Links for 12-15-2011

• Fountainhead: Predictions: What You WON'T See in IT For 2012 - Good list. Would quibble here and there but don't really disagree with any of the basic assertions.
• Envelope Please... Announcing the Winners for the 2011 Washies | CIO's Guide to Cloud Computing and On-Demand | Appirio - The 2011 cloudwashing winners.
• From the comments - This sums up my take pretty well: "The “class warfare” comment shows Josh is missing the point on this one. It’s not that the Mercedes is “empirically better” and certainly not “because it’s more expensive.” That’s not what Siegler is saying. He’s saying the experience of driving a merc is better (he doesn’t give any reasons it’s better) in a way which not everyone can appreciate. I don’t know if what Siegler is saying about the Nexus is right. I haven’t used it. But I can appreciate the metaphor. There is a level of attention to detail which is paid to some products that some people simply do not care about, and for other people it absolutely MAKES the product. For instance, BMW engineers the sound of the closing car door. This is something that subtly affects the experience of driving a BMW. I think this sort of thing is what Siegler was (admittedly poorly) describing."
• Horseshit | The Verge Forums - I mostly disagree about this. Yes, the original article generalized. But there are indeed aspects of experience that large groups of people just don't care about--or "get" if you would--or, as in the case of cars, dismiss as not worth the cost.
• How Much Does Facebook Know About You? [Video]
• IN-DEPTH PHOTO ANALYSIS OF THE SUPPOSED RQ-170 SENTINEL DRONE IN IRANIAN HANDS | aviationintel
• Infochimps Blog - RT @JoMaitlandSF: Oh boy I could get lost in data sets in here for hours! << I blame u f new productivity suck:-)
• Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands

Podcast: Red Hat's Tushar Katarki talks grid

I sat down last week with Red Hat's product manager for grid products, Tushar Katarki, who joined us recently. In this interview, Tushar talks about:

• What grid is
• How it's evolving
• What's new with Red Hat's MRG Grid product
• How Dreamworks uses grid
• What's coming

Listen to MP3 version (6:00)

Listen to OGG version (6:00)

Links for 12-14-2011

• How American food got so bad — Marginal Revolution - "I think there is a very bad period for American food. It runs something like 1910 through maybe the 1980’s. And that’s the age of the frozen TV dinner, of the sugar donut, of fast food, of the chain, and really a lot of it is not very good. If you go back to the 19th century and you read Europeans who’ve come to the United States, they’re really quite impressed by the freshness and variety that is on offer."
• Ten things your kid will never see | Sync™ Blog - I'm totally off to get my Geritol now.
• Banking on Change: Software IT Spending Predictions for 2012 | Sandhill - “Increases in IT spending in 2012 for large enterprises will be concentrated in cloud, mobile and Big Data solutions. As enterprises realize the power of a cloud infrastructure combined with Big Data solutions that can use this infrastructure, new analytical solutions will be possible and will be pursued. Mobile solutions will continue to have an impact on large enterprise IT, and spending will increase as more new solutions are deployed."
• Top 10 Presentations on Cloud Computing
• When Truth Survives Free Speech - NYTimes.com - "In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence."
• An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation - RT @marcosluis2186: An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home << interesting concepts

Links for 12-12-2011

• Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics - Very details and sobering read. From a design perspective, the way Airbus averages two opposing flight control inputs is particularly striking.
• Open-source webOS is dead on arrival | ZDNet - "The bottom line is HP appears to be not so much contributing webOS to the open-source community as it is abandoning it to open source. Neither Google with Android nor Apple with iOS will need to worry about webOS being a competitor. Unless HP shows that they’ll be a lot more serious about supporting open-source webOS than it has to date, webOS is dead as the Indianapolis Colts’ Super Bowl hopes."
• In Defense of Kitchen Gadgets - Megan McArdle - Life - The Atlantic - In defense of kitchen gadgets: Need to keep this one handy :-)

Links for 12-09-2011

• Cloud computing history lesson | Technology Spectator - (Primarily focused on public clouds.)
• Why An Investment Firm Was Awarded $2.5 Million After Being Defamed By Blogger - Forbes - People are still free to disagree but seems a rather more in-depth view of situation than the usual uncritical Internet mob.
• Top Ten Virtualization Risks Hiding in Your Company
• Untitled (http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-08/) - Today's Dilbert is great:
• Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics
• Spam sinks to lowest level in almost three years, says Symantec | Security - CNET News - RT @amcafee: Spam is down... to 70% of all email - (HT @adamthierer ) << But uptick social media etc attacks
• Why Siri had to start in beta | Benoit Maison's blog - Good perspective on the importance of lots of data in speech recognition.
• Siri Is Apple's Broken Promise - The Siri backlash: . OTOH, have heard positive comments. Voice recognition has been a long road.

Links for 12-06-2011

• The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011
• If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "And in fact, if management of all these large public companies really were the staggeringly malevolent yet totally hapless lackwits that so many seem to believe, it should be really, really easy to get rich by outwitting them.  Oh, sure, they'd probably get all their rich friends in Congress and Kiwanis to gang up on you, but since, according to the internet, almost all those people are also too dumb to come in out of the rain, you should be able to defeat them with a couple of well-placed banana peels."
• All.I.Can’s Kootenay Street Segment Goes Viral | Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine - "It’s definitely one of the coolest street ski segments you will ever see on film. Not only that, it might just be one of the best ski segments ever caught on film. And it all goes down on the streets of Trail, Rossland and Nelson in crappy, grey, wet, gravelly conditions. Shot by Dave Mossop of Sherpas Cinema, and starring JP Auclair, one of the most legendary freeskiers in the world, the segment was recently cracked to the world online and has since gone viral. Surprise, surprise."
• Why Siri Can't Find Abortion Clinics & How It's Not An Apple Conspiracy - Seems a pretty good rundown of Siri weaknesses in real world
• When will we have IaaS Cloud Standards? Not till 2015 | Forrester Blogs - "If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for IaaS to become more standardized, stop it. You’ll be waiting there till 2015, while everyone else is building fundamental skills and ramping up their cloud knowledge. So jump in the game already!"
• Your LED Light Bulb Holiday Shopping Guide - Forbes

Links for 12-02-2011

• Building a Spotify App « Music Machinery
• Red Hat Gordon Haff: from open source to cloud computing - Computer Business Online - Me on Chinese TV.
• The 5 Best Toys of All Time | GeekDad | Wired.com - RT @jyarmis: the 5 best toys of all time (from @berkson0) i played with all 5 #nostalgia
• The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum
• Sous Vide for the Holidays | Michael Ruhlman - I bought a PID controller for my crockpot this year and I like the results.
• IDC - Press Release - prUS23177411 - "One year ago, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the IT industry's next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, would begin its transition into the mainstream. Today, spending on these technologies is growing at about 18% per year and is expected to account for at least 80% of IT spending growth between now and 2020. With future market revenues at stake, IDC predicts that 2012 will be marked by some of the first high-stakes battles as companies seek to position themselves for leadership in these critical and fast-growing technology areas."

