My Personal Infocloud
So
Haven't been posting much lately because things have been crazy-busy on all fronts. Plus, I have been trying to resist the temptation to blog about all of the political insanity and the ridiculous press coverage (or lack thereof). Leave it to Jon Stewart to knock this out of the park once again. It 'tis a thing of beauty to expose the Republican perfidy and hypocrisy in their own words and actions. Behold:
So
I has been an interesting week for some much needed innovation in the web browsing space. First up was the introduction of Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs. This is a very interesting idea and surprisingly functional considering it is a .1 release. Sort of reminds me of QuickSliver on OSX, except targeted for Firefox.
Today comes word of Google's Chrome browser that among other things, gives each tab its own process so that an errant tab can't take the entire browser down (I'm looking at you gratuitous, Flash-encrusted sites).
I hold out more hope for these that the Titanicly overhyped and ultimately underwhelming Flock collection of plugins browser from a few years ago.
Technorati Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, flock, google, innovation, mozilla, ubiquity
So
There is a great (and free!) Aperture Plugin that allows you to add or update the GPS data in your digital images called Maperture.
Technorati Tags: aperture, apple, google, googlemaps, photography, software
So
This Wired headline The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon made my twisted mind think of two possible immediate reactions:
1) Republicans push for a mission to Titan to begin drilling and extraction
2) Some late night infomercial claiming that they could even get a Titan-esque'oily liquid' stain out of clothing
So
I loved this blog post title Experience should guide, not constrain. Basically the point of the post was a recasting of the old cliche about 'when all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail'.
What the post really made be think about was the importance of having a breadth of experience in technology as well as depth in a few areas, especially if you are (or aspire to be) an enterprise architect. I personally have been lucky enough to work as a software developer, database administrator, network engineer, project manager and tech lead over my 20+ year career. I feel that each of these has helped me as an architect to bring all of that experience to bear on current issues and plans. Consider trade offs and side effects.
The converse of this is the puzzling phenomenon I have seen where people who only know Microsoft technologies declare themselves to be 'enterprise architects' when in fact they are little more than one-note technologist. This is particularly laughable in enterprises that aren't 100% MS technology. These EAs probably only have about 5% of the picture — have they lost track of what the 'enterprise' really is. So it is no wonder that the way they 'fix' a problem is by insisting that it move onto the MS platform (which is my experience is usually the wrong answer).
So in technology as in life, grow what you know, keep learning and try new things.
Technorati Tags: architecture, enterprisearchitecture, ideas
So
Here you have it yet another eye candy time waster. I warned you.
So
Lively Kernel is another one of these technologies from Sun that is tantalizingly cool, but hopelessly unfinished enough that you really can't commit to develop against it in a non-trivial way. Having it only work properly in Safari pretty much dooms it to obscurity. It is supposed to work in Firefox, but for me it only displays about the top two inches of the demo and that is it.
I think one of coolest features of all is that it is SVG-based under the covers. I think that SVG is a real sleeper technology that is going to emerge as an extremely powerful way of getting scalable user interfaces that go from mobile to desktop (and beyond).
Intro from Sun's site:
The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a new web programming environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. The Lively Kernel supports desktop-style applications with rich graphics and direct manipulation capabilities, but without the installation or upgrade hassles that conventional desktop applications have. The system is written entirely in the JavaScript programming language, a language supported by all the web browsers, with the intent that the system can run in commercial web browsers without installation or any plug-in components. The system leverages the dynamic characteristics of the JavaScript language to make it possible to create, modify and deploy applications on the fly, using tools built into the system itself. In addition to its application execution capabilities, the Lively Kernel can also function as an integrated development environment (IDE), making the whole system self-sufficient and able to improve and extend itself dynamically.
Technorati Tags: software, svg, sun, technology, webdev
So
Keep this in mind when you hear the often repeated falsehood that the reason why the price at the pump is soaring is because of increased demand from China and India. Maybe a factor, but perhaps we should address the fact that the state of California uses more gasoline and diesel than China. That's right, California has ~2.8% of China's population but manages to consume more that an entire country of 1.3 billion.
Technorati Tags: badideas, energy, ideas, propaganda
So
Who is surprised that the Bush Regime was feeding political talking points to Fox News? No one who was paying the least bit of attention.
And thanks to our impotent press in the US, they are only now (7+ years after the fact) starting to report on the growing, festering pit of scandal and illegal activity of the W regime.
Still to come: the swift-boating of Barack Obama and whatever October surprise the republicans have planned (martial law? attack on Iran?).
Technorati Tags: dubious, politics, press, propaganda, suckage
So
Yahoo Shopping is a flippin' joke — apparently their motto is 'we don't have a clue and we don't give a crap'.
Over the weekend, I came across an item that I was looking for that was sold by a 'Yahoo endorsed' online vendor. I called their customer support number, only to find that it was disconnected. I called the '24 hour customer support number' only to find it was the mobile phone number of a rather irate woman who disavowed any knowledge of the web site. Not looking good. I even tried to place a order for a token item just to see what would happen. Predictably, I received a message back from Yahoo about an 'invalid merchant' when I submitted the order.
Trying to be a good Internet citizen, I then sent an email to Yahoo pointing out that I was unable to get in contact with the vendor and it looked as if the web store was, in fact, defunct and asked them to confirm the status of the merchant. After all, you would think that they would be interested in weeding out dead sites to maintain some semblance of trustworthiness. Apparently not. Here is the response I got back:
Hello Rich,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Shopping.
Yahoo! Shopping is an online service that helps you find products you want from a variety of merchants with online stores.
If you have a suggestion, request, or question for a particular merchant featured in Yahoo! Shopping, you should contact the merchant directly.
Regarding your request, please direct all suggestions, requests and questions to the merchant directly. At the stores web site, you can find contact information in links such as “Info” or “About Us”.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Shopping.
Regards,
Theo
Yahoo! Customer Care
[Emphasis added] So the solution to my issue of not being able to contact the vendor is to (wait for it) contact the vendor directly. So either the person who responded to this request doesn't even possess a fundamental grasp of the English language or they simply don't give a wank. I can only imagine the round and round I would have to go through if I ordered something from an endorsed vendor and had an issue. No thanks.
Here endith my first and last attempt to do business with a Yahoo endorsed vendor (or Yahoo for that matter). You have been warned: any shop you encounter under *.stores.yahoo.net is suspect and you should find a safer alternative. Yahoo, everything about you sucks. That is why your bloated, Flash-encrusted carcass is overdo at the dot-com dead pool and will no doubt arrive shortly after Microsoft acquires and then kills you off.
Technorati Tags: badideas, buyerbeware, crap, defective, dubious, suckage, yahoo