Links for 03-19-2012

• 10 Tips for Data Visualization
• It’s the battery, stupid: The looming 4G smartphone crisis | PandoDaily - In general, I think the market rewards svelteness over long battery life. For my personal taste, smartphones don't have long enough battery life--especially those without replaceable batteries (although I don't think replacement batteries are a panacea.
• The End of Pax Papyra and the Fall of Big Paper - Forbes - Fascinating read.
• For most Prudential shopping center businesses, two-day blackout means lots of red ink - The Boston Globe - Srsly? "Guests are what are valuable to us" but don't know if will discount/refund after no power/showers/etc?

CastingWords for podcast transcriptions

With my recent podcasting ramp up, I decided that I wanted to add transcripts. Podcasts are all well and good--and a lot of folks genuinely like to consume interviews that way--but others would just as soon read. And, of course, there are search-ability advantages to a text version as well.

Now I wasn't about to do this myself. Transcribing takes a fair bit of time even for a fast touch typist with the right gear (which I am not and don't have). So, I asked and Googled around and decided to give an outfit called CastingWords a shot.

You can see the results here. I only did some very light editing--mostly for formatting in the blog post (changing some paragraph breaks and the like). All the technical language, even non-inutitive stuff like spelling "Basel" correctly, was handled flawlessly as was the random capitalization that afflicts so many IT industry terms like JBoss. To be sure, I gave them a well-edited and audible file to work with, but the results are nonetheless top-notch.

Pricing for 6-day turnaround was $1.50 per minute of podcast time. (My only--minor--beef with the service was that they took about 7 days. Not a big deal.)

The behind-the-scenes at CastingWords is quite interesting. They have a workflow that leverages Amazon's Mechanical Turk, splitting audio files into chunks and having them worked on by both transcribers and "editors." The idea is that there's a system of checks to ensure a quality finished product. (This also means that the cost is doubtless higher than if you were to just use Mechanical Turk on your own, but presumably you get a more consistent result. For my purposes, CastingWords' price is low enough that it's not worth spending much time to shave a few more cents.)

 

Links for 03-16-2012

• The 25 Happiest Animals In The World
• A Look at DeltaCloud: The Multi-Cloud API
• The World's Most Ethical Companies - Forbes - Must say, 2 (of the handful) of IT companies on this most ethical list seem... interesting... choices
• Reality Check on Ubuntu's Enterprise Claims - An analysis of Mark Shuttleworth's latest Ubuntu claims by @jzb on @RWW << tl;dr The claims are very iffy
• Is there a Plan B if Windows 8's Metro fails? | ZDNet - IMO the whole question of the degree to which touch & traditional desktop interfaces can be brought together is underappreciated. >> "Not only that, but it seems like the entire OS was really not designed for desktop computing. If you don’t have a PC that is touch UI enabled or has human interface devices that are touch-optimized, most of you are not really going to get a ton of value from running Windows 8."
• Cloudcamp - An Unconference for Cloud Computing - Do you have Good #Cloud Kung Fu? Take survey and find out. ITPI is having fun with serious research.
• The TSA's Insane Budget And Woeful Track Record | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
• Transformer fire sends black smoke into streets near Back Bay Hilton; wide swath of the city is plunged into darkness after power is cut - Metro Desk - Local news updates from The Boston Globe - Looks like my choice to head home after #Directions12 rather than grab dinner first was a good decision
• After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses - NYTimes.com - RT @apatrizio: RIP the Encyclopedia Britannica print edition. << Inevitable I guess but still wow & a bit sad
• Why I left Google - JW on Tech - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
• Server virtualisation: From sprawl to stall - CIO UK Magazine - RT @AndiMann: "From sprawl to stall" - Freeform's @Dale_Vile on virtualization to #cloud (via @CIO_Magazine) #VMstall
• Oracle has a cloud computing secret — Tech News and Analysis - Oracle's pricing problem with the cloud
• Instagram - RT @karaswisher: People will stand in line for anything at sxsw. It's like USSR but with hipsters.

Links for 03-12-2012

• The PC Is Dead ... Again - Forbes - Smart, nuanced piece.
• What ‘Angry Birds’ Teaches Us About Sales | BostInno - Amusing but also insightful.
• Google Lat Long: Exploring 1938 San Francisco through aerial photography in Google Earth
• Something’s Unraveling, Alright | Matt Thomas - Nice sarcasm.
• Introducing the Symantec Smartphone Honey Stick Project | Symantec Connect Community - "Maybe you think that having a 50/50 chance of getting a phone back is a glass half-full situation. Sorry, but I have to drain your glass: Even the people who attempted to return the phones made attempts to view the data on them. In fact, 96 percent of our lost smartphones were accessed by their finders."

Podcast Post-production in Python

As I've begun ramping up my podcast production a bit, I've also started running into some error-prone tedium associated with getting all the files and their associated incantations updated and distributed to all the right places. To help matters, I put together some Python code that automates some of the process. By design, the code doesn't push anything live at this point--although it would be fairly straightforward to extend it to do so.

The script:

1. Gets information such as duration from MP3 file
2. Creates an XML file for insertion into an iTunes podcast feed
3. Uploads previously-created MP3 and OGG files to Amazon S3
4. Creates a draft blog post on Blogger with a label (tag)

Given my workflow, I still need to:

1. Update master iTunes podcast feed XML file
2. Upload edited file to S3
3. Make the newly uploaded XML and MP3/OGG files public
4. Make Blogger post public

That may sound like a bit of manual work, but these are pretty quick and straightforward steps relative to the actions taken by the script. For example, the script gets the file size of the MP3 file and calculates the duration, which are needed for the iTunes feed.

You'll need to install boto (https://github.com/boto/boto.git) for S3 access and mpeg1audio   (https://github.com/Ciantic/mpeg1audio/) to extract the duration from the MP3 file. You'll also need to setup the appropriate accounts on Blogger and S3 and set a number of global variables before you can use the script.

