http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

Now
that I’ve seen these guys mentioned a few times, and I’ve had a chance
to try them out, I can say that I’m pleasantly satisfied with this
service, though it did leave me wanting just a little bit more.

Now, before anybody goes all purist and “KISS”
on me… I do believe less is more, and I hate Office for it’s feature
bloat. To be honest, there are quite a few applications out there (and
not just desktop ones, I mean some Web 1.0/1.1 applications too) that
are just too feature rich to be useful. I subscribe very much to the
Web 2.0 mashup thinking as well as the SOA line of thinking where
customized “applications” are merely just mashups of many smaller
miniature applications.

However, I do believe in having at least a little bit of power in these
miniature applications. For example, the name “Remember the Milk”
indicates that these guys were thinking of the paradigm of “shopping
lists”, or, at very least “honey-do” lists, not just simple and
unstructured to-do lists. Why then, would they not have specific
functionality to add a List of items in a way that’s more obvious than
adding a Note to the to-do item? Would it not make sense to have a
simple way to add basic styles of attachments to a to-do item that were
interpreted in very basic, but powerful ways? I mean, what if I wanted
to have some automated process send a web-page to me for future review
or study? I could send a link in a Note, but would it be obvious what
that to-do item was for? Or would I have to then go into the item and
personally interpret the intent of the to-do item.

Another thing I think they could improve upon, although I know that
there are other, probably more appropriate services for this, is group
sharing of to-do lists. Now, I’ve only done basic research into RTM,
but it was not obvious to me how to accomplish such tasks as having a
team of people be in charge of a set of tasks, or how to share a task
with the ability to determine the level of security associated with
that task.

Overall, I am impressed with the service and I hope they continue to
move forward and make improvements. Considering that Google Calendar
does not have tasks built-in yet, even though they’ve been talking
about it since they first released it into beta, and considering that RTM
has already designed a way to integrate the two… they make a very
powerful combination already. There’s more work that I think can be
done, though, and I look forward to seeing the results. Maybe I can
even participate in the engineering process somehow…

So I finally had the opportunity to order and start playing around with
Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.  My first
impression: “Wow”…  I hate to say that, too, because I really
had started to get annoyed by Microsoft’s use of that word in their
marketing campaigns.  I was thinking to myself, “nothing can
really be THAT much better to evoke that kind of response.”  Well,
I was wrong.  But my experience has not all been sweet and rosey
smelling.

Obviously,
there are going to be usability issues in getting used to the new
environment.  There are also going to be some compabitibility
issues in running your favorite software.  There are even going to
be some of your handy “tricks” that just don’t work anymore because of
some new security feature or underlying design principle.  All of
these are good things, in general, if done for the right reasons. 
In my short experience, and in what is coming out of Microsoft these
days in terms of security, their heart seems to be in the right place.

The
one issue I have heard so much about (and I’m sure others have too) is
their User Access Controls mechanism.  Many people seem to really
hate this feature of Windows Vista.  I, being a seasoned
professional and having experience with Linux, Unix and their heavy use
of privilege systems, am not really that annoyed by it.  In fact,
I think it’s a great feature.  I do think it is very
misunderstood, however, and here is why.

One of the most
annoying user practices that I have seen over the years is that people
want to stick files wherever they want on the hard drive.  After
all, it’s their hard drive, is it not?  It’s their computer, their files… Why wouldn’t they be able to stick their files wherever they think they can best organize (or disorganize) them?

What
people don’t seem to understand is that an operating system, such as
Windows Vista, or HP-UX, or even Mac OS X, makes certain areas more
“protected” than others specifically so that it can keep itself
organized, stable and secure.  When we as users, engineers and
administrators don’t follow these guidelines and the best practices
associated with them, we cause our own headaches by going against the
design of the operating system and having to “hack around” it’s default
organizational layout.

You see, each of these operating systems
provides “playgrounds,” so to speak, for users to store their documents
and their settings.  These playgrounds are specifically put in
places that are designed not to interfere with the operating system,
but rather to work “with” the operating system and with other
well-behaving applications that are running on the system.  When
we venture outside of these “playgrounds” when we aren’t really
supposed to, whether by direct choice or by usage of a software package
that doesn’t follow the right procedures, we have to start doing things
to disable the very features that are designed to protect our
experience.

So, while many angry users are out there bashing UAC
and vowing to disable it on every machine they touch, I will be leaving
it on and considering carefully every time that prompt comes up,
whether I’m doing something that is working with the operating system or against it, and what the consequences of what I am about to do are.

In my everyday wanderings of the web, this article from SmallBizResource
caused me to think about the nature of VoIP, who is succeeding and who
is failing and why.  In it the essential message is that Cisco and Microsoft
are both gunning to provide VoIP to the Small and Medium sized Business
sector.  I have many views about why enterprise level companies
are failing so miserably to catch the SMB market, but I wanted to focus
on a particular couple of points that are glanced over in this article.

