Category: Technology

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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PowerPoint – An Old Feature Newly Found

Please Pay Here - How?This weekend I discovered something new in PowerPoint that has been there for generations (at least since 2002 anyway). I was amazed to find that it existed, because it’s something I have looked for in the past.

Occasionally I want to load a lot of pictures into separate slides in PowerPoint to make a photo album in the middle of a presentation. I’ve always done this manually, create slide, add picture, create slide add picture. It takes ages.

This weekend someone pointed out to me a feature which does just that, automatically.

You’ll find it under “Insert Picture” – “New Photo Album”.

If you then click on “File/Disk” you can select a load of picture files.

You can then reorder the pictures and even pick a layout for the pictures on the slides.

I hate to think how many hours this would have saved me over the years.

But I suppose you all knew that this feature existed and just hadn’t bothered to tell me.

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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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Wearing White Headphones

Jimmy and Grandad do podcastsMy present from my family at this Christmas time was an iPod Nano 8GB. So I have become the wearer of white headphones for now, that might change in the future because they aren’t the most comfortable or the best quality.

So far I’ve really enjoyed the experience.

The out-of-box experience was quite good, it certainly wasn’t flawless but it was good. It took me a little while to work out the iTunes setting for Album Art and was amazed at how long it too to synched up a few hundred photos.

I was intrigued by the reactions of a number of none technical people. They had a play, but soon put it down because they regarded it as too complicated.

For me, the best part of the iPod experience has to be the way that it handles podcasts. I listen to a lot of them but struggle to listen without interruption. The iPod is flawless in the way that it remembers what has en listened to and also how far through.

I’ve also bought myself an armband to wear down the gym. The weight feels just about right, it’s light enough that I don’t feel it dragging down on my arm so I can focus on doing my exercises and not on the technology.

8GB seems to be just about right, I’ve got over 6GB of audio on it at the moment so the 4GB would certainly have been too small. I don’t think I’ll do too much with video so I can’t see my requirements getting to much bigger for now.

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What has technology done to our sense of dignity?

DerwentwaterWhile at work in the office today I went to the gentleman’s room. I was the only one stood, but a couple of the cubicles were occupied.

Then I heard a mobile phone ringing. It only rang a couple of times.

You know what’s coming don’t you.

Yes, that’s right, after a couple of rings the phone was answered. it didn’t even sound like a very important conversation.

There was a time when such things were unthinkable because you couldn’t take the phone into the gents.

It’s just another example of technology stripping away our dignity.

There are certain things that should always be done in private, but it’s clear that attention addiction has become so engrained in people that they are willing to forego their dignity in order to feed their addiction.

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Quota Warnings – Percentages

ChampagneThis is just a little gripe that bugs me from time to time but I fancied getting it off my chest.

The organisation I work for, along with many others, operates a e-mail mailbox quota. I’m Ok with that, as a service provider I think it’s a great idea.

My gripe is that I get warned about the size of my mailbox based on the percentage of the quota I have used. I have a large quota (one of the privileged) I get told when my mailbox is 80% full, the same as I did when I had a 100MB mailbox. This doesn’t make sense to me, the issue is how much space I have left to work in, and 20% doesn’t seem like a sensible way to measure that especially as mailboxes get larger:

  • 20% of 100MB is 20MB – which might cause me a problem during a particularly busy day. So I might like to see a warning.
  • 20% of 200MB is 40MB – I suppose it’s interesting
  • 20% of 300MB is 60MB – that would be an exceptionally busy day.
  • 20% of 400MB is 80MB- I’m not sure how busy I would have to be, it’s more likely that someone has sent me the same 10MB file a few times.
  • 20% of 500MB is 100MB – right is as much as I had when I had 100MB.

Warning me that I have 100MB left isn’t really telling me anything, I’m highly unlikely to do anything about it.

I’d much rather have a quota warning that told me how many days I had until I needed to do something about it. Even one that warned me at 20MB free would be better.

Time to stop the grumpy posts now.

More Data Lost – But What's The Impact?

Before the walkData loss seems to have become the latest cheap news story here in the UK. Back in November the UK Government admitted the loss of some really important data from the Child Benefit department of Her Majesties Revenue and Customs. There is no doubting that this was a significant data with potentially massive consequences for the people who’s data was lost (me included). This data set included bank account details and National Insurance Numbers, things that would be very useful to anyone with criminal intent as well as children’s names which would make password hacking a lot easier.

There was lots of information and lots of analysis telling people what the impact of this could be.

Since then though, the stories have come thick and fast, but the information hasn’t.

Yesterday was another announcement from another government minister – Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly. This time the data lost consists of name, address, phone number, fee paid, test centre, payment code, e-mail where provided.

So what is the impact of that data getting out?

In this instance nearly all of the analysis has been on the political impact of the loss. You have to look very hard for any information on how risky this is. About the best I could find on the BBC was this:

The information commission had judged the risks presented by the loss were not “substantial” and there was no need to notify each person individually.

This poses a real difficult challenge to the IT industry, how do we communicate what the risks are and why this loss is “not “substantial””. More broadly, how do we communicate the things that people should protect at all cost, and the things that are already in the public domain. I know, for instance, that my name, address and phone number are all out in the public domain and that there’s no point in worrying that someone has misplaced it, likewise with my e-mail address. I’m not sure what use “fee paid, test centre, payment code” would be other than some form of targeted fraud. I also have a graduated password scheme, my bank password is nothing like the password I give to a site that requires me to register but doesn’t do any financial transactions. I don’t really care about the latter password, but the first one is used in one place only.

My issue here is that we aren’t doing a good job of communicating and that all data loss incidents are receiving a very similar reaction. The problem with that is that people become immune to the message, it’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf, only in reverse. The first data loss from HMRC was a really big issue, subsequent minor ones just blind people to the impact of the first one. If we have another significant loss announced people won’t realise it because they have become deaf to the messages.

Vista SP1 RC

London EyeI’ve installed SP1 for Vista onto my tablet. I was expecting some problems with the specific drivers for the tablet but they all seem to be working fine. A few of the glitches I had have been resolved and it all seems to be just a bit slicker.

There are two methods of updating, one is to use the standard full install mechanism, the other sets your Automatic Update to download it and install it over time. I chose the later as a bit of an experiment, seemed to work just fine.

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Flickr Stats and Flickr Uploadr 3

Anthony Gormley ExibitionI now have statistics on my Flickr. It’s quite intriguing, my Flickr views come in at around 127,000, in a similar period this blog has only seen 20,000 views. Just goes to show how active a community Flickr is. The number of comments I receive are quite low though with only 10% of photos receiving a comment. Perhaps that’s high though? I wonder what the benchmark is?

I’ve no idea why the most viewed photos are the most viewed.

Flickr Uploadr 3 has also been released. This is a big improvement on the previous version with lots more flexibility. The best part is the ability to start a new batch of uploads while the old batch is still uploading.

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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.