Download code

Cloud Security Chat with Richard Morrell and Ellen Newlands

Our Red Hat cloud team was all together in Westford, MA this week, which gave me an opportunity to sit down with Richard Morrell and Ellen Newlands to discuss security trends in cloud computing. Richard is our new cloud evangelist in EMEA (Europe/Middle East/Africa) so he's basically my counterpart across the pond. Ellen's responsible for Red Hat's security products. They're both serious security experts with lots of experience. We talked about:

• Cloud standards
• Whether the cloud is "safe"
• The role of identity management
• Why application security matters

And more...

Listen to MP3 (13:43)

Listen to OGG (13:43)

Transcript

Gordon Haff: Hi, everyone, this is Gordon Haff, Cloud Evangelist with Red Hat. Today, I have two guests. We're going to talk about cloud security, which is something that always seems to be on everyone's minds. We have Richard Morrell, and Ellen Newlands. Richard, why don't you introduce yourself first?

Richard Morrell: Right, so I'm Richard Morrell. I'm the Cloud Evangelist doing the equivalent of Gordon in EMEA, but with a focus very much around cloud security and around application-level security for our ISVs and also our cloud provider partners.

Ellen Newlands: And I'm Ellen Newlands, and I'm doing product management for our certificate system, directory server, and the identity management features and functions that we've recently placed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Gordon: So Richard, I'm going to start off by asking you a question that probably gets your blood pressure up every time you see it in a news headline. Is the cloud safe?

Richard: I think the cloud is as safe as the vendor, the controls that are put in place, and also by the thought and the governance that goes into the development and the architecture of the systems that are deployed on cloud.
I think if we can look at the trailblazers in cloud who have started to move those applications and services into the virtualized environment, into the new world of elastic computing, we have a compelling story to tell, which needs people to start thinking about being courageous enough to start building the internal controls and processes to be able to think about the workloads they want to move to cloud to keep them safe.

Gordon: In other words, it's really a pretty meaningless question without any context.

Richard: What we're doing in cloud security is really no different to the security controls that we've used in the SOA environments traditionally within data centers and in on-premise data. What we need to think about is the cost in ownership of how we actually get to cloud, and once we get there, the management controls and the governance risk control piece that we as IT professionals are dear to as part and parcel of standard business-as-usual activities.

Gordon: Now, Ellen, you were just out at the RSA conference in San Francisco. We talked a little bit the other day, and there was really a lot of attention being paid to cloud out there. Admittedly cloud is a term that is applied to an awful lot of different things, but it does seem to be getting people thinking about security and governance in a somewhat different way.

Ellen: I found it very interesting that many of the IT professionals with a background in security who work for the larger companies, the enterprises, are thinking about what is the best way to take advantage of the cost benefits of the cloud. Some are sophisticated enough to do this quite wisely, and many others are looking for guidance. But clearly, there's no question that the economics of moving to the cloud are quite compelling. Everyone in this field is looking for the best way to maximize their return and minimize their risk of moving to the cloud.

Gordon: Now, we're starting to hear a little bit of discussion around standards in the cloud, in general, but since we've got security experts here, let's maybe focus specifically around cloud security standards. I guess I'd have a couple questions. First of all, does it matter? Secondly, what is happening out there?

Richard: The security standards in cloud have been dovetailed into a mishmash of risk issues, which people like the Cloud Security Alliance are absolutely critically involved. We have been working very, very closely with the CSA now for quite some time, and in past lives I've been pushing and promoting the cloud security matrixes. If none of you are already aware of this, I suggest you Google the words "security matrix" and "CSA," and you will find that there are over 80 individuals working out there, from the Basel, PCI-DSS, ISO, and the open-source community, building levels of controls that you can push to your applicable workloads, in whichever vertical that you happen to be working in, whether it's health, whether it's finance, to enable you to get a standing start in understanding what you need to be able to say to your CIO or your CFO with regards to who needs to sign off against what, and also the controls and matrixes that you need to push against the applicable standards you're building.

Gordon: Now, Richard, I think you touched on something which is I've certainly seen around cloud security. That is that the "security" word seems to get used, really, to cover a much broader range of risk mitigation and governance issues.

Richard: Sure.

Gordon: Ellen, you've obviously worked a lot around identity and access management. It seems that, for instance, those kind of technologies tend to get lumped under security, even though it means something very different from firewalls or protecting against SQL-based exploits or whatever.

Ellen: One of the things that's very common, especially as you're moving into the cloud, is you're moving beyond the borders of the traditional enterprise. You may find that your users are not your employees. So, you may be working with your partners, with your suppliers, with your consumers, your customers. One of the things about that is you want to know who is accessing what you put in the cloud, and you want to make sure that they are only accessing what they're allowed to. That is the security piece. Part of where the standards come in is that, when you move to the cloud, you want as much openness, interoperability, and as little lock-in as possible. What you're seeing in identity and access management is sets of standards that allow great flexibility and interoperability while still allowing you to know who is accessing your information, who has the privileges to access your information, and who, frankly, to blame if for some reason things may go wrong.

Gordon: Yeah. It's not really even just cloud. It's just the way computing, in general, has been evolving, so that the old-fashioned, 19th-century fort model of having this big, honking, strong wall to keep "them" out from the data center, really, increasingly doesn't apply to cloud. Not that it ever really applied all that well to traditional data centers either, given how many security breaches were traditionally done by employees, of course.

Ellen: Your average person now has so much computer power in their hands. You get an iPhone or a tablet of any kind and you find, as you say Gordon, that the walls around the enterprise, the walls around the data, are breaking down. There really is a consumerization of IT. People bring their own devices, people go to the cloud, and the organization has to securely enable that.

Gordon: It's really at the application level, as we've discussed, Richard.

Richard: Sure. The ability now for vendors to start developing the tools and the hooks that customers need to be able to develop security into those applications, to understand who is consuming what, but also to be able to patch control and to keep version control on the libraries and the binaries that you're using or the applications that you're using.
Red Hat came from a community background. We've grown on the ethos and the goodwill that's come from the open-source community, and also the maturity that we help bring to it. But what we see increasingly in the open-source community is greater granularity in the versions of PHP and Ruby and Python, to allow people to get to cloud faster.
It's really up to individuals who consume those technologies and those libraries to ensure that when you go to cloud that you work with your vendor to ensure that you have the latest, greatest patches working there, what your rolling maintenance period is, to make sure, and also to have a complex risk register so you understand, potentially, what that means from a data leakage or a data privacy, especially in Europe and especially in the USA.