Preface

First, a note or two about VoIP:

1. VoIP
   is a game-changing technology specifically because it is based on open
   networks and open standards (for the most part, though Skype might be
   even more popular if it opened it’s network with some kind of open
   gateway system).
2. The open-ness of VoIP standards has created a
   wealth of vendors and a wealth of oppurtunities for collaboration, both
   in the product and service development sense, and in the “unified work
   experience” sense.

The Guts

Okay, so here’s where these guys, and a quite a few others (ahem, Nortel, Toshiba, Shoretel and all of those vendors that like to “lock” their hardware into one system…):

1. People like choice.  People like to be able to touch and feel a device,
   and choose between a few different hardware platforms.  You give them
   that choice, and they’ll love you for it.
2. People like flexibility.  People don’t like being locked in.  Oh sure,
   they’ll accept it, but they won’t necessarily like it.  Doesn’t anybody
   notice all the trends of “unlocking” cell phones, “hacking” various
   embedded devices (AppleTV to be the latest), and “porting” of telephone
   numbers when switching carriers?
3. People
   like innovation.  The ability to open your platform to extensions
   and experimentation breeds a whole new level of innovation.  If
   you encourage this from your community, they will more than likely
   respond positively and do things that your internal engineers would
   never have dreamed of.  If they do it well enough, why not buy
   them out and encourage them to continue innovating with your products.

Anyway,
that’s my short little rant on why I think some of the major players in
the industry are really missing the point of all of this
technology.  It’s supposed to be a disruptive technology.  It’s NOT
supposed to look, or feel, exactly like the old stuff.  One of the
biggest problems with the old PSTN network is that it’s stability
crippled it’s innovation. Sure,
they made some recent advances here and there.  But, for the most
part, nobody wanted to add features to upset an already working
system.  So nobody ever innovated any new functionality into it.

My Advice

Open
up your phones and your servers so that anybody can talk to them, not
just a few select vendors (or even just yourself).  Make the Cisco
IP phones talk SIP so they can talk to any SIP-based server or
service.  Make the Cisco Call Manager systems talk SIP so you can
run your favorite SIP phone against the server.  Stop locking
users into systems they’ll just have to throw out in 3 years
anyway.  If you open both ends of the system up, you can innovate
and synergize on both sides of the solution.

Network World Article Source

I saw this article today and said to myself “well ain’t that just a
kick in the pants.” This has to be the coolest idea I’ve seen in a very
long time. I mean, take your basic 3 components needed for fire, and
change which of the 3 components you remove. How long have we been
damaging our computer systems with either toxic Halon systems, or
simply destroying them with water based solutions? This is one of those
technologies that, in hindsight, begs the question of why didn’t
somebody think of this sooner.

I have to say to the makers, well thought and thank you for your simple
brilliance. Now, let’s just hope that they can get it to be affordable I’m sure it will play a part in the next generation of high caliber
data centers. Of course, now we might have to deal with altitude
sickness even though we’re still setting at or near sea-level.

Slife – an awareness browser from Slife Labs

These guys have a very interesting concept in mind here. I can see this
being a very powerful tool if used in the proper ways. However, like
all powerful tools, if it is misused, I would be quite afraid of the
consequences. There are major privacy concerns here, at least in my
mind.

One example of a very good use is that I tend to work in a very
multi-threaded fashion in my web-browser. It can be very hard,
sometimes, to keep up with the 40 to 50 tabs I get opened in my Firefox
sessions at times. Most of the time, however, I am really only actively
using about 5 to 8 of those windows and the rest are kept open for
referential purposes because I don’t want to go back and look for them
later. (As a side note, if any of you have any suggestions on how to
save a group of pages as semi-temporary bookmark groups, let me know…
I would love to come back to a group of 5 or 6 tabbed web pages at a
later date and continue on from that point, but I wouldn’t necessarily
need to hold those references past that later date.)

I could also see this being used in a group collaboration activity (see my other post on collaboration here)
where research regarding a given subject is followed and tagged so that
others can see the trail of information that led to certain decisions.
This could be an immensely useful tool for training and/or educational
purposes. Something very similar to a shared bread-crumb trail that
tracked web pages all over the world wide web.

Of course, most of you privacy guys know that this is exactly the kind
of thing that could get out of hand fairly easily if implemented by the
wrong people and for the wrong reasons. It could also be misused if it
was just implemented in the wrong fashion, but technology is usually
easier to fix than people’s bad intentions…

I have only one request for these guys… Please make it available for
Windows… Maybe Linux would be easier since you’re starting on OS X,
but most of my semi-untracked time goes into stuff I do on my Windows
machine anyway.

Second Life

My father had a saying when I was growing up in front of my computer…
Something to the effect of “Life is not completely digital, get out and
enjoy the analog world too.”

So tell, me, why would I want to waste MORE of my time in a virtual
world that, by definition, doesn’t even exist when I don’t have enough
time to do the things I enjoy in the REAL world?

