Steve's Seaside Life

Monthly Archive: May 2004

All Posts / Chronic Illness

AOSD Flare Status update

AOSD Flare Status update
My current Adult Onset Stills Disease flare seem to be nearly over now and I should be back at work in a couple of weeks.  This is my longest flare, lasting from Mid January to the end of May.  Its not been too severe because now I am diagnosed the drug treatments keep me fairly stable, but its not very comfortable and its difficult to work through the pain, fatigue and difficulty concentrating. 

For those of you who are interested, probably only fellow AOSD sufferers I have attached my ‘end of flare report’

All Posts / Chronic Illness

Document all about AOSD

I came across across a medical paper on AOSD the other day, but it was so full of jargon I couldn’t follow it.  I created an annotated version which I have posted here in case it’s of any use.  Not being a medical person myself don’t take it too seriously...

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Another short article that describes whats important about RSS

This site has just appeared http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com it includes the following bullet list of things that make up RSS.

RSS is…

1. A format.

2. Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.

3. Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.

4. Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.

5. Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.

6. Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters — that distribute news and opinion in RSS.

7. Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.

8. A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.

The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.

RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It’s big. A lot bigger than a format.

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My personal information processing pipeline!

In this blog I talked about a generic concept of operations associated with a conceptual information lifecycle. 

however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and  subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved

In this article talk about my personal application of tools and techniques to that lifecycle.

  1. Publishing, I used to use radio for all of my web publishing, either directly through the Radio Userland Web UI, or through MailEdit which provides an email interface which I can use through my BlackBerry.  MailEdit uses a number of directives to define for example the title for the entry and the categories that it belongs to.  I use autotext on the BlackBerry to make entering these easier.  I now use Blogmedia that uses the BlogWare SW.  I tend to write the entries in Word though because the screen area is bigger and because of the spell checking, and then just paste and post.  You can read my blog here

  2. Location, like most people I locate RSS feeds …

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Information Bridge Framework

My first thought when I cam across IBF, (who could miss it!), was that it was another Microsoft thick client solution.  I am still not sure but it looks like it might be a bit more creative than that for the following reasons:

  1. I have always been a big advocate of standardizing the infrastructure capability layer and integrating it with the line of business layer.  That way an enterprise has its infrastructure in common, regardless of which process or division of the company you work in.  IBF looks like it addresses that need pretty well

  2. I have also felt that the ad-hoc processes and information and collaborative processes are under emphasized in businesses that have a lot of formal mega processes that they like to optimize.  I talked about this in another blog entry.  IBF allows you to integrate ad-hoc and formal business processes.

  3. It seems that a lot of thought has gone into making the maintenance of the IBF client environment as ‘thin’ as possible.  It still requires a client component to get started though.  I need to look into this more to be sure but it looks hopeful.

  4. Its all about consuming web services, caching them …

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WS-Federation and other Web Services, an area where MS seem to be getting things right?

PC World talks a bit about Web Services for identity management.  The list of vendors demonstrating interoperability, (Netegrity, Oblix, RSA Security, OpenNetwork Technologies, and Ping Identity), as well as MS and IBM is pretty impressive. 

Web Services seems to be one of the few areas where MS seems to be getting its story straight, if my impression is correct:

 

1.     Very involved in the standards process

2.     Perhaps to the point of dominance of the standard process?

3.     Building great tools and middleware in VS and Indigo, so that their platform is the best way to implement the standards

4.     Building an innovative client environment for the caching and presentation of web services, WinFS and Avalon/WinFS Shell

5.     Integrating Office and Collaboration processes with line of business processes, Information Bridge and InfoPath

 

That’s not to say that there are no problems in these products.  But the story looks fairly coherent at least.  Have a look at this MS document if you want more details.

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Exchange Futures

Infoworld talks to David Thompson, a Microsoft corporate vice president who has been in charge of the Exchange Server group since early this year.   It maybe just me but I get the distinct impression that the Exchange Group is in a bit of a state.  They don’t seem to really know where storage is going because of the flux around Longhorn server, and they don’t seem to know where to take Public Folders and other Document management like capabilities because they are dropping the old store and because of ‘competition’ from SharePoint services.  Core email does not have much growth potential in it, so all that seems to be left to work on is Edge Servers!  Not a very exiting roadmap!!

Last year I thought that the ‘big thinking’ that must be going on in Microsoft was starting to pay off in terms of well architected products that did not overlap and were being rebuilt from the ground up.  Now I am not so sure,  I see the delays in the foundation layers, ie SQL Server and Longhorn Server, triggering panic in the Office tools and Collaboration space, who are probably starting to think more short term about customer …

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Longhorn Search

Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch talks a bit about Longhorn search and links to a Channel 9 video clip where you get some glimpses of how search is going to be implemented in Longhorn.  What’s clear right now is that they are:   1.     Planning for a search experience that operates...

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RSS and its role in Information Management

The Problem

 

Internet users have largely given up trying to keep up to date with the vast amount of content being published on their ‘favourite’ web sites, let alone the slow moving sites that they need to track but are not motivated to visit ‘just in case’.  Portal vendors have tried to help by allowing users to aggregate bits of many web sites together, to minimise the number of web sites a person needs to access, particularly in a process context.

 

Proprietary approaches to Syndication, or the publish and subscribe model to information access has been tried several times on the internet, taking the form of for example Internet Explorer channels, and PointCast personalised news feeds.  Avantgo continues to find a niche publishing channels to PDA’s.

 

Email has become flooded with newsletters, status updates, just in case cc emails, and application specific notifications.

 

RSS to the rescue

 

Recently however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and  subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved…

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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Just finished my first read of this book, (it really needs reading twice), and found it pretty good.  Unfortunately it also left me being very frustrated because the methodology proposed is so well supported by the outlook Add-in, and I have to use Lotus Notes.  There is a template for Notes,...