http://www.infoworld.com/weblog/blake Joy's InfoWorld Watch Joy Blake InfoWorld http://www.fus.net/2004/11/20-it-mistakes-to-avoid.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEtop20_1.html [Matt Fusfield's Blog] InfoWorld has a great article entitled The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid. Among my favorites on the countdown are: * Mismanaging software development - "Simply put, a great programmer is 100 times more valuable than a regular programmer." I think this goes for a lot of occupations, but is especially important in development and IT work; * Developing Web Apps for IE only - the browser wars are (sorta) back. Not everyone uses IE; * Clinging to prior solutions; * Violating the KISS principle. Its a well written article and the remaining mistakes are all worth reading and learning from. http://linux.quicksurf.com/index.php?p=965 http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/000835.html [Adrian Bacon's Linux Log] For the first time, quarterly revenues of Linux servers have exceeded $1 billion, according to a report from IDC. While Linux sales accounted for just 9.2 percent of the $11.5 billion in servers sold in the third quarter of 2004, it is safe to say that Linux is like a hot celebrity these days. Linux servers posted their ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 42.6 percent and unit shipments increasing 31.7 percent. Still in the game, Unix servers experienced an 8.3 percent growth rate year over year, but a 2.3 percent revenue decline, to $4 billion for the quarter. Windows server revenues on x86 hardware grew 13.3 percent, with quarterly revenue of $3.9 billion. http://wheresyourbrain.blogspot.com/2004/11/queen-cards_24.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/23/HNukbiometric_1.html [Where's Your Brain?] If you happened to watch the traditional annual opening of the United Kingdom Parliament and listen to Queen Elizabeth II read what her government is planning to do you would have heard mentioned identity cards for the country. An article in InfoWorld didn't waste anytime highlighting this. Some countries are doing this to some extent, and in the current world of dangerous strangers it is a capital idea (but not new). I think a card that had biometric identifiers would be great - especially if it helped us get through those TSA lines at the airport faster. Now if you're a criminal or terrorist or a paranoid-type then you might not like the idea. Personally, I say it's overdue! http://peterdawson.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/hp_into_blogsph.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/23/HNhpweblog_1.html [Peter Dawson] HP silently dips its toes into Blogsphere!! "Over the last few weeks, a handful of developers in the company's software development group have quietly begun publishing their regular musings on such technical issues as service-oriented architectures and XML (Extensible Markup Language). Competitors have also taken notice. Schwartz's Sept. 16 comments on the "death" of HP's Unix operating system, HP-UX, elicited a Sept. 28 letter from HP's legal department calling on Sun to retract Schwartz's comments. Sun's lawyers responded with a letter of their own, arguing that the contents of Scwhartz's blog were merely his opinion" Via:InfoWorld. HP's new BLogzone can be found here. Ok HP, welcome to Blogworld and may we all live in interesting times.!! http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/node/6060?PHPSESSID=a2f3babccecd71f93e3f570f006fd29e http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNgooglecorpblog_1.html [Bert Boerland] Google sees benefits in corporate blogging (Internet): "This article is so very true. Obviously seeing the benefits of corporate blogging, Google has launched a Weblog of their own for internal uses. Important notices, facts of interest, plus a whole ton of other random daily information." Are you picking this up, CTO of my company? Earth to CTO! HELLO! 2005! http://www.synop.com/Weblogs/Peter/default.aspx?date=2004-11-25 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/07/21.html#a1045 [Peter Bailey] Often when I blog I want to refer to something or someone. When it's a something, then in the world of the web, there is a beautiful thing called a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI for short. Sometimes URIs are also known as Uniform Resource Locators or URLs. These are the hypertext links we see in our web browser. The URI for my weblog is http://www.synop.com/Weblogs/Peter/ for example. These things all exist in a virtual world, and thus are identifiable. When it's a someone, the answer is not so clear. Why is this important? When working with computers, it's very important for them to understand the notion of identity. To answer the question, is A identical to B, the computer needs to know the identity of A, and the identity of B. Vice versa, it's at least equally important (often more so) to know when A is not identical to B. Of course, in computing, A may be equivalent to B in some circumstances, but equivalence is not the same as being identical. As people, we have the same needs. We like to know who we are talking to. It really does matter that I'm talking to my best friend, and not my best friend's friend. We have highly evolved senses that learn to discriminate between individuals, so that we can recognise people that are important to us from fragmentary bits of identification - the tone of their voice, the sound of their footsteps, or the curl of their hair on the back of the neck. We can make this identification in fractions of a second, from considerable distance, and with lots of other distracting information surrounding them. So when I wish to refer to someone, and provide a hyperlinked virtual "identity" what do I use? I can choose from among the following options: * email address (bad, don't like spam, but most people online have one - and there again, which email address do I use if they have several?); * home page URI of their website... http://gnuix.com/ammar/index.php?p=92 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEtop20_1.html [Ammar Ibrahim's Blog] Interesting article Via InfoWorld. My favorites are: 2. Dismissing open source – or bowing before it; 11. Developing Web apps for IE only; 18. Underestimating PHP. IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and .Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages – particularly PHP http://bernardmoon.blogspot.com/2004/11/mozillas-firefox-slowly-eats-away-at.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/HNfirefox_1.html [Bernard B. Moon's Junto Boyz] A fair amount of press on Firefox over the past few weeks, so I guess I should post something just in case some of you haven't read about it or tried it. A couple weeks ago I downloaded Firefox for the first time and love it. It seems faster than IE and the functionality is better. Some more notes on its functionality and the possible impact on Google at Steve Hall's blog here. You can download it here. http://www.notizblog.de/comments/4790_0_4_0_C/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNgooglecorpblog_1.html [Notizblog.de] Meldet Inforworld.com, die Google zum Bloggen im Intranet befragt haben. "Google sees benefits in corporate blogging: 'Google (Profile, Products, Articles), which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.' " http://www.aimlesswords.com/archives/20041030/gmail_security_flaw_fixed/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/29/HNgmail_1.html [the unofficial gmail blog] Well, you have to give Google credit. They certainly turned this one around quickly. Per my post yesterday evening: "An Israeli publication, Nana Net Life, broke the news that a simple XSS exploit can be used to gain access to your GMail account. The exploit was not explained specifically but in the most general terms, it seems that a hacker hijacks your GMail cookie when you follow a special link that has been setup to grab your cookie. Once your cookie is captured, a hacker then has access to your GMail account and changing your password has no effect. Workarounds? I think that not checking the autologin for 2 weeks button will safeguard your account." According to InfoWorld, Google has now fixed the problem. http://www.coffeehouse-at-end-of-days.com/2004/11/260000_miscount.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/HNevotingflorida_1.html [Coffeehouse at the End-Of-Days] Or are the researchers themselves biased? If true, it wouldn't have changed the result (thank God - whoever your candidate might have been). It does demonstrate the razor edge on which credible elections are hanging for 2008. http://www.voipov.com/blog/2004/11/infoworld-world-according-to-att.asp http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47OPreality_1.html [VoIP: Points of View] In a word, that strategy comes down to services. Not voice services, or even VoIP, but SoIP (services over IP). Eslambolchi told me emphatically, just short of pointing his fork at me, that AT&T is no longer a voice company. It is a data company. The stats, albeit from AT&T, appear to back up that claim. Its IP network handles 1,700TB of data per day, while its public switched network handles 450TB per day. SoIP includes IP security, application hosting, managed network services, and multimedia, including HD-TV over IP and radio over IP. http://peterdawson.blogspot.com/2004/11/open-source.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47NNsdforum_1.html [Blogzone of Peter Dawson] Enterprises are opening up to open source alternatives to commercial software, panelists said at the SDForum conference "Open Source Entering the Mainstream," held in Santa Clara, Calif., last week. http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000220.html?from=atom http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/17.html#a1116 [Julien Couvreur's programming blog] A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a demo video is often more useful when it comes to software, especially GUI. Of course text still rules and man pages shouldn't be replaced with "man videos", but demos are a great way to learn about an application. Some products offered online flash introductions/tutorials, but most of the time they are impersonal and soporific. Recording of live demos are more interesting. Channel 9 has been doing some (ex: Monad shell demo). But from experience, recording the person is usually not as informative as recording the screen or whiteboard. Jon Udell has been advocating this format: recording the display directly, along with a voice over commentary. And he baptized it "screencast". I agree with him that this format is going to become more popular, as the tools democratize (Camtasia sells for 299$) or some free tools like ... http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1730 http://weblog.infoworld.com/foster/2004/11/23.html#a184 [AMDZone] Infoworld has an article on Dull having major communication and product knowledge issues largely due to outsourced sales. "A long-time Dell customer, the reader says that this type of experience has become all too common. "I used to buy everything from Dell, but their customer experience has deteriorated so badly that I have started to purchase more and more items elsewhere," he wrote. "I don't buy their desktops anymore and am probably going to stop buying their laptops and servers as well. Who has the time to be bothered with the kind of aggravation I went through?" When you become too cheap you will start to lose, not gain income from it. Dull is almost there. http://wirelessdev.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000837021392/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/23/HNphillywifi_1.html [The Wireless Development Weblog] The list is growing… Telecom carriers that provide DSL and cable access are standing up and taking notice of this whippersnapper upstart that is wireless. Here is a wrapup of the past few day’s articles on the subject as it applies to city-funded wireless deployments: Today’s Wall Street Journal article. And the online discussions from WSJ.com readers. An amazing poll of WSJ.com readers reveals that 49% are in favor of city-run municipal Wi-Fi while 51% prefer private enterprise drive muni wi-fi programs. Wow, another divisive issue for November 2004. Feedback on the WSJ article from Muniwireless and Wi-Fi Net News. Feedback on the news about Philadelphia State Assembly bill HB30 from Wi-Fi Net News. Also, read about it from PC World, Wi-Fi Planet, and Infoworld. http://iggy.gnomeblog.com/blog/_archives/2004/11/23/189938.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/23/HNukbiometric_1.html [Iggy Uncensored] This is another article in relation to this previous blog post Supermarket Loyalty Cards Vs National ID Cards The new story can be found here InfoWorld Queen's Speech sets out plan for U.K. biometric ID card November 23, 2004. http://www.sauria.com/blog/2004/11/23#1151 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/02.html#a1106 [Ted Leung on the air] Michael McCracken is interested in a shell with better auto completion functionality. I use zsh because it's had super auto completion functionality for a long time. At the hackathon, someone, Ben Laurie, I think was recommending the "new" bash-completion, because it would help with all those gpg commands. The zsh autocompletion for gpg can also complete people's user id's which goes beyond what bash-completion does (today, at least). I've been impressed, though, with how fast the bash project is improving. I'd love to see a similar thing for zsh. In any case, neither of these will produce a code completion style of UI for the command line, which seems to be at the heart of what Michael is asking for. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, since zsh can already do incremental-search through its history, so it seems like it would be a matter of... http://www.emergic.org/archives/2004/11/24/index.html#using_delicious http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/08.html#a1109 [Rajesh Jain's Weblog] Jon Udell writes about Roland Piquepaille's use. "What Roland Piquepaille is doing here, like what I'm doing here, begins with self-interested personal information management. We categorize our own items first and foremost for our own benefit, so that we can find things more easily and so that we can better understand how new items relate to our collective works. But del.icio.us is also a social system. The tagging I do is also potentially useful to you...This will enable metadata vocabularies to converge in a decentralized way. Think 'cornucupia of the commons': self-interested use leads to collective abundance." Interesting way to think about the Memex... http://channels.lockergnome.com/news/archives/20041122_skulls_trojan_attacks_symbian_mobile_phones.phtml http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/22/HNskullstrojan_1.html [Lockergnome's Tech News Watch] If own a mobile phone running Symbian’s Series 60 software, heads up. InfoWorld reports that there is a trojan floating around out there that has the ability to infect phones running the software mentioned above. I think this is a needed reminder that even mobile devices can be affected by malicious code if we are not careful. This also tells me that since its inception, the Symbian operating system is really beginning to become a target among hackers. "We have located several freeware and shareware sites offering a program, called Extended Theme Manager, that contains a... http://www.oliviertravers.com/archives/2004/11/22/the-top-20-it-mistakes-to-avoid/index.php?atom http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEtop20_1.html [Olivier Travers] Chad Dickerson and his Infoworld readers come with this list which is a bit uneven but includes common sense tips: 1. Botching your outsourcing strategy; 2. Dismissing open source -- or bowing before it; 3. Offshoring with blinders on; 4. Discounting internal security threats; 5. Failing to secure a fluid perimeter; 6. Ignoring security for handhelds; 7. Promoting the wrong people; 8. Mishandling change management; 9. Mismanaging software development; 10. Letting engineers do their own QA; 11. Developing Web apps for IE only; 12. Relying on a single network performance; 13. Throwing bandwidth at a network problem; 14. Permitting weak passwords; 15. Never sweating the small stuff; 16. Clinging to prior solutions; 17. Falling behind on emerging technologies; 18. Underestimating PHP; 19. Violating the KISS principle; 20. Being a slave to vendor marketing strategies. http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=74852 http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/000825.html [Financial Express] Tired of unsolicited commercial mail that clogs your inbox virtually every second day? Well, you can take heart from the news that Microsoft head Bill Gates too suffers from the spam plague. It’s a malady that needs to be dealt with stringently. For, other than its nuisance value, spam mail has a lot of misleading information on offer — ranging from easy bargains and loans to Caribbean cruises. And generous dollops of porn. Spam also clogs networks, is a drain on the resources of internet service providers, and unleashes viruses into computer systems. According to estimates, nearly 3/4ths of all mail sent on the internet is spam. Gates himself describes it as the "pollution of the e-mail ecosystem," and "so significant a... http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2004-11-22-UdellCunninghamFactories http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/22.html#a1119 [Bill Seitz' WebSeitz/wikilog] Jon Udell talked with Ward Cunningham and [Jack Greenfield] about the [Software Factory] concept, but unfortunately only has AudIo for now. http://whoisgringo.brendoman.com/archives/008887.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/HNevotingflorida_1.html [whoisgringo] Researchers claim more than 130,000 votes may have been wrongly awarded to President Bush. So here's the deal, I am going to ask you to read this article and then tell others about it. We very seriously need to get this ball rolling now otherwise this kind of injustice will just keep happening over and over again. It is very important and that's why I'm asking you to share this article, post it on your website, print it out and show your folks and friends. It's not a conspiracy theory, it is an undeniable fact that there were voting irregularities in several states and to not at least investigate is inviting disaster. It's imperative that we do something about this and at the very least, talk about this and spread the word and if you can donate a few bucks to the Green Party who is conducting the recount in Ohio. Do something. Don't wait for the politicians, do something now. http://hopper.iuplog.com/default.asp?ITEM=66578 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNgooglecorpblog_1.html [Robin Hopper's iUpload InSights] InfoWorld aticle covers how Google's seen tremendous benefits from using blogs internally. A couple of the behind the firewall blog uses mentioned included: "...people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to..." I liked Gartner analyst, Allen Weiner's quote: "What is undeniable is that there is a growing interest among businesses towards blogs as business communication tools, particularly among IT departments", Weiner said. "The mandate of IT organizations today is to do more with less, so the better they can communicate and share things, the more efficient their operations will be," he said. "There's a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It's going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years." Still wondering why we introduced Personal Publisher and integrated it with our Content Management Suite? http://channels.lockergnome.com/news/archives/20041119_turn_up_that_radio.phtml http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/Hnfccradio_1.html [Lockergnome's Tech News Watch] Isn’t it fun when new technology gets approved for consumption? Well I think so. Anyway, InfoWorld reports that software defined radios will be making their way forward here very soon. The FCC ‘applauded’ the technology saying it this is great since it will allow users to share limited airspace without the problems of interference. I also think that this could have some real potential. I sounds like radio just made a comeback! "The Vanu Software Radio GSM Base Station from Vanu can support multiple cellular technologies and frequencies at the same time... http://www.xlogs.net/2004/11/22.html#a1516 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/46storinside_1.html [NI3, Inc.] This InforWorld article, entitled A Rationale for ILM, on ILM is nothing more than a weak attempt to perpetuate the fizzling ILM story. Don't get me wrong. I believe ILM is very important, yet extremely difficult to do today. The article is 12 paragraphs long. The first four paragraphs tell us how easy it is to set up a SAN these days. Five more paragraphs tell us how tape backups today don't fit into the ILM model. The remaining three paragraphs tell us an "ice age" in the industry is coming if we don't adopt ILM and point us to other sources that define ILM. There was no rationale in this article other than some pseudo-strategic swipes at how data needs to be classified for tools to automatically determine the most cost effective storage for a particular data type. http://www.xlogs.net/2004/11/22.html#a1515 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/18.html#a1117 [NI3, Inc.] This post from Jon has rekindled my interest is speech recognition as a viable tool. I have not tried NaturallySpeaking. I've used ViaVoice in the past and it was just too time consuming to train. It also didn't allow you to transfer libraries it created for a specific speaker between computers. I wonder if NaturallySpeaking allows you to transfer the libraries it creates for a specific person between computers? http://people.etango.com/~markm/archives/2004/11/21/jon_udell_on_dragon_naturallyspeaking.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/04.html#a1108 [Mark Mascolino] Jon Udell has always been one of my fav tech writers because he is a hacker at heart and dives right in with the technology and actually uses it. He is also actively creating new things (case in point LibraryLookup). Now he has done it again with a review of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8. What makes this review special is that he includes a screen capture movie of himself using the product (what he is now calling a screencast. This absolutely perfect for this kind of product since you can't really get a flavor for its use until you see it in action and while conceptually I knew this how one dictates and corrects with voice commands, it didn't really click until you see it on the screen. He is a link to the Flash screencast. He includes several other formats in the article. Check it out and be on the lookout for when you can use this type of technology in your blog posts to make your point clearer. http://sholden.typepad.com/weblog/2004/11/i_love_radio_sp.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/04.html [Steve Holden's Weblog] "Talking to Speech Recogition Robots" is a pretty interesting MP3. Speech recognitation has always been one of those areas of huge potential. Maybe it is getting better for customer service types of things but I have always been left a little disappointed when I try to use it on a personal computer. That being said ... there is a new version of Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 8 - I had version 7 on my laptop before the TabletPC) that Jon Udell over at Infoworld.com got to review. http://www.reviewcolumn.com/archives/2004/11/2236/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47TCknownow_1.html [Review Column] In the late ’90s, CIOs bought lots of ERP and CRM systems and built out Web applications for everything from managing 401K updates to online retailing. Now, IT shops are trying to … http://www.xsltblog.com/archives/2004/11/intro_to_xml_an.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive.pl?/97/31/rpusha.dat.htm [M. David Peterson] XML Strengths and Weaknesses with DOM ASP and XSL. I sometimes forget that I have been working with XML and related technologies since way back in the day (circa 1996) when I first started working with the Site Builder Network and the Channel Definition Format they were responsible for promoting. According to Tim Bray CDF was the first XML-based implementation (the original XML Working Draft was published, as far as I know, on 2004.11.14) to hit the streets sending champagne corks a-flying over at the old W3C. [OT NOTE: Thinking back to those days reminds me that I need to track down and old friend of mine Kerry Woolsey who took over my position on the SBN team when I left to work for the Windows CE team -- If anybody knows how to get a hold of him please let me know...] I loved the CDF technology but I think its safe to say we were all a bit happier to be rid of the channel bar that suddenly appeared when IE 4.0 hit the scene... It seems the channel bar was just ahead of its time and/or a little too marketing oriented as I think you can easily argue that various XML feed readers (or components of these readers) now on the market have a striking resemblance to the channel bar (as does the PDC build of Longhorn -- ahh, recycled technology :)... http://www.satterlee.com/w/index.php?entry=entry041110-152754 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/20/34OPstrategic_1.html [satterlee] Some links on the topic of folksonomy: Ideas Bazaar: emic and etic; Many2Many: Clay Shirky: canonical and a priori vs. contextual and a prosteriori; peterme.com: Peter Merholz; peer pressure; Designweenie: James Spahr: managing classification terms for portfolios; headshift: One thing's for sure: social tagging is a revelation for anybody who has sat through days of agonising taxonomy design with client organisations who are unsure of their users' real needs; Infoworld: Jon Udell: abandon the taxonomy; alex wright: semanitic web: Fast at the bottom, slow at the top; Cory Doctorow: Metacrap: 7 reasons why not; geodog: they turn out to be great ways of following a conversation on the web. I display the RSS feed for my Del.icio.us subscriptions and it updates hourly with what other people have bookmarked about topics that interest me. For a term that is only a couple of months old, it's hot -- over 9,000 hits on google. Net result: information architecture is a bitch, especially computer-mediated information gathering. Flat classification schemes are valuable but depend on human pattern matching to work. Hierarchical taxonomies are valuable because they are (hopefully) unambiguous but are inflexible. Obvious take-away: there's need for both. But how and when? More here: Amy Warner on controlled vocabularies in general. http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/2004/11/blogger-offers-multilingual-services.htm http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/15/HNbloggergoes_1.html [Andis Kaulins' LawPundit Weblog] Via Sifry's Alerts we read in the November 15, 2004 article by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, at InfoWorld that "Blogger goes multilingual". Blogger is now available in nine languages as the first phase of "internationalization". http://nitinvish.blogspot.com/2004/11/re-top-20-it-mistakes-to-avoid-we-all.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEtop20_1.html [Nitin] We all like to think we learn from mistakes, whether our own or others'". So in theory, the more serious bloopers you know about, the less likely you are to be under the bright light of interrogation, explaining how you managed to screw up big-time. That'"s why we put out an all-points bulletin to IT managers and vendors everywhere: For the good of humanity, tell us about the gotchas that have gotten you, so others can avoid them... http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/2004/11/google_advocate.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNgooglecorpblog_1.html [Neville Hobson's Weblog] Since implementing an internal blog about 18 months ago, Google has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, according to a report in InfoWorld. Google deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003. Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google, said employees have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog: "Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to. It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents." InfoWorld quotes Allen Weiner, an analyst at industry analysts Gartner as saying there is growing interest among businesses towards blogs as business communication tools, particularly among IT departments. "The mandate of IT organizations today is to do more with less... http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=154 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/HNmsplatform_1.html [Keep an Open Eye] Actually, I am from just across the Mississippi river in Alton, Illinois. But being so close to Missouri the "Show me" skeptical attitude rubbed off. And I am skeptical about any parnership with 1 Microsoft Way. Simply because Redmond has proved time after time to be inconstant, changeable, fair-weather friend, fickle, and machiavellian opportunistic - just as Burst, Sendo, IBM, Sybase and many, many others have all learned to their regret. Take Sybase. Sybase and Microsoft signed a joint agreement in 1988 to develop Sybase SQL Server for OS/2 and Windows NT. Sybase SQL Server was an enterprise caliber database which had pioneered stored procedures and some other nifty client-server functionality. At this time Microsoft had been spectacularly unsuccesful in cracking into the database market with Omega and other fall shorts both on the desktop and on the server side. Now in 1988 Microsoft was already having a rocky relationship with IBM and was two years away from breaking up - and taking their portion of "the joint venture with IBM" and bringing it to Windows and Windows NT. Within two years, history repeated itself - except this time Microsoft had managed to legally wrangle the exclusive rights to SQL Server, an enterprise caliber database, for use on Windows NT (its answer to OS/2) and the basis for current Windows Server technology. It appears to be a case of Microsoft getting Sybase to open the kimono and then Redmond light fingering in to swindle, finagle, swipe, or otherwise glom and filch Sybase enterprise database technology to go with the glommed, finagled, and swiped technology garnered from IBM on the server side. Two years later Microsoft even had exclusive use of the name SQL Server. Talk about Chutzpah … Now I am sure the troopers from Redmond have a different view of circumstances and they are invited in the comments section below to add their version of events - or point to "Get the Facts on Linux …. ooops … no , wait a minute …. thats OS/2 and SQL Server" that will, for sure, set the record straight. I think they are currently working on rewriting the History Files. Microsoft Co-operating: Means Check Your Pockets. Well now Microsoft is co-operating to get its MOM 2005... http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=155 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNmsindemnify_1.html [Keep an Open Eye] General George C. Patton was no defensive minded tactician and I am now beginning to suspect neither is Redmond. They are losing bigtime to Linux in the server world. And so what Steven Vaughan-Nicholls suggested just a week ago and which looked somewhat stretched is now beginning to take shape. So be prepared for the Patent Attacks as Microsoft uses IP-Intellectual Property and patents to tilt, tilt the playing field in Windows Server 2003 favor. Besides the article linked above there are some other earthquake tremors (if you thought SCO was a nightmare, wait until Linux IP Patent wars breaks loose - hence the Earthquake metaphor). [links cut] Now to add color - the Register is doing a story on how Bill Gates and Microsoft are the second most respected business company(not just IT company) in the world according to worldwide Business Leaders. It is hard to believe that a company that has such a checkered past based in substantial part on "innovation by legalistic opportunism" and whose operating policy keeps it constantly on the border of "business ethics gone awry" and whose current strategy of IP and Patent Attack brinkmanship could unleash devastating turmoil in an industry already reeling with a new world order change - how can that company be so universally admired by business leaders who should have vision beyond being slaves ... http://www.danmitchell.org/#635 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/HNevotingflorida_1.html [dan mitchell] Voting irregularities in three Florida counties that used electronic voting machines may have awarded as many as 260,000 votes to President George Bush in this month's election, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. http://techskim.blogspot.com/2004/11/oliver-rist-noteworthy-competition.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47enterwin_1.html [Techskim--Tech News I'm Reading] I panned OneNote upon its initial release in Microsoft Office 2003. "Beyond the tablet, what was the point of this thing?" I asked acerbically. The folks in Redmond, of course, attempted to "re-educate" me. But even after several electrotherapy sessions with Slerma Hurtcolumnistoff, I still couldn't articulate any real value posed by OneNote. Of course, I couldn't articulate solid food, either, but that had nothing to do with it. http://techskim.blogspot.com/2004/11/jon-udell-whatever-happened-to-svg.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47OPstrategic_1.html [Techskim--Tech News I'm Reading] Remember SVG? The acronym stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. In a posting to the xml-dev mailing list back in 2000, XML co-inventor Tim Bray said: "SVG is going to change the face of the Web." If that prediction had come true, we'd have used SVG to visualize the results of the recent election. Instead, as Macromedia's Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch noted on his Weblog, the election was closely divided, but developers voted overwhelmingly to use Flash for interactive maps, dynamic tables, and live charts. http://www.blogherald.com/2004/11/19/google-sees-benefits-in-corporate-blogging/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNgooglecorpblog_1.html [The Blog Herald] Google, which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said. Google deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003, and since then Google staffers have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog, said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google. http://www.downtheavenue.com/2004/11/rsi_speech_reco.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/04.html#a1108 [Renee Blodgett] It's hard for me not to occasionally catch wind of Dragon NaturallySpeaking updates. After all, we launched the original back in, hell, was it 1997? One of the years we were all driving around in limos and walking down red carpets. Dragon had a fabulous marketing and sales team, many of whom are probably living on the West Coast now. So I couldn't help but get a little nostalgic when I read Jon Udell's review this month of NaturallySpeaking, Version 8. Jon, I didn't realize that you suffered from RSI (repetitive stress injury). Yet, so many journalists and writers do. While I've never had a serious case of it, my arms and hands are often sore and the pain has increased since I started writing this blog. In my Dragon days, I mainly used it for reports and plans. Tech Support wizard Kevin Gervais used to make daily visits to my office setting up various macros and creating other such shortcuts. I haven't really had much of an issue since then, until now.....until the transition to the West Coast, where I'm not in an ergonomically friendly office environment and am... http://www.craweblogs.com/commlog/archives/002330.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45OPconnection_1.html [CommLog] InfoWorld columnist Chad Dickerson weighed in on wikis last week: "After my conversation with Peter, I was psyched up to give TWiki a spin, so I logged into our intranet server planning to set TWiki up and check it out. Guess what? It had already been installed months ago by our IT manager. I took this as yet another reason that I needed to pay attention. Worthwhile IT innovation is nearly always a bottom-up affair. If you were a naysayer about the Internet, Linux, or even Weblogs, embracing the Wiki might be your chance to beat your staffers to the punch at last." http://log.netbib.de/archives/2004/11/13/infoworld-wiki-goes-to-work/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/46OPconnection_1.html [netbib weblog] Chad Dickerson, technischer Direktor bei InfoWorld, beschrieb gestern, wie InfoWorld in einigen firmeninternen Bereichen Wiki einsetzt. Bei InfoWorld hat man sich für das Produkt TWiki entschieden, da einfache Formulare benötigt werden, z.B. um die Auslieferung von Computern in der Firma zu organisieren. Ein mit Wiki realisiertes Trouble-Ticket-System richtet sich direkt an die Endnutzer. Abschließend geht Dickerson noch darauf ein, warum er Wikis für ein geeigneteres Instrument des firmeninternen Informationsmanagements hält als Weblogs. Insbesondere Dickersons kurze Schilderung des Wikieinsatzes bei InfoWorld fand ich sehr alltagsnah und interessant. Sie enthält gute Hinweise darauf, wie ein durch Wikis organisierter Informationsfluß innerhalb einer Firma auch die Nicht-Computerfreaks, die darin arbeiten, unterstützen kann - vorausgesetzt, die Firma verfügt zumindest über ein paar Computerfreaks, die das Wiki entsprechend den Organisationsbedürfnissen einrichten. http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1687 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/17/HNamdfujitsu_1.html [AMDZone] Infoworld has a story on Spansion's expansion plans in Japan. Spansion is AMD's memory arm. "The company will convert its plant in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, into a "mega-site" for advanced flash memory chip production as part of a strategy that was announced at a webcast AMD analyst briefing in the U.S. on Friday." http://offshorexperts.blogspot.com/2004/11/offshore-outsourcing-healthcare.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/16/HNoutsourcehealth_1.html [Offshore Outsourcing News] InfoWorld reports healthcare organizations not considering offshore outsourcing are missing out on significant cost savings, but administrators need to be aware of potential risks, including lax handling of data security by some vendors and the effect on employee morale. Offshore outsourcing of some functions not directly related to patient care can deliver savings of 20 percent or more, said John Lovelock, a health care analyst with Gartner Inc. Gartner estimates health care organizations save an average of about 23 percent on outsourcing contracts, including IT and non-IT outsourcing, with some organizations seeing savings up to 45 percent on some outsourcing contracts... http://iggy.gnomeblog.com/blog/_archives/2004/11/18/186512.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNriaasues_1.html [Iggy Uncensored] Looks as if the RIAA may be a bit jealous of the MPAA. So they had to file some new lawsuits. Infoworld has the story. Previous blog post in relation to the MPAA starting to sue is here MPAA Starts Suing - Let the MPAA lawsuits begin. http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=25714&category=main http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/18/HNmsyahoowebads_1.html [Neowin.net] Microsoft has extended its partnership with Yahoo to deliver sponsored search results on its U.S. and international MSN sites, despite the software maker's recent declarations that it intends to be a major force in the search market. Microsoft has extended until June 2006 its agreement with Yahoo subsidiary Overture Services Inc. to deliver the pay-for-performance results, it said Thursday. The agreement was initially undertaken in 2001 and was due to expire in June 2005, an Overture spokeswoman said. There has been no changes to the terms of the contract, the spokeswoman said. Financial details were not disclosed. Microsoft's decision to lengthen its search partnership with Yahoo comes at a time when the software maker is sharpening its own tools and expertise in the area. http://radio.weblogs.com/0117767/2004/11/17.html#a1292 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/17/HNpolishrejection_1.html [Ted Roche] "Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive. The future of the controversial European Union (E.U.) software patent directive was thrown into doubt Wednesday after the Polish government indicated it could no longer support the legislation in its current form." [InfoWorld: Top News] Software patents are an abomination: licensing an idea, instead of the implementation of an idea (the latter is what copyrights are). Patents will chill the software development marketplace and reserve software development for the big companies that can afford patent lawyers. Stealing another programmers copywritten code is theft; building on another programmers code is progress. http://www.afroginthevalley.com/archives/000262.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/16.html#a1115 [Sylvain Carle] "...an example showing how rich internet applications can display their current state in the URL as the user interacts locally. This enables a user to bookmark a particular state in the local application, and also enables rich internet applications to be composed with others through REST." Wow. Ça fait des années que je pense que REST et Flash vont ensemble, c'est trop webbish pour ne pas... http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/001393.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/04.html [Darren Barefoot] A couple of weeks ago, I referenced the video that Jon Udell made of testing Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I commented that I was still underwhelmed. I'm still underwhelmed because I tried an earlier version by Dragon in 1998., and wrote an article about it. Here's an excerpt: "Simple, right? Naturally Speaking claims 95% accuracy. That's darn swank, until you evaluate what that really means. 95% is one in twenty. Imagine if once every twenty words you had to stop, go back, and tediously re-type the word. You would hardly be a model of efficiency.. Furthermore, the microphone (being "high-quality") tends to record every paper shuffle and neck scratch as "the" or "and". Consider this last paragraph, as read at normal speed, without corrections, into my computer: 'Symbol, right? It keeps once hands free to do other tasks right? NaturallySpeaking claims at 95 percent accuracy. Great, I think, into you value eight what that really means. 