Adventures in home working

There is a recent trend for software to auto-update, and if you are logged in as administrator then it works pretty well, and hopefully with Longhorn and ClickOnce the experience will be good for non-administrators as well.  What’s surprising is that its taken so long for the auto-update model to become popular.

About 13 years ago I developed my first distributed system on PC’s that was going to be widely deployed within an enterprise.  The first thing I did (initialy just to make testing easier) was to write a stub that checked the currently installed version of the program, against the manifest file version on the server defined in the last version of the manifest.  If the version was different, the stub downloaded the installer programme defined in the updated manifest and ran it, otherwise it started the application.  The stub was so simple that we hoped it could cope with any update scenario and of course the stub could be updated anyway.  Using this system we were able to keep thousands of PC’s up-to date without any manual intervention, other than publishing a new manifest and associated updates to the distribution points.  Of course there is nothing clever in this at all,  the only clever bit was doing it 12 years before it became standard practice!

I look forward to the time when the experience of locally installed software is nearly as slick as browsing the web,  with administrative priv its close already,  the major thing we lack right now being background downloading and security, both features of ClickOnce.  It will be interesting too see how popular it becomes for classes of applications that have migrated to the web because of the upgrade and installation complexities that Microsoft has made us suffer with for way too long.

I am still on a journey of discovery to try and “find what I love doing”,  I am fairly content in my work, find it interesting and challenging, but I don’t feel I make a difference, at home I spend most of the time with my family – which is great – but very internal focused.  I would like both work and home life to change over time to be more community centred and to feel that I am giving something back to the world and that I live in a more natural and sustainable way.  My relatively poor health is currently the excuse I hide behind that stops me taking the risk associated with change.

I do however continue to be on the lookout for advise in this area and I recently cam across these two articles, one by Steve Jobs – You’ve got to find what you love and the other my Dave Pollard ‘Business’ Advice for Young Adults (and Their Parents & Teachers).  Check them out if you ever think about your work or worry about how you are preparing your kids to help them make good choices about their future work choices.

I recently listened to a lecture by Thomas Malone on the “New world of work”, I enjoyed the lecture although the material in it was not too surprising.  That said the implications on IT are considerable as the old concept of a single infrastructure for all of an enterprises employees starts to collapse as those employees become a fragmented mix of oursourced, contractors, suppliers, small isolated teams in internal markets etc.  Tom describes 4 models for the future of the distributed workplace:

1. Loose Hierarchies — with flat organisation structure and substantial autonomy granted to individual business units, subject to overarching principles, review and budget control (e.g. consultancies, universities, technology developers)
2. Democracies — where all employees, or all managers, get an equal vote on some or all key corporate decisions
3. External Markets — where most of the non-executive jobs are outsourced to independent businesses and contractors, so all ‘employees’ essentially become ’suppliers’, with the commensurate rights and autonomy
4. Internal Markets — where each business unit, and even individuals within business units, contract with each other as if they were dealing at arms’ length, so, every business unit and every employee acts much like an autonomous business

To get a good overview of the topic check out David Pollards review, and comments

A keynote by Tom available on IT Conversations

An article in CIO magazine – the decentralization imperitive

Tom’s book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life 

Here is a summary of the book:

We are in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in business that may in the long run be as important a change for business as the change to democracy was for governments. New technologies are making it possible for the first time in human history to have the economic benefits of very large organizations and, at the same time, to have the human benefits of very small organizations, things like freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity. Information technology is reducing the costs of communication to such a low level that it’s now possible for huge numbers of people even in very large organizations to have all the information they need about the big picture to make their own decisions for themselves about what they do rather than waiting for people above them in some hierarchy to tell them what to do.

Dave Pollard has a good introduction to corporate blogging, here.  Dave’s work is consistency good and he also tends to get great comments which complement the posts.

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/teched2005/

I have been writing about RSS for about a year now and my vision for RSS is highly congruent with Microsoft’s.  However I have only learned that this is true today, as I have seen Microsoft’s RSS strategy unfold.  Whilst I am not surprised by the announcement I am relieved as I truly believe that making RSS a subscription protocol that supports many different application types will revolutionise the way we work, and make all of our lives just so much easier. 

I can see Microsoft themselves going wild and RSS enabling everything, especially everything in Windows SharePoint Services,  SharePoint Portal Server search, Windows event logs, Exchange Email and Calendars,  Exchange Public Folders, Windows File Systems etc etc and the opportunities for an event driven interface to a myriad of business applications is mind blowing.  In addition Microsoft make a good point that our feeds will also be a great source of information to the machine learning software that runs on our PC’s and acts as virtual agents on our behalf on the Internet, and will be even more powerful if they actually track which feeds we read.  The potential for agents that really help us prioritise the information overload will be huge.

Please research this topic more,  this is huge:

Channel 9 video

Microsoft monitor articles one, two, three

Dave Winer message of support

Some examples of potential subscriptions

IE Blog Posting

and its approachable feel.  We corporate sorts can learn a lot.

