My Digital Life

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and ended up reading an old article about cloud computer by Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet.   It’s quite a good article, but one bit caught my eye:

Like so many aspects of Web 2.0, the industry is moving a lot faster than most businesses are currently able to keep up with.

Being a customer looking at cloud services, that was news to me - I’d argue that the opposite is true, at least for some enterprises.

Whilst there are some maturing cloud services out there, many of the big players that Enterprises will traditionally deal with just aren’t quite there yet.  Whilst they’ll talk a good game, when you dig into the details and try and actually buy this stuff you soon find out that the grass isn’t quite as green as you’ve been lead to believe. 

It soon becomes clear that whilst many of the big players aspire to providing cloudy ’service effect’ style solutions very few are able to deliver them at the moment.  And those that do have solutions are often both limited in scope and more expensive than doing it yourself.

I’ve found that billing models aren’t developed, when you look for the simplistic £-per-user, £-per-GB, £-per-CPU/hour models you’ll find them strangely absent. 

What’s worse is that one of cloud computing’s big selling points - reduced capital investment and cost of entry -  is also quite often AWOL.  Many of big players are still reluctant to take on the cost and risk of owning the hardware layer, preferring the more traditional hosting and support style agreements.

Unless you’re specifically looking at apps that you can move to solutions like EC2 or App Engine, there are very few options available right now for delivering applications and services from the cloud.

So in my experience the appetite of enterprises for cloud services currently exceeds the markets ability to deliver them.   Or at least deliver them against the promises it’s already made.

Seth Godin made a good point on his blog today about online ads being the new tip jar.

What he’s saying is that if you’re reading some content you like, why not click an ad on the site to say thanks (clicking on the ad will result in the site getting a little bit of cash).

It’s something I’ve tried to do for ages, not usually on the larger commercial sites, but on peoples blogs or on smaller sites where the author is more likely to benefit.  The way I see it, if some content entertains or helps me then I’d like like the author to get something for their troubles, it just seems like a decent thing to do.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/ads-are-the-new.html

Well there goes the rest of my day… :)  Photosynth is now out of private beta at photosynth.net.  You can now sign up for a photosynth account to create your own synths and there are a host of new ones to browse.

There are a few things to keep in mind at the moment, all synths are public and you can only use Windows PC’s but I’m looking forward to trying it out.  There might be a synth of my office up there soon…!

I just got back from a fantastic trip to Sorrento in Italy (a great part of the world you should go!).  To get around whilst we there there I hired a car at the airport.  Now I’d never driven in Italy before and didn’t think too much of it.  I should probably have taken more notice of the warning in the Lonely Planet book I’d bought that said of driving in Naples (where I flew to)  ‘There can be no greater test of courage…’.

It was obvious from the first few minutes on the road that the rules there are different, so without having a copy of the Italian Highway Code to hand I started to work out these strange new rules based on what I saw. 

1. The most obvious… they drive on the right (ready as ‘wrong’) side of the road.  Not much of a problem really as long as you remember!

2. Speed limits.  Although there is very little actual speeding, it seems there is an overwhelming sense of urgency that compels you to overtake anything and everything in front of you at all times.

3. Overtaking.  Overtaking is allowed anywhere - on straights, on the entry of a corner or on the exit of a corner.  This can also be used in conjunction with rule 4 below.

4. Any speed is acceptable on blind corners as long as you use your horn as you turn in.  It seems the horns on Italian cars are sufficiently powerful that they sweep away hidden obstacles as you approach.

5. Road markings and signs.  Where as in some countries road signs and markings are used to control and manage road vehicles, in Italy they are for decorative use only and do not have to be obeyed.  For example on motorways although lane markings are present it’s accepted that you just fit as many cars as will fit onto the road.

6. Road positioning.  As a result of rules 2, 3, 4 and 5, the racing line should be used at all times.  It is not necessary to obey rule 1 when following this rule.

7.  Parking.  Anywhere will do.  Really.

Hopefully these observations will help any new travellers to Italy that stumble across this blog.

In truth it’s not that bad.  Whilst it does come as a bit of a shock, even for a South London boy like me, you soon get used to it.  For me I just came to the realisation that you just have drive like you would on a Trackday - not a well organised trackday mind, but maybe a test day or something like that.  All you need to do is keep an eye on what’s in front of you and let whatever is behind take care of itself.

There are some amazing roads around the Amalfi coast, and I’d love to take my car down there someday for a bit of exploring.  Maybe just not during the busy summer months.

Disclaimer:  Whilst these are genuine observations and based on things I saw and experienced, DON’T ACTUALLY FOLLOW THESE RULES!

I’ve not had a chance to read through this in detail yet, but I was just sent a white paper from Corsaire about the security built into OSX (10.4 and 10.5) and some hardening guidelines.  At first glance it looks like a good doc and might be worth a read.

Securing Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

Their site also has some other white papers that are quite good.

After a few weeks waiting, O2 finally shipped an iPhone 3G to me on Tuesday, so I’ve spent a good few hours fiddling with it over the past few days.  I thought I’d post up a few thoughts, really for my own benefit in keening some notes.

Compared to the Windows Mobile phones I’m used to, the iPhone setup, activation and registration was a real mess… With pretty much every other phone I’ve used you put in the sim, turn it on and that’s it.  I’m really not keen on this requirement to register the phone with iTunes before it can be used. 