I think, more, there's a level of maturity that a sys admin can have from a perspective in his organization, to go from zero to hero. Traditionally, the sys admin's been locked in a cupboard. Now, a sys admin can be an even more bigger hero in his organization, because the safety and security of the whole cloud operation sits on his shoulders daily.

Gordon: As these things scale up--and that's one of the consequences of cloud is that things are really happening at scale. It does seem that it becomes more and more important that you automate a lot of these processes.
Richard: Yeah, sure.

Gordon: Because you just can't keep up with all this stuff at scale.

Richard: No, you can't. If you look at the percentage of people who are using OpenJRE applications in cloud, you'll see a large amount of JBoss.org applications. The JBoss.org community has some very good security people in there, people who are thinking very much about how applications are consumed. But we're also seeing a lot of JBoss.org customers, in the SME space and ISV space and the enterprise, moving across to becoming supported JBoss.com customers, where we have the power of the JBoss Operations Network, known as JON, to enable them to automate those functions, and also to audit and report.

I think we can't lose focus on the fact that, at the end of the day, you need to be able to be auditable. In the US and further afield, we have the SAS 70 certification, which is really no more than an accounting standard. We hope will be surpassed by the sort of standards that the cloud security lines are pushing and promoting, and also the PCI-DSS and Basel piece where companies are actually looking to make revenue from applications hosted either on a public/private hybrid model or directly public cloud providers.

Gordon: Ellen and Rick here, maybe finish up here by asking each of you to share if there were three pieces of advice that you could give people looking at moving to the cloud, whether that means adopting a public cloud, whether it means building a more automated self-service resource internally. What are three pieces of advice you'd give them? You first, Ellen.

Ellen: Well, I think my first piece of advice would be to understand what is the value of what you are moving to the cloud and make sure that you start your movement to the cloud, in security or in any other way, on a business case with an understanding of the business economics. I always believe that business drives security.

The second thing that I would say is there is a great deal of value in working with trusted vendors who understand this space and can certainly help with that movement.

Last, but not least, I think is to begin. I think it is important to take some level, however minor, of risk and start moving those applications that make sense into the cloud so that you'll have the experience and the background to do more over time.

Gordon: Thank you. Great advice. Richard?

Richard: I regularly stand up at conferences and I don't tend to conform to the norm and the first question I ask the crowded room is, "Who wants to go to jail first?" I'm met with a lot of white, ashen faces. I do a lot of cloud aggregation where I sit down with organizations looking to move to public cloud vendors rather than the private model.
That big piece of white paper that we sit down with enables them to start understanding who owns what risk, be it the provider, be it themselves, and what controls you can actually build and place to go to cloud. It's those controls which are the hidden cost to your company of adopting virtualized cloud computing.

The other thing is when you're working with your chosen provider, don't be afraid to ask them for the levels of both security controls and also the physical and mandatory access controls that they have built into their architecture. They should be able to provide it. If a provider just comes back to you saying oh we're secure or here's my SAS 70 certificate that's not enough. You need to be able to push and promote the fact that you're also talking to other cloud vendors that can do it bigger and better. Please can I have the right information.

The third piece is the fact that you need to be able to ensure that the data that you're moving to cloud is secure. Think about the level of risk that your company is willing to be exposed to. Also, is it possible that you can work with your trusted vendors to be able to have a hybrid model where you can tunnel databases from your data center to a cloud provider without exposing that level of risk?

The other thing is this is fun. This is enabling us to change the paradigm of computing. Red has a trusted vendor. We have the ability now to help you get to where you want to go. It's like a level of adolescence now and we're here to help you get to that next level.

Gordon: Thank you. Is there anything else you would like to share with the audience?

Richard: Stay safe.

Gordon: That sounds like good advice, no matter what you're doing. Thanks, everyone. I've been here with Ellen Newlands and Richard Morrell talking about cloud security. Thank you. Bye bye.

Links for 03-08-2012

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Bring back Google Scholar! - "This is exactly the kind of of self-serving bloat that Google used to make fun of Microsoft for. We become what we hate."
• Alex Payne — How Not To Sell Software in 2012 - "your site says “cloud”, but your sales process says “1970s mainframe”."
• 90 Minutes Of Free Lightroom 4 Video Training From Adobe | PhotoshopSupport.com
• Basic color schemes: Color Theory Introduction
• Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog » Blog Archive » The ‘Great Winnowing’ has begun - "What we’re going to see over the next several years is a “Great Winnowing” in the industries of journalism, a shifting in the marketplace of ideas and information from one driven by paid professionals to one driven by passion, whether amateur or professional. Those who make it best will be independent contractors, those who live and thrive apart from the teat of mother employer. This is likely to be a brutal place, which means the selling of the “occupation” to wide-eyed high schoolers will be problematic for universities and the institution itself."
• Ambient Social Location Apps Will be Consumer Duds - "The microclimate that is SXSW and San Francisco often creates hype for services that, ultimately, no one is going to really care about. Foursquare and Twitter did well at SXSW in their growth phases but those companies may prove to be the exception instead of the rule. The crop this year includes several "ambient social location' apps that are likely destined for obscurity when the time comes that normal users are supposed to adopt."
• Kdenlive Part 1: Introduction to Kdenlive | opensource.com
• Dos and Don’ts for PowerPoint Business Presentations | BostInno - IMO the "best practices" for Powerpoint animations etc. can mostly be summed up as JUST SAY NO
• This Article Generating Thousands Of Dollars In Ad Revenue Simply By Mentioning New iPad | The Onion - America's Finest News Source - RT @TheOnion: This Article Generating Thousands Of Dollars In Ad Revenue Simply By Mentioning New iPad
• 10 Great Imperial Stouts To Try Right Now | Serious Eats: Drinks
• These Ducks are Ready to Start Drinking For St. Patty’s Day [Image] | BostInno - The duckling are ready to start drinking. Very funny.

