Wildfire!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in visualisation, FiRe, Google on
Driving from San Diego to Silicon Valley up the 101, we passed an airfield where helicopters were loading up with water and fire retardants. They were helping to control a wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains, where dry bush had been burning for nearly six days. I knew what they were doing, and why, as I’d just had a crash course in California’s fire problems.
Back in San Diego, at FiRe, I spent some time listening in to a group of CTOs and other tech luminaries trying to come up with an improved IT architecture for fire fighters dealing with wildfires. Inspired by the response to 2007’s disastrous fire season, science fiction author and TV presenter David Brin presented a panel from all sides of the tech industry with a challenge from the local supervisor.
The panel included Larry Smarr, the head of UCSD’s super computuing visualisation lab. He had experience of helping coordinate volunteer imaging specialists during the fires, and of using the university’s IT resources to help disseminate information. The panel was joined by two local subject matter experts - one of whom was a fire chief who’d had to put his own men in the path of the fire to help track the source of the flames.
It turns out that San Diego has a lot of the basic infrastructure needed to build an effective fire detection and warning system - including sensors on mountain tops in risky areas. What’s really needed are a way of increasing sensor coverage at times of maximum risk - and of pinpointing fires directly. Information also needs to be routed to help support decisions that need to be made quickly - and presented in a manner that makes sense. Visualisation tools are important here, as they can bring information from multiple sensors and display it in an easy to understand manner alongside appropriate geographic information.
Two days weren’t enough to solve the problem, but plenty of good ideas made their way into an overall system diagram. FiRe’s brains trust may not have prevented the next round of fires, but some of its ideas will go back to the team at UCSD - as well as to the local fire departments. San Diego may not yet use airships to spot fires, but better image processing and improved sensors could go a long way to saving lives and property.
San Diego’s fires also made it to this week’s Google IO (our San Francisco destination). In a presentation on Google Earth, it tutned out that a local radio station used Google’s tools to create an impromptu early warning system on its web sites. Fire reports were plotted on a map, and used to help predict the likely trajectory of the wildfire.
Imaging and visualisation are critical technologies. We’re visual animals, and a well designed image can compress huge amounts of information into very few lines. Appropriate imaging (if it’s on UCSD’s super computers, or on Google Earth) is a powerful decision support tool - and one that in the face of wildfires most certainly saves lives.
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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Video opera? What would you do with huge bandwidth and millions of pixels?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Web browser, People, Futures, Networking, HP, Internet on
One of the highlights of the Future in Review conference is the chance to go to the supercomputing visualization lab at the University of California in San Diego, CalIT2. It
Rated: 80% (2 votes)
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More battery life, fewer explosions
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Silicon, Toys & gadgets, Hardware, Laptop, Mobile on
No battery ever lasts long enough. The extended battery on the HP 2710 tablets
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Runnning BES the Blackberry Way
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
RIM’s WES 2008 event wasn’t just about the shiny devices (though the Bold is very impressive). It’s also about the nuts and bolts behind RIM’s platform, and about how you actually run your own Blackberry service. With plenty of RIM staff on hand, and giving presentations on everything from web design for Blackberry browsers to configuring RIM’s tools to work with the latest versions of Lotus Domino, there’s a lot of material to help you through your working day.
Blackberry Enterprise Server is a hefty piece of software, and RIM’s own network administrators came down to Orlando to show how they run their service. Not surprisingly they have one of the most complex BES infrastructures around, supporting all three mail server platforms (Exchange, Domino, Groupwise) and with three distinct user classes: bleeding edge Alpha users, advanced Beta users, and general everyday Production users.
With a complex environment like that, spread across the world, what’s the secret sauce? It turns out to be their domain database strategy, which is regionalised and segregated (by mail platform and by user class). Even so, RIM aim to have as few databases as possible, with the intention of keeping management simple.
The team gave out some numbers. They currently support 9300 Blackberrys, of several different generations. There are 42 BES servers in the company, supporting all the different combinations of geography, user type, and mail server (of which there are more than 55). All that’s handled with 9 domain databases - running on centralised high availability SQL Server systems with remote connections from RIM’s global BES network.
If you’re worried about your BES performance you can take a tip from RIM, which uses a mix of virtual and physical BES systems. They use 2GB of RAM for Exchange nodes and 4GB of RAM for Lotus (as BES runs on the same server as Domino). Best results come from placing BES local to the mail server it’s using as a message source. The servers are also connected to the local PABX systems, as part of RIM’s new voice service.
So how’s it all managed? Users are supported with a service desk and with self-service. Self-service is increasingly important, and using RIM’s web-desktop manager rather than the standalone desktop tools they can set their own activation passwords and upgrade devices without having to call on the help desk and server administrators.
