A good friend of mine at IBM Rochester has asked me to publicise this survey:
https://www.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag21f?wsb34=c_stg
If you use any IBM support website (for any IBM hardware or software product, not just System i) please take a few moments to complete the questionnaire - thanks a lot.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Thursday, 19 February 2009
One 2009 objective under way ...
The first version of the Ashton Singers website is now available at http://www.ashtonsingers.hampshire.org.uk/. There will be a logo (and a proper look and feel) soon.
Incidentally I've now retrieved my copy of 'The Complete Plain Words' from the book cupboard at Logicalis - with luck some of it might rub off on this blog (I have just been re-reading the section on 'Padding').
Incidentally I've now retrieved my copy of 'The Complete Plain Words' from the book cupboard at Logicalis - with luck some of it might rub off on this blog (I have just been re-reading the section on 'Padding').
Monday, 2 February 2009
More links I don't want to lose
'How to return a result set from a stored procedure written in RPG' - I have just discovered that this old chestnut has found its way into a set of midrange FAQs, which is rather cheering.
http://faq.midrange.com/data/cache/5.html
Customers are still using these tried and tested techniques, I am glad to see (I fished this example out for an iPerimeter customer today).
Domino Java agent to check received mail items for spam:
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2143&mode=linear
'Domino in Notability' presentation - I was asked to present at an IBM event which showcased business partners and whose main theme was the, then only just announced, Domino 6 release. I knew sod all about Domino 6, and racked my brain for a subject. It occurred to me simply to tell the assembled company about Notability's advanced use of Domino (the link actually omits the first few slides, about our various Notes client based applications). It went down a storm, with IBMers and others saying, firstly, that they'd never heard anyone use themselves as a case study before, and, secondly, how well it had worked. A very instructive episode (KISS, focus on business benefit).
ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/as400/web/skillbuilder/notability_3.pdf
http://faq.midrange.com/data/cache/5.html
Customers are still using these tried and tested techniques, I am glad to see (I fished this example out for an iPerimeter customer today).
Domino Java agent to check received mail items for spam:
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2143&mode=linear
'Domino in Notability' presentation - I was asked to present at an IBM event which showcased business partners and whose main theme was the, then only just announced, Domino 6 release. I knew sod all about Domino 6, and racked my brain for a subject. It occurred to me simply to tell the assembled company about Notability's advanced use of Domino (the link actually omits the first few slides, about our various Notes client based applications). It went down a storm, with IBMers and others saying, firstly, that they'd never heard anyone use themselves as a case study before, and, secondly, how well it had worked. A very instructive episode (KISS, focus on business benefit).
ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/as400/web/skillbuilder/notability_3.pdf
Sunday, 1 February 2009
Thoughts about spam
I seem to have been involved in quite a few discussions about spam lately, so this is perhaps a good time to collect up some of my thoughts on the subject.
Surely spam only matters if it is delivered to you?
I think you just have to see spam as 'noise'.
In my view things have improved markedly over the last couple of years. As with anti-virus, the need for spam handling is accepted in the industry, as is the probable need to spend money on it. Assuming an organisation has something in place, its end users should be able to ignore spam because they actually hardly ever see any. The old worry, that anti-spam measures mean proper emails get lost, does remain to some extent, but there are plenty of R&D dollars in the anti-spam industry now, and I would personally say they are nearly as much on top of the problem as the anti-virus vendors. When did you last get any spam in your business email account? I get hardly any even in my hotmail account these days. The legal sanctions, especially those imposed by the EU, do help - in the U.S. spammers are harder to deal with because the anti-spam law has less teeth. In summary, there's more and more spam out there, but if you put an intelligent product or service in place you really ought to be able to ignore it for practical purposes.
What are the spammers trying to achieve, and how do they do it?
There are three types of entity involved: the more or less criminal, stupid and/or misguided entity that is trying to sell its services or to defraud people; the intelligent and criminal entity that undertakes to send out spam on behalf of the first entity, and which uses completely dodgy techniques to do it; and the entity that actually transmits the spam, probably without knowing anything about it through its accidental membership of a botnet managed by the second entity. (It's almost certainly only the second of these that makes any money out of the enterprise.)
Incidentally I am frequently amazed by the appalling quality of the product - I've often thought that someone with a modicum of common sense, reasonable grammar and spelling and some commercial nous could actually achieve a lot more than these people do ... let's be grateful for small mercies.
