Changing Bad Habits

Snail

I have had a bad back for the last few weeks and of course it is all my fault. Poor posture and terrible typing style had to take their toll eventually.

So I have decided that it is time to learn how to type touch properly. I have been learning for a few days now. Why is it so difficult to change these things? I can read a book and take in a good deal of what it says without any problems; but why is it so difficult to tell my left hand that it’s the right hands job to press the ‘y’ key.

Perhaps thats the way other people feel when we change their IT. Over the years I have seen all sorts of definitions which characterise people and their resistance to change; but never a definition of change types that people can cope with. I don’t think that all types of change affect people in the same way. Perhaps it’s about time that we stopped branding people as resistant to change when it’s only certain types of change that they are resistant to.

(writing this took ages)

Windows 95 – Ten Years Old

Start

What was I doing 10 years ago. Was I waiting with baited breath for the release of Windows 95. I don’t think I was actually, it was obviously such a significant event that I have completely forgotten it.

Back in those days we were far more interested in Windows NT and OS/2. I think most of us in the little office where I worked looked at it (except Vince because he was the Mac man).

I don’t think I know anyone still running Windows 95, I still have some friends and family running Windows 98 and Me. They are the ones who normally have the problems that are difficult to mend. It is very difficult to remember how to do things from that long ago.

Microsoft Monitor wonders where the Hoopla is? I kind of agree, however painful some of our experiences have been, there were ad continue to be some real wow moments too.

Mary Jo Foley makes some comments – mainly about the people still using Windows 95 and why they haven’t upgraded.

And there is a growing number of articles on Technorati.

But no big hoopla from Microsoft – perhaps looking back isn’t their strong point.

Count Your Blessings #18 – Waves

Quiberon

I have always been fascinated by going to the seaside and experiencing waves. I say experiencing because you don’t watch waves you experience them. Even if I am not in the sea every one of my senses is influenced by the constant pulse of the waves.

  • My eyes are drawn into their rhythm

  • My ears are soothed by their tempo

  • I feel the moist air and spray

  • I taste the salt

  • I smell the rich sea aroma

There is no escaping the presence of the wave, but yet it doesn’t assault me. It doesn’t come up and howl it’s presence. Even in the biggest storm the wave may shout, but still it is somehow strangely natural and in keeping.

Wave are remarkable. Each wave is unique; each resounding whoosh is different to every one before it and every one after it; it’s height is different; where it breaks is different; each one draws back at a different pace. Every minute of every day they drum onto millions of miles of shore and yet they are matchless.

Joshua and EmilyEach of us recognises the sound of a real wave. We were told as children that the sound in the shell was the sound of the wave; but none of us were really fooled. People have tried to synthesis the sound; but we all recognise these imitations. I have a CD of classical music with wave sounds in the background; but it’s not the same.

Some of my fondest and most vivid memories are animated by the presence of waves.

As a child walking along the front (as we call it) at Hornsea in a storm I decided that I wanted to get closer to the waves. So without my parents watching a snook down one of the paths leading to the sea from the sea wall. Closer and closer a crept towards the waves. And then, without warning, one of the waves decided to come and say hello. It engulfed me. I was drenched. My mum was shouting, screaming even. I was fine, I had lived my adventure and survived.

A few summers ago we went to Florida as a family; my brother and his family were living out there. They were living in Cocoa Beach and we would have happily spent every day in the waves. We bought body-boards and spent hours trying to master those waves. Some times those waves lifted us up and dumped us onto the beach; on other times they would break on top of us. You can’t master a wave, you can only allow it to come and treat you to a ride.

Last summer we went to Quiberon in Brittany while staying with Andrew and Katharine.  What a fabulous day. Fabulous waves that we spent all day enjoying. We were tossed and tumbled and lifted off our feet and we loved it.

North Berwick at SunsetJust this weekend we had a barbecue on the beach at North Berwick with friends. We listened to the waves as the sun set in magnificent colours or purple, red, orange and gold. But those waves weren’t intimidated by the grandness of it all, they just continued in their cadence and in so doing amplified the whole experience.

The waves also remind me of Jesus and His power over them, His ability to still them. We stand before the wave and dance to its tune; but not Jesus.

And to finish, a poem:

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea —
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me.

Sara Teadale

When is it time to wait for Exchange 12?

Honister Pass

As part of a recent project I have been asked the question of whether to wait for Exchange 12 or not. The choice being to architect for a deployment now on Exchange 2003, or whether to delay until the architecture could be made for Exchange 12.

Here are my thoughts on this specific question and also on the generic issues with making this kind of a choice.

