Alarm Bells

So in my experience everybody has their own individual hot buttons, the topics that trigger those alarm bells in your head. The statements that make you stop what you were doing, and sit up to actually pay attention to the meeting / conference call / video conference you were supposed to be enduring / participating in.

Now for me these alarm bells can be areas I have particular specialist expertise in (started small and reducing daily), topics I have a passion in (growing), FUD, or just things that leave me initially dumfounded.

Naturally in the last few years I've had plenty of these, a couple of recent ones that come to mind are :-

1) "Writing data to a CD at a person's desk and keeping it in a drawer is more secure than storing it on an array in a corporate information management platform within a data centre"

2) "We need physical segregation between virtual servers" (Now depending on the context this can be valid in order to enable fault tolerant services, however 90% of the time its used by non-trusting tin huggers.)

So once I'd closed the PowerPoint deck that I was inevitably editing at the time, asked for a replay of the conversation & recovered my composure - I thought for a while (quite a while in fact, in order to self censor the expletives).

My first conclusion was a simple one - "Are the TeleTubbies now working in IT?". My second conclusion was probably of more use - "IT is moving too fast and leaving many people, processes, definitions, roles & techniques without time to adjust - let alone time for diverse disciplines to align.". My third conclusion was "people still look at partial, incomplete & inaccurate cost models - and have little actual or mental methods for valuing risk or consequence"

Not a radical, new or difficult set of conclusions at all really - but ones we don't seem to be making any real progress on. But something that are vital for us to resolve urgently in order to prevent the IT technology hermits detailing the future.

Oh and (with the exception of @Beaker) I continue to believe IT Security dudes live in an entirely parallel independent universe with no concept of reality, consequence or costs!

Kindle - IT companies take note

So as per my previous blog entries show, I'm a major personal fan of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. It's really improved my reading experience and consumption.

So why do I think Kindle is important to IT companies? Well to put it simply it's a great cross-platform framework for information delivery and consumption! I can seamlessly access & synchronise the same eBook content on an iPhone, Android phone, PC, iPad & Kindle ereader.

Yes Kindle can read & display existing Adobe PDF files, but they are nowhere near as usable & visually readable as eBook format documents.

There are also some other interesting advantages :-

* built in secure channels for charged, or less public, content

* ability to automatically push & receive updated document versions

* the annotations & highlighting capabilities allow peers to share 'user feedback & content' associated with the document & topic

So Gartner, when will you deliver your reports & papers via Kindle's secure subscription channels?

So EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, Cisco, Netapp, Oracle et al - when are you going to deliver your whitepapers, product manuals and documentation in eBook format?

From a marketing aspect, just bundle a kindle (or iPad running kindle) with your enterprise data-centre products - stock it full if your documentation and watch your happy customers...

Still here

Yes I'm still here, yes I'm daftly busy right now on all the wrong kinds of work - overall my mood could probably be best described by :-

Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to finish and publish the 90+ partially written blog posts and move back to more IT infrastructure related topics...

@Twitter Vs @Twitdroyd

So this weekend was an interesting one in the twittersphere. On Friday twitter decided to suspend UberMedia client products for some rather unclear reasons.

Now for years there has been tension between platform owners and platform access gateways. With the company behind @twidroyd rumoured to 'gate' up to 20% of twitter usage there are clearly bigger games at play.

So what did I personally learn from & get reminded about from this :-

1) my main usage of twitter is now via my Android Nexus One phone

2) Twidroyd is by far the best android twitter application - I tried twitter www mobile, twitter native app, tweetdeck & tweetcaster. Whilst tweetcast was the best it was still frustratingly poor compared to @twidroyd

3) I now use twitter as my first point of call to gauge the pulse on both the IT industry & world events

4) That I spend money, and am now 'dependent' on, cloud services that I have no SLA or control over

A minor blip for sure, but I'm expecting quite a few more of these in the future as providers go through the wrangling re who "owns" the customer & the data they create...

End of availability

Just a quick post this morning, no it's not about my seemingly new role as "GrumpyHermit" but rather about vendor product churn.

You see in the last two weeks I've had two supposedly global 'top 5' IT infrastructure vendors casually inform us that four of the products we standardise on worldwide will no longer be purchasable in ten days time!

Now naturally we have agreements in place re minimum 18 months availability, and 6 months advanced notice of any EOA date - but nowadays these get treated with the corporate equivalent of "meh" by suppliers...

Naturally this has all sorts of impacts to WIP projects, our design & build teams and our competency centres re build images & operational readiness acceptance etc.

This is further compounded by the vendors increasingly operating "build to order" policies with little or no stock held in channels, thus causing inevitable delays around each sku change. Of course it doesn't help that this increased rate of change appears to be hand in hand with a reduction in core quality & testing by suppliers.

So please vendors I implore you to remember that diversity is the enemy of efficiency and drives real world customer costs through the roof... Please give some serious thought as to how to abstract the customer from the now constant hardware & firmware changes masked in so called 'benefits' (it's 5% faster, 7% greener, 3% cheaper etc) that need new configs, new drivers, new testing, different interop skus etc.

From my perspective, if its not a "direct field replacement unit compatible" then it generates real cost and pain - not dissimilar to that of changing suppliers...

Oh and whilst I'm on the topic, why isn't there a standard (ISO, DTMF, ANSI etc) on product lifecycle definitions & lifecycle events?? And don't even get me started on the concept of major & minor product version numbering standards and conventions between products & vendors...

The current situation on all these areas is chaotic, unacceptable and untenable. The IT industry is slowly killing itself through unwanted & unwarranted 'change for changes sake' that is driving a real but often unreported cost time bomb...

A quick thought - and a possible explanation?

