Twice the screen, twice the productivity: another reason I won’t go back to XP
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Hardware, Microsoft on
The more you can see, the more you can do. I used to work in front of two 17″ monitors; the gap between the screens where the bezel interrupted the view just vanished from my vision and all I saw was a lot of Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and emails. A couple of years back, I damaged my ankle and couldn’t comfortably sit at a desk for several months and even when I could, I found I preferred working in a big recliner chair. A 17″ laptop was ideal but mostly I work on 12″ or 12.1″ widescreen notebooks - currently it’s an HP 2710p because it has such excellent battery life. My elderly Athlon had started crashing every 20 minutes with a hardware failure and besides, I didn’t want to go back to XP, so I put up with the smaller, single screen. Occasionally I’ve tried two laptops side by side - usually when I was reviewing one of them - but the switch from keyboard to keyboard is very disruptive.
I’d seen the DisplayLink technology before but it was seeing the wireless USB setup at CES this year that gave me the inspiration. If I could link my notebook to my two 17″ screens by wireless USB I could easily go back to twin screens without worrying about dealing with yet another cable. So we started juggling the office, to put my chair closer to Simon’s desk and with a flat surface where monitors could stand. This involved replacing a wall-mounted bookcase that would have tapped me on the head and I spent a happy Easter weekend decoupaging a pair of wooden Ikea drawers to put the monitors at comfortable eye height (they’d sat by an open window during one rainy summer and got very grimy).
Today we started hooking things up. Turns out two screens will really need some kind of wall-mount, hopefully on an extending bracket at an angle.I don’t have the wireless USB connection just yet so I’ll save DisplayLink for when I get the wall-mount and want two external screens and put up with a VGA cable for now. I’ve already used a strip of Velcro to mate the power and Ethernet cables so one more isn’t much more unwieldy.
For now, there’s one monitor perched on my right. This isn’t the same as screens side by side - but it’s ideal for parking a PowerPoint I plan to refer to or a Webex meeting I’m taking notes on. It came in very handy juggling hotel details and conference schedules for a trip, and then for having the details of last-minute cash ISA deals where I wouldn’t get distracted by them while I was on the phone talking about the next version of Windows Mobile. I can put my inbox over there and have messages and documents I’m writing in front of me.
Rated: 26.67% (3 votes)
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The browser wars are over. HTML has lost.
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Web browser, Adobe, Internet, Microsoft on
With Firefox 3 around the corner, and IE 8 in beta, perhaps its time to call this round of browser wars over before they’ve begun. Adobe’s put a line in the sand today with the beta of Photoshop Express, and there’s no way a pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript browser can ever cross it - no matter how much of ACID3 it can render.
Why?
Microsoft and Adobe are pushing innovative web application development outside the browser into cross-platform runtimes that deliver everything that Java promised. HTML is obsolete, and all we really need is the <object> tag.
One of the big announcements at Microsoft’s web development conference Mix08 was the public beta of Silverlight 2. It’s another salvo in the developing rivalry between Microsoft and Adobe. Both companies are treading on the same path as they struggle to find direction in the developing software as a service world. Adobe’s made its latest step today, with a Flash-based in-browser version of Photoshop built using its Flex platform. Both companies are targeting developers with their rich internet applications strategies, offering platforms for next generation web applications that go beyond the limitations of HTML and web browsers.
Silverlight 2 is Microsoft’s first cut at a high-performance in-browser rich internet application platform. Flash may well perform well if you’re using the Flash 9 player, but noit everyone writes well-architected Flex applications, and the Flash/Flex designer/developer dichotomy is a tricky one to deal with. Not everyone can write an application like Photoshop Express, and the capabilities of Flash are being lost in a morass of advertising animations that mean a lot of influential users block Flash from their browsers completely…
Microsoft is watching Adobe carefully, and it’s trying not to make the same mistakes. While Silverlight is designed to be used by advertisers (and comes with plug-ins suitable for most analytics platforms), it’s also developer friendly. Install Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 2 SDK and you’ve suddenly got a tool that lets you write C# code that runs at desktop speeds inside a browser - and on Macs as well as Windows boxes. There’s no point in codeing for a host of incompatible browsers if you can target a plug-in that’ll work across a sizeable set of your target userbase.
