Adventures in home working

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.

My trustworthy Blackberry 8800 was upgraded to a Bold last week and after much anticipation I can definitely say it’s been a very worthwhile upgrade.  I’ve made these notes which might help anyone considering or receiving a bold in the near future.

Background

I’ve previously been an enthusiastic user of a Palm Treo 650, a not so enthusiastic user of various Windows Mobile Smartphones and a pretty happy user of a Blackberry 8800.  I can safely say that the Bold has the best attributes of all of these devices with few if any of the downsides.  My wife has an iPhone 3G and despite it winning over the bold in terms of sheer style and “conceptual integrity” the bold wins out for me in terms of good old fashioned performance and functionality.

The hardware

Overall the Bold seems slightly larger than the 8800, it fits fine in the 8800’s holster though and it feels great in the hand.  It’s certainly not a small device, but any smaller would be too much of a compromise for me in terms of keyboard or screen.

Screen

The screen is amazing, it’s only when you see a screen of this quality – both resolution and brightness – that you realise what a compromise you’ve been living with.  More importantly I’ve started using the bold for reading, video watching and web browsing much more than on any previous device.  Web browsing in particular is so much better, not all down to the screen of course.  I was initially surprised that RIM didn’t take the approach of cramming more information onto the screen in applications like Email and Calendar, but now I think I see their logic, the larger fonts are wonderfully crisp and I’m pleased to say that I can use the device easily without glasses, which is a luxury I haven’t had for several years.

Keyboard

Wonderful!  I was very happy with the keyboard on the 8800, but I’ve been amazed at how much better the bold is.  I have fairly small hands and this last week I’ve been suffering from Arthritis pain in them, but it’s not mattered – I’ve been tapping away faster than I thought possible.  There’s absolutely no comparison with my iPhone experience, which for me at least requires a lot of focused attention to tap out even the shortest accurate message. 

Convenience keys and trackball

I’ve found these keys to be a big differentiater compared to the iPhone.  On the iPhone I often find myself wondering whether I’ve actually pressed a soft key or whether the iPhone’s just responding slowly, pressing the home key and starting again is often required.  The physical keys on the bold are faster, more reliable and pretty consistent in terms of how applications use them, soft keys seem to give application designers perhaps too much freedom.

The trackball is the biggest area of compromise on the bold, it’s nowhere near as intuitive as the iPhone’s touch screen.  But in practice this affects only a few applications, and whilst pinch zoom demo’s well, I’ve quickly got the hang of the equally convenient shortcut keys on the bold keyboard (not always consistent across apps though).  One thing I like is that the trackball/mouse is a much more accurate way of navigating buttons and links on web pages than the finger on the iPhone.

Camera

Although the camera resolution’s not that great at 2M Pixels, it’s fine for most of my point and shoot opportunistic family snaps and wonderful for day to day photographic recording of labels, book covers, whiteboards, things I want to buy on the web when I get home from the seeing them live in the shops etc.  Although I’m missing the Camera integration with the Evernote client that the iPhone has (I love Evernote on my PCs).

Speaker

I use the speaker for listening to Podcasts and music around the house, and the Bold’s speaker is excellent, much louder and better quality than the 8800 and better than the iPhone.

Stereo A2DP Bluetooth

I have a tiny Jabra BT8040 Bluetooth headset that’s mono aural (ie fit’s in one ear) but it supports A2DP so I get good quality streamed music and more frequently Podcasts to it.  It’s working great so far and it also works with my TomTom GPS. 

Stereo Headset

I’m not a big fan of the supplied headset which seems a little too chunky for my ears, but I’m using my wife’s iPhone headset most of the time and that works fine.  At first I was annoyed that RIM changed from 2.5mm to 3.5mm, given the number of 2.5mm headsets I’d acquired over the years – but now I’m happy having realised that I now only need to carry a single headset for the bold, laptop and my car GPS.

Battery life

Seems less than the 8800 but then that’s no surprise.  I’ve not had an issue with running out of power yet.

