Category: Solution Architecture

Windows Live Writer Dictionary Hack – Obsolete

Choices, choicesAlong with a load of other Live announcements Microsoft announced that Windows Live Writer was now out of beta and has three English dictionaries. This makes my kludge of a dictionary hack wonderfully obsolete, it’s better that way. The installation even picked up the correct dictionary for me. So I can now be English (United Kingdom) without any issue.

I’m sure that the debate about the use of “ize” will continue for some time to come though, but I’m adamant that “colour” needs it’s “u”.

Everything seems to work great, although for some reason I find it strange to be writing about Windows Live Writer while using it.

If you are struggling to get the correct dictionary you can change it in Tools-Option-Spelling.

64-bit Information and Training

DipI’ve talked a few times about 64-bit and it’s slow adoption (here, here).

If you want more information Channel 9 are running a set of videos from their Route 64 training event.

Check out the first one: Route 64 – Kang Su Gatlin talks about 64-bit

Word of the day: Peremptory

One Strawberry, is that all you can manage?I was reading an article from the Harvard Business School today and came across a word I wasn’t entirely familiar with the meaning of: “peremptory”.

I like coming across new words, especially ones that might have a use. I sometimes run an experiment with them to see how long it will be before I hear someone else using the new word.

According to the dictionary it means:

peremptory puh-REMP-tuh-ree, adjective:
1. Precluding or putting an end to all debate or action.
2. Not allowing contradiction or refusal; absolute; decisive; conclusive; final.
3. Expressive of urgency or command.
4. Offensively self-assured or given to exercising usually unwarranted power; dictatorial; dogmatic.

I think this might be a word I use again, it describes a number of people I deal with every day. It also one that could be used of me, especially in my ADT moments.

Facebook – Mixing Personal and Professional

Keeping walmI tend to have two worlds that I keep reasonably separate – personal and professional. There is, of course, some overlap, but for the most part, my professional relationships are different to my personal ones.

I keep this principle in my online society too. My Facebook contacts are a different set to my LinkedIn contacts. It would appear, though, that Facebook are wanting to change that. Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook is making changes that could enable it to know about both sets, but treat them differently:

But that’s changing, fast. First, we noted that Facebook is creating friend grouping last month. By specifying certain friends as professional contacts, a whole different set of content can be shown to them (sans the dating status and pictures of you getting drunk). Or as Nick O’Neil puts it, Facebook may be growing up.

And now Facebook is quietly making changes to their data structure to allow for the concept of “networking.”

…

Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.

I’m not sure how I would feel about having one tool and two different sets of relationships. The relationships are different. I might set my status to “Graham Chastney is feeling tired” in Facebook, but that’s not something I would necessarily want to tell all of my professional contacts. I’d also want to be able to mark all of the applications as professional or personal. Take the bookshelf type applications, I might want to tell my friends a different thing to my colleagues. Would I really want to poke a professional contact?

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We are still learning about e-mail

How did this grass get so long?I am regularly reminded how easy technology change is when compared to people change.

This week the New York Times looked at the things that we are learning about communication in the Internet age.

This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.

Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say.

Most crucially, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

Most people are a long way from understanding what is being said here. Many people have little comprehension that what they think they have written isn’t what people read.

Personally, I write this blog in the knowledge that most people won’t comprehend what I want them to comprehend. I’m also quite sure that I haven’t really comprehended what the author in the New York Times thinks they wrote.

There is a trend in many businesses that limits travel in favour of teleconferences, e-mail and video conferencing. It’s driven by a focus on the cost, rather that a focus on the value. I really liked this quote from the article:

“When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it’s like having functional Asperger’s Syndrome — you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle,” Professor Shirky said.

As we come to comprehend how we actually communicate I expect to see the balance between electronic and face-to-face interactions change significantly. This week I spent much of one day in a room with a team working on a single deliverable. We got much further together in a few hours than we would have done in a week as a virtual team. We recognised that we needed to be together to achieve what we needed to achieve. It was a high value meeting, it was also a high cost meeting.

We are a long way from fully understanding the extent our Asperger’s, until we understand it, we will not be able to design coping mechanisms.

Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2008

Where has all the pizza gone?There have been a few reports on Gartner’s top 10 technologies for 1008 over the last few days (here, here).

It’s been a while since I wrote a reasonably serious post so it’s time to get back into the saddle.

So what did I think of this top 10.

To start with there weren’t any surprises in terms of inclusion, but as the list is supposed to be in order I was surprised by the place on the list of some of them. It was nice to see the mandatory “2.0”.

1. Green IT

I think that Green IT is actually the incorrect phrase for these initiatives. Green IT gives it a nice feel, but the real driver for most business is the increasing cost of fuel. Businesses aren’t really going for Green, they are going for cost savings.

