CollabuTech

Simplicity is the hallmark of truth

2006-11-27T11:09:00.000-06:00

This was the one thing my grad school adviser told me that really stuck with me. Joel Spolsky provides an excellent example of this maxim in his discussion of Windows shutdown options.

Bonus link: Moishe Lettvin, a developer of the feature, tells the ugly story of the development of shutdown in Vista.

The authority of easy

2006-09-18T15:03:00.000-05:00

Tim Bray leads his readers through an exercise that shows why Wikipedia gets page rank. In short, it's because FAQ type information is typically readily accessible. It's not the authoritative source, but it is easy, and authoritative sources tend to be the furthest thing from easy.

This isn't that different from using Google to find help on a product because the manufacturer's site is useless.

So, if you'd like to retain your authority on the web, make it easy for people to find the information they care about.

Sushi Documentary

2006-09-14T22:37:00.000-05:00

This is excellent!

Though intended as farce, some of it I actually find to be pretty accurate (curtain protocols, illegal menu items, yakuza knife tricks) Oh, and the pouring ritual is dead on. That seng character you always see on Japanese beer labels means fresh, i.e. "draft".

There was no singing though. There is always singing at the Sushi Bar.

Is IM the heart of collaboration?

2006-07-07T13:04:00.000-05:00

Ephraim Schwartz proposes IM as a unified collaboration platform. While this is an interesting viewpoint, I view IM as something closer to all-purpose glue than a platform, but maybe that's just semantics.

Engaging the blogosphere

2006-06-27T08:20:00.000-05:00

Adina Levin points to a good example of business blogging. Michael Pollan dismisses Whole Foods Market as "industrial organic" in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, repeatedly comparing Whole Foods to Walmart. John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods, replies with a lengthy "open letter" on his blog.

Here's Adina's take:

The response is partly satisfying; it's a good example of a business using blogging to participate in a public conversation about it's business; and Whole Foods could go much further to use blog openness to be better corporate citizen.

In another example, Mark Cuban regularly uses his blog to respond to inaccurate and misleading reporting about his various businesses. Buried in a post about how it is ridiculous to say that the NBA is rigged, he takes on the Miami Herald for shoddy reporting:

Apparently the Miami Herald is reporting i screamed at the NBA comissioner after the game the other night. Didnt happen. Didnt say a word to the man. Not a single word. And that was absolutely by intention.

Apparently this “reporter” has written he has several “sources”. Well they must be the same sources the tabloids use to find two headed babys and aliens, because it didnt happen.

Later in the same post, while still taking on the Herald, he sings the praises of blogging:

You are also the reason Im thankful for this blog. In the old days I would have had to make the rounds of media, doing my best to discredit your efforts. Now I can just write this blog, link and let your work discredit itself. Which is a whole lot more fun.

Two totally different styles, but in both cases, the business is directly engaging its customers and potential customers through the blogosphere.

Leveraging the intranet

2006-06-15T09:11:00.000-05:00

This Cringely column on PBS local stations as a non-profit Akamai is a thought-provoking look at the value of intranets. The arguments around intranet v. Internet have always been about bandwidth and service level v. ubiquity. When the intranet is the ISP’s network and therefore your Internet gateway, from an end user perspective, the lines blur. This is also different from the traditional caching approach, as the content is hosted on the co-located servers.

Gentle prodding from an unlikely source

2006-06-05T08:08:00.000-05:00

It has been a full month since I last posted here, but I've been relentlessly blogging internally, with a record for me of 27 posts in that time frame. We are very slowly getting some traction, as more people get more active, but we still have a l-o-n-g way to go.

However, I really don't mean to neglect CollabuTech. I've been meaning to cross-post my relevant internal postings here, but just haven't made the time to do it. However, when I checked on the health of the internal blogosphere, I found this waiting for me:

Ever since Eric Jurotich starting blogging internally, his posts on CollabuTech have pretty much come to a screeching halt.

Yikes! I wasn't expecting to get called out, however mildly, for my lack of CollabuTech posting by a co-worker on the internal blogosphere. So, expect to see much more here over the next few weeks.

Of course, if we could encourage my proverbial partner to contribute to both spots, we'd all be better off. :-)

Internal blogging

2006-05-04T11:51:00.000-05:00

We have a new internal blogging pilot underway, and I'm spending a good portion of my blog cycles over there, trying to get that effort of the ground. The first time around, the ease of use of WordPress left a lot to be desired. Now that WordPress is vastly improved, we'll see what other factors keep a critical mass from developing. My leading contenders:

No good free feed reader for internal sites
Not enough people actively blogging to make a viable blogosphere

Update: Shortly after posting, I overcame my "too big a chunk to digest" problem and paid a long overdue visit to my Many2Many feed, where I found An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise. I haven't had time to read it, but it looks promising.

Accessible spam blocking

2006-05-01T21:35:00.000-05:00

In a great move towards accessibility, Blogger now provides an audio alternative to word verification pictures. Very cool.

The hens drank my Hen!

2006-04-12T07:45:00.000-05:00

Last night was bunko night and my wife was hosting, so the child and I were booted from the house lest we dampen the party vibe. We ate dinner and ran errands and channel-hopped relentlessly on the XM in search of songs that would satisfy us both. We had a good time and returned home at the appointed time.

But we couldn't get close to the house, because the bunko group's cars filled the driveway and lined the street. So, we parked down the street and slipped into the basement. Thirty minutes later, the party was still going strong. For a party is what it was. My wife and her friends would rather socialize then play.

Tired of our forced exile, the child and I went upstairs, but we had no real dampening affect on the affair, and we retreated to our respective rooms. Finally, the party broke up, and I emerged from the cocoon, and discovered what I believe to be the engine behind the party: my Old Speckled Hen was gone!

My wife, seeing my shock, asked "Would it make you feel better to know that they really liked it?"

While I am glad to discover that these fine ladies have excellent taste in malted barley and hops, the answer is no, not really.

Death by "Slideument"

2006-04-11T08:02:00.000-05:00

I recently attended Gartner's BPM Summit in Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland. The venue was interesting. The public spaces with their giant indoor gardens were very nice, but the rooms were nothing to write home about and the food was way overpriced for the quality. The conference itself was bi-polar: sessions either were excellent or a total waste of time. There was almost nothing that was just average.

One or two outside presenters actually understood the purpose of slides, but even the best Gartner presenters were undermined by Gartner's insistence on building what Garr Reynolds refers to as slideuments: the Frankenstein's monster that is created by mashing up a presentation and a hand out and fails to serve either purpose well.

The vendor sessions were almost universally horrid. Why Gartner insists on subjecting paying attendees to these "I don't think I'll bother with a veil" sales pitches is beyond me. Maybe the vendors pay more to sponsor conferences in the short term, but Gartner's abuse of its corporate client base can't be good for Gartner's long term viability. Please, restrict the vendors to the exhibition hall, or at least police the presentations.

The one lone exception was a Fujitsu-sponsored user case study, which pointed me towards a specific application of these tools that I hadn't considered previously. However, there's no reason that Gartner couldn't identify interesting user case studies itself. Burton Group seems to do this just fine, and while Burton slides aren't where they need to be either, they are typically better than Gartner's.

A final plea to all who read this blog: please resist the urge to slideument. Garr's Presentation Zen can start you down the path to presentation enlightenment.

Alea iacta est.

2006-03-15T21:12:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, I worked up the nerve to open an iPod Shuffle (that had been) in perfect working order, in hopes of making .. uh, kustom konfigurations based on informed opinion and a good bit of theory. Last night I gave up on ever reviving it again. Beware the Ides of March. The price of an education can sometimes be quite dear.

I wonder if praeter-hackers like Charles W. Scott ever ran into similar setbacks whilst blazing a trail across the Great Basin?

Many people today wish consumer electronics were intentionally manufactured to encourage tinkering and unforeseen after-markets. Componentized innards, folkart exteriors, spaces for innovation to emerge from the great non-payrolled masses.

Experience shows this strategy succeeds like none other, insofar as brand loyalty goes, spanning generations and bridging cultural divides.

hearing from strangers

2006-03-10T05:33:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine was a realtor for awhile in the 1990s. Seeing the end of that business coming fast, he has long since moved on. I can still recall this funny greeting on his business cell though:

Hi. I'm in at the moment. But if you would like to
leave a message, I'll return your call when I'm out.

Ha! Sometimes we'd call and just laugh into the phone. He kept the answering machine in the trunk of his car. What a nut case, I can remember thinking ...

My, how times have changed. We have been using Skype at home for 2+ years now - no biggie - I still can't get the wife to agree to total abandonment of the old Bell system. (I'll save that rant for another day). However, for the last few months I've been playing with SAM and Kish and now, dear friends, big changes really are afoot.

