16. December 2008 by admin.

Back soon…. Trying to figure out what to do with this site. Blogging is not really working out for me yet.

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11. September 2008 by admin.

Sorry Mr. Roese, but you’ve discovered an already known incontrovertible truth, known for many years, but best summed up as John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

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11. September 2008 by admin.

There are many, many post out there already regarding Chrome. I have no intention of rehashing the debates of whether or not Chrome is good, bad, needed, or unneeded.Instead, I was to comment on what I see as the coming together of several stories in the media, and the reality of Google’s ambitions.As mentioned, there are many insights on why now for Chrome, etc. I think David Weiss has the right notion when he comments that Chrome is trying to be the platform. The use of Webkit and the instant ability to support Webkit based application/capability, and the inclusion of native Gears support is certainly demonstration of leveraging Chrome as a platform. Moreover, this further entrenches the “Google owns both ends of the pipe” discussions that have been ongoing. But I see Google owning both ends as more than a reliable means for them to ensure their application (Cloud based or whatever buzzword you want to use) are delivered in a meaningful and correct way to their users [more specifically, having a significant browser in the market gives them a greater voice in standardisation].No - I think there’s another facet to this strategy of owning both ends. Specifically, this is another means for Google to collect “anonymous statistics” on their users, now not only when you’re at a Google site/application, but when you’re at any site/application using Chrome. Of course, collection of such data allows the Google analytics machine to better serve you up ads for all those items that you didn’t know you needed.And what makes me so certain that this is the case is, Google is doing what they reasonably can to make their data collection look as innocuous as possible to the powers that be. One needs only to reference the other recent Google-related media happenings around privacy.  Specifically, note the following (within the past two weeks):

• Google to Microsoft: We’re Serious about Privacy
• More Google backlash? 
• Google to Anonymize Suggest Queries within 24 Hours
• In Online Privacy Fight, Google Blinks
• Google On the Run From the Privacy Cops

I know that you’re going to tell me that several of those reference the same recent Google announcement. That’s not my point. My point is, there has been a lot of pandering to data and information privacy rights by Google, and ensuring that it’s well and truly visible in the media. And I truly believe it is because they’re gearing themselves up for an even greater incoming tide of data.So, all being equal, I don’t see the debate as whether or not Chrome is needed in the market now, but rather how Google needs Chrome to provide new food sources to its ever growing analytics appetite.

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29. August 2008 by admin.

I have little to say on this, but I do want to point out that the claims of bloggers such as Sam Diaz in his summary of recent troubles at Apple are a tad overblown, as the always entertaining Macalope states far more eloquently than I ever could.It’s truly sad when people overstate their loss resulting from the workaround for this flaw. The temporary loss of the optional ability to change the “Home” button to a “Favourites” button is not going to make your life intolerable - it’s adding two taps to the process - get over it.If this is the reaction to relatively easily mitigated flaw, imagine the screams of anguish and sacrificing of kittens that is going to occur when the first true vulnerability in the iPhone’s software is exploited via malicious code.

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27. August 2008 by admin.

Mark Evans of All About Nortel, points out in his latest post that Nortel’s advertising brain-trust are asking employees to generate videos touting the companies “Green” strategy. I wonder if any anonymous videos will be submitted that play up on the concept of “Look how many buildings we have with the heating/cooling/lighting turned off due to lack of employees to fill them”. One needs to only have a recent look at their Carling site in Ottawa, with the almost complete vacancy of the recently added Labs numbered 6 through 9.

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26. August 2008 by admin.

A few stories have appeared recently regarding the practice of throttling traffic. While one of the most egregious offenders (Bell Canada) is right in my own backyard, I’d rather talk about Comcast and Verizon. Obviously, the FCC decision against Comcast on August 1 2008, and the order requiring Comcast disclose the nature of its traffic management are seen as significant victories for ‘Net Neutrality’.I completely applaud the FCC for taking this stance, and I agree that Comcast has acted inappropriately. But… I also largely agree with Verizon CTO Richard Lynch’s comments as cited in this ars technica article. Now, don’t misinterpret my agreement in this case; I believe that not all traffic can be treated equally. But I do not believe that any trafic should be slowed down. Rather, I believe that the access providers like Verizon, Comcast, Bell Canada, etc should be offering stated traffic classes, and adhering very strictly to categorisation of traffic. My opinion is that certain content providers or certain forms of content should be granted a higher traffic categorisation (e.g. expedited forwarding). Traffic such as my stock trading (if I actually had a sufficient amount of money to participate in stock purchases), my health-provider research, and similar content should be prioritised highly. Traffic such as YouTube, and BitTorrent should be prioritised lower, however the content provider and/or the subscriber should have the option to buy a higher traffic class. It’s doubtful one would be able to give their YouTube traffic equal prioritisation to critical Health Care data, but the user and/or provider should be able to buy a higher rating that best effort.In my opinion, this would be a win-win for the access provider, who can meet time-critical data delivery by engineering and segregating their network paths for sufficient  bandwidth for high priority traffic classes. And, they can take a piece of the content providers revenue by taking a piece of premium per-service bandwith subscription. However, to make this work, the access providers need to focus on providing the best possible and most flexible network access, and stop worring about competing with the content providers… Alas, that is unlikely to occur.