Charger/Cradle

Before the Bold even arrived I bought a couple of the cute little charger units, one for my desk and one for my bedside table.  The external charger pickups on the Bold case mean that it’s incredibly easy to drop the bold into it’s cradle, which means I do it more often.  The really big plus though is that when charging the Bold displays a great clock – very useful.  The software also supports the concept of bedside mode, which makes for a great alarm clock, which I have configured to automatically switch off all of the radios as well as wake me up to music.

Micro SD card

I have an 8GB Micro SD card crammed full of music, Podcasts and videos.  Larger cards are supported but 8GB is cost effective.  I found inserting and removing the SD card VERY difficult, eventually resorting to tweezers.

WIFI

WIFI is a nice addition to the 3G radio, with the 3G radio off, most – but not all – applications continue to work over WIFI, and downloading software’s is much faster.

Interface and built in applications

Theme

The new theme is very nice, choosing to take a more stylised approach than the easier to identify iPhone icons, although I’m sure that an iPhone like theme will be available already for download. 

So far I’m happy with the built in Precision Silver theme, although I did quickly copy most of the applications out of folders and into the home folder.  I don’t have enough additional applications to make folders that worthwhile yet, I have kept the folders for downloads and games, although downloads that I find really useful get quickly copied to the home folder.

Applications

In the order that they appear in my home folder

Email

The new screen and the super crisp fonts make emails a joy to read (well some of them anyway) and various other minor tweaks make the whole reading experience simpler.

Calendar

A bit of a disappointment, I was hoping for a better week view that would take advantage of the new screen solution (third party products will fill the gap) but it’s fast and functional and makes good use of keyboard shortcuts for jumping around and switching views.

Browser

The improvement in the browser is great, making it so much more usable than the 8800 was, of course the WIFI/3G helps.  It’s not quite in the same league as the iPhone browser which feels almost desktop like, but for me the Bold’s browser does the job I want it to, its fast, following links and clicking on buttons is very precise with the trackball, it seems pretty compatible with everything I’ve used it for, zooming is fairly quick and easy. 

On my desktop and laptop I rely totally on Roboform for password management, which means the only password I know is my master password.  This is a major issue for password protected web sites and I’m looking forward to a solution for automatically entering passwords into web pages.  Roboform has a Blackberry app available, but it doesn’t support auto password entry yet.

Twitterberry

I’m a massive fan of twitter – my web command line, and main social networking/communications tool.  Twitter was the first application I installed and it really takes advantage of the Bold’s screen.  The latest version of Twitterberry is great as well.

Google search

Being one click away from a Google search is just so convenient, so it’s right up there in terms of my most used applications

Sametime Connect – Instant messaging

CSC (my employer) uses Sametime for instant messaging and presence and it works superbly on the Blackberry, it’s not noticeably better on the bold.  CSC push installs Sametime into the downloads folder, I copied it to my home folder straight away.

Media Player

I reprogrammed the left hand side convenience key to start the media player, which I mainly use for Podcasts, video and music.  The media player is pretty good, massively improved for video and now seems to support the videos targeted at iPods, the video quality is excellent.  Playing Podcasts is reasonable, it doesn’t bookmark, but the media player keeps your place so long as your don’t reboot the device. 

If you browse for Podcasts in the file system you get the option to play a single file, a folder or all the files in a folder and the file browser allows you to delete Podcasts and videos that you have listened to which is very useful.

Audio quality is good, but lots of Podcasts don’t have the gain very high – ie they are quiet even at max volume, removing the safety limit on max volume helps here.

I copy media files straight from the PC to the Bold, no Blackberry Desktop Manager required.

Camera

The Camera is ok, as described above, it’s made a big difference to me and it’s made even more useful with the Flickr uploader application and through the integration with Twitter via Twitpic support in Twitterberry (lets you upload a photo and publish a link via Twitter) which is good fun.

Contacts

No real changes that I noticed, although by installing Taskify, it’s now really easy to turn an email into a task which is very useful as I do a lot of email processing on my Blackberry and also send a lot of tasks to myself as emails.

GPSed

A great application for saving GPS tracks for later sharing or personal use.  They can be uploaded to a website and linked to photo’s taken to illustrate the route.  I used this a lot on the 8800, not yet used it in anger on the Bold, but looking forward to it given the Bold’s Camera.

