Adventures in home working

What made it the best? I pretty much ignored the scheduled talks and spent
most of the time in one to one discussions. Some of them scheduled in
advance by our great Citrix and Appsense teams, especially Chris and
Alister. Some of them opportunistic scheduled with twitter followers and
some with staff managing the conference. The relatively low attendance made
discussions at the stands viable this time in a way I’ve not experienced at
many conferences. When I did attend sessions, a couple of times it was the
post session chats that added most value.
 
Prior to this conference I had talked myself out of the value of live
conference attendance, but now with this new strategy I’m back on board. It
takes more prep, but it pays off.

Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

when I got a big screen for my home office I thought I would make most use
of it sat at my desk, luxuriating in all that screen real estate. Whilst I
do use it that way, what’s made most difference is that I can sit on my
sofa with my laptop and use the big screen for remote attendance of web
conferences, watching conference videos, vidcasts etc.
 
Now with Windows 7 I can put all these various video sources in my Video
Library and they are available in media center, which means I can control
the whole experience using the remote control.
 
While I watch I can be taking notes or following up leads on the laptop.
 
When work ends of course, it’s also great for movies and TV.

Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

On recovery days like today, the sofa in the office is my favourite place
to work. 
 
 
Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

Steve over on the Reflexions blog try’s to answer the question

Does Corporate Failure = PKM? posed by Nick Milton and I must admit I find myself agreeing with Steve, who has a few points of agreement with Nick.  That is up until the point where Nick is quoted as saying:

If the company is doing Knowledge Management properly, and making communal knowledge transparently available at the point of need, then you would not need PKM.

and Steve responds:

Here’s where I think Nick is spot on

At this point we diverge and here’s why:

1. The personal knowledge that I need to manage is not and never will be the same as any pool of knowledge held by my company, although there will be overlaps and gaps in both
2. My personal knowledge spans several different companies, and with 60%+ of the content of my knowledge repository being publicly available information, I don’t want it locked up in some company specific silo
3. In the last 10 years of working for my current company if I’d put my trust in the companies well funded knowledge management infrastructure, it would now be fragmented across dozens of different systems. Some of these different generations of the enterprise system and some functional or project specific repositories that all existed with sound justification
4. A significant proportion of my personal knowledge management system is meaningful only to me based on a context that only I understand, with a subtlety that I’ve never seen in the meta-data support of any enterprise KM system
5. Locating the specific “thing I want” in my personal system relies on many clues that don’t exist in enterprise systems and a narrow search scope “just the stuff I’ve tagged, linked, saved or created or modified”.  I don’t see an easy way to create this search scope in another way
6. I’ve been an avid contributor to enterprise KM at the same time as I’ve built my personal knowledge, but I’ve contributed a small subset to the enterprise, because much of my personal stuff would be clutter to the enterprise, lacking the connections and context that make it knowledge to me
7. I’d never consider my personal knowledge as a substitute for enterprise PKM or Google, but I find many people who use google or enterprise search confuse being able to find “something” on any topic, with being able to find the “specific assets” I want in the way that I do in my PKM system
8. One final point is that some of my best work and best external knowledge has been dropped from issued versions of work at the enterprise level, because it didn’t survive a scope cut or a change in customer requirements or didn’t convince some approver.  I still have that stuff. Unissued stuff still has huge value to me, but would quite rightly confuse the enterprise in a big way

In summary I’m all for enterprise KM, but PKM is a complement to it.  A good KM strategy should see itself in this capacity too.  Take a look at the “my life bits” research to see the direction that PKM is going, taken to this extreme I don’t see anyone suggesting that all “my life bits” belong in the enterprise KM system.  Rather it see’s PKM as an extension of the brain.

PKM is one of the most neglected areas within the enterprise, no surprise that there’s such a rich eco system of tools being created directly targeted at the individual, with many now starting to integrate with the individuals network of contacts, to create a personal knowledge network.

Graham writes an interesting post where he compares the impact of slow login and slow applications.  It’s a good analysis and leads Graham to conclude that forced to choose he would go for slow login, because it’s predictable and infrequent and so can be proactively managed (ie do something else why you wait.