Have you experimented with these things yet? Virtual voice mail is free and easy to setup, ripping yet another giant tear in the space-time continuum. Outrageously useful and fun.

But is it secure? Probably not perfect yet, but much good work is being done. That's what got me started on this investigation in the first place. This week I'm playing with VOMIT. Did I just say that? I'll let you know what comes up ... er, so to speak.

My lips move, but you can't hear what I'm saying

2006-03-02T07:51:00.000-06:00

Starting this afternoon, all the IT leadership of my company meets to hear key messages for the year and network. I won't have any problem hearing the messages, but the networking piece will be a challenge since I have laryngitis. Although I wouldn't say my throat is "comfortably numb," at least it doesn't hurt. I just can't talk, which many that know me will undoubtedly find humorous.

As big a proponent as I am of collaborative technologies that help span geographic distances between people, in my view they are adjuncts to physical interaction, not a replacement for it. We'll see how well I can take advantage of this opportunity with my current physical limitation. Networking with laryngitis is like walking on a sprained ankle.

Joel disses Missouri

2006-02-15T09:04:00.000-06:00

An otherwise interesting post about how Fog Creek hires its interns is ruined when Joel disses Missouri:

We did get a lot more good applications. Really good applications. Not just kids from Indiana. Students from all over. Illinois. Missouri. Well, OK, maybe not Missouri. Missouri is crazy talk.

Come on, Joel. Kansas would be crazy talk. Well, at least he didn't pick on Alabama.

GUHOR

2006-02-08T22:04:00.000-06:00

Have you seen Syriana yet? It's not the new "Z" or anything, but pretty darn good. Better than I expected out of Hollywood, that's for certain. Baer's memoir was (understandably) thin in the areas where curiosity is greatest, so I guess one can forgive a few clichés and product placements allowed in as commercial filler.

The art-imitating-life thing is quite forceful in this movie. And there's a single brief scene (all of 4 seconds?) which established the whole story as serious and realistic for me. It takes place in the kitchen of the character portrayed by Jeffrey Wright, when the actor playing his father tries to make sense of a wall-sized diagram he is constructing.

Comprehend what's going on there, and you'll have grasped the essence of what makes Intelligence work so difficult, and so valuable when done right. (Oh yeah, Mr. T., if you're still dropping by here, that mysterious figure I was first telling you about between dishes of Massaman, and then over coffee at The White House, is Mark Lombardi.)

This film put me in a mind to blog a lot of provocative comparisons I have drawn between Art History & High Tech. You will please indulge me if I harp on that theme several more times this year?

Fame

2006-02-01T17:14:00.000-06:00

... makes a man think things over

Combining work and personal calendars

2006-01-18T21:31:00.000-06:00

For at least a year and half, my co-worker Olin has been bemoaning the state of calendaring. It is just way too difficult to do something that should be very simple -- coordinating work and family calendars. Recently, this topic has been discussed by some significant players, so maybe we will finally get some relief.

I'm a bit concerned that people working on this problem are trying to do to much. I believe that the needs of most people could be met with a relatively simple approach. The family calendar is the master calendar. Each person manages their own work calendar, which gets replicated to the family calendar. Don't be finicky. Just dump the whole thing in there.

So where does this master calendar reside? Certainly your typical geek could host his or her family's master calendar, but Steve Gillmor has the right idea:

Please please please Google ship the damn calendar app.

Google's competitors are welcome to get off the dime also.

Graphical passwords

2006-01-18T20:21:00.000-06:00

Graphical passwords are an interesting idea. While they aren't for everybody, they might be a reasonable addition to the arsenal. The "icon triangle" option would probably be both more secure and a bigger pain than the fixed picture. My guess is that prompting the user to speak a randomly generated series of digits and using voice recognition would work better for more people.

The value of TiVo

2006-01-18T07:47:00.000-06:00

I love my TiVo, even though I don't watch much TV. I have season passes for maybe five shows that I watch on regular basis, and those aren't on every week.

Where TiVo really shines is watching sports. I can set up season passes for the teams I care about. I can watch a football game in less than half the scheduled time with a much greater level of enjoyment.

However, I don't think I've ever read about the best thing about TiVo -- the disgust pause. Let's say you are watching something you care passionately about, like the Missouri-Kansas game Monday night. Let's say your team is down nine with about a minute left. Instead of stalking off in disgust and missing the incredible comeback victory, you hit pause, chill, and don't miss a thing.

Priceless.

My new role

2006-01-09T20:40:00.000-06:00

Over the holidays, I transitioned from being an IT Architect to being a Business Analyst. To me, the roles are opposite sides of the same coin. Instead of being focused on applying a relatively narrow swath of technology across the enterprise, I am applying the full spectrum of new technology in response to the needs of one business unit.

I am excited about the opportunity to be more business focused and to be able to move more quickly. It has to be easier to convince one business unit to do something than fourteen.

In response to my new job and Guy's nudging, I have broadened our charge some, as reflected in the new tagline. However, implementing and using collaborative technologies will be a key to the success of my business unit. Appropriately securing these tools while facilitating their use is still important. While the edges may become more diffuse, the core will remain. Which is just how things are for business today, as the so-called perimeter gets ever fuzzier.

The Maturation of Identity Management

2006-01-04T09:19:00.000-06:00

Proprietary mechanisms for individual application authentication (each corporation has their own unique set), RADIUS, VPN gateways, Active Directory, Vintella, RACF, RSA tokens, smartcards, biometrics, federation agreements etc ... are common examples of how it's done.

Strong authentication, while a good security practice, is not a cure all for electronic crime. It is expensive and often not user-friendly, so careful planning and realistic expectation setting are advised. Information Security pundit Phil Becker has made a name for himself with the claim: "Identity is Center." Let's respectfully agree to disagree with the simplicity of that assertion.

Who on what, both must be known, to combat today's sophisticated hacker threats. Signature-based deterents to identity manipulation are only effective at thwarting known attacks. Enterprises must focus on knowing first what is normal? - on their networks, on their database and server platforms, and on their workstations.

We believe the truth is closer to "Action is Center." Counter-intuitively, the heart of Identity Management is really applications, not people. Legacy apps have to change, to rely not on themselves but on central authorities to make action approvals. And those authorities must be behaviorally attuned. What you do, where you've been, the whens and hows ... these things matter far more than a match of ID with password, token, certificate, whatever.

Look at how credit cards and automated teller machines work for a good example to emulate. Each is more concerned with right behavior, far more than rigorous credential enforcement. Threat damages are comparmentalized (account separation, debit limits, historical profile), and overall design favors ease-of-use rather than total control.

Avoid the need for soviet style oversight of your information systems (by humanizing the interface and processes required for use). Technology should serve man, not vice versa.

Security design

2006-01-04T08:02:00.000-06:00

Kim Cameron dispenses this wisdom:

...systems must be designed in light of the assumption that they will be breached, in spite of the security reviews. This may in fact not be true, but even knowing this, it is the best assumption one can make.

I concur wholeheartedly.

Great Expectations

2006-01-03T15:08:00.000-06:00

Hello again. I've been dormant in this space for a lo-o-o-ng time. Not a premeditated decision, to go AWOL, but there's an explanation of sorts.

Some close associates (though we've never met) sent me the good book

(no, not that Good Book, this one)

at summer's end, and it has honestly changed the course of my life.

Initially, I was surprised and, in fact, quite disappointed. A heavy box comes insured 1st class to my door - totally unexpectedly - from a far off corner of the globe. What could it be? Egads, an impenetrable textbook ... yawn. Not my idea of a joke.

So, I connected the dots and sent out feelers to those I felt were likely suspects. My "benefactors" readily admitted their complicity and explained that some of the problems which I had posed to them were not unique at all. Only the language was different from the original - symbolic logic, pure mathematics. And that many have sought solutions to them, certain cases for decades and centuries, before any applied uses could be anticipated.

Motives varied, of course. As you might imagine, beauty and truth were key instigators; money altogether another. VAST sums, too; not the trifles offered by academia.

It has taken me months just to track down the resources and mentoring I needed to even begin getting up to snuff. Something had to give in that interval, and what it was was you, dear friends.

Anyway, my extended blogging hiatus may be over. Lots of interesting new things I'd like to present here (or somewhere), but it's getting harder to always cast my interests into a collaboration mold. Maybe Eric will loosen up this charter, now that he has embarked on some new pathways himself.

Happy New Year everybody !

Visualizing tag clouds

2005-12-28T10:55:00.000-06:00

I have never really got into the habit of using del.icio.us to bookmark and tag items. Maybe this is because I don't bookmark anything anymore. All of the bookmarks in my browser are ancient and essentially useless. Some of this is due to autocomplete. If you can type two characters and get the link you want, why bookmark it?

