Steve's Seaside Life

Daily Archive: September 22, 2004

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Tim Bray worries about WS-*

Tim and others are starting to worry that WS-* is getting out of control:

No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure

Now I want to make it clear that I am no expert on this, but I have followed the debate.  It seems to be that the reason that this stuff is getting so complex is so that developers don’t have to worry about it.  What the heck do I mean by that; well I mean that these spec’s are not meant to be implemented by developers, they will be implemented by the tools and libraries that the developers use.  At least that’s the impression I get when Don Box talks about Indigo.  I think he said something like, “I spent the last n years, before I joined Microsoft,  worrying about the plumbing”, then he said something like “Since I joined Microsoft I am working to make all that knowledge about the plumbing completely irrelevant”. 

My guess is that without a complete and comprehensive set of specifications, the tools …

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VMware ACE, I like it and use it

VMware have just announced ACE, this is how they describe it:

VMware ACE is an enterprise solution for IT desktop managers who want to rapidly provision standardized and secure PC environments throughout the extended enterprise. VMware ACE installs easily, improving the manageability, security and cost-effectiveness of any industry standard PC. VMware ACE enables IT desktop managers to apply enterprise IT policies to a virtual machine containing an operating system, enterprise applications, and data to create an isolated PC environment known as an “assured computing environment”. VMware assured computing environments are self-policing, protect enterprise data, and enable safe access to enterprise resources.

I like the idea, I have been using VMWare myself for exactly this requirement.  On one of my home servers that sits on my home network I have a Windows XP VM, configured with corporate firewall, AV products, locked down configuration and VPN client.  I use this VM to connect to the company network. 

This has two advantages, The company network is pretty well isolated from my home network and I am well isolated from it, (since its pretty big and represents a fairly large threat).  I would prefer to be able to just fire up a Windows Terminal …

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All the buzz about weblogs is really about one thing: Making publishing to the web as easy as writing an email

Or so says a really interesting presentation posted here http://www.37signals.com/blogprez/ but blogging for me means much more to me than that.  It’s about being able to craft for an external audiance, a view onto what I am doing, what I think is important, and why I think its important.  Even though my blog is essentially for an external audiance, I often find myself posting articles to help me shape my ideas, or as reminders of things that I want to work on in the future.  Its suprising the extent to which my blog has become a sort of personal reference library. 

I have never sustained a Journal before, but my blog is now probably the longest lived personal productivity tool, and personal development initiative I have ever used, so their must be something to its more than easy publishing.

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The more data you have, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why have data?

Microsoft Researchers have an answer for this old, slightly twisted riddle. They’ve put together a nifty interface that will find all the data on your PC that you need, be it email, documents, tablet notes or spreadsheets. You can find all the data that people have sent to you, all the Web pages you’ve ever seen, and all the attachments you’ve ever forgotten to save. Its called Stuff I’ve seen and you can read about it here.

It’s an important concept in Personal Knowledge Management.  I personally have been using X1 for about 6 months and also use Lookout to seacrh my RSS feeds.  I find the two incredibly useful and routinely find things now that I would never have tried to even find before.  The level of re-use I am now achieving is significantly greater. 

I figure these tools probably save me an hour a week, thats one impressive ROI, and X1/Lookout don’t do everything that Microsoft are promising.

There is a downside though, I suspect that these capabilities will only work best when the products your use to create, manipulate, views and store the data all come from Microsoft. 

Not suprisingly the Open Source community are …