Links for 12-01-2011

• Top 10 Cloud Predictions for 2012: The Awkward Teenage Years Are Upon Us | Forrester Blogs - Like the analogy. Wish I had thought of it :-)
• As Cloud Becomes a Teenager, It Is Time for Adult Supervision! | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "As a toddler, cloud was not expected to have any maturity, discipline, self-control, or to understand the real world. So we all just did our best to help it grow, resigned in the process to just clean up after it and at least to prevent any life-threatening injuries. However, as cloud becomes a teenager, I think a key to building real maturity (as in real life) is in giving our budding teen the benefit of adult experience and supervision, while expecting it to show a growing level of responsibility. We need to give our teens the benefit of our ‘grown-up’ experience in the real world, provide them with a positive role model, be a ‘responsible adult’ for them, and expect them to show an increasing degree of self-discipline."
• Analyst: Pay TV Industry to Lose 200,000 Subscribers in 2012 - The Hollywood Reporter - If I could get basic HD OTA, I'd probably drop my cable sub. I don't use it much but I don't want to give up broadcast HD entirely either.
• Going Beyond PUE for Data Center Efficiency » Data Center Knowledge - Good rundown of the issues with PUE.
• The Big Green Egg | Michael Ruhlman - Cool toy :-)
• Where in the World? A Google Earth Puzzle - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic
• Don't Trust Your Gut With Assortment Planning - Marshall Fisher - Harvard Business Review - "Retailers periodically update their product assortments, deleting slow sellers and adding new products in response to shifts in consumer demand or to accommodate new offerings from suppliers. Assortment-planning processes vary greatly across retailers and product segments but have one thing in common: They rely too much on human judgment and not enough on hard data that might allow a retailer to predict how customers will react to a change in the assortment."

Posting HTML from Pinboard

I finally jumped off social bookmarking site Delicious during the whole kerfuffle over their problem-laden relaunch and moved to Pinboard on the recommendation of @sogrady and others. I had previously setup an account when the then parent of Delicious, Yahoo, began to send signals that it was shutting the service down. I now switched full-time.

The problem was that some Javascript code I was using to easily generate HTML code from my bookmarks and notes for pasting into Blogger stopped working.(See, for example, this post.)  This was actually the reason that I didn't switch to Pinboard full-time when I first setup the account.

I'm far from a Javascript wizard and I had received the code indirectly through a friend so the issue wasn't immediately obvious. It should have kept working; the API's were supposedly compatible except for some documented format changes. But it didn't work.

However, with my full-time switch I had to do something so I dove in and started hacking at the code. What appears to have been the problem was that, with the old Delicious (the new Delicious broke the code too), an object with global scope was being instantiated by the JSON call that retrieves recent bookmarks. Copying the JSON object into a global variable seemed to fix the problem. This doubtless should have been obvious.

In any case, if you use Pinboard and ever have occasion to create HTML from your bookmarks for posting somewhere else, you may find this code useful. You just need to substitute your username into the JSON URL where the comment tells you to. You can also customize in other ways as shown on the Pinboard HowTo page.

pinboardlinks_template.html

 

Links for 11-30-2011

• Seamless Topographic Maps for Google Earth « Google Earth Library
• Why There Will Never Be Another Drug Like Lipitor - Forbes

Big Data: Asking the right questions

In this interview by Mac Slocum over at O'Reilly Radar, Alistair Croll, Strata online program chair, weighs in on the differences between Big Data and more traditional Business Intelligence.

Big data is a successor to traditional BI, and in that respect, there's bound to be some bloodshed. But both BI and big data are trying to do the same thing: answer questions. If big data gets businesses asking better questions, it's good for everyone.
Big data is different from BI in three main ways:

1. It's about more data than BI, and this is certainly a traditional definition of big data.
2. It's about faster data than BI, which means exploration and interactivity, and in some cases delivering results in less time than it takes to load a web page.
3. It's about unstructured data, which we only decide how to use after we've collected it and need algorithms and interactivity in order to find the patterns it contains.

When traditional BI bumps up against the edges of big, fast, or unstructured, that's when big data takes over. So, it's likely that in a few years we'll ask a business question, and the tools themselves will decide if they can use traditional relational databases and data warehouses or if they should send the task to a different architecture based on its processing requirements.
What's obvious to anyone on either side of the BI/big data fence is that the importance of asking the right questions — and the business value of doing so — has gone way, way up.

Croll's last point--that asking the right questions is critical--bears highlighting. There are many reasons that traditional data warehousing and business intelligence has been, in the main, a disappointment. However, I'd argue that one big reason is that most companies never figured out what sort of answers would lead to actionable, valuable business results.
After all, while there is a kernel of truth to the oft-repeated data warehousing fable about diapers and beer sales, that data never led to any shelves being rearranged.

Podcast: Red Hat's Kim Palko talks messaging and AMQP

Messaging used to be the province of expensive, proprietary software but--as in many other areas of the software universe--that's changed with open source. And the AMQP protocol provides a particularly good example of the open source development model in which innovation comes from customers as well as vendors. I sat down with Kim Palko, Red Hat's Senior Product Manager for messaging, to talk about the latest happenings with AMQP.
Topics we cover in this podcast include:

• How customers use messaging products
• What AMQP is and why it's generating so much buzz
• Red Hat's MRG-Messaging implementation of AMQP
• How Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS uses MRG-M
• The new JCA resource adapter

Listen to MP3 (13:49)
Listen to OGG (13:49)

Red Hat's Doug O'Flaherty discusses Supercomputing (SC11): Big data and more

As far as I'm concerned, the Supercomputing show may just be the most interesting computer industry trade show. I didn't make it this year--the content is a bit less central to my day-to-day interests than in the past--but I did have the opportunity to record an interview with fellow Red Hat marketeer Doug O'Flaherty who did make it out to Seattle.

Topics we cover in this podcast include:

• The big announcements and themes
• What Red Hat was up to at the show
• The cool hardware
• Big data
• How the TOP500 list has evolved

Listen to MP3 (6:57)

Listen to OGG (6:57)

Links for 11-29-2011

• Ranked: Martin Scorsese Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Pretty good list IMO.
• The Great Cloud Computing Pricing Debate CIO.com - "A continuing controversy in cloud computing is its putative cost benefits; specifically, whether public cloud computing can provide cost advantages over computing carried out within a company's own data center."
• Holiday Gift Guide 2011: Video Game Edition - Megan McArdle - Entertainment - The Atlantic - "Modern Warfare 3  Yes, it's absurdly over the top, and yes, the story, which I think has something to do with a Russian terrorist's war on Europe and America, makes less sense than a Rick Perry debate response. But if you're a fan of the Michael Bay Theory of the World -- explosions now, more explosions later -- this is the game for you. Like MW2, the game fetishizes military firepower; you can think of it as a virtual commercial for defense spending. Also like MW2, the game makes expert use of digitally mocked-up real-world locations -- there are massive setpiece shootouts on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the streets of Paris. Indeed, its only real curiosity about the world comes down to a single question: Wouldn't this place make an awesome location for an action scene? Fortunately, the answer is always yes."
• The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia - Yeah, it's just one case but pretty damning and not at all some freak occurrence.
• 50 reasons not to date a photographer - Funny! Sample: "If you ask them if you look fat, they’ll say “don’t worry I can photoshop you later.”"
• Samsung Galaxy S II Commercial - This Samsung smartphone app is hilarious
• PEPPER SPRAYING COP - Pepper spray cop tumblr. Some of these Photoshopped images are very well done.
• For HP, a tough road ahead | Business Tech - CNET News - Seems like a pretty good analysis.
• How to Destroy Your House With One Five Pound Bag of Flour - RT @Samibouni: How to Destroy Your House With One 5-Pound Bag of Flour (VIDEO) << Hilarious if it's not your house