95 percent is one in 20. Imagine if the ones every 20 words you had to stop, go back, and tedious the read type the word. He would hardly be a mottled efficiency. Furthermore, the microphone being high-quality tennis record every paper shuffle and crash as the war and.' " Now, in truth, speech recognition has come a long way since 1998. However, based on Jon's demo, I still don't think it's easy enough to use. In a follow-up entry, Jon references this chart by Richard Sprague. It shows the converging error rates of speech recognition software and humans. Roughly another seven years and we should be in good shape. I've pasted the complete text of the original article after the jump. Say What? I don't know about you, but I talk to my computer. Well, mostly I swear at it. In fact, on more stressful days, one might mistake my home office for the cab of an eighteen wheeler jacknifed on a crumbling overpass. We have more sedate conversations as well. At times I cojole (?come on, you can download that page?), plead (?please don't crash, please don't crash, please don't... http://www.corante.com/goingglobal/archives/google_taking_blogs_global.php http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/15/HNbloggergoes_1.html [Corante] Google appears to be doing for blogs what it did for search engines. According to this InfoWorld article, Blogger, which is owned by Google, is going to be localized for 9 languages "soon." The languages are Japanese, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, German and Brazilian Portuguese. This can't be good news for the folks at Six Apart. Although they have a head start over Blogger, having already localized TypePad for six markets, I can't imagine they can hold that lead for long. Here is where TypePad stands today: [image cut] It will be interesting to see how many locales are supported six months from now and where Blogger stands in relation. Google, as I've said before, is arguably the most global commercial Web site ever created. With 97 language interfaces, it truly speaks to the world. There is no reason why Blogger can't also be available in 97 languages; but can TypePad (and the other blog services) keep up? http://www.byz.org/~rbanks/movableType/webLog/trends/archives/002104.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/16/HNmotorolabuysmeshnetworks_1.html [Trends] Motorola to acquire MeshNetworks. "It lets users of mobile devices create self-forming and self-healing wireless networks that can reach beyond the range of established wireless hot spots. The technology has potential applications ranging from enterprises to home entertainment, for delivering data, video, voice and location information, Motorola said in a statement." http://www.vrtprj.com/weblog/communication/acrobat7.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/15/HNacrobat7_1.html [Rainer Volz: Virtual Projects] After Adobe Systems’ moves in the electronic process/electronic business server area (see Adobe buys ebXML software developer and More about Adobe ebXML), Acrobat 7 does something for the client side. Users of the free Acrobat Reader versions can now be included in review and approval flows via PDF documents. (More about that in Adobe Introduces Acrobat 7.0 Software for Driving Intelligent Document Workflows and InfoWorld: Adobe aims at workgroups with Acrobat 7.) While the new features won’t transform Acrobat into a fully interactive clientside process application (not yet), they might be enough for project teams, looking for a possibility to include external sponsors, experts more actively into workflows. Due to the ubiquity of the Acrobat Reader, even on non-MS platforms, software problems are unlikely. http://www.blogsource.org/blog/2004/11/health_care_pro.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/16/HNoutsourcehealth_1.html [The Outsourcing Times] A new study by Gartner concludes that health care providers who are not offshoring are missing out on a chance to save some serious cash. According to InfoWorld: "Offshore outsourcing of some functions not directly related to patient care can deliver savings of 20 percent or more, said John Lovelock, a health care analyst with Gartner Inc. Gartner estimates health care organizations save an average of about 23 percent on outsourcing contracts, including IT and non-IT outsourcing, with some organizations seeing savings up to 45 percent on some outsourcing contracts, said Lovelock, who spoke at the Gartner Healthcare IT Summit in Baltimore. Gartner estimates that healthcare organizations will spend 16 percent of their external services budgets on business process outsourcing during 2004, and the IT-focused research firm expects that number to grow in coming years, Lovelock said in an interview." Read more: Analyst: Outsourcing can save costs in health care http://techskim.blogspot.com/2004/11/nokia-demos-first-mobile-call-using.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/16/HNnokiademosmobile_1.html [Techskim - Tech news I'm reading] Nokia Corp. has developed a prototype handset that supports Mobile IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a version of the protocol that will help to improve the quality of VOIP (voice over IP), streaming video and other applications delivered to wireless devices, the company said Tuesday. http://wheresyourbrain.blogspot.com/2004/11/outsourcing-ala-microsoft.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/15/HNmsindianstaff_1.html [Where's Your Brain?] According to an article yesterday in InfoWorld Microsoft already has employed over 700 staff in Hyderabad, India and will be hiring hundreds more new developers. Steve Ballmer, attending the inauguration of their nice new campus in Manikonda India happily declared that development and support operations in India would not lead to a loss of jobs in the USA. Now excuse me Mr. Ballmer, but it seems to make sense that if you are employing all those in India then there are that many that are NOT being employed by Microsoft in the USA, right? Duh! In my opinion consumers should have a right to be informed on all packaging where that product or service is from – just like we see on food products. If you were considering buying a software package from Microsoft (India) or a competitor (USA), both packages being equivalent, which would you prefer? If this is the future for the American consumer perhaps it would be best if schools start teaching Sanskrit as a second language? http://www.wispdirectory.com/blog/index.php?p=2933 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/15/HNphillywireless_1.html [WISP Directory Wireless ISP/Wi-Fi Hotspot Industry News] In September, the city of Philadelphia announced its plans to invest in a new wireless mesh network based on the current Wi-Fi 802.11b standard. By deploying Wi-Fi antennae on streetlights and other traffic control devices, city officials hope they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world’s largest wireless Internet hot spot, according to a press release on the city’s website. Between 8 and 16 Wi-Fi antennae will be needed per square mile in Philadelphia, depending on the topography and buildings in the area, according to the city. The plan is to connect these units and create a self-organizing and self-healing wireless mesh network. The city estimates the Wi-Fi network can be deployed for $40,000 to $60,000 per square mile, for a total cost of between $7 million and $10 million. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041116-110650 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/15/HNbloggergoes_1.html [SearchEngineWatch] Infoworld reports in: Blogger goes multilingual, that Google is now making interfaces and documentation available for Blogger in nine languages. Until now, Blogger was only available in English. "Google Inc. is calling the first phase of the service's internationalization...Now, key Blogger sections, such as its sign-in and account pages, are available in Japanese, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, German and Brazilian Portuguese, Google announced." http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/006352.cfm http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/16.html#a1115 [John Dowdell on MX] Jon Udell builds off of Kevin Lynch's example of supplying state info to a SWF in its URL. (Example: A single SWF for a restaurant has a menu display, a map display, a history display... how can you send your friend an URL which brings up the map display directly?) My question for you: What do you think the best Best Practices recommendation would be here? Should we say something like "Examine your app, and see if it has sections, or values like zipcodes or other frequent user choices -- if so, then consider an upfront ActionScript routine to extract any such query terms from the URL." Am I seeing too small a picture, a picture slightly askew, an unrefined picture here...? http://42.blogs.warnock.me.uk/2004/11/jon_udell_restf.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/16.html#a1115 [David Warnock] This Jon Udell: RESTful Flash is good as far as it goes but when you try the demo at Kevin's Photo #1 and read the extra information at Stateful Linking to Rich Internet Applications: How To which says: This technique covers bookmarking well, but doesn't support using the browser's back button to step backward to previous states. Some browsers will actually update the URL to show the previous states, but Flash isn't notified of the change. then to me you have hit a real big problem. If the url changes as you use the flash application, and yet the back button does not work then you have a real huge way to confuse the user. My feeling is that flash apps belong in windows with no browser controls. Maybe then the bookmarks could be useful if they can automatically launch the flash app to the right place but in a popup window (which of course FireFox can then block). Instead the gmail interface seems to be a real advance (see A Better Web Application Interface, Revisited - ThatWebThing) and one that surely reduces the need for Flash (although I still like the idea of 42: Open Laszlo for some things). http://linux.quicksurf.com/index.php?p=867 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/HNhpjboss_1.html [Linux Log] HP (Quote, Chart) deepened its relationship with open source software concern JBoss, agreeing to become a major source of support for its application server and Linux. In the deal, for which financial terms have not been disclosed, HP will also use its solid reputation for services and provide a fleet of consultants to help clients design, implement and migrate to the JBoss platform. http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/006349.cfm http://www.infoworld.com/Nexaweb_3.2/product_50823.html?view=1&curNodeId=173 [John Dowdell on MX] ICESoft, Nexaweb:Peter Wayner at InfoWorld reviews two ways to build better-than-browser web applications. ICESoft uses a customized browser as the client, while Nexaweb uses Java as the clientside engine. From the description, ICESoft sounds reminiscent of Mozilla, where you can customize the browser code and then try to persuade people to download and install this shell for your application. The Nexaweb description seemed to imply that ongoing client/server communication is handled by an internal file format, rather than as XML or whatever type of standard transmission method you might want to use... I'm not sure if the client has a way to communicate with arbitrary remote servers. Towards the end Peter writes a bit of comparison with the DHTML applications which are seeing a bit of a renaissance now, such as Gmail. (Even if you're sold on SWFfish RIAs, it's good to track how others are approaching similar problems.) http://bernardmoon.blogspot.com/2004/11/have-you-wiki-ed-today-only-recently.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/05/21/21OPconnection_1.html [Junto Boyz] Only recently have I been introduced to Wikis. I'm not really taken by it, but I can see their usefulness in the right work environment. Good article by Chad Dickerson at InfoWorld: Is Wiki under your radar? Your staff may already be using one of the most productive collaboration tools ever built... http://pbokelly.blogspot.com/2004/11/ent-news-news-vmware-cuts-prices.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45FEvirtual_1.html [Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check] The company has reduced the price of its GSX Server running on Windows or Linux hosts to $1,400 for a two-CPU license or $2,800 for an unlimited CPU license. Previously, GSX Server cost $5,000 for a four-CPU installation and $10,000 for eight CPUs, says Michael Mullany, VMware’s vice president of marketing. A configuration for two processors or fewer previously cost $3,025, according to the company’s Web site. While VMware is enjoying fast growth, it also doesn’t hurt that Microsoft just began shipping its Virtual Server 2005 product last month for $499 for the Standard Edition (up to four CPUs) and $999 for the Enterprise Edition (up to 32 processors). Also see an EMC/VMWare versus Microsoft review in this week's InfoWorld. http://ubaldoh.com/index.php?p=33 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/15.html [ubaldo huerta @ LoQUo] The narration part of the question Udell posted: * A progressively-downloadable video, * which shows interaction with software, * as is narrated by a presenter, * or as emerges in a conversation. Makes me think of a newsreel, so I’d say softreel or software reel http://blog.deeje.tv/musings/2004/11/jon_udell_descr.