You’re going to need to write code if you’re planning on using Silverlight in anger. Deep Zoom, one of the Mix 08 Silverlight announcments, may only take a line of code to implement in your XAML - but you’ll need a lot more in the associated code to actually work with browser, mouse and keyboard to actually handle the zooming… Microsoft is a developer-focused business, and even though its attempting to redress this with its Expression family of tools, you’re going to need Visual Studio to get the most out of Silverlight.
Photoshop Express is a good idea - and a powerful tool. Could you build it in Silverlight as well as Flash/Flex? The answer’s quite simple: Yes. It’d probably run faster too, as Silverlight has a threading model that’s not there in the current generation of the Flash player. This time next year, well, who’s to say. Flash 10 will have probably changed the game yet again. One things certain: you couldn’t build it in HTML.
There’s something for everyone in the competing RIA platforms. That’s a good thing, as it’ll mean better user experiences for everyone - and a step back from the current round of browser wars. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe wil take competition outside the browser and into the development platform. The next step, well that’s most likely to happen where it’s needed most - server side.
–Simon
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Identifying who you trust to know where you are
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Privacy, Business, Enterprise, Identity, Futures, Internet, Security, Microsoft on
Way back when consumer digital maps were new, I went in to see the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas on DVD. We were looking at the California map and I wanted to see where the Apple headquarters were. I said ‘Cupertino’ and the helpful PR said ‘OK but I thought we could finish the demo and then have lunch’. We looked at each other blankly for a little while; they’d heard a rather curt ‘cup of tea now!’ rather than a place name.
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Songs of distant satellites
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Futures, Wireless on
Yesterday Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, on the far side of the world, a long way from the Somerset coast where he first dreamed of the stars.
We may think of him as the man behind the books and the films, as the bone spinning in the air shifts into a spaceship orbiting the earth, but it’s his ideas that have help shape our modern world - both from the engineers he inspired by his stories, and from his own scientific writings and papers.
It’s not many people who have a whole ring around the world named after them. The Clarke Orbit has become shorthand for geostationary orbit, home of the myriad communication satellites that bind our world together. It was his paper in Wireless World, back in 1945, that first suggested a network of satellites that could cover the world from an orbit that kept pace with the spinning globe below. He probably didn’t imagine that there’d be so many, or that there’d be so much traffic passing through them.
It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world. Satellite phones bring the most isolated village to your door, while TV images show us the faces our neighbours. Without communication satellites there’d have been no LiveAid - at least until after film and video of famine had spent weeks being trekked out of isolated refugee camps. The world has become a smaller place, but it’s also become a closer one.
Satellites aren’t Clarke’s only contribution to the world. During the Second World War he was one of the team of engineers that developed radio-beam controlled landing techniques. If you’ve been on an airliner landing at night - or in fog - you’ve benefited from his work (which he wrote about in his book Glide Path). He also was one of the first to suggest that satellites could be used to deliver information that could be used to improve weather forecasts, spotting weather hundreds of miles out to sea.
Clarke was an early user of email, and he published a book in 1984 of his email collaboration with Peter Hyams on the film of 2010, a fascinating document of the early days of a technology we now take for granted. Email and handhelds were a recurring feature of his novels (especially later works like Imperial Earth), and he regularly explored the theme of a highly connected communicating society - expressing the hope that it would finally bring down the barriers between people and nations.
Engineers were often the heroes of his stories, along with auditors and administrators. His was fiction for the makers and the doers, for the people who took the visions of his stories and started to build a better future. While SpaceShip One and the X-Prize owe a lot to US science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, it’s Clarke who inspired work on space elevators and on solar sails - efforts he hoped would be his lasting gift to the world.
I’m one of those who were inspired by his books. I started young, with his early works (which were what we’d now label Young Adult) and with his short fiction. I wrote my degree dissertation on communication satellites, and spent the first few years of my life working as an electronics engineer - first on radar systems, and then on the electromagnetic launch technologies he explored in stories like Earthlight. I was privileged to meet him once, in 1992 on what was one of his last visits to the UK, in his home town of Minehead.
Vale Sir Arthur.
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
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If it ain’t got an API…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
We spent some of Friday powering up and down the 101, meeting folk at both Serena and Yahoo!.
There was a common theme to the meetings - the power of open APIs to power the next generation of consumer and business applications. It’s well documented, discoverable, APIs let us build the complex mashups of services and processes.
Discoverable is the key word. We need to be able to automate API access in our development tools, whether they’re GUIs like Serena’s new business mash-up tool, or whether they’re JavaScript code in my web development tool of choice, Aptana.
