I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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Apple has just announced the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt has joined the board of Apple.
Wow!
So that accelerates the rumours of an Apple Sun Merger. But really, is Apple going to make a big push into the Enterprise Server market?
More interesting to me is that the worlds biggest server side computing company creates a stronger link with arguably the most dynamic client computing platform company - who operates in a much faster revision cycle than the incumbant.
What do you think? Is this a big deal?
I’m speaking at the Auckland ICT event tomorrow afternoon.
Details here: http://www.aucklandict.org.nz
Gmail Notifier has just been updated and renamed.
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/notifier_mac.html
- Adds Calendar notifications
- Doesn’t use Growl anymore
- They still haven’t fixed the hosted domains issue. They’ve been pounded on this and I can’t believe this wasn’t the first thing they fixed. The Hosted Domains issue has even dropped off the FAQ. Great way to loose loyalty.
Anyhoo. Prettier than before.
Oh, another thing I saw on TV while on holiday was a World Sport Stacking Association (WSSA) event on ESPN.
The premier event seems to consist of:
3-6-3
6-6
10
Here’s a demo …
You can get your gear at http://www.speedstacks.com
The world record is for the cycle stack appears to be 7.43 seconds by Emily Fox (USA).
Found Emily’s world record stack on google video.
I was cleaning up my photo library and found these shots of the King Kong boat (coming back from Skull Island I assume). This is taken from the front of my house in Wellywood.
It didn’t seem cool to post them before the film was out. It’s still sitting at the dock.
Back after a week off. Fiji was great.
Some random thoughts
- We flew Freedom Air. That’s the service where you take your own food along. It was an Air New Zealand (A320)light without food. That was a much better model than being tied into a standard food service and clean up schedule. Much better with kids to be able to do what you want, when you want to.
- Direct flights rocks. It really made the difference for where we chose to go. Having to stop in Auckland with kids and adding the extra hours to the flight is just scary. The more direct flights destinations we get into Wellington the better my life will be. We need to fight for flights. Once a week to Asia and US West Coast would be great.
- I didn’t watch much TV but I did notice the Australian business shows. It was earnings week and the style in Australia is just so much more aggressive than in New Zealand. Seeing Packer (the younger) strut into their conference with his posse was cool. Hells Angels in suits. In Australia that business culture is much more masculine than here. It looks more like sport and I found it motivating.
- Explorer 7 RC1 was announced. There may be an an RC2. In my first month of Blogging (June 2003) I noted my frustration that Explorer was in need of a refresh. IT IS OVER 3 YEARS LATER AND STILL NOT RELEASED. The slowing release cycle is absolutely nuts but fortunately it creates a heap of opportunities for more nimble players.
- ASB Business releases video podcasts of their 6:30am business interviews. http://tvnz.co.nz/ASBBusinessPodcastMP4 This is very cool as I can’t often watch the show at 6:30 but can now check what was on and just pick up the stories I’m interested in later in the day. The dis-intermediation of the broadcast model continues.
I’m out for a week. Hoping to avoid the internet, email, comments and crackberry.
Bula.
Update:
Another week into using my MacBook for my combined Mac and Windows experience and I’ve noticed that my Mac has become my constant companion.
That is because of speed. Startup speed and wake up speed. Sleep works really well. Super fast off and on. Even wifi (airport) wakes up very quickly.
Speed is the key. It just irks me that in 20+ years since I started using computers the logon time seems no faster. In the late 80’s on that 286 I’m sure that I would have had a conversation (to fill in the awkward silence on boot up) that went something like, “By the mid 90’s computers will start instantly”. Well its the mid 00’s and it can still be several minutes.
I think it goes the Apple advantage of controlling the hardware and software. That tightness allows optimization of start up.
The next big thing in hard disks is the inclusion of flash or NAND memory for saving state, so I’m hoping that finally laptops will be instant on. That is the key to keeping your machine with you.
I really like the Safari Browser. It’s fast and minimalist. RSS support is quite useful too (though you can’t easily import OPML - wtf!).
But many complex websites don’t support it. It seems to have major CSS problems and editing control issues. I therefore use Camino (which is based on FireFox) as my main Mac Browser.
This note on Safari from a Rich Text Box control vendor reveals some of the frustration.
