The big news in professional bicycle racing is that Floyd Landis may be stripped of his Tour de France title because he tested positive for a banned performance-enhancing drug. Sidestepping the entire issue of whether professional athletes should be allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs, how dangerous those drugs are, and what constitutes a performance-enhancing drug in the first place, I'd like to talk about the security and economic issues surrounding the issue of doping in professional sports.

When you’re trying to get a team all working in the same direction, we’veseen that Command and Control management and Econ 101 management both failpretty badly in high tech, knowledge- oriented teams.

The foiled UK terrorist plot has wreaked havoc with air travel in the country:

I got talking with Laurence Timms this morning, author of blog aggregator Chuquet, a UK product that nonetheless finds itself focusing on American high tech debates. Chuquet works by aggregating blogs based on their common links. The subject of our discussion: What is happening with news information? Is aggregation providing a better or more satisfying [...]

Content became a ubiquitous word about two years ago, the kind of appendage that first everything written, drawn, photographed, filmed, imagined, coded…. that’s one of the developments that makes understanding change difficult. In the amorphous new world of content weemee deserves a little praise. London-based Weemee provides you with a visual identity for your online [...]

iPointer: Identify Landmarks Using GPS Phones: "In most mobile applications, GPS phones are typically used to track the physical location of their users. iPointer is an interesting location-based service that uses GPS phones as ‘pointers’ for identifying physical things that surround their users — e.g., landmarks, buildings, and point of interests.This is how I think it works.When a user points the [...]"

An earlier blog entry focused on virtualization in general. This one focuses on storage virtualization. You can virtualize at many levels:Disk-level—cutting disks apart, gluing them together, cloning, thin provisioning.Homogeneous Systems—virtualization spanning multiple systems with the same architecture (Isilon OneFS, Equallogic, ONTAP GX).Heterogeneous Systems—virtualization spanning multiple systems with different architectures.This blog focuses on the third type, because I've found that's usually what people mean when they say "storage virtualization". I suspect that's because they see the first two as features of one vendor's storage, perhaps valuable features, but not part of a bigger strategy. The third type includes products like Acopia, NeoPath, Hitachi TagmaStore, EMC Invista, IBM San Volume Controller, and NetApp V-Series.

There's an interesting article at Optimize Magazine enttiled "The CIO As Business Predictor." It talks quite a bit about the uncertainties prevelant in business today, something I've talked about frequently here.

A collection of 11 prison shivs confiscated over 20 years ago in New Jersey.

Think about these, and the adverse conditions they were made under, the next time you see someone's pocket knife being taken away from them at airport security. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports.

Good wrap on press release optimization (or press release SEO) for search. And more here on search. Technorati : PR...

Great page on the New PR Wiki on astroturfing....

Apple is enjoying a little first mover PR advantage with its pricing comparisons to Dell. First mover advantage is something that has been both promoted and discounted, but in the PR wars it's worth lots - especially when your foe...

Just a quick heads up to anyone who will be attending next week’s Linux World Conference in San Francisco: I will be joining a Linux panel hosted by IBM’s Scott Handy, Vice President for Worldwide Linux and Open Source, next Tuesday, August 15th at four o’clock. I’m looking forward to the live panel and discussion [...]