I will concede that there are some very compelling reason for virtual
reality technology, such as remote medicine, real estate preview, or
even virtual meeting places. However, the entertainment industry as a
whole is so adept at helping people escape from the reality of their
lives that people can easily forget that normal reality can be a very
interesting and exciting thing.

I guess the part of me that needs balance just screams to stay away
from this kind of thing except in those rare circumstances in which it
is truly the most productive way to accomplish a task. Of course, that
same drive for productivity is also what drives my family crazy at
times because I just won’t sit down and relax in front of the
television like so many people are accustomed to doing.

Much time and energy has been devoted to analysis of TCO on open source
vs. proprietary systems. I have, for a long time, been overly
optimistic about open source in general. I can attribute this to a very
conservative exploration of open source packages, usually limited to
widely used applications with deeply committed and knowledgeable
communities, such as those that support Apache, BIND DNS, Postfix and
Courier-IMAP on the server side and Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird
applications on the client side.
Recently, however, I have been working with projects that have exposed
me to projects with lesser depth and attention to usability acrossed
many environments. Trying to use the projects together in such a way
that they weren’t necessarily designed to work, but claim to be
compatible, has proven to be more of a task than the websites of each
project let on, do to the complexity and maturity of these projects.
For example, I have been investigating the realm of Java based portal
software as of late. What with the promises of
wikipedia!”JSR-168″{JSR-168} technology combined with an enterprise
level programming language in Java and all of it’s extensions, I was
hoping to develop a nice platform in which to architect a functional
intranet site, but to extend our legacy and seperated systems into the
portal and create a functional and easy to use customer extranet site
as well. What I have actually experienced, so far, is far from the
rosey scenario I originally naively imagined.
I went about things in what seemed to be a logical plan and did a quick
Google search on open source Java wikipedia:”portals”{portal} and found
a few that seemed to be highly regarded:
#1. Jetspeed-2 – Jetspeed-1
was also regarded well, but doesn’t have the JSR-168 capabilities, and
I had already reviewed it quite a few years ago.
#2. Exo Portal

#3. Liferay Portal
Note: JBoss seemed to be good as well, but infant in it’s release. It
also didn’t seem to have much history yet, and even though I like
technology, I wasn’t ready to be a bleeding edge adopter yet.
Before I begin with my experience, please note that I will be
spending more time on all of these platforms to achieve some sort of
satisfaction in my quest for a good portal.
I started with Jetspeed-2. I downloaded the prebuilt package and got it
running in a Tomcat web container after trying and failing to get it to
compile from source. I believe I could have gotten it to compile from
source eventually, but I was not in the mood to commit that much time
to the project just to get a decent example up and running so I could
do a good test trial. Regardless, I found the interface confusing at
first, with not many portlets included, so I continued on my way
recognizing that if I came back to Jetspeed as my choice, I would have
to write a few basic portlets as well as my customized ones.
I then moved onto Exo’s Portal. I can’t remember what the exact problem
was now, but I was just not able to get it to run the way I wanted it
to. It may have been my desire to run my Wildfire
wikipedia!”Jabber”{Jabber} instant messaging server. Regardless, I was
unable to get any of their versions to adequetly run to my
satisfaction.
Finally, I downloaded and tried to run the Liferay Portal. I was unable
to get it working in my version of JBoss or Tomcat, so I finally
resorted to downloading the bundled portal+JBoss suite (preconfigured).
When I did install it, I was unimpressed with the layout and with what
the general consensus around the project said it would do. I’m sure it
was there, I just did not have time to go looking much deeper than I
got to.
Now, on all of these, I didn’t have a good server with more than 512MB
of memory in it to spare, so I kept running out of memory in each of
the circumstances, which is something that concerned me as I was the
only user even configured to login. The sites also seemed quite slow,
though I admit that I hadn’t given them much of a chance to cache the
compiled JSP pages and servlets, that was almost expected with how
often I was restarting the web containers.
Note: Now, I’m going to go onto my general gripe about open source
architectures.
Maybe it’s just me trying to do things that don’t quite match the way
the developers environments were setup, but if a project says it’s
compatible with a certain environment, at very least it should have
basic instructions as to how to set it up, and they instructions should
be kept up to date. Well, the instructions are less important if it
just works, but instructions are what is generally lacking in most
software development projects. And, without structured support
scenarios as you generally find in proprietary projects, accurate
documentation becomes a significantly more important factor in the
success in any open source project.
Now, most people knowledgeable in the open source space realize that
the TCO (or Total Cost of Ownership) of any given project is affected
by the general level of knowledge required by system administrators. It
is, therefore, appropriate to assume that since the general population
of open source projects require a higher level of expertise to install
and maintain, the post-acquisition phase TCO of open source projects is
generally a little bit more expensive. However, this is generally
offset by the low entry cost to these projects and the ability to get
“more bang for your buck” by having access to the source code and being
able to alter the code and contribute those alterations back to the
community.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-roadmap.html