Yahoo! has been working on API-level tooling for sometime now, and a recurring theme of our lunch conversation was summed up in a question from a developer evangelist: “What APIs can we offer you next?” It was a question that made me think, as Yahoo!’s APIs have been at the heart of the web applications I’ve been writing recently. It’s Yahoo! Local Search that geocodes my postcodes for me, and Yahoo! Pipes that converts any web service into a simple JSON operator I can use in JavaScript to build cross-service mashups that down fall foul of the browser security model.
The latest tool to come out of Yahoo!’s research teams is Fire Eagle, a universal location broker. Tell Fire Eagle where you are, and you can share your location with applications that you’ve given access rights. The Fire Eagle API is designed to handle location information (along with the details of the providing service, so you know how accurate the information is), and authentication (making sure the right person gets the right level of detail).
APIs like these are a key to delivering on two key visions: cloud computing and SOA. When you’re using Fire Eagl, you’re subscribing to a service, either as an information provider or an information consumer. You’re also taking advantage of the infrastructure Yahoo!’s built, using compute resources in the cloud to manage your individual location information.
Analyst James Governor came up with an interesting list of signs that something isn’t cloud computing. At number 5 on the list was this: If there is no API
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Biometrics - it’s not the technology that’s broken
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Identity, Hardware, Security on
When we landed in Los Angeles this trip, I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. We’d been expecting the new ten-finger sensors instead of the left-index-right-index-photograph dance you currently do, but they weren’t installed yet. I’m keen to see these in action, and I don’t expect to be in Boston, Dulles or Atlanta any time soon (they’ll be in all US airports by the end of the year). The current scanners are optical - rather like a bar code scanner in a supermarket. That’s a little slow and could be fooled by a fake finger (unlikely as the TSA agent would spot it).
Scanning ten fingers is good for security - more chances of a match with fingerprints the FBI has found at crime scenes where you’re as likely to get a thumb print as anything else. And if it’s not going to take five times as long, it must be using an active technology like the AuthenTec scanner in my HP 2710p notebook - and I want to see how well it works in a heavy duty situation.
I like the HP scanner because I don’t have to remember passwords any more, so I can make them longer and harder to break. I wish HP would write a driver to let me use it for scrolling and I can’t wait until the promised update compensates for the way the screen moves a little as I scan my finger so I don’t have to brace it with my other hand any more. This is much more about convenience than security, and I think my fingerprints are safe enough in my PC. I’m less happy about government use of biometrics, because the government has a terrible record on data security and a dubious one on protecting privacy.
Motorola didn’t reassure me after they did a pilot for biometric visas for the UK, Austria, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain and the UK.
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Why it matters that Steve Ballmer uses a Toshiba G500
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Web browser, Futures, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on
Steve Ballmer was kidding around with former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki at the MIX 08 conference here in Las Vegas, but there was an edge to a lot of the banter. Kawasaki had a MacBook Air hidden amongst his papers and he flourished it, asking if Ballmer wouldn’t like a machine that light and thin. Ballmer hefted the machine and bellowed that his notebook was lighter and a real machine to boot, complete with an Ethernet port. “That thing is missing half the features of a PC. Where is your DVD drive, let me look for that. I’ll have a bake-off with my Tosh versus that thing backstage
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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Seeing the World for what it is
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Web browser, Futures, Internet on
In “The Graduate” Robert De Niro was given one word of career advice: Plastics.
After this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference I’ve got one word for all of you out there: Visualisation.
We’re being faced with more and more complex data sources that we need to turn into something useful. There’s a huge amount of raw data out there, in company reports, in scientific data and in the millions of words that fill the Internet (and our hard disks). The question is, how can we avoid drowning in this information?
The answer is simple - providing tools that can be used to give easy access to the information that’s there, and along with managing that data and mining it, and then making it easy to display the information graphically. Presenter after presenter at ETech showed off various graphs and visualisations that helped make sense of the information they were working with.
One example came from the team at design company Stamen. Working with the folk at MySociety they’d produced a map of London that mixed and mashed transport times with house prices. All you needed to do was move the sliders to find an area that met your budget and the time you want to get up. Their demo also showed how housing prices flowed across the San Francisco Bay area, and how they bubbled up and down in Texas sub-divisions.
Another presentation, from Saul Griffith, used visualisation to put his personal carbon footprint in perspective - and how it matched to his personal energy budget. The graphs and diagrams he’d produced meant that it was easy for him to decide where he needed to cut back - and how the cut backs could be linked to changes he was meaning to make in his life anyway.
