allowed to consume.

With the growth of internet and the ease of access to it, both from a proliferation of network access and the abundance of internet enabled devices this traditional resource measuring model simply isn't applicable anymore.

The modern view of the internet should be realigned to one of that of a persistent layer, a non-tangible pervasive entity that sits comfortably over our existing social infrastructure. This is quite a common view when you go back to classic internet literature like SteamPunk or Manga.

The internet is integrating into everyday life so much that it is becoming impossible to separate it from the fabric of everyday activity. We need to stop viewing it as a commodity resource and instead move it into an amenities category. Would you deny your children access to lighting or heating? No, you wouldn't but go back in history a little bit and you'll find that those two items were also rationed against a resource model.

The best thing you can do is inform them of best practices in using the internet. You wouldn't ban them from spending all day in a library, instead you'd teach them how to use it. Now this does rely on parents knowing how it works (often far less technology savvy than their children) and there is still a strong requirement to shape exactly what content they can get to. The idea here though is to shape their desire to access inappropriate content, rather than shaping their access to it. No present day internet management software can blanket cover all items of concern in terms of access, it just isn't possible.

Instead of trying to measure access out, why not help integrate it into everyday life, the usage pattern will develop on its own. Otherwise education establishments will continue to produce inaccurate reports based on historical understanding that just propagate a jaded view of our modern digital era.

A link to the Telegraph article is here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10410349/Limit-teens-web-access-to-two-hours-a-day-parents-told.html

One thing that is often overlooked in a partner driven outsourcing operating model are the specific alignment of the goals between the parent business / IT owners and the outsource partners themselves.

In the working model where core IT resource is supported by partners, such as IBM, Accenture and HP there is a large focus on the integration and working practices of the multiple teams involved. Each partner brings its own working practices and nuances of design and Architecture. Overcoming or adapting to these working practices often takes centre stage as this can consume the most amount of time and effort.

One key element of the outsource partner model, that's often overlooked, is understanding the partners goals and managing the differences in alignment to yours.

Your IT / business goals may be very open to the organisation. You could be driving towards your business goals by following a set up principles like:

• 1. Create a generic IT capability to allow greater market flexibility and adaptiveness, responsiveness to change
• 2. Follow principles of re-use and optimisation where possible, efficient cost management and resource management
• 3. Strict governance to industry wide standards to such frameworks as TOGAF, eTom and SOA.

Just as examples. There are likely a lot more than these, all lined up to point at the company vision.

Let's take a look at a partners goals now, I'm sure they are aware of the industry frameworks listed above, but are they a goal? No, they aren't. They are a way of integrating with the parent company. If I, as a governing body in the parent company, dictate that HP have to follow eTom category modelling then they will, but not because it brings them any benefit but because there is little to no chance of getting through the owning companies governance process without it.

This is quite a basic example but the idea is fundamental. Examine your outsource partners motivations when you look at their output. Does their design or implementation meet your requirements or does it meet their resourcing targets? Does something really take that long to deliver or have design decisions been affected by the fact that August is a slow month and the partner needs to place more people?

This is particularly relevant when you may be working in a fixed pricing model. If a release phase has an allocation of N thousand days a simple increase of 20% design and implementation time across the board from a partner can drastically reduce the amount of functionality you will receive, and the amount of design they have to complete.

I've found that there are an amazing variety of reasons that designs are influenced, or potentially deviated from their 'ideal' state. Just make sure that the financial goals of your partners aren't the primary reason that your company is saddled with a bizarre technical workaround for years to come.

Are you getting web form spam? I was, mainly from bots, or 'copy and paste' farms where users sit and paste bulk code into your forms. Mostly these contain links or image tags. Rather than compromise the form usability for genuine users I decided to fix my spam issue with a little more tact than you may usually find, such as in the case of Captcha devices.

I'm already cleaning html code submissions on the server side but why not make things even more informative for my users and tell them up front that their HTML isn't appreciated.

I didn't want a complicated Regex or pattern matching plugin, I simply wanted to detect key HTML elements and tell the user that it wasn't going to be accepted by the form. This code uses the JQuery plugin for form validation. You can get it here:

http://jqueryvalidation.org/

First things first, let's create a custom validation rule to detect our html elements.

This creates an array of disallowed elements and loops through them when the rule is invoked.

Secondly we will use this rule in our validation routine when a user tries to submit the form.

The key line here is:

This invokes our previously created validation rule.

In this way the user is told 'You cannot enter HTML in this field'. A friendly validation message that clearly shows WHY the form isn't going to work.

You can see this working on my contact form here : http://www.mccran.co.uk/contact/