Also, I have a partial substitute in Bloglines, which provides links to the home page of many sites I'm interested in and new content on those sites. Since I tended to bookmark home pages in my browser, this really isn't much different.

Today I finally saw the light of how del.icio.us could really help me. Jon Udell posted a rather ineffective visualization of his year in tags, but the Juice Analytics guys saw it and posted a much better tag cloud viewer, which Jon then reworked in JavaScript.

The ability to see where my attention has been focused over time is huge for me. How helpful would a reminder of what you were looking at when be in assembling your year-end accomplishments for your boss, for instance? Or maybe even to figure out what accounts to charge your time to? A great addition would be the ability to tag your email and calendar items, so you'd be able to see something closer to the full scope of your work. Unfortunately, in a corporate environment, email retention policies would likely make this an impossible dream.

Another more obvious benefit is in addressing my feed reading backlog by tagging and bookmarking interesting items.

The power of well-done visualizations is an immense. The need for cheap, effective tools in this area is nearly totally unmet.

Expert prediction quality

2005-12-13T13:27:00.000-06:00

As an IT architect, I make a lot of predictions about where technology is headed. This fascinating review (via Kottke) of Expert Political Judgment : How Good is It? How Can We Know? discusses the efficacy of experts in making political predictions. In short, get out your dartboard and you can outdo them. While the reviewer doesn't make this connection, it doesn't sound very different from success at picking stocks.

Indeed, while the realm is political prediction, what Tetlock describes seems to apply very generally to predictions. His recommendation also seems apply beyond policy debates:

Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that “we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms”—that is, as probabilities—“monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets.”

Probablities without accountability are worthless. Gartner has irritated me for years by saying assigning probabilities to predictions and then saying, "As we predicted ..." and never saying "which took us by surprise" or "where we whiffed badly" or even "happened much more rapidly than we thought possible" much less providing a statistical analysis of their analysts' accuracy.

We don't assign probabilities, but we clearly have accountability.

Setting Abby straight

2005-12-08T10:14:00.000-06:00

Jon Udell does a great job of setting Abby straight about blogs and employers. While acknowledging the potential pitfalls, he clearly tells the benefits:

Here's something to consider, though. A blog can be used to narrate the key events and accomplishments in your professional life, to establish your reputation as an authority on subjects in your areas of expertise, and to educate the world about your company's products and services.

It's true that many bloggers haven't yet learned to use the medium to communicate in focused, responsible, and professional ways. But those who can are more interesting, not less so, to employers who value these skills.

Bing me!

2005-12-07T19:37:00.000-06:00

TristanK has a vocab suggestion. I approve, but I'm open to other suggestions for one syllable alternatives for IM.

The tyranny of numbers

2005-12-06T11:22:00.000-06:00

I am way behind in reading my feeds, and it's become apparent that some of it is due to the tyranny of numbers. How so? Simply put, a big number of unread posts is intimidating. Clicking on that link in Bloglines marks them all unread by default, and then I'm committed to reading them. My preference is to follow up on items of interest immediately, including embedded links. That's why the "river of news" approach, using "keep new" to mark items for follow up has never appealed to me.

This puts me in the strange place of reading less frequently updated or less in-depth bloggers more frequently than some of my favorites, especially when I don't have much time. In order to keep up, I need a change in ways. Why? Read all the good stuff Jon's posted in the last month or so.

Absolute power?

2005-11-22T12:08:00.000-06:00

Cringely provides some interesting speculation about what Google is up to. Meanwhile, Liz discusses Google and anonymity, referencing Milly's anonymizing bookmarklet. I really like Milly's comment on Liz's post:

FWIW, as the de facto repository of too much of our information, I trust Google more than, say, the Yahoo/Kelkoo/Flickr/Overture/etc or Amazon/A9/Alexa/etc or MSN/Hotmail/MS/etc or eBay/Paypal/Skype/etc octopi (partly as evidenced by their past abuses and attitudes). But being the best of a bad bunch isn't itself a very high standard (nor is "don't be evil", it seems to me). And who knows what tomorrow will bring ...

New IBM collaboration tools

2005-11-10T13:17:00.000-06:00

David Weinberger blogs IBM's "Future of Social Networks" press event. There's a lot of cool sounding stuff in there.

I particularly like Public Image Monitoring, which sounds like a really useful tool for corporate PR departments. dogear, an inside the firewall del.icio.us, looks promising also.

Feeling old

2005-11-03T13:32:00.000-06:00

I received my high school's annual report in the mail today. Mostly, it's a list of donors, but there is some actual content. As I read the president's letter, I discovered that each freshman this year received an HP 4200 Tablet PC "not only for learning, but also for organizing and giving structure to their knowledge."

When I was a freshman I learned to type on a manual because "electric typewriters teach you bad form." You know, push instead of strike. We did have an HP 2000F and a handful of VT100's in the computer room. They did replace the manuals with a Mac lab at some point.

I'm not a huge fan of tablets, so it will be interesting to see how this works out. Do they really add value?

Real disclosure

2005-11-02T11:36:00.000-06:00

David Weinberger on what disclosure statements should really include, revealing more than merely financial connections.

The story of a blog

2005-11-01T14:33:00.000-06:00

This story seems reflective of a typical blogging experience, relatively high volume aside. I haven't read the blog itself, since I can't bring myself to read about the Mets. At least it's not a Yankee or Red Sox blog...(via kottke)

Does presentation matter?

2005-10-25T15:24:00.000-05:00

Ben Metcalfe asks a good question. Here's the best part:

Or does it go out of the window entirely? With RSS there is presentation. It’s just user-selected presentation – either explicitly through a custom stylesheet or implicitly through the choice of newsreader used (and it’s look and feel is uses to render the content). Either way, it’s no longer under the control of the content provider, so why bother?

User selected presentation is increasingly important. One of my favorite Firefox and Safari features is "ctrl +" to increase font size on certain pages to make them readable for me. Like RSS, it's all about control.

This also makes sense from a web services perspective. If you are writing a service, you presentation is an XML stream. If you are consuming that service via some sort of gadget or web part, then you can present that information in whichever way makes sense. The user of that gadget controls whether and where it is displayed in a portal interface. You might even give the user of your gadget the option to change how the information is displayed by the gadget.

Search tips

2005-10-24T17:00:00.000-05:00

Liz is blogging the Internet Librarian conference, including Mary Ellen Bates' 30 search tips. BTW, I have a 20Q. It's fun, but easy enough to stump. That sort of technology migrating to search would be an interesting development.

The case for EVDO

2005-10-24T13:35:00.000-05:00

The utter cluelessness that Liz documents here is shocking. In fact, it's so appalling that you have to wonder if it is a scam set up by someone other than the hotel. On the bright side, one trip a month justifies EVDO service.

Sports snark

2005-10-24T12:41:00.000-05:00

It's not very nice of me, but I'm celebrating the Astros being down 2-0 in the Series and hoping for a 4-0 White Sox sweep. Yes, I'm bitter about the Cardinals loss, but I have never been a fan of the wild card. If you can't win your division, you don't belong in the post season. Period.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

CIO extinction?

2005-10-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

Not really. Fewer are likely to report to the CEO, and more are likely to report to the CFO. Thank SarbOx for the change. Recommend my child go in to accounting? I think not.

Continuous partial attention and screen size

2005-10-18T08:47:00.000-05:00

Jason Kottke points to this NYT article:

The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains.

I'm going to submit my 42-inch plasma monitor request shortly.

Grab bag

2005-10-13T16:06:00.000-05:00

Neil McAllister asks, should Linux vendors act different? My answer is yes. If they put together a Mac-like Linux system, I'd be very interested.
There's a scary amount of versimilitude in this installment of Off The Record. I was discussing the need for guerilla operations at the SOA Summit we held recently. I cast Guy in the role of Che'. We also vigorously discussed UDDI as an internal service catalog. I'm with those who see the value; others are skeptical.
I like Chad Dickerson's column, but Off The Record is my new favorite. Here's another great guerilla IT story.
Fuzzers sound like a very useful tools.
Jon Udell correctly values interaction data.
"People are the only sustainable advantage in business"
Four down, seven to go

Fat app futures

2005-10-04T09:25:00.000-05:00

Spurred by Jonathan Schwartz's keynote, Tim Bray discusses desktop application futures:

Most ordinary database-backed business apps have migrated into the browser and they’re not coming back, no matter how great Windows Vista is. Given that, what kind of apps justify the irritation and inconvenience of having to download ’em and update ’em and back up the data and so on? Jonathan lists a few, including the browser itself, Skype, Google Earth, OpenOffice. But what’s the pattern behind that list? From right now in 2005, I see three families of desktop apps that are here for the long haul: First the browser itself, including variations like news readers and music finders, whether P2P or centralized. Second, realtime human-to-human communication, spanning the spectrum from text to voice to video. Third, content creation: PhotoShop, Excel, DreamWeaver, and whatever we’ll need for what we’re creating tomorrow.

