Technology: January 2006 Archives
Spent the last week trying to dig out from having been gone for two weeks - I'm glad to not be traveling for work again until March.
I'm not much of a football fan, but we enjoyed watching the Seahawks win the NFC championship yesterday - a Seattle team has never gone to the Superbowl before, so it's all very exciting (though not exciting enough to skip a Sunday of skiing with my son in two weeks).
We saw the Apple Intel cleanroom TV ad during the game - the folks watching at my house, who are not following the whole technology story of this switch, enjoyed the ad a lot.
I think Ted leung has the sanest take on this that I've seen so far:
It looks like Apple did the most expedient thing that it could, which is to take an Intel 945PM chipset and stick it into a PowerBook case, and add a small number bells and whistles (like the built in iSight and remote control). That explains the ExpressCard slot, and the FW400. If I didn't have to measure the MacBook Pro against something like the Lenovo T60 (see preview), which has 5 hours of battery life with a 2.16GHz Core Duo T2600 in a 4.8lb package, I might be happy. But this is hardly the top to bottom revamp of the pro notebook line that you'd expect for the Intel transition. And let's not even discuss the name.
That's what it looks like to me too - that Apple did what they could to get some Intel-based product on the street as quickly as possible. Craig Wood's got some performance testing data that shows that the new MacBook Pro is quite a bit quicker than the G4 Powerbooks, though nowhere near the four times as fast as Apple is touting.
My primary uses of a laptop don't include a lot of CPU-intensive tasks - for me it's a web-browsing, blog-writing, emailing, presentation-making, IMing machine. So I'm not jumping on the upgrade bandwagon just yet (though the built-in ISight camera and Front Row remote software are a nice touch). I'm still hoping for something lighter, cooler, and with longer battery life from Apple.
Technorati Tags: apple
Chuck Norris from EVDB is talking about how to store detailed location information in calendaring objects.
iCalendar specifies just a single text field that contains location - that's not specific enough for much event calendaring.
They are proposing an extension to iCalendar to handle more structured location data. The concept is that there is a location ID that is referred to in the Location field of an iCalendar file, then there is a Location block that has contains all the detailed data on that specific location.
There's some discussion about why not to just embed Vcard into iCalendar - apparently there are some syntax differences that would make iCalendar parsers choke on vCard data. Another reason is that vCard is really oriented towards people, not location (though it contains some location data).
Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring
I was sad to read Paul Andrews' final column for the Seattle Times on Monday. Paul has been a consistently sane voice for the knowledgeable users of information technology in a world that has gotten progressively less sane.
Paul's joining the folks at Green For Good - I wish him all the best in his new endeavors!
Technorati Tags: journalism
Mike Lambert from the Open Group is talking this morning about a challenge for achieving federated free/busy. The Open Group's Messaging Forum is the descendant of the Electronic Mail Association.
The Vendor Challenge approach is a method for bringing vendors to work on real problems presented by users. The problem is defined in terms of a Business Scenario (Use Case) which defines the problem, the business and technology environment, measures of success for the solution, and the constraints. Vendors of relevant products are invited to accept the challenge. On completion, vondors demonstrate the solution.
Afterwards they work to ensure that the solution is deployed in commercially available products in a consistent form. If the activity has identified the need for standardization work (which often happens) they try to make sure that happens in the proper forum. They also have a certification program to recognize and promote products that embody the solution.
Wen Feng from Boeing is presenting the Federated Free/Busy challenge. Why bring this question at this time? Boeing's aircraft programs are increasingly collaborative between Boeing and other partners. The 787 program is being designed in a global collaborative environment - brings up issues of how to exchange data securely, how to work collaboratively. This program has around 300 first tier partner companies. The problem of getting people together in this virtual collaborative environment brings up the issue of scheduling.
Even within Boeing they have multiple calendaring systems, despite concerted efforts to standardize.
Currently they've built an internal system that allows authenticated users to use a web page to retrieve a table of free/busy time for anyone with a Boeing email address from their Exchange servers. But they need to broaden it outside the company - the Boeing free/busy is probably only 30% of the problem in the collaborative environment.
Current calendaring systems do not all contain sufficient information to solve the problem - for instance, if I'm usually in Pacific timezone, how does the free/busy time reflect the fact that for a week I'm travelling in Asia and am on a different time zone?
Free time is not always reliable - just because you're not busy doesn't mean you're available.
Few organizations have corporate policies on updating of calendar information (e.g. you must keep your calendar updated).
The challenge:
By the end of Q2 2006 there should be a real-time mechanism that is able:
- to extract and c ollate/display free/busy information
- from at least 3 major groupware packages
- using open standard protocols
- for a constrained list of named attendees
- and a constrained list of times.
"as large corporations, we do not use proprietary protocols."
Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring, scheduling
This week I'm at the Calconnect roundtable, which is being hosted by Novell in Provo, Utah.
