Steve's Seaside Life

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Personal Information Disaster!

I wrote this post then lost it!  So this is just a place holder to remind me to get around to writing it again.

links I need are

http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html

http://esw.w3.org/topic/PersonalInformationDisaster

http://www.kde.org/

http://oopm.openoffice.org/

 

http://news.com.com/2009-1016-5103226.html?tag=nl

 

http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000021.html

 

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2004/office2004.aspx?pid=highlights

 

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/17.html#a1025

 

http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween11.html

and my own blog entries

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Which Office Suite?

Which Office Suite? Is shaping up to be a fascinating decision making process.  I am not ready to expose all of my thinking on this topic but it goes something like this:

 

  1. Some people think its easy, MS Office alternatives are cheaper and most people don’t use the bells and whistles in Office so people will migrate provided the alternatives meet peoples core needs.

  2. I think its more complex than this and as a minimum the costs of migration, lost productivity, and compatibility and rework need to be factored in

  3. Intertia is a big one in Microsofts favour, for a business that has SW Assurance or an EA, the decision is deferred probably for at least 2-3 years after their EA expires and probably longer if they do a lot of data interchange.  That probably means 4-5 years from now!

  4. But this is the trivial stuff.  Sure direct and indirect cost comparison is important but I want to consider:

    1. How do people really use Office and is it really true that people only use a small amount of the functionality, and if they do, do they all use a different small amount?

    2. I also want to consider …

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More integration of Microsoft Products?

Microsoft Watch describes the trend at Microsoft towards more integration of Microsoft Server products.  Although the areas of integrations described don’t seem that great to me:

  • Management packs for all Windows Server System products that will allow them to be managed by Microsoft Operations Manager 2005;

  • Windows Installer and Windows Update support for all Windows Server System products; and

  • Consistent methodologies and prescriptive guidance support for all members of the Windows Server System family

There’s more on this topic here:

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3359261

However whilst the Architect in me likes the idea of integrated products, built in a layered infrastructure fashion, with each layer isolated by standards, I don’t see this happening with Microsoft.  What I see is ever tighter integration between products, locking the products into a set that all need to be purchased from MS, and all upgraded together to get real business advantage.  At enterprise scale linked upgrades of products always spells trouble, (making the business case, getting the agreement, managing the disruption, risk), and the assumption of everything from Microsoft is equally troubling, unless their is a REALLY compelling value proposition, and that’s definitely not evident today. 

Loosely integrated products by contrast, ie those that rely on stable …

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The Joy of Working from Home

A little book that concentrates mainly on opportunities for working from home.  If you already have a job and are looking to work from home then its not so appropriate.  But it does give a few hints on issues you might face working from home like feelings of isolation etc.  Not my best find on the subject.  In fact I would recommend te following web site as an alternative to any of the books I have read:

http://www.flexibility.co.uk/index.htm

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Choosing a PDA – can it really be so difficult!

I used to have an IPAQ years ago and despite using it a lot in the beginning I gradually stopped using it mainly for the following reasons:

 

  1. I did not like having to sync it

  2. It was too big to carry around everywhere

  3. I did not have a case that gave me instant access to it when carrying it around, so it tended to be in a bag

  4. The battery life deteriorated to the point where it could not be relied upon

  5. It did not have enough storage space without a great big expansion jacket add-on

 

Then along came a Blackberry which I instantly fell in love with, I have talked about my love affair with my Blackberry before in my gadget blog.  However I recently started working from home and the subscription costs to the Blackberry service no longer seemed worthwhile so I decided that I would take that money and invest it in something that was a higher priority, I decided I would try a traditional Palm or Pocket PC PDA again.

 

The process of choosing is a classic example of the tyranny of too much choice.

 

My experience went something …

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 …