Well below is something I've seen written up before on various web sites & forums - so no credit to me - but it could certainly be a good explanation for a fair number of business projects, proposals, technologies and products I've been pitched over time :-

In The Beginning Was The Plan
And The Plan had Assumptions
And The Assumptions Were Without Form
And The Plan Was Without Substance
And The Darkness was upon the face of the workers

and they spoke amongst themselves, saying 
"It is a crock of st, and it stinketh"

and the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth "It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odour thereof"

and the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them, "It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it"

and the Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth "It is a vessel of fertilizer and it has great strength"

and the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them, "It promotes growth and is very powerful"

and the Vice Presidents went unto the President and sayeth unto him, "This new Plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of The Company"

and the President looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good and The Plan became Policy.

Certainly worth remembering that sometimes there is nothing better than clear and direct communication to the people at the very top, and never assume the people at the top understand what's really going on, or being done, or sold...

Some thoughts on little green men

No not the aliens that your typical tinfoil hat wearing nutter will recount in detail whilst drooling slightly - but as some of you will know I've been a user of Google Android for a couple of years now, on a number of different phones, versions and builds. Currently I'm using the native Android v2.2.1 on the Google reference Nexus One platform - and I have to say it's really rather good...

Naturally there are however some annoyances that I'd like to see tweaked :-

Memory Related

• More memory - the standard 512 MB ROM & 512 MB RAM (and in my unit an additional 32GB of SD card) might sound big compared to some devices, but the phone really would benefit from at least 1GB (but better 2GB) of RAM. With 160+ applications installed I find I'm now at the point of 'remove one to install one' re the dreaded 'low memory' warning...
• Cache management - with a number of common applications (eg Browser, Tweetdeck etc) I've started to notice that they consume RAM memory as cache but don't release it automatically, leading to applications having 10-15MB of RAM memory as cache (often triggering the 'low memory' warning)  until you manually clear the cache using the application manager.
• Not an Android core issue but some applications should handle memory better - for instance ChompSMS stores MMS images in RAM and not on SD storage, and refuses to receive text messages if the 'low memory' indicator is showing despite having GBs of SD card space free.

SD Card Storage Related

• There should be the ability to force any application to be moved or installed onto SD card storage - works fine on 'rooted' ROMs so should be a possible setting for standard ROMs
• Google to enable their applications to install on SD card storage, rather than the majority currently refusing to support it (for example gMail, Earth, Maps, Voice Search, YouTube, Listen, )
• To be able to 'partition' the SD card (or have a better USB driver) so that when the phone is connected to a PC via USB the applications & widgets on the SD card continue to operate.
• Fix the update bug that occasionally occurs (ie twice in 4 months for me) for applications installed onto SD card storage detailed here and fixed here

Application MarketPlace
MarketPlace improvements, for it to have :-

• Verified developers - ability for developers to get some for of 'tested & verified safe' certificate from a trusted authority, to ensure that the developer name shown in the MarketPlace really is from the perceived developer / company
• Verified applications - ability for applications to get some for of 'tested & verified safe' certificate from a trusted authority (eg to protect against malware & trojans etc)
• The application profile should be updated to show if the application supports move/install to SD card storage, and how much RAM the application uses after install (not just how much storage it needs)
• Ability to manage my phone's applications from a desktop PC browser - to be able to uninstall existing applications, browse & search the marketplace to install applications and upload my own APK applications for install. All of these changes to then be synchronised over-the-air to the device.
• To be able to do 'bulk backup/restore/installs' of applications onto devices - eg when I change device to be able to 'backup' all my existing installed apps and then 'restore/install' them onto new device in a single action
• To better align the various MarketPlace versions around the world - it's getting more than a bit irritating seeing applications that only exist in the USA version of the MarketPlace and not the international ones
• Sort out billing and payments to international developers - it's frustrating to only be able to get the 'lite' or 'free' version of an application via the MarketPlace, but then have to go to some other website to purchase a license key for the full featured version.
• It would be good to add-in age rating 'certificates' (eg as per films & PC games etc) for applications in the MarketPlace
• To be able to search and/or filter the display of applications in the MarketPlace by attributes (eg age suitability, support SD or not, size, release / update dates etc)

Miscellaneous

• Support for folders on the home screens (and more home screens - think a 5x5 grid of screens rather than current 1x5) - to allow applications to be grouped together into nested folders on any of the home screens
• Add back the WMA / WMV codecs that were previously in Android 1.x - yes MP3/MP4 are fine but support for WMx should also be standard as it was originally
• WiFi connectivity - now it might just by the CostlyCo utter junk that I'm currently suffering as a wireless router, but there does appear to be some fragility with working with wireless N based wifi networks
• Of course the topic of proxy servers and authenticated proxy servers via the wifi connection needs to be resolved in order to be able to use to enterprise networks properly
• Enable Live Wallpapers to work automatically upon reboot if they've been installed onto SD
• Full native OS / device backup/restore into the cloud - not just contacts and application purchases but all content on the phone. Yes you can purchase applications to do this but it really should be standard.
• To be able to completely uninstall some of the standard OS bundled applications I never use or want (eg Facebook & Twitter native clients etc)
• To be able to do remote phone location discovery/tracking and also secure erase management from a PC browser (ie should I leave my phone somewhere I can remotely discover where it is and issue a 'remote destroy' command etc)
• It would also be rather useful if they could 'fix' the Google 'Finance' application, as it spend more time failing to work or synchronise than it does working

For some of my previous posts re Android see here - as I said I'm a major fan of Android and what it's done to overturn a lacklustre & incumbent marketplace (anybody remember Symbian?). So for 2011 I'm looking forward to Android v2.3 & v3.0 to see just what of above gets done, and how far this real OS flies onwards past the competition...