Robin's Hood

After the 'New Win' in the 'Federal Sector' things went downhill at MPC.....

Awards & Press

November 7, 2008
MPC Corporation Announces Chapter 11 Filling
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October 27, 2008
MPC Corporation Receives Notice of Delisting
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October 9, 2008
MPC Scores New Wins in the Federal Sector
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The time is now right for corporations to start using Google Apps. Cut costs and simplify your IT all at the same time.

I read last month that 1.5 Million Australian students are dumping Outlook/Exchange for Gmail. I also saw this week that the venerable British newspaper the Telegraph is swapping Microsoft for Google for its 1400 users. Is this a tipping point? It is a tough business climate out there. As well as server-virtualisation and server-reduction, maybe now is the time for application-virtualisation and application-reduction. Is Microsoft's monopoly coming to an end? I only use 10% of the functionality in Microsoft Office so Google Apps suits me fine. I use it on my corporate website yellowconsulting.co.uk and because I am a knowledge worker, using my knowledge is how I make money. So if I am worrying about whether my infrastructure is up to the job then I am not making money.

Microsoft Office is successful due to its heroin selling model. Low barrier to entry, but once you start using it, it is difficult to stop. It is hard enough for me to persuade my wife to use something else (which I have now done) so I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a company like the Telegraph to do so.

I salute the Australian education board and the Telegraph for their brave move. There will be a lot of corporates watching closely to see how the move goes. I have been a user of Gmail and GCalendar since the first day they came out. I have not been dissappointed and I am sure you will not be either.

I have recently been a victim of identity fraud. Someone has successfully applied for credit in my name at UK retailer Littlewoods. The first I knew about it was when some Wii peripherals arrived at my house. I phoned them and it turned out that two weeks previously I had set up a 1000 GBP line of credit with them and this was my first delivery. I cancelled the account.

The bad: they gave an account to someone who applied through the Internet and shipped the goods without me signing any kind of credit agreement with them.

The good: their fraud department dealt with the issue very professionally and signed me up with CIFAS (see below) who will protect me from now on from this sort of thing.

I have signed up with Experian to make sure they haven't applied for any other credit in my name but if you are a fraudster reading this, or even the actual fraudster who did this, please do yourself a favour and use your considerable resourcefulness to get a legitimate job which will benefit the UK economy and might make you feel better about yourself.

Welcome to CIFAS Online - CIFAS Online: "CIFAS is the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service with 270 Members spread across banking, credit cards, asset finance, retail credit, mail order, insurance, savings and investments, telecommunications, factoring, and share dealing."

I attended a teleconference today with John Powell, John Newton and Denis Dorval. This was hosted at BigCo by Matthew Langham who runs the Open Source Community of Interest there. John Powell gave an excellent presentation covering Open Source : Myth & Reality, the Business Side of Open Source, and Outlook for the future. It was very interesting but things really got going during the Q&A. The two John's are really big hitters from the world of document and content management and their acumen really came through. I asked some questions about how BigCo might trust open source companies like Alfresco to still be around in 5 year's time and they gave excellent answers. We discussed vTiger and Interbase (remember them?). Rick Pittard asked some great questions as usual.

I have been a big fan of Matt Assay for some time. He is a regular guest on Open Season which is one of the excellent podcasts produced by Radio Reg (register.co.uk). Unfortunately he was not present today. Alfresco must really be interested in establishing a relationship with BigCo. On today's performance they stand a very good chance. Impressed!

Alfresco People - Open Source Content & Document Management Industry: "Alfresco People"

I met with Ross Mayfield last night at the All-Bar-One near Tower Bridge on the South Bank of the river Thames last night. I was invited along by my friends at Headshift and I was struck by what a good combination Headshift and Socialtext make. I'm sure Lee Bryant would disagree with my assessment but I have thought for a long time that Headshift are a bit too locked into Atlassian Confluence and that greater ties with other software vendors would be good for them. When I was at PA Consulting we prided ourself on our independence and went to great lengths to remain technology neutral, courting and rejecting the advances of vendors in equal measure.