Server administration is handled by the corporate database team and a team of BES administrators, with the aim of tracking the code people are using on any given day. Systems are monitored using familiar enterprise management tools, including HP Open View and Microsoft System Center. A reporting database handles configuration queries, while custom scripts and the Blackberry Enterprise Resource Kit handle log analysis (though there are always ongoing evaluations of alternate tools).
It’s important for RIM to have good management tools and practices, as it’s using several different versions of the BES code - the current release, the next service pack, and the next generation release. At any time 1000 users are early adopters, already on the next generation Blackberry Enterprise Server.
So what are the five key tips from RIM’s own administrators for a successful BES implementation?
- Keep your messaging environment healthy
- Protect the domain databases
- Ensure adequate server resources have been provisioned
- Remove orphaned/unused accounts from your mail servers
- Always document custom configurations (and also save logs)
– Simon
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Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
The new BlackBerry Bold sounds like a hot new smartphone: half VGA resolution, 600MHz processor, 1GB of internal memory, 2 megapixel camera, H264 video in hardware, GPS and Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE, HTML email and a better Web browser ready for Web 2.0. Think YouTube, hi-res movie trailers, photo blogging, Facebook updates, ringtones, online shopping…
Oh, and think SAP CRM, encrypted email, secure Bluetooth for authenticating with a smartcard and all the other enterprise tools you expect from a BlackBerry. The Bold has a QWERTY keyboard and a screen you might point at but can
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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It
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Identity, Security, Google, Internet on
I find it easy to spot most of the phishing messages that hit my inbox, because there’s nearly always an egregious grammatical mistake in there somewhere. Real messages from banks may be full of logical errors (like a regular savings account with a headline rate of 7% that never tells you that actually it averages out nearer 4% because not all of the money gets to earn the high rate for the whole year), but the spelling is spot on.
And spammers are in such a hurry to put up the Web pages they want to earn ad money on, or use for drive-by downloads to increase the size of the botnet they use to spend most of the spam from zombie machines, that they often make stupid mistakes. If you’re checking 100 messages a day in your junk mail filter for anything real that got in there by mistake, I’m not sure if it’s any comfort to remember that spammers are only human. But Google finds it useful.
According to Matt Cutts of Google at Web 2.0, Web spammers often use templates and tools to build their pages. And fairly often they follow the commented-out instruction to ‘type your hidden text in here’ - but never delete that instruction. The tools they use to fill in forms are simplistic too; the captcha you have to complete to leave a comment here is enough to defeat most of them - but so is a box labelled email address with the instruction not to fill it in. When the bot adds whatever email address it’s abusing, you know you can just delete the comment. Simple maths or the instruction to type in a specific word are beyond bots - at least until Jeff Hawkins perfects Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
If you have a site, you need to think of things that raise the blood pressure of the spammers without doing the same to your users. It’s like being chased by any dumb but dangerous pack animal, says Cutts; you only have to run faster than the slowest person you’re willing to sacrifice. If your system is a little different from the default installation of whatever you use, the default attacks are less likely to work and the spammers may move on to slower prey.
Apart from the obvious advice to patch, patch and patch again, Cutts didn’t say much more - because every time you tell spammers how you’re spotting them, they get a chance to stop doing that. A lot of what Google knows about spam comes from the analysis it does of real Web pages, which lets it work out what things go together. If you know that timepiece and chronometer are synonyms for watch, those strangely-worded Rolex spams are easier to stop. You can see this classification in Google Sets and it’s used in Google Spreadsheets. The equivalent of Excel AutoFill does more than days of the week and months of the year, without you having to add the lists by hand; start with red, yellow and blue and Google Sets will add other colours. Start with lion, tiger, bear and you get other animals.
But you might also get wood, tin and cotton. That’s because Google Sets can’t always tell the difference between the list of animal names and the list of animal toys on the Web sites it looks at. It will learn; like spammers it will learn more quickly if someone tells it what it’s got wrong. But at this point, we get into a race between whether the anti-spam tools can learn faster than the spammers
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
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Round Two?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Internet, Microsoft on
So Microsoft walked away from its bid for Yahoo! after raising its offer to $33 a share.
I’m not really surprised at this result. As much as he’s like to think so Yahoo! isn’t worth the $37 a share that Jerry Yang was holding out for, and I really don’t think Microsoft wanted to go hostile considering the damage it would have done to the Yahoo! engineering teams it wanted. Yahoo!’s stated strategy would do much to destroy the company that Microsoft wanted, and that wouldn’t have been what anyone wanted. If the price had risen to more than $33 a share, and Steve Ballmer would have been risking an awful lot of additional gearing that would have ended up diluting Microsoft’s control of its own destiny.