Paul Torrens is using visualisation techniques to model the behaviouir of crowds. With 3D models and animations he’s able to show how people exit a building in an emergency, and how a demonstration becomes a riot. Using the information from his simulations architects can design safer buildings, along with cities that can reduce the risks of a peaceful demonstration becoming something else - and protecting the peaceful majority that are just trying to avoid being caught up in clashes between police and people just along for the fight.
These folk are the “alpha geeks”. They may have more of a grasp of what they’re looking for in the data than most of us, but they’re using the tools we already have. Data analysed in Excel can become a web 2.0 mashup or a set of well designed PowerPoint slides. We can use these techniques to visualise data ourselves, building dashboards of the information that we need or want.
There is one danger here: it’s very easy to trust the visualisations that someone else has made. Are they manipulating the data to give the results they want? The only answer is to learn how to visualise complex data ourselves, becoming adept at manipulating and merging information in our chosen tools. Tools like Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services are key to this, as is getting to grips with Excel’s Business Intelligence features.
It’s a brave new world. Let’s take advantage of it.
–Simon
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Brave New (enterprise virtual) World
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, virtualisation, Enterprise, Hardware, Server, HP on
Sometimes weeks have a theme. This last week’s was most definitely virtualisation.
Cannes in February is a refreshing change from an English winter, and it’s where HP were announcing their latest storage virtualisation platform - along with servers that come with VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor built-in. Getting the right physical infrastructure for your virtualised server farm is becoming increasingly important, along with beign able to deploy your virtualised images quickly.
That’s where ESX 3i comes in handy - it’s a 32MB hypervisor that doesn’t need an OS. Boot your server, connect to the hypervisor from one of VMware’s handy management tools, and you’re ready to configure the hard disk and deploy all the virtual machine images you need (and if you’re using BEA’s Liquid VM thin Java servers that can be a lot!). Now that most of the major industry standard server vendors support ESX 3i, with hardware shipping from IBN, Dell and Fujitsu as well as HP, it’s going to be easy to quickly add new compute resources to a virtual infrastructure. All you’ll need to do is order the appropriate server from your usual vendor, shove it in the rack (or the blade host), and a few mouse clicks later you’ve got a server.
Microsoft is going to have to do a lot to compete with this. Its Hyper-V VM is still several months away - and it will still need its own partition to run and manage the rest of the virtual machines running on your server hardware. Sun’s xVM will have similar issues, as will the open-source Xen hypervisor.
HP’s launch was in its Sophia Antipolis offices, as VMworld Europe was just down the road. With more than 4500 attendees, it was definitely the place to be if you were running a virtual infrastructure. BT’s plans to roll out a service oriented virtual network with global load balancing was a benchmark for the maturity of virtual infrastructures, and a fascinating look at how businesses can encourage the move to virtualisation. BT’s decision to make physical server implementations subject to a rigorous review process and hefty chargebacks is intended to make this an economic decision - with virtualisation the clear winner on ease of deployment and lower costs.
At Vmworld Europe the thin client was one of the elephants in the room. While the server products got the stage time, client virtualization got a set of ropy demonstrations which were, to say the least, confusing. Conflating VMware’s impressive VDI virtualised desktop tools with managed desktop virtual machines, CEO Diane Greene demonstrated how virtual machines could be deployed to desktop PCs, and how thin client applications could be used offline and on the road. Given that presentation it would be easy to confuse two very different ways of managing virtualised desktop environments.
Microsoft made a lot more of client virtualisation at its 2008 server wave launch last Wednesday. That’s not surprising, especially when you consider that its big server success story of the moment is its relatively recent acquisition SoftGrid. Delivering applications over the network is a powerful way of controlling user desktops, and reducing your support costs. SoftGrid’s impressive sales figures are even more impressive, when you realise it’s only available through Microsoft’s volume licensing programme.
Perhaps the ideal infrastructure is a hybrid. VMware virtual servers hosting enterprise applications, with SoftGrid -wrapped applications streaming from the server network on to desktop PCs. The PCs themselves might be thin clients fed by Citrix’s tools running on an array of desktop blades somewhere in your data centre. It’s all a blast from the past - the mainframe is back.
This time, however, it’s an ever-growing array of industry standard servers hosting a virtual infrastructure, while applications are delivered to not green screens, but thin client devices with HD quality LCD panels. It’s a brave new enterprise IT world out there.
–Simon
Rated: 60% (1 votes)
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