This is a great interview on Longhorn.  Some bits I liked:

better security with application compatibility!

As you well know, most users on Windows XP run with administrative privileges, and this is because the system didn’t partition itself well. This is one of the legacies that were inherited from Windows 95. Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP all have the security built into them, but the problem is that in many of the applications that were designed to run on Windows 95, you have to relax the security in order for them to run, which meant that the people had to run as administrator. We’re just getting rid of all the user level classifications in Longhorn. We have shimming and other capabilities that we’ve done with our applications like file virtualization, registry virtualization and other characteristics that allow applications that want to write to administrative parts of the system to think they are writing to those parts, while all along keeping those parts isolated and virtualized to the instance of that application.

Search done right, like apple,  I particularly like the fact that they are doing desktop search in a way that makes sense on the desktop, rather than the way that makes sense on the Internet – a completely different environment

In Longhorn, what we have done is taken the concept of content indexing, which has already been in Windows for quite some time, and added property based indexing. And then we’ve also done two things in the shell, one is we’ve put a search box anywhere you are in the shell, which does filtering and fast search, full text search and property searches, and the second is that we’ve changed the way the shell works in that you basically build queries into the properties. For example, a user could write “show me documents written by John” and the result will look like a folder, but it is actually a running query. It uses the same index so it does not re-crawl the drive; it just goes to the indexer and requests the set of documents with the prescribed set of properties. So this is not just desktop search, it is an indexed property store with full text search and rich views based on the indexed store, and those properties will vary on the type of data. So for example, photos have metadata like the size of the picture, time it was taken, and maybe voice annotation; all of these get indexed. Music also has metadata like track numbers, names of songs, artists and that all gets indexed also.

I used Windows 2003 on my desktop and Volume Shadow Copy is one of the main reasons, and at last a home user friendly backup approach:

We’ve basically changed how the file system works in Longhorn. Functions like system restore and document backup are now handled by the file system. For example, when you save documents, the system will also save a version of the document in the background in the file system. This allows the user to use a function that gives them the capability to request an earlier version or versions of the document. This function already exists in Windows Server 2003 today and is being used. We took that same capability and applied it to system restore, so the way we keep restore points is to take snapshots of your system on a periodic basis, with the ability for the user to set the duration between snapshots. This function is also integrated with backup, so that if you have two drives on your system, and one is designated as the backup drive, the system can just snapshot deltas to the backup drive, so if your drive fails, the system can just restore your previous state from the other drive. The same back up procedure can be performed with an external drive as well, or you can burn CDs or DVDs that are snapshots of your back up, and all of this will be built into the Longhorn system.

And things get more firewall friendly, great for collaborators

Remote assistance exists in Windows XP today, so you can go via remote assistance into your mother’s system and help her to repair and or configure her system. The problem that exists today is the issue of firewall transversal with the remote assistance tool. With Longhorn, the system runs rendezvous services for the IPv6 network, so that you can do consumer-to-consumer firewall transversal. This functionality will work seamlessly in Longhorn, which is good for enabling voice, video, instant messaging and remote assistance. For other programs, we just use terminal server protocol between the remote and local computers. But if both users have Windows messenger, the user in need of assistance can application share through the program. With Windows Messenger or MSN Messenger, a user can open up a session and invite another user to use an application on their system and control that application remotely. The reasons we use Messenger is that you need consent to use those remote applications, and you need an IP address. So Messenger servers are used to do the rendezvous, and once the connection is established, what is left is a peer-to-peer connection, which is why you need firewall transversal. In the future, the system will use IPSec to secure the communication between the two terminals.

This is a useful post on technologies for creating and capturing form data.  Too many technologies of course.  Interestingly no mention of OOo

I recently came across the company AES.  I don’t know much about them, but I was very impressed by their values.  I wish more would emulate them!  Most impressive they appear to actually live by them as well!

Fairness - We work with people in a way that’s fair and just. AES people intend to treat fairly our customers, suppliers, stockholders, governments, the communities in which AES operates, and other AES people.

Integrity - AES people strive to act with integrity. Our people accept responsibility for their actions, and are expected to act with integrity in all circumstances. They honor their commitments to customers, to partners, and to the shareholders who make the company’s efforts possible. They develop or access the right knowledge and skills to make informed, balanced decisions that advance the interests of the entire enterprise.

Social Responsibility - AES people strive in all cases to act in a socially responsible manner and believe that working to fulfill AES’s mission is one of the important ways to do this. In addition, we are committed to being involved and constributing corporate citizens in the communities we serve.

Fun - AES people desire that fellow employees and those with whom AES people interact have fun in their work, in the sense that striving to achieve a high level of performance, being trusted to make decisions to achieve such performance, and being held accountable for decisions, is fun. They bring an innovative approach and can-do attitude to even the most daunting challenge, and their passion for the work creates an energizing business environment.