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/15.html#a1114 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/12.html#a1113 [deeje.com/musings] Jon's Radio reports: Name that genre. As I continue to explore the idea of making movies of software, I've been thinking that this medium needs a name. Apparently I'm not alone. Eric Hanson thinks so too. Jon, make sure to check out Macromedia Captivate. Much more than simple screen movies, Captivate automatically adds action bubbles and descriptive messages, and allows you to create interactive simulations. http://ascher.ca/blog/index.php?p=47 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/15.html#a1114 [david ascher’s blog] Jon Udell asks what to call his experiments with downloadable narrated demos of software. He’s looking for a name that describes: * A progressively-downloadable video, * which shows interaction with software, * as is narrated by a presenter, * or as emerges in a conversation. I think he’s got the requirements wrong. What’s interesting about what Jon’s been doing, from my point of view anyway isn’t so much the fact that it’s progressively downloadable, or even that it’s a video. What’s important is that it’s a recorded presentation of commercial software as demonstrated to a smart, critical, independent journalist. It could be presented as punch-out origami or a slide show or even a few screen shots, and it would be equally valid (although possibly less accessible!). Video/continuous screen captures are useful, not because they are animations (although that helps convey the ‘feel’ of an app, much like screen captures convey the ‘look’), but mostly because they record everything... http://hipaablog.com/articles/infoworld-ssl-vpn-security-threatened-by-desktop-search-engines-51.php http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/HNsslrisk_1.html [HIPAA Blog - HIPAA Compliance, HIPAA News, HIPAA Enforcement] If you’ve installed Google’s new desktop search tool, you might want to consider the security issues of having software that caches SSL-encrypted traffic specifically so it can be rapidly and easily searched. This has clear implications for administrators responsible for maintaining HIPAA-secure information technology. http://www.inter-net-viewer.nl/weblog/2004/11/13/weblog-wiki-of-combinatie/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/46OPconnection_1.html [inter-net-viewer.nl] "Because Wikis and blogs are often mentioned in the same breath, it’s important to point out a key distinction: Blogs are an excellent tool for knowledge management in IT, but in practice, blogs have shortcomings. One of the hallmarks of blog structure – a reverse chronological listing of posts – can actually be a drawback for certain types of information. In some contexts, instead of having the newest information at the top of a page, you might want the most important information at the top". Toen ik dit vandaag las moest ik denken aan de diverse ‘webloglijntjes’ die ik momenteel heb uitliggen. Het zijn namelijk niet allemaal vrijblijvende presentaties -zoals die voor mijn eigen collega’s- die van me verwacht worden de komende maand. Op diverse niveaus (platform, kenniskring, mediatheek) wordt er serieus gedacht over het inzetten van een weblog en mijn presentatie zou mede kunnen bijdragen aan de besluitvorming... http://securityawareness.blogspot.com/2004/11/problem-technology-cant-fix.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45secadvise_1.html [Security Awareness for Ma, Pa & the Corporate Clueless] As distractions go, there's nothing like the first good head cold of the season to take the wind out of one's sails. I've been huffing VapoRub for so many days that I'm approaching the point of substance dependency. Although the reduced flow of oxygen to my brain is making me feel a little dopey, I haven't taken complete leave of my senses. So when I read a Gartner representative's claims that social engineering is more of an IT security threat than traditional cracking and hacking, all I could do was nod my head and agree. That's because I've been taking a good look at the spam in my inboxes. http://techskim.blogspot.com/2004/11/chad-dickerson-wiki-goes-to-work.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/46OPconnection_1.html [Techskim - Tech news I'm reading] In last week's column, I talked about the potential of Wiki as an enterprise tool and promised more details on that topic this week. A recent conversation with Peter Theony, the developer of TWiki, got me thinking about how to solve some specific knowledge management problems I encounter in my daily work as a CTO. Although Wikis are still largely an underground IT phenomenon, a Wiki can be one of the most immediately useful tools in an agile IT organization. http://www.windowsatoz.com/techblogbeta/index.php?p=151 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/HNsp2flaws_1.html [Tech Blog 2.0] Microsoft is investigating claims that several news holes have been discovered in Windows XP Service Pac 2 (SP2). Security firm, Finjan Software Inc., said they have found as many as 10 "serious" security flaws in SP2. Just a few of the flaws is a hole allowing hackers to gain complete remote control of a computer or to download malicious code onto a compromised computer. Microsoft says that if the claims turn out the be true, they will take "immediate and appropriate action to help protect customers." http://www.margaret-marks.com/Transblawg/archives/001105.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/04.html#a1108 [Margaret Marks] Möchten Sie diktieren, statt tippen? In Windows Media Player, Flash oder Quicktime (Link klicken) demonstriert John Udell auf Englisch, wie er ein paar Sätze in Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 diktiert. Ich war schon bei der ersten Version von Dragon Dictate begeistert, als ich vor einigen Jahren einen Rechtsanwalt in London diktieren erlebte. In der Praxis ist das Programm noch etwas schneller als im Demo, wo es aus technischen Gründen verlangsamt wurde. Das Programm gibt es natürlich auch auf Deutsch. John Udell demonstrates Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 – click on Windows Media, Flash or Quicktime to see the video (in which the program appears slightly slower than in real life). Michael Benis reports regularly on voice recognition software in the ITI Bulletin. Here’s a past article by him at transref.org: and here an article in Translation Journal. http://www.windley.com/2004/11/12.html#a1520 http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/07/12/020715aptraction_1.html [Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] One of the reasons I went to Salt Lake today was to attend the Utah Government RSS Publisher's meeting. This group meet at irregular intervals to talk about how governments can use RSS. Ray Mtthews is the leader of the group and put a splendid program together for today: Jordan Frank from Traction Software and Bill French from Myst Technology Partners. Jordan Frank from Traction Software who makes the TeamPage product. (See Jon Udell review at InfoWorld.) TeamPage uses WebDAV for document management, has pluggalbe LDAP authentication, and has support for mobile devices. Its used by the DOD (CIO's office), Justice (Western States Information Network), Homeland Security (AZ Customs and Border Security) and State of Connecticut (Network Security definition and tracking). The State of Utah, by the way, uses Movable Type for some of these same purposes. Traction positions teampage as a "time-ordered journal" as opposed to a "personal podium." This is really just marketing to position themselves "above" the blogging world as a "serious piece of enterprise IT software." The thing walks like a blog, talks like a blog and looks like a blog. At its core, it's a blog. In fact, if I showed you one of their pages, you'd have a tough time telling that it wasn't produced by Movable Type. The difference is not so much that TeamPage isn't a blog, but that its a system for using multiple blogs in concert. Traction's RSS feed is dynamic, allowing custom RSS feeds by keyword, poster, and so on. Access control allows RSS feeds to protected for certain users. There are some interesting ways that they system puts blogs together for enterprise use. For example, projects can contain multiple blogs and each project can have various ways of aggregating the content from these blogs including keyword and category. People have "homepages" on the system that shows projects and alerts that they're interested in. I have to admit that I see some immediate benefit to these features. For example... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/13/0041257 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/11/HNdelltouseamd_1.html [Slashdot] LarsWestergren writes "According to InfoWorld, Dell may be close to adopting AMD processors. Don't get your hopes up too early though. It is mainly for servers (and possibly "gaming"?) since AMD doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell with enough processors for the desktop. Furthermore, Dell have said similar things before, possibly to put pressure on Intel and get better deals from them. Still, this is definitely a PR win for AMD." Intel, though, has a lot more ad dollars to contribute. http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1661 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/12/HNamdreflects_1.html [AMDZone] Infoworld has an article on AMD's comments at their analyst briefing today. "Two years ago, AMD Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Hector Ruiz told analysts at the annual meeting about AMD's plans to slash its workforce amid a sharp downturn in the PC market. But on Friday, flush with the success of the company's 64-bit x86 processors, Ruiz spoke of an AMD that "is in the midst of a major transformation." http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris/20041114#advice_for_jonathan_go_ask http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/000799.html [Jim Grisanzio] Everyone has an opinion, right? This bit of advice is directed to Jonathan from an "E. Schwartz" at InfoWorld under the headline, "Sun in need of good business advice." Here are a few paragraphs from the piece: "With all due respect to someone with the same last name as me, Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun, Schwartz's November 10th blog, left me almost speechless. I can't believe Sun is singing that same old Java song about how the company is licensing Java for a nominal fee, practically giving it away, in order to use it as a lever to sell its other products and services. This time around Schwartz says Java everywhere will take Sun from an $11 billion company to a $50 billion company. I've been hearing that tired tune from Sun executives for at least five years. In its latest form it is Java Desktop System and J2ME on cell phones that will save the day. ... I hold no degree in business, so take it for what its worth. But all I know is Microsoft doesn't give away ice in the winter. If it's not too late, as its new president Schwartz should steal a page or two from the Microsoft play book. Or maybe, instead of accepting the $1.6 billion settlement with Microsoft over the Java suit it should have asked for some good business advice instead." I don't know about you, but that last sentence is pretty condescending to me. How can I consider anything E. Schwartz says as credible if that's his perspective? Oh, well. No big deal. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=744 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/11/HNdelltouseamd_1.html [ZDNet Blogs] For the second time in a week, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has gone on record as saying that the company will very likely offer AMD-based products. Last week, at Forrester Research's Executive Strategy Forum, Rollins said "We believe there will come a time when we use AMD products, too." Then yesterday, in an interview with InfoWorld editors, Rollins said "My guess is we're going to want to add that [AMD] product line in the future." Rollins' comments come in stark contrast to statements he made just two weeks ago. In an interview with News.com editors, Rollins characterized a Dell/AMD deal as a non-starter saying "Could I do it? Yeah, but why?" So, what happened in the last two weeks that might have led to Dell's change of heart? Suggesting that concerns regarding production capacity were an issue for Dell when it came to AMD, Dell spokesperson Wendy Giever told me that "AMD's newly added fab capacity is a big deal." This week, AMD added significant capacity to its chip production capacity... http://www.windowsatoz.com/techblogbeta/index.php?p=150 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/11/HNmsnsearchbeta_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNgmailpopthree_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNfirefoxholes_1.html [Tech Blog 2.0] The beta version of Microsoft’s new search engine went live today. The engines interface mimics Google’s slick and clean interface. Currently the beta searches over 5 billion documents and is expected to be finalized in 2005 and it will replace Microsoft’s current search technology that it licenses from Yahoo to power the MSN search engine. You can check out MSN Search Beta here. Google will begin to incorporate POP3 (Post Office Protocol) support over the next few weeks to their GMail online email service. The free POP3 feature will allow GMail users to download their email messages from GMail servers to email application’s such as Outlook. Expect the POP3 service to be in all GMail accounts within the next weeks. Google is also working on a antivirus scan feature for the online email service. A bad security hole has been discovered in older versions of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. The flaw could allow the spoofing of dowloaded file extensions and launching of a DoS (denial of service attack) attack. The problem was fixed in the new 1.0 version, but the hole affects all versions up to 0.9. http://www.shamelessgeeks.com/index.php?p=45 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/11/HNdelltouseamd_1.html [Shameless Geeks Say...] InfoWorld is reporting that Dell amd AMD are talking about a deal …again. If you’ve been following these two companies over the last few years, it seems that this happens every time Dell and Intel have a contract about to expire. It would be wonderful news if it happened, but I’ll just assume it is yet another attempt by Dell to squeeze a better deal out of Intel. Some things never seem to change. http://www.figby.com/archives/2004/11/11/googles-amazing-expanding-index/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/02/17/HNgoogleexceeds_1.html [A weblog by Michael Moncur] The search engine size war in review: * August 21, 2003: Overture announces that their FAST search engine indexes 3.2 billion documents. * August 27, 2003: Google updates its site to indicate that it searches 3.3 billion documents. * February 18, 2004: Yahoo announces its new search engine. * February 18, 2004: Google expands its index to 6 billion items. * November 10, 2004: Google announces an expanded index of over 8 billion items. * November 11, 2004: Microsoft debuts its new MSN search engine, indexing 5 billion documents. Anyone who works with large databases knows that "number of items" can be a very vague concept. Google’s number of items could vary depending on whether they decide to include or reject things like duplicates, obvious spam, malformed pages, newly crawled pages, and so on. Considering that they must index millions of new pages every day, it amuses me greatly that the "number of pages" at the bottom of the search page only changes when it’s convenient for marketing purposes. http://hdc-cyberlaw.blogspot.com/2004/11/eu-objects-to-microsoft-time-warner.