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.

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 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.

I just found this pretty good video on the apple site describing - at a high level - Mac integration with Active Directory. 

http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/activedir/apple/

For someone from a Windows background (like me) it’s worth a look.  It’s also interesting to see the difference in style between the Apple and MS.  Given the brand personas of the two companies you’d expect the styles to be reversed, with the more friendly informal stuff coming from Cupertino rather than Redmond.  But, you can’t fault the content.

I got a Mac today.  Ok… it’s works rather than mine, but you know what I mean! :)

I’ve always been a PC kinda guy.  Not for any particular reason, I’ve just never needed to use a Mac, PC’s and Windows have always done the job.  Recently however a few things have made me look more closely at Mac’s. Some of it is personal interest (I am a geek after all), but my immediate need is for work.

Although we’ve got a few Mac users dotted around, we don’t really support Mac’s in a big way.  We’re essentially a PC house, based around Windows and Active Directory.  Over the next few years though it’s pretty clear that we’ll need to adopt and support multiple platforms - at least on the client.

So… I ordered a Mac.  It’s only a plain old Macbook, but it’s all I should really need for now.  First impressions?  I really like it.

In fact, the first impression you have of Mac is bound to be great because of the beautiful packaging.  Apple really know how to make feel good about spending your money.  Quite why the PC vendors haven’t caught onto this over the years is beyond me.

One thing that impressed me was the out-of-box-experiance, that’s in the desktop deployment sense, the initial setup and config.  As one of the first things to be configured is the networking, the OOBE was able to go onto the net to get the latest up to date setup.  Or at least I assume it does as I was asked to join Mobile Me, and I’m pretty sure this Mac was built long before it’s release last week.

With regards to the hardware itself, it’s as pretty as a Mac should be.  Nice and shiny white.  The keyboard is fantastic - much nicer than the ones on my Lenovo or old HP laptops.  Although having said that I’m still getting used to the different layout and shortcuts (no del key?!?) but I’m sure all that will come in time.

Tomorrow I’ll start looking at how I go about integrating this new toy into our MS environment.  From what I’ve read and planned, basic integration won’t be too tricky, but I want to do it myself to be sure.  Then I’ll start looking at the basic applications.  First on my list will be Office 2008, like it or loath it businesses run on Office, especially exchange.  I’ll also need to take a good look at AV/Malware tools and print drivers etc.  Should be fun :)

Oh… and I’m already missing Live Writer.  What a great little app MS have there.

I just stumbled across a great initiative from the UK Cabinet Office.  The ‘Show us a better way’ site asks the world at large how it could best mashup the vast data sets the UK government has at it’s disposal to provide useful services.  To support this the Power of Information Taskforce have released some previously unavailable data to get people started (no personal info!).

Given the vast amount of raw statistical data that a government must hold, there’s got to be a serious amount of potential there.  There are already hundreds of ideas that have been submitted, and looking through them quite a few look like they would be useful if built.

Rightly or wrongly I’ve often thought that the public sector seems to lag behind the private sector in terms of its utilisation of new technology.  Initiatives such as this show that in some areas the opposite is true. 

Hopefully this will lead to some new useful services for us Brits, but more than that this has to be an encouraging sign for things to come.  I can’t remember a government crowdsourcing a problem before, could this be the start of a new trend?  For things like this it would seem to make a lot of sense.  It’s good to see the government trying to harness some of the ingenuity innovation out there in the world.   At the very least it shows that areas of government aren’t ignorant of the changing word around them.

Liveside have just posted about a cool new technology MS is building called DeepPhoto.  It looks like a mashup of tools like Virtual Earth and PhotoSynth and allows photo’s to be mapped against the geometric data being built up by the virtual earth team.

With all of this information combined you can do some pretty interesting things.  The video demo the LiveSide guys recorded shows how knowing the real world 3D references for objects in a photo allows the technology to de-haze images that are hazy for example.  The real interesting stuff for me though comes at the end of the demo.

A photo of the Yosemite valley is mapped against the geometric model from Virtual Earth.  This allows the software to increase the accuracy of the 3D view by extrapolating colours and textures from the real image.  You can then move around this composite view in 3D - in effect filling in the gaps between the photos in a PhotoSynth scene. 

Working for a company that does loads of GIS work, and produces visualisations of new projects, I can see this sort of technology as being genuinely useful to business.  Assuming there’s some sort of API for adding your own data into the views (hyperlinks and additional models for example) it would be a very powerful way of visualising the sort of change we plan and design every day.

The LiveSide Video:

Having just been thinking about what a next generation Microsoft OS might be like, I do wonder if they would keep the Windows name. 

It’s served MS well for decades, but it brings with it a heap of baggage.  A shiny new name would help give the platform the fresh start it might need.

(What a pointless post…  I apologise! :)  )

There’s been quite a lot of talk over the past few days about an project MS is running called Midori that may, or may not, be the makings of a new legacy free OS.

The prospect of an entirely new OS is quite an exciting one, the world has moved a long way since the WinNT code base that XP and Vista are based around was first written.  It’s probably fair to say that to some extent today’s hardware is held back by the legacy components that the OS are forced to include.

That said, as Ed Bott talks about on his blog, such a change is not something to be taken likely.  There are A LOT of existing Windows users and applications that would need to be supported in any change.  As I believe MS discovered with Vista, the cost of migrating applications to a new platform is a huge obstacle to business migration.

Or is it…

Virtualisation technology is advancing hugely, if not in overall functionality then in the ease with which it can be utilised.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V is part of the basic server OS, and as I understand it will be core to Windows 7.  Application virtualisation is maturing nicely as a tool and is, I believe, about to become mainstream.  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is now something that enterprises can realistically consider, again Windows 7 will drive this even further forward.

With all of these components in place, the release of a new OS should be much simpler than ever before.  Application compatibility, the big killer of migrations, should slowly become less of a challenge.  The toolset needed to run applications across multiple OS’s on the one system is pretty much all there.  Of course those apps won’t benefit from whatever advances Midori might bring, but as cover for a transition period that’s not so important.  As long as they work, both independently and with each other, that’s a huge problem out of the way.

I agree with Ed that any new OS is likely to live in parallel to a standard Windows product for some time, but I do think the migration will be quicker than we’ve seen before.