I don't see much to argue with here. I use my browser far more than any other app (family 1). Next up is email (family 2). It's a big dropoff after that to Word, Powerpoint, and Excel (family 3).

Word verification

2005-09-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

I had to turn word verification on this morning due to an increase in comment spam. We'll see if that is effective. Requiring Blogger ID's isn't, as some of the spam has come from bots with Blogger ID's.

Speaking of bots, I found this piece on pokerbots yesterday. There's a sucker born every minute, and apparently that sucker is playing poker online. To bring it full circle, the way you detect bots is by chatting them up using the built-in chat feature. Language is still the unbreachable man/machine wall.

Blog survey results

2005-09-26T12:38:00.000-05:00

Qumana has posted some interesting stats from a survey of their users. I found this to be particularly enlightening:

When you look at time blogging versus aggregator, you get a stronger preference for Bloglines. For those blogging 1-2 years, 28% use Bloglines; for those blogging more than 2 years, 61% use Bloglines.

You can find more stats and and analysis here, including the caveat that this may not apply to the blogosphere in general. It is good to see some real research publicly shared, regardless of its limitations.

Thoughts from a Katrina relief worker

2005-09-14T10:14:00.000-05:00

Doc Searls asked how does IT help with Katrina recovery? My answer: mostly by putting IT aside and doing what needs to be done.

Sure, if you are in IT operations, you do everything you can to restore communications and data for the affected area, but in a large IT organization, there are a lot of people who don't have direct operational responsibility.

My company and our customers were ravaged by Katrina. Many employees had no house to go back to, and many more had homes that had suffered significant damage. When I was offered the opportunity to help salvage what I could for our affected employees, I went for it. As important as IT planning and architecture is, it certainly wasn't as urgent as helping out storm victims.

So what did I do for most of a week? I was part of crew of ten folks from throughout our company, five of whom are in IT. We tarped roofs to prevent further water damage. We removed drenched carpet and tile, ruined furniture and appliances, and anything else that fell victim to the incredible storm surge. Anything above the water line, we boxed up and moved to storage. We even moved some wood furniture that had been treated for mold and other badness to storage for one family.

There were definitely some grim moments. On the way to tarp a roof near Ocean Springs, we passed several houses with a red X on the door or the roof, indicated that someone had died in the house. We worked on a house in Pass Christian that was on a rise about ten feet above the bayou, and sat on concrete pilings ten feet tall. The waterline in the house was two feet. We sat on the back deck of the house eating lunch, imagining the storm surge that had brought water to our knee level, 22 feet up, stretching out over the vastness of the bayou.

On the whole, though, it was a very positive experience. It was a lot of hard work in very hot and humid conditions, but it was great to something tangible to help.

Being geeks, technology did play a role beyond basic communications. Base camp had a satellite link, through which they'd try to generate maps and driving directions for us. One evening we received a faulty address for an employee. So we fired up a laptop, established a s-l-o-w cellular data connection, accessed our customer information system, found the correct address for the employee, and then mapped it and provided driving directions. Our non-IT team lead was duly impressed.

So, what can IT do to help? For Katrina, realize that often the most important thing you can do is the hard physical labor of helping salvage homes and possessions. For the future, design redundancy into your infrastructure -- multiple fiber paths, geographically dispersed and backed up data and applications, microwave shots, cell on wheels, satellite trucks, wi-max, and whatever else so that will facilitate critical communications and data access.

Child’s Play

2005-08-29T20:53:00.000-05:00

Time was, not so long ago, my kids would walk the dogs down to the park. Daily, all eight of ‘em. Grabbing four or five energy beads along the way. Tra-la-la ..

But they grow up fast and Mornin' Walk is now all but forgotten: “bo-ring.” We never go back to something after that word has been uttered. Children have the ability to spot tedium a mile away.

Our eldest is absorbed with Su Doku in idle moments lately. (I readily admit to becoming enthralled with these myself.) When I ask her, what makes working on them so enjoyable, the response comes straight back, “it’s relaxing.”

Good answer. In a way, it actually clears your head, maybe by stretching logic muscles that don’t otherwise get used often enough. When will the electronic gaming industry start releasing similarly mature products?

Virtual facilitator

2005-08-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

What a great idea! This could be really helpful, although the skeptic in me wants to see it to believe it.

Delete them all

2005-08-24T10:59:00.000-05:00

I've been tempted to follow this strategy when I head out on vacation, but I fear the repercussions in my particular corporate environment wouldn't be pretty. Even if I modified it to keep line of command and official communications, I don't think it would fly. It's still tempting, though.

Security by obscurity isn't all bad

2005-08-24T09:41:00.000-05:00

InfoWorld's new security columnist Roger Grimes defends obscurity as a security technique. Here's his key point:

I didn’t say security by obscurity was the only defense technique someone should use. I didn’t even say it was real security, but I am saying that it should be an important part of most computer defense strategies.

In other words, it's a valid part of the security mix, not a complete solution. So obscure away while you follow other best practices.

Blogger for Word

2005-08-17T10:03:00.000-05:00

Why?

More feed foolishness

2005-08-16T16:10:00.000-05:00

I've ranted about InfoWorld's feeds before, but now it is time to rant again. Then I said:

I do appreciate getting full text on the columnists feed, since I don't have to click open a jillion tabs to read them. There, I'll put up with the ads because it provides an overall better experience.

Well, not anymore. I end up seeing the same columns over and over again in my aggregator because InfoWorld marks them as updated. Has anything of substance changed? No. These are the columns published in the print edition, after all. The only things that may have changed are the ads and the "see also" links. Newsflash: no one who's read the columns cares if the "see also" links change. I won't even address the ridiculous possibility of these updates being caused by ad changes.

I'm amazed that InfoWorld can't get this right.

Soulpad

2005-08-15T13:04:00.000-05:00

For a while now, my co-workers and I have been talking about booting from USB flash drives containing your customized desktop configuration and leaving no footprints behind. IBM has gone one better with the Soulpad, which allows you to suspend and resume, leveraging a virtual machine. I'm not wild about the name, but I love the concept. (via Roland)

Eleven hours in a tin can

2005-08-15T10:13:00.000-05:00

I spent my day Friday driving to Atlanta, attending a product demo and follow-up discussion, and driving home. That's eleven hours of joy, five of which were spent on the always scary I-20. I filled up midway on the way over for $2.35 a gallon. When I stopped on the way back, that very same station had raised the price to $2.49. I keep waiting for affordable collaboration tools that make more of these sort of trips unnecessary. There's got to be a better way.

The Contributory Web

2005-08-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

Tim Bray is absolutely right. Web 2.0 is nothing other than "vacuous marketing hype." Tim O'Reilly naturally disagrees, since he foisted this term on the world, but his arguments aren't very convincing. Trying to break a continuously evolving web into discreet chunks is just silly.

If it really is an attitude, not a technology, then it really needs a clear definition and a descriptive name. I like the Contributory Web: everybody contributes and builds off each others' contributions while expecting and encouraging others to do the same. Those contributions may be facts, opinions, code or whatever. It's a web designed for reuse and remix.

Mapping the blogosphere

2005-08-08T12:04:00.000-05:00

To me, the most interesting conversations to come out of BlogHer concern linking patterns and the biases of ranking systems. danah boyd's analysis is well worth reading. Mary Hodder discusses what metrics ought to matter in a new ranking system. Be sure to read the comments there too, as one commenter provides some insight about what people are trying to measure. Adina Levin proposes a cloud structure, which certainly could help the discovery process.

There are many implications for the corporate blogosphere. How do you measure the worth of contributions? How do you help people find "blogmates" who have affinity for and knowledge of similar topics? Do you encourage a particular pattern of linking? What norms do you establish?

Identity Rights Agreements

2005-08-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

Phil Windley has a good point:

even though most people hate digital rights management (DRM) schemes on digital goods like software and music, that’s exactly what we’d all like for our identity information. For example, I’d love to be able to control how my bank uses, stores, shares, etc. my SSN when I’m forced to give it to them.

He then proceeds to discuss Identity Rights Agreements, which he concocted with some others on the train to airport after OSCON.

Blogging women

2005-08-04T12:20:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of good discussion about BlogHer out there. I used Liz's post as my jumping off point. This discussion is important to anyone pondering corporate blogging, because your efforts aren't likely to be very successful if half your workforce feels marginalized out of the box.