Links for 11-22-2011

• An Open Letter to Chip and Dan Heath about Second Life « It’s All Virtual - A counterpoint to the latest Second Life is dead argument. A lot depends on your perspective. It didn't come close to living up to the initial hype but it plods along at a certain level.
• Google Drops The Price Of Chromebooks to $299 And Polishes The Interface | TechCrunch - Chromebooks never made much of an impact, did they?
• Farage: The Euro is a Failure - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Quite the video.
• What cloud boils down to for the enterprise — Cloud Computing News - "What you do bring to the table–er, service–is code, data, configuration metadata and/or policies that are, in fact, what makes any cloud service valuable to you as an individual or an organization. Your task in consuming a cloud service is to deliver those elements to a service that turns them into functionality that drives business value. Thus, a new order of operations has to evolve in order to meet the demands of this new model."
• Cloud Computing's Vendor Lock-In Problem: Why the Industry is Taking a Step Backward - Forbes - "Only one thing will eliminate or reduce the risk of vendor lock-in in the long run: if end-user customers start demanding standardization and interoperability, just as they have in the past with on-premises applications. “Once it dawns among organizations that use third-party clouds that they need to demand this from cloud providers, then the cloud providers will fall in line.”"

Links for 11-21-2011

• How Facebook is ruining sharing | Molly Rants - CNET News - "Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems."
• 1 visionary + 3 launchers + 1,500 employees = ? | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine
• Daring Fireball: Getting Steve Jobs Wrong - A good read although I agree with Gladwell more than not in this case.
• A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org - "A tablet is a tough sell. It’s too big for your pocket, so you won’t always have it available like a phone. It’s too small to have rich and precise input methods like keyboards and mice, and its power and size constraints prevent it from using advanced PC-class hardware, so it’s probably not going to replace your laptop. It’s just one more gadget to charge, encase, carry (sometimes), care for, and update. And it’s one more expenditure that can easily be cut and done without, especially in an economic depression. “Tablets” weren’t a category that anyone needed to give a damn about until the iPad. It was a massive hit not because it managed to remove any of the problems inherent to tablets, but because it was so delightful, fun, and pleasant to use that anyone who tried their friend’s iPad for a few minutes needed to have one of their own."
• Man stole goat in Lakeway, served it at barbecue, police say - RT @jyarmis: ya know, we just don't get these kinds of stories up here in the northeast
• TOP500 List of Supercomputers Released | Linux.com - Wow. Just *one* Windows system on TOP500. Admittedly, more focused on smaller clusters but still.
• redhat.com | Downloadable Version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Now Available to All - Downloadable version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 beta available
• Amazon: How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business? - Quora - The "use up excess capacity" origin of AWS is definitively a myth.
• 5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation | Cracked.com - "Older people talk about how fat you're getting, about childhood obesity and diabetes and how you're all lazy slugs. They imply that back in their day, kids got up and did 50 jump squats every morning just because they enjoyed the sense of pride in their self discipline. But let me let you in on a little secret: We only got exercise because there was nothing fun to do indoors. If they had Modern Warfare multiplayer when I was a kid, we would have played the shit out of it."
• Cambridge, MA police include yoga instructions with parking tickets | Nerve.com - "What will those smarty-pants up in Cambridge think of next? First they founded a couple of good schools*, then they invented rowing**, and now the Cambridge Police Department are printing stress-reducing yoga instructions on the back of parking tickets."
• Why Is Payroll Hard - "I once thought payroll was simple too. It turns out that it is essentially complex, because of all the special deals and weird practices that have been set up over years of union negotiations and HR people with strange ideas."
• eReaders are alive and well, thanks very much - FierceContentManagement - "Remember when some joker predicted the end of eReaders a while back--oh, that was me. In the words of the late, great Gilda Radner playing Emily Latella, "never mind." New research suggests that eReaders are not only doing well, they are dare I say, thriving." Shows how tricky predicting convergence trends can be.
• Magazine Archive - Technology Review - RT @jason_pontin: All of @techreview's archives going back to 1899 are now live on our Web site. Here's January 1899:
• How to replace low bit rate tracks with higher quality tracks from iTunes Match – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home - How to upgrade your local iTunes library w higher quality matches:
• Flash: Misunderstood by Adobe, Apple, the Haters, and the Press - "Seldom have I seen a technology so widely adopted yet so poorly understood, so polarized between haters and fanboys, and so indifferently managed by its owners.  It may have many other problems, but Flash’s worst problem is how widely it is misunderstood by key parties."
• xkcd: Map Projections - Today's xkcd is great for map geeks

The Best Couple of Paragraphs Written About Tablets

The context of these paragraphs written by Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, is a negative review of the Kindle Fire. But they also capture why so many people either: 1.) Think anyone who buys an iPad must be some sort of uncritical Apple fanboi or 2.) Think anyone who isn't wowed by the iPad must be some sort of uncritical Apple hater.

A tablet is a tough sell. It’s too big for your pocket, so you won’t always have it available like a phone. It’s too small to have rich and precise input methods like keyboards and mice, and its power and size constraints prevent it from using advanced PC-class hardware, so it’s probably not going to replace your laptop. It’s just one more gadget to charge, encase, carry (sometimes), care for, and update. And it’s one more expenditure that can easily be cut and done without, especially in an economic depression.

“Tablets” weren’t a category that anyone needed to give a damn about until the iPad. It was a massive hit not because it managed to remove any of the problems inherent to tablets, but because it was so delightful, fun, and pleasant to use that anyone who tried their friend’s iPad for a few minutes needed to have one of their own.

 

Links for 11-15-2011

• 5 key trends in cloud computing's future | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld - "As we gain experience with the cloud, expect to see centralized trust systems, amazingly large databases, and more." << Short piece but a good list.
• Apple's iTunes Match Pitch: Pay Up, Stick Around - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD - This strikes me as a pretty spot-on summation.
• Patient BW, DOB 2/16/1971 - Very good!
• Pam Moore: Stop the Social Puppetry for Klout and Other Influence Metrics! – Influencer Marketing Review - Pretty good although author seems to have more faith than I that such a metric can be broadly meaningful.

