Category: Solution Architecture

VMWare purchases Thinstall

Assending GrassmoorOne of the challenges that Thinstall has had in the market place has been the classic small company problem. How can a small company provide assurance to large customers that it will be there in the future. Well that concern went away yesterday with its purchase by VMWare.

Most of the reporting is just restating the news release. There has been some commentary though.

Randall Kennedy of Infoworld:

Some might see the acquisition as a “tasty morsel,” a way for VMware to expand into the nascent Application Virtualization space by purchasing a smaller (20+ people at last count) player with an outsized presence in the market. I, on the other hand, see a potential “hairball” in the making.

Not surprisingly from VMware’s Warren Ponder:

For years now customers and IT visionaries have been planning their next generation desktop architectures. IT organizations have been stepping outside the traditional way of deploying desktop services and regaining the control of their desktop environments by leveraging the power and benefits of VMware virtualization technology. Where server based computing solutions such as Citrix and Terminal services have allen short, VMware VDI has been able to step in and revive the promise of server based computing and dynamic desktop environments.

Brian Madden:

The most obvious place for Thinstall in VMware’s solution stack is for use with their Windows XP and Windows Vista desktop delivery products, including their VDI solutions for server-based computing scenarios and VMware ACE for local computing scenarios. Thinstall is great here because the more apps you package with Thinstall, the less you have to build into your base Windows disk image that your desktop users will use.

From a personal perspective, VMWare is one of the few companies that could have purchased Thinstall and still given it the potential to remain within the mainstream. VMWare is a trusted middleware organisation and Thinstall would fit in as an extension to existing capabilities. If, however, Thinstall retreats into the VDI stack then it’s of limited applicability.

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The Lone Server

Blencathra from Walla CragSomeone recently spoke to me about a plan to turn off the first server I ever installed, it’s an old NT 4.0 server and has been doing a sterling job as a PDC for more years than I am going to let on.

I’m starting to get worried that they might be planning to turn me off at the same time.

I thought about my old friend  server as I watched this video:

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: The Lone Server – extended version

I particularly liked the reference to Windows ME.

Follow along at the Windows Server Blog.

So “where do you want to go today?”

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Half Hour Meetings

PoseWe all avoid things we dislike, it’s in our nature. I am always trying to find ways of avoiding meetings.

It’s not that I don’t like interacting with people, it’s because I think that most meetings are waste of time. there are multiple reasons for this, and the primary one is lack of planning.

I work in a culture where an meeting agenda is a rare thing, meeting minutes are even rarer, people reading either minutes or agenda prior to a meeting are as common as an excited man in Ikea.

This lack of planning makes the whole thing drift along like a discarded quavers packet. As you may have picked up I’m definitely a task oriented individual.

The other issue I have with meetings are that they are always booked in 1 hour slots. It’s the default in the company Notes system and I’m sure that is a big reason for it.

Today I have five separate 1 hour meetings booked. Three of the meetings are update meetings on which there are few update because we have been off for nearly two weeks since we last met, I have no idea why one of the sessions even exists.

The one remaining meeting is with one of our senior managers. He has an attention span of less than 10 minutes. I have some information to communicate to him. I have structured it to fit into the 10 minute attention span I know that I will get from him. His PA has still booked an hour, and always does.

Perhaps we should all agree to 30 minute meetings so that we regain the focus that they deserve.

Half-Hour Meetings

Perhaps I’m being too task oriented though, perhaps all of the other things we  talk about during our meetings are just as important as getting on with the task. Perhaps the meeting is the important thing and not the agenda.

Or perhaps not.

I twitter therefore I am

Eden ProjectI’ve now been twittering for a while. It started out as an experiment. So here are my observations so far:

  • I enjoy twittering.
  • I have built a group of “followers” who provide good feedback (9 at present).
  • I “follow” a small number of others (11 at present).
  • Two of these are organisations using twitter (BBCTech and Endgadget). I’m not sure how long they will survive. The noise to signal ratio is quite high.
  • I enjoy providing feedback to others but I tend to be a bit shy about it for some reason.
  • I normally only twitter in working hours. Twittering about my private life would be too time consuming.
  • I haven’t integrated twitter and facebook.
  • I am showing my twitter on my blog.
  • I still have no idea why I write what I write.