I find the discussion of weak links v. strong links to be very interesting. danah's summary is good:

The gender difference concerns the style of networking. Men are more likely to gather many weak ties; women tend to work hard to maintain strong ties. Each have their value. But when it comes to technology like Technorati, there is a validation of weak ties over strong ties. Or more actually, there's an assumption that all ties are created equal, which inadvertently validates the weak ties over the strong ties.

My question is, how much more valuable are strong ties than weak ties, given the strength of weak ties?

How do style differences matter, especially within a particular corporate culture? What's the "right mix" of professional and personal info in your corporate environment, and how does that affect men and women in your organization?

One negative from my exploration was the odd bit of man bashing here and there. C'mon now, we aren't all preening peacocks, and "unconferences" aren't the sole domain of women.

SOA Summit

2005-08-03T10:19:00.000-05:00

As I sat in the "SOA Reality Check" at Catalyst, I noted several things that seemed especially relevant to my organization. Post conference pondering and subsequent conversations with co-workers have led to a us scheduling an internal SOA Summit focused on identifying and removing impediments to adopting a service oriented architecture. We will have a small group of attendees representing developers, security, architecture, and infrastructure.

Speaking of SOA, Phil Wainewright at Loosely Coupled has posted five excellent items in a row on SOA, rebel platforms, governance and other application development topics.

Attention

2005-08-03T09:59:00.000-05:00

Steve Gillmor has been ranting about attention for a long time. I'm not much on his blogging style, but if you can wade through the incessant name dropping and other annoyances, you can find some good information. But I'd recommend reading Nick Bradbury's take, which is clear and concise, and linked from Gillmor's shortest.post.evar.

I'll be curious to see actual implementations and if they really operate automagically without making you change how you read. I'm even more eager to see true user ownership of attention data. Put me in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp for now.

Observation

2005-07-25T23:21:00.000-05:00

I was stopped short by this proclamation, which breathlessly described iTunes as the new center of our computing universe.

Because on a large corporate network near and dear to my heart, the number one 'non-standard' protocol in use today is iTunes. Last December it was not even a blip. Start of a new year and zzooom, making for zenith. Does it rival http/https for bandwidth consumption? No, not close yet, but dang the trend is strong! I believe we'll discover soon that my world is a microcosm of the greater WWW. So what's going on here? Several developments I see as noteworthy:

DVDs may be the next format pitched into history's dustbin; "records" of everything demand a platform allowing for far greater plasticity

Walking in, all manner of consumer tech today serves business too, no geeks required for operation and integration

Enclosures are the bomb! (RSS is merely a much-improved arming mechanism)

Economy (measured less often in dollars, more by ergonomics of the hand, ear or eye, and by spatial and social considerations)

Beyond (beyond the PC, beyond mostly static networks, beyond simple search, next generation browsers are coming soon)

Well, Ptolemy, a re-ordering of the cosmos then? Nah ..

But has a powerful new quasar formed? No doubt about it.

Catalyst overview

2005-07-25T11:13:00.000-05:00

Catalyst, on the whole, was a very good experience. I learned a lot. I ended up staying in the Application track the whole time, although I wish I'd jumped to the ID Management track for parts of the first day. There was too much emphasis on what Burton likes to call "application superplatforms" the first day, but day 2's SOA reality check was really excellent. The application security "cross-cutting concerns on day 3 didn't really live up to its promise. The presentations just weren't integrated and collaborative enough -- each clearly came from one research practice's domain.

I do have a couple of suggestions for any Burton Group folks that might be reading this. Nowhere during registration do they make it clear that track jumping is allowed. It would be nice if they said "please pick a primary track, but you are welcome to attend others as needed." That way, I wouldn't have wasted time deciding between tracks. Also, Burton seems eager to eliminate the printed presentation option. This is a bad idea. It is so much easier to take notes on a printed copy, even if it is not completely up to date, because you don't have to supply context in your notes. You can simply circle or star a key point. You can easily refer back to previous pages. Annotations can be briefer. I'd say that The Myth of the Paperless Office should be mandatory Burton reading.

Here's what I got out of Catalyst. This isn't a rehash of what I heard, but my views on areas of discussion.

Even though we spent a lot of time talking about tools and technologies, the most important message is that SOA is a cultural shift which doesn't just impact IT, but the business units IT supports. Governance, funding, cost recovery, BU expectations and more all have to change. For instance, true functionalization cuts across BUs, but BUs control and fund projects. We've had a taste of this with component reuse, but this is orders of magnitude different. You have to move your organization from a project based model to a utility based model.
Collaboration tools are no longer side items on the menu, but part of the main course. The Social Life of Information speaks of practice and process. To be successful in the future, collaborative tools (which enhance practice) must be seamlessly meshed into the process (applications). You have to enable people to collaborate in context of the process.
Increasingly, vendors are trying to provide ever expanding "complete solutions" that include more and more functionality. Burton refers to these as superplatforms. When you marry the SOA vision with the legacy reality, it becomes clear that most enterprises are going to have pieces of multiple superplatforms -- a primary or desired platform certainly, and then bits and pieces of others. Vendors that give interoperability short shrift will find themselves on the losing end, eventually.
A services oriented application architecture benefits from a services oriented physical infrastructure. This should accelerate the virtualization of processor, disk, storage, etc.
All of this SOA goodness won't help you much if you don't fix your fundamental data quality and management issues. Data stewardship across the enterprise is critical -- data can't reside in BU silos.
If Microsoft actually delivers what Ari Bixhorn promised for Indigo, it will go a long way towards alleviating "WS-Vertigo," as Anne Thomas Manes likes to call it. While REST is clearly not appropriate for many corporate applications, I think there are some places where it is sufficient. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
There's still too much emphasis on network layer security, although Dan Blum of Burton disagrees with me. Seriously, there is no perimeter. Get over it, and start fixing the real problem of application layer security.
Nobody has really addressed the issue of trust and its related risk. WS-Trust isn't going to do it, either.

Random thoughts

2005-07-25T08:57:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's time for another episode of random thoughts, where I dump random snippets running through my head apropos of nothing. Naturally, these episodes occur at random intervals.

Camp websites are a great enhancement to the summer camp experience (for parents). Nothing like seeing your child's smiling face on the web site to assure you that she's having a good time while you wait for a letter to arrive.
David points at the cowbell skit. More cowbell!
Cringely muses about a coming Intel/Microsoft battle. As usual, it's an interesting take, but I'm not sure I agree.
There is no substitute for sleep.
The Cardinals are looking more like the Memphis Redbirds these days. Thankfully, they still have a huge lead and a healthy pitching staff. They will need the bats back in September if they want to win in October.

Cinema on demand

2005-07-20T11:33:00.000-05:00

While simultaneously feeding body and mind, I found this gem on M2M. In short, even theaters won't need physical media anymore, opening up the cinema experience to the long tail.

From a technology perspective, I like the use of WiMax here. More interesting to me is the social aspect, which is the biggest difference between cinema and home viewing. The idea of my group being able to see perhaps our favorite film even though it's been out for 20 years in a cinema environment rather than stuffed into someone's den is very appealing. I could see corporate teambuilding sort of activity generating a lot of on-demand business.

Laws of Identity

2005-07-18T13:57:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Kim Cameron was at Catalyst too. He has some interesting thoughts on identity, which is what you would expect from a blog with that name. More grist for the mill.

Is cohesion disruptive?

2005-07-14T10:23:00.000-05:00

During yesterday's panel session at Catalyst, I remarked to the
application superplatform vendors that they dissed the "good enough"
rebel platforms at their peril, since good enough always beats out those
moving to the higher end over time. I got decent answers from the IBM
and Oracle reps. The others didn't do so well.

Most interesting, though, is that Anne Thomas Manes of Burton addressed
the question during her wrapup. Her take is that cohesion is the
disruptive technology, not what the good enough vendors bring. I'm not
so sure I but that, but it is an interesting thought. More later when I
have a bigger keyboard.

Open source video

2005-07-11T16:10:00.000-05:00

The BBC is attempting to develop truly open video in support of their charter. Good stuff!

Intranet RSS aggregator

2005-07-11T15:48:00.000-05:00

Apparently, I'm not the only one looking for an intranet equivalent of Bloglines. Jack has a lot of good linkage. One of the comments on Andy's post indicates that Newsgator Enterprise is in beta.

Hurricane on the brain

2005-07-10T15:29:00.000-05:00

It's been just over an hour since Dennis made landfall between Pensacola Beach and Navarre Beach. The storm video is pretty dramatic. My heart goes out to all my friends down there. I hope you all are safe. I was on Pensacola Beach earlier this year, and it was still a mess from Ivan. Only one hotel had opened back up, and repairs hadn't even started yet on several houses.
On the positive side, my friends and family in the Mobile area were spared the brunt of the storm. So far, winds haven't topped 50 mph there.

