Facebook

On my sun/oracle blog, I noted my first use of Facebook. The main interest at the time I wrote this post is historic. I review the apps installed, and today, we can note that most have gone as Facebook have colonised the platform and made redundant the apps that helped popularise their network. The original article also notes that Facebook, i.e. the network is an end-point in terms of content distribution. …

Enhancing Google Maps

I have just updated my South Coast Travel public google map to include placemarks with links to the BBC and Met. Office weather reports. I am disappointed that they have no obvious weather icon and that the i icon is available in only one colour.

I did poke around the Google maps API pages and may take this further so that I can incorporate the page into www.davelevy.info, but if its like yahoo, this could be a bit difficult.

Otherwise its screen shot and link to the Google Maps URL …

Running Python on Windows XP

I wrote an article on installing Python; a bit of chat about why and a bit about how. I got myself a copy of the O’Reilley “Learning Python” book and started working my way through it. For various reasons, I decided to try it on Windows; I thought the binary install would be easier and I had some reasons for not trying it on Solaris. The windows install from python.org is quite cute, as you would expect but it requires some further configuration before the python imports and module search works properly.  …

New Business Models for the Participation Age

Today, Don Tapscott, author of “Wikinomics” presented a keynote about how mass-collaboration is changing the way that value is created in the world economy. This stems from both software functionality and network economies of scale. Obviously the enablement of new forms of economic co-operation is also a factor at continuing to drive specialisation. Tapscott quotes Carr’s “IT does matter” and mentions that he has often debated with him, which is hard because Carr is good, but he (Tapscott) says “I have an advantage in this debate, he’s wrong”. The last three days has made me question about how one can innovate in corporate IT. …

More Futurology, Gartner’s “Emerging Trends”

I am in Barcelona, attending Gartner’s European Symposium and Expo. They have two of these each year and the spring event is positioned as broader and more forward looking. It was opened by a tour de force from Peter Cole, (CEO) and six of their top researchers. Later discussions brought home to me that one needs to be very careful when listening to clever people, as sometimes one (i.e. I ) can assume that they mean the same things as yourself, this isn’t always so. …

Project Blackbox, it’s real you know

Yesterday, Sun’s Project Blackbox Tour visited the Thames Valley at Sun’s UK HQ Campus and today we have taken it to the National Army Museum so prospective customers, journalists and analysts can inspect it and ‘kick the tyres’, and I am one of the engineers answering the mediumly hard questions. The really difficult ones have been handled by Joe Carvalho, one of the designers. …

Sun’s Connected Customers

Steve Wilson led a presentation about the changing nature of Sun’s connected customer response and where the provisioning and image maintenance tools now sit. This means that he’s responsible for network support, subscription services and what’s left of our N1 management suite. …

Coming to a Desktop near you

Or near me anyway, and not necessarily all that soon! This morning’s presentation on the Sun Ray technology road map suggests we’re planning to to do local VPN some time this year and Video next year. Its getting there! The presentation covered a number of technologies showing Sun recommitting to the desktop and offering a number of Linux/Windows interoperability solutions …