In many respects I use twitter as a diary notepad. If you want to see what I am doing then twitter is probably as good a place as any to find out.

The 11 people that I follow currently generate a lot of output. I work in teams that are a lot larger than that, I’m not sure how well it would scale if I got that same level of output from the larger team.

I can imagine a security person really struggling to get their head around the potential security risks of twitter, and hence the potential appropriate use policy. Suspect that it’s so difficult that they would just say – “don’t use it”.

I’ve tried a number of clients (Twitteroo, TwitBox, Twhirl). I’m settled on twirl for now.  There is still a lot of development to go with these tools and I suspect that we will start to see some clear leaders coming forward quite soon. I moved on from twitteroo because I started to get .net framework crashes on my primary PC and suspected twitteroo. Once I removed it I no longer got the crashes. I moved on quite quickly from Twitbox because URL’s weren’t click-able.

 

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Status Feedback – Establishing an Infinite Loop

Jimmy and Grandad at Blackpool LightsIt’s now possible to update your status in all sorts of places (Facebook, Plaxo, Twitter, etc.) and for that status to be fed through to all sorts of other places (Facebook, Plaxo, Twitter, etc.).

Just wondering, when will we start to see feedback type conditions where people create for themselves an infinite loop which they can’t break out of.

I’ve not actually worked through whether all of the pieces are in place yet, but they can’t be far off.

On a slightly more serious note – I’m already starting to find it tedious when I get told in more than one feed about exactly the same event. Some people have a configuration similar to this:

  • Someone writes a blog.
  • This event get’s written into their RSS feed.
  • It also gets written into their Twitter feed.
  • It also gets written into their Facebook status.
  • Is also gets written into their Plaxo Pulse twice, once for the actual blog  update and again for the Twitter update.

I think you get where I’m going here, and I think it’s actually worse than that in some situations.

As I said the other day it’s all very interesting, but the user experience has still got a long way to go.

Guardian: UK's social network obsessives are European leaders

Jimmy and Grandad bring a special messageI find this statistic really interesting, apparently:

One in four UK adults do it 23 times a month. And Britons do it more often than anyone else in world, except for Canadians.

The Guardian

Social networking – that is (We are British, we don’t do anything else 23 times a month).

Why Britons? Why Canadians?

  • Are we more technology savvy?
  • Do we struggle with real life?
  • Are we bored of the TV (because we watch less of it than others)?
  • Is the weather really that bad?

SPAM – who needs a machine, just get the humans to do it

Jimmy lifts a carrotThis may become a bit of a rant. Apologies for that, I try to keep my posts positive but this one is really starting to get under my skin.

I have often wondered whether people should be made to pass a driving test before being allowed onto the Internet. Most countries, even the less advanced ones, have a driving test for the roads, but we let any idiot onto the Internet.

OK, I accept that the issues are different, get something wrong in a car and you may kill someone, get it wrong on the Internet and death is not a likely outcome but still the outcome isn’t a great one.

I used to only ask myself this question when I got a one of those “forward this email to 10 people and the national charity for sufferers of bad breathe will receive 2p for each recipient” email. These would nearly always be from someone who has enough intelligence to drive a car, but not enough to know that this is complete tosh.

Now I ask myself this question almost everywhere I go online. Facebook is the latest. I’ve recently received one containing these particularly offensive words:

If a chap called bum_tnoo7@hotmail.com adds u don’t accept it because its a hacker!!
Tell everyone on your list because if somebody on your list adds them u get them on your list he’ll figure out Your ID computer address, so copy and paste this message to everyone even if u don’t care for them. Do this quickly because if he hacks their email he hacks your mail too!!!

Now, anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that this is just another hoax. Not only that but this hoax existed before Facebook was even born. You don’t have to be clever to know it’s a hoax, all you have to do is a really simple search and you’ll soon find a reputable source telling you in very clear and concise terms that it’s a hoax.