Surely spam only matters if it is delivered to you?
I think you just have to see spam as 'noise'.
In my view things have improved markedly over the last couple of years. As with anti-virus, the need for spam handling is accepted in the industry, as is the probable need to spend money on it. Assuming an organisation has something in place, its end users should be able to ignore spam because they actually hardly ever see any. The old worry, that anti-spam measures mean proper emails get lost, does remain to some extent, but there are plenty of R&D dollars in the anti-spam industry now, and I would personally say they are nearly as much on top of the problem as the anti-virus vendors. When did you last get any spam in your business email account? I get hardly any even in my hotmail account these days. The legal sanctions, especially those imposed by the EU, do help - in the U.S. spammers are harder to deal with because the anti-spam law has less teeth. In summary, there's more and more spam out there, but if you put an intelligent product or service in place you really ought to be able to ignore it for practical purposes.
What are the spammers trying to achieve, and how do they do it?
There are three types of entity involved: the more or less criminal, stupid and/or misguided entity that is trying to sell its services or to defraud people; the intelligent and criminal entity that undertakes to send out spam on behalf of the first entity, and which uses completely dodgy techniques to do it; and the entity that actually transmits the spam, probably without knowing anything about it through its accidental membership of a botnet managed by the second entity. (It's almost certainly only the second of these that makes any money out of the enterprise.)
Incidentally I am frequently amazed by the appalling quality of the product - I've often thought that someone with a modicum of common sense, reasonable grammar and spelling and some commercial nous could actually achieve a lot more than these people do ... let's be grateful for small mercies.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Thoughts on home working
I'm responding to a LinkedIn question concerning remote working - I wanted to collect up some thoughts on the subject (mostly previously published in a slightly different form on the IT Sanctuary).
I was contractually 'home based' when working for Logicalis; this experience has undoubtedly made setting up my own business very much easier.
You have to accept that not all home environments are conducive to home working - you have to be able to separate yourself from the rest of the household during working hours; I have personally always found this difficult.
The effectiveness of business systems, when used from home, varies widely. I can remember an application which took 15 minutes to load over a dial-up line. It's an obvious point that morale and productivity are totally dependent on both the business process and its supporting application systems being designed or tweaked to cope with distributed working and broadband connections.
We found we could support all our home working, including IP telephony and videoconferencing in usable if not brilliant quality, over ordinary broadband connections.
Do not underestimate the amount of specialised 'phone support home users will require with their distributed setup.
While I am 100% convinced of the benefits of unified communications technologies to business, and not just for home workers, I feel that these technologies need to be integrated, automated and simplified, and people's concerns about the security of their personal information allayed, if take-up is not to remain limited to the young and the technologically savvy. Even in Logicalis, a sizeable minority communicates only via email and mobile 'phone. Both of these technologies provide ease of use, and these individuals simply don't see any benefit in presence and instant messaging. When we first implemented Sametime, many years ago, its use spread like wildfire - but only to a certain point (probably about 30% of the workforce). Some people don't like the visibility; some people just don't see the point; some people can't cope with the technology; some people see it as allowing others to chat in work time; and some people (and this should not be discounted, I have heard it several times) are really bad at typing quickly and understandably don't want others to be aware of it.
I was contractually 'home based' when working for Logicalis; this experience has undoubtedly made setting up my own business very much easier.
You have to accept that not all home environments are conducive to home working - you have to be able to separate yourself from the rest of the household during working hours; I have personally always found this difficult.
The effectiveness of business systems, when used from home, varies widely. I can remember an application which took 15 minutes to load over a dial-up line. It's an obvious point that morale and productivity are totally dependent on both the business process and its supporting application systems being designed or tweaked to cope with distributed working and broadband connections.
We found we could support all our home working, including IP telephony and videoconferencing in usable if not brilliant quality, over ordinary broadband connections.
Do not underestimate the amount of specialised 'phone support home users will require with their distributed setup.
While I am 100% convinced of the benefits of unified communications technologies to business, and not just for home workers, I feel that these technologies need to be integrated, automated and simplified, and people's concerns about the security of their personal information allayed, if take-up is not to remain limited to the young and the technologically savvy. Even in Logicalis, a sizeable minority communicates only via email and mobile 'phone. Both of these technologies provide ease of use, and these individuals simply don't see any benefit in presence and instant messaging. When we first implemented Sametime, many years ago, its use spread like wildfire - but only to a certain point (probably about 30% of the workforce). Some people don't like the visibility; some people just don't see the point; some people can't cope with the technology; some people see it as allowing others to chat in work time; and some people (and this should not be discounted, I have heard it several times) are really bad at typing quickly and understandably don't want others to be aware of it.
