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I thought it was a joke. Who could blame me? After all, the announcement began: “Starting on April 1, 2009…” Then again, Microsoft usually ain’t one to make “April Fool’s” jokes.
I read the announcement again. I clicked the buttons. The download started. I double-checked the URL — “Perhaps it was a fancy phishing scheme,” I thought to myself. “Better check.” “Free” often means free trouble.
I Googled. I got half-a-dozen links. I clicked the Wikipedia entry. It said: “SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as license-restricted freeware.”
Hey, if Wikipedia says so, it’s got to be true, right?
Here’s the scoop, the lowdown, the straight poop: Continue reading Free Beer, SharePoint, and an April Fool
I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup since before before. In fact, I can’t remember (and can’t imagine) not having two monitors in front of me. My office setup is currently two 20-inch 16:9 LCD flat panels. It’s amazing what you can artfully stuff on that sort of screen-space. I’m here to say that it ain’t uppity opulence — it’s productivity enhancement, and damn handy too. For example, with two monitors:
- You can chop-and-paste from one monitor to the other, keeping a browser open on one monitor for… uhm… err… research and your Great American Novel front and center on the other.
- You can set different resolutions on different monitors. This lets you quickly see through other eyes, a handy thing when designing web pages, especially if you have a penchant for extra-large (or extra small) fonts. Guilty, I am. I often forget that some people like their icons larger than a pinhead and text measured in multiple microns.
- You can run multiple flavors of browser — IE, Firefox, and Safari, maybe Opera just for grins — simultaneously making sure that nothing looks right on any of them regardless of what you do.
- Finally, for the A.D.D. amongst us, you can while away your day, in manifold multitasking, with more stuff in your face — calendar, email, task list, Facebook, ESPN and CNN, three or four or five or ten browser windows, slash-dot, iTunes, and a copy of the DMCA (just in case).
Continue reading Trilateral Symmetry
I’m quite fond of my Kindle. Sure, the design’s a little bonkers; and it’s a wee bit awkward. That aside, it is easy to read, easy to use, and mine happens to be loaded with books I want to read.
Moreover, it’s taken a great weight off my shoulders. I like to read when I’m travelling. As a result, I tend to carry lots of lots of books along for the ride. For unfathomable reasons, one book is not enough. I must have at least two or three, sometimes more. Consequently, I end up schlepping somewhere around three-point-two million pounds of books to the far corners of the world.
It’s a proven fact that books get heavier the longer they remain in your luggage. It’s something to do with gravity, airplanes, hotel food, relativity, dirty socks, quantum mechanics, and the amount of missing dark matter in the universe. Perhaps, too, the TSA is involved. I can’t quite explain it.
Nevertheless, somehow — depending on the number of books you’re carrying and the length of your trip — they get heavier. It’s one of the true mysteries of the universe, right in my briefcase.
For me, the Kindle has solved this problem. I’ve cut my beastly book burdens down to one pound. I do still, however, manage to clutter up my briefcase with lots of other stuff, but the book weight has definitely diminished. Sadly though, the addition of my Kindle contributed to what I call “the YAB epidemic” (Yet Another Brick). The Kindle added one more power brick to my ever-expanding multiplicity of power bricks; another brick for the wall. Continue reading Power Tactics
I blame Santa. It was he that started me down this road.
It was he that surprised me with a shiny new Nikon D200 a few years back. Smart, he was, as it happily mated with all my old Nikon lenses, lenses that were pretty much gathering dust in my closet. He eased me in to the dark world of digital photography. And, at first I was happy, wandering the night streets of Brussels, amazed at the versatility and just down-right fun of modern digital photography. But soon, I wanted more — more lenses, fancy carrying cases, tripods, books, and filters; batteries and bling.
The birthday fairy — an enabler working in cahoots with Santa — served only to fan my addiction. She delivered an amazing piece of glass; a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR zoom lens. Oh my. With this combo, I’m almost superfluous in the process. You want a lens, this is the one. One lens to rule them all, One lens to find them, One lens to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…
Between the camera and the glass, I need only twirl a few dials and pretend like I know the difference between aperture and exposure, mutter a few incantations about depth of field, and… voila! I have pictures, pretty pictures. I was caught, before I knew it. I’m now carting Nikky the Nikon, everywhere, buying her presents and shiny bling. And, her latest bling is a marvelous thing — automatic geo-tagging. Continue reading No matter where you go, there you are…
Connectivity is dangerous. The fricative sounds of German wafting through the open windows of today’s hotel room reminded me of that fact, reminded me of a misadventure long past, a memory from a time when connectivity took a modem and a phone line. Sometimes it took the diligent and careful application of alligator clips. Hotel phones were, and still are, nothing but trouble.
That time, in that past hotel, things went south. I had tried to look innocent. I failed. “Monsieur!” said the hotel’s night manager as he pounded loudly on my door. “Monsieur, he repeated as I opened the door, “is there is a problem with your telephone, Mein Herr?”
The switch from French to German seemed ominous. Moreover, he looked ominous. He looked like he had spent his formative years on a diet of steroids and fondue, while bench pressing Tony Soprano. “Whoops,” I thought, “this can’t be good.” Articulate and ever ready with smooth repartee, I replied with a set of universally understood monosyllables. “Uh, err, ah, umm,” I said.