The problem with these hoaxes, of course, is how to stamp them out. Once they have been released into the wild they seem to stay forever. It’s not a machine that needs to be turned off, it’s all of the humans who need to be reprogrammed. Unfortunately humans are notoriously difficult to reprogramme. Although I see the wisdom of crowds at work all over the place, I also see the stupidity of crowds as well.

We humans are fabulous replicators, the problem is, we aren’t very intelligent replicators. Perhaps a form of test would help us to become better filters. At the beginning I said that the stakes wee different between driving and using the Internet, considering the impact of IT upon the environment perhaps the stakes are just as high.

Yesterday the news was all about how fast we were evolving – really?

IT worse than aviation for carbon emissions – nearly

Jimmy and Grandad help with the wordsAccording to a new report from an organisation called Global Action Plan the ICT sector is about to overtake the aviation industry when it comes to CO2 emissions (I hadn’t heard of them before now so I’m not vouching for their pedigree, but they look genuine).

There are more than one billion computers on the
planet, and the worldwide ICT sector is responsible
for around 2% of man made CO2 each year – a similar
figure to the global airline industry. In the UK, there are
an estimated 10 million office PCs; and ICT equipment
accounts for roughly 10% of the UK’s total electricity
consumption.

The ICT sector is growing at a faster rate than the
aviation industry. In 2006, 48% more data storage
capacity was sold than in the previous year, compared
to a 3% increase in UK air travel passengers in the same
period. The impact of the sector is starkly illustrated
through the following statistics.

  • A medium-sized server has a similar carbon footprint
    to an SUV achieving 15 miles to the gallon.
    Servers also require as much energy to cool them
    as they directly consume.
  • 1,000 PCs left on 24/7 without any power save
    settings activated will consume up to £70,000 of
    electricity per year and for every unit of electricity
    consumed, around another half unit is required to
    dissipate the heat generated.
  • If 20% of European business travel was replaced by
    teleconferencing, around 25 million tonnes of CO2
    could be saved each year.
  • In 1980 before the introduction of the PC, world office
    paper consumption averaged 70 million tonnes a year
    – by 1997 it had more than doubled to almost 150
    million tonnes.
  • In the UK, 120 billion pieces of paper are printed
    every year, the manufacture of which emits 1.5
    million tonnes of CO2 before taking into account the
    impact of the manufacture of printing equipment and
    ink and the energy consumed by printers.
  • Each year 125 million computers are taken out of
    circulation worldwide and most of these end up in
    landfill sites (a problem addressed by the introduction
    of the European WEEE directive in 2007).
  • Manufacturing one PC requires 1.7 tonnes of raw
    materials and water and consumes over 10 times its
    own weight in fossil fuels.

Some interesting headline numbers there. headline numbers tend to make me skeptical though, I’m not entirely convinced by the growth parallel in the above extract – 48% more disk storage doesn’t need 48% more power. I’ve not had chance to read the whole report though, so it may be that the headlines mask the real detail.

I’m not saying that the problem isn’t real though. Today I am looking at a solution for a customer which will have huge amounts of redundancy because the service levels are very high. All of this redundancy will be consuming power all of the time, but delivering no value other than to be ready to take the load of the active servers. It could all be in some kind of “stand-by” mode, but the technology isn’t there to allow us to do it. It’s this kind of thing that we need to start resolving. There are a lot of things we could do, but there seems to be little urgency to get it done, even though initiatives like Energy Star have been running for a very long time.

What with this, the Child Benefit CD fiasco, and other major IT project problems we need to start getting our act together before we become completely demonised in the eyes of the British public. I also think that there is a growing  problem with people of my age experiencing work related health issues from 20+ years sat in front of a screen and keyboard. It reminds me a bit of the problems we have experienced with asbestos workers and could be just as expensive to fix.

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Happiness at Work

If you ever wondered what happiness at work looked like then watch this video:

It’s not about pay – it’s about passion.