Dealing with the generic issues initialy:

  • Risk averse, mainstream or leading edge – customers tend to fit into one of these categories especially with a mission critical solution like Exchange.

  • Level of third-party software complexity – the complexity of the architecture can be significantly influenced by the level of third-party software integration. Exchange environments always have at least two third-party application integrated in at the server infrastructure level and they anti-virus and backup but there is also a long list of other integration requirements; Fax, Blackberry, Archive, Anti-Virus, etc.

  • Complexity of the existing infrastructure – is the current infrastructure standardised and all at a specific level. In the case of Exchange; is the environment to be upgraded all at a certain level of Exchange or is there still a mixed environment.

  • Current Equipment – what you buy now, won;t be what you will buy in 12 months time, or even 6 months time.

Specific to Exchange 12.

The current feature set looks something like this:

  • Edge Services – Gateway protection, incorporating current IMF technology

  • Outlook auto setup of profiles

  • Redesigned ESM UI

  • Scripting for all ESM components

  • Continuous Backup – Replicate changes to another database

  • Improved search functionality

  • Web Services API

  • OMA will be removed (probably because of the wide adoption of ActiveSync)

  • Policy compliance – verify client configuration

  • Enhanced mobile device support

  • Access Sharepoint and other application through OWA

  • Unified messaging  – voice mail and faxes in your mailbox

  • Improved Calendaring functionality

  • 64-Bit version

So the considerations from this are primarily:

  • The release dates for Exchange 12 are still not available, although likely to be some time late in 2006 it may slip into 2007. Until these dates become clearer it would seem that delaying a migration would be a little dangerous.

  • Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 is delivering an amount of incremental change, particularly in mobility that many customers will take a good while to adopt.

  • Microsoft is increasingly linking the capabilities of the client to the capabilities of the server; Outlook and Exchange. Though they talk a good talk on backward compatibility my experience has not been all that good.

  • Exchange 12 does not change the database technology, so the things that constrain the architecture are unlikely to go away.

  • Continuous Backup becomes available in Exchange 12, but from my perspective will only be used to protect the ‘really important’ mailbox in most organisations, it’s too expensive to do much more. The architecture that is required to support this will involve a lot of testing.

  • The move of Exchange back to the centre of all messaging will require others to release their control. Most large organisations that require a Unified Messaging solution, in my experience, have already done it. I really see Exchange 12 Unified Messaging capabilities fitting into the smaller organisation context.

  • Not sure on the background to this statement but a quote from a TechEd session – “migration from Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 will be the easiest migration to Exchange 12”.

  • The changes to Exchange edge-services is going to be adopted in slow time, people will want to be sure of the benefit before moving such a critical part of the infrastructure over.

  • The improvements in Calendaring will not be compelling to many customers. Calendaring is still something that hasn’t quite got there, and it still won;t quite get there in Exchange 12.

I have some questions though:

  • What on earth is 64bit support giving. Is this being used to break the 3GB limit on memory usage?

  • Will Outlook auto-configuration require Outlook 12?

If someone gave me some money to invest in a messaging infrastructure I, personally, would invest it in establishing a clean Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 environment and start to drive the adoption of SharePoint as the ultimate replacement to Public Folders (Public Folders will still be available in Exchange 12, but with little change and a statement that they won’t be in Exchange 13 (unlucky for some)). I’d also push the adoption of Office Live Communication Server. Each of these three things will encourage people to regard presence as central to their working, once they get this mind-set change all sorts of behavioural changes start to occur. In this context productivity training will become a massive need.

Some links, although most of my information came from a TechEd session that was held much more recently than most of these articles was published:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Windows/Article/ArticleID/45880/45880.html

http://www.msexchange.org/ExchangeNews/February-2005-Exchange-12-Features-Announced.html

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/07/07/28OPenterwin_1.html

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/03/31/HNexchange2006_1.html

Silly Sign

Crazy Sign

I’m just posting this one for fun.

We all went to a park at the weekend and came across this sign next to a play area with loads of children’s tractors and the like. Would be interest to know how you are supposed to sit on all of them.

Longhorn (heart) RSS

Maize Maze

I love to watch enthusiast people – it’s infectious, and this team are certainly enthusiastic.

The RSS team at Microsoft demonstrate what they have been doing in this Channel 9 video. They do a great job of talking through the importance of building subscription right into the bedrock of the platform.

We are going to have great fun as Infrastructure people working out how that impacts on the infrastructure that we deliver. Content providers are also going to have to consider the impact of their actions, and that could be fun. Imagine the corporate environment where a huge number of individuals have chosen to automatically download enclosures and someone decided to add a 200MB file into the enclosure set. Within a very short period of time those enclosures are on there way down to every device.