Links for 11-14-2011

• The Likability of Angry Birds - The Oatmeal - The Likability of Angry Birds Outstanding!
• How Long Is This Hot Wheels Track? | Wired Science | Wired.com - From the comments: "The video is what happens in a world without women. Fun, yet pitiable." :-)
• Mobile Opportunity: Lessons From the Failure of Flash: Greed Kills - Not sure I agree with everything here but well worth a read.
• Polaroid Z340: A Futuristic Digital Instant Camera That Spits Out ZINK Prints - A digital instant printing camera. Kinda cool in an anachronistic sort of way. via @petapixel
• Internet Evolution - Gordon Haff - Google's TV Plan Evokes Bad Memories - I could keep dusting my "XYZ interactive TV projects will fail" piece w different names every couple of years
• Logitech confesses to 'gigantic' mistake with Google TV | Digital Media - CNET News - Ref: Until interactivity model w TVs that ppl want to use (I'm skeptical), efforts will continue #fail

Links for 11-11-2011

• Oracle Pitches Solaris as 'First Cloud OS' | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com - "Cantrill, like many of Sun’s freewheeling engineers, really didn’t mesh with Oracle’s top-down culture. “I have never encountered an entity with less empathy or humanity or complexity than Oracle,” he says. “It was soulless at its deepest level.”"
• How to best fight the rise of rogue IT services? Compete - Learn - "While many IT organizations will decide to fight these cloud services from encroaching on their turf – the reality is that without onerous monitoring and swift enforcement such plans are futile. In fact, they are probably futile with those controls in place. No, the best approach is probably not so draconian. In my opinion the most optimal way to defeat internally acquired rogue IT services is to compete."
• (404) http://t.co/eWpP4gTU%E2%80%9D - “@VanityFair: "It's the perfect play!" Kim Cattrall on playing Amanda in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” should be gr8t
• Buy More Experiences and Less Stuff — PsyBlog - RT @the_saltworks: RT @davidahood Buy more experiences & less stuff: cc @collcons <-- wow I just had this exact ...
• EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM TEST FAILS - Well, I guess this is why you test things. Better than "Oops. We were sure it would work."
• Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash Development, Report Says | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - RT @TheTechScribe: RT @nonprofit_tech: Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash Development, Report Says <- ...
• Is Klout crossing the line when it comes to privacy? — Tech News and Analysis - "it’s hard to see why Klout should be criticized for collecting information about people based on their public web activity. How is this any different from what Google does when it uses the behavior of users to assign a PageRank to the ads and links it shows in search results? And when I look at Google+ or Facebook, both show me people I might want to add based on my history of interacting with them in a variety of ways, again based on my public activity on the web. They may not be creating a profile for me or assigning me a Klout rank, but it fundamentally amounts to the same thing."
• The Big, Honking Problems With The TV Market, According To Steve Jobs - Nice pulling together of Apple discussions over years around TV. Example from 1998: "In this fuzzy video, Jobs explains what's wrong with "convergence" of the TV and the PC. The TV is used when we want to turn off our brains. The PC is used when we want to turn on our brains. The TV is for leaning back. The PC is for leaning in. How do you make these two gadgets play nice when they're designed for two totally different uses?" Not sure the fundamentals have changed all much.
• Simon Crosby, the godfather of Xen, on virtualization, security and wimpy private clouds
• Calxeda hurls EnergyCore ARM at server chip Goliaths • The Register - Typically good TPM writeup.

From Building a Cloud to Operating It

First you build your cloud. A week back, I shared my thoughts on how best to do so based on my keynote from the Red Hat Cloud Tour. But that's just the first step. Once your cloud is in place, you need to operate it.

What makes this less than straightforward in a typical enterprise IT environment is that there's a balancing act in play.

 

Users want the simplicity they get from public cloud providers. They want self-service. They want to be in control. They don't want to think about underlying infrastructure. They want things to just work. In short, they have expectations set by the consumer Web and by the plethora of "magical" iDevices that they increasingly bring to their day jobs.

Historical enterprise IT sat largely in opposition to these user desires. Applications focused on business processes rather than user interaction. Minimizing risk and cost was equated to minimizing user choice of user choice. And a myriad of unavoidable regulatory, compliance, security, and audit needs meant that laissez faire attitudes to where applications ran and data was stored were a non-starter.

Balancing these two sets of desires and requirements requires four capabilities, all of which Red Hat provides:

• Self-service with rich policy
• Application lifecycle management designed for the cloud
• Application portability across clouds
• Proven stack and ecosystem delivering enterprise-class SLAs in the cloud

 

Self-service is a sine qua non of cloud computing. It's fundamental to eliminating friction between users requesting a service and the IT infrastructure providing that service. Business processes and workflows also need to support rapid servicing provisioning of course; associated manual approval requirements adding days or weeks blunt any positive technology impact. However, even reasonably automated provisioning processes that require admin intervention can add significant latency and limit scalability.

The key in an enterprise context is pairing this self-service to a rich set of policies. Policies specify which standard operating environments (SOE) a user or group of users have access to. They specify where those SOEs may physically run, perhaps based on whether they're being deployed for dev/test or whether they're being put into production. Thus, for example, policies could allow a service to be deployed to a public cloud while it's being developed--using test data--but require that production applications working with customer data be run on-premise.

 

Traditional enterprise management was "heavyweight." It focused on relatively static environments that had, as their core, large, proprietary legacy servers ministered too by a cadre of specialized sys admins. A cloud environment, on the other hand, is highly dynamic. Workloads are more typically scale-out. They are mobile, often running at different locales at different points in their lifecycle. Application lifecycle management for the cloud needs to take these differences into account. The System Engine component within Red Hat's CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud management software was designed with such cloud requirements in mind.

 

One of the ways that portability breaks down is that public clouds encourage ad hoc development that doesn't necessarily comply with an organization's standards for applications run on-premise. This may be fine for prototyping or other work that is throwaway by design. However, it's far too easy for prototypes to evolve into something more—as often happened in the case of early visual programming languages—and the result is applications that either have to be rewritten or that may have support, reliability, or scalability issues down the road.

One approach to addressing this problem is to provide consistent runtimes across public and private clouds. Red Hat does this through its Certified Cloud Provider program that provides access to certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on public clouds. (Pay-as-you-go RHEL is initially available on Amazon. Cloud Access provides a way to transfer on-premise RHEL subscriptions to Premier Certified Cloud Providers.) By running the same runtime across physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, and public clouds, application certifications and testing need happen only once.

 

Finally, just because the "cloud" word is getting thrown around doesn't change the needs of either the IT department or the users when it comes to quality-of-service (QoS), security, or reliability. Users may fixate on the simplicity of consuming external computing resources but they expect the high level of availability that they're (hopefully) accustomed to IT providing. And, as an organization starts building a cloud, the goal needs to be to meet or exceed traditional IT operational benchmarks.

This requires no-compromise infrastructure. Cloud management may abstract this infrastructure and it may span multiple underlying technology stacks. But the capabilities of that underlying infrastructure still matter--more than ever. Dynamism and multi-tenancy (whereby disparate users share physical resources) are fundamental to clouds and they amplify any underlying infrastructure weakness. Red Hat has a long history of providing platform software for the most demanding IT environments. The cloud is simply the latest such.

Cloud computing operations requires blending the new and the old. Our expectations as consumers come to the fore. The "Consumerization of IT" phrase is often taken as synonymous with bringing your own iDevice to work. But it equally applies to user expectations of IT as shaped by Google and Facebook. Yet cloud computing doesn't suddenly void all legal, security, customer data, and uptime requirements. Those organizations that hit the right balance will be the most successful ones.

