Links for 06-28-2010

• The "Consumable" Cloud, Red Hat Flavoured | ZDNet UK - Good piece on Cloud Foundations launch from ZDNet UK.
• The basics of cloud computing - This video was actually taped at VMware last September, but TechTarget put it up fairly recently.
• Jon Lech Johansen's blog - The flip side of Apple's much-maligned locked-down app store.
• Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization - Park & ride lots in Massachusetts.
• Marten Mickos says open source doesn't have to be fully open | NetworkWorld.com Community - Marten defends the open core approach.
• Cityscapes: When lightning strikes (twice), a photographer is ready - Cool piece about a photo of twin lightning strikes.

Links for 06-18-2010

• Questions From "Journey To The Private Cloud" Simulcast - Chuck's Blog - A 68(!!) question Q&A on the subject topic.
• Spend Matters: HP's Supply Chain -- By the Numbers (Part 2) - Interesting analysis of HP's supply chain numbers.
• SF Signal: Futurama Recap-O-Rama: 5 Seasons in 7 Minutes
• Daring Fireball: Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies... - This is an oldie but goodie.
• Bring your own PC comes despite vexed IT pros - "While many IT pros hate the idea of allowing end users to bring their own PCs to work, executives and other employees are using netbooks, iPads and other devices without their companies' blessings."

Links for 06-16-2010

• The Map Room: The L.A. Times on Volunteer Mapping - It's worth remembering to temper enthusiasm for local crowdsourcing with the reality that it takes a critical mass that isn't everywhere present.
• How tape dies - "$1.5B markets don’t die overnight – even dropping 25% a year. Tape will be around for a long time to come."
• Map: Where Americans Are Moving - Forbes.com - Shows migration inward and outward by county. Good visualization.
• Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole. - "Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type."
• SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry | VentureBeat - Interesting but I've seen the low-power server film a lot of times and it never seems to end well.
• Google Earth 5.2 Released | Google Earth Blog - New features around elevation tracks for hiking, etc.
• HP's PC supply chain by the numbers | ZDNet - Some of the numbers are impressive.

Links for 06-14-2010

• "Suddenly...": Seven different salutes to the Odessa Steps scene. - Indie Eye - Blogs - IFC.com
• 468 – Crime Topography of San Francisco « Strange Maps
• furtwangler beethoven - Public domain MP3s
• YouTube - usbtypewriter demo - This is incredibly cool!
• Economic View - Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall St. - NYTimes.com - Thaler was a professor of mine at Corness
• The Mother of All Invention - Magazine - The Atlantic - The 50th anniversary of the Xerox 914 photocopier.
• What Makes Private Cloud Private « Wikibon Blog - Video interview with Marketing VP for the CTOs office at EMC/RSA.
• Bits or pieces?: A life less cloudy - Simon Wardley has joined CSC LEF.
• Blogger Buzz: Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone - I've tuned blogger templates by hand. This could well make things easier.
• Looking Back at SCO - ConsortiumInfo.org
• Department of Energy - Data Summary from Deepwater Horizon - "As part of the Obama Administration's ongoing commitment to transparency surrounding the response to the BP oil spill, the Department of Energy is providing online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer."

Links for 06-11-2010

• Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies? - Community - ComputerworldUK - "Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will “fail” in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won't be possible in most markets. Red Hat stands a chance because it has (wisely) colonised the biggest sector, that of enterprise infrastructural products - “we are plumbers”, as Whitehurst put it with brutal frankness. "
• Top Ways to Start and Expand Your Virtualization Deployments | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Good piece.
• BP (Logo Redesign Contest) LogoMyWay.com ™ - This is funny. Sad, but funny.
• Dave Eggers on America and the World Cup. - By Dave Eggers - Slate Magazine - This is also a good piece.
• The Rest-of-the-World Cup - TIME - An oldie but goodie by Joel Stein.
• Lazy, Hazy, Crazy: The 10 Laws of Behavioral Cloudonomics - Good piece on what behavioral economics mean for cloud adoption.
• Be a better interviewer in 14 steps | Article | Homepage articles