2. Unified Communications

This one has been around for a long while now. The steady shift to IP as the transport for everything seems inevitable. I think that we still have a long way to go before we will have worked out the human interactions and created a truly knew way of interacting. Some are further ahead than others but it still feels a bit too specialist. People are going to spend lots of money in this area, it’s going to be really important but it still has a long long way to go.

3. Business Process Management

This isn’t really a technology, it’s more of a methodology for using existing technologies. The issue I see is that most businesses don’t have a clue what they really do.

I was surprised to see this one so high up.

4. Metadata Management

Data is going to be a huge issue over the coming years especially the integration of data across systems. There is lots of data all over the place and increasingly people are wanting to put it together. At the same time the types of data are exploding.

5. Virtualisation 2.0

Well there had to be at least one “2.0” in there. It’s all about flexibility, moving this machine here, moving that application there without impacting the machine or the application. Green IT is going to be dependent upon this kind of technology.

6. Mashups and Composite Applications

Personally I’ve yet to see a mash-up that has really gone mainstream within an organisation. It’s used a lot for single web sites bringing together information from various sources, but within a corporation is a very different proposition.

7. The Web Platform

More service architectures. It seems to be moving that way, but very slowly. Most organisations are still struggling with what it means to deliver a service that they can tangibly see like email.

8. Computing Fabric

Fabrics have been around for a long time, this is the fabric moving inside the hardware of the device to work with the operating system. In computing terms most people are never going to knowingly interact with a computing fabric.

9. Real World Web

I think this is talking about the web becoming ever more part of the real world. It’s about the Internet being the real world rather than the Internet being the virtual world. It relies on something though – universal Internet access at good bandwidths. It’s OK in some places and using some connectivity but it’s not yet part of the real world.

10. Social Software

This is the one I was surprised to see so low down. I know a number of organisations who are seeing the use of social software explode within their business as well as outside of it.

What did I expect to see that I didn’t? I expected to see a lot more about mobile. I suppose it’s covered in 9. Real World Web but it’s not really central.  I suppose it’s also part of 2. Unified Communications, but still not central.

I wonder, do other industries have lists that change so dramatically year by year, by comparison, the 2007 list:

  1. Open Source
  2. Virtualisation
  3. Service Registries and Repositories
  4. Business Process Management Suites
  5. Enterprise Information Management
  6. Ubiquitous Computing
  7. Information Access
  8. Web 2.0 – AJAX Rich Clients
  9. Web 2.0 – Mashup Composite Model
  10. Communities and Collective Intelligence

I suppose that four of them are very similar, perhaps they don’t change that much.

That wasn’t too bad, perhaps I should write more of these.

Another Childhood Fantasy Shattered – Dig Through The Earth

That's a big pizzaAs a child I quite liked the thought of tunneling through the earth and coming out in Australia. In England that’s where you are told that you will come out, Australia, that’s the other side of the world.

Thanks to Google and Dig a hole through the Earth I have now had that fantasy well and truly shattered:

Apparently I would have come out somewhere in the middle of the ocean with the nearest land mass hundreds of miles away. I’m sure as a child that it wouldn’t have been anything like as exciting to have imagined travelling through the middle of the earth just to get wet. It’s not like it’s even in the middle of some Polynesian coral islands, it’s literally in the middle of nowhere.

(Before anyone comments, yes I do know that it would be impossible to tunnel through the middle of the earth for all sorts of other reasons, but this was a fantasy. In the words of Mark Twain: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”)

facebook offline too

Is it time for some conspiracy theories?

Not only are my feeds broke, my facebook is offline too.

At least it’s only temporary.

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eBay "Addiction"

Storm TroopersFollowing on from my post about Infomania and Facebook the BBC is today reporting on a set of workers who have lost their jobs because of ebay addiction.

Unison welfare officer Mark Fisher said people got “addicted” to certain web sites.

“People get very involved in eBay, Sky Sports and their favourite soccer teams. It happens in many, many offices,” he said.

“Obviously we cannot justify people spending a couple of hours of working time looking at these sites – but temptation was put in their way,” he added.

“We plan to push for the authority to make changes to its IT system, to help prevent workers landing themselves in hot water.”

He called for Internet access be limited to lunch break and that web access should be filtered at other times.

“We want them to take temptation out of people’s hands,” Mr Fisher said.

I suppose that’s one way of doing it, but is that really realistic. Is it actually practical to filter out every site that would potentially land people in hot water if they used it too much?

To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable with the word “addiction” in this context either. If someone really is an Internet addict they shouldn’t be using the Internet at all. Alcoholics don’t go from over drinking to moderate drinking, they go to no drinking. It may be that for some people that is the case and they should stay away from the Internet all together, but I’m not sure that it’s really like that for everyone who overuses the Internet. I’d like to be able to suggest another word, but I’m not sure what that would be, perhaps “mania” is a better word.