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21. August 2008 by admin.

According to electronista, Microsoft is bringing out Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld for a series of pro-Vista / Anti-Mac ads.Personally, I have trouble believing that bringing out these two is going to change the views of the young professional, college/university student, or casual home user who has invested in a Mac. Let’s face it - Seinfeld is not at the top of his popularity and Gates may be viewed as having something of a bias. At best, these new pro-Vista ads may lead those who are opting to remain at WindowsXP or even “upgrade” from Vista to XP, to give Vista another chance.

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20. August 2008 by admin.

I couldn’t help but notice Mr. Bo Gowan’s post yesterday regarding Gartner’s magic quadrant for corporate telephony. In his post, he notes that Nortel is cited as the leader in completeness of vision, and goes on to quote Mr. Marty Parker and the Gartner publication on how Microsoft is focused on applying communications in a new way, and how Nortel has the best OCS integration.While it’s great that Nortel integrates its commodity (voice) infrastructure with the revenue generating potential of Mocrosoft, I have to wonder how much being King of Commodity adds to Nortel’s bottom line.And of course, regarding Nortel’s completeness of vision, I can only think of the Thomas Edison quote, “Vision without execution is hallucination”.

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20. August 2008 by admin.

There’s recently been substantial focus on the doom and gloom of recent “cloud computing” issues. There’s no specific blog postings I’ll link to in this case. Rather, one just has to search on any of:

• Apple’s MobileMe woes
• Google’s repeated GMail outages
• Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) downtimes

It’s not a giant leap in understanding as to why people are so upset about losing their services. cloud computing offers a very significant opportunity for users, and more so businesses, to migrate data and services to a centralised entity. For the user, it’s internet hosting on steroids; not only my website and email, but my picture, music, my applications, and my user profile can be stored at a trusted host, and managed by the user. The rise of the netbook, and the fall of home managed backup solutions.Businesses have even more to gain. As Larry Dignan points out, the benefits to an enterprise  (reduction of costs related to staff, in-house technologies, and the omnipresent Green costs) are substantial.But as Mr. Dignan points out, the availability is not quite there yet; which is why people are crying in the streets and ready to march on the head-quarters of their selected cloud provider with lit torches and pitchforks.Honestly though, is this really a surprise to anyone? Hosted technologies have been around a long time. Every time I pick up my home telephone, I’m using a hosted technology. How long did it take AT&T, or Bell Canada to master the so called five-nines of availability?The new way of cloud providers and the SaaS offerings delivered via those clouds are bound for something near the stratospheric promises being thrown about. It will take time to achieve though. In the interim, early adopters who are paying for the services, and relying solely upon those services as their primary data storage mechanism, or primary customer interaction mechanism, or primary intra-business communications mechanism, or … (surely you get my point) … are setting themselves up for pain.It has been said in other blogs before, but the user must be prepared to either accept the Service Level Agreement provided, or they must prepare for the inevitable failure of the service they’ve purchased. The SLAs from these vendors makes this inevitability clear. Amazon is a great example of a company that will refund you a portion of your billed service when they fail to meet their targets. They know it’s going to happen, and they’ve let you know.Going back to Mr. Dignan’s article, users and businesses should be prepared for the inevitable. Data should be kept in a secure, private storage if one is afraid it may be compromised. Data should be stored redundantly in case of prolonged unavailabiliy or worse, loss of an online storage service. Compute resources should be allocated in a manner that considers a failure of the cloud environment (for example, via multiple cloud providers, or via making the cloud the distributed resource behind a “local” resource).All that being said, this is not a reason to abandon cloud computing. These progressive companies offering cloud infrastructure, and these early adopters are providing the learnings which will ultimately make the cloud and the SaaS offerings sufficiently reliable. New technologies and manners of use will always have such pain points… I would wager that AT&T wouldn’t be failure-proof with their cloud offering either, and the have the benefit of all those telecom lessons learned already.Yell at the cloud if you must… But it won’t hurry along the process.

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