Now Dennis is headed our way, and the current prediction is for 50 mph winds here. Things should start getting ugly around 9:00 p.m. lasting through the morning, with the peak winds about 2:00 a.m. We'd done most of our storm prep early, and finished it up this morning. So now we are just waiting, watching our favorite weatherman.

As we figured, the airport is essentially shutting down by about 6:00 p.m. and everyone expects the early morning flights to be cancelled. It's a good thing we already switched our flight to San Diego to Tuesday. I imagine there's a mad rush now.

Why San Diego? I'll be at Catalyst, and the family will be enjoying some vacation time. If Catalyst is as good as I've heard, everyone will have fun. I just hope the storm passes us without incident so we can enjoy our trip.

UPDATE: I thought we'd made it through unscathed, but we lost power at about 8:15 this morning. It hasn't been restored yet, and it may be a while.

UPDATE: Power is back! My family is ecstatic.

Feed ads? Let your readers choose

2005-07-08T16:21:00.000-05:00

Tim Bray doesn't like InfoWorld's graphic feed ads. Others are complaining too. Chad Dickerson has a different view:

I'm biased because I work here, but I'll put a stake in the ground and say that mixing advertising in a full-text feed with content produced from a staff of writers and copy editors seems reasonable.

Well, not necessarily. Google makes a fortune from ads that are clearly marked, unobtrusive, and relevant. These graphic ads are really annoying and distract from the content. For the top news feed, the signal noise ratio is completely out of whack for me, and I've unsubscribed. If there are lots of folks with my reaction, how will these ads be a money making proposition?

I do appreciate getting full text on the columnists feed, since I don't have to click open a jillion tabs to read them. There, I'll put up with the ads because it provides an overall better experience.

Why not let your readers choose? InfoWorld says "we should probably offer an alternative feed for those who prefer the old version. Will add it to the to-do list immediately," but frankly, I don't care enough to see if they've done it. I will rely on other sources.

Sharepoint at PDC

2005-07-08T14:54:00.000-05:00

Mike Fitzmaurice reports that there's a Sharepoint track at this year's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. If you do Sharepoint development, it's worth checking out.

Open source directory

2005-07-08T14:28:00.000-05:00

I was way behind on my feeds, so this may be stale news of the "Germans bomb Pearl Harbor" variety, but Red Hat has acquired Netscape Directory Server and is opening it up. Neil McAllister says:

The difference is that none of the competing products are open source -- not even Novell's. Red Hat has said it will release its directory source code under the GPL (General Public License). In addition, it will sponsor a Fedora Directory project designed to spur community-driven development of the product in much the same way the Fedora Linux project acts as a technology incubator for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This sounds very promising. It is quite interesting to watch open source software climb up the stack.

Ohggba Zl Yvc

2005-06-30T20:50:00.000-05:00

Rirelbar ybirf uvqqra xabjyrqtr; gur qrprcgvbaf vaibyirq fbzrgvzrf ba nyy fvqrf (uggc://jrorkuvovgf.bet/ubpxarlbcgvpf), gur nggenpgvba bs varyhpgnoyr zlfgrel (uggc://jjj.enaqbzubhfr.pbz/obyqglcr/0303/ohee/vagreivrj.ugzy), svaqvat gur xrl gb n qbbe lbh qvqa'g xabj rkvfgf.

Gbavtug, V'z chmmyvat bire gur gvzr fvtangher bs gur yrnq genpx ba gur arj Ryivf Pbfgryyb qvfx. Vg ernyyl fjvatf, creuncf nygreangvat onpx naq sbegu orgjrra 6/4 naq 5/4, nf n sevraq urycshyyl bcvarq.

Vg'f gubhtug pyrire gb uvqr ovt frpergf va cynva fvtug. Naq bppnfvbanyyl gb znxr n ovt fubj bs uvqvat gung juvpu jr jvfu rirelbar gb xabj.

Dark Blogs, Competitive Intelligence

2005-06-30T16:52:00.000-05:00

Suw Charman of Strange Attractor fame has published a very fine case study on The Use of Blogs in Business, in conjunction with the good people at Traction.

If your employer has been considering the use of blogs (facing inward or outward) but has been unable to make a decision yet, you need to put this document in their hands.

"I'm In Charge Here!"

2005-06-28T20:33:00.000-05:00

Remember Sec'y of State Haig's famous assertion to the press corps, when it seemed as if the Prez would be away from his desk a week or two?

Well, dear friends, looks like Eric may be off grid for a spell, and guess who's got the con?

It's about time

2005-06-27T08:36:00.000-05:00

Blogger images are here. I'd celebrate by posting a picture, but there's nothing I particularly want to post right now. This definitely will come in handy, though.

Corporations ought to re-think their Wireless Connectivity Strategy

2005-06-23T13:01:00.000-05:00

No question, pervasive computing is just as empowering and amenable in office spaces as it is everywhere else. However, with few exceptions, corporate facilities have had networked computing over wire for decades. Not true of other public places in general, nor in most homes until recently. So in that sense wireless connectivity in the office was a redundant channel.

The cost sensitivity that usually accompanies 'luxury' didn't last long because the barriers to entry for the consumer (cheap cards and WAPs, embedded centrino etc ...) dropped precipitously, starting from the earliest days. It wasn't secure (ch-ching) and it wasn't centrally managable (ch-ch-ch-ching) - but by golly it worked terrific in the office as an extension of the intranet out your wallplate.

There's a recap of WiFi circa 2001-2004. So what's happening now? Same thing, only better. The local has gone wide (think internet), the wireless tether (often measured in yards today) is disappearing altogether, security is tighter and there are greater mixed usage options. That last one's a doozy because once again, the pace of this change is all end-user driven.

I used to say I'd never seen any body of tech standards evolve as quickly as the 802.11 family. And while that hasn't abated, I find enough foundational problems to see it all getting pushed aside soon, in favor of much better approaches. Things like EvDO, yes, but also WiMAX, CDMA-based WiMESH and UWB, to name just a few.

The more important deja vu for corporate IT staffs? This stuff is going to walk right into building, just like last time. No budget flags, no cost recovery model, no support training, no targeted security system adjustments or policy modifications ... surprise! Here we are, it just works. "Now please tweak the data repositories, authentication systems and application proxies to meet our changing needs. You've anticipated all this, right; it's why we pay you the big bucks, right?"

Well, the answer I'm seeing from peers across corporate America is, "not exactly, chief." Are folks still reeling from the shorter change cycle, or bought into all the vendor nonsense about how now, finally, wireless has achieved maturity and stability?? Nothing could be farther from the truth, in my opinion.

While support for the 802.11 flavors of WiFi may be around for a few more years, increasingly, users (affiliates of every type) will demand that their intranet resources be made available from everywhere, to any device. I believe continuing major build-outs of corporate WiFi infrastructure will prove to be a poor ROI. Better to put more funding towards secure, internet-facing proxies to serve up their intranet resources, independent of concern over points of origin.

Can't do 3rd party email from the office today, or instant messaging trans firewall, or VOIP, or having your business-related content searches blocked by imperfect filters etc ..? (chances are, you'll be walking in with your own solution next) But these are different 'opportunities' that deserve separate discussions. Stay tuned.

IP4Me

2005-06-22T14:36:00.000-05:00

We've been having a lot of discussions recently about the impact of Verizon's EVDO service and competitive offerings, sparked by the personal experiences of some folks and this Microsoft-Aruba announcement. How will EVDO and its competitors in the wireless WAN market affect the wireless LAN market? How much should a corporation invest in technology from the 802.11 family? Will it be a long term or a short term investment? How will this affect cable modem and DSL usage? And lots of other questions to boot.

In my view, the days of hotels, airports, Starbucks, and other places charging for WiFi are nearing an end. As the WWAN rollout expands, anyone who travels frequently will sign up for WWAN account. It doesn't take many $10/day hits to justify a WWAN account, especially when, as my colleague Jay notes, that it's really $10/day per provider. If the hotel, conference center and airport all have different providers, $80/month WWAN service looks good quickly.

However, if you only travel a day or two a month, the WWAN proposition isn't very compelling at $80/month. I'm sure prices will go down eventually, and maybe corporations can score volume discounts now. Free and faster in certain locations will beat more ubiquitous, not free and slower for a significant number of people. So, free public WiFi isn't going anywhere. It will probably continue to grow, especially as some current pay providers turn their systems into customer perks.

