Having failed to publish a summary in May I thought I would get in slightly early for June:
My Tools Summary: June 2008
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Monthly Archives: June 2008
My Tools: Jing
One of the things that I quite often want to do is to show people a snapshot of what I see on my screen. That’s where Jing come in.
Jing does stills and movies and it does both of them in a wonderfully simple elegant way.
Jing appears on the screen as a small yellow/orange half-sphere. When you move over it you get to see three options:
Once you have selected “Capture” you then select the area which Jing automatically helps with by selecting the active window. You don’t have to use this window, but it’s surprising how often that this is exactly what you want to do.
The next thing to choose is what type of capture you want to do. If you select “Image” then you are prompted as to where you want to put it, if you select “Movie” then you are given a count down of 3-2-1 and then you record the movie.
Once captured you then decide what you are going to do with your capture. Again there are some nice features here, including the ability to send directly to Flickr and to screencast.com. The things that I am capturing are normally going into presentations for my work so I normally save them to a file.
Movies are in created in shockwave making them easy to transport and to publish.
I had forgotten how much easier Jing makes this process until I came to write this post. One of the challenges with showing snapshots of a snapshot tool is that you struggle to use the snapshot tool to do it. Going back to alt-prt scr was a real step back in history for me.
Hello Supplier
I’ve noticed an interesting trend in the access logs for this blog.
Every time I have a meeting with a supplier my blog will be visited by someone from that suppliers just beforehand, or just afterwards.
I wanted to say “Hello” and “Welcome” in acknowledgement of the effort you are putting in to understanding what might be important to me.
Seth Goblin: “You need to increase your value”
Sometimes someone says something in such a succinct way that it resonates.
Today it’s Seth Goblin:
Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.
It’s not true.
You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.
You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.
IT service delivery has become a commodity sell; so much so that the only focus is cost reduction.
The huge opportunity is this – no end-user really wants to buy their IT as a commodity, it’s only their organisation that wants to buy it that way. End-users want loads more value than the value they are getting today. They need to innovate, and we need to help them to do it. we either help them, or they do it without us.
Wordle – a little diversion
Just took a little diversion down the Wordle route. It’s a tag cloud creation tool for test, or for del.icio.us tags. Here are my del.icio.us tags, spit the themes:
If you take the text from my current blog front page it looks like this:
That’s right – nearly completely different.
My Tools: Synergy
Synergy does a really simple thing, but it does it really well – it allows two PC to share the same mouse and keyboard.
When I am working from home I stand my work laptop alongside my home PC so that the monitors line up. I then start Synergy as a server on my home PC, and start it as a client on my work laptop.
Synergy then allow me to use the two systems sat next to each seamlessly switching between them by moving the mouse from one to the other.
Doing this I get all of the advantages of having multiple displays, I also get to use all of my processing power and I don’t have to worry about which applications I have available on the machine that I happen to be using, because I’m using both of them. I’m running Windows XP on one of the systems and Windows Vista on the other, so I also retain access to two different operating systems, and as it happen, two different versions of Microsoft Office too.
There are a couple of disadvantages. Because the Synergy is relying upon a network you can sometimes get glitches caused by network latency. Having said that, I’m running across a 802.11g LAN and the glitches are rare. The other disadvantage is that the system relies on some processing, so if the processor is flat out you can get problems. If you have UAC started on Vista Synergy can’t intercept the UAC Shell, but that would be expected, the nice thing about Synergy is that it doesn’t stop you using the real keyboard. These are minor issues though.
Synergy is free, open source and hasn’t changed since 2006, and still works with Vista. There’s a reasonably active patch community, but I’ve not needed to install any of the, sometimes software that works is best left alone.
The death of the “classical geeks”
A quote from ReadWriteWeb:
Today, there still may be plenty of businesses employing ‘classic geeks’ in their I.T. Department, but that’s about to change. Don’t misunderstand – the world will always need a good engineer, but the I.T. leaders of tomorrow – the ones guiding the business in the use of their computer resources, the ones working with the CEOs to execute the vision and direction via information technology – they will no longer be what we think of as the classic ‘computer geek.’ You know the type – the stereotypical introvert, who’s more comfortable behind the glow of computer screen than interacting with the rest of the human race. The one who likes to speak in acronyms that only he or she understands. The ones who know how to do everything from a command prompt. These folks will be a dying breed…at least around the office. Instead, tomorrow’s computer ‘geek’ will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong.
Instead, tomorrow’s computer “geek” will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong. So what does the “new geek” need to know to run tomorrow’s I.T. Department? An entirely new skill set, as it turns out.
It then goes on to talk about the shift to “Enterprise 2.0″, “Cloud Services”, “The Mobile Workforce” and “A Self Provisioning User Base”. I’m not sure that the titles are as important as recognising the general shift away from in-house provisioned and in-house constrained services to services that are leveraged globally and have few constraints.
I speak to many I.T. people, because I’m an I.T. person and very few of them see that there is a change lurking just over the other side of that hill over there. A change that isn’t going to swoop down in a huge rampage, but is going to work under the radar and change their lives without them even knowing it. The ones who choose to go with it and to become valuable to their customers within the business will thrive, those who hide behind existing policies and standards will have their value steadily eroded until their value is difficult to see.
Change shouldn’t bring fear, we are used to it, we do it every day, we just need to recognise it and embrace it. As I.T. people we can, at least, see that the change is there. Business people, in general, have no idea about the change that is coming their way. Security organisations, as an example, will have massive changes to make, the old rules will no longer be valid. I know of organisations where there has been a huge backlash against the security organisation when they have insisted on locking down Internet provided Instant Messaging. There view was that it was an unnecessary security risk, the business’s view was that it was essential to operations, user innovation had overtaken them. It’s just one example of many of the things that are going to occur.
It’s just one small example of the mind-set change that will need to take place. Organisations that don’t change will themselves find it difficult to survive, those that go with the changes will thrive.
Today is Monday, it’s the start of a new week, perhaps now is as good a time as any to start embracing some change.