What’s not told in this story is what level of training these people were given and whether they have been offered some form of rehabilitation. Traditional training has always focussed on the practical side of IT systems – click here, type there – but very little training has been undertaken on the social elements. As I’ve said before, I think we are moving into an age where we need to start training people to be safe Internet users in the same way as we train them to be safe drivers. Safe for themselves and safe for others. We need to start doing this as early as possible, from children through to adults, if we are going to avoid an epidemic in the future.

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Media Player Choices

Woburn Abbey - Not SpeakingI’ve been using the built in Windows Media Player capabilities on my iMate SP5 as my primary mobile media player for a while now. The jack plug socket has developed a fault recently which means that the plug needs to be in a specific position to get stereo sound. Often this isn’t a problem, but when I am exercising it is definitely a problem.

I’ve mostly been happy with this way of working, the only thing that has been a real problem is that limitation of 2GB which has meant me developing a rather complex process for getting the current podcasts onto the card. It’s also meant that everything is heavily compressed and quality suffers (the strange thing is that quality seems to suffer more for music that is quieter, when it’s even more noticeable).

So I think it’s time for a change – but to what?

I’m not even sure whether I want to go to a dedicated media player or not. I quite like the convenience of have a combined phone and media player (and that’s a surprise to me). Should I just get a new phone and put a bigger memory card in it?

Most of my media is in WMA format, apart from podcasts which are nearly always in MP3. So it would seem sensible to go with a WMA compatible device, but I’ve not really seen one that makes me actually want it. I quite like the look of the Sony ones, for instance, but I’m not sure that 8GB is actually enough. There is something about the handling of the Creative Zen Vision:M that I don’t like. Am I being to narrow in my thinking?

So what about the iPod’s – ummm. One of the things that my recent leadership assessments told me was how high I valued the "new". this means that I hate being a follower and buying an iPod would feel a bit too much like following the pack. Would it be such a bad thing to follow the pack for once? I also think that I would have to start afresh ripping my music collection because I can’t imagine that the transpose from WMA to AAC (or even MP3) would give a quality of file that I would be happy with. That seems like a lot of work. It would need to be an iPod Classic because I’m still not sure that 8GB would be enough. Is an iPod Classic too big?

Don’t even mention Zune – I’m in the UK and it’s not available to me, but perhaps Microsoft have a story to tell there. Would I want to wait even if they did?

Choices, choices.

Infomania and Facebook

Sparkling Water at the Science MuseumThere are days when thoughts come together. I’ve been wondering about the impact of Facebook on infomania. This follows on from some of the reports in recent days about the productivity impact of Facebook and a newish report on Informania.

To recap, infomania is the condition that your boss (probably) has when they feel the need to checking emails on their Blackberry while they are talking to you. it’s the need that they have to make sure that they aren’t missing out on something.

As we increase access to information and information sources then we increase the infomania that these people all feel. Facebook is just the latest source of information.

This need to access information costs business lots of productivity, but is it really Facebook that is to blame. I’ve written before about the Blackberry effect on the work/life balance as another example.

My starting point is that infomania not the tool’s problem, it’s a human problem. We are still in control of the machines, we still have access to the off button (although I was in a meeting earlier this week where a senior manager didn’t know how to turn his Blackberry off). It’s our choice not to use it.

The numbers in the report are startling:

Intel employees spend an average of some three hours per day processing email. About 30 percent of messages (one million per day) are unnecessary.

On average, knowledge workers can expect three minutes of uninterrupted work on any task before being interrupted.

On average, a major interruption occurs every 11 minutes, the time to return to an interrupted task is 25 minutes …

The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge-intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.

If those numbers are true, then we need to do something to protect people from themselves. If we were talking about a drug we would probably ban it. If not an outright ban we would at least have a huge education programme making sure that people understood the dangers they were entering into. Anyone can buy a computer and connect it to the Internet without any understanding of the potential dangers. A car is a dangerous thing, so we train people how to use it properly.

I wonder, though, whether we need to go further.

  • Perhaps we need global information rest days when we turn everything off.
  • Perhaps we need to run infomanics anonymous courses to help people.
  • Perhaps we need to remove network connections and ban blackberry’s from meeting rooms.
  • Perhaps we need to give children IT Education alongside Sex Education.
  • Perhaps…
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"Facebook will increase your network, but not your friends"

Anthony Gormley ExibitionDid this report really need writing?

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.
Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.

Apparently all of those people who are in my list of friend on Facebook might not actually be real friends. Is anyone in IT naive enough to believe that anything that is displayed on a two dimensional screen can come anywhere close to replacing a real person to person interaction.

Previous research has suggested that a person’s conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. Larger numbers just require too much brain effort to keep track of.

But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked over 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face.

Five close friends that’s it – it’s not going to be changed by IT any time soon. As a task oriented person I’m not sure how people maintain a network of 150 let alone 200. As I have a people oriented wife I know it can be done, actually 200 seems a bit light .

via Wikinomics