Portable computing creates scalable private clouds that can be federated to a public cloud provider under a unified management framework. Portable applications mean that developers can write once and deploy anywhere, thereby preserving their strategic flexibility and keeping their options open, while lowering maintenance and support costs. Portable services simplify development and operations by eliminating the need to re-implement frequently needed functions in private clouds and enable the movement of data and application features across clouds. Portable programming models let existing applications be brought over to cloud environments or evolved incrementally.

Three Approaches to Building a Cloud

In the course of preparing for the Red Hat Cloud Tour, I (along with many others on the Red Hat cloud team) gave a lot of thought as to how best to articulate the value delivered by cloud computing, what's needed for a private or hybrid cloud environment, why you'd want to build a cloud in the first place, and which approach delivers the greatest value.

Let's talk about that last point with the aid of a few slides from my keynote presentation from the Cloud Tour.

The typical IT operation can be thought of as consisting of a set of silos. Some of these silos may be the result of deliberate plan--perhaps to meet some regulatory need to keep internal businesses completely separate. However, more commonly, they come about through the accretion of new technologies, products, and organizations. All these silos create complexity. One goal of implementing a cloud should be to reduce this complexity.

How best to proceed?

This first approach essentially attempts to translate the "Greenfield" methodology used by service providers into an enterprise environment. The thinking is that throwing out existing infrastructure and replacing it with a grounds-up, homogenous, standardized computing foundation is a dramatic simplification relative to the typical enterprise IT infrastructure as it exists today.

In fact, this approach does dramatically simplify. It's also naively simple. For the vast majority of organizations, IT assets tarred with the pejorative "legacy" are also critical and core to the business. More broadly, IT infrastructures advance in an evolutionary way rather than through wholesale replacement. Doing so keeps both risk and cost down. Cloud computing is no different. While infrastructure standardization, modernization, and simplification are frequently good practices, they can usually only be taken so far.

Suppose, instead, we tackle just part of the problem. There are a couple of different ways to go about this.

We could, for example, decide to add some self-service and automation to a specific virtualization platform. This is VMware's approach to cloud. vCloud Director essentially just extends the vSphere virtualization platform and therefore requires that the underlying platform, whether in a private or public environment, be running a VMware technology stack. Alternatively, we could roll in a dedicated cloud appliance for some single purpose, such as a database.

Whichever of these two paths we take, the result is the same. Our IT infrastructure now has another silo. Hardly a reduction in complexity!

This is not to say that we can't start our journey to a cloud on a subset of infrastructure. In most cases, a pilot project or proof-of-concept using a subset of applications will indeed be the prudent path. The difference is that a proof-of-concept is a first step; a new silo is a dead end.

The final approach, and the one that Red Hat advocates, is to enable bringing the broadest set of IT assets under a cloud management framework. Certain existing--often static--workloads may be kept separate for a variety of reasons. But such decisions should come about because they make the most sense from an IT operational perspective, not because of restrictions imposed by a technology stack.

Supporting these capabilities requires a cloud management product that can span multiple virtualization platforms, a variety of public cloud providers based on a variety of underlying technologies, and even physical servers. While most clouds will have a virtualized foundation of some sort, we have spoken with a number of customers who require blending physical and virtual environments for different types of workloads or use cases.

The Red Hat product that makes this approach possible is CloudForms, which provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service management for private and hybrid clouds. It works across virtualization platforms such as vSphere and the KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and a variety of public clouds starting with Amazon. Its key interoperability component is the Deltacloud API, an incubator project under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.

I've covered just a small part of our our Cloud Tour content. However, it's an important part because fundamental differences in approach to building clouds lead to fundamental differences in the business value that can be extracted from them.

Links for 11-04-2011

• Apple's Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers - Businessweek - "“Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, the former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”"
• Can a Commercial Be Too Sexy For Its Own Good? Ask Axe - Martin Lindstrom - Business - The Atlantic - "However, the brand's early success soon began to backfire. The problem was, the ads had worked too well in persuading the Insecure Novices and Enthusiastic Novices to buy the product. Geeks and dorks everywhere were now buying Axe by the caseload, and it was hurting the brand's image. Eventually (in the United States, at least), to most high-school and college-age males, Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers and, not surprisingly, sales took a huge hit. "
• Tarmac delays traced to lack of buses to ferry fliers - USATODAY.com - Rt @flight_status10: Tarmac delays traced to lack of buses to ferry fliers << airports too dependent on jetbridges
• Daring Fireball: The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos - "I’m not arguing that making concept videos directly leads to a lack of traction in the current market. I’m arguing that making concept videos is a sign of a company that has a lack of institutional focus on the present and near-present. Can you imagine a sports team in the midst of a present-day losing season that makes a video imagining a future championship 10 years out?" << Mostly agree.
• How Groupon Was Founded - Nice, detailed rundown on groupon history.

How to Browse the Amazon Kindle Lending Library from a PC

One of my complaints about Amazon streaming for Prime Members is that they don't make it easy to search and browse only within the stuff you can get for free. This seems to be the case with their new Kindle Lending Library as well. Here's a recipe for browsing the list (currently at 5,379 results) from this Amazon discussion thread:

Follow these steps to browse books that are in the new Kindle lending Library on your PC. 
1) When on the front page of Amazon take a look at the search function near the top of the page. 
2) Don't put anything in the search box. Select "Books" in the department drop down box. Click on the "Go" button. 
3) You will now see pretty much all of Amazon's books. All 34+ Million of them. Select "Kindle Edition" in the Formats you see up at the top of the results list. 
4) Now you have all 1+ Million Kindle books. Over on the left side of the screen is further filters. Go all the way near the bottom of the long list of filters is a check box for "Prime Eligable". Click on it. 
5) There ya go. All 5,377 Kindle books that are in the new Prime Lending Library. This is all of them as that is the same number of books that I got when I was looking at them on my Kindle.

Apparently this only works if you're already a Prime member. It also appears as if you then need to use your Kindle device (the lending library only works with Kindle hardware--not the apps for devices like the iPad) to actually download the title.

 

Links for 10-31-2011

• The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review - Cool that it still works with iTunes. It's worth noting though that it took the iPod quite a while to set the world on fire. At the time, the original was just another MP3 player that got, as I recall, middling reviews.
• Aeolus | Manage Your Cloud Deployments with Ease - @swardley Much of the CloudForms upstream is at Project Aeolus

Links for 10-28-2011

• http://dartreview.com/dartlog/2011/10/28/hilarious-occupy-wall-street-quotes.html - "A protester comments on the power of greed: “It’s weird protesting on Bay Street. You get there at 9 a.m. and the rich bankers who you want to hurl insults at and change their worldview have been at work for two hours already. And then when it's time to go, they're still there. I guess that's why they call them the one per cent. I mean, who wants to work those kinds of hours? That's the power of greed.” – Jeremy, 38"
• Daring Fireball Linked List: HP to Keep PC Division - "You know what HP should do? They should acquire Netflix. Then a week later back away and say “Never mind.” Then a month later go ahead and buy Netflix. Those two are made for each other."
• Bloggers Selling Links to Marketers? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "Well, I certainly got a wake-up call this morning.  You can imagine my shock and horror when I learned (via Google Reader and Twitter) that some bloggers may have actually accepted money to mention companies and commercial products such as our fantastic 50-inch Panasonic Viera plasma television." << Good discussion, amusingly written.