The Safari Team seem to be out on their own. There is some split from the KHTML core. What’s going on here? Does anyone know what the deal is?
Is the next major Safari update in Jaguar? Will that allow Safari to be my #1 Browser?
Finally it looks like the Windows Mobile team (and Palm) have noticed why the BlackBerry works …
Brighthand: Get Ready for Some Big Changes in the Way Your Mobile Device Looks and Acts
… Palm OS and Windows Mobile will be redesigned from the ground up to make one-handed use as easy as possible.
2008.
We use Atlassian’s Enterprise Wiki Product Confluence. It’s pretty good.
Great business video here (Thanks Zoli).
This should get you motivated.
The Wiki space is red hot right now, but plenty of room for innovation as the power of wiki’s for unstructured data collaboration is put alongside, or within, structured data. Wiki’s can go vertical.
With new ‘lean steer’ technology replacing the left hand steering.
How will the Segway Polo set take the new machines?
Update: There is one i2 in Auckland and 4 available before xmas. Contact Philip is you want one.
Preview but seems to work OK using the inbuilt camera.
http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/videopreview.html
I’ve installed Office 2007 beta on Parallels.
To share data between OSX and Parallels you can use Parallels Shared Folders or take advantage of Windows networking as per the following article.
One home folder to rule them all
Works well.
An email convention we used to use in the Glazier days was ‘#’ at the beginning of an email subject line to say there was no body in the message. E.g.
Subject: #Printer on level 3 is broken
This means you do not need to click onto the message to open it, saving hours per year. An alternative notation might be
Subject: Printer on level 3 is broken (EOM)Â Â
I like the ‘#’ notation best.
I’m promoting this as an international standard.
Wow. I’ve loaded up Parallels on my MacBook and running Windows XP in a Parallels Virtual Machine.
I’m stunned by how good this is. I can access my Desktop Widgets, Expose works, Speed is good and Growl alerts overlay. I was worried that it might be slow so was considering BootCamp. Not necessary. I’m using the XP VM for LiveMeeting, Visio and Outlook. This allows the best of both worlds. Those couple of Win apps that were holding you back are on your machine.
Talking to few people today it became clear the model of virtualizing/marginalizing Windows has potentially significant consequences. You could simply back up your XP image every week. Or for new staff just copy a standard image. This is end user driven Virtualization. Not driven by server hardware optimization but by user liberation. Sure another layer just got added to the stack but the benefits of this additional abstraction are significant.
Also significant is that that Apple have a clear advantage here. OSX readily hosts Windows but the reverse does not apply.
As AAPL dips while they too sort out their stock option issues there may be a great buying opportunity. Having experienced Parallels I have no doubt Apple is poised for significant market share growth. The trickle to OSX is about to be a flood.
As veggiedude says: It is no longer “Mac vs PC†- Apple has changed the rules of the game. It is now a question of “Mac and PC†vs just “PCâ€.
Update: Dave5 noticed too … MacOS X + Parallels == Kick Ass
Some of the great software ideas just come out of finding things that cause you a problem. Even though the web is a perfect market here is three quick things I couldn’t locate on google that I’d spend $10 on today.
- Gmail Notifier that works with hosted domains
- A direct OPML importer for Safari RSS (yes I’ve seen the Sage hack)
- An OSX Windows tweak that:
- Moved the close window ejector seat away from Minimize and Fit
- Adds a ‘Fill Desktop’ (in Windows: Maximize) option
- Makes those pesky dots bigger. Sometimes its hard to click on those little suckers
Let me know if any of those things exist.
I’ve been appointed to the NZ Advisory Board for NZTE’s Beachheads program.
This was a program we were part of as AfterMail. As a member company I was impressed with the calibre of people on the country specific boards. This program is very export focussed so is one that I’m keen to contribute to.
If you’re in the process of going offshore I strongly recommend getting onto this program. Networks are so important and this program can get you tapped in.
MySQL at Dreamhost was down causing an outage.
The downside of hosted applications is that sometimes they stop. How the hosting company deals with this experience is key for customer service.
Dreamhost had an excellent trouble shooting system. Once I logged on, they presented me with a list of services I was running. I could select them to test, down to the database under my site. It quickly identified my site problem as a known issue and had status updates. I could register to be notified of status changes.
This was excellent and turned a negative into a strong positive.
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