Google maps

Just keeps getting better and better!  Ultra useful application, I especially love the ability to search for – say – nearby Cafes and then get instructions for how to get to them from my current location, and the awesome satellite view, which has saved me from getting lost many times.

Fastforward

Autoforwards by mobile number to my home office phone whenever I plugin the USB, which I almost always do at home. 

gMail

Access to my personal gMail account

YahooMail

Access to my personal yahoo email account

Flickr uploader

Auto upload photo’s to Flickr, these photo’s can be linked to routes uploaded using GPSed

Profiles

Discovered that “press and hold” Q will switch the phone into Quiet mode, press and hold again switches back to Normal, very handy.  I also like the bedside mode.

Clock/Alarm clock

I know it’s sad but the auto display of a really nice clock, alarm clock or countdown timer when I pop the phone into it charging cradle is a small but very useful feature.

Remember the Milk

Integrates my RTM account with Blackberry Tasks, Twitter integration and Email integration is also good with RTM, so I have lots of ways to get tasks to the Blackberry and then back into Lotus Notes.

Documents to go

A massive improvement over the 8800 and I particularly like the Text only view which is easy to read and fast to navigate.  No support for viewing ink annotations though.

I’ve known for years that I will eventually switch to Firefox, the richness of the extensibility appeals too much to a tinkering power user like myself, but it’s taken me literally years to get comfortable enough with it to drop Maxthon as my day to day browser.

To date Maxthon has been just too slick and efficient, especially when combined with Foxit for PDF files (and I have a lot of those!!)

Anyway – last night by the pool I spent a good couple of hours learning FF3 and Acrobat and tweaking and extending it and I’m reasonably happy.  These are the addons that got me there:

1. http://www.roboform.com/ I have hundreds of passwords and form definitions in RoboForm and it works with IE, maxthon and FF and replicates between my different PCs very easily using SugarSync.  It’s essential!!
2. http://scholten.arno.googlepages.com/ Adds “bookmark this page” to the bookmark menu, this is a standard feature in Maxthon, browse to the folder you want to save the bookmark in and click.
3. http://delicious.com/ I don’t use delicious (too lazy) , but this addin promises to synch up with FF.
4. http://www.downloadhelper.net/ I do a lot of video watching offline, plus I can’t stand the stop start involved in buffering so an easy way to download video is key
5. http://www.evernote.com/ I’m loving evernote, Maxthon had a plugin to allow easy capture of web pages or regions of pages, so does FF
6. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jchien/code/ftu.html  In maxthon I could just highlight URL’s in web pages and open then by drag and drop, this is the closest FF3 compatible addon I could find, saves a lot of cut and paste, and allows you to control whether the link opens in new window, new tab or existing tab.
7. http://flashblock.mozdev.org/  When I transferred my reading list of 30 tabs from maxthon to FF3 I found that FF was using 40% cpu, whereas Maxthon was using less than 10%.  Flash was to blame, this addon blocks all Flash from executing until you click on it – wonderful!
8. http://www.foxmarks.com/ – Synchronises bookmarks and tags between multiple machines – I like the idea of tags!!
9. http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/ – One click proxy control.  I have a local proxy and work proxies and this makes switching trivial
10. http://sessionmanager.mozdev.org/ – Not sold on this one,  Maxthon’s groups were so easy and allowed tabs to be added to existing groups and it was easy to see the content of a group and open just one page.  Session manager seems to do some of this, but so far found no way to appends a set of tabs to an existing session, or to look inside a session to see its contents.  Also I don’t like the way that a session includes all my windows by default.  I tend to have multiple task specific windows open, and I want each to be its own session.
11. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/380 Swifttabs, allows me to define keys to move between tabs, delete them etc.  I have left and right arrows for moving previous and next tabs and Delete for deleting a tab.  Disables the key assignments when you are in a form field.
12. http://tmp.garyr.net/ Tabmixplus, lots of little fixes to makes things more Maxthon like, basically I like things to open in new tabs, in the background most of the time rather than replacing my current tab.  This allows me to set all of these options.
13. http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/TabSidebar Shows this cute little sidebar (I actually have it at the bottom of the screen) with live images of the all of the tabs.  It only displays 6 tabs at a time, but its still useful for keeping track of several windows that are all updating.
14. http://n31m4d.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/tab-url-copier-for-firefox-3/  Right click on a tab and this useful addon copies a list of all the currently open tabs into the clipboard,  I used it to generate this list
15. http://www.abstractpath.com/powermenu/  The only other thing I needed to get off maxthon was a way to keep FF in the background.  For example when I’m scanning feeds in FeedDemon I click on links that I want to read and in Maxthon they open up while maxthon is minimised,  in FF3 each time I click FF open’s up in front of FeedDemon and I need to Alt Tab FeedDemon back in front.  But by using PowerMenu I’m able to right click on the FeedDemon task bar entry and make it Always On Top,  that does the trick.

