Interesting Items From Apple's World Wide Developer Conference

I don't own a Mac. Somedays I wish I did. This week more than most. I would like to win the lottery too!

So what is so attractive this week. Well, first off there is the dual processor 2.5Ghz G5. It's not new. But it is what goes with it that is interesting. Like the 30 inch Cinema displays! Gorgeous. A pair of those would be ever so sweet.

What else? Spotlight. This is Apple's search technology that will be part of the Tiger release of OsX. Think of it as Google for your desktop. The demonstration at the conference was very impressive. Speed was excellent. But I think effectiveness it the more important aspect. With spotlight you can save a search query and have it re-executed any time. Because of its speed, one should regret opening such a folder. I know that when I do a search on my windows machine, I plan on it taking some time.

Finally there is Rendevous. This might come in handy within our branch environment for application deployments with minimal configuration.

These are each very cool. Good work Apple.

Loose Lips Sink Ships?

Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the keeping of secrets in the world of international espionage. He discussed the American supposed cracking of Iranian encryption, and made the point that keeping secret that you know other people secrets can be very valuable.

During World War II, the Japanese made huge balloon bombs that they release into the air to be carried to North America. The intent was to start fires and kill people. It was of some success. However, 'In May 1947, the New York Times wrote "Japan was kept in the dark about the fate of the fantastic balloon bombs because North Americans proved during the war that they could keep their mouths shut. To their silence is credited the failure of the enemy's campaign."'

Somebody once said about music that the anybody can play the notes, but the rests make the music. Perhaps something similar can be said about security and silence.

Smart Dust, Even Smarter Vacuums?

In case you haven't read about it, there is a technology called Smart Dust - glitter sized network computing devices that can do all sorts of cool and scary things.

So what happens after we produce billions of Smart Dust devices and spread them pervasively (invasively) throughout our world?

Perhaps this could spawn add-on features for our Robot vacuum cleaners?

Not only could your smart vacuum cleaner take care of regular dust, it could seek out smart dust as well? And then what?

Do we need virus scanners for our smart dust? Can we run Norton anti-virus on our Roombas in order to separate 'good' smart dust from 'bad'? Maybe we will need a Smart Dust recycling program?

A New BEA Emerges From The Beehive

A few days ago i suggested that BeeHive was an important development to track. The META Group has published a report that is in agreement.

You need to be a customer to access the article. http://www.metagroup.com/us/displayArticle.do?oid=48577

California Passes Anti-Gmail Bill - Is this good

I hate banner ads. Why? Mainly since they are such a waste of screen real estate. They are irrelevant. I click on a banner ad very rarely (yearly?), and when I do, it is usually from a web site meant for a targeted community, therefore the ads are most relevant.

I have been using GMail for a month now. The text ads that Google has been placing on the right hand side have been very relevant. I find myself actaully reading the ads, and clicking thru many times a week. Are they invading my privacy? I don't think so - since I agreed to it.

If there must be ads on the web sites I use, then I prefer it the GMail way.

BEA donates Beehive to Apache

In October 2003, Crossvale (a research firm) published a report entitled “A Study in Enterprise Development Productivity”, subtitle “Comparing Implementation Approaches with J2EE API coding vs. Using a J2EE Development Framework”.

This report has been widely circulated by BEA as evidence that WebLogic is better than Websphere. However, in reviewing the report I found that they were really comparing the benefits of using advanced tooling to generate code rather than coding major portions by hand.

My conclusion was that BEA's WLW (WebLogic Workshop) may offer some improvements in our project delivery time, it also required a significant change in our infrastructure, and more importantly would require us to abandon our vendor neutral position.

On May 19 of this year, BEA announced that portions of WLW will be released to the open source community via Apache. The first code releases would be available later this year. It is a little early to gage the importance of this development. But given good market acceptance, this may be an importance addition to our tool set.

References
The Crossvale report
BEA Beehive Press Release
ZDNet News article

First Impressions of Gmail

I have started using my new Google mail account. So far I like it. The interface is clean and simple. But the thing that impresses me the most is it's speed. It is very fast. Much faster than Yahoo, Faster than my corporate Notes client as well.
I like the label approach to filing things, rather than the folder concept.

Good work, Google.

Infopath and Sharepoint Portal Server

I have been experimenting with using Infopath and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. It has been fun, and I think it can be a very useful combination. The main problem with using it in our environment is that we have yet to deploy Office 2003 Professional throughout our organization. I am working on that.

Simple form design is very straightforward. Drag-n-drop form controls - very easy. When you want to publish the form to the SPS server, that too is very easy. It creates a portal page for the form with a simple click to fill out a form interface. The portal page can show any field values from the saved forms.

One aspect that I still need to work on to get it working the way I would like is the merging of multiple forms in order to aggregate the data into a single view.

Another area that I need to work on more is scripting.

I still exist

I haven't made any postings in a long time. Things just got too busy and to add to that, I am not sure anybody is reading this. All of my known readers were internal and got the things I needed to say directly.

Rich Internet Applications

Two years ago we did a prototype of a rich client application using SVG. It was crude, but demonstrated the idea fairly well. We never did much with it. We got reorg'd a couple of times and has now been all but forgotten.