We're starting off the roundtable with a report from the technical committee on time zones. That group is proposing the establishment of a formal timezone registry (for reasons why this is necessary, see my post from October 30).
The whole group here think that's a great idea, and votes in favor of it.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, Calconnect
Yesterday afternoon the Westwood Advisory Council, the CSG group that works closely with OSAF on development of Chandler for higher education, met.
Mitch Kapor and Katie Parlante laid out the current status of Chandler work and the plans for moving forward. Katie's slides are here.
One of the important themes was the emergence of the OSAF work as being about a whole ecology of related projects, including Chandler (the desktop PIM client), Cosmo (the *DAV server for PIM data), Scooby (the web PIM client), and others, including work on clients for mobile devices.
OSAF is very interested in fostering community work on Chandler and related projects, and we talked a bit about how to encourage people within higher ed institutions to participate. If anyone is interested in finding out more on how to take part, drop me a note.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, CSG-Winter-2006, PIM, OSAF
Mimi talked a lot about focus, and integration of PIM data allowing you to focus - answering the question "what should I be doing right now?" instead of "where should I look for things I should be doing now?"
Mimi notes that task lists are themselves artifacts of a pre-digital era. For information workers, the item itself (the draft of an email, a meeting that needs scheduling, the document you need to work on) should be on the list - just like we leave the video to be returned in the hallway, instead of writing "return video" on a list. That's what the Chandler "stamping" concept is about.
Chandler has "bi-directional" references, where each item that belongs to a collection contains data indicating the collection(s) it belongs to, and the collection knows what items it contains.
Three categories: Tagging, Capturing, and Monitoring. Just as items have a life cycle, so do collections - you don't realize the first time you see a topic, you don't realize that it will be a project (or collection), so maybe you tag it. But later, when more items come in on the same topic, you want to change that tag into a collection without having to go back and find all those items and create a folder and drag them into it.
In response to a question Mimi brings up the idea of collaborative triage of a shared mail list - an intriguing concept.
- Update - Mimi's slides are online here.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Winter-2006, PIM
Bill Clebsch from Stanford is giving this presentation.
He starts with a slide saying "Funding: The Final Governance".
He notes that funding evolved from two different models:
That of Communications, which evolved from a culturally accepted phone billing model and monopoly necessity, which gave universities a major windfall, which got used to fund other programs (e.g. networking and data services, which weren't then necessities). That created within the university a false sense of what IT really costs.
Computing, otoh, had no culturally accepted billing models. The services were perceived as optional. There is a constant influx of new services which require a constant influx of new funding, and those services become necessities - but the funding was based on an optional model.
Admin Systems and Services - automation of tasks cost more than anticipated - e.g. the dispersion of PCs on the desktop was a very difficult transition. It's a problem because we never pick up the savings on the other side.
The current state is a perception that IT is too expensive without seeing hte corresponding value, and there's very little "Budget Dust" left to throw at systems. There's a tenuous link to academic program, and people perceive central IT as administrative computing (including course management systems), and all faculty mistrust everything administrative.
The objective for funding models should be to spread costs equitably across the multiple funding sorces, to link funding with perceived value, to scale IT with university growth and success, and to allow the introduction of new services.
some possible bases of funding could be based on people, facilities, machines, or usage - all of these have to be tempered by how much it costs to bill for it. It was amazing how much the support costs at Stanford went down when they went to flat-rate long distance service. B-School 101: All allocation is arbitrary, but you need one that is consistent and defensible. Several people are recommending the book "Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner)Freakonomics.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Winter-2006, IT-Governance
This looks cool -
To all --
This is a notice that the room block cut-off date has been extended till this Thursday, January 5th 2006, for the jointly hosted Internet2 and New World Symphony workshop. Be sure to make your travel plans in the next few days! For registration and hotel details, see: http://events.internet2.edu/2006/NWS/index2006.html
What: Performance and Master Class Production Workshop
When: 30 January - 1 February, 2006
Where: New World Symphony, Miami Beach, FL
Internet2 and the New World Symphony are hosting a hands-on audio/video production workshop on 30 January--1 February 2006 on the campus of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL. The workshop will emphasize real-time experience connecting with remote sites over Internet2 advanced networks, setting up incoming and outgoing audio, creating a multi-camera shoot, placing lights and projectors and operating codecs. This year's workshop will include demonstrations of state of the art codecs for producing events, will explore in depth the elements needed to do everything from simple one-on-one interactions to larger scale stage productions, and will highlight the latest network testing tools developed by Internet2. The workshop is designed for an audience of technologists responsible for setting up distance learning and remote interactive media events. Administrators, deans, CIOs, network and audio engineers, and other hands-on technicians will also find this workshop useful and are encouraged to attend.
Ann Doyle
Arts & Humanities Initiatives
Internet2
(734) 352-7011