I’ve been mulling over the same issue – but without the nice graphics -when it comes to desktop and application virtualization, and I’m very keen to dig a bit deeper into the user experience impact of a collection of new technologies:

1. Virtualised applications add a small performance overhead
2. Streaming virtualised applications adds a significant overhead to launch time, especially in a VDI environment where caching is of limited value (although pre-caching in the image would be better)
3. Virtualization of the applications configuration and the users personalised settings adds a further overhead to launch times
4. WAN access to data adds a further overhead to application launch times
5. We’ve yet to quantify for many niche applications whether non-persistent VDI images (where only the roaming profile is persisted at logoff) are going to be slower, maybe because they cache for performance in the local profile and assume that the users local profile is going to be there tomorrow 99% of the time
6. Sharing server resources across many users, is likely to work out great on average, but I’m not 100% sure that it will be faster for peak CPU periods which often occur at application start-up
7. Most VDI deployments encourage users to logoff frequently and that’s likely to increase as the logon/logoff cycle is required in order to update the master image, not only does this affect a few of the points above, but it also makes detailed user state preservation very important – ie saving which applications, files, scroll locations, browser tabs, window positions etc the user has open and restoring them when the user logs back in. 
8. I dread to think how regular logoffs would impact my productivity, right now I logoff once ever couple of weeks, and it takes me at least 20 minutes to close everything down and open everything up again, if I had to do this every day – the least of my worries would be the time it takes for the OS to boot.

So one things for sure, in the new word of desktop, end user experience performance monitoring is going to be pretty important.

Every year or so I hear Microsoft talking about Internet Search and implying that Google Search is nothing compared to what Microsoft has in store for us.  Unfortunately what seems to be delivered is useful, but incremental.

I heard about Wolfram Alpha today, and it the first time for years that I’ve seen a real revolution in Internet Search, the kind of revolution that depends on the search engine really understanding the information it’s searching and the content of the search query.  It’s not the full vision of the semantic web, but it’s the best demonstration I’ve seen that illustrates the promise of it.

It’s developed by Stephen Wolfram and team, a genius, who’s delivered a series of breakthrough products and insights over the years.

This is going to be ace on the Blackberry!  True information at your fingertips   Check out this article

This short video:

This longer video

Excellent!!!

I’m using Postie to allow me to send an email to my wordpress blog, it works great, supports images as attachments, some formatting and categories,tags and more, it also has better security than the built in wp email support. What it doesn’t do is trigger twitter tools, so currently no tweets to say I’ve blogged from my Blackberry.

I gave my old bike to my Mum a few weeks ago as an excuse to by another, as if even more excuse was needed though I had the opportunity to take advantage of the governments cycle to work scheme. Vince seemed to have a few issues getting a non Halfords bike so I took the lazy route and went for a Carrera Subway 8 and I’ve been very happy so far.

What I added:

A rack and rack bag, which I’ve padlocked to the rack so I don’t have the hassle of having to carry it around

A mirror, I don’t know how to ride without one now, I’ve had one for 20 years

Handlebar extenders, never had these before but they really vary the riding position, great

Jennie gave me her handlebar bag, this has been very useful

The bike:

The disk brakes are a revelation,

The 8 speed hub gears cope just fine with all the hills around here, changing is effortless and you can change gear while stationary

Overall the bike seems great, a bit heavy but that’s the price I’m paying for tough and comfy

This blog post is also an excuse to try out posting via email using the WordPress Postie Plugin.

I had the chance to spend the morning being briefed by VMware on their current VDI offerings and their longer term roadmap, a lot of it is NDA but it’s useful to take a look at the broad themes and to contrast their approach to that of Citrix and to the issues we are seeing in the enterprise VDI market.

The good

1. The core hypervisor is clearly very mature and the most widely used for VDI.  However it seemed to me that the opportunities for VMware to further increase desktop density/core was pretty limited now, from now on we really need to rely on Moore’s law.
2. Memory over commit, this is a nice feature, to decrease memory costs, but my impression is that impact on overall TCO is pretty small
3. USB, VMware have written their own USB support, the team have tested a very wide range of USB devices, iPhones, iPods, Blackberries, Scanners etc – they all work, even though not many of them have yet made it all the way through the rigorous VMware QA process
4. Users who install apps, most VMware VDI customers today have a significant number of users who install applications.  The Citrix Provisioning Server model’s not really suitable for this, although there’s some very interesting third party activity around virtualising end user installed applications at the time the user installs them,  this would allow a users installed apps to roam with them from one pooled non-persistent PC to another, and potentially also into XenApp and Physical Desktops.
5. The Wyse multi media redirection extensions have been licensed to mitigate some of the limitations of RDP

The potential

1. The cloud – I was most impressed by the mid term potential of the cloud services capabilities.  More specifically the ability to describe the characteristics and SLA requirements for a Virtual desktop workload, and its associated infrastructure servers.  This would in theory allow us to have a general purpose VMware cloud onto which we could deploy virtual desktops as “just another workload” but with the confidence that all of our SLA’s would be met.  In this model as our environments scaled and performance characteristics changed over the years, we would just make metadata changes and the cloud would adapt to the changing workload automatically.

   The current approach is to have a server infrastructure that’s optimised for the virtual desktop workload at the physical level which is fine for now, but not so flexible in the long term. 