Links for 03-07-2012

• Facebook Cartoons Tell it Like it Is [COMICS] | BostInno
• The 5D Mark III – From the Inside « Canon Rumors
• Five Leadership Lessons From James T. Kirk - Forbes
• The Wild West of Big Data | ITworld - "So really, the community isn't missing so much as invisible, and that raises a sharp difference between the Linux and open source sector of a decade ago and the big data sector of today. Community in big data is acknowledged as a corporate resource, and that is all. Commercial vendors here seem to pay little more than lip service to their open source origins, and usually only to mention how they contribute back to projects like the ones mentioned earlier."

Links for 03-06-2012

• Dollar Shave Club Launches Razor Subscription Service, Raises $1M From Kleiner (And Others) | TechCrunch - Someone please tell me that an Onion headline accidentally ended up on Techcrunch.
• E-discovery in the cloud? Not so easy - Computerworld
• 24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed
• Five Leadership Mistakes Of The Galactic Empire - Forbes
• 9 Phrases We Should Stop Seeing in Tech Journalism | Dissociated Press - "“Anything-killer” – I’ve probably done this myself, so mea culpa. But this is so over-used now, and so very often wrong. Mostly, though, it’s the binary nature of the argument that I find most objectionable. It’s possible for two successful products of similar types to co-exist."
• 451 CAOS Theory » That’s not science: the FSF’s analysis of GPL usage - RT @maslett: That’s not science: the FSF’s analysis of GPL usage << 451 analysis seems pretty solid
• Data vs. models at the Strata Conference | The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News - RT @xamat: "Data vs. models at the Strata Conference" - Great summary of my #strataconf talk at CNET by @ghaff
• Groupon Fail: Daily Deal Site Offers Deal For Closed Cambridge Restaurant [Image] | BostInno - Groupon runs daily deal for (very recently) closed restaurant. Oops.
• TileMill | MapBox
• Technology News: Distros: Canonical's Ticking Time Clock - "Given Canonical's history of abandoned users and product announcements that come up short in execution, Shuttleworth's most recent goal of 200 million users by 2015 doesn't compute. There's simply no path from "declining OS vendor" to "competing on an equal footing with Microsoft, Apple and Google." It's the sort of rhetoric a CEO would say to rally the troops, but it's become obvious that it's already too late."
• Are community cloud services the next hot thing? - Includes comments from me.
• Appealing to the base - Roger Ebert's Journal

The laptop charging ritual

The laptop charging ritual
Originally uploaded by ghaff

Links for Leap Day (02-29-2012)

• SmugMug's Camera Awesome Photography App Review - Katherine Boehret - The Digital Solution - AllThingsD - RT @waltmossberg: Camera Awesome -- @kabster728 has first review of an iPhone photo app that lives up to its name.
• Ideal Features for Cloud Management | Cashdollar Automation - "However, I think a corporate decision to use EC2 is usually a top down management decision based on trendy buzzwords." << How shall I put this? Oh right, nonsense.
• Will we ever kill the business card? | BostInno - Solutions for getting business cards into digital form.
• Library of Congress, Twitter Record Life Today - Re: the latest hand-wringing around archived tweets. Isn't it all already being stored by Library of Congress?
• Could This Cat Gamble its Way Into MIT? [Video] | BostInno
• With Help From the Government, MIT Researchers Work on Developing a Self-Healing & Secure Cloud | BostInno - Self-sensing & responding to cyber attack research from MIT CSAIL w DARPA funding
• Ad Fail: Dramamine Ads Cause Air Sickness « Doug Garnett's Blog - "Airlines have yet to show that they’ve figured out a sensitivity for their travelers. And companies like Dramamine look like they will buy anything. So buckle up. The noise has started and the volume will only increase."
• Tom's Hardware US - RT @thomasdcameron: Really good article on SSD reliability. I was (unpleasantly) surprised: #fb
• Infochimps and the Future of Data Marketplaces – tecosystems - "Certainly the friction towards the marketing and sale of data as an asset is, at present, high. In comparing current market perceptions of data to enterprise acceptance of open source a decade ago, we’ve argued that mundane issues like licensing make data marketplaces at present largely inefficient, which in turn acts as a drag on adoption in a vicious cycle."
• Search User Interfaces
• Guy Kawasaki: Don’t Plan Your Social Media; Just Do It | Inc.com - RT @ZUrlocker: Inc: @guykawasaki says "Don't plan your social media strategy --just do it!" #custserv
• Yelp Product & Engineering Blog: Towards Building a High-Quality Workforce with Mechanical Turk
• The Emotional Pull of NoOps by @RobynWeisman - "Despite my previous assessment that NoOps is a misnomer, the term seems to be gaining steam in the developer community."
• RHEV 3.0 Sets Stage for VMware Challenge - Virtualization - News & Reviews - eWeek.com - RT @screnshaw: eweek: RHEV 3.0 Sets Stage for VMware Challenge - Virtualization - News & Reviews
• Data.gov
• HP’s PC Addiction | Monday Note
• Parcel 104 - Santa Clara, CA - I checked in at Parcel 104 (2700 Mission College Blvd) on #Yelp

Links for 02-27-2012

• River Maps « somethingaboutmaps
• Freeform Comment: Big data storage technologies - "When we look at managing the data explosion, we can boil it down to three core elements that are commonly referred to as the ‘Three Vs’ - namely Volume, Velocity and Variety"
• Instagram - Dinner at CIA in Napa
• No, a 14-year-old didn't invent email in 1978 - Input Output
• Gallery: Dead technologies Gen-Y and younger will only find in old movies and TV | ZDNet - Quite cool. Even if it does make me feel old.
• The Story Behind the Olympus Scandal - BusinessWeek - RT @stshank: Good long blow-by-blow piece on the Olympus scandal in BW << bumped to Instapaper f tomorrow's flight.
• The Netflix Tech Blog: 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS - "When designing customer-facing software for a cloud environment, it is all about managing down expected overall latency of response. AWS is built around a model of sharing resources; hardware, network, storage, etc. Co-tenancy can introduce variance in throughput at any level of the stack. You’ve got to either be willing to abandon any specific subtask, or manage your resources within AWS to avoid co-tenancy where you must."
• Plug It In | Blog | Tesla Motors - Tesla is doing a really piss-poor job of PR around the battery discharge matter IMO
• Whatever Happened to First Class? - NYTimes.com - In my experience domestic first class never (for values of ~ last 20 yrs) huge upgrade other seat size & leg room
• So how much is a fair price to pay for an e-book? | Digital Media - CNET News - Per comments here, many assume printing/distrib larger % of physical books than reality