It has to be the way to go, though. The challenge is dealing with the human behaviour changes that will be required.

Sorry – Google Earth

Hands Up

I feel it’s appropriate to issue a public apology for introducing so many of my friends to Google Earth and in so doing consuming hours and hour of their valuable time.

Over the last few weeks I have talked to a few people about how fascinating I had found Google Earth, and how much time I had spent on exploration of our amazing planet.

Unfortunately I clearly didn’t explain to them just how addictive this pass-time was. Following on from these conversations I have since had many of them complaining about the amount of time that they have spent just looking around.

I went around to Dave’s house the other day and we spent again trying to find a hotel in a middle of a lake in India. We had the maps out that he had used to get there, we searched around and eventually found it. We were consumed for a good hour. I have no idea how long Dave had been playing prior to this, but it was more than a few minutes, I know that much.

Another friend, I won’t name them for obvious reasons, who works from home admitted to spending an entire working afternoon enjoying the views of South America.

Perhaps I should start a self help group helping people to release themselves of this addiction. ‘Google Earth Anonymous’ how does that sound, or ‘Addicts to Google Earth’ although that would be AGE.

RSS – What?

Castle Howard

Do you ever wish that you could be told that a web page has been updated rather than going and looking and finding all of the same old stuff that was there last time you looked.

Well that’s what RSS is about. You don’t need to know what it means, like you don’t need to know what DVD means.

RSS allows you to subscribe (or syndicate) to a web page and to be told about updates. This blog, like most blogs, supports it.

So how do you get to use it?

Well there are a number of different ways. If you want help deciding which is best for you please leave a comment with some contact details and I’ll get back to you.

One way is to install a program on your computer. There are loads of these, but I’ll focus on a couple of free ones for now.

Sue is using RSS Popper which plugs into Microsoft Outlook. All of the updates appear as if they are emails. You can sort them, search them, just in the same way as when you use email. You can also click on links start your browser and see all of the content as if it were on a web site.

The other favourite around is RSS Bandit. This is a dedicated program and doesn’t require anything like Outlook. I’ve not personally used RSS Bandit, but friends have and quite like it.

The other alternative is to use a web site which brings together all of the subscriptions. One of these in NewsGator Online, another is Bloglines. I don’t directly use either of these, so I’m not in a position to recommend, but I’m sure I could help if you have an issue.

The really great thing about RSS is that it is getting everywhere. You can now subscribe to news directly from the BBC, you don’t need to go and look at the BBC web site to get all of the news, you can have it delivered.

Why spend time going from site to site trying to  wok out if something is new, or not. Get told that new stuff is available and what it is.

Count Your Blessings #17 – Friends Who Live Away

Daisy

This weekend Sue, Jonathan, Emily and I are visiting friends in Edinburgh.

There is something very special about having friends who live away. I don’t mean that it’s nice that they don’t live too close. It would be fabulous to have these particular friends much closer. What I mean is that it’s great to get away from the day-to-day grind of living your normal life and go and visit someone you know cares about you.

When friends live away you can get in your car and leave all of the day-to-day niggles behind, they don’t have to come with you if you don’t want them too. If you do, however,  decide to take them with you friends who live away from you often have a completely different way of looking at those niggles. So often, in my experience, that different perspective has been the thing that has stopped the niggle being a niggle and started it on the road to becoming something that is getting resolved.

I do have to confess, though, that I am terrible at keeping those kind of relationships going. Sue it brilliant at it. She’s the one who makes phones call, remembers birthdays, sends Christmas cards. Thank you special lady.

Guardian: How Green is your PC?

It doesn't always rain in Lancashire

OK, so I’m not the only thinking about it. It’s interesting how often this happens though.

The Guardian today ran an article on “How Green is your PC?”

“Christian Aid has just done something that is, but shouldn’t be, unusual: it has chosen its new PCs partly on the basis of their “green” credentials. However, governments have already started to introduce laws that will oblige PC manufacturers to take better care of the environment, even if most buyers can’t be bothered.”

And it was only yesterday that I was bemoaning my own dismal lack of effort.

Count Your Blessings #16 – Going Wow

Sky

Wow: Used to express wonder, amazement, or great pleasure.

I went to the cinema last night with some friends. Sue is away at a Crusader camp with Jonathan and Emily. Sue has gone as an emergency cook (they were short of one) and the kids have gone along for the fun (and they are having a lot of it)

Anyway, Dave, Bob and Nina decided to take me out to the cinema to see Crash (2005).

Wow, what a film.