Sunday, 25 January 2009
Thoughts on open source
I was thinking of re-visiting some thoughts on this subject that I collected a couple of months ago (intended for a published article that never appeared). Now a LinkedIn question on this subject has encouraged me to get it done.
(With many thanks to my ex-colleagues Brett Delle Grazie and Darren Smith for their input.)
For:
Low or zero cost;
Typically open standards based, so interoperable;
Typically works on a wide range of hardware and chip architectures.
Against:
The standard open source support model is community-based, although more formal support can frequently be purchased. Because of its different mindset, the open source community can never provide a single 'butt to kick' - as Darren would say, 'communities are ethereal, companies are real'.
Some other things to consider:
Take-up:
This depends entirely on the open source product under consideration. For example, I was told several years ago that the Apache HTTP server was used by 65% of all public websites. Skills are widely available for the entire LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Security:
To quote Brett: 'Open source software, with its source being available and scrutinised by many, is quite often held in the highest regard. At the recent DEFCON hacking conference, obviously one of the world's more hostile networking environments, the Internet connection router and firewall systems were running the open source operating system OpenBSD.'
Customer attitude example:
Open source software typically supports multiple chip architectures, and we're beginning to see organisations taking real advantage of this. Oracle customers have historically run it on Windows or, more frequently, on a proprietary UNIX, but more and more of them are looking to Linux for the flexibility they need to optimise their Oracle availability, performance, and licensing. As an example, moving Oracle onto System z Linux can involve very considerable cost reduction.
Vendor attitudes:
For:
It's noticeable and interesting how big software vendors now happily include Linux components in their enterprise offerings - that shows a real mind shift in my view.
Against:
Another angle, however, based on my personal experience on the Power platform, is that smaller vendors can be unable or unwilling to support their code running on non-Intel Linux.
Open source and open standards:
Tomcat is the reference implementation for the J2EE standard, but it may or may not be a good place to actually run your J2EE code; the needs of a business ('build, run, manage') don't necessarily map onto the thought processes either of a standards body or of an open source development community.
(With many thanks to my ex-colleagues Brett Delle Grazie and Darren Smith for their input.)
For:
Low or zero cost;
Typically open standards based, so interoperable;
Typically works on a wide range of hardware and chip architectures.
Against:
The standard open source support model is community-based, although more formal support can frequently be purchased. Because of its different mindset, the open source community can never provide a single 'butt to kick' - as Darren would say, 'communities are ethereal, companies are real'.
Some other things to consider:
Take-up:
This depends entirely on the open source product under consideration. For example, I was told several years ago that the Apache HTTP server was used by 65% of all public websites. Skills are widely available for the entire LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Security:
To quote Brett: 'Open source software, with its source being available and scrutinised by many, is quite often held in the highest regard. At the recent DEFCON hacking conference, obviously one of the world's more hostile networking environments, the Internet connection router and firewall systems were running the open source operating system OpenBSD.'
Customer attitude example:
Open source software typically supports multiple chip architectures, and we're beginning to see organisations taking real advantage of this. Oracle customers have historically run it on Windows or, more frequently, on a proprietary UNIX, but more and more of them are looking to Linux for the flexibility they need to optimise their Oracle availability, performance, and licensing. As an example, moving Oracle onto System z Linux can involve very considerable cost reduction.
Vendor attitudes:
For:
It's noticeable and interesting how big software vendors now happily include Linux components in their enterprise offerings - that shows a real mind shift in my view.
Against:
Another angle, however, based on my personal experience on the Power platform, is that smaller vendors can be unable or unwilling to support their code running on non-Intel Linux.
Open source and open standards:
Tomcat is the reference implementation for the J2EE standard, but it may or may not be a good place to actually run your J2EE code; the needs of a business ('build, run, manage') don't necessarily map onto the thought processes either of a standards body or of an open source development community.
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Progress on the commercial front
I now have a business bank account. This puts me in a position (along with the public liability insurance I already had) to get listed on my customers' vendor databases, to receive purchase orders, to invoice my customers, and, eventually, to get paid ... I finally feel that iPerimeter is a real business.
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