Now if you're single, you might be willing to trash your landline-equivalent and go all mobile. In that case, you are only looking at an extra $30/month. But if you have multiple machines, you probably have a WiFi network, and you aren't going to rip that out. You'll be using EVDO for Internet connectivity, not home networking. If you share your house, forget it. "Honey, you won't have Internet access while I'm out of town" will never fly.

The answer to this is what I'm calling IP4Me. There's no reason a provider has to tie location or method and network access. The provider should tie identity and access, and provide me Internet packets (IP4Me) wherever I am and however I am accessing the network for a reasonable flat fee. Like voice services, there should be family plan options, too.

In my next post, I'll discuss the corporate implications of all of this, unless Guy beats me to it. Thanks to Guy, Joe, Jay, and Mike for their contributions to the discussion so far.

pulling up

2005-06-21T14:59:00.000-05:00

Is the tech sector reigniting, after years of ursine torpor? I think so.

The Bootstrapper's Bible was last updated in 2004, but as I recall first appeared in those heady days when IPOs grew on trees and pets stalked the web. Godin can be annoying, seriously, but have a glance at this thing. Because I think the gestalt is returning strong. Parts of the document are still smart and (again) timely, occasionally constructive or wildly funny.

PS - what's that GOOG multiple up to now??

Poolside

2005-06-15T18:31:00.000-05:00

Having a great summer so far? Hope so.

I've re-committed to trimming my waistline, and the stack of publications piled high in my home office. Began regularly doing laps again in May, and hit the books last weekend - first with Slack, by Tom DeMarco. Strongly encouraged, folks! (exercise, and the book, and its theses)

Happily, I'm employed by an enlightened company with superior management. (Is it sucking up if no one by that name reads this?) Anyway, it's OK for me to deviate from my routine 10 hour workday, and come in an hour late occasionally, having kicked off the morning with a half-mile swim. Totally invigorating.

DeMarco's insights have also put me in fine fettle. While I do have a better book to review on the subject of Risk (watch this space), I cannot praise highly enough his deconstruction of the measures of departmental "effectiveness", and hilarious exposition on the dangers of blind faith in calendars and lists.

Time out is not necessarily time off or ill spent.

Don't be fooled by the jacket; Slack is not a counter-culture manifesto. I would consider passing my copy on to our CFO. But he hoovers up biz books, too, and has probably already been here, done this.

My first Wikipedia edit

2005-06-13T11:31:00.000-05:00

I fixed some spelling errors in Pajamahideen.

Tools for derivative languages

2005-06-13T11:07:00.000-05:00

In a discussion of tools for dynamic languages, Jon Udell mentions the creation of domain-specific "little languages" from dynamic languages, which he rightly traces back to Lisp and Smalltalk. Oddly, though, he misses a key tool need for dynamic languages -- the ability to simple extend an IDE to embrace the derivative languages with syntax highlighting and the like.

I spent years using AutoLISP, and the syntax-highlighting editor we purchased was worth every penny and the inconvenience of its odd copy protection scheme. However, this tool didn't help me much with decoding the undocumented derivative language that a contractor had used to create many programs that I had to maintain after he left. It would have been nice to have been able to extend the development tool to include these functions once I'd figured them out. Of course, that would have never worked with that particular tool, given the paranoia of its developers.

While UDDI may never really work on the Web, perhaps a similar sort of system for IDE's would help address this problem.

Intel/Apple/Microsoft steel cage deathmatch

2005-06-10T15:21:00.000-05:00

Cringely has some interesting ideas about why Apple is moving to Intel and why they are announcing it now. The biggest hole in his theory: why all these shenanigans when Intel could just buy Apple right now? So it won't look like Intel forced Apple to switch? I'm not buying that one.

Where's the mobile Web?

2005-06-08T22:25:00.000-05:00

Why are there no compelling mobile web apps? I don't mean applications that run on your phone or some other device when you are disconnected. I'm talking about honest-to-goodness I-need-some-connectivity-to-run apps.

Phone processing power, screen size, screen quality, coverage, and data rate have improved dramatically over the last 4-5 years. We've been talking about multi-headed applications for at least that long, but we are lucky if apps have both a rich client interface and a web interface. Phone interfaces are gimmicky or non-existent.

I think part of the problem has been an obsession about operating in disconnected mode, which to me is a relic of rich client thinking. Sure, it would be nice. But is it really necessary? Let's step back to 1998, when dial-up was king. You'd lose your connection any number of times during a session due to various flakiness and limitations, and you'd keep plugging away. Annoying, yes, but not annoying enough to hinder the explosive growth of the Web.

But we don't have to go back in time to find an analogous situation. WiFi exploded even though a large percentage of users can't provide whole house coverage with one WAP. People simply deal with it, because the benefits of mobility greatly outweigh a few dark corners.

Mobile browsers used to be lame, but now are much better. Additional work is still required, but tools exist to lighten the load.

So is it merely inertia that's holding developers back? What am I missing here?

Blogging patterns

2005-06-07T13:33:00.000-05:00

One thing I've been looking at as part of my corporate blogging research in preparation for our pilot later this year is how people blog -- what motivates someone to post, what impedes posting, what gets emailed instead of posted, is there a particular type of person who is more likely to blog, etc.

I haven't posted anything recently, and I wanted to look beyond the obvious ("I'm too busy. I don't have any time!") to see what might be contributing factors. So, yes, I've been busy, but I think the key is "busy doing what?"

First, I've taken some vacation, and for me vacation means total electronic disconnect. I don't want anything to do with computers when I'm on vacation. That, however, doesn't mean much from the corporate blogging perspective.

More significantly, I decided that I was spending too much of my day reading my feeds. When I'm really in research mode, I can't spend enough time reading my feeds, searching out new ones, etc. But instead of strategy and vision work, I've been working on new technology rollouts. This very different work requires specialized instead of general queries, which limits what I need to look at. More general research benefits from the serendipity of the feed reader. I've also discovered that when I do implementation work, I'm more likely to spend my evenings reading a book than online.

One thing that I did that had a real effect was organizing all of my feeds into a handful of categories. I'm much more likely to click on a link in Bloglines that says I have one or two new items than one that says I have 147. I was also pretty rigorous in defining "work" sites and "general interest" sites, which has cut down on serendipitous wandering as I look for the work-related nuggets in those general interest sites. With a different tool with different "mark read" behavior, this organization might not have the same effect.

For me, at least, the more feeds I read, the more likely I am to blog myself. It's not the posts are responses to what I've read, although some are. I've had a couple of things on the back burner for a while about work, but I've been out of the blogging mode. Reading feeds apparently contributes to the blogging frame of mind.

So, making the leap that others are like me, how do you create a corporate ecosphere where reading feeds daily helps you get your job done? Where this regular reading makes you more likely to post yourself, contributing to a virtuous circle? I think that partial email replacement is in the mix, but it's not the whole story. Thoughts?

Filtering feeds

2005-05-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

Many people worry about filtering information in their feeds, leveraging searches and watches for specific terms. To me, though, the feeds are the filters. One of the best things about RSS/Atom is finding people who you trust to filter the vast amount of information available on a particular subject area for you.

For instance, Jack Vinson serves as my KM filter. While KM is among the topics I follow, it's not something that I can spend much time on. Before I met Jack at CSCW, started reading his blog and finding value there, my KM research was haphazard at best. Now I get a steady stream of relevant KM information. The blog/KM intersection that Jack occasionally writes about is of particular interest to me.

Russ Beattie is my mobile filter, but it is a completely different sort of "relationship." I spend less time on the mobile space then I do on KM. I've never met Russ, and we tend to disagree on lots of things - AJAX, the relevance of screen size, the usefulness of a quarter VGA screen, etc. He's responded (with vitriol) to comments I've made on his blog, but he wouldn't recognize my name or this site. However, his extreme passion for the mobile space, his personality, and the fact that we often disagree makes him a good filter for me in this space.

On the other hand, I read scads of blogs about collaboration-related topics. This is where I serve as a filter for others -- not just via the blogosphere, but in my role as an IT architect. What's important isn't just what's going on in the world at large, but how it affects or could affect our company. Similarly, I read Bruce Schneier and the endlessly revolving InfoWorld security columnist, but I rely heavily on Guy and his coworkers for analysis of what's happening in IT security.

Getting under the hood

2005-05-10T16:16:00.000-05:00

Mark Pilgrim has published Dive Into Greasemonkey, which looks like a great way to learn how to put Greasemonkey to use. I'm looking forward to spending more time with it. I'm particularly interested in seeing if I can use GM_setValue and GM_getValue to further modify LibraryLookup to allow users to select which libraries they want searched without having to modify the code themselves.

