Category: Weblogs

Green IT

TramwayWe 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.

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Flickr Passed 10,000 Views

Mighty cliffsMy flickr site passed 10,000 views and I didn’t even notice.

The amazing thing is that the graffiti pictures continue to be the ones most viewed – but by whom?

For anyone who hadn’t noticed: All of the pictures I post here are hosted on flickr. If you click on the picture it will take you to the flickr page for that picture where you can perform all sorts of flickr goodness.

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Windows Live Writer – English Dictionary Please

La PaludI’m still using Windows Live Writer. Up until now it has done a number of things better than BlogJet, and the things it does worse are less important. I say up until now because the lack of a proper English dictionary is starting to bug me.

As a slight aside:

Why is is “emphasis” and “emphasize”?

English makes much more sense “emphasis” and “emphasise”.

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Organizational Friction

BailsOne of the things that frustrates me the most is organizational friction. I’m talking here about all of those things in an organizations which you know are simple to do, but difficult to get done. Everytime I come across someone who says that something can’t be done because they need approval from a Line Manager, CIO,  Gordon Brown, Elvis it’s just friction. It’s purpose is to slow you down, or even to stop you.

Dilbert highlighted this today:

What makes this cartoon, like so many, funny is that it’s very close to the truth.

Friction produces two effects – heat and wear. The same is true for organization friction, especially when it’s used against people trying to get on with their job. People worry that organizations without friction will run out of control and fall apart. What these people forget, though, is that no-one has yet invented a perpetual motion engine. 

Many organizations would perform a lot better if they went after the friction rather than trying to increase the friction to retain the control. 

For those of you wondering, yes I have some across some friction today.

Brain Dimensions

Grassy Sun

I was watching Imagining the Tenth Dimension yesterday with intrigue. The intrigue didn’t so much come from the idea or concept, but rather the method of communication. This site tries to convey a very complex scenario by using diagrams, animations and voice.

Having started to research our leaning styles a little in order to understand a little more about brain polarization I was intrigued by how others would interact with this site. I (as a right-brained person) found myself primarily following the diagrams and animation. Do left-brained people focus more of the voice? Is the concept easier to understand in words than in diagrams?

As an IT Architect I regularly come across issues which have multiple dimensions, because they have multiple variables. I have often tried to portray these problems as diagrams and often struggled, the diagrams becoming too complex for many people to understand Trying to explain the multi-dimensional problem in words is also problematic. This issue is often made worse by different people wanting to understand their dimension, and not being too bothered about the other dimensions. I have often found myself writing documents which repeatedly say and illustrate the same thing, but in different dimensions representing different members of the audience of the document. I’ve also used PowerPoint as a mechanism to constrain myself to a single slide for each dimension and hence each audience. This constraint actually helps to remove the desire to explain every other dimension.

If we want people to engage with something we need to show a dimension that’s relevant to them and not to confuse them with the totality of all of the dimensions. Showing all of the dimensions might not be enough though, we might need to show all of the dimensions in a way that is relevant to people with different learning styles.

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Writer Extensions – already

SkimmingOne of my worries with Windows Live Writer was whether people would be motivated to extend it to include the functionality that I wanted it to have.

Well two of my requirements have already been met.

There you go, just like that. Although Beta code, both of these projects go beyond the capabilities I already have in BlogJet. FlickrWriter allows me to search by tag which Blogjet doesn’t. Tag4Writer provides an interface, BlogJet requires me to go into the code.

And yes I’ve used both of them to create this post.

Via Tim Heuer

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Even more , on More on Windows Live Writer

Sweet Peas

My last post made Steve think I wasn’t impressed with Windows Live Writer.

I wasn’t wowed, but I am still impressed.

The first things I tend to see in any new product are the things that it doesn’t do compared to my current capability, that is what my last post was reflecting.

I am impressed with the cleanness of the WLW interface.

I am impressed with the way it deals with posts and drafts, retaining a local copy.

I am impressed by the way it properly formats my posts. It’s nice to be writing in the same colours and fonts as will appear on the blog. It’s even nicer to be writing in a screen that is the same width as the blog without having to guess where things would actually appear. For those of you looking on the web you will notice that the paragraph spacing is much batter than in my previous posts.

I am impressed that they have written a product that covers ore than just Spaces.

I am impressed that they have created a plug-in capability and SDK.

The thing that concerns me about the things I think are missing is whether I believe Microsoft have a motivation to put them in, or whether a plug-in movement will be built which will add them in. Microsoft has little motivation to put Technorati tag support in, or Flickr support, or a broad Ping Server list.

But I am still impressed.

Trying Windows Live Writer

Lilacland: There must be something in here to sort Jimmy's hair

Thought I would give Windows Live Writer a go.