2. vmSafe,  I really like the idea of taking the anti-malware protection out of the VM and running it on the infrastructure.  Not only does this remove the need to keep running VMs up to date with changes to Antimalware signatures etc, but it should also be more efficient and make it much quicker to respond to a critical events.  However it’s only a nice concept right now.

The stuff I’m not so sure about

1. The protocol – One of my biggest concerns, currently VMware are taking a variety of approaches, using and extending RDP and then also supporting the PC over IP protocol from Teradici both in software and hardware.  My initial impression is that it’s going to be a long time before VMware has a protocol story that’s as flexible and performant as Citrix has with ICA. In our case where we have a very wide variety of use cases to support, Citrix allows us to use one protocol for all of them.
2. The broker – improved in that it now supports access to anything that supports RDP, including physical blades, terminal servers and distributed PCs – however there’s no ICA support or Wake On Lan support for distributed desktops that makes it only useful in a few scenarios.
3. Bare Metal (type 1) hypervisor – I like the idea of a client side hypervisor, I can see that within a year we will have PC’s with all the characteristics of thin clients (low power, no moving parts, cheap, secure, stateless etc) but to which we can stream the OS  (we can already “stream” everything else), however these don’t really need a hypervisor – Citrix provisioning server can do this to physical “thin PCs” now and seems a very good solution, even better when it gets integration with Wan Caches. 

   Where I do see client side hypervisors being popular is the employee owned notebook PC, unfortunately the first release of the VMware bare metal hypervisor will only support a singe VM, so it’s not going to be that attractive for employee owned use cases, also its likely to only support a small subset of laptops, most likely also requiring vPro, and these are likely to be too expensive for employee purchase.

4. Offline VDI – VMware has another (Type 2) client side hypervisor solution, currently available as an experimental release.  This works on the idea of the user having a Physical PC and a VDI PC and then when they need to go on the road they can “check  out” the VDI PC – download it to their Physical PC and then check it back in at some later date.  I’ve always been a bit surprised by this use case, mainly because almost all the VDI deployments I see are for locked down PCs. 

   For a locked down VDI PC – the whole virtual PC image doesn’t flow down to the client, only the users apps, config and personality, and all that needs to flow back up is the users personality.  The config can flow to the client using something like AppSense which can also copy the users personality back to the server as well.  The users apps can flow down to the client device using Application Streaming.  This just leaves the Virtual machine itself, in the locked down use case it’s always the same master image the flows down to the users PC, nothing gets copied back.  So this is really Operating system streaming and caching, similar to virtual app streaming and caching.

   The benefit that VMware has is a solution that works for locked down and non-locked down PCs and its available now.  However the more elegant model is where we dynamically compose the users offline VDI PC from separate OS, App, Config and personality streams and then persist just the Personality back on the server.  Why’s this more elegant?  because it allows us to use the same, apps, config and personality to dynamically compose physical PCs, client and server hosted virtual desktops, and Terminal Server Apps and Desktops.

   Final thought though is that VMware approach will also be easy to extend to user data, sitting in a virtual disk, so whilst I have some concerns over it’s elegance, it’s a pragmatic approach.

5. Cloning, the new cloning support is a big improvement, but I still feel that cloning at the storage layer is a better idea.  For example the Offline VDI stuff doesn’t currently work with the View Composer cloning technology, however I’m guessing that it would work just fine if the cloning were done by the storage infrastructure.   

   I’m also pretty amazed by products like ILIO from Atlantis that looks to the hypervisor just like storage, but actually does amazing image management behind the scenes. 

6. Thinstall, I think ThinStall has some great use cases, but the fact that it doesn’t support dynamic caching in the virtual machine makes some use cases problematic, particularly the Offline VDI and OS streaming ones.  Also it seems to me that precaching virtualised apps in the Citrix provisioning server image would probably be faster than thinstall “streaming” from a network file system, but I’ve no lab results to support that view
7. User personalisation, VMware personalisation ideas are currently focussed on Virtual Machines.  I like the AppSense/Res approach that allows for the users personality to be injected into physical desktops, client and server hosted virtual desktops and terminal servers/XenApp.
8. Configuration, I’ve not seen anything from VMware around OS/User and App configuration

I’m watching an old episode of the West Wing and the “President” – Martin Sheen – just said “one of the good things about having MS is that you learn to appreciate the good days”.  I don’t have MS, but I do have a chronic condition with good days and bad days and how true this is.

  When I have a pain free day – like most of today – it’s a great feeling, almost “high”.  Last summer I had a couple of months of good days, and felt so good that I almost made some very bad career choices, luckily a few of my trusted advisors took the time to take me aside and convince me there were better options, so I’m back in a trusted advisor – pretty low intensity and low stress – role and loving it.