I also met for the first time fellow PA alumni Lars Plougmann who, even though he is Danish, knows the word 'blunderbuss'. Respeck.

From now on please take notice that I shall be changing my name by deed poll to Justin Credible.

Worst bad name announced - Web User News: "In an internet contest to find the worst bad name run by the New York Times, Miss Knipl came out on top of a list that included Chastity Beltz, Wrigley Fields and Justin Credible."

I have been working with Amazon EC2 for two years now managing development projects which have been deployed there. I have had a wonderful experience and I won't go back to the old way of doing it unless someone holds a gun to my head. I was excited to see Google enter the space but closer inspection of there service shows some constraints which might make it less useful to me.

How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2 | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com: "Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon's approach to providing infrastructure services to Google's. He found that Amazon's set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google's App Engine."

"Never ceases to amaze me how much this country suffers when it is been snowing. We had just a few centimeters of snow yesterday and it was big fun for me and the family it brought the infrastructure to it's knee. My wife was flying to Spain and she was delayed by 8 hrs because of a few flakes of snow."

spoken through SpinVox

My son has been watching Tron a lot recently (or 'Tong' as he calls it) and this is his favourite scene. Perfect Youtube relaxation but you can't help feeling these guys have just too much time on their hands :-)

Tron's Classic Light Cycle Scene 'Sweded' | The Underwire from Wired.com: "Here, French filmmaker Freres-Hueon tackles the light cycle sequence in Tron, the '82 sci-fi cult classic that follows the adventures of a computer programmer who gets digitized by a laser."

This is a fight I have every day where I am working now. There seems to be a pervasive feeling that Sharepoint is the solution. Somebody says 'Microsoft' and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Stewart Mader explains here why you shouldn't get stuck in the 90's.

The Atlassian Blog: "Control, control, control...Sharepoint’s got it, and it’s the opposite of the open, minimally structured philosophy that makes the wiki universally useful for anything. Sharepoint also has an extremely complex, workflow-centric interface. Software should learn how you work, not the other way around."

I am a user of Amazon EC2 in my business and as such I was very happy to see them introduce today features which increase the acceptance of their service to the Enterprise community. The less reason 'old school' data centre jerks have to criticise cloud computing, the sooner it will come become mainstream and dump them all out of their complacent jobs on to Unemployment Avenue.

Amazon Web Services adds 'resiliency' to EC2 compute service | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs."

There is a great diagram in this CNet article on cloud computing which explains things well. Cloud is the next evolution of ASP, with SaaS branching off to the side. Nice explanation Martin LaMonica/Forrester Research.

Is cloud computing more than just smoke?via CNET News.com on 3/25/08 The hype cycle around cloud computing is picking up, just like utility computing did a few years ago. But new technologies, notably virtualization, are giving cloud computing more shape.

I have been saying for ages it is all about cooling. This excellent Economist article explains it all.

Data centres | Cool it! | Economist.com: "The data centres that power the internet demand a lot of power. Time, then, to make them more efficient"

"It is all about relationships."

How often do you hear that at work? Successful people concentrate on relationships not process or technology. This CNET article suggests that it is a logical step to build an operating system around relationships and not around the file system. I wonder how long we will have to wait for this to become a reality? Facebook is about as close as I have seen so far, but of course that is not an operating system... or is it?

Thinktanks hail era of the 'social operating system' - ZDNet UK: "A recent study has asserted that the next generation of operating systems will link users to each other on an unprecedented scale as developers incorporate social networking into their platforms."

I was intrigued when I first saw OpenID and I put it on my watchlist. Closed logins systems like Google and Yahoo promote loyalty to the brand and as such I thought it would be a cold day in hell before one of these two behemoths adopted OpenID. What do you know! Yahoo will support OpenID from the end of January. Kudos and respect to somebody at Yahoo for this brave move.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever adopt OpenID. They used to have passport didn't they, which was a similar thing.

For the record I have got a Yahoo account as I think my ISP (BT) uses them for email and other services. My heart belongs to Google though.