You Had Klout

I confess to having a few good belly laughs yesterday over the minor tempest that was Klout revising its algorithms. For the 99%+ of the population that has no idea what a "Klout" is, it's a site that purports to measure online influence as calculated by a user's activity on twitter, for example.

Klout recently revised its scoring algorithms. And, apparently, various self-styled social media experts saw their scores drop dramatically. Outrage ensued.

One user (no names used in the interest of protecting the terminally self-important) in a reply to Klout's blog announcing the changes:

Very unhappy with this change. My score went from 73 down to 53. 20 point drop. I've been working for months to increase my Klout score. Please fix this.

Really. Seems like a good use of time. This video captures the concept perfectly.

Another social media "guru" (and I use the term sardonically) is now faced with explaining to clients that he might have been, umm, wrong in getting them to put a lot of faith in this proprietary metric:

Not only have I used Klout to measure my score, but I've instructed my social media beginner consulting clients to use it too- as an easy way to market their progress as they begin Tweeting and using Facebook.  Thank you for making my job harder- now I have to explain why, with all of their hard work, some their scores went DOWN.

Paraphrasing: "I blindly pimped Klout and now they've screwed me":

Unfortunately, I have been promoting Klout to clients as one of the various metrics to use in measuring the impact of social media campaigns. This change has already caused me to lose clients, and I have to start over using PeerIndex instead. Pity they hit us so hard after we helped make KLOUT influential.

I could go on. The whole comment thread to Klout's blog makes for an amusing read.

It's hard to feel much in the way of sympathy for those affected. It would seem that they've been among the most responsible for promoting Klout, a score based on a proprietary algorithm, as something companies ought to weigh heavily. I'm also suspicious that many of these social media "experts" busily working to increase their Klout have probably been engaging in the sort of reciprocal linking and retweeting behavior that Google fights to keep out of its search rankings.

That was fun.

More seriously, though, was this a good or bad move on the part of Klout? I'm just going to throw a few thoughts out there.

Self-styled social media mavens getting their comeuppance is a feature, not a bug.

If a dramatic one-time change was needed to clear a backlog of gaming behaviors, so be it.

Although Klout published a graph showing how users were affected by this change in the aggregate, they haven't said anything--even at a very high level--about the sorts of behaviors that resulted in large swings. Even Google does this to a degree.

Most to the point though, OK maybe Klout needed to make a one-time change. But their business is predicated on the idea that their score means something. That complaints about this change aren't akin to complaining that your horoscope wasn't specific enough, as Jared Sprool remarked on Twitter. And this, in turn, implies continuity of results modulo ongoing changes needed to address specific types of behavior that Klout perceives as gaming their system.

Whether or not you think that there is any connection between a measure of influence derived from social media metrics and objective business results, that is Klout's mission in life. (Personally, I think the connections are tenuous but so are lots of measures that companies around the world make decisions based on every week from pageviews to clickthrough rates.) And therefore, it is also in Klout's interest to avoid making changes that amount to saying that its measurements last week didn't mean anything.

Links for 10-27-2011

• Productivity Future Vision - From John Gruber: "This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today."
• Adobe Premiere Pro: What are the best export settings? « Crooked Path Blog - Some good tips. I'm still learning this stuff.
• Saturday Night Live's 'painfully accurate' Steve Jobs sketch - The Week - Unaired sketch. Quite good!
• A VC: OccupyAppStore - "Just because an app was the most popular six months ago, doesn't mean it should be the most popular now. But a leaderboard model is a self reinforcing action. The most popular stay the most popular. The new upstart doesn't stand a chance at unseating the aging category leader."
• The Fifty Greatest Cult Movies of All Time | Nerve.com - Pretty good list.
• The Pot of Gold in Red Hat’s Gluster Acquisition « IT Depends - Good Gluster overview from ESG.

Links for 10-26-2011

• The "GE Flight Simulator" gets some solid improvements | Google Earth Blog
• Steve Jobs: The iPad Almost Had Intel Inside - Techland - TIME.com - "Jobs goes on to criticize Intel in Isaacson's book: "There were two reasons we didn't go with them," says Jobs in the authorized biography. "One was that they are just really slow. They are like a steamship, not very flexible. We're used to going pretty fast. Second is that we just didn't want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.""
• The X Factor Live: It’s Not Idol. And That’s Not a Compliment | Entertainment | TIME.com - "Seriously, it was as if the show was designed on the philosophy, “Like an Oscars production number, but more over-the-top.”"
• Steve Jobs biography: The new book doesn’t explain what made the Apple CEO tick. - Slate Magazine - "There are several admiring Steve Jobs stories in Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s much-anticipated authorized biography, but they’re overshadowed by the many, many more instances in which Jobs comes off as a world-class jerk. Jobs was rude, mean, abusive, and often neglectful to everyone in his life; the people he hated got it bad, but the people he loved sometimes got it worse. Some of this isn’t surprising. Jobs’ arrogance, his monumental self-regard, his irresponsibility, and his unremitting cruelty to those who failed to live up to his expectations have always dogged his image."

Links for 10-25-2011

• IPads Change Economics, and Speed, of Hotel Wi-Fi-On the Road - NYTimes.com - "The iPad represents the “final nail in the coffin” for the idea that all Internet is free, Mr. Garrison said. Amy Cravens, a market analyst with the mobile Internet group of In-Stat, a technology research and consulting company, agreed that tablets “have had a huge influence on bandwidth consumption.”"
• Lead Bullets | TechCrunch - "As I excitedly reviewed the plan with my engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, he looked at me as though I was a little kid who had much to learn. Bill was a long-time veteran of battling Microsoft from his time at Borland and understood what I was trying to do, but remained unconvinced. He said: “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”"
• Brave New Thermostat: How the iPod’s Creator Is Making Home Heating Sexy | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
• NSM: Often the Weakest Link in Business Availability - "Gartner research shows that an average of 80 percent of mission-critical application service downtime is directly caused by people or process failures. The other 20 percent is caused by technology failure, environmental failure or a disaster. The complexity of today's IT infrastructure and applications makes high-availability systems management enormously difficult (see "Making Smart Investments to Reduce Unplanned Downtime," TG-07-4033)."
• (503) http://www.amazon.com/Palm-1048NA-Z22-Handheld/dp/B000BI2180/ref=dp_ob_title_ce - Not sure how many of these still manufactured but (a few) ppl seem to still buy PDAs as if it's 1999
• Microsoft to bump Apple into sync-hole? - ZDNet Asia News - ""Certainly by...2005, possibly by the end of 2003, Linux will pass Mac OS as the No. 2 operating environment," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky."
• The Jobs backlash begins | Real Dan Lyons Web Site - "I’ve always felt that people did Steve a disservice by portraying him as a holy man, some kind of silicon saint leading us into the promised land. It seemed to me that Steve had a deep reservoir of darkness inside him, and that this dark energy was what fueled his genius. WIthout it, he would have been just another Silicon Valley marketing guy in a pair of khakis and an Oxford shirt. His challenge was to harness that dark energy and use it without being consumed or destroyed by it."

