Social Networking at its worst

I am a notoriously “early adopter” of most IT / techie gadgets, tools and online whatsits… I have been very leery of getting too hooked in to social networking however and now someone has articulated exactly why for me! See the skit below by “idiots of ants” (cheers to Tom Raftery for pointing this out on his blog)

Who killed Dilbert.com?

Will someone please tell me what the frack has happened to Dilbert.com? Where is my daily strip? Where did all this Web 2.0 garbage come from? What is with having to read a simple web comic strip in a Flash Widget? Why in the name of all that is good online do we have a comic strip with a 2 Mb footprint? Where is the “I want to see this in simple mode” option? Is there a text only / accessibility enabled option? I can’t find any way of getting back to a simple interface!

Even my links to old archived comics are broken now: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080402.html points to a 404 comic strip… It’s very funny and all – but this is not the droid I am looking for!

This epitomises all that I think is wrong with the whole Web 2.0 concept and increases my worries about what is coming. The whole thing is so open to abuse / misunderstanding and plain ignorance!

Win a new 120GB REV Drive with Computers in Business

Computers in Business Magazine is running a competition to win a 120GB REV USB Backup Drive. Go have a look at the Computers In Business Blog and email in your answer.

Closing Date is Tomorrow!

Caveat: There is no data protection notification on the post in question, I didn’t read the article in the magazine so I don’t know if there is one there. I do not know what they intend to do with the email addresses harvested this way but I assume they are going to be responsible about it? (Positive thoughts, positive thoughts!)

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way. I have entered. I will be winning (still with the positive thoughts positivity) but go ahead and enter anyway – you never know

Google “Shared Stuff” fills a hole!

I have been using Google Reader for a while now and even posted a more readable list of keyboard shortcuts on my personal blog (before they had a nice easy to find list of commands). In that time Google Reader has come on a long way and I have been (in general) very happy with the new functionality that has been added.

I have been thinking for some time of posting a list of “improvements” I would like to see in Reader. I think there are some pretty glaring holes in the functionality that are begging to be filled in. For example – if I’m going to be sharing stuff from my feeds, I’d like to be able to comment on them in some way so that people who look at my shared links (people who may not really know me) have some idea why I have shared something… Do I think it is an absolutely brilliantly written post or a shocking story or do I just love the graphics? If I find something through a friend’s “Shared Links” feed I like the fact that when I re-share it the link still goes directly to the original article but I’d love to be able to annotate and say “thanks to X for pointing this out to in his shared links”! Reader is a bit weak on this front – it’s really just a “noise filter” so that I end up sharing approximately 10-20% of what comes in on my feeds so my friends won’t have to read all the stuff I don’t judge worth sharing…

Enter Google Shared Stuff! http://www.google.com/s2/shared/stuff (The URI is a bit unwieldy at the moment but I’m sure at some point they will tidy that up.) This will hopefully allow me to share things I find interesting from a bookmark on my toolbar (works FINE in FireFox, unfortunately Internet Explorer seems to have some issues with it – I may just need to update IE so I’ll come back about that later) and a neat little dialogue pops up asking if I want to share a link only or an excerpt; there’s also a box for a comment which allows me to annotate with whatever I have to say about the article.

How viral do you like your advertising?

As it strikes home pretty firmly in the “techie” arena I thought I’d just link to this post from my personal blog. It always makes me annoyed to see people propagating spam the way the Dublin company mentioned appear to be doing!

Chain mail emails are spam! Please tell anyone you know that forwarding chain mail emails (especially ones for advertising purposes) is propagating spam!

Windows Server 2008 Launch

Ok, have to say it – this was a very “American” event… Lots of glitz and big screens. That said, there was a lot going on and a lot of information passing around. We arrived a few minutes early to find a massive queue outside tripod (my colleague had never seen anything like it at a tech event and insisted we pop into the coffee shop across the road until the line started moving, “I’m not standing there in the cold like all you techies!”). Pretty typically we had only been in the queue 2 minutes when I ran into someone I know and we all made our way through the efficient and streamlined registration and into my first tech event in a nightclub (complete with blacklight and atmospheric music).

After a couple of short promo videos and a statement or two from “the man in brackets” (does he have a name yet?) Paul Rellis (Microsoft Ireland MD) got up on stage and gave a nice short speech to kick things off. He was followed by David Lowe (Senior Product Manager with Microsoft) who reminisced about his days as a DJ in Dublin and then took off with a pretty good run down of the benefits of Server 2008 (considering he had about 15 minutes it was a pretty remarkable speech) and a recap of the time-line for the next 6 – 12 months.

After that it was off upstairs to the Silverlight room (the first Visual Studio 2008 session was full before we even got close) where I got to play around with a couple of demos I hadn’t seen before. I liked the fact that the laptops were there and it was up to you to just jump in when one came available and have a good look for yourself but I think my colleague would have preferred if there was a bit more “demo” given. Martha Rotter was doing a storming job as an [Ask the] Expert but with a room full of curious techies her time was a spread a bit thin. We skipped off early downstairs to grab some finger-food and catch the end of the demo being given by Dave Northey and Aiden Finn on Server 2008. The talk was interesting (but pretty much the same stuff as covered in the Longhorn Academy) and the snacks were nice (my vegan friend was even surprised to find that there was plenty she could eat…)

Next stop for me was Visual Studio and LINQ (my colleague wanted to catch the SQL Server session so we split up – all the better – more ground covered that way). I was pretty impressed with the LINQ demo. Pretty good showing of the LINQ to SQL functionality but I was left wondering will the LINQ to XML and LINQ to Objects really work “pretty much the same”? I was especially curious about the LINQ to “other stuff” that is planned but not implemented yet; it sounds good in theory but is it really going to pan out as simple as the LINQ to SQL? Still – all in all I was pretty impressed with the ease of use and the code generation.