Outstanding wish list

1. A way to force certain URL’s to open in IE but within the Firefox chome, just like Maxthon does (Maxthon is essentially a shell around IE)
2. A different session manager, that operates at the window level, allows me to see and manipulate the content of saved sessions, and add tabs to saved sessions.

I’ve hardly done any blogging since I started to use Twitter so as an
experiment I thought I would enable email blogging on my wordpress account
and see if I blog any more often now that I have no excuse!

Open source has always been difficult at Microsoft, they’ve struggled with how to use its obvious value as a development and delivery model, but the SharePoint podcasting kit seems to be a great example of how to do it right. 

Although SharePoint itself is unlikely to ever be Open Source there’s great value in stimulating an Open Source culture around developing on top of the platform.  Podcasting is a good example because although SharePoint provides some good plumbing in the form of support for taking a document library of media files and surfacing this as an RSS feeds with enclosures, it didn’t have a polished solution.  The same can be said for most of the SharePoint “applications”, great platform – ok solution.  If you’re interested in Podcasting, this is definitely worth checking out, but there’s much more for SharePoint going on at Codeplex.

What Can You Do With Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS)?:

• Listen and watch audio/video podcasts, anywhere on your PC or mobile device (Zune, SmartPhone, or any podcasting device)
• Share content by producing your own audio/video podcasts and publish them on PKS on your own.
• Connect and engage with podcasters via your integrated instant messaging program
• Find the most relevant content using the five star rating system, tag cloud, search engine and provide your feedback via comments.
• Get automatic podcast updates by subscribing to RSS feeds fully compatible with Zune and other podcasting devices
  • Simple RSS feed based on a defined podcast series
  • Simple RSS feed based on a person
  • Dynamic RSS feed based on search results
• Play podcasts in real-time using Microsoft® Silverlight™ and progressive playback
• Retrieve instant ROI and metrics with the ability to track the number of podcasts downloaded and/or viewed, instant feedback via rating system and comments, and subscribers via the RSS feed
• Access the richness of SharePoint to extend the solution: workflows, community sub-sites, access rights, editorial and more
• Customize your own PKS User Experience

I picked up a few useful bits of information during iForum this week:

1. Citrix predict that between 30 and 50% of people will be mobile by 2010
2. Some form of rights management is required when delivering to unmanaged PCs.  For example XenApp has a type of rights management, ie it can disable cut and paste, save to local PC disk, Print etc based on the results of a NAC check.  Microsoft have a much richer rights management solution, but its not currently integrated with NAC, nor can it be applied to all applications.  My thought perhaps SoftGrid execution environment could be NAC and rights management enabled, and therefore prevent certain things on unmanaged PCs
3. 10% of people poled in a couple of sessions had increasing IT budgets
4. 60% of people are expected to be working either from home or in branch offices by 2010
5. There were 1.2B mobile phones in 2007, expected to be 1B SmartPhones by 2010
6. 47% of companies now consider data protection now more important than perimeter security, again another hint at the potential growth of rights management if it could be made seamless enough for people who have rights!
7. An IDC study was quoted that predicted that knowledge workers would be working with 60% of their information sourced from outside the company within 5 years.  I can really relate to this, I think I’m way beyond that ratio already and this >60% is part of my personal knowledge management system, not my companies, although some small part of it is relevant to share.