Video: Red Hat OpenShift's Under-the-Covers Secret Sauce

A couple of days ago, Matt Hicks sat down with me to talk about some of the cool ways that Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering is making seriously heavy-duty use of features like SELinux, cgroups, and AMQP messaging in underlying Red Hat products. It makes you appreciate just how much rocket science goes into running the infrastructure for Platform-as-a-Service. Matt's the Managing Principal Architect for Red Hat who is responsible for much of what goes into keeping OpenShift running. Have a look!

Links for 10-24-2011

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 v. Battlefield 3. | Entertainment | TIME.com - "But it’s not just the scale of it, or who wins Christmas at GameStop. The other part of it is the weirdness of the fact that we are playing games that simulate wars that the U.S. is still fighting, right now, and that real people are dying in. I mean, some of the clips from Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3, look like Wikileaks just leaked them from Iraq. Is that…OK? I remember when wargames were historical only. I remember when it was considered edgy to make a Vietnam game."
• Economics in One Lesson
• VMware CEO Maritz: Get Ready For Consumption-Based Pricing - "We are going to have to move towards more of a consumption-based model. This is where we are going," Maritz said at the event Thursday, as reported by Computerworld UK. "We are trying to keep the licensing stable for as long as we can, but in 10 years from now, things will have changed quite radically."
• (403) http://antispec.com/hq/moleskine - Crowdsourced on-spec design work does feel vaguely icky to me via @cdgrams
• Gartner’s Public Cloud Fallacy and EMC’s Secret Weapon | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com - "One position that Gartner appeared to get very wrong, according to the CIOs I’ve spoken with, is to start public cloud deployments with email." << Not sure this is always true but it's absolutely true that email isn't the no-brainer "do it in a public cloud" function it's often presented as.
• lessons of the web: on vmware, cloud and what comes next – James Governor's Monkchips - Seems like a pretty good overview of Raghu's keynote at VMworld Europe.
• Details of United’s 2012 Mileage Plus program released - One Mile at a Time - United's FF program has fairly significant downgrades for mid-level miles next year

Nevada Desert (near Lake Mead)

Nevada Desert (near Lake Mead)
Originally uploaded by ghaff

It hit 111 degrees in Nevada on the August day I headed towards Las Vegas from Zion National Park.

Links for 10-20-2011

• GAMBIT: Updates: New MIT Game Research Explores Singapore Culture from the Inside Out
• Bad Pitch Blog - Good stuff!
• Mary Meeker’s 2011 Presentation On Internet Trends [Slides] | TechCrunch - The obligatory annual Mary Meeker Internet trends preso
• HP And Cisco Bury The Hatchet To Accommodate Customers – Everyone Wins? | Forrester Blogs - "So what drove this seeming rapprochement? The coined word “coopetition” lacks the flavor of the German “Realpolitik,” but the essence is the same – both sides profit from accommodating a real demand from customers for Cisco network technology in HP BladeSystem servers.
• Apple's R&D spending hits bottom as percentage of revenue | ZDNet - Don't see much puzzle in AAPL's relatively low R&D % Massive volumes of small # of high margin products
• fcheblog » using systemtap better
• Brendan's blog » Using SystemTap
• There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe - Scott Hanselman - There is only one cloud icon:

General social media and contacting me update

I've been making some tweaks to where and how I publish and how I use various social networking and communications services over the past few months. Here's the current status:

Blogging:

I have two primary blogs.

Connections is my "personal" blog. It's personal in the sense that no one else has any control over what I publish here. That said, it's mostly (75%+) devoted to topics that fall generally under the umbrella of "tech." I generally keep the blog going with short link-comments when I'm not pushing out anything longer. In a new development, I expect to be publishing more posts that directly pertain to my activities at Red Hat here.

The Pervasive Datacenter is my CNET Blog Network blog. I typically publish once or twice a month on technology topics, nominally with an emphasis on enterprise IT although I do posts on photography and other consumer tech of interest from time to time. I am especially careful about topics that could be perceived as in any way a conflict of interest because of my day job at Red Hat and therefore mostly avoid getting into individual companies, strategies, and products.

Social Networks:

I am active on twitter as @ghaff. As with my blogs, I concentrate on tech topics but no guarantees that I won't get into other topics from time to time.

I mostly view LinkedIn as a sort of professional rolodex. If I've met you and you send me a LinkedIn invite, I'll probably accept though it might help to remind me who you are. I'm most likely to ignore you if you appear to be someone just building up a big network for spammy purposes.

I'm a pretty casual user of Facebook and I limit it to friend friends. That's not to say that some of them aren't professional acquaintances as well. But if you just met me at a conference somewhere and want to friend me, please understand if I ignore you.

I'm not sure where I stand with Google+ at this point. I'm on it, generally like the interface, and some of my friends are active. But I don't feel a great hole in my social media sphere that's calling out for a Google+ to fill. We'll see.

PR pitches, etc:

Lord, do I get a lot of crap sent my way. The redeeming aspect of this is that I periodically get some gem that gives the PR group at Red Hat a chuckle (after any embargo is off of course). If you work for a Red Hat competitor or their agency, you might also want to think twice about offering to pre-brief me on some new announcement.

With that out of the way, I'm interested in a wide variety of tech topics. However, for obvious reasons, I tend to avoid writing about specific companies that closely intersect with my day job whether as competitors or partners. It's also a matter of my bandwidth. I have less time for blogging than when I was an analyst but if I write about one company in a space, it's not really fair to turn down all the inevitable requests that come in from other companies doing something similar.

Links for 10-12-2011

• No More Servants - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Interesting discussion. I think one of the main reasons is that, as a number of commenters note: 1. Past a certain income, people do tend to have personal assistants for a combination of business and personal matters, and 2. For a variety of reasons, people across a wide range of income brackets use lawn services, etc.
• redhat.com | Where's Red Hat This October? - “@RedHatNews: Blog: Where's Red Hat This October? #redhat” << I'll be keynoting DC cloud tour on 19th
• Siri security flaw? - iPhone, iPad, iPod Forums at TiPb.com - “@cchristiansen: Discusses bypassing passcode & Siri implications” <- good question. Could be showstopper f lots of us
• redhat.com | Red Hat to Acquire Gluster - Brian Stevens (Red Hat CTO) blogs on the Gluster acquisition:
• Amazing Reuters Photo of Rebel Firing RPG was Not Photoshopped - RT @petapixel: Amazing Reuters photo of rebel firing RPG was not Photoshopped:

Links for 09-30-2011

• Selling Is Not About Relationships - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Harvard Business Review – "This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The remains of the book – "Up until now, there's been a fairly common assumption that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web's manifest destiny. They'd go digital without losing their print nature; they'd retain their edges. That assumption always struck me as naive, and Bezos's choice of a novel for his demo of X-Ray makes me even more dubious that literary works will remain exempt from webification."
• You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – "When enterprises were able to impose their will upon their employees, enterprise vendors enjoyed barriers to entry sufficient to shield them from the likes of Apple. Businesses only bought the products that they wanted, which in turn were the products enterprise vendors built for them. "
• You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – Consumerization of IT makes it more challenging f businesses to focus from @sogrady << Harder to segment
• Pan Amorama | Blogs | Vanity Fair – "But where fashion runway models are unsmiling, robotic in their militant march steps, these stews smile like mod angels, their wings pinned to their snazzy blue jackets. No, Pan Am has none of the stomach-acid accidie of Mad Men--for primetime TV, it’s a far more formula drive--but it’s a wonderful throwback to Jean Negulesco films such as Three Coins in the Fountain and The Best of Everything. (Margot Robbie’s Laura Cameron, a flight attendant who lands on the cover of Life, is the Suzy Parker figure.) Nothing about Pan Am demands to be taken seriously and the espionage angle is an absurdity (even given the Cold War era), but everything was nicely done, and the crosscutting between adjoining hotel rooms of undressing lovers about to meet smack in the middle was elegantly, Europeanly sexy."
• Ex-Fed CIO Vivek Kundra’s Cloud First policy trashed - The Troposphere – "According to the study, 92% of feds believe cloud is a good idea for federal IT, but just 29% are following the administration’s mandated “Cloud First” policy. And almost half (42%) say they are adopting a “wait-and-see” approach related to cloud. Respondents cite numerous challenges including security issues (64%), cultural issues (36%) and budget constraints (36%) as barriers to cloud computing."
• Freakonomics » The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems – "What these results suggest is that in the real world, where social influence is much stronger than in our artificial experiment, enormous differences in success may indeed be due to small, random fluctuations early on in an artist’s career, which then get amplified by a process of cumulative advantage—a “rich-get-richer” phenomenon that is thought to arise in many social systems."
• Autonomy's reaction to Oracle's statement | Business | guardian.co.uk – "Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help."
• Connections: Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt – Check out my latest podcast. I talk oVirt (open source virt mgmt) with #redhat's Carl Trieloff:
• AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet – "The re-launch of social link sharing site Delicious, now under the stewardship of YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley under their AVOS startup banner, is nothing short of a complete, mind-boggling disaster. How AVOS took a beloved social sharing site and ruined it from stem to stem, and up to this minute have a complete, angry user PR explosion on their hands, is as enlightening as it is hard to watch."
• redhat.com | Survey Results and Conclusions: Evolving to the Cloud – Here are results and my commentary from a survey that Red Hat conducted at VMworld
• Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles – "Amazon built an alternative to the iPad, rather than a direct competitor. It’s a different market segment. As Steve Jobs explained back in 2010 at the introduction of the original iPad, there’s unexplored territory between smartphones and laptops." << Agree. It remains to be seen how viable the segment is but sometimes less really is more.
• Assess enterprise applications for cloud migration – Good, albeit probably overly academic, overview of how to think about enterprise application suitability for cloud.
• Bezos Portrays Kindle Fire as Service, Not Tablet- Bloomberg – RT @iwantmedia: Jeff Bezos: "We don't think of Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service" <
• Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Re-Thinking Pork Bellies. Why There are No Commodity Clouds, Only Commodity Thinkers. – "Don’t confuse platform with commodity." << The "commodity" term makes me uncomfortable in a lot of contexts.
• Workshop | oVirt Project – RT @mestery: 5 weeks until #ovirt kickoff meeting @ Cisco campus in San Jose. Have you RSVP'd yet?
• Delicious.com - Discover Yourself! – is being relaunched. It does look prettier. But it seems to have broken existing APIs and tagging system.
• The myth of standardisation – "We have to accept that. It’s evolutionary, in our genes. We wouldn’t have existed without this primordial urge to grow and divert whenever we can. Evolution means upward growth, based on a firm rock bottom. Don’t you think it’s funny that we now all have mobiles, yet download apps onto those like madmen? I do. A splendid opportunity for Cloud web apps, and what happens? Install local."
• How to create an OpenShift github quick start project | Red Hat Openshift Forum – RT @gshipley: Check out my new blog post on creating #openshift quick start projects. #cloud #paas

Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt

oVirt is the newly announced project focused on open source virtualization management, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more. Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with Carl Trieloff, Red Hat's technical director for cloud, to discuss the ins and out of oVirt. Among the topics we cover are:

• What is oVirt?
• How does oVirt relate to the Open Virtualization Alliance and the KVM hypervisor?
• How will licensing and code contributions work?
• What's the governance model?
• What comes next?

Listen to MP3 (9:06)

Listen to OGG (9:06)

 

Links for today seems to be broken

With the, ahem, less than elegant relaunch of the delicious bookmark saving tool, I'm back on pinboard. Alas, the Javascript I've been using to format JSON feeds into a form I could use to easily generate daily postings is now broken on both sites. (The delicious version never worked on pinboard.) My very inexpert eyes don't spy the problem immediately. I may fix this or I may, at least for the moment, continue to experiment with different ways of sharing content. One of my considerations here is that, while I'm all in for posting on the social media darling of the moment, I also want to largely mirror on a site I control or can at least easily export in a meaningful form--in this case, Blogger.

Links for 09-26-2011

• auntie pixelante › get lamp - I see the point--though don't really agree. Jason's film did focus on the players who ultimately made the most impact. It's a choice and not necessarily a bad one.
• Voting to Hire a Chief Without Meeting Him - NYTimes.com - "...when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker."
• Why I’m Stepping Down from TechCrunch | The Reformed Broker - The sad thing is, as one commenter noted, that it takes a while to realize this is humor unless someone tells you going in.
• Bryce's Ramblings: Board Games on the iPad

Links for 09-16-2011

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop | Fast Company - "The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory."
• Bill Poole's Creative Abrasion: Business-IT Alignment - A nice feedback diagram.
• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
• The Agonies of Picking a Product Name - Fog Creek Blog - "Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy. It’s also a giant time-slurping vortex. And in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter."
• How many photos have ever been taken? | 1000memories
• R&D is Important, But For Whom? – tecosystems - "What the above suggests, however, is that R&D is relatively independent of financial performance for companies that conduct it, with the caveats that this is merely a five year sample and that the selection of vendors is arbitrary and cross-industry. Which in turn implies that Palmisano is correct, and that we should consider research and development separately, because the two may actually have little to do with one another."
• The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist - "TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read."
• Photos, Copyrights, and the “Mechanical Representation of Facts” - I lean towards the narrower view of copyright here. Anything else strikes me as a very steep slippery slope.
• Fountainhead: IT-as-a-Service: Models for Consumption, Operations, Technology - "The market is equating virtualization with cloud, and worse, equating cloud with IT Transformation."
• Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT - Perspectives: CA Technologies corporate blog - CA Technologies - "Consumer-driven IT extends beyond the enterprise (fire)walls too. Like all consumers, your customers are rapidly becoming used to accessing cloud services whenever it suits them; they are connecting with product and service vendors online; they are interacting with businesses through social media and portable cloud-connected apps. Yet none of this means that employees are inherently correct in their sourcing decisions."
• CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD - "By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time."
• Be warned: cloud, virtual apps can magnify the cost of wasted software licenses | ITworld
• Red Hat's Aeolus to 'out-Linux' Rackspace's cloud • The Register
• Nikon: we don't need mirrorless cameras | News | TechRadar UK