Links for 02-24-2012

• Weekend Playlist: SF/F Songs About Love - SF Signal – A Speculative Fiction Blog
• The True Agent of Technological Change | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "Rather than look for a single driver, let’s look at where the entire constellation of drivers is taking us as an industry and as a society. Do that, and you find not technology, but a cultural revolution as the real change agent – and it is built on mobile, social, and cloud computing."
• Inside Google's recruiting machine - Fortune Tech - Interesting read about Google's recruiting process.
• Google Music not living up to expectations (exclusive) | Media Maverick - CNET News - At what point does Google's really dismal track record outside of search/ads/email(sorta) bite them hard?
• Here’s What “Post-PC” Looks Like: Over Half Of Info Workers Use 3 Or More Devices | TechCrunch - "Info workers reported using 60 percent of all their PCs and mobile devices for both personal and business use, with only 14 percent used just for work, and 26 percent for personal purposes. The numbers indicate a further blurring of the boundaries between personal time, and time spent working."
• The BLS Thinks These Jobs Will Grow a Lot. I Think They’re Wrong. - "My first question when I look at this graph is not ‘what do these jobs pay?’ but instead ‘which of these will be deeply affected by automation and other kinds of technological progress — more deeply than the BLS is currently thinking?’ This of course is an impossible question to answer precisely, but after spending some time looking at the BLS’s projections methodology and its factors affecting occupational utilization, I think it’s likely underestimating the broad impact of technology."
• Playing The News: To Push Social Gaming Forward, Two New Startups Look To The Real World | TechCrunch
• Data mining's adult challenges | The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News - Data mining's adult challenges:
• The Tesla Bricking Story? It’s Nonsense | TechCrunch - Hmm. I read this Tesla story and my takeaway is the dead battery story has the tech facts largely correct.
• At Amazon, Buggy Bots, Confused Markets and Books Collide - Business - GOOD - Crazy story of bots gome wild at Amazon.

Digital to film looks with Exposure 4

Artsy photo filters don't make me as cranky as they do Stephen Shankland. That said, I generally prefer the subtle to over-the-top. And I give B&W a pass even if it's only special pleading because of the many years I spent doing B&W photography with film. Thus, when Alien Skin offered me a look at their new Exposure 4, which can "accurately simulate classic films, like Kodachrome, Polaroid, and Panatomic-X," it caught my eye. It sounded like effects I might actually use rather than dabble with one or twice and then forget about.

The software works with either Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. I use the latter almost exclusively for my photo editing these days, so that's how I tested Exposure. Lightroom is a "non-destructive editor," which means that changes  made within Lightroom are essentially stored as a change log relative to the original image rather than altering the bits in the image itself as Photoshop and other traditional editing programs do. The implication is that because Exposure (and competitive products such as those from Nik Software) have to work outside the framework of Lightroom's non-destructive settings, you'll typically make a copy of an image, work on it within Exposure, and then return to Lightroom. This whole workflow is reasonably well automated though, so it's certainly not onerous.

Exposure has all manner of effects including soft focus and dust & scratches. However, its centerpiece is a wide range of film types that it attempts to simulate. I don't buy their marketing copy that claims "the result is a photo that looks like it was made by a human, not a computer." (And, in fact, I'm not even sure what that means.) However, it's a nice collection of both color and B&W effects, many of them quite restrained. I certainly don't claim to be an expert on the nuances of all the films represented but, for those with which I'm at least passingly familiar, the effects seem appropriate. Below, I apply presets to a few photos in my Lightroom collection.

The first photo, of a dead tree in Utah, shows the conversion from a fairly conventionally processed color image to a Platinum B&W effect.

This next takes a woman standing in fog in Montepulciano, Italy and punches it up subtly using a Velvia 50 effect. While I was never a huge fan of Velvia when I was shooting film, in this case I like the pop the effect gives relative to my initial editing.

Finally, we have a faded Kodacolor effect applied to a railroad crossing in the Mojave desert.

The program has a lot of features but it does a nice job of hiding most of the complexity until you want to dive in. My experience was that using standard effects offered a lot of good options right out of the box. The company says that the user interface was redesigned for Exposure 4. I don't have a comparison point but I certainly had no major complaints.

The one significant downside is one that I suspect will be a show stopper for a lot of potential users: the price at $249. This is a product that is priced for professionals, often I assume portrait or wedding photographers looking for a particular look that they can apply quickly and consistently across many pictures.

Bottom line: Nice interface, nice effects, but at a price that will scare off casual users.

  You can also check out Stephen Shankland's review on CNET.

