I wonder how long it will be before someone decides this site needs to go away simply because the words ‘bomb’, ‘gun’, ‘pistol’ and ‘grenade’ have ‘how-to’s associated with them. Yikes!
Video Of US Airways 1549 Crash
I came across some video of the US Airways 1539 crash. With as zoomed back as this camera is, you actually barely notice the plane hit the water and probably wouldn’t notice at all if you weren’t looking for it. The other thing that is pretty amazing is the zoom ratio and resolution of that video camera.
Still find it amazing that everyone walked away from that.
A Step Toward Ubiquitous Data
I have previously stated a desire to have what I term ubiquitous data; that is my data available wherever I need it. Having tried various tools, it was starting to look like Google Notebook was shaping up to be the best option at freeing up my data as I could capture and view info in a desktop and mobile browser. Well, unfortunately, Google have recently chosen to stop development on Notebook.
By chance, I had recently come across Evernote and my first impressions of it is that it is a strong contender to finally deliver on my desire for ubiquitous data. Evernote provides a full featured desktop app (goodbye SOHO Notes), a slightly less featured browser-based interface and (at least for now) a rather minimal mobile interface that is also browser-based (at least on the Nokia N95 — Evernote does not yet have a native S60 mobile client).
Evernote also goes beyond simple web clipping, tagging and categorization with features that allow you to upload photos/scans and do OCR on them. This is pretty cool — you can take an iSight image of a plane ticket or itinerary, place it in Evernote and it will not only be available through all the channels, but you will be able to search for information that is in the image (flight number, airline, arrival/departure city).
Evernote also addresses the link-rot concern by making a copy of the web content in addition to noting the URL. So if the original site goes away, you still have the data you were interested in. One consequence of this is that the page you capture doesn’t always look like the original because some styling information may be lost. I have also found that it doesn’t do a great job if you clip something out of Google Reader or Gmail — the resulting clip tends to lose most all of it’s formatting and just run together into one long ugly string.
Evernote is not without it’s pitfalls though. I rather quickly discovered that the sync mechanism needs some work. For example, if I clip something from the browser it goes into the default notebook. If I then create a new folder via the desktop client and move the recently uploaded note into it, the new notebook shows up in the browser but the new note still shows up in the default notebook. No amount of forced syncs or logging in/out seem to fix this. I have noticed that after a day or so, the notebooks seem to somehow get back in sync. An extremely useful addition to the browser clipping bookmarklet would be to allow the user to create a new notebook at the time that they are submitting the clipping.
The lack of a native S60 client really limits the usefulness of the mobile client for me as there are plenty of opportunities to snap an image of something I want to note and upload it rather than peck out a note manually. Instead I have to download the image to the Mac and upload it via the desktop client. I see there is an opportunity to use MMS to send an image via email from the phone. I’ll give this a shot and see how it goes. Otherwise, I would be happy to help Evernote alpha/beta test an S60 client when they develop one.
Overall, I am hugely encouraged by Evernote and will continue to explore it’s features and functionality. If only Evernote would create an easy migration tool for Google Notebook (and perhaps even SOHO Notes) users that would be a huge adoption aid.
Technorati Tags:
evernote, google, googlenotebook, n95, nokia, tools, ubiquitousdata, webtools
Site Updates
I finally got around to updating to wordpress 2.7. Once again, dreamhost’s one-click upgrade made this a near effortless task. While I was at it, I installed a fresh new theme for the new year.
Apologies for any disruptions you may have experienced during the upgrade.
Apple Online Store Suckage
I recently blogged about how I decided to ditch my long-held mobileme email address from Apple. It just so happens that that email address is the one that I had used with the Apple on line store (duh). Apple, in their infinite wisdom decided to make it very difficult for you to change from using a .mac email ID to a non-Apple one. Impossible in fact.
When I went to the Apple online store to order a new copy of iLife, I wanted to make sure I changed my email address (which is what Apple also uses as your ID) to my new address. No can do. Here is the completely lame message that I was presented:
This change is not allowed. This account name was originally set up as a .Mac account and upgraded to MobileMe. An Apple ID has already been automatically set up for use with this member name. You can access this Apple ID by using either .Mac or MobileMe addresses (e.g. membername@mac.com or membername@me.com), but you cannot change the Apple ID. If you would like to use a new account name, please create a new Apple ID.
That is swell, but when you leave .Mac, you can’t change your email address and have to create a new account. As an added bonus, there is no ‘logout’ functionality on the Apple store site. So you have to start another browser, create a new account (re-keying all of your info), then go place the items you want to order in your cart again, then, finally, check out. Very, very crappy user experience Apple.
Technorati Tags:
apple, badideas, shopping, suckage, webtools
Apple Killing Off DRMed Music In iTunes Store
As an unlikely response to my previous blog posting, Apple has seen the light and is now offering (or will soon, it is hard to tell) all of it’s music DRM free. Oh, and thanks for the 30 cent vig on each tune to re-buy a DRM-free version of what I already have and paid for once.