See more here.

Concept of the day: Deindividuation

Caramel and Cream - yummyAnyone who has used email or any other form of electronic communication has seen (and probably sent) written content that shocked you. You were amazed that the person, that you know, could say such a thing in such an aggressive way. The New Scientist has an interesting article that suggests that some of the reason for this is deindividuation:

Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting” – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.

The most recent place where I have seen this personally has been in the occasional reply-to-all storms that we have in our email system. Someone will send out an email to whole set of people. Someone else will reply-to-all that they don’t know why they received the first email, or similar. This will then set of a storm of activity from people replying to the reply-to-all. Each of these replies will get more and more aggressive in their language.

If only these people sat back and analysed what they were doing they would stop doing it. It’s unlikely any of them have read though the recipient list to see who is on it, in their minds they are just replying to some random person. What they are actually doing is replying to all sorts of senior people who could have a great influence on their career, what’s more they are abusing a fellow colleague. If they only thought about how they would feel to receive such an email they wouldn’t do it.

A wise person once said: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

via TechCrunch

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Identity Fragmentation

Jimmy and Grandad at Blackpool LightsThe other day I blogged about the fragmentation in the experience of using Facebook + LinkedIn + Flickr + Twitter + Blog + etc.

Francis Shanahan has gone a bit further and tried to map it all of the entities that know something of his identity.

His result was this picture:

The interesting thing is  that he’s only gone as far as the entity that holds the information not what the information is that each one holds. I suspect that a diagram with all of the information types on it would be a huge diagram.

Is there any wonder people can’t remember where they left themselves, or is that just me.

via Kim Cameron

Facebook + Twitter + Flickr + LinkedIn + Blog + RSS + Email + IM = Interesting, but a messy user experience

Where has the smell come from?I use a whole set of services these days: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, blog, email, instant messaging. I have multiple blogs, I also have multiple email accounts and multiple instant messaging accounts and I make extensive use of an RSS reader to gather information together. I really enjoy them all, that’s my personality.

There are multiple integration points between some of them, there are multiple ways that I express myself (Flickr, Facebook, blog, Twitter). There are also multiple ways that I can make and receive comment (Facebook, blog, Twitter) without including direct communications on email and IM. There are multiple ways of me being notified about these communications (email, IM, RSS).

As a technologist this is all very exciting, but as a usable system of tools for anyone else, it’s a bit of a messy user experience.

Let me give you some examples:

  • If I want to write a message to someone I can use my email, IM or Facebook.
  • I get comments on my twitterings in Twitter and on Facebook.
  • I get comments on my pictures in Flickr and on my blog and also in Facebook.
  • I get comments on my blog posts on my blog and via email and IM.
  • I can post a picture to Flickr or to Facebook, or even both. I’ll then receive comments in both.
  • If I get a comment I will be informed by email or by my RSS reader, or both depending on the system.
  • My LinkedIn contact list is different to my Facebook contact list, and my email or IM ones. I actually want the lists to have different people in them, but I don’t want to have to maintain the same information for some people in three or four different places.
  • I know a lot about which of my blog posts get read, I know a little about which of my pictures are popular on Flickr, but I  know nothing about the number of profile reads that my Facebook has receive.

I regularly want to say “don’t comment there, comment here instead”.

I have developed a way of working that allows me to push out a whole set of information and to receive a whole load more back in return. Others have developed a their own way of working, differently. Many people only see a small subset of my working, others see a more holistic view. People react in the way that is massively influenced by their viewpoint and context. If they see a picture in my blog, why shouldn’t they comment in my blog, it seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do from that viewpoint. They have no idea that I would rather they comment on my pictures in Flickr. They may well have no idea that the picture is hosted in Flickr anyway.

Having these different systems gives me lots of flexibility. This flexibility means that I will put up with the niggles. But I do think that I am getting to the point where I can’t actually add anything else in, unless I take something out.

I can’t imagine proposing this working practice to a corporate customer. I think that over time we will start to consolidate some of these different capabilities into more generic services.

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