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNcontentguarddeal_1.html? [CyberLaw NewsWatch] The European Commission has issued a formal set of objections to Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc. taking control of ContentGuard Holdings Inc., a digital rights management (DRM) company, according to sources familiar with the case. http://onclick.blogs.com/biometrics/2004/11/identity_manage_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/29/HNmicrosoftgemini_1.html [onClick Biometrics] Since the post on defining identity management solutions just days ago, I've come across another juicy bit along the same lines. Microsoft drops some infromation on Gemini, the next version of Microsoft Identity Integration Server to be realeased in 2006 or 2007. It is supposed to provide a simple, cost-effective solution that let users manage the identity information themselves. No talk yet as to whether it will be an option to incorporate the biometrics they have just started providing. http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/index.php?p=17 http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm?featureid=956&Page=1&pagePos=2 [ZDNet Blogs] There’s a great piece out by InfoWorld’s Eric Knorr on the impending resurgence of the ultimate SOA machine: the mainframe. Big Iron is constantly given up for dead, yet IBM is reporting record sales, especially the ones that run Linux. A very short history – mainframes were accessed by "green screen" terminals that were eventually emulated on PCs, then through browsers. Now, Web services components capture mainframe-based processes, while leveraging Big Iron as a data repository. Web services/SOA will extend mainframe investments well into the future, and mainframes will provide reliability and scalability to Web services/SOA. That’s pretty good synergy. http://nberry.baltiblogs.com/archives/2004/11/11/gmail_adds_pop3.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNgmailpopthree_1.html [aishel] First sighted at Shaftek, there was an article at InfoWorld talking about Google slowly enabling POP3 capability for people using Gmail. "Have you enabled POP in your Gmail account? We're rolling out POP access to all users in phases. Once it's available to you, a 'Forwarding and POP' tab appears on your 'Settings' page. You need to have this tab in your Gmail account before you can configure POP in your mail client." I don't have it yet, does anyone else? I'm looking forward to this feature being enabled. If I'm still able to keep my messages and labels on the server, it'll be a valuable tool. http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2004/11/website_gmail_p.html http://infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNgmailpopthree_1.html [PalmAddict] Hoorah POP email for GMail coming soon! This from Stephen Cosgrove about GMail as he pointed me to this over at Infoworld. "Google Inc. will roll out POP3 (Post Office Protocol) support gradually over the coming weeks to Gmail users, who will be able to use the feature to download e-mail messages from Gmail servers to e-mail applications on devices such as PCs and wireless devices." Read in full over at InfoWorld. http://www.stabell-kulo.net/greier/2004/10/hailstorm-was-before-its-time http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/16/29OPstrategic_1.html [Tage Stabell-Kulø] En meget bra observasjon om hvorfor det gikk som det (ser ut til at det) gikk med Hailstorm og Passport (for annet enn MSN: "I suspect there's an even deeper reason, though. Many folks wouldn't want to be reminded how easy it is to convert sparse input into a detailed profile that includes a phone number, a street address, a satellite photo, and driving directions. Re-entering the basic facts each time perpetuates an illusion of privacy. Yet the reality, for many of us, is that these facts are public. Since I haven't told Google (or any other directories) to delete my..." http://www.macminute.com/2004/11/10/gmail/ http://infoworld.com/article/04/11/10/HNgmailpopthree_1.html [MacMinute] Google said today that it will graually roll out POP3 (Post Office Protocol) support over the coming weeks to users of its Gmail e-mail service. "With POP3 support, users will be able to transfer their server-based Gmail messages to a client-side e-mail application such as Microsoft's Outlook and have the messages stored on their local hard drive and thus accessible when they are offline. Users with wireless devices that have POP3-compliant e-mail clients will also be able to download their Gmail messages to personal digital assistants or cell phones. Google is also working on adding an antivirus scanning feature to the Web mail service." http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/006314.cfm http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45OPstrategic_1.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/09.html#a1110 [John Dowdell on MX] Jon Udell raises an interesting point here (and in his weblog): When you want to show someone else a particular state in an application (like, a particular map in a web atlas, or a particular graph in a business dashboard), then how can you quickly describe this state? In a traditional, server-based web application, with all query data passed in the URL, this is easy -- you could even bookmark an application state, like this radar map at AccuWeather. Describing application state through HTTP query terms works if you expect to get back a new display from the server for every request, but what type of easy, consumer-friendly mechanisms do we have for describing state in applications, with local interactivity? (In standalone desktop applications application state was described... http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/another_new_mydoom_variant_is_making_the_rounds/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNmydoomieflaw_1.html [stupid evil bastard] Looks like there’s a new version of the MyDoom virus circulating on the Net taking advantage of another unpatched hole in Internet Explorer. "The worm, which security firms dubbed MyDoom.AF, MyDoom.AH and MyDoom.AG, spreads by e-mail and exploits a recently discovered buffer overflow vulnerability in IE. Internet users should avoid opening suspicious e-mail with the subject headers "funny photos ," "hello," "hey!" and blank headers, according to security firm iDefense Inc. Users who open the infected e-mail and click on links in the message body will be directed to destinations from which an attack may be launched. Microsoft issued a statement saying that it was aware of the new variant and an investigation is underway. According to early reports the vulnerability does not exist on Windows XP (Overview, Articles, Company) Service Pack 2 (SP2) so customers running the security update are at a reduced risk of the threat, Microsoft said. The software maker and security experts advised users to install SP2 if they have not already." For those of you who still aren’t running Windows XP your best option is to make the switch away from IE. Hell, it’s probably your best bet even if you are running XP. http://blog.monhaut.com/index.php?p=138 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/09/28enterwin_1.html [Random Drivel] The new version of firefox was released today… if you haven’t downloaded and installed firefox (and tabbed browser extensions and adblock and any of the other extensions) then you don’t know what you’re missing! According to this article on infoworld and the United States Department of Homeland Security, continuing to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is hazardous to your computing health. Mozilla Firefox is an open-source browser that is continually updated to fix bugs and add new features, and each new version builds upon the versions before it. New internet browsing techniques such as tabbed browsing, which allows you to open several tabbed windows within one instance of the application, allow you to manage your internet viewing in a much more efficient way. Other features are a download manager that allows you to keep track of downloaded files, internally built popup blocking (and the option to allow popups from certain sites or to allow popups that are not automatically generated, which typically include advertisements) and the ability to modify the program through the use of "extensions", which are plugins for the browswer. Two of these extensions are must haves for Firefox users. The first, adblock, will prevent advertisements detected in webpages from being downloaded. This is accomplished through a filtering system... http://gemal.dk/blog/2004/11/10/mozilla_considers_desktop_search_integration_for_firefox/ http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNmozilladesktop_1.html [gemal's psyched site] Having launched the much-awaited version 1.0 of the Firefox browser on Tuesday, the Mozilla Foundation is busy planning future enhancements to the open-source product, including the possibility of integrating it with a variety of desktop search tools. The Mozilla Foundation also wants to place Firefox in PCs through OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals with PC hardware vendors and to continue to sharpen the product's pop-up ad blocking technology. http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000254.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/ [James Governor's MonkChips] I have pointed to Furl a couple of times recently. i like the online bookmarking service. but i do admit to having a certain del.ici.ous envy. This post from by business partner didn't help. But i can't help wondering if some of the apparent momentum in delicious is down to the Udell effect. John is a blogosphere supernode and his interest in del.ici.ous is piquing others too. So am i envious of the buzz or the service itself? and how come furl seems to be garnering less interest. Well, it turns out googlefight-ing challenges assumptions and points to the idea i may indeed have fallen into a self referential chamber: furl vs. del.ici.ous: furl has about twice as many google mentions as delicious (could be down to the weird periods in the del.ici.ous though). so i got to wondering whether it was that del.ici.ous is just more API oriented - so it is getting picked up more broadly in developers minds, because of its politics of lighweight service calls. here googlefight's results definitely surprised me. del.ici.ous API vs furl API 13 results for delicious to 8,260 for furl... and as it transpires there is plenty of furl buzz in feedland. my opinion is shifting as i look around and remember an article called 10 Cool Things To Do With Furl, which led me on through... http://www.karlnelson.net/weblog/000871.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html [Information Management Weblog] Ted Lueng did a much better job describing the concept of a book queue than I did in this post. But we're talking about the same thing. From Ted: "We're not subscribers to Netflix, but I like their notion of an "interest queue". In addition to the queue, there's what I'll call you interest working set, which is 3 DVDs. When you return an item from working set, you get the next item from the queue. I'd love to have a queue like this for books, and I'd also like to be able to specify whether queue requests get satisfied via my local library or via Amazon (or your favorite book retailer)." I think most of the pieces are there for something like this to happen. But, I think it would be tough to make it as automatic as Ted envisions. Making the Amazon purchase should be fairly easy; doing the local library bit would be harder. Probably the best we could do given the lack of exposed library catalog APIs would be to do something similar to Jon Udell's Library Lookup. Still, it shouldn't be too hard to pull this off. http://marketingplaybook.com/2004/11/08/quote_of_the_week_simplicity.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/10/29.html [The Marketing Playbook] Great set of articles from the recent Economist Technology quarterly, starting out with a great quote from Confucius: "Life is simple, but we insist on making it complicated." Here are some highlights from these articles: * The ABCs of complexity in the enterprise: 66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity; average firm's computer networks are down for an unplanned 175 hours a year; 15 years ago firms were spending 75% of their IT budget on new hardware and software and 25% on fixing the systems that they already had; now that ratio has been reversed—70-80% of IT spending goes on fixing things rather than buying new systems.... Customers no longer demand "hot" technologies, but instead want "cold" technologies, such as integration software, that help them stitch together and simplify the fancy systems they bought during the boom years. * A huge gap exists between what consumers want and what vendors would like to sell them. * And few technologies pass the Mom Test where they are simple enough for mom to use. Simplicity seems to be the new buzzword in the blogsphere as well. With good reason. So what's the answer? Several threads recently talk about simplicity in software and where it’s headed, where it might be coming from and what might happen in the process of trying to get there, alot highlight the promise of Web Services but the jury is far from in.... http://auditguy.blogspot.com/2004/11/wikis-for-enterprise-collaboration.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45OPconnection_1.html [Dennis Arter] Here's a good article by Chad Dickerson on using Wikis as an enterprise collaboration tool. I like the definition of Wiki, which he pulled from the Wikipedia: "A Wiki is a Web site that allows any user to add content, but also allows that content to be edited by any other user more easily than a blog. The term "Wiki" can also be used to refer to the software used to drive a Wiki." I'm trying out a test Wiki for the Customer-Supplier Division to use for our planning and management of the "Roadshow" seminars, which we hold around the country several times a year. I have the four primary team members getting comfortable with the idea, then I'll open it up to the rest of the team in a week or so. Chad has a good Blog, which has RSS feeds so I don't have to remember to visit the site. The teasers come to me via the Sage plug-in for Firefox. http://www.terrystorch.com/2004/11/wiki_stupid_nam.