Meanwhile, Jon has been Greasemonkeying around with screencasts and password generators. His rebuttal of Nate Root is dead on. Greasemonkey will cause headaches for IT managers, but it will alleviate some too. Extensibility is a good thing. Greasemonkey pain isn't really any different from Excel macro pain or Access data pain.

50 ways to kill your computer

2005-05-10T15:38:00.000-05:00

How exactly is a Red Screen of Death worse than a Blue Screen of Death? Dead is dead, unless the red death is somehow more painful. Given this cue, my co-worker David suggests a panoply of color screens:

Red Screen of Agony
Green Screen of Nausea
Teal Screen of Indecision
Yellow Screen of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

This truth should be self-evident

2005-04-29T08:34:00.000-05:00

but in case it's not, this Northwestern research may help:

The researchers studied data on Broadway musicals since 1877 as well as thousands of journal publications in four fields of science and found that successful teams had a diverse membership -- not of race and gender but of old blood and new. New team members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the experience of the entire industry. Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other whereas the members of successful teams were interconnected, much like the Kevin Bacon game, across a giant cluster of artists or scientists.

Diversity is so much more than ethnicity, sex, or orientation. Add personality type, background, expertise, and the spark provided by new combinations to the mix, and you greatly increase you chances for better results. (via BoingBoing)

a simple tool to prevent phishing

2005-04-28T21:34:00.000-05:00

"SpoofStick contains no adware, spyware, nagware or other unhealthy additives."

Don't leave your homepage without it.

Regulation of Trade

2005-04-28T20:30:00.000-05:00

I was pleasantly surprised to discover this fine study, an analysis of the whole spyware phenom, had been issued by a previously unlikely source - the FTC.

Their document is written in plain English, not often the case in this line of work. I am heartened to learn that the folks most empowered to take legislative actions in response to the threats of spyware are, frankly, this far down that road.

Let me commend the entire paper to you, but draw in particular your attention to Chapter IV, Section A.5, the discussion of possible future changes to browsers and/or operating systems. In most cases, I'm afraid an overhaul from the ground up will be required.

"Cancel" means "yes." Indeed, it may.

Trespass & Deception (for starters)

2005-04-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

Sick Spitzer on 'em! Why didn't we think of that earlier? A NY State official whose powers are now effectively nationwide in reach. The man is strongly reminiscent of my favorite ex-pres, Theodore Roosevelt. Bully.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued a major Internet marketer today, blaming it for secretly installing software that can slow and crash personal computers.

Spitzer accuses Intermix of redirecting millions of computer users to Web sites where ads get displayed, adding unnecessary toolbars to Web browsers and delivering unwanted ads that pop up on computer screens.

''Spyware and adware are more than an annoyance,'' Spitzer said. ''These fraudulent programs foul machines, undermine productivity and in many cases frustrate consumers' efforts to remove them from their computers.''

Spitzer's civil suit accuses Intermix of violating state General Business Law provisions against false advertising and deceptive business practices, and accuses them of trespass under New York common law. Additional suits may follow.

Spitzer, after taking on Wall Street and the insurance industry, is taking a harder look at Internet companies he believes are stunting the growth of e-commerce.

''Said Kenneth Dreifach, chief of Spitzer's Internet Bureau, ''Increasingly, people don't feel in control.''

'parasite' to advise feds on privacy matters?

2005-04-21T20:53:00.000-05:00

I've read it - but can it really be true?

Reed Freeman has been appointed to the DHS inner sanctum. That small business he was hired away from being Claria (a.k.a. gator or GAIN). Their emerging technology focus, you ask? Why, the buggering of your PC for the unsolicited collection and re-sale of personal information garnered from all subsequent users thereupon, of course. Nifty, huh?

Oh, to be a fly on the wall for some of those meeting minutes ...

Amen, brother!

2005-04-21T14:51:00.000-05:00

That's our response to this bit of Chad Dickerson wisdom:

You can aggressively block services like these at your firewall, but you have to offer functional alternatives to remain relevant to the users you serve. If you don’t, your users will go around you. After all, they have real work to do, and if you can’t help them leverage technology to do it, they’ll figure ways out on their own.

Guy and I regularly discuss business people "routing around" IT. Of course, we are talking to IT folks when we say it, so our geek-speak is in order.

Chad also gets bonus points for drastically limiting workstation admin rights.

LibraryLookup revisited

2005-04-20T16:40:00.000-05:00

Shortly after I mused about customizing Jon's new Greasemonkey version of LibraryLookup for select libraries in the JCLC, my coworker Brad provided me with one. Apparently, the LazyWeb sometimes works even when you don't explicitly invoke it. Boo-ya!

Some background is in order. All of the municipal libraries in Jefferson County participate in the Jefferson County Library Cooperative, or JCLC for short. The cooperative appears to its patrons as one big library with 41 branches. I never go to many of these libraries, so I really don't care if they have a book that I'm looking at on Amazon. I need to filter on the most convenient libraries for me.

I spent some time looking through the code and reading parts of JavaScript: The Complete Reference, Second Edition on Books24x7. I found both the book and the service to be quite useful. I then made some modifications of my own to the code, changing and reordering the branches.

Ari took a different approach, leveraging a search and replace and a quick study of the JCLC site to make his own straight-forward customization.

I'll be glad to share with any JCLC patrons or other interested parties. Leave me a message in the comments.

Social networks form around objects

2005-04-15T13:55:00.000-05:00

I have to agree with Russ: Object-centered sociality is much better than the social networking approach of talking about relationships in a void, as Jyri Engeström's post makes clear. It's nice to have theoretical backing for the problems with social networking that I voiced at CSCW, which were brusquely dismissed by a leading academic. You don't have to read every paper ever written on the subject to realize that boiling your relationships across various objects to a single, cross-domain strength indicator is bogus. Social network software could definitely use a theory injection, but it needs to be the right theory.

Sodas are cheap

2005-04-04T10:14:00.000-05:00

The vendor who manages our drink machines recently raised the price of a sodas again, so Jack's pointer to this piece caught my interest.

My wife's company provides free sodas. Contrary to Rothman's assertion, it's just not that expensive.

Regardless, it's important for companies to promote this sort of informal mingling. This idea is discussed extensively in The Social Life of Information.

Web intermediation

2005-04-04T09:09:00.000-05:00

Another informative screencast from Jon. I really like his Greasemonkey script that takes Library Lookup to the next level. I wonder if I can get my hands on that and modify it for my own needs? I'd need to filter results for select libraries in the JCLC.

NEIDA

2005-03-30T10:29:00.000-06:00

"External access" can be a confusing term. Are you talking about people who aren't physically on site? Are you talking about non-employees? To clarify, I started referring to a project as "non-employee identification and authorization." After banging out that phrase a few times, I realized that I had a ready acronym: NEIDA.

To me, adding NEIDA to the mix is where you really get the value out of Sharepoint (used generically - SPS is an application that rides on top of WSS). Sharepoint is a definite improvement over the cumbersome and kludgey ways we now share data internally, but those ways simply don't work at all with non-employees and remote personnel. For instance, if you want to grant a contractor access to a DFS share, you are forced to add this non-employee to your corporate directory, have him install a VPN client, and then let him run remote desktop. All of this assumes that you happen to have a spare workstation, either physical or virtual, for him to remote into. Very ugly. You are attempting to electronically convert the remote contractor into a physically co-located employee. This is silly and risky. Identity and location must be decoupled.

We've recognized and articulated the need for this capability for about two years now. But in our company (and I suspect in most large corporations), a single business unit with a huge project gets a lot more attention than a thousand voices spread throughout the enterprise. We now have that giant business unit stick, and are moving forward rapidly lest the stick is used to hit us.

Here's what we are doing specifically: We are putting a Microsoft ISA cluster in our DMZ and using it to securely publish Sharepoint, which is located on the corporate network. The ISA and Sharepoint boxes will belong to our separate extranet forest, which has a one-way trust with our corporate forest. Non-employees needing access will be given accounts in the extranet forest, and site administrators will grant those accounts access to specific containers within the extranet forest.

The nice bonus in this approach is that we solve the remote employee problem while addressing the non-employee problem. The more applications we publish, the less our need for remote desktop.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who's done anything similar. What gotchas, landmines, etc. await us?

Rich web interfaces

2005-03-18T13:38:00.000-06:00

Since Guy brought it up, I'd like to mention Blogger's text entry box. Here's an old post that I just stumbled across that talks about how it's done. Note that while OS might not matter, your particular browser does. I hate not having the hyperlink button in Safari, which is still the default browser on the family Mac.

Blogger slowdown

2005-03-18T08:30:00.000-06:00

Blogger and/or Blogspot has become more pokey more often recently. C'mon, folks, we know you can scale.

UPDATE: Phil has the scoop from Biz: Google has plenty of computers. They just need more juice.