Australian Domino shop calls it as it is....

Friday 3rd September, 2010

Ok folks, this is a touchy one, comment #35 by Matt Cunneen, MD of Satsuma, on Ed's blog makes a well over due response about IBM's conduct with its Business Partners. Satsuma, similar to other business partners here in Australia, are seeing the action out there on the battle field, and like any business are moving with market forces independent of their influence to better insure their viability.

Satsuma, from appearances is doing no different than IBM, and if you read through their site, have taken great care about the way they can offer services to a changing market. We already know that IBM, in it's own operations, has services and support through it's GTS business that can also migrate clients. Just like Satsuma, IBM supports it's clients, to deliver the best outcome for the customer. The difference between Satsuma and IBM is merely the scale of offerings.


Comments [0]

M2 traffic advice.. No Kidding!

Thursday 19th August, 2010

For those who know Sydney, the M2 is a privately funded car park that is in a parallel configuration where cars are parked end to end for many kilometres between the hours of 6am-9am, Monday - Friday. The parking management road management for the M2 like to help out by giving you hints about these sorts of problems.

No Kidding there are delays!


Comments [2]

Super Broadband + Virtualisation = Gaming revolution

Saturday 14th August, 2010

I recently heard about onlive and GaiKai.

This is perhaps the next big thing since MMO games came into existence around 1997 with Ultima Online. Rather than buy the console or software, you simply play a virtualised session through any capable device be it mobile/droid/"i" device, PC or MAC. You need at least 5-10Mbits to play, as the video is literally streamed to you from the host server, whilst your inputs are relayed back, processed and returned to you (and anyone else in the virtual vicinity). The other big thing is that it would transform the subscription based model for gaming. Rather than buying a title outright, or subscribing to one game only (ie World Of Warcraft or Eve), you buy a membership to a range of games that could be streamed to your a$$kicking 50inch Plasma.

So, this means you could be on your Android phone, or your 50inc plasma ;), playing a PC game against someone else who is using an iPad or iPhone. Best place to play these games at the moment would be in Korea, Japan or any of the 10Mbit+ club of countries. On a side note Kyrgystan it seems has 4 times the average speed of Australia if Speedtest.net has any substance to it, (/facepalm). I know the tyranny of distance that our forefathers had to endure to discover Australia continues to plague us today, but in terms of latency...

 

 


Comments [2]

Collaborating requires 3 key attributes...who, where and when..

Tuesday 27th July, 2010

Through this link, I found out Alistair Rennie is coming to Sydney. Screen shot below.... See the missing detail ? The third key requirement for collboration.. When...I look at the registration form and it doesn't mention it either..sigh! IBM, please fix this...

UPDATE: Thursday August 12. Thanks for fixing it ASAP.


Happy to go along to the Ivy... I don't think they'll let me in though, as I'm not cool enough as I still use Notes 7 alot...LOL.


Comments [0]

Whats happening to app development ?

Friday 11th June, 2010

Reading through the blogs it's now quite clear where things are heading. Jake's post about his focus on Sharepoint (and the grim comments), as well as Vowe's observations at DNUG make for the epiphany the developers out there need to discover.

I checked out the IBM marketing blitz on LotusKnows (www.lotusknows.com.au) and it's all generic commoditized services, (Calendaring, Quickr, Telephony, Connections, portals). It has NOTHING to do with custom application development or the great ROI you can achieve leveraging app development.

This actually cannibalises the custom app work we have become accustomed to as IBM goes ape-sh_t on selling LotusLive. I had signed up for the LotusLive trial a while ago and got a follow up phone call recently asking if I wanted to buy LotusLive not once, but twice. Clients who do take it up can also ditch some of their infrastructure, and push the Lotus components into the cloud for lower cost thus reducing their capability, and subsequently your opportunity for app dev work. So, I don't see how the LotusKnows campaign will help application developers from that perspecitve.

I do however see a silver lining. BP's with sufficient agility can move into specialised hosted app dev services where they provide specific solutions through the "cloud". It also forces BP's to cross train into other up-trending technologies to maintain profitability (or survive).

Right now though the BP's are gonna have to drink the the IBM coolaid because that's where IBM is shoveling their dosh. License sales, (no surprise there). Custom application development is a secondary sell and actually conflicts with the "cloud" philosophy.

Given that historically 70+% of IT projects go over-budget and over-time it's no surprise then that customers are trying to reduce their exposure to the risk of those missed expectations. So, I think in many places, (outside the rarified atmosphere of North America), Lotus is will become largely irrelevant on the client site. You need to skill up elsewhere, and/or gear solutions for the "cloud" (aka Application Service Providers 2.0).


Comments [0]

Lotus Knows has landed in Australia

Tuesday 8th June, 2010

Well, Lotus knows has arrived in Australia, with mats and posters out the front of IBM's office in St Leonards, Sydney.

Hope there will be more in terms of print media in the public domain, than promoting Lotus to internal IBM staff and the coming and going of couriers. I resisted the metaphorical comparison of IBM staff just wiping their feet on Lotus, but that would be snarky.... ;)

 UPDATE: Yep.. The LotusKnows.com.au site is up as well as some print media hitting the shelves (via Ed).