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45OPconnection_1.html [Terry Storch] Thank Chad for this stuff. However, I do have to say that this is pretty cool. I am sure that Bailey is all over it. "Occasionally when you're writing a regular column that is turned in a full week before it actually runs (for copy editing, etc.), a serendipitous intersection with real-time blog discussion happens. And so it happened with Tim Bray's post reinforcing the fundamental distinction between the blog and wiki concepts and my column that went online the same day ("Is the Wiki under your radar?"). My sense is that your average corporate IT person is still catching up on what blogs mean for knowledge management, and something with such a whimsical name (a wiki?) is way down the priority list. A lazy writer might be tempted to lump blogs and wikis together just to get it out of the way and move on to other topics, but equating the two is kind of like saying basketball and hockey are converging because in both cases, you are trying to put an object in a net." http://www.windley.com/2004/11/10.html#a1515 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45FEvirtualvmware_1.html [Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] Tom Yager reviewed VMWare ESX for InfoWorld this week. This was a review I wanted to do, but he beat me to it. :-) I think virtualization is a tool that not enough IT managers use yet. I've got ESX installed a couple of Dell 6650 4-way SMP boxes with 16Gb of memory connected to a SAN. This set-up is my virtualization testbed and serves as the platform for study we're doing in my lab. At some point in the not too distant future we hope to have some hard data on the performance trade-offs. Power is one big reason to go virtual that Tom doesn't mention in his article. Data centers are getting denser and hence the power/square foot ration is going up--way up. I believe virtualization on dense servers can reduce overall power requirements and we're trying to gather evidence to support the idea. http://www.windley.com/2004/11/10.html#a1514 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45OPconnection_1.html%22 [Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] Chad Dickerson asks "is Wiki under your radar?" in his latest column at InfoWorld. Most of the column is about his exploration of Wikis and deciding which one to install at InfoWorld. The kicker, is that after all that, he finds that its already been installed months before. Some CIO's get nervous when that happens. I always say that "I love when good things happen and I didn't have to push it." Most IT people will scratch their itches and that's a good thing, in general. The trick is discovering these rogue projects and then finding ways to grow them into services that the rest of the organization can use. http://www.windley.com/2004/11/10.html#a1513 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/08.html#a1109 [Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] Jon is expounding the virtues of Del.icio.us: "What Roland Piquepaille is doing here, like what I'm doing here, begins with self-interested personal information management. We categorize our own items first and foremost for our own benefit, so that we can find things more easily and so that we can better understand how new items relate to our collective works. But del.icio.us is also a social system. The tagging I do is also potentially useful to you. For example, Roland's entry today cited several of my prior items about del.icio.us. A shorthand way to refer to those -- and, in fact, to all six (soon to be seven) items in that set -- is: http://del.icio.us/judell/del.icio.us+jonudell. That's a nice convenience. [From Jon Udell: Cornucopia of the commons]" Jon goes on to talk about using Del.icio.us as a way to get information about what other people are bookmarking your posts and, potentially, to find larger communities with like interests. I've found Del.icio.us to be a great way to organize bookmarks and, using the RSS feeds, have my students follow what I'm book marking. When I want to bring something to their attention, I can just bookmark it in Del.icio.us and they see it in their feedreader. Very easy to do. I haven't yet taken the step that Jon and Ron have and enter bookmarks for each blog entry on this site, but its something I plan on doing. I'm not sure whether to set up a different user name on Del.icio.us for that so that its separate from my personal bookmarks, or just use a special tag and then select blog posts by including that tag in the search. http://www.gnuheter.com/article.php?sid=3414 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/03/HNciscopixhack_1.html [Patrik Wallström och Mikael Pawlo] En grupp crackers säljer källkod till proprietära program på Usenet. För en nätt summa på $24.000 kan man köpa källkoden till Ciscos brandvägg PIX, som är ett av flera program vars källkod finns att köpa. Gruppen kallar sig för "The Source Code Club" och dök upp första gången i Juni, då på en server som stod i Ukraina. Läs mer på InfoWorld. http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/11/10#a2877 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/08.html#a1109 [Will Richardson Weblogg-ed] Jon Udell goes into great depth about the potential for using del.icio.us as a collaborative tool. My head hurts after reading it, but I actually think I see some of the interesting ways that del.icio.us can connect ideas and interests. Just one example; I didn't realize that it not only tells you who else posted the same bookmark, but it also tells you how they tagged that bookmark so you can potentially easily subscribe to that narrow topic via RSS feed. Not so with Furl, I don't think. He also suggests saving your own posts, which is something I had started to do with Furl a while back. It didn't last, however. The idea of going back and tagging each post with keywords is daunting, but I can see the reasoning behind it, I guess. It's the index to the blog, more or less, and I really like that concept. I do wish it was easier to retreive certain ideas and posts that were written many moons ago now (I can't believe I've got almost three years worth of writing here...oy.) But one obvious classroom use of either Furl or del.icio.us is ... http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/006315.cfm http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/09.html#a1110 [John Dowdell on MX] Wunderground satellite SWF: oooh, I think you'll like this... while logging that conversation from Jon Udell, below, I first went to Weather Underground to find a radar map with a long URL... I remember something like this to see a realtime satellite photo above Northern California. But they've switched! Their new SWF display has a simpler URL, but does UI controls locally, and fetches only new data on demand, instead of reloading all the UI and logic and advertising and the rest you see with a trad serverside web app. I *like* being able to see Lat/Long with a mouseover! And check out the little navmap lower-right! Nice, nice, nice. (Now, I'd send you a custom view within this application, but because it doesn't go back to the server with new query terms each time, there's no new URL after each user interaction, like Jon was describing in his posts....) http://financialhealth.blogspot.com/2004/11/microsoft-and-mozilla-lennon-had-it.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/02/HNielosing_1.html [Financial Health Blog] I often tell people that the concept of financial health covers everything that touches the financial part of a person's life, which, since most every aspect of a person's life has a financial component to it, is virtually everything in their lives. Today we put that notion to the test by looking at software. * * * In today's paper I saw news of the following: (a) Microsoft is settling a law suit brought by Novell by paying some half a billion plus dollars of its cash horde to Novell, a once-dominant networking company that, woe-be-to-it, ended up smack dab in the middle of Bill Gates's competitive sights (see the NYT article here), and (b) Mozilla is releasing a new version of Firefox (see the article here and on the front page of today's SF Chron). Now, the fact that Mozilla was on the front page of the business section of today's SF Chronicle must have given the folks at Microsoft (which we'll refer to in here by its stock ticker symbol, MSFT) pause, for MSFT's competing product, the ubiquitous Internet Explorer (which we'll call IE in here), is something over which MSFT has waged the software equivalent of a holy crusades in the past. That happened in the mid-90s when Bill I'm an Innovator, not a Dominator Gates failed to understand the mass commercialization of the Internet in a timely fashion, and found himself playing big-time catch-up with Netscape's Navigator... http://www.dsi-info.ca/moteurs-de-recherche/2004_11_01_blog-archives.html#110005055854946420 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNmozilladesktop_1.html [Marc Duval] La fondation Mozilla vient de lancer la dernière version de son fureteur FireFox. Elle planche déjà sur un logiciel de recherche sur PC. Cette annonce témoigne de l'ébullition dans ce segment de marché. Plusieurs acteurs ont lancé cette année leur propre logiciel de recherche sur disque dur dont Copernic et Google. Yahoo! et AOL ont avoué travailler sur ce projet. AOL possédant le navigateur Netscape, le grand frère de FireFox, plusieurs pensent que cette société le relancera. http://vasim.blogspot.com/2004/11/infoworld-state-of-rich-web-apps.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45OPstrategic_1.html [Adnan Wasim: Adnans Sysadmin Blog] People want to be able to get on a system, and instantly start browsing, filling out forms, or what have you. They dont want to sit on an app and first figure out if they are connected or not. If they are not connected, they have to connect. The wait in itself is bad. Then there is the day when the server does not connect. People just dont want to deal with these things. Further, todays rich web apps dont have the capability to save data and upload later. Maybe the server is down, maybe it is not responsive or under a lot of load. It would be cool if I could queue up data nad transfer it later. Not possible with any of the web apps that I use. Neither bloglines, blogger, or gmail. Something that might improve as web apps get more mature. http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003321.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/20/HNmsppscaleback_1.html [Joho the Blog] According to an article by Joris Evers in Infoworld on Oct. 20, Microsoft has dropped its o'erweening ambitions for Passport. Instead of being the "single sign-on for the Web," it's now going to be a service for Microsoft and the few partners who had signed up to use the service. Says the article: "In 1999, the Redmond, Washington-based company envisioned thousands of online stores and other services using Passport, allowing users to sign on using the same user name and password combination used for Microsoft services. But the reality turned out different, as Web site operators balked at the idea of having Microsoft control access to their sites. Aside from Microsoft-owned sites only a few dozen others signed on to Passport... Going forward, the mission of the Microsoft Passport service will be to provide authentication services to Microsoft services and products and to Microsoft partners," she [Brooke Richardson, lead product manager for MSN] said late Tuesday." This is good news because it means Microsoft will not become the de facto repository of your digital ID. It may even mean that now I can register for Microsoft products without feeling that I'm adding value to to Microsoft's attempt to put itself at the heart of every transaction on the Net. http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=25489&category=main http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNmozilladesktop_1.html [Deren Smith's Neowin.net] Having launched the much-awaited version 1.0 of the Firefox browser on Tuesday, the Mozilla Foundation is busy planning future enhancements to the open-source product, including the possibility of integrating it with a variety of desktop search tools. The Mozilla Foundation also wants to place Firefox in PCs through OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals with PC hardware vendors and to continue to sharpen the product's pop-up ad blocking technology. These and other enhancements, such as graphics display improvements, will help Firefox to continue building the already considerable momentum it has generated so it can capture between 10 percent and 12 percent of the Web browser market by some point next year, said Chris Hofmann, the Mozilla Foundation's engineering director. "We believe there's room for a lot of growth for Firefox's market share and there's a number of things we need to do to continue on this growth curve," Hofmann said. http://www.webstractions.com/news/2004/11/mozilla-considers-desktop-search.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNmozilladesktop_1.html [WebStractions] An InfoWorld article is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation is considering desktop search integration for Firefox. Chris Hofmann, the Mozilla Foundation's engineering director says, "There are a variety of companies that are working on that technology and we may just try and identify a way for Firefox to plug into a variety of desktop search engines and enable users to pick and choose." Some of the possible desktop search vendors include X1 Technologies Inc., Copernic Technologies Inc. and Blinkx. The bigger news however is that the Mozilla Foundation also wants to place Firefox in PCs through OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals with PC hardware vendors and to continue to sharpen the product's pop-up ad blocking technology. This would be a major push into Microsoft Internet Explorer territory by far. http://www.cmaeda.com/index.php?p=27 http://archive.infoworld.com/reports/26SRbizrules.html [Chris Maeda] Pointer to a good review article on business rule engines; appeared in Infoworld in June 2004. Infoworld Business Rules Engine Review. The article forgot the unfortunately named but open source DROOLS engine. http://www.mjberger.com/archives/2004/11/the_benefit_of.