Links for 06-10-2010

• Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
• John Nack on Adobe: Brief thoughts (and a question) on tablets & styluses - "When did my finger start resembling a giant breadstick? More on that in a moment."
• ignore the code: Gestures - "In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface."
• Locals and Tourists - a set on Flickr - Fascinating maps of local vs. tourists in many cities using geotagged photo data.
• Urban Photo Data Uncovers Local Hot Spots - Yet another interesting example of the sort of information that can be mined from widespread "instrumentation"
• The 'Cloud Computing Bill of Rights': 2010 edition | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - "Possibly the best thing cloud vendors can do to extend their community, and encourage innovation on their platform from community members is to open their platform as much as possible. By making themselves the "reference platform" for their respective market space, an open vendor creates a petrie dish of sorts for cultivating differentiating features and successes on their platform. Protective proprietary vendors are on their own."
• Balkinization - "The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines."
• Session videos from Google I/O 2010 now available | Google Earth Blog - I've been wanting to get back to playing with Google Maps again but I haven't had the time.
• Lessons from Apple on Advertising and Aesthetics | Smarterware - "They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments. Contrast this with the Droid ads, which actually scare my friend's two-year-old daughter away from the TV when they come on. The dark, rainy background, the spinning globe of glowing apps, the robot hands poking at them, nary a human in sight. Droid does. Does what? Show, don't tell."

Links for 06-08-2010

• My iPad? A Great Bundle of Sticks : Andrew McAfee’s Blog - Cory Doctorow gets Andrew McAfee riled up. I pretty much agree with Andrew on this.
• Open Reasoning: This thing called cloud - "The trick is to focus on what is underpinning all of the noise in terms of fundamental trends and developments. When you do this, it becomes clear that cloud computing in its various forms is not the ‘cause’ of anything; it is rather a marketing friendly word used to label certain ‘effects’ of the ongoing evolution of capability in some key areas." << I may think things aren't quite as vague as Dale does but this generally seems about right.

Links for 06-07-2010

• The Macalope Weekly: I want to believe! | Phones | MacUser | Macworld - "Rob works in crazy like other artists work in clay or pastels. "
• Data Center Dialog: Is your organization ready for an internal cloud? - From a little while back but still relevant.
• only rainwater and pure grain alcohol: On 'On Android Compatibility' - The bad old world of the carrier-controlled experience.
• Distortion Article: 1. Page 1: Digital Photography Review - Interesting piece on computational photography--designing lenses with post-capture image correction in mind.
• Careers In The Clouds - Chuck's Blog - How cloud computing intersects with IT skill sets.
• xkcd: Worst-Case Scenario - As is always the case with xkcd at its best, there's a layer of specialist knowledge below the surface. (Plus it's just pretty funny.)
• Daring Fireball: The Good and the Bad Regarding AT&T's New Data Plans - Great analysis of AT&T's changes.

Links for 06-02-2010

• The Oil Drum | What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? - The best technical analysis I've seen to date.
• What is data science? - O'Reilly Radar
• Top Of The Food Chain: Hanger Steak – Eat Me Daily
• Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code
• Incomplete Thought: The DevOps Disconnect | Rational Survivability - "In many presentations promoting DevOps, developers are shown to have evolved in practice and methodology, but operators (of all kinds) are described as being stuck in the dark ages. DevOps evangelists paint a picture that compares and contrasts the Agile-based, reusable componentized, source-controlled, team-based and integrated approach of “evolved” development environments with that of loosely-scripted, poorly-automated, inefficient, individually-contributed, undisciplined, non-source-controlled operations. You can see how this might be just a tad off-putting to some people."
• Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture? - Advertising Age - Digital - Interesting--although any such relationships are inevitably complicated and diffuse.
• Are you still in a "fog" over cloud computing? - CA on Service Management - "Cloud computing is about bringing together many existing technologies and approaches in a new way for delivering and consuming technology as services."
• 'Zero clients' promise to replace fat clients but have downsides
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification - I actually struggle with this with respect to footnotes as well. I tend to favor inline footnotes for context and parentheticals but, for one thing, this format doesn't fit well with digital formats.
• Can Asus take on iPad with Eee Pad, Eee Tablet? | Crave - CNET - Styli seem to have been almost written off at this point and I think that's premature.

Links for 06-01-2010

• BP, the oil spill, and the urge to crucify…. somebody - Agree with the general sense of this piece although it remains to be learned whether reasonable best practices were followed throughout this operation.
• I've Changed My Mind About The iPad - I concur with all this.It's not that the iPad has unique capabilities but that it does some things more naturally than the alternatives.
• Sales Venn diagram - This is optimistic. You'll spend way more than four hours and what's sold won't necessarily intersect with what the technology can provide.
• ABC adding confusing images to 'Lost' finale: Dumbest move ever? Take the poll - The Watcher - Wow. Just dumb. The images don't actually invalidate the ending but they do open a big door to "It was all a dream."
• Keeping Cloud Computing's Prospects Safe and Sunny - IEEE on cloud security and work with CSA.