Comments [3]

Counter Propganda

Wednesday 26th May, 2010

What's that ? Hard to explain but just check this twitter feed and it will be immediately clear.

http://twitter.com/BPGlobalPR


Comments [0]

Yes, money does grow on trees.....

Monday 24th May, 2010

Raboplus RaboDirect, (recently re-branded from Raboplus) is on a push to grow market share in the online banking/investment sector in Australia. Part of their campaign in the re-branding was to have a money tree in Circular Quay, (outside the MCA). Covered in $5 notes and film it to exploit viral marketing as a means of getting the word out. Check out the video.



Comments [0]

IBM gives malware at security conference... whoops...

Saturday 22nd May, 2010

Not sure what the rep from IBM would say to customers, and peers after you accidentally spread mal-ware at the annual AUSCert conference in your complimentary USB keys to promote your security credentials. But I'm sure "oh crap!" fits in some where.

 


Comments [0]

Facebook has lots of security....

Saturday 22nd May, 2010

I recently deactivated my facebook account. Basically it's getting pretty messy out there in terms of what people think is private and what Mark Zuckerberg thinks is private. Most of my "friends" agree about the principles for doing so, but one friend sent me this blog post from Scoblizer. As per Scoble's usual inciteful perceptions on topics, he makes a good argument for opening everything up.

I am in agreement to actually. But, (and it's a "Serena Williams" sized "but"...), my beef is more about the fact that Mark Z continues to change the goal posts without letting you know. I can see why people are getting miffed about it. You can't start out being all secure, and then move the goal posts every year or so, as people aren't sure what's going on and not all will be smart enough to avoid identity theft.

This ABC article helped me see the light, as it were. This brilliantly animated analysis of Facebook privacy over the last 5 years sums it up perfectly.


Only now after 5 years is it blatantly obvious that Facebook will eventually be totally open. And perhaps that's the way you need to approach it as a user. Mark Zuckerberg is a right -royal twat for not taking the couple of billion dollars that was offered almost 3 years ago, for facebook. Technology is a ruthless business, and some technologies have a useby date shorter than the life expectancy of single-cell organisms. Adding to the disquiet amongst the natives, the Quit Facebook day campaign, I can see a facebook "reboot" coming.

In the meantime, I'll wait it out.... But where was I ? Oh yeah, back to the original headline. Facebook has lots of security... when deactivating your account, I had to re-enter my password, and also enter a "captcha" value to complete the process, then I get a confirmation email as well. So, a very secure and safe means of closing your account...Ironic I thought in the circumstances.


Comments [1]

Google Pad on its way.

Wednesday 12th May, 2010

Well, it makes sense that Google will enter this market. It has already purchased Bumptop which would make for a kewl human-contact interface.


At least it will support flash ;)

I suppose it'll be nick-named the "gPad". I can see it already, if you touch certain parts of the screen to launch Google's applications you would be touching the "gSpot".. Booom-tish.. thank you everyone and goodnight!


Comments [3]

Your disposition is important.

Wednesday 5th May, 2010

I'm talking about your "content-disposition" in your HTTP headers, which has become quite useful. Finally, I have managed to come up with a nice little tech tip I can publish without it being a war-and-peace effort to get out to you all. Ok, now remember that people pay me to make things compatible in IE, not Chrome/FF/Safari/blah/blah.. So this seems to work nicely in IE7 and 8.

Recently, I was asked to modify a web app to open dynamically generated spreadsheets/word docs, natively, in their respective applications. Normally, the content would fire up the application but it would render in IE, and it would be a bit of a pain to do things like save it locally after reviewing it, (see screen shot).

 

It's almost useful, but you can't easily save the data else without starting up the native application manually and copy and pasting. Bit of a pain..

Well, after trawling google with a drift net, I managed to collate something that you may find of value.

Eventually, my trawl led me to Codestore, which is it's own little fountain of knowledge. I found this article where Jake explains how a java agent can do this job quite well and is designed for static files. It's a much more serious solution, and has a bigger scope. But my scope is smaller, and I'm lazy.

I am "ok" with Java, but after a day or two of it, my left eye starts to twitch, so then realise I need to read the signs, and want to achieve something similar but without too much complexity in it's implementation.

A link on Jake's article took me to this little post to generate "downloadable files". But the comment at the end was the key which talks about using "application/download" as the content type and content-disposition like this.

RESPONSE.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/download')
RESPONSE.setHeader('Content-Length', len(data))
RESPONSE.setHeader('Content-Disposition','attachment;filename=Data.dat')

Now remember that we can control the response header by printing "Content-type" as the first thing the agent outputs. So, with all this in mind you can do

   Print {Content-Type:application/download}
   Print {Content-Length:} + Str(Len(sContentData))
   Print {Content-Disposition:attachment;filename=yourFilenameHere.xls}
   Print sContentData

Now, sContentData is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in XML format in this example. So this works well for text data. If you put the code above into your agent that you call via an anchor link, it should be alot more intuitive for your users to download the content.

 

If they select "open" the application will launch natively in it's own application, or you can still save it to a file as you would expect. This blog post by Scott Hanselman talks about all the gotchya's when dealing with IE and file downloads.


Comments [0]