Publishing the blogs of technology leaders and connecting them to a large audience of industry decision makers.
20 entries filed this day
Alistair Croll · VP Product Management, Co-Founder, Coradiant · Data Management / standards
The Change Management Database (CMDB) is a map of the components in an IT environment and how they depend on one another. It’s at the core of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of best practices developed by the UK government and broadly adopted in recent years.Even if you’re not an ITIL shop...
Filed at 1:00am
Alistair Croll · VP Product Management, Co-Founder, Coradiant · Data Management / performance theory
I spend a lot of time (more than I probably should) discussing performance with people. And often, disputes are the result of disagreement in terms. Armed with a common syntax, adversaries can often find common ground.There are four main dimensions that I’ve found useful in describing performance metrics. These include whether the...
Filed at 1:00am
Alistair Croll · VP Product Management, Co-Founder, Coradiant · Data Management / politics
Let’s define the two camps.The operations teams are responsible for keeping things running. Their view is that change is the leading cause of problems. A support team member I know has a big sign marked, “What Changed?” on his wall as a constant reminder of this.The engineering teams like change. They’re the agents of change....
Filed at 1:00am
Alistair Croll · VP Product Management, Co-Founder, Coradiant · Data Management / technology
I often hear people say, “the website was down.” Not only is it usually wrong; it’s also completely uninformative.Look at the statement a bit. And look at what it doesn’t tell you.The web: What part of the web? The whole site? Or just the part you were trying to use? Most companies split their websites...
Filed at 1:00am
Alistair Croll · VP Product Management, Co-Founder, Coradiant · Data Management / webops
In traditional IT environments, silos of domain expertise focus on the atomic elements that perform some kind of business function. These include the client; the WAN/network, the data center, the application cluster, and the back-end systems.The network and data center tiers are often represented by clouds (particularly when drawn by those whose responsibilities do...
Filed at 1:00am
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
Visionary architect Buckminster Fuller reportedly liked to jumpstart his creativity by grabbing the magazine at the top right corner of the newsstand rack, no matter what the subject was. I’m trying the same experiment this week by attending O’Reilly’s decidedly non-musical Where 2.0 Conference .
Filed at 1:15am
Andy Lark · Chief Marketing Officer, LogLogic · Networking / travel
I'll be posting light this week. Am back in Tokyo with LogLogic partners and customers. If you are a frequent user of the AA San Jose to Tokyo flight make the most of it now through October. After that, it...
Filed at 1:49am
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
The Extensibility Manifesto is not the latest Robert Ludlum novel but a movement, spearheaded by respected industry figure Dale Waldt, well-known as a publisher of the newsletter for many years in the 90s: was what the SGML industry did for information before XML.COM came along. The Extensibility Manifest shares a lot of the mindset of The Agile Manifesto , for example the need to protect against over-engineering and out-of-controlness.
Filed at 3:16am
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
On the 12th of this month Google released version 4 of the Google Earth software with support for Linux. It can now be downloaded from here: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
Filed at 9:17am
Bruce Schneier · Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Counterpane · Security
NIST has just published " Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators ."
Filed at 10:17am
Haydn Shaughnessy · Founder, TheContentStudio.com · for argument's sake / Knowledge Management
I wrote an article last week (it appeared in the Irish Times) on the rising aesthetic standard of everyday objects. I didn't simply want to say that the iPod is beautiful or that my Sony phone is a cool anthracite.I mean the aesthetic standard people are now setting is closer to glamour than mere luxury. What are screen...
Filed at 11:05am
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
On upgrading my webserver recently (from RHEL3 to Debian stable, fwiw), I discovered an issue with renamed/old versions of index.html in the new version of Apache (2.0.54). A user had two files in his public_html directory - home.html, which was what he wanted as his homepage (i.e. to be served up for http://server.net/~user/); and index.html.old, an old version of that page. Under our previous setup, this had worked fine. Under the new one, index.html.old took priority over home.html, and was therefore served; despite the fact that home.html was listed under DirectoryIndex in the config (and index.html.old wasn’t, although of course index.html was). Changing the name of the old page to index_old.html worked to fix it.
Filed at 11:45am
Bruce Johnson · Principal Consultant, ObjectSharp · Software Development
If you weren’t listening closely, you might have missed the announcement that the WinFX technologies have been renamed to .NET 3.0. One of the questions I have been fielding frequently here at TechEd is ‘what does .NET 3.0 mean to .NET 2.0 applications’.
Filed at 12:22pm
Barry Graubart · Vice President of Product management, Alacra · content business / Knowledge Management / search / technology
As access to information becomes more decentralized, the role of the corporate librarian has undergone significant change. Once the guardians of access, today they are more frequently involved in developing the strategies for how information is consumed at the desktop...
Filed at 12:40pm
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
hello, peter drescher here, i am currently sound designer at danger, inc. , makers of the hiptop wireless internet device (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick), and o’reilly has been kind (and brave) enough to let me speak my mind (unedited! holy crap, batman!!) on interactive audio technologies, with an emphasis on the mobile space … oh, this should be interesting!
Filed at 1:47pm
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
Why emulate when you can run native? The Alky project has been developing a binary translator for OS X that converts Windows executables into OS X binaries. The goal is to create a translator that combines a Windows app with a custom library specific to the OS X platform creating a program that runs natively on OS X. It’s still early days and the organizers are looking for C, Mac and Linux folk willing to help out with the open source project.
Filed at 1:48pm
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
Brand-happy Microsoft is slapping the word “Live” on just about every new product it launches, from anti-virus software to search tools. Bad idea. Even the most loyal Microsoft fans have no clue what the term means…and it looks as if Microsoft doesn’t, either. I certainly don’t.
Filed at 1:48pm
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
I try to expand my knowledge of Ruby by reading code from other developers I admire. In the past few weeks, that has meant reading the meager source of Camping , Why the Lucky Stiff’s tiny website framework.
Filed at 2:15pm
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
For some time, I’ve been looking for a beats-per-minute analyzer for my iTunes library. So I was delighted to stumble across TagTraum’s beaTunes . By analyzing songs beats per minute, you can organize them for your workouts or for any other coordinated playback (like DJ’ing at a party). Unfortunately, beaTunes doesn’t deliver on the promise. It’s very, very, very slow. It took approximately 90 seconds to analyze a 22-second track. I put it out of my misery long before it had analyzed more than a few tracks. Also, it will not analyze FairPlay tracks which includes most purchases from the iTunes Music Store. Can anyone else recommend a good (quick and reliable) OS X BPM utility?
Filed at 2:47pm
David A Chappell · Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software · Software Development
In yet another example of how the patent system continues to issue patents that should never have been granted, 8—8 has been awarded a patent for hosted VoIP PBX systems . Interesting, because I remember writing extensively about just this subject (except it was called IP Centrex or Net Centrex) in the 1990s. Virtual PBX , which has been offering hosted PBX services since 1997 and pioneered this space, also comes to mind. AccessLine has also been offering IPBX services for several years, at least. Apparently the US PTO does not subscribe to trade magazines like Computer Telephony (now defunct, but it was the main trade publication for computer telephony and VoIP in the 1990s).
Filed at 4:45pm