Gathering my wits about me, I continued: “Uh… nope, err… Nein. Ich bin… err.” At that I had exhausted what I remembered of my high-school German. All I could think of was “Ich bin ein Berliner.” That wouldn’t work. Wrong country, wrong era; moreover (urban legends about jelly donuts aside) I am no John Kennedy. Giving up, I continued in English, once again adopting my best Midwestern silly grin, “Can I have a late check-out?” I said. Continue reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses
The failure statistic is often cited, usually with a moan and a wail. It goes like this: 30, 40, or 50 percent of all IT projects go bad. The rest — the ones that actually succeed — well, they go “slightly bad too.” At least some of them do. In the end, nobody’s happy. Jobs are lost, heads roll, teeth gnash. The statistics are real enough, by the way, although they are often cited incorrectly. I fault leadership and the incessant mixing up of means and ends.
Here are the facts. The original source of those numbers is a 1994 report by the Standish Group called the CHAOS REPORT. The report said this about IT projects (and I’m paraphrasing not plagiarizing):
- 31% of [IT] projects are cancelled before completion,
- 88% are over deadline or over budget or both,
- The costs of such overruns are usually (at least) double original estimates
If you think those numbers are sort of long in the tooth, how about these from 2004.
- 18 percent of all IT project out and out fail,
- 53 percent are “challenged” (in other words went awry in some way),
- Only 29 percent actually “succeed.”
These were updated in 2004. Unfortunately, the damn researchers rearranged the categories, so it’s actually impossible to compare the numbers. Continue reading A Means to an End
Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Wisely or foolishly, I think of this particular moment as a “time in between” – we’re no longer where we were and not yet where we’re going — both an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom.
It’s a time of great shifts; the rules of the great game are changing and the players are all different. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the same game. The world may be “flat,” as Tom Friedman says, but it’s also very very bumpy.
Ok, “ho-hum,” you say. It’s no news to you that the forces of globalization, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications, and unparalleled technological innovation are tearing markets apart, changing global dynamics, and redefining almost every aspect of our lives — but, what may be news is that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” There’s a revolution brewing in this epoch of incredulity. Continue reading The Epoch of Incredulity
I think I was eight when I read my first “real” book — of course, that’s not counting comics, Willy Waddle, or books designed to be chewed. The book was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, a proper book; a marvelous story for a boy who spent his days poking at squiggly-wiggly things in the tide pools of Cadboro Bay. I’m sure I still have it somewhere.
I love books — the look and feel, even the smell. They’re almost perfect: relatively portable, random-access, and — treated properly — they’ll last a hell of a long time. If you get tired of them, you can give them away, sell them on eBay, take them to a used-book store, or burn them for kindling, al la Fahrenheit 451… They look grand on bookshelves. They’re almost perfect. The do have a few draw backs:
- Books (and paper) are heavy — especially those damn 4-inch thick computer books.
- Books are not very portable — small quantities are fine, but if you try to take ten or so on vacation with you, it’s a literal drag. Despite their catchy name, Few “Pocket Books” will actually fit in a pocket — or if they do, you look kind of stupid.
- Paper takes up a lot of space — especially those damn user guides, administrator guides, and installation manuals I print and bind in 3-ring notebooks.
- Printed materials tend to “expire” — Today’s newspaper is worth about a dollar, yesterday’s is suitable for wrapping fish. (Of course, tomorrow’s newspaper, if you had it today, would be worth a fortune.)
- Repurposing is difficult — Transmutation costs are outrageous, either lead to gold, or paper to digital. Screw OCR, it’s not good enough, ever.
- Paper is expensive — There a “tree-cost” and an environmental cost. The manufacture and bleaching of paper is horrendous. Stand downwind of a pulp mill and breath deep. You’ll know what I mean.
- The print publishing process is arcane — the economies discourage risk and tend to favor existing authors and large publishers, to the determent of the small publisher or aspiring writers.
In late 2007, Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle. I’m not sure he’ll be remembered in the same breath as Herr Hoffmann Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (whew). At least his name is shorter. The Kindle is, nevertheless, revolutionary. Continue reading Digital Pulp Fiction
I think it was Alan Kay who once said (and I’m paraphrasing here): the personal computer won’t really be personal until you can wear it on your T-shirt. I think of that quote every time I see an IPod commercial.
I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is actually pretty “personal.” I used to say that the internet revolution was all about having a “one-to-one personal conversation with hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people.” But, I’m not sure I really groked just what I meant, just how essentially personal much of this communications and information revolution really is.
Technology Gets Personal
The fact is many of today’s really revolutionary technologies, and all those related gizmos and gadgets, don’t easily lend themselves to the needs of an organization. They are personal; either they don’t scale, or they don’t scale well. They’re not designed to. They are designed for the individual, for the consumer market, not for the organization. Continue reading Adventures in Telephony — Scaling Skype
You may remember my April adventures with a beta of Microsoft’s “Windows Home Server” (AKA: WHS). WHS is a neat little consumer product. I think it also has some applicability in the NGO-SOHO space. It’s perfect, for example, for a nonprofit with fewer than ten or so people in need of automated backup and some easily expanded shared file storage.
Since that foray into Betatown, MS released a new WHS version, the so-called “RC1″ or “release candidate 1″ edition — just a little bit closer to an actual commercial release. Just between you and me, I don’t pretend to follow Microsoft’s various mystical and mysterious machinations as it (slowly) walks a product to market. RC1, or Beta 3, or CTP, they’re all beta’s to me. It means you can’t buy it, yet. It also means install at your own risk. A beta, by any other name, is still likely to break your heart, eat your hard drive, and maybe shred your collection of precious Godzilla DVD rips. Continue reading Dancing with Abby Normal…
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