A fantastic TED presentation by Jamie Oliver discussing the effects of poor diet/food choices on children in most of the western world. His solution: teach every child about food. Some enlightening facts and figures about the issues as well as an overall engaging discussion.
How Much Money Is Your Meeting Wasting?
‘Snow Means No Global Warming’ – Idiots
For all the right wing idiots who keep banging on about how the snow storms of late are ‘proof’ that Global Warming doesn’t exist, here is a bit of science.
All this frenzied pointing to snowfall as proof that global warming is a hoax has only, if anything, demonstrated the slight, one-dimensional thinking being done by the parties who are desperate to discredit climate change and/or exploit for political gain its apparent nonexistence in the face of cold weather events.
Cheap Alternative To Apple Tablet?
If you can’t afford the Apple Tablet (iTablet?, iPad?) when it is anticipated to be announced on Wednesday, check out the certainly-less-functional-but-still-a-bit-of-fun Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet
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apple, boogieboard, gadgets, tablet
Another Fun Little Time Waster
Evernote for Symbian S60 Beta Available
Finally! An Evernote client app (beta anyway) that I can use with my Nokia N97. Unfortunately, Evernote chose to develop the client as a widget rather than a native Symbian S60 application so performance suffers (as does the number of handsets that it can be deployed to).
It is a good start but has a ways to go with regard to the UI and general functionality (huge issue with the current beta is no local notes database). Hopefully we will see steady improvement in the coming releases.
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evernote, mobile, nokia, nseries, tools, webtools
New Google Phone Name Has Blade Runner Tie?
This kind of attitude from the estate of Phillip K. Dick is a bit theatrical and somewhat stupid.
As many bloggers have noted, the name Nexus One seems to be a reference to the cyborgs in the dystopian movie “Blade Runner,” which in turn was based on the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by the late Philip K. Dick. Both the film and the book feature a bounty hunter tracking down several rogue Nexus-6 cyborgs, the sixth generation in the line of Nexus robots.
This sort of reminds me of Carl Sagan finding out that the code name for what became the Apple Power Mac 7100 was ‘Sagan’ and threaten legal action even though Apple wasn’t publicly using that name. When contacted about the legal threat, Apple made a somewhat public announcement that they were in fact using the code name ‘butt-head astronomer‘ for the product.
Post created at 32,000 feet in route to LAX using in-flight wifi free trial.
Mobile Data Bandwidth Running Out?
Interesting long-ish post on The Mobile Data Apocalypse, And What It Means To You. Of course, as noted in the posting, the assumptions are made based on the Cisco provided data — Cisco not exactly being a disinterested party when it comes to selling more WiFi and network gear.
The mobile industry is now completing a huge shift in its attitude toward mobile data. Until pretty recently, the prevailing attitude among mobile operators was that data was a disappointment. It had been hyped for a decade, and although there were some successes, it had never lived up to the huge growth expectations that were set at the start of the decade. Most operators viewed it as a nice incremental add-on rather than the driver of their businesses.
But in the last year or so, the attitude has shifted dramatically from “no one is using mobile data” to “oh my God, there’s so much demand for mobile data that it’ll destroy the network.” A lot of this attitude shift was caused by the iPhone, which has indeed overloaded some mobile networks. But there’s also a general uptick in data usage from various sources, and the rate of growth seems to be accelerating.
The Death Of Uncool
Interesting thoughts from Brian Eno on the impact art and culture diversity and availability is having on society. I share his hope that this will translate into advances in politics and other attitudes as well.
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
Party On An Iceberg?
I guess this cements the Aussie reputation for being down for a party regardless of the locale.
A group of Australians is planning to helicopter out to an iceberg off the New Zealand coast, camp on it while they carve out an ice bar, and then stage a party – complete with a DJ who will produce a music track.