Apple also announced individual track prices as low as 69 cents — we’ll see how many tracks actually are priced at that level. Overall, I think that I will still look to Amazon first for my music download needs.
Amazon Music Download vs iTunes
When it comes to music downloads, the iTunes music store just doesn’t add up when compared to Amazon’s offering. In fact, I regret the small number of purchases I made from iTunes prior to Amazon launching their service in May of 2007. The two big issues with iTunes are DRM and cost.
DRM: Aside from my iPod, I have one other device that is able to play Apple’s DRM crippled files and that is an Airport Express. And by and large, it sucks. I have it connected to a Bose CD player in the kitchen which is about 15-20 feet from the Airport base station with a dry-wall wall between the two. Airport Express will play between 1 and 5 songs before it just stops playing music — no error on the iMac side, no indication that there is a problem on the AE side. It usually gets confused at the end of a song. The rest of the music needs of the house are served by Roku Soundbridge network music players. The Roku devices more or less just work with one problem — they can’t play any of the DRM crippled music from the iTunes store. Amazon’s downloads don’t have this issue and are of the same or higher quality as the iTunes files.
Cost: If a CD that I am looking to buy is available on Amazon download; I’m going to download it. That way I don’t have to deal with shipping and storage of the physical CD. The downloads can be significantly less expensive than the CD, especially for imports. And in every case, the download is $1-4USD cheaper from Amazon than from Apple. And did I mention, no DRM on the Amazon files. The Amazon downloader puts the files right into iTunes and even includes the CD cover art at the click of a button so there is no challenge or inconvenience in using Amazon’s downloads versus Apple’s.
So tell me again why I should buy music from Apple? Surely not just because it’s Apple and it’s ‘cool’.
Goodbye To .Me
No, I personally am not going away, but my me.com (aka mobileme aka .mac aka itools) email account is. I started with the free iTools service that came out shortly before the first release of OS X. In fact, iTools was released 9 years ago tomorrow (January 5th). I stayed with it when it became the .mac paid service in 2002 because of the discounts on offer and the free software that was given to subscribers (this perk has now gone away). I had second thoughts when the fee increases were announced over the years. But when I got the most recent ‘we (Apple) will automatically update your subscription’ email, I thought to myself ‘what value am I really getting from this’?
The answer ‘is not a lot’. Syncing bookmarks was cool, but I can do that now with Opera or Evernote. As the me.com service becomes more and more iPhone-centric it becomes less attractive to me because I don’t own an iPhone nor will I own one anytime in the foreseeable future. I can sync my contacts on my Nokia N95 using Nokia Ovi online service. In fact on Ovi, I can sync my calendar, upload photos and video, store and retrieve files, enable push-mail from any POP account to my phone, access map updates and more. I have my own hosting account on dreamhost so I don’t need Apple’s crippled iWeb tied hosting.
The fact that I have stronger alternatives to Apple’s offering as well as the poor performance and outages that accompanied the mobileme ‘upgrade’, the choice was a fairly easy one. It has cost me a little effort in switching sites that were using my .mac email accounts over to another and downloading the files that I was sharing that I will need to get around to re-hosting on mobrec.com . In the end I feel better about not handing over $100+ dollars to Apple every year for what has turned out to be diminishing returns.
Technorati Tags:
apple, blogging, dubious, email, iphone, mac, n95, nokia, webtools
Happy 2009
Happy 2009, all.
You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the words and phrases that are banished for 2009.
Photo Fun
An excellent collection of photos ‘taken at just the right angle’. Enjoy.
Technorati Tags:
creativity, fun, photography
Malcolm Gladwell Beatdown
The Register rather mercilessly skewers Malcolm Gladwell in a recent posting. I’ll grant them that some of his grand proclamations turn out to be a bit hollow (discussed previously) but is that enough to conclude that he has nothing to say?
I recently purchased Gladwell’s new book Outliers. Hopefully I’ll have time to read it and draw my own conclusions as most of the comments in the Register’s posting refer to statements he has made in public presentations/discussions.
Smelly Service Custodian
As I was reading Martin Fowler’s post on ServiceCustodian I was struck by something that, in his words, didn’t smell right. After re-reading the article several times, I finally put my finger on it. He appears to assume that a service is no different than Java .class file or a .jar . Nothing could be further from the truth.
A true service should reflect a reusable business function, not merely some technical/programatic detail. As such, it should have a business owner who defines and controls what changes are appropriate to that function at a business level. Having coders making changes willy-nilly could prove disastrous to the business (but quite satisfying to the coders). It is unlikely that the business service owner will be able to understand the nature of a change from a patch (or even what a ‘patch’ was for that matter). There is no substitute for appropriate documentation and change control procedures to avoid errant changes.
