My Digital Life

Although Photosynth has been out for a while, I’d not rally had a chance to play with it much until the weekend.  After giving my car a quick wash I thought I’d take a few pictures and feed them into a synth and see how it came out…

(You’ll need a PC, Silverlight and PhotoSynth installed to see the embedded Synth - sorry Mac guys)

Here’s a link to the full thing: Linky

I think it worked out pretty well considering I didn’t take that many pictures.  If I do it again I’ll take more pics around the interior to try and allow you to move in close.

Photosynth is definitely a cool bit of technology and could be used in loads of different ways.  It’d be a pretty unique way of showing off my car if I was selling it online for example.  In fact if I were a car dealership I might experiment with using it on a few cars.

Anyways…. I think it’s great.  Give it a go!

I’ve just been looking at Yammer a bit more after signing up over the weekend.  It’s a great idea - twitter for the enterprise.

Essentially you sign up using a work email address, and then you only see messages from users with addresses from the same domain. Clever idea.  What’s more, although it’s free for end users, the company can pay for administrative controls.  A nice business model I reckon.

They have a web client, a desktop client, iPhone client and one for Blackberry.  It’s odd there’s no Windows Mobile app, but I can only guess that will appear at some point.

It’d be good to see a SharePoint webpart as well, perhaps a couple in fact.  Maybe one to add a Facebook like status, and one to show your messages etc.

I also wonder what would happen for companies with multiple domains used for email - I know we have a bunch of them at work.  And perhaps whether you could ‘federate’ (in the LCS/OCS sense) your company messages with those of a trusted partner.

I really like the idea - I just need to get a few people from work to sign up!

Apps that I use day in day out…

Hahlo - not strictly an iPhone app, but the best mobile Twitter client that I’ve found.  It does everything I need of it (apart from maybe twitpic), it’s quick to use and looks pretty.  The only downside it that as it lives in Safari you occasionally get unwanted refreshes so you loose you place in the list of tweets.

Facebook - I’d pretty much stopped using Facebook before installing this app, but now I check it once or twice a day.  It just makes it so much easier to check for updates and messages.

Linked In - This app is much the same as the Facebook app, but perhaps slightly less well executed.  I have to say I use Linked In less, but it’s still a worthwhile app if you have an account.

Tris - I always was a fan of Tetris :)

Evernote - A fantastic tool, if you don’t have an account you should go and try it.  I love the way I can take a photo on the phone, it’s then uploaded to Evernote, OCR’d and indexed.  It makes recording notes from whiteboards so much easier, just take a photo then search for keywords. 

A few weeks ago I posted up a few initial thoughts about my iPhone 3G.  Without reading back through the post, I think it’s fair to say that my opinions were mixed.  Although I loved the device itself, the silly battery life made it hard to use as a day to day phone.  Now I’ve had the iPhone for a few weeks I thought I’d jot down a few more thoughts.

So do I still like it…?  Yeah, I do.  It really is a great little device, and it’s really changed the way that I use my mobile.  I’ve used smartphones for email, calendar and contacts for years, but mobile browsing has always been something that I’ve done only when I needed to - like checking train times or something like that.  I guess at first cost was a barrier, but I’ve also realised that the general usability of the devices and the browsers played a big part.

Although the iPhone is physically bigger than something like the HTC Diamond, all that extra screen size makes it so much more usable for browsing or running applications.  I now spend much more time browsing when I’m on the move.

That’s not to say all is perfect on the browser front… Although the Safari browser on the iPhone is ok, for me it’s very much a love-hate relationship.  Yes it’s probably the best mobile browser so far, but it crashes faaaaaarrrrrrr to often for my liking, and the lack of support for flash etc is a real pain. 

The traditional mail, calendar and contacts tools are also pretty good.  For me the Calendar particularly stands out, as the interface is much better then the Windows Mobile equivalent.  Although I have seen a few ‘ghost’ appointments where previously re-scheduled meetings still appear in their original times on the iPhone, but not in Outlook or on WM.  Very odd, but repeatable on a number of iPhones at work.

I’ve also seen a slightly worrying security issue with the iPhone and Exchange Activesync…. I’m not going to post the details until I’ve had a chance to check it out with MS and Apple, but it’s a little weird to say the least.

Apart from that push email from exchange works very well indeed, though I’d still like to see a ‘working hours’ style option to set the hours that push email is working and when it should go to manual.  I used that feature on WM to both stop myself checking work email at weekends and save a bit of battery power over night.  It seems like a strange thing to leave out.

Other things I can think of… the lack of MMS doesn’t bother me too much as email or twitter do the job for me anyway… copy and paste - what were Apple thinking by leaving that out?!…  I’m also puzzled why I can’t record video… 

Overall I still really like the iPhone.  It really has changed the way I work for the better.  There are problems that Apple need to fix but I’m sticking with it… for now… :)

In a my post earlier today I noted that Google Chrome wasn’t passing credentials through to our SharePoint intranet.  Having played with Chrome a bit more this afternoon unfortunately it seems it’s not just SharePoint that suffers.  

With Chrome seemingly not supporting Windows Integrated Authentication, if you’re using an Internet proxy server with authentication enabled you’ll be prompted for credentials each time you want to browse an external web site.  Not a great user experience…

The good news is that the problem is logged with Google here so will hopefully be fixed in the future.

Generation Y.  It’s a term that keeps coming up.  Before that it was Digital Natives, and I’m sure different companies and areas have their own terms.  What makes these guys so special eh?

Well I guess the most basic answer is that these are the guys that our companies will be employing from this point on.  If you work in an internal IS group like me, that makes them our customers.

For anyone born after 1984 or so, social web applications like Facebook and messaging tools like MSN or Sykpe are part and parcel of life.  Of course there are plenty of other examples, and I’m sure that these things are just as important for some of us slightly older types.  But it’s Generation Y that really sum up this new wave of technology savvy people who use and rely on technology far more than ever before.  It’s this consumerisation of the workforce and the tools they demand that cause problems in enterprise IT.

For the past 10-15 years the primary drivers for many enterprise IT groups has been simple:  Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and then hopefully earn the opportunity to use some of those savings to deliver extra value to the business. 

This lead to the usual standardising of services to reduce complexity and and consolidation of those services to further reduce management and support costs. 

In effect this means standardising and locking down what people can do to server the greater good.  It’s never really been a popular move with end users, but from a business standpoint it has made a lot sense. 

The times are a changin’ however.  The need to attract and retain Generation Y is starting to have a profound effect on these old strategies.  With technology now playing such an important part of peoples lives its becoming a factor in peoples decisions about where they work.  The traditional locked down computers, controlled applications and restricted Internet access just isn’t going to cut it with people used to communicating and collaborating live online.

What does this mean for IT?  Well for a start we’ll need to be a lot more open in our approaches.  The problem is that often the old drivers for low TCO etc still stand.  So in the short term at least there are some compromises to be made.

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.