Macromedia has been flogging their rich client technology. I have finally gotten around to taken a look at what they have to offer. If you have 15 minutes to invest, to a look at their web presentation entitled: Macromedia - The business impact of Rich Internet Applications.

Tom, if you don't even have that much to spare, take a look at the section that talks about the etrade stock quote application. It is about 9 minutes in.

Consider their Watergate Hotel example. What would that kind of approach do to a banking application. Bill payment on one screen? (By the way, I checked out the applicaton on the hotel's web site... They don't use the new flash based application, it is the old one. Wonder why?

Unicode and Character Sets

This article gives a very good overview on the topic of character encoding. Recommended reading for any and every programmer. Even if you only work in COBOL and IMS, there is a very good chance that your data will end up on a webpage.

A Pair of Interesting Articles

This first articles talks about a new IBM server platform, the x455 which will let customers configure a server with between 4 and 16 processors in a manner which reminds me of lego. Need more processing power? Slide in another group of processors.


CRN : Daily Archives : IBM Pushes Scalable Itanium Server : 4:36 PM EST Mon., Nov. 10, 2003

But this second article could add a really interesting twist to the above capability. VMware's new capability provides a huge degree of abstraction from the underlying hardware. Workload can be moved around using a drop-and-drop interface.

InformationWeek > Virtual Servers > Multiplying Virtual Servers With New VMware Tools > November 10, 2003

So if you need more horespower on a server, you could add more x455 units, or move a virtual server image to another physical server.

Sweet.

IBM's case for VoIP

Although a 240,000 user conversion to VoIP is a significant investment. IBM's existing Rolm based phone system is quite antique. It was pretty state-of-the-art at the time it was installed, but that is no longer true. By 2008 that will be overdue.

When examining the case for VoIP, it dosen't usually make sense to upgrade for the purpose of using the technology - there has to be some direct benefit to make it worthwhile. Otherwise you wait for your old equipment to age into obsolescence, or you acquire new premises.

SearchNetworking.com | Networking Decisions notebook: IBM's case for VoIP: "Johnny Barnes, IBM's vice president of global IT solutions and standards, told attendees that his company plans to migrate at least 80% of its more than 300,000 employees to voice over IP by 2008."

Acrobat and InfoPath

Jon Udell has an interesting commentary onAcrobat and InfoPath. When InfoPath was first announced, under the name of xDocs, there was much hubub about it being an Acrobat killer. There certainly is some competition between the two. This will be an interesting fight once it gets started.

A Conversation with Jim Gray

An excellent interview.

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design

I stumbled across this site on web usability. Something that gets left out of a lot of requirement specifications. Is usability a functional or non-functional requirement?

Perhaps they represent principles that drive out both requirement types.

Skype - VoIP Redux

So, FreeWorldDial work well from home, but not behind the corporate firewall. Today on /. I came across this new application (Skype) that combines instant messaging with VoIP. It is what msn could be, if they didn't require pay-for-use subscriptions. Software install was fine, but will it work well with firewalls and VPNs? I'll give it a try and let you know.

Update on VoIP

My original purpose for experimeting with VoIP was two-fold. 1) to talk to my daugther who just went off to college on the other side of the continent, and secondly to improve on my effectiveness while tele-commuting. The first objective looks like it will be a 'win' once she gets her high-speed (and always on) connectivity set-up.

The second objective was somewhat reliant on being able to tie into into the corporate VoIP phone network - over the VPN. This looks to be a challenge. It seems that so far, the best I will be able to achieve is Direct IP dialing. So does this put me any further ahead than using Sametime or Netmeeting? I think the answer is 'no'. To be practicable I would need to know the IP address of the recipient, that would likely be established via a sametime chat. It appears that I should focus on audio calls using sametime and getting everybody I know signed up for that.

Everyone Needs a Personal Server

So I saw this on slashdot "Everyone Needs a Personal Server". I was kind of upset with myself. A long time ago - about when we started developing cell phone applications, I thought that this might be the way to go.

My thinking at the time was that rather than trying to jami everything into one device, spread them out a little. A palm-like device for display, an ear bud for sound, a little black box that would provide compute power and communications (I was thinking bluetooth at the time), and disk storage. So this is kind of like that.

I am sure I was the only one who thought of that too! ;-)

Experimenting with Voice Over IP (VoIP)

Looking for ways to work better from remote locations, I have been exploring Voice Over IP solutions. So far I have signed up with Free World Dialup . I am phone number 57902 . It is a free service.

I have been using xten-lite as the softphone (SIP agent). It was very easy to install. The quality has been good so far with the biggest variable being the speakers and microphone used by the other end. Some feedback has occured with they are in close proximity.

The biggest limitation so far is that FreeWorldDialup is not useable from behind the corporate firewall - at least I haven't figured out a set of workable parameters as yet. Perhaps it won't be needed - that is if the new IP telephone system allows connectivity over the VPN from computer based softphones.

So if you want to play around, install a phone and sign up for FWD, and gve me a call - FWD# 57902.