This seems to be an increasingly frequent miss for coders: focusing on the code and what is convenient for the coder rather than on what makes sense for the business that they are supposed to be supporting.
Technorati Tags:
agile, architecture, badideas, design, development, dubious, ideas, software
My Idea For The Big 3 Auto Makers
Auto makers: instead of going, hat in hand (fresh from your private jet) to the government and asking tax payers for a bailout, why not go to your biggest benefactor: the oil companies? You have tacitly been in their service for the last thirty years if not more, cranking out bigger and less fuel efficient cars that serve to line their pockets with more and more cash.
Why does a minivan need to have an engine in it that is bigger than what was in a ‘muscle car’ back in the 60s? Do you really need a 2.5 ton pickup truck to drive down to the wings place and pick up a case of beer on the way home? ‘No’ to both.
So there you go: ChrysForGM can consolidate and be the demand side for the oil companies who will continue to pay them for their wasteful services. After all, the oil companies are flush with cash and government is still giving them corporate welfare checks. Please don’t let it be American taxpayers. Again.
Ahh Shucks, Gartner Is A Failure (Again)
It is becoming routine to see baiting headlines like Gartner’s latest on SOA Is A Failure. Suitably, this puff piece was delivered by the king of the malaprop.
To save you the time, here is the formula for a Gartner blog posting of this type: “_insert technology to be disparaged here_ is/will be a failure if it doesn’t solve a business problem and is technology for technology’s sake. It will fail even faster if you do not manage it properly and don’t have accountability.” Done. There you have it. No insight, no facts, just the same set of pro forma platitudes that have existed in the IT industry for years.
It is equally important to notice what doesn’t get written: ‘We (Gartner) told you to drop everything and run after this technology previously without making sure it solved a business problem, etc’.
Technorati Tags:
architecture, dubious, soa
BPM Consulting Marketplace
I was reflecting on the state of the BPM marketplace while returning from Software AG’s Innovation World. It seems that, by and large, there are few consultants out there who can advise you on the actual implementation of BPM (the hard part) but plenty of them that can fulminate on the easier theoretical portions. For example, here is a relative plot of the marketplace as I see it:
The justification phase is easy, as it primarily consists of the same pro forma advise for any IT-related project: have an executive sponsor, get business buy in, don’t try to justify a big bang approach, blah, blah blah. Check.
The analysis phase is where the Lean/Six Sigma types will descend upon you with endless discussion of SIPOC and other jargon. Don’t get me wrong, this is a valuable analysis to have, it just does not solve the entire problem.
Then comes the actual implementation and the sounds of crickets in the field. For implementation, that favorite consulting cliche comes out all too often: ‘it all depends’. Well, yes, it does all depend, but if anyone has successfully implemented BPM even a handful of times, they should be able to begin to synthesize a set of best practices and guidelines in general and offer specifics in a given tool stack. This area is sorely wanting — in most cases, even the vendors can’t tell you how to effectively use their own tool stacks in any detail.
Assuming that you have navigated the rocky shores of implementation, there are any number of Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence vendors who will sell you their wares to help you visualize your process data as executive friendly dashboards and portals. They typically have nothing to say about effective data collection and meaningful representation of data.
Technorati Tags:
architecture, BPM, consulting, enterprisearchitecture, soa, technology
Batman The Inspiration For Fox News?
Turn Your Name Into A Face
Not really sure of the value of this, but it is a bit fun to type in names and see the result.
Technorati Tags:
fun, visualization, webtools
Cincinnati Scooter Parking
In an amazingly progressive move from embarrassingly staid Cincinnati, the city has introduced dedicated parking spots around the central business district dedicated to two wheeled vehicles. Though in typical Cincinnati fashion, they introduce the parking spots at the onset of winter when there will be fewer riders to actually take advantage of them. What I hope doesn’t happen is that they assess the usage of the spots over winter and conclude that no one is using them.
Technorati Tags:
cincinnati, parking, scootering
Dream Fulfilled
‘Optimizing’ Your Driving Actually Slows You Down
From Counterintuitive physics may help everyone drive home quicker
If you’re trying to drive to a destination as quickly as possible, you might think that knowing the traffic conditions would help you choose the quickest route for yourself. Traffic reports and new GPS technologies that provide traffic data are based on this assumption – but scientists have found that knowing this information may do more harm than good.
A recent study has investigated just how much time is lost due to individuals opting for strategies that maximize their own personal utility rather than the social optimum, which often aren’t the same. Physicists Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, Korea, and computer scientist Michael Gastner from the Santa Fe Institute and the University of New Mexico in the US, call this lost time “the price of anarchy” (POA) that society must pay for the lack of individual coordination.
This would appear to be another demonstration that acting for a greater good rather than for individual gain actually benefits the individual as well. Check out Robert Axelrod’s excellent book The Evolution of Cooperation for more on this topic.