So what’s next? One option is to for Microsoft to take the same approach it did with Borland in the 90s, when it failed to purchase the developer tools company. Instead Microsoft just started to hire the talent it wanted, bringing on board the skills it needed to give it a more mature development platform. If that’s the case here, then recruiters in the Bay Area can probably look for a bumper year as Microsoft starts to cherry pick the talent it wants from Yahoo!’s engineering teams. That’ll be considerably cheaper for Microsoft, though any results will take time to filter through its product pipeline. It took nearly 10 years for .NET to get to where it is today. There’s one problem though, in that Google’s checque book may be a little bigger than Microsoft’s - and unless Microsoft substantially increases the size of its Silicon Valley campus it’s going to be hard to entice developers to move from the balmy South Bay to the damp of the Pacific NorthWet.
The other option is, I think, going to depend on how the Microsoft and Yahoo! stock prices behave over the next quarter or two. The first few days of trading should see a steep drop in Yahoo!’s price, and an equivalent (but not so dramatic) rise in Microsoft. The spectre of a hefty gearing has depressed Microsoft’s stock, and the prospect of a payday has pushed Yahoo!’s up. If Yahoo! continues to trend down, its board is going to come under considerable pressure from institutional shareholders as to why it didn’t take the $33 offer. Yahoo! will end having to approach various suitors, but there won’t be a white knight until Microsoft comes in with a bid at around $28 (or possibly even lower) a share, which the Yahoo! board will be forced to accept.
That certainly seems to be what the market is expecting. Looking at the stock prices a day or so after Microsoft’s Microsoft’s share price rose, but not hugely, and Yahoo!’s hasn’t fallen all the way back to its pre-bid lows. Key shareholders are making a lot of noise about Yahoo!’s boards performance, and it looks as though Jerry Yang is going to be in for a rough ride. Yahoo! is going to have to pull out all the stops to get its new Yahoo! Open strategy announced at the Web 2.0 Expo up and running, and board-room turmoil will be an unnecessary distraction.
It’s still too soon to call it. The story’s not over by a long way - and the dealer’s just started to put down the cards for the next round. There’s a lot of money on the table somewhere for someone, and whatever happens over the next few months Microsoft gets the people and skills it wants for less than it was originally planning to pay, though the second option adds a few additional properties and the trauma of a merger…
–Simon
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Say it in English
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Futures, Internet on
Do you speak fluent geek? Or would you rather your computer learned to speak your language? To those of us who
Rated: 60% (1 votes)
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Log in and lock in
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Web browser, Internet on
There’s a proliferation of online document editing services. At Web 2.0 Expo every man (and his dog) seemed to be demonstrating another cloud-based document service. Now Google’s applications have been bundled with Salesforce.com’s online business services. Are desktop applications doomed?
From where I’m standing the answer has to be no.
Microsoft’s Office file formats were often described as how it locked customers into a never-ending cycle of upgrades. New version, new file format. That changed with the arrival of tools that decoded Microsoft’s files and provided compatibility. Open Office and the like had effective file converters that meant you weren’t locked in, and Microsoft’s new XML formats mean you can get at your text no matter what…
Online the story’s different. Create a document in Google Docs and it goes straight into their database. Yes you can save it locally, but that’s not the point of cloud services - you want to be able to get at that file wherever you are. So it stays on Google’s hard drives with no SLA, and no guarantee that you’ll be able to get your files if the service is ever withdrawn - and no idea if you’ll even get notice of a service’s imminent demise. It’s the same for Zoho or for Buzzword or any of a myriad other services. The cloud may be big, but there isn’t enough market out there (especially at $5 a month a user) for all the services to survive. When one goes down, and one will, sooner than later, how will you get your documents?
It’s the ultimate lock in, far worse than anything Office ever did. Unless, of course, you explicitly remember to save documents locally (and it’s not surprising that you have to click an export button to do just that). The convenience of online access to files isn’t enough to give up the freedom to store files where and how you want.
That’s enough to make me stay away. Things get even worse when you actually try to use them for what they’re apparently best at: collaboration.
If two people are trying to work together on a document, it’s good to be able to share edits and to quickly change focus. Try to use Google Docs, and things get a little tricky. Is the current section of the document locked or not? It’s impossible to tell - and if it is, it’s also hard to find out when the lock times out. The locks vary from application to application, and vendor to vendor. It’s not difficult to lock on a per word or per cell basis, and Excel has been offering per cell locking for network collaboration since the mid 1990s. Flickr developer Kellan Elliot-Mcrea put it last week, talking about online tools,
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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