Steve's Seaside Life

Steve's Seaside Life Blog

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Tablet PC Podcast

James, author of the jkOnTheRun weblog, covering all thing mobile, emailed me yesterday to let me know about his new podcast on all things Tablet.  I have recently been getting into podcasts and listen to them when I am out walking or swimming.  This time though I listened to James at 5* speed in Windows Media Player at home while I followed the products and sites he mentioned in my browser.  All in all the combination of the 5* speed and the excellent content made for a very useful 10–15 minutes.  Podcasting has definately got a future!

Check out the podcast, James covers a wide range of topics, including: 

  • The under utilisation of speech recognition
  • Inking strategies and the effect of inking on the creative process
  • Alternative pen input applications including ritePen, OrangeGuava and a rumour of a Tablet enabled version of ActiveWords.

Here is a list of the main sites he mentioned, snipped from his blog.

Tablet PC Buzz– Spencer Goad, Rob Bushway
Tablet PC Talk– Chris de Herrera
What is New– Lora Heiny
Tablet PC Weblog– Marc Orchant
Tablet PC Questions– Layne Heiny (newsgroup)
Tablet PC Post– Lora & Layne; …

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Report writing – second edition

Imagine my surprise when the day after writing this post on my frustrations with the existing medium for writing and delivering reports, I see a very similar post on the subject of writing books and insightful comment.  Although in this case the frustration is not so much with the paper medium (which has worked and continues to work pretty well) but with the fact that we have not exploited the electronic medium.  The following extract talks to the lost opportunity, without which Joe does not believe eBooks will really take off:

The biggest barrier I see is this recognition that an e-book needs to be developed with the delivery platform in mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could introduce the concept of a hyperlink to a printed book so that someone could just touch a phrase they don’t understand and they’re magically taken to a definition of that phrase or the first place it appears in the book? Instead, you have to flip back to the index, look it up, and then jump to that page. Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to keep a thumb on your original page so that you don’t lose your …

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Maxthon gets RSS

MaxthonrssI am just blown away by Maxthon, far and away my favorite browser.  Even more impressive is the fact that its primarily developed by one person with a community of plug-in developers.  of course its developed upon the foundation of IE, which provides its core functions but the level of innovation is staggering.  It reinforces my belief that a few good programmers who understand their market are better than a team ten times the size.  If you want to read about productivity in programmers, read peopleware, but if you want the best browser get Maxthon and donate.  What promoted me to write today, RSS reader integration.  But there are loads of other great features I have written about in the past.

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Could Microsoft Kill Linux?

I have speculated before on the subject of Microsoft’s options concerning competing with Linux, but it seems to receive little serious debate, so I thought I must be off track, either technically or commercially.  In my view Microsoft would extend its Services For Unix product to comply with the Linux Standard Base requirements and would therefore support Linux applications.  For many corporates this would be a dream come true, access to all of the Open Source applications that support either Windows, Linux or both, and of course it would also benefit both users and developers.  However Microsoft have told me they have no interest in doing this (but they would wouldn’t they).  So in that context it’s interesting to see this article by John Dvorak, How to Kill Linux, where he says:

The immediate usefulness of Linux running under Windows is obvious. You can use all the Windows drivers for all the peripherals that don’t run under Linux. Drivers have always been an issue with Linux as PC users have gotten spoiled with Windows driver support. Today’s user wants to grab just about anything and not worry about installing it and making it work.

That said, there is no …

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Report writing

I have spent probably 30% of my working life writing reports and presentations, and now the thought of writing them fills me with dread.  At this point those who know me probably think I am going to write about arthritic hands, but no, its the medium that’s the problem.  Having started to write a blog it’s difficult to contemplate another medium for writing, and having started working with mind maps and concept maps it’s difficult to go back to sequential presentations.  I would happily accept wiki’s for collaborative authoring as an alternative to blogs, but blogs have the amazing benefit of providing the author with full control of content and presentation, and allow the author to build not just on their own knowledge but on the knowledge of others, “on the shoulders of giants” and all that.  On the subject of giants Don Box motivated me to write this little post.

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Linux models the IT desktop

I have worked in desktop computing for many years and promoted the need for different desktop capabilities to meet the needs of different user communities.  I have always sought to address this with my corporate customers, whilst also trying to ensure some common enterprise application delivery capability was shared by all, in my company we call this a WorkStyle.  I was therefore greatly encouraged to see that The Open Source Development Lab last week released four specifications for its Desktop Linux Capabilities document, which outlines what requirements a Linux distribution should have to meet the needs of certain desktop Linux users.  This document describes the topic in more detail.

File Attachment: OSDL_DTL_Capabilities 1.0.pdf (281 KB)

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Thinking

I am being bombarded by information and initiatives that relate to thinking from all directions.  I thought it would be interesting to list the main ones and try and identify the many different perspectives.

Structure and rigour.  It all started with David Pollard’s structured problem solving process, which although not a perfect fit for me was an interesting insight into how formal and rigorous the process could be.

Quick and intuitive.  Then I read reviews of books that discussed rapid decision making, I have not explored them further but they support my gut feeling that my intuition is a valuable skill that I should nurture.  I don’t have a very good memory for facts, but am good at remembering relationships. I have specifically avoided learning memory improvement techniques because I worry that whilst I will be better at remembering names my intuition and innovation will suffer.

Innovation.  I came across a blog entry on types of innovation, quickly followed by one of my colleagues sending me a presentation, which led to me exploring innovation processes, in particular TRIZ and some of the tools that support it. 

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XForms and InfoPath

Momentum is building around forms.  At a recent panel discussion Bill Gates was asked about all of Microsoft’s different forms technologies and indicated that the InfoPath technology was the best long term bet.  Here is the full text, but this is the crucial snipit:

BILL GATES: No, I think that hits it. They- today, a little bit you have to think of HTML, and then our rich forms where InfoPath is the one that’s definitely on the rise there. What we want to get to is where InfoPath’s at the high-level, then we have all these rich controls you can use, and underneath we have the Avalon runtime. We have a roadmap for InfoPath where it gets richer and richer, embraces our rich controls, and sits on the latest presentation system. We also have some ways that if you do your work in InfoPath in future versions, we’ll be able to project that onto classic HTML, although today you have to think, do you want to be pure HTML or be able to assume InfoPath? That’s the one that will rise in usage even as we’re compatible with everything we’ve got.

As Chief Software Architect, drawing these roadmaps and …

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Decision Making

As a person who likes to research it’s always worried me how rapidly some people make decisions.  At the same time I have also found that my gut feel and instinct is very accurate and so that has given me some comfort.  There are a couple of books that address this topic and Thinking faster discusses both, as well as adding its own perspective.

What I did not understand until last night was that I had established in my own mind the amount of information I needed to begin making a decision.  I went with some friends to see Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.  In Blink, his latest book, Gladwell evaluates how people make quick decisions based on less than complete evidence, and the risks and opportunities that present themselves in making decisions like that.  What I took away from his talk were two things:  first, people do make good decisions with over a short period of time with little information if they have a lot of experience in the topic, and two, most of us have biases that color our decision making that we may not even be aware of.

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The future of support

Me and some of my friends have been debating the subject of “how to” support, which represents a significant amount of a service providers costs.  We have tried the approach of centrally managed knowledge bases, but they only take us so far.  My view that the virtual Internet community and the internal intranet community of peers will become increasingly important.  Also the richness of the support experience will increase as well.  Eric Mack provides a great example with his pod cast on delegated task management, and even better a discussion thread has started that refines his advice.  Others are going beyond the podcast to video and screen-casting.  The progress in this area can be tracked monthly, which is really quite amazing.