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/09.html#a1110 [Mikel Berger] "In a Web application, those hooks are simply URLs. Consider what happens when you include a MapQuest URL in an email to someone. A piece of state information -- namely, the state of the MapQuest viewer when displaying a given location -- has been reduced to a token that one person can hand to another. The same thing can usefully apply to the state of a shopping cart, or an airline reservation. The idea that an application wears its state information on its sleeve, readily available for users to bookmark, modify, and trade, is an underappreciated strength of Web-based software." That's a benefit of web applications I've never really realized before. Though not entirely true if the the state isn't totally on the server (e.g. it's dependant on a local cookie so I can't email you the link + the cookie) http://radio.weblogs.com/0112415/2004/11/09.html#a76 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNsecuritygrows_1.html [Sree Nilakanta's Radio Weblog] The number of cybersecurity professionals is projected to grow at an annual compound rate of nearly 14 percent from now until 2008, according to a study released this week during the Computer Security Institute (CSI) trade show in Washington, D.C. [InfoWorld: Top News] Another piece of good news for our graduates! http://radio.weblogs.com/0117767/2004/11/09.html#a1289 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNfirefox1_1.html [Ted's Radio Weblog] "The Mozilla Foundation has released Version 1.0 of its Firefox browser, an open-source product that has generated lofty expectations that it will offer real competition to Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous Internet Explorer." Posted at InfoWorld: Top News. Use BitTorrent, if you can, and the download goes faster than greased lightening. http://www.tweakers.net/nieuws/35001 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNskipitanium_1.html [Tweakers.net] Eind mei werd door ons gemeld dat Microsoft bezig is met de ontwikkeling van een speciale Windows-versie voor supercomputers, een domein dat op dit moment voornamelijk het bezit is van Linux en enkele Unix-varianten. Ongeveer een maand later werd bekend dat Microsoft deze speciale versie van Windows aan het einde van volgend jaar wil introduceren. InfoWorld meldt nu dat deze Windows-versie voor supercomputers alleen zal kunnen samenwerken met x86-processors die zijn uitgerust met 64-bit extensies. Systemen die zijn uitgerust met Intels Itanium 2-processor zullen het besturingssysteem niet kunnen draaien. Het is mogelijk dat na de officiële release een Windows-versie zal uitkomen die wel compatibel is met Intels 64-bit cpu, maar een releasedatum voor die versie is nog niet bekend. Volgens Microsoft is de Itanium 2 een te dure en te krachtige processor voor de relatief kleine onderzoeks- en bedrijfsclusters waar het bedrijf zich met deze Windows-versie op richt. Hoewel Microsoft ervoor gekozen heeft om de ondersteuning voor de Itanium 2 waarschijnlijk pas later toe te voegen, heeft onder meer HP al laten weten het softwarebedrijf te pushen om toch support voor Intels chip toe te voegen. HP ziet namelijk wel mogelijkheden om de chip in combinatie met Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, zoals de officiële naam is voor deze Windows-versie is, aan bedrijven te verkopen. Dit zijn voornamelijk bedrijven die qua huidig softwaregebruik voornamelijk op Windows zijn georiënteerd en een verandering van besturingssysteem dus grote problemen kan opleveren. Ondanks dit alles... http://www.techlog.nl/archive/2004/11/09/microsoft_to_skip_itanium_with http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/09/HNskipitanium_1.html [Maarten Goet's Techlog.nl] Microsoft Corp. will support only x86 processors with 64-bit extensions when it releases a special version of Windows Server for high performance computing (HPC) next year, leaving support for Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 for a later, undefined date. Microsoft is sharing early details of its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, previously called HPC edition, at a supercomputing conference in Pittsburgh this week. "In our first edition, we don't plan to support Itanium 2," said Greg Rankich, senior product manager at Microsoft, in a telephone interview on Monday. "When you look at our target market, the departmental clusters, Itanium 2 is a bit outside the reach in terms of budget and in terms of needed computing power." Microsoft plans to support Itanium 2 in a second release of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, but no release data has been set for that version, Rankich said. http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/categories/drm/2004/11/09.html#a3986 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/08/HNibmsupercomputers_1.html [Juha Haataja's Universal Digital Ideas] "With performance almost double that of the Earth Simulator, in Yokohama, Japan, IBM Corp.'s Blue Gene/L on Monday was officially ranked first on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. IBM built four of the top ten machines on the biannual list, which was set to be announced Monday evening at the SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh." [InfoWorld: Top News] The fastest supercomputer in Finland is now in position 295. In the June list the position was 186, so the IBMSC machine dropped 109 positions. http://blog.qualdata.net/index.php?p=15 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/08/HNcsi_1.html [carlos leal's weblog] InfoWorld reports that a survey to be released at this week’s Computer Security Institute (CSI) show in Washington DC of 300 IT managers of companies with annual turnover greater than $30M reveals that 76% felt their networks were safer than in prior years while 81% reported attacks on the increase. More frightening was the fact that 20% reported that a hacker had gained access to their network. Not surprising was the fact that in spite of the increased regulatory environment regarding network security, budgets have not increased to meet the need. http://stealthmode.typepad.com/tech_careers/2004/11/management_shak.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/HNstone_1.html [Tech Careers] InfoWorld reports that Novell vice-chairman Chris Stone is leaving the company to pursue other career opportunities. At Novell, Stone was responsible for engineering, product management and alliances; he also played a key role in the acquisition of vendor SUSE Linux and the company's recent embrace of Linux. Since neither Stone nor Novell offered much in the way of explanation, rumors were already buzzing among Novell users and analysts about what the departure of Stone means for Novell. http://123suds.blogspot.com/2004/11/virtualisation-and-reality.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45FEvirtual_1.html [Sadagopan's weblog] Infoworld has published an excellent article titled, Virtualisation and Reality. We covered the importance of virtualisation in our earlier blog Hal Stern on next generation datacenter saying,"On Next Generation Data Center: - The first is that I think it’s largely going to be defined by virtualization of resources. So virtualization at the storage level, virtualization at the processor and memory level, and then finally virtualization at the application level". This infoworld article written by Tom Yager says,although it may seem like magic, server virtualization is real, and it's giving admins unprecedented control over enterprise datacenters. Excerpts: Server virtualization is one of those rare technologies that sounds too good to be true, but it’s real. Its earliest use was to consolidate underutilized server hardware onto a smaller number of machines. It has now grown into a multipurpose solution that enables greater reliability, improved management, and other benefits that make it an all-but-indispensable tool for enterprise datacenter administrators. To use an oversimplified definition, a virtual server mimics, using software alone, the behavior and capabilities of a stand-alone computer.The bottom of the software stack is occupied by a single instance of an ordinary operating system that’s installed directly onto the server hardware. Above that, a virtualization layer handles the redirection and emulation that make up the virtual computer. The combination of these two lower layers is referred to as the host. The host provides the full workings of a familiar PC right down to its BIOS ROM, and it can spawn as many independent PCs -- using varying user-defined configurations -- as you choose. As are physical servers, a virtual PC is useless until you install an operating system on it. The operating systems... http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/2004/11/09.html#a984 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/08/HNibmsupercomputers_1.html [William T Goodall's Weblog] With performance almost double that of the Earth Simulator, in Yokohama, Japan, IBM Corp.'s Blue Gene/L on Monday was officially ranked first on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. IBM built four of the top ten machines on the biannual list, which was set to be announced Monday evening at the SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh. http://www.primidi.com/2004/11/08.html#a1019 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/ [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends] Many of you already know and use del.icio.us, this free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks launched a few months ago by Joshua Schachter. Here is a quick reminder of what del.icio.us is about. It allows you to bookmark a web page you find interesting, to organize these pages by categories, using tags of your choice, and to share your discoveries with other curious minds. But you can do much more. When Jon Udell, currently with InfoWorld, published a series of articles about del.icio.us on his blog, this gave me an idea: categorize all the entries posted on my blog in the last thirty months. Instead of using a search engine to check if or when I already wrote about something, I'm now using my del.icio.us archive and I click on a tag. Remarkably fast and useful! And you, how are you using this service? Have you discovered other tricks easing your online life? Please post your comments below. And many thanks to Joshua Schachter. Read more... Before going further, here are the two first paragraphs from the what del.icio.us is about page... http://www.elmer.teknoids.net/categories/newsFilter/2004/11/08.html#a12849 http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/08/HNnovelldesktoplinux_1.html [Elmer Masters] Well, this is breaking large today with lots of press. Novell has released its Linux Desktop 9 powered by Novell SUSE Linux. It is aimed at the corporate market and it's only $50 per seat plus support, etc. It is only available through Novell resellers, not directly to consumers. For the official Novell particulars see: * Product home, * Press release, * Eval download. For lots of press coverage, reviews, etc, see: * vnunet.com, * InfoWorld, * Slashdot, * Newsforge. All this follows the recent release of SUSE Professional 9.2 and the apparent sacking of Chris Stone. Lots of goings on in Novell penguin land. http://www.shared-spaces.com/blog/2004/11/shared_spaces_b_5.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/HNcerulean_1.html [Shared Spaces Research & Consulting] Cerulean Studios announced some details for the forthcoming Version 3.0 release of Trillian, its multi-network IM client. New features: video and audio chat, enhanced session logging, and "Instant Lookup" (to cross reference terms with Wikipedia entries), among others. http://duncanlamb.blogspot.com/2004/11/virtualisation-and-reality.html http://123suds.blogspot.com/2004/11/virtualisation-and-reality.html [OLAP/BI/IM stuff] Sadagopan points out this Infoworld article, Virtualisation and Reality which discusses the growing acceptance of Virtual Servers. Server Virtualisation is very cool stuff, allowing you to run one or several "virtual" stand alone servers within a normal OS environment. To your network, they actually do look like several unique machines, although they all run on your desktop, or server depending on which product you buy. The first time people see it and use it, it comes as a bit of a revelation how useful it can be. For geeks that like to dabble (a group most DBAs are probably part of) it can be a sandbox to try new ideas or programs, comletely fenced off and safe from your normal OS. The products (from VMWare and Microsoft (Virtual PC) almost exclusively) allow you to mount iso images, so you can do cool stuff like download and spin up and check out cool Knoppix images that you'd never mess with otherwise, because doing so used to require a seperate machine. I have posted links before to instructions on setting up RAC and an active-active cluster in VM sessions. Among our clients, which include Fortune 500 companies and midsize, only two have bought in to Virtualization in a big way. One is a hospital holding company (all of a hospital's apps run on a single server, and when a new hospital is added, the machine's are simply duplicated. An entire environment set up in a matter of hours, and completely configured and ready to go), the other is one of the major car manufacturers Alabama facilities... http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2004/11/08/how_do_you_use_.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/ [Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs Weblog] Many of you already know and use del.icio.us, this free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks launched a few months ago by Joshua Schachter, and already mentioned in Del.icio.us Smartmobs. Here is a quick reminder of what del.icio.us is about. It allows you to bookmark a web page you find interesting, to organize these pages by categories, using tags of your choice, and to share your discoveries with other curious minds. But you can do much m