Links for 02-22-2012

• Flickr Is Getting a Major Makeover | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0. - Apparently flickr is going to roll out major interface changes
• What made Deep Throat leak? | Jack Shafer - "Leak, to be published Mar. 6, vindicates journalist Edward Jay Epstein, one of the earliest critics of Woodsteinmania. In a Commentary piece published in July 1974, about a month after the Woodstein book came out, Epstein eviscerates what he calls the “sustaining myth of journalism.” Naïve readers believe that intrepid reporters expose government scandals by doggedly working their confidential sources. Of course such scoops do occur, but the more conventional route to a prize-winning series is well-placed leaks from well-oiled government investigations, which Holland maintains was the case with Watergate."
• Project Narwhal: How a top-secret Obama campaign program could change the 2012 race. - Slate Magazine - "This year, however, as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obama’s team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Obama’s views on the issue."
• Political, personal struggles in China - Boston.com - I pretty much agree with the Boston Globe review of Wild Swans, both the good and the not so good.
• Dell's Predicament by Dustin Curtis - "While productive corporate employees might not give up PCs, the vast majority of other workers will. That is not industry growth; that is transition and consolidation. When thinking in the long term, Dell's PC group can be basically ignored. It's the end of an era, and it puts the company in a terrifying predicament. There is now no clear end game for Dell, and the company's core competencies are being rendered irrelevant by evolution."
• Six Ways Boston’s Museums are Utilizing Social Media to Bring Their Exhibits to Life | BostInno
• FINALISTS: 2011 Nebula Awards (With Free Fiction Links!) - SF Signal – A Speculative Fiction Blog
• Paintings of the Americas | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - The MFA catalog of American paintings is now online
• Making Hybrid Real: Disambiguation via Operations | Ferris f(x) - Hybrid clouds by @mikeferris

My video from Cloud Connect on nethawk.tv

Red Hat’s Gordon Haff at Cloud Connect 2012 from NetHawk Interactive on Vimeo.

Links for 02-16-2012

• AwkwardCloud: Here’s Hopin’ For Open | Rational Survivability - "“Open Cloud” is described as a set of solutions for those looking to deploy clouds that provide “… better economics, greater flexibility, and less lock-in, while maintaining control and governance” than so-called Enterprise Clouds that are based on what Randy tags are more proprietary foundations. The case is made where enterprises will really want to build two clouds: one to run legacy apps and one to run purpose-built cloud-ready applications.  I’d say that enterprises that have a strategy are likely looking forward to using clouds of both models…and probably a few more, such as SaaS and PaaS."
• Guidance and perspectives from Vivek Kundra - CA Technologies - RT @AndiMann: #Salesforce.com EVP & ex-US CIO Vivek Kundra on '#cloud first' policies,security, beating inertia, … ...
• [Interview] Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat Inc - RT @marcosluis2186: [Interview] Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat Inc
• Decoding the World of Portlandia « Acculturated
• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Deltacloud as a Top-Level Project - MarketWatch - Deltacloud is now a top-level open cloud API project at Apache. Happy graduation!
• 451 CAOS Theory » On the continuing decline of the GPL - "The figures indicate that not only has the usage of the GNU GPL family of licenses (GPL2+3, LGPL2+3, AGPL) continued to decline since June, but that the decline has accelerated. The GPL family now accounts for about 57% of all open source software, compared to 61% in June."
• The 1st Tenet of Open Cloud: Open is About Control | tentenet.net - "Many people think that an open cloud means an open source cloud.  It’s true that open source is an important mechanism for creating an open cloud.  But, an open cloud is about much more than code or even community—it’s about giving you control."
• Understanding the Controversy Over Silicon Valley's 'Journalism' - Technology Review - "It's easy to dismiss all attempts to put oneself at a remove from the subject of a story. After all, everyone who writes about technology has their preferences—companies we like and don't, and our tastes change over time. What the liberation from old models of objectivity brought us was an escape from the View from Nowhere— that is, the notion that we aren't all biased to begin with, or that we shouldn't disclose it. But wearing your biases on your sleeve doesn't mean you don't have them, or that talking about them is sufficient to inoculate readers against the most pernicious form of delusion there is: your own self-delusion."
• Envisioning a Post-Campus America - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "I can see all sorts of factors that might combine to preserve the status quo, from signaling and status and networking, to the desire of college students for a four-year debt-financed semi-vacation.  On the other hand, disruption never looks inevitable until it suddenly is--if you'd told someone in 1955 that GM was going to have its lunch eaten by some Japanese upstart, they would have laughed until the tears came.  So it's interesting and maybe even useful to contemplate what the college system would look like if this sort of distance learning becomes the norm."

Podcast: Red Hat's MRG-Grid Cloud Access

Discussion of cloud interoperability tend to focus on technical aspects. But there are business aspects too. One of the programs that Red Hat has put in place to simplify moving workloads from on-premise to a public cloud is called Cloud Access. In a nutshell, this allows enterprise subscriptions to be transferred for use in a public cloud such as Amazon. We began the program with Linux but have begun expanding it to, in this case, our MRG-Grid software that's used primarily for high performance computing-style workloads. (PR here.)

If you're interested in learning more, I recorded a podcast with Red Hat's MRG-Grid product manager Tushar Katarki las week. (For a little context, take a listen to the podcast I recorded with Tushar last December in which he discusses grid, MRG-Grid, and how customers like Dreamworks are using the product.)

MP3 version (5:15)

OGG version (5:15)

Open clouds: Beyond a veneer

After one too many shouts punctuated by "In the name of the Queen!" by London's Master of Revels, Judi Dench's Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love rises to intone: "Mr Tilney! Have a care with my name -  you will wear it out."
I sometimes feel similarly when it comes to the ferocity with which a lot of vendors apply the word "open" to cloud computing. Especially given that not a few of those involved aren't very, well, open but make up for the glancing and incidental ways their software and approaches are open with the volume of their rhetoric and the font size they use to display "OPEN" in their marketing literature.
But what does "open" mean in the context of building a hybrid cloud? (In this context, I'm primarily focused on building hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, although a lot of the principles carry over to other forms of cloud computing as well.) It certainly doesn't begin and end with the submission of some format to a standards body or with an announcement of partners endorsing some specific technology platform. And open source may be (or should be anyway) a given. But it's more than that too. In getting ready for a Red Hat Webcast that I helped put together, I did a lot of thinking about the different aspects of openness. Here's what I (with the help of others at Red Hat) came up with. An open cloud:

• Is open source. This allows adopters to control their particular implementation and doesn't restrict them to the technology and business roadmap of a specific vendor. It lets them build and manage clouds that put them in control of their own destiny and provides them with visibility into the technology on which they're basing their business. It provides them with the flexibility to run the workloads of their choice, including proprietary ones, in their cloud. Open source also lets them collaborate with other communities and companies to help drive innovation in the areas that are important to them.
• Has a viable, independent community. Open source isn't just about the code, its license, and how it can be used and extended. At least as important is the community associated with the code and how it's governed. Realizing the collaborative potential of open source and the innovation it can deliver to everyone means having the structures and organization in place to tap it fully.
• Is based on open standards, or protocols and formats that are moving toward standardization and that are independent of vendor and platform. Standardization in the sense of “official” cloud standards blessed by standards bodies is still in early days. That said, approaches to interoperability that aren't under the control of individual vendors and that aren't tied to specific platforms offer important flexibility. This allows the API specification to evolve beyond implementation constraints and creates the opportunity for communities and organizations to develop variants that meet their individual technical and commercial requirements.
• Intellectual property rights owners offer freedom to use IP. Recent history has repeatedly shown that there are few guarantees that intellectual property (IP) assets will remain accessible to all from one day to the next.  To have confidence that you will continue to enjoy access to IP assets that you depend on under the terms that you depend on, permission needs to be given in ways that make that technology open and accessible to the user.  So-called “de facto standards,” which are often “standards” only insofar as they are promoted by a large vendor, often fail this test.
• Is deployable across a customer's choice of infrastructure. Hybrid cloud management should provide an additional layer of abstraction above virtualization, physical servers, storage, networking, and public cloud providers. This implies—indeed requires—that cloud management be independent of virtualization and other foundational technologies. This is a fundamental reason that cloud is different from virtualization management and a fundamental enabler of hybrid clouds that span physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, and a wide range of public cloud providers including top public clouds.
• Is pluggable and extensible with an open API. This lets users add features, providers, and technologies from a variety of vendors or other sources. Critically, the API itself cannot be under the control of a specific vendor or tied to a specific implementation but must be under the auspices of a third-party organization that allows for contributions and extensions in an open and transparent manner. Deltacloud, an API that abstracts the differences between clouds, provides a good example. It is under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation and is neither a Red Hat controlled project nor tied to a particular implementation of cloud management.
• Enables portability to other clouds. Implicit in a cloud approach that provides support for heterogeneous infrastructure is that investments made in developing for an open cloud must be portable to other such clouds. Portability takes a variety of forms including programming languages and frameworks, data, and the applications themselves. If you develop an application for one cloud, you shouldn't need to rewrite it in a different language or use different APIs to move it somewhere else. Furthermore, a consistent runtime environment across clouds ensures that retesting and requalification isn't needed every time you want to redeploy.

Of course, none of us have a perfect grade in every respect. Communities take time to develop. There are finite developer hours but an almost limitless variety of potentially supported infrastructure. And there will always be tradeoffs between value-add and perfect portability. However, I'd argue that the more aspects in which a cloud is open, the greater value an organization can gain from that cloud.
If you're interested in seeing my thoughts fleshed out in a bit more depth, here's a white paper that I wrote on the topic.

Links for 02-14-2012

• Real Dan Lyons Web Site » Blog Archive » Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool » Real Dan Lyons Web Site - "Now Arrington and Siegler have appointed themselves the watchdogs of tech journalism, eager to point out the irresponsible and inaccurate reporting that they see all around them. This might ring a little less hollow if they hadn’t been such egregious violators themselves, and if they weren’t writing this stuff to protect the people they’re in bed with financially."
• Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn’t - NYTimes.com - "In the 15,000 or so tweets and retweets I have written, there are a few I’d like back and a few that probably made my betters uncomfortable, but mostly I’ve stayed out of the ditch. The rule at The Times is that there is no rule, but there is an expectation, as Philip B. Corbett, the standards editor for the paper, told me in an e-mail: “We expect Times journalists to behave like Times journalists, and they generally do.”"
• Outgrowing Instagram? Alien Skin releasing Exposure 4 | Deep Tech - CNET News - Alien Skin Exposure 4 looks kinda cool But seems pricey f what will just be a novelty f most ppl (by @stshank)
• Mountain Lion Strategy
• NOVA | Rosalind Franklin's Legacy
• Microsoft gets it right with Windows 8 on ARM, and why Apple should be worried | ZDNet - Personally I tend towards thinking that unifying device & desktop experience is a bug rather than feature.
• Mobile Cloud Backend as a Service Ecosystem Map – All roads lead to BaaS | BostInno - Nice visualization too. "The phrase Backend as a Service came about because when I talked to mobile developers about how they wanted to setup and operate backends for their mobile apps to host data, run business logic, etc., they didn’t directly want to use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings like Amazon EC2, RackSpace Cloud and Windows Azure – that was too hard, and most of them didn’t want to deal with Linux prompts or virtual machine setup. At the same time, they didn’t want to get stuck with building a backend platform stack from scratch with Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings from Heroku, CloudFoundry and OpenShift."
• designboom shop: airframe by james kim - Oh good. What I need. To always feel like I'm up in the air :-)
• Of funerals, digital photos and impermanence — Tech News and Analysis - "In the past, photographs were treasured because they were so rare: it took so long to make them and the process was so expensive that having one meant a lot. It was like a moment in time had been frozen forever, and the way those photos could trigger memories was unlike almost anything else. Now, photos are just another form of digital detritus; there may be treasures in there somewhere, but we don’t have time to find them, if we can even remember where they are. Photography seems to have become more ephemeral, less permanent — whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen."
• Roll Over, Beethoven: 14 Years of U.S. Weather Meets 'The Emperor' - Very cool.
• Release Notes - oVirtWiki - RT @quaid: ♺ @ovirt: In case you missed the #oVirt 3.0 first community release announcement: Also:
• images.4channel.org/f/src/589217_scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf - Cool (even with up-front ad). See also Eames Powers of 10 film.
• Prezi - The Zooming Presentation Editor
• How to fix any computer - The Oatmeal - How to fix any computer from The Oatmeal--priceless
• Don't Confuse Passion with Competence - Scott Anthony - Harvard Business Review - "Passion only matters if it leads to an innovation that delivers impact, whether that impact is measured in revenues, profits, improved process performance, or something entirely differently. This is one reason why good venture capital investors dole out capital in stages. They are waiting to see if the vision that looks so great on paper bears any resemblance to reality."