It starts with this line “It’s the sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.” and then off it goes. It twists and it turns all over the place. Some films have one or two story lines layered on top of each other. This film has loads and loads of layers. People crash into each other all over the place, but not car-to-car, this is all person-to-person, life-to-life, culture-to-culture, pain-to-pain and joy-to-joy. If that doesn’t make any sense, then you’ll have to go and see the film.

I can’t say I got some deep meaningful understanding from the film; it definitely challenged me about my attitudes to race. But, wow, what a film. The film ends with a man enjoying the falling snow; I had been so consumed by the film that when it became time to leave I actually looked for my coat and jumper before realising that it was still summer outside.

I love to be amazed and to go wow. Being a reserved English type I don’t spend my whole life going wow at every blade of grass. It takes something special to get a wow from me, and yet, I love it when I do. I love it that something can sneak up on me and amaze me. I love it that after 37 years I haven’t seen it all, I haven’t experienced it all. I love knowing that there is so much more to experience and so much more out there that could make me go wow.

From time to time in my life a sense God talking to me, touching my soul. Every time that happens I go wow. But this wow is different to all other wows. This wow goes much, much deeper than any other wow. That type of wow is a blessing that my meager words could never even begin to describe.

(If you don’t like swearing don’t go and see this film because there is lots of it. For me the swearing was all in context. I hate films that just swear for no apparent reason)

How Green is IT?

York Museum Gardens

In a world which is clearly getting warmer (yes, it is) we should all clearly do anything we can to try and limit that situation.

In a world where we human seem to bring devastation wherever we go, we should do all we can to limit our impact.

So how those of us in the IT industry stand up to close scrutiny.

How about our recycling credentials?

Today The Register reported on this report produced by Greenpeace on the impact of IT equipment refresh an recycling;

Expansion of the global market for electrical and electronic products continues to accelerate, while the lifespan of the products is dropping, resulting in a corresponding explosion in electronic scrap.

As noted by UNEP (2005)*:

“Every year, 20 to 50 million tonnes of electrical and electronic equipment waste (“e-waste”) are generated world-wide, which could bring serious risks to human health and the environment. While 4 million PCs are discarded per year in China alone.”

This rapidly growing “e-waste” stream presents additional difficulties because a wide range of hazardous chemicals are, or have in the past been, used in components of electrical and electronic devices, and these subsequently create substantial problems with regard to handling, recycling and disposal of obsolete products.

And:

Results confirm that all stages in the processing of electrical and electronic wastes have the potential to release substantial quantities of toxic heavy metals and organic compounds to the workplace environment and, at least to the extent studied, also to surrounding soils and water courses. Among the toxic heavy metals most commonly found in elevated levels in wastes from the industry, as well as in indoor dusts and river sediments, were those known to have extensive use in the electronics sector, i.e.

  • lead and tin, most probably arising in large part from solder and, in the case of lead, batteries

  • copper, for example from wires and cables

  • cadmium, from a variety of uses including batteries and solder joints

  • antimony,most probably from use of antimony trioxide as a flame retardant additive in plastics and resins as well from use in electrical solders

Many other metals associated with the electronics industry were also relatively abundant in many samples, including barium, chromium, cobalt, gold,mercury, nickel, silver and zinc.

So not too well on that one then.

How about our usage of power and the inevitable production of green-house gases that accompanies it?

Well for this I’m not going to use a study, I’m going to use personal observation, self critique.

When was the last time I considered power consumption in a purchasing decision for piece of hardware? Never.

When was the last time I considered the power requirements of a piece of software? Well never of course, because that would require me to do a lot of study on how the software works.

When was the last time I actually turned all of this stuff off? Well, again, never. I always leave something on in some way or another. it’s only tiny power use after all, I think. If I’m going to turn a single PC off I have to turn the machine off, and the monitor, and the speakers and the printer. that’s too much like hard work. And then there is the router which stays on, and the cable modem which stays on.

How many people are there currently in my house? One

How many computers are running? two. Why, well one is for work and I’m remote controlling it from over here because it’s more comfortable.

So are both of these computers working really hard? Well of course there not, they never really work really hard.

That’s my example and I know it’s not unique. Drip, drip, drip, all of this energy flowing out of my house. All of that CO2 flowing into the environment.

I think that it’s about time we started to take these things seriously as an industry. Understanding the power requirements associated with software would be a really good start. One of the reasons the the third world isn’t taking our fat bloated software is because they can’t afford the power requirements, and why should they. If we can make powerful software work on low power hardware why don’t we? A little effort on our behalf would go a long way too, go on turn it off. Your time isn’t really that important, or that precious. If it was you wouldn’t be using that software, you’d be using a pen and paper.