Further on and further in! SQL Server 2008 – I have to say I was really impressed here by the HierarchyID data type. From the point of view of both query speed and ease of use it really seems to hit the nail on the head… Still, I’ll need to use it in anger before I make any judgments – as was pointed out last night – the demo may well have been a “best case” scenario. The change tracking and database protection look really useful as well. Impressive to see people actually giving live demos at that speed (especially when they have had to type the same code 8 times already in the day) in front of a bunch of techies. Fair play!

On the way out we got a good look at the sponsors’ and vendors’ stands and then went to hand in our feedback forms and pick up goodies… Besides the Expression Studio evaluation and training DVD and the Windows Mobile development kit I picked up inside we were also given copies of the software being launched and a pretty cool book entitled “Heroes Happen Here” with photo articles about IT Pro’s the world over and the work they are doing… Finally a proper techie coffee table book!

All in all, well worth the afternoon it took up and definitely a different event to the ones I’m used to!

WS-UGI Maiden Event!

So, several months after the end of the Longhorn Academy (Windows Server 2008 preview sessions that ran over 8 months), there are a bunch of us getting dug into Windows Server 2008. Personally, I’m signed up to the IT-Pro Momentum initiative and trying to get a fully virtualised test environment up and running.

To support us “early adopters” getting up and running (and because we were enjoying the discussions) we decided to put together a User Group. Aiden Finn, one of the attendees of the Longhorn Academy, took the bull by the longhorn as it were and has hit the ground running (with the help of Dave Northey from Microsoft). The website for the Windows Server 2008 User Group (Ireland) is up and running with a nice regularly updated blog, the mailing list seems to be working nicely and best of all – we’re having our maiden event in the Westin!

The first event will be on Wednesday 12th March. It’s billed as “a technical session” and will apparently involve a “very interactive” discussion with David Lowe who is the keynote speaker at the Windows Server 2008 Launch the day before! I’m going to the launch so I’m looking forward to having loads of questions for him…

If you want to go along to our first event go to the site for instructions or email the user group at ws-ugi _ at _ live _dot _ com

To Recap:

What: Windows Server 2008 User Group (Ireland)
When: 12 March 2008 at 19:30
Where: The Westin Hotel, Westmoreland Street
Who: David Lowe (Keynote Speaker at the Launch) and You! Oh – and me…

A Priceless Feature!

More applications need this kind of trapping!

Found here on The Daily WTF

World Wide Stargazing!

So it turned out to be a long busy weekend and I missed the blog awards and a bunch of other stuff – including as it turns out, one of the things I was waiting for for the last few weeks…

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a conference that brings together some of the great minds in all three of those fields and runs talks, showcases and demos. I’d love to go someday! Until that day, over on www.ted.com they put up some of the highlights for free viewing and that will have to do me! When you’re finished here pop over there and have a look at the biggest item on the front page right now… I can’t believe I nearly missed this; thankfully Claire Dillon pointed it out on her blog and I got the heads up on the thing that “made Robert Scoble cry“.

Microsoft are launching a new toy for the hardcore geeks, the casual nerds, the sky lovers, the star gazers, the astro dabblers, the average Joe Soap, the “big kid inside”, the teachers, the alien seekers, the physicists and above all the children! The “WorldWideTelescope” (clever naming too) is a digital representation of the night sky that you can scan and pan around, zoom in on, zoom deep into (no really, really deep – like think “Space Porn“). I don’t know how far the zoom goes or to what resolution but Ray Gould mentioned, “the worlds best telescopes (on Earth and in space)”, in his talk at TED so I would assume they are pretty much the best you can get without your own observatory. (See the talk here.)

I have been a sky watcher since I was a very small kid and while I never learned all the constellations, I did regularly fall asleep at the window while gazing out at the stars wishing I had a telescope. Later I used to sneak out at night to lie on the lawn (or the sand dunes or a handy golf course) and watch the stars. Now, while I wouldn’t have replaced that with booting up an application and panning across the sky (warmer but far less fun) I would most definitely have given the tooth fairy all my teeth (and those of my friends and neighbours) to have been able to zoom in and look deep into the nebulae and star clusters or to have been able to pull up fascinating facts right there and then without hitting the books and trying to reconcile that wonderful, beautiful, deep vista of space with the boringly flat and comparatively unfulfilling pictures and diagrams.

All in all this is fantastic news and I’m pretty excited to see how it actually flies! Forget Google Earth (one of my favourite apps of the past few years) I’m waiting eagerly to get going “where no man has gone before”!

Edit (01:40 04/03/2008): Robert Scoble has just commented on Claire’s post that there is a “better” video of the World Wide Telescope on http://www.fastcompany.tv – unfortunately I can’t confirm that because all I get is a “Sorry” page. (Scoble did say today that they are having “some technical difficulties — our engineers have been up all night optimizing databases and getting things turned on”)

Further Edit (01:50 04/03/2008): Scoble’s video seems to be up and running now and looks pretty good

Hugo Kornelis’ talk on indexing at IMTC 2007

I stumbled across this while looking for info on this year’s IMTC (not much info up yet but I’m sure more will follow). It’s a video of the whole talk on improving database performace with indexes (warning – it was dark so you don’t see much clearly except the screen).

There are videos of some other sessions up there from the same user. Some of the sessions are ones I attended and they were pretty good…