Links for 02-09-2012

• 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Services - The CA Cloud Storm Chasers - CA Technologies - Good list of core competencies needed to operate enterprise clouds by @andimann
• BOT: Business, Operations, Technology | Ferris f(x) - Framing cloud in terms of business, operational, & technical issues By #redhat colleage Mike Ferris
• The Apple fanboy problem | ZDNet - RT @sjvn: The Apple fanboy problem, by @violetblue at ZDNet ~~ Scumbags. << Sadly, broader internet mob mentality
• Comic: Canon, Nikon, and iPhone - RT @petapixel: Funny comic - Canon, Nikon, and iPhone: << Like it :-)
• 'Huffington Post' Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
• Untitled (https://plus.google.com/109074857816744029470) - I pretty much agree w Stephen Levy on Groupon deals. Increasingly uninteresting or "crumb snatching"ly small
• Community Types « Wild Webmink
• The Death of Slander by Leslie Yalof Garfield :: SSRN - "Technology killed slander. Slander, the tort of defamation by spoken word, dates back to the ecclesiastical law of the Middle Ages and its determination that damning someone’s reputation in the village square was worthy of pecuniary damage. Communication in the Twitter Age has torn asunder the traditional notions of person- to-person communication. Texting, tweeting and other new channels of personal exchange have led one of our oldest torts to its historic demise. "
• New York's 9 Most Iconic Dishes ~ Food News - Restaurant News | Zagat Buzz
• 5 Things You Should Know Before Trying to Fix Your Computer | Cracked.com - "I come from an era where computers were designed for geeks and geniuses. Without the Internet, their only practical uses were data storage, being a really expensive word processor and being a kickass solitaire machine. Growing up in that mindset, you learned to fix computers because there wasn't much else to do with them. "
• Adobe: Here's why Creative Cloud is worth $600 a year | Deep Tech - CNET News - SW subscriptions probably reasonable deal for heavy users but they're hard on users who don't need latest.

Links for 02-02-2012

• Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?! - YouMoz | SEOmoz - Personally, I thought the trick was just to put "Apple" in the title :-)
• Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10X Revenue Club « abovethecrowd.com - Amongst an awful lot of blather around the Facebook IPO, this is an interesting analysis (and framework for analyzing other companies).
• Julie Craig, EMA video on Devops

Links for 02-01-2012

• The Future of GlusterFS – Slides « Red Hat Storage - The future of GlusterFS presentation from community manager John Mark Walker
• LensRentals.com - Sensor Size Matters – Part 1 - "Why do manufacturers keep using such an archaic measurement? Because it helps them lie to you, of course. "
• Red Hat | Red Hat Updates Messaging, Realtime and Grid Platform - RT @RedHatNews: News: Red Hat Updates Messaging, Realtime and Grid Platform #redhat
• HP v Oracle - Amended Cross Complaint - While some of the (new?) details about the Itanium Collaboration Agreement are indeed quite juicy, putting on my former analyst hat, they are also thoroughly unsurprising.
• We Have a Winner! (And Many Losers.) - Despair, Inc. - I bet this new demotivator poster is going to be a big seller aorund Baltimore :-)
• Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card Altucher Confidential
• The Only Chart You Need To Mix A Proper Cocktail | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

Cloud computing's culture of discipline

Enterprise architects have led the way to successful business transformations. That was one of the key points delivered by MIT's Jeanne Ross in an interview she did with my one-time analyst colleague, Dana Gardner. Ross is the Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research where she "studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms." The interview is excerpted in Gardner's ZDNet blog, which also links to the full podcast and transcript.

What particularly struck me about the interview is that, although the "cloud" word was essentially nowhere to be found, a great deal of Ross' points echoed best practices that I'm seeing coming out of the first wave of private cloud deployments.

...the thing we’re learning about enterprise architecture is that there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.

Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it. But we do want to get past heroes sub-optimizing. What companies traditionally did before they started thinking about what architecture would mean, is they relied on individuals to do what seemed best and that clearly can sub-optimize in an environment that increasingly is global and requires things like a single face to the customer.

What we’re trying to do is adopt a culture of discipline, where there are certain things that people throughout an enterprise understand are the way things need to be done, so that we actually can operate as an enterprise, not as individuals all trying to do the best thing based on our own experience.

This philosophy is very much in line with the idea that a cloud moves beyond virtualization by shifting to a services-centric approach. This means offering a standardized catalog of services to users and controlling access to and deployment of those services through policy. In other words, it's about granting access to IT services within a framework of established, consistent policies. A "culture of discipline," if you would, rather than an ad hoc "culture of heroes." (I discuss more details of this shift in this CNET Blog Network post.)

What's worth noting about this culture of cloud computing in the context of cloud computing though is that it can really streamline the access to IT resources rather than the other way around. Yes, there are consistent controls and policies in place, but self-service access within that framework makes for more agility not less.

A discipline of culture doesn't need to mean a culture of "No." In fact, it can make saying "Yes" easier and faster.

 

Links for 01-31-2012

• Visualizing the Future of Tech - Cool visualization tho may be too high level to deduce a lot.
• (500) https://www.illuminata.com/?name=tpcc - @merv I wrote this piece in 2004(!) TPC-C as a simulation of the real world has only gotten sillier since
• MIT's Ross on how enterprise architecture and IT more than ever lead to business transformation | ZDNet - "Yes, the thing we’re learning about enterprise architecture is that there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline."
• One tsp. — Online Recipe Box
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Why publishers should give away ebooks - "Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow." -- Appealing idea. But I'm skeptical it can work in many cases.
• The Future Of Screen Typography Is In Your Hands - Smashing Coding | Smashing Coding - "In many ways, 2012 is the new 1999. We have the freedom to work with any font we like via the @font-face selector. But our main tool, the browser, does not have any OpenType features to speak of. We have to create workarounds."
• Open Virtualization Alliance – News & Events - I'll be speaking at the @OVAorg webinar 2/15-16. Register:
• New Ferris Bueller Ad Released - The Daily Beast