Nokia N97 vs iPhone 3GS
From the Nokia97Forum:
Some of the pluses of N97 over iPhone are:
– Full Qwerty keyboard (iPhone doesn’t have)
– 5MP fully functional digital camera with Carl Zeiss optics and several editing options(iPhone has 3MP basic camera)
– Camera dual LED Flash to take pictures in dark (iPhone useless in dark)
– FM Transmitter (iPhone doesn’t have)
– Stereo bluetooth 2.0 (A2DP) (iPhone doesn’t have A2DP)
– TV out, (iPhone doesn’t have)
– expandable memory with 16gb microSD card (takes total memory to 48GB!) – iPhone has only 16 or 32mb max with no expansion.
– Unlocked so will work on any carrier (locked to AT&T in US and in most countries, where not prohibited by law)
– Widgets so you don’t have to opens most used apps like Calendar, email etc., (no widgets in iPhone)
– Flexibility to self sign a lot of free applications and install (iPhone doesn’t provide this flexibility)
– Resistive touch screen so you can use it with your gloves on or with stylus in winter (you’ll have to use your fingers only with iPhone)
– better screen resolution at 640×360 (iPhone has 480×320)
– Removable battery so you can carry one extra or replace on easily(iPhone does builtin battery)
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apple, gadgets, iphone, mobile, n97, nokia, nseries
Snow Leopard Secrets
Learn all about Snow Leopard’s secrets using the Secrets app.
The hidden tweaks are a mix of features that didn’t quite make the final cut or were deemed too slight to deserve their own tick-box, and deep system changes that normally call for terrifying terminal commands. And they don’t stop at Snow Leopard: Secrets, which has been around in one form or another for a while now, has collected a huge library of “gray” settings for other apps too, from Apple’s various software suites to civilian apps like Skype and NetNewsWire. The app is free, and installs as a PrefPane.
SuperFreakonomics Gets It SuperFreaking Wrong
Apparently, in their haste to produce an even more controversial followup to the first book, the authors of Freakonomics get the facts colossally wrong (from the New Yorker):
Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modeling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.
“The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them,” he observes. “The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking.” Pierrehumbert carefully dissects one of the arguments that Levitt and Dubner seem to subscribe to—that solar cells, because they are dark, actually contribute to global warming—and shows it to be fallacious. “Really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you,” he writes, that this claim “is complete and utter nonsense.”
Google Wave Guide
If you have received a Google Wave invite only to login and stare blankly at the screen and say ‘ok, what now’ get yourself over to view the excellent online Google Wave guide. This is the most comprehensive guide to gWave that I have seen so far.
And if you are too impatient to read through the wealth of information there, here is a quick tip: In the search box in the upper left replace the text ‘in:inbox’ with ‘with:public’. This will show you a listing of all of the current waves that are marked as public. You can further search by including additional tags after public (for example: ‘with:public cincinnati’ for cincinnati related public waves).
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books, collaboration, google, googlewave, reference, webtools
Google Wave Sandbox
From Read/Write Web:
Google just opened the Google Wave developer sandbox for federation. Developers can now begin prototyping tools against WaveSandbox.com. Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers. Google also released a how-to document that explains how to set up a Java-based Wave server over the weekend. More details about how to implement the Wave Federation Protocol can be found here.
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collaboration, google, googlewave, webdev
Open A Bottle of Wine Without A Corkscrew
I am not sure this guy needs to open that bottle of wine, but here is a nifty trick to open a wine bottle with a shoe.
I have seen this work the opposite way, where if you pound on the open neck of a bottle the bottom will come off (granted, a slightly less useful trick if you are interested in consuming the contents).
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fun
Translation Functions in Google Docs
Google this week added some translation and other language functions into their online spreadsheet offering. The functions allow you to enter a formula that will translate text or detect the language text is written in.
Surely a score for localizing docs of all sorts as this type of function expands across the other Google Docs offerings.
