May, 2008

Overheard: Visual Studio Express — Hello World

The reason we’re able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages. Dan Fernandez, Visual Studio Express and TestDriven.NET

Microsoft wasn’t happy when developers began to extend what was freely given to them. Dan’s post above could have been called “We give you an inch and you take a mile.”

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On another totally unrelated Dan Fernandez note:

Wow! He’s blonde in this interview. I’m a big Dan Fernandez fan — but I had a hard time watching this video because I kept thinking “why did you bleach your hair?”

In spite of my hair distraction, I liked the interview. Dan is a great evangelist for Visual Studio Express. He’s able to capture and convey that feeling of accomplishment we all felt when we made those magical words “Hello World” appeared on the monitor. He’s not a snob. He appreciates the hobbyist, the hacker and the curious.

Ok…I can’t resist.

Q: What do you call a swimming pool full of blonde Visual Studio Express evangelists?
A: Frosted Flakes.

Overheard: Leveraging rich presence — a marketer’s dream

Ignoring the fact that I find the whole concept of “presence management” a solution in search of a problem for most people, there’s the whole technical problem of trying to work within the various walled gardens…Until we have a single identity across networks, no method of managing presence will be effective. Dameon D. Welch-Abernathy,  Presence And Identity

Rich presence is simply networking on steroids. And people are right to be wary about how the information aggregated from rich presence opt-ins could be used by marketers.  Sure, Facebook backed down on Beacon — but you know its just a matter of time before the “tweet” saying you wish you were in Hawaii brings you snail mail brochures.  Our best protection right now is that there isn’t a way for marketers to leverage rich presence effectively.  We have too many networking identities.

Overheard: Your PUE number is like golf

“Your PUE number is like golf — the closer to 1, the better. At least that has always been the common wisdom. The goal, says experts, is to reduce your PUE. But sometimes an IT energy efficiency project can play games with that number.” Mark Fontecchio, How a virtualization and server consolidation project could hurt your PUE

Overheard: AT&T and American Idol

You have to hand it to the hit FOX reality series: It’s putting SMS systems to maximum use, turning them into a giant cash machine. Om Malik, “American Idol” — Cook-ed by TXT Messages

Om Malik asks a good question. How much did AT&T make off those 78 million text messages? That’s a revenue stream I’ve never even considered. It’ll be awhile though. According to a survey by ExactTarget, 95% of U.S. online consumers have given at least one company permission to deliver messages to them by email — compared to 7% for text messaging. That may change when this next generation enters the workplace.

I’m guilty of sending a few txts earlier on. By the end, I was ok with whichever David won. In fact — I loved the duet they did together. It blew me away how well the timbre of their voices blended.

Overheard: I don’t want to ever have to wait for Java to load

Java doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s a programming language. Programming languages are like sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of them, something’s gone wrong. Rupert Goodwins, Gallery: 10 most annoying programs on the Internet

Love it!  When I see that Orange Java box come up, I go get a cup of coffee.

Overheard: Who invented the Internet?

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating theInternet.
- Al Gore describing his 1986 legislation to interconnect five supercomputer centers (17 years after thefirst Internet servers hooked up)

If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check.
- Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle

The day I made that statement, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder.
- Al Gore attempting damage control

Those days were funny, weren’t they? Actually, the Internet is just a grown-up version of ARPANET.

Overheard: Memristor is the missing link of integrated circuitry

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. Leon Chua as quoted in ‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

Overheard: Why would anyone want to attack the firmware?

The danger with embedded devices is that they are often forgotten. They don’t always get patched or audited, and they can contain application-level vulnerabilities, such as flaws in the remote management interface that leave the door open for an attacker. Rich Smith as quoted in Permanent Denial-of-Service Attack Sabotages Hardware

We aren’t seeing the PDOS attack as a way to mask another attack, such as malware insertion, but as a logical and highly destructive extension of the DDOS [dedicated denial of service] criminal extortion tactics seen in use today.

So this is about corporate sabatoge? Or criminals wiping out a few routers and extorting money for keeping the rest of the company’s network operational? Wow.  Sounds like a good plot for a John Grisham book. 

Rich Smith (HP System Security Lab)  has even come up with a cool name for the attacks: phlashing.  And the fuzzing tool he developedfor either launching an attack or detecting vulnerabilities? PhlashDance. 

Overheard: Telepresence is the new magic word for videoconferencing

I’ve seen videoconferencing vendors trying to upgrade their offerings with high-definition media and larger screens to compete with telepresence technology. You can put wings on a pig and call it a bird, but it still won’t fly. David Hsieh, as quoted in Telepresence industry to pass $1 billion in 2013

Videoconferencing is out. Telepresence is in.

It’s been ten years since I’ve attended a meeting in a videoconferencing suite.  I remember it feeling like I was talking to astronauts on the moon. The audio lag was at least five seconds. 

The new telepresence technology is too pricey for small to mid-sized businesses, but just like in the old days — there will be telepresence centers where you can take advantage of the technology. Cisco has partnered with Regus business centers and HP has partnered with Marriott to make it happen faster.

Overheard: Live Mesh — your Briefcase in the cloud

To put it really simply: the promise of the Mesh is that you won’t have to care where you are or which device you’re using - your data will always be there. You’ll only have to care about which data you want to share with whom. Stan Schroeder, Live Mesh - The Version You Can Understand

I got my invitation for Live Mesh about two weeks ago. The toughest part was finding someone to play with — to share documents and other content with. Once I dug in, I realized “Hey, this is nothing new!” About ten years ago, there was a very handy web-based app called Briefcase that sort of did the same thing. It was much clunkier, but the idea was there.

Briefcase was a very valuable tool when I was training and moving from building to building. I could keep everything I need on the Web, get to a new building and download what I needed for a particular workshop. I could post all my bookmarks, PowerPoint presentations, handouts…whatever. I could make things in my briefcase public, keep them private or share them with specific users.

Sometimes lately, when I’m writing about new technology, I feel like I’m in some strange time warp. Everything new is just updated old.