Every time I travel to Cambridge I have cell phone problems. Five bars of signal; can’t get through.
Tonight was no exception. Full signal, dial, wait, nothing. Dead air. Dial again, nothing. Again, “You could not be connected”. Again, and again.
Turned out that each time Granias phone was ringing, showing my number and the line was dead. Go figure.
Even Mayor Menino thinks it sucks.
I was talking to a friend in Barcelona about application development (note – I’m not a hacker; “I don’t write code” TM).
He mentioned that Ruby on Rails was getting a few people inside Novell excited.
Since then I’ve stumbled across literally dozens of brand new, hot, useful web apps that are based on Ruby on Rails. All stemming from a few core projects from 37Signals.
I blogged a few days ago about Backpack – and I’ve now been using it for about a week.
I’m still pretty impressed by the look, feel and general behaviour of the application; Backpack really reminds me of Lotus Organiser from about ten years ago. Except it’s extensible, in the web, always available and sharable.
One new feature that’s had some attention in the blogosphere (Scoble et al) is the Writeboards. Think of it as an always on Word or Powerpoint document that’s many-to-one sharable. And Editable. With track changes and edits.
This is a way cool feature.
I’m still looking at the security of all this. I implicitly (foolishly?) trust people like Google for my mail; I also accept that my corporate data is backed up somewhere and belongs to my employer. It’s just a little larger leap of faith for me to trust a new player in this space. What will they do with my data? Should I ever store anything more confidential than a to-do list online?
Dilbert today was spot on:
Haha – anyone called Ted reading this 🙂
ex-Noveller Todd Dailey blogs on making his iPod Nano perfect again.
I guess there’s a disclaimer somewhere that Todd works for Apple – but it’s fun none the less to see blogosphere hysteria brought to earth with a polish of Brasso.
[Update – Todd got a front page on Memeorandum!]
I’m surprised this hasn’t reached more people – a great PDF from Reporters Sans Frontiers
There is a great essay included from Dan Gillmore – “What Ethics Should Bloggers Have?” – one of my pet topics; this really goes back to the trust and implied trust between bloggers and readers.
Worth a read.
The capabilities of browser based applications have exploded in recent years. (This is especially important for ZENworks – as we move the management console to the new ZENworks Control Center.)
There is a breaking set of new ‘Web 2.0’ applications that use AJAX to deliver a really rich UI; Google Maps is probably the most well known; but I also love these:
I remember some of the contortions that had to turned just a few years ago to get anything even looking like this in a browser.
I saw some of the Hula calendar work when I was last in Cambridge – it all looked very slick.
TechCrunch is a great resource for tracking some of these new concepts.
I predict that these UIs will become prevalent on the most sticky sites; I also hope that a lot of the ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’ comes across into the more mundane enterprise IT world.
I finally spent some time (and parted with the hard earned) and got some new music:
Camera Obscura – Biggest Bluest Hifi
Camera Obscura – Underachievers Please Try Harder
I first heard this band on the John Peel 65th Birthday Party – it’s a lot like early Belle and Sebastian; mellow lyrics and guitar. Best served with a nice bottle of red.
Decemberists – Picaresque
This band is on tour this fall – nearest gig to SLC is in Boise, ID. Huh? Go figure. SLC truly is a live music backwater – my proof points are here and here.
Final hit was a couple of CDs from DJ Tiësto – a hot tip from Mark Schouls.
DJ Tiësto – In My Memory
DJ Tiësto – Parade of the Athletes
Nice – a couple of hours of European electronic music. Good for the drive into work.
ZENworks OS imaging has always been based on the Linux kernel – it’s fast, efficient, has a great networking stack and is also extensible. None of the problems of DOS and getting NDIS drivers etc.
Earlier versions of ZENworks – (ZfD 3.x, ZfD 4.0, ZENworks 6, ZENworks 6.5) – spawned a slew of sites dedicated to tweaking this Linux environment. Notable is the Novell Forge Project zfdimgdrv. The imaging environment has also been extended by the likes of ENGL.
ZENworks 7 changed to a SLES 9 SP2-based kernel; this provides extensive hardware support (and real support; things that have been tested).
For unsupported hardware – or to add updated drivers – life is now a lot simpler.
Matt Misbach – one of the ZENworks engineers – passed on this tip:
As mentioned I’m working on a best practices guide for ZLM7.
I’m writing a discussion of the package universe concept; how it differs from previous versions of ZLM (ZLM 6.x and RCE) and some design recommendations.
I also wrote a nifty script to populate the package universe 🙂 I’ll share that when I’ve tested it to death – but here’s the output:
Right now I can build all of my package universe as well as SP2 updates for SLES 9 and NLD 9. It takes about 20 minutes and minimal prep work.
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