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google, googledocs, webtools
Augmented Reality with Layar
Augmented Reality is certainly getting a great deal of attention of late, with the emphasis (quite naturally) being on delivering this capability via mobile devices. Layar is on the several companies with a mobile offering in this area. Pity it is currently only available for Android based phones.
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ideas, innovation, interfaces, mobile, android, augmentedreality
Interesting Smartphone UI from Nokia
I thought this was an interesting clip showing a smartphone UI ‘concept’ that “Puts the ‘Friend’ in User-Friendly“.
Though the implementation has a slightly too childish feel to appeal to many potential users, it does expose the current crop of Apple, Palm, Nokia and Android UIs as catering to the look-and-feel of glossy futuristic, nay sci-fi-esque gadgets. And while that’s resulted in some sleek technology, it may be missing out on the softer, more human side of human-gadget interactions, rather than “putting people first…”
Food for thought, but I think it also needs to be balanced with the lessons learned from the VRML/Virtual World interfaces that cropped up in the 90s: Cute to look at, frustrating to use and ultimately limited in what can be expressed in a purely visual interface metaphor.
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ideas, innovation, mobile, nokia, ui, usability
Enterprise Architecture Is Business Driven (Duh!)
I find it fascinating (and a bit disappointing) that Gartner and others are just beginning to figure out that an effective Enterprise Architecture practice needs to start with an understanding of business strategy and direction and cannot (successfully) exist as a purely technical concern.
Perhaps this is because the early days of EA was really more of an application or technology architecture focus. The much lauded (and, in my opinion, over-rated) Zachman framework is really nothing more than a taxonomy as much as it wants to be sold as an ‘architecture’. If you can fill out the top row of Zachman, you have probably exhausted its usefulness (and really gained nothing more that the Who? What? so on perspective that you learned in elementary school).
Spewak then came along with another view of EA that was heavily technology oriented. The thrust of this seemed to assert that if you had a complete inventory of your applications and their interactions you were doing EA. No, actually you were on your way to doing portfolio rationalization – a valuable EA service, but not EA in its entirety.
Maybe it was the recent addition of Business dimension to TOGAF in release 9 that caused these ‘pundits’ to finally come to there senses and realize what successful EA practitioners were doing all along.
It would seem that this technology-focused approach has been the seed corn for the old saw ‘IT needs to align with the business’. I always thought it was odd that there was never an exhortation to have Accounting align with the business or Marketing align with the business. I believe that both parties are to blame here — the business needs to articulate a vision and plan that IT can understand and execute against. Without a clear plan from the business, IT more often than not will turn inward and focus on technology in a way that may or may not support business direction.
This disconnect on having business drive EA sort of reminds me of the strange looks that I would get about 10 years ago when I would try to explain that before an enterprise rush into slathering pointy brackets on their data and declaring that they are ‘service oriented’ that they should take the opportunity to make sure that there was a single enterprise definition of enterprise data and use services to expose them in a enterprise uniform way. ‘That has nothing to do with SOA!’ I was told. Tsk, tsk, that is data management, not SOA. Now, this ‘insight’ is all the rage, with every vendor and consulting firm thumping their chests and proclaiming that ‘data comes first’ and ‘the importance of MDM‘ as a pre-cursor to SOA.
Similarly the same pundits thundered on that it was laughable that BPM be tied to SOA. Problem is that BPM has a certain amount of ambiguity around what the M in BPM means for any given speaker. Is it Modeling? Management? Monitoring? Mapping? So, yes, for all of the non-implementation aspects of BPM, the service orientation part is largely irrelevant. But for any business process implementation that has system touch points (nearly all non-trivial processes do), services are (or should) play a role in exposing the business functions in a consistent, re-usable manner within the enterprise.
So, yes, Enterprise Architecture should be business driven, not technology driven. MDM is a critical underpinning for successful SOA. And BPM is probably the most visible part of service orientation and SOA is key to BPM implementation. What next, governance is key to enterprise SOA success?
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architecture, consulting, dubious, enterprisearchitecture, ideas, soa, technology