First impressions – it’s BlogJet with bits missing. Some of the screen are even in the same order, it’s a bit too close a likeness sometimes. The similarity to BlogJet is be interesting in itself though – I like to use BlogJet. BlogJet costs a small amount of money, so a free alternative is interesting.

I’ve already found a few places where BlogJet is definitely better. I add Flickr pictures into my posts which is best done using some code cut from Flickr. Switching to the code page is easier in BlogJet because it’s just a tab at the bottom of the screen, it’s a bit more complicated in WLW. You can use F12, but as I’m not likely to live most of my life in the tool I suspect I won’t remember that.

When working with code BlogJet highlights incomplete code, no such joy in WLW.

I was living in hope that Windows Live Writer would have the Microsoft Office wiggly line for spelling mistakes, but unfortunately not. You need to do the spell check. As others have mentioned Spell Check is Shift+F7, I have no idea why, F7 doesn’t do anything? Once is Spell Check there is no “Ignore All” option either. The Office Grammar checker would be even nicer, but I suspect I’m pushing for too much there.

BlogJet doesn’t do a good job of dealing with Tags, but at least I can create an “Auto Replace” which replaces a keyword with a set of code. Using this code it’s then really easy to create tags. There is no such option in WLW.

WLW allows you to add ping servers, but doesn’t have any in the default.

Given all of the effort Microsoft has put into smilies in other products I’m also a bit surprised that they haven’t put smilies into WLW. BlogJet smilies are great.

For some reason it can’t delete a post it creates in order to understand the make-up of the blog – that’s what this post is about. I thought I would leave it there as a reminder. This is a niggle really, I was just pleasantly surprised that WLW even considered blogging tools other than Spaces.

One thing I have notices, and it’s only a small thing, WLW does a proper selection when you double-click, BlogJet always selected the space following the word.

It’s still a Beta so hopefully we’ll see some changes.

I forgot Flickrmap

It’s one thing being in flick and being able to see where a picture was taken – but what about the other way around – that’s where flickrmap comes in.

http://map.flickrmap.com/v2/map.swf

Get your own Flickrmap!

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Flickr Eco-system

Skimming

You know that a service or technology has made it into the mainstream when there is vibrant and active eco-system surrounding it.

It seems that every time I look into it someone has built something new to enhance, support or simply have fun with Flickr.

This week there has been three:

  • Localize Bookmarlet is a geotagging enhancement that allows you to geotag your photos really, really easily. Geotagging is great for remembering where something happened. See the link in the description in this picture of Jonathan Skimming for an example.

  • Flickr Inspector is a piece of fun. It shows the characteristics of a particular Flickr user; groups, sets, favourites, etc. It then gives the flickr user a score because people love to be able to give themselves a score. Here’s mine.

  • Graham Chastney. Get yours at flagrantdisregard.com/flickrProfile Widget is doing a similar thing to Flickr Inspector but this time it’s using the information available to create a nice banner for either a user or a group.

It’s these kind of enhancements that make people passionate users of a service and creates a self feeding eco-system. As other Web 2.0 type services make it to this point we are in for a very interesting future.

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Count Your Blessings #76 – 100th Post

Chateau de Dinan

This is my 100th post into this blog. I have found it a real blessing thinking about blessings. Every time I think I might be running out of things to say another flourish arrives.

I don’t get many online comments, but I know people are reading these posts because they tell me how much they like them. Those comments are themselves a blessing.

e-Society Profiler

How many planes?

via BBC

Apparently I have been classified again. This time my household has been classified dependent upon its access to technology services. Each post-code has then been classified into a set of groups and types all made available via a profiler. My area is apparently F19:

Group F : Instrumental E-users

This Group tends to use electronic technologies for purely instrumental purposes, because they provide a practical method of saving time or money. They have plenty of other leisure activities that they enjoy and tend to be light television watchers. However they find the Internet useful for purchasing on line and they are smart enough to realise that they can drive better deals when purchasing goods and services if they fore-arm themselves with consumer information. Generally they use the net to undertake transactions and manage their personal finances rather than to explore.

This Group contains mostly people in well off, middle class, owner occupied suburbia. Many have children.

Type F19 : On-line apparel purchasers

This Type consists of well educated young professionals, many of them women, who are confident users of electronic technologies and communications. They use the Internet for purchases across a wide range of product categories, but in particular for children’s products and fashion wear. They tend not to use this medium to purchase wines or insurance. Many members of this type look after children at home and do not have access to electronic technologies at work. They are not particularly interested in computer magazines.

I’m not sure that this successfully describes me, but perhaps I’m not typical for my area.

Anyone willing to pay me to do this kind of research it sounds like fun?