Graham Chastney

The other week I wrote about third-party extension that utilized Flickr to provide geotagging support – well now it has been built into Flickr. Unfortunately the photos for my region of the world are terrible because they are using Yahoo maps, but at least it’s part of the product. They are supposed to be making them better. It still impresses me how seamlessly the web service providers can make these changes.

All I have to do now is work out the process for getting the geotags into Flickr in such a way that I can use any maps. The other great thing is to be able to see other people’s flicks taken at the same spot. I think it involves using the same old mechanism for tagging and then importing them into the Flickr capability.

If you want to see my map it’s here.

tags: tags, geotagging, Flickr, yahoo

We are continuing to see all sorts of movements in the Green IT’ arena. Over the weekend Greenpeace issued a report which positioned each of the top vendors and their ‘green’ credentials. Collaboration Loop commented:

Over the weekend, Greenpeace, which monitors such things, released a report that ranked the very devices we use every day for knowledge sharing and collaboration “on their use of toxic chemicals and electronic waste.” Greenpeace also ranked leading manufacturers’ decisions to actively recycle their products in a safe manner. The results, if accurate, were shocking. Using a scale of 0 to 10, no device maker ranked higher than 7. Nokia and Dell both received 7s, “barely acceptable,” based on the fact that both companies have decided to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in their devices and also to publish a timeline for future reductions. Three major manufacturers, Apple, Lenovo, and Motorola, received failing grades.

This has provoked a lot of other comment.

There was also some interesting comment on the promotion of Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs at Wal-Mart which was started by Fact Company (via RPM)

Jonathan Schwartz has been banging the drum for some time. It does look, though, that Sun are starting to see some traction for their ability to deliver low-power equipment.

I have been involved in a number of evaluations of equipment and software and never have they directly considered power or toxic waste issues – it looks like that’s about to change. I was contacted today by a colleague who is interested in how we construct a desktop service that is ‘green’. There are a lot of interesting elements to that question, the starting point would appear to be power consumption.

One example is the impact of software on power usage. It’s one thing understand the power rating of a piece of equipment, it’s another understand the impact of piece of software or system. If a piece of software stresses the processor more than another then it uses more energy software should really come with a power rating too.

Another interesting thing is the cost of services like file services. Is it more power efficient to have a file server spinning fast disks all day for hundred of users, or to have a local hard-disk do that work.

And then there is the issue of power rating the whole, a desktop infrastructure doesn’t just have a desktop and a network, it has a directory and file services, and print services, and backup services, and management services.

There is also the issue of location. A desktop which pumps out heat in California needs to be cooled (most of the time), a desktop which pumps out heat in Scandinavia reduces the heating bill because it is warming the space. Using a PC as a heating device is not an efficient use of energy, but it’s certainly less of an issue that the cooling required in California. Thinking about it, why do we put data centres in warm parts of the world where it costs  more to cool them than it would in a cooler part of the world?

It’s certainly time to change the evaluation criteria.

tags: green, greenpeace, sun, power, evaluation, criteria, wal-mart

This weekend was a bank holiday in the UK. The Chastney family got together in Derbyshire. We had a good time visiting a few sites.

Driving home through the countryside took ages. The delays were only to be expected as it was a Bank Holiday and were trying to get through Buxton.

I started with a head-ache on the way home, this continued through Monday evening, Tuesday and is now only a dull thud (on Tuesday).

I’m back now though.

I’ve read a few posts recently (here and here) encouraging people to work to be lazy.

Some people seem to love being busy on repetitive tasks. This has always baffled me. Why do something more than once if you can automate it?

Ask me to do any tasks and my first question (normally only to myself) is ‘why?’ I want to know why because I want to link it to a reward.

These two needs (to automate and to see the reward) are deeply engrained within our predatory conscience.

Wildebeest start the day grazing, they spend the rest of the morning grazing, in the afternoon they do the same, and for evening relaxation they do a spot more grazing.

Lions start the day lazing around expending as little energy as possible waiting around for the food to come to them. If the food doesn’t come to them they form a plan to go and get some food. They could chase the first beast that they come across, but they normally don’t. They could repeat the task over and over again until they manage to catch something, but they don’t. They use their brains.

Eagles spend more time sat in trees than flying. They normally only fly to get food. They remember the good places to get food and visit those places more frequently.

For both the lion and the eagle the reward is directly linked to the effort. A wildebeest, however, follows the routine.

The lions use the wildebeest to do the repetitive task of converting grass into food. The wildebeest automates the task for the lion, all they have to do is catch the wildebeest which I am sure requires less effort than grazing all day, and is certainly more interesting.

I would much rather be a lion or an eagle than a wildebeest. I am a predator, I only want to expend effort when it is linked to a reward and that requires me to use my brain. If getting the reward requires something to be repeated I’d rather something else did it for me, I’ll make the most of their efforts.

The modern IT infrastructure has given us the ability to automate all sorts of repetitive tasks, but many of us haven’t used these capabilities to their full potential. It’s time to become more lazy and to get all of those repetitive tasks automated.

I believe that the next wave of IT will radically change the way that businesses work and reconnect many of us directly with the rewards. This reconnection with the rewards will directly influence the amount of repetitive tasks that we do because we will only do the ones that contribute to the reward. But we still need to go out and hunt the reward down. For those of us sat in corporate land hunting sounds scary, and that is the saddest part of all.

Anyone joining me on a hunting expedition?

In a post about the use of PowerPoint during the Iraq War, Visual Beings used this term “Visual Illiteracy”.

Some days a phrase gets me thinking – Visual Illiteracy is a new one.

Visual Illiteracy is of course the opposite of Visual Literacy of which there seems to be a lot written.

There’s even an International Visual Literacy Association.

Take your pick of definitions, they all seem to be saying very similar things: the ability to communicate and understand visually rather than in words.

I suppose this fits into my brain series. The right-brained people seem to be the ones who are more likely to be visually literate. Visual literacy is going to be a skill which will be invaluable to people who are needing to be more creative and more conceptual. It seems to be something you can learn.

Having done a small amount of research I am staggered by how many words have been written about a topic that is all about visual. Apparently there is a taxonomy of visual literacy?

tags: visual+literacy, PowerPoint, visual+illiteracy, right-brain