For consumers it’s probably ok, but in an Enterprise do you really want to install iTunes on your (probably) managed desktops?  Personally I can do without iTunes and its MobileMe adverts etc for a work phone.  I’m reasonably sure I won’t be the only one either.  To be honest I don’t even bother with ActiveSync these days and just do everything over the air.  Apparently O2 have some managed services that might help here, and I’ll be looking at them as soon as possible.

The other slight problem was with O2, they managed to incorrectly activate the sim’s or something that lead to a 24 hour delay in activation.  It was only with the inside knowledge of our service manager here that we managed to identify and fix the problem.  Hopefully this was a one off issue with the two iPhones and sim’s they sent over, but if I’d been an end user I would not have been happy as O2 were initially insisting everything was fine and we had registered the phones incorrectly.

Now it’s all working though, I have to say the device itself is great.  Quite a few people have told me that it’s slower and less responsive than the original, but as a new user it seems fine to me.

The apps all work well, and the browsing experience is much better than on Windows mobiles - with the possible exception of the Opera browser on the HTC Touch Diamond. 

I’m also impressed with the App Store.  I found some great apps for twitter and Facebook, and I can’t wait to see what else appears over the next few months. 

Back to the work stuff… the setup of Exchange ActiveSync was nice and easy, and the interface for mail and calendars is nice to use.  It’s be good to see tasks etc added in, but I can live without those for now.

Although I’ve played with the configuration tools, I’ve not applied any profiles yet.  I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks though.

The big omission in my mind is the ability to set a window where push email is activated.  On my Windows phones I have push setup between 7am and 6pm and manual syncs during the evenings and weekends.  I find this is not only useful for separating work from home, but also saving battery life and data charges.

Speaking of battery life… Oh dear.  Now I’m not really a heavy user.  On my other phones I usually keep wifi and bluetooth off, just keeping email pushing down and doing the occasional bit of browsing.  Usually I go a day or two between charges on my S620. 

When I got the iPhone 2 days ago it was charged more or less all day - in that is was plugged into my laptop while we sorted out the activation problems.  Yesterday I turned it on at about 10am and it was dead by 3.30pm.  Admittedly I was busy playing with it and trying stuff out.  So I got home and charged it up again and turned it off over night. 

This morning I turned it on at 8.30ish to try out hahlo.com (a great twitter app)… looking at the usage stats it’s been on for 2 hour’s 33 minutes and I’m at ~40% battery.  Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and everything else apart from 3G and push are off.  That’s really not good.  At all.

I’ve read that the battery life improves after a few charge cycles… if not, as much as I like it - and despite the the little problems I really do like it - I’ll have to send it back… if it can’t last a full day between charges its really no use to me :(

So overall… I really really like the iPhone 3G.  the interface and user experience is much nicer than the standard Windows Mobile phones I’m used to.  I’d like to spend some more time with a Touch Diamond as a comparison, but overall it’s streets ahead.  I’d also like to loose the iTunes requirement - in an Enterprise I just don’t think that’s on.  But… the battery life so far is a killer problem.  As it stands today, mine will be dead by noon.  But I do really like it. Lots.

Yesterday a friend pointed me at blippr.com, a new (I assume!) site that seems to merge twitter like short comments with reviews of books, music, movies and games.

As a format it works really well, you just search for whatever movie you want to see reviews for and browse through the results.  Overall ratings are also aggregated  to provide an overall score. 

For things like movies and games I find a consensus of opinion much more useful than an in depth review followed by one persons opinion.   As Blipper can also import contacts and friends from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook you should also be able to see what you buddies are think of the same movie, and what other things they are enjoying.

Reviews are short <160 character twitter style comments, and use a simple ‘love it’ to ‘hate it’ rating.  I’m not sure if there’s a mobile interface or iPhone app but it would seem like a great addition to catch people views right as they leave the cinema (for example).

The only slight flaw I found was that if you miss spell your email address when signing in the site creates a fresh account for you… so I now have a dummy account there!

Still, I like it :)

Looks like the Mac Live Mesh client has been released - despite the ‘Microsoft Confidential - Internal Use Only’ lable at the bottom of the installation window :)

Anyways, here it is: https://www.mesh.com/Web/MacDownload.aspx
Update:  I may have spoken to soon there… although the client installed properly, once it started it asks for an update but then fails to find the files it looks for on the web.  Not sure if thats just me though.

It turns out that after installing SP1, the process leaves behind ~800MB of original Windows files to allow uninstallation. 

After filling up my old laptop last night a quick search found this article pointing to a cleanup utility that sits in the Windows\System32 folder.

To run the utility, start a command prompt as an admin (right click | Run as Administrator), change directory to the system32 folder, and run ‘vsp1cln.exe’.

Yesterday I was having a conversation with someone about the iPhone configuration utility and heard a comment asking why the iPhone allows settings to be emailed to the device.  What they meant was that if your device is un-configured it wouldn’t have any email accounts to receive the settings - a chicken and egg kinda thing.

The simple answer is for ongoing maintenance of the config.  Sure it’ll be easier to deploy an initial setup using other means - the web for example.  But if you already have iPhones out in the field email should be a good delivery method for applying changes.

One thing to consider there though is training your users not to install configuration profiles that are marked as un-trusted, or that they are not expecting.  After all, anyone can download the config utilities and email out profiles.