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Steve Richards - Adventures in home working

I'm Steve Richards a strategist and all round tech enthusiast working on enterprise desktop, application delivery and collaboration solutions. I work from home by the coast in the North West of England. All the views expressed in this blog are my own.


Blackberry Bold – the good the bad and the greatNovember 13 2008

image My trustworthy Blackberry 8800 was upgraded to a Bold last week and after much anticipation I can definitely say it’s been a very worthwhile upgrade.  I’ve made these notes which might help anyone considering or receiving a bold in the near future.

Background

I’ve previously been an enthusiastic user of a Palm Treo 650, a not so enthusiastic user of various Windows Mobile Smartphones and a pretty happy user of a Blackberry 8800.  I can safely say that the Bold has the best attributes of all of these devices with few if any of the downsides.  My wife has an iPhone 3G and despite it winning over the bold in terms of sheer style and “conceptual integrity” the bold wins out for me in terms of good old fashioned performance and functionality.

The hardware

Overall the Bold seems slightly larger than the 8800, it fits fine in the 8800’s holster though and it feels great in the hand.  It’s certainly not a small device, but any smaller would be too much of a compromise for me in terms of keyboard or screen.

The inevitable switch to FirefoxSeptember 9 2008

I’ve known for years that I will eventually switch to Firefox, the richness of the extensibility appeals too much to a tinkering power user like myself, but it’s taken me literally years to get comfortable enough with it to drop Maxthon as my day to day browser.

To date Maxthon has been just too slick and efficient, especially when combined with Foxit for PDF files (and I have a lot of those!!)

Anyway – last night by the pool I spent a good couple of hours learning FF3 and Acrobat and tweaking and extending it and I’m reasonably happy.  These are the addons that got me there:

  1. http://www.roboform.com/ I have hundreds of passwords and form definitions in RoboForm and it works with IE, maxthon and FF and replicates between my different PCs very easily using SugarSync.  It’s essential!!
  2. http://scholten.arno.googlepages.com/ Adds “bookmark this page” to the bookmark menu, this is a standard feature in Maxthon, browse to the folder you want to save the bookmark in and click.
  3. http://delicious.com/ I don’t use delicious (too lazy) , but this addin promises to synch up with FF.
  4. http://www.downloadhelper.net/ I do a lot of video watching offline, plus I can’t stand the stop start involved in buffering so an easy way to download video is k
Open Source at MicrosoftJune 16 2008

PKSFlyerSmall.png Open source has always been difficult at Microsoft, they’ve struggled with how to use its obvious value as a development and delivery model, but the SharePoint podcasting kit seems to be a great example of how to do it right. 

Although SharePoint itself is unlikely to ever be Open Source there’s great value in stimulating an Open Source culture around developing on top of the platform.  Podcasting is a good example because although SharePoint provides some good plumbing in the form of support for taking a document library of media files and surfacing this as an RSS feeds with enclosures, it didn’t have a polished solution.  The same can be said for most of the SharePoint “applications”, great platform - ok solution.  If you’re interested in Podcasting, this is definitely worth checking out, but there’s much more for SharePoint going on at Codeplex.

What Can You Do With Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS)?:
  • Listen and watch audio/video podcasts, anywhere on your PC or mobile device (Zune, SmartPhone, or any podcasting device)
  • Share content by producing your own audio/video podcasts and publish them on PKS on your own.
  • Conn
Some useful facts and predictions driving application delivery and mobilityJune 12 2008

I picked up a few useful bits of information during iForum this week:

  1. Citrix predict that between 30 and 50% of people will be mobile by 2010
  2. Some form of rights management is required when delivering to unmanaged PCs.  For example XenApp has a type of rights management, ie it can disable cut and paste, save to local PC disk, Print etc based on the results of a NAC check.  Microsoft have a much richer rights management solution, but its not currently integrated with NAC, nor can it be applied to all applications.  My thought perhaps SoftGrid execution environment could be NAC and rights management enabled, and therefore prevent certain things on unmanaged PCs
  3. 10% of people poled in a couple of sessions had increasing IT budgets
  4. 60% of people are expected to be working either from home or in branch offices by 2010
  5. There were 1.2B mobile phones in 2007, expected to be 1B SmartPhones by 2010
  6. 47% of companies now consider data protection now more important than perimeter security, again another hint at the potential growth of rights management if it could be made seamless enough for people who have rights!
  7. An IDC study was quoted that predicted that knowledge workers would be working with 60% of their information sourced from outside the company within 5 years.  I can really relate to this, I think I’m way beyond that ratio already and this >60% is part of my personal knowledge management system, not my
Citrix Multi-media over the ICA channelJune 11 2008
  1. This was a very difficult session to follow, so the following notes are not that great
  2. Multi-media virtualization
  1. to any end point, over the ICA channel
Apollo
  1. Streaming media
  2. 3D graphics
Remote audio/video extensions, not in XenDesktop - but it is supported with the Linux Wyse thin client
  1. At some time in the future this will run on virtual machines, rather than physical machines with a GPU
key to the above is:
  1. inspecting the end point
  2. inspecting the app
  3. inspecting the network
  4. then decide how to deliver the experience
3D graphics
  1. Server side GPU’s
  2. Server side rendering units
Accelerated bitmap remoting
  1. directX, OpenGL, WPF, Flash and Silerlight
Realtime communications
  1. VOIP over ICA seems to work ok
  2. Softphone on demand