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Informal Brain

strategic thinking from Shawn Smith


#cmdb advice on twitterApril 18

If you are interested in some snippets of cmdb advise follow me on twitter and watch for the #cmdb hashtag.  I am live tweeting our quest to go from zero to cmdb in 6 months… I invite you to watch, learn and comment!

Posted in ITIL Tagged: cmdb

Nambu 1.1 .. Twitter unleashed for OSXMarch 11

Yesterday Nambu unleashed version 1.1 of their new twitter client for OSX. Here is a quick review and some screen shots.

The good:

  • The new release supports a tweetdeck like multi column view which lets you see all of your twitter activity in one handy window.
  • You can now create groups.
  • Much faster then the 1.0 release.
  • Nice click through options on the users to see their profile and their tweets.
  • Much quicker then any of the AIR based applications.

Needs Improvement:

  • Groups are not working in the column view. (expect this will be fixed shortly).
  • Some of the services are not working right now. Friendfeed as an example.
  • The gray background for the tweet list is hard on the eyes. Color needs to change.
  • The profile pictures and text are a bit too big for my taste in the tweet list. Others millage might vary if you have higher resolution.
  • Group functionality needs a better way to add users. Maybe drag and drop in column view?

Overall it is an excellent improvement over 1.0. You can download it here: www.nambu.com.

And here are the screenshots.

Single window mode:
Nambu Single Window.png

Multi-column wind



Comments on the Scalability of Facebook’s Social BehaviorFebruary 27

An interesting points from a new Facebook study:

In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-7% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.

via Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior .

The study also noted that people with more friends do not respond to more posts or chat to more friends.

I would propose that the true is not with end user bandwidth but their ability to consume the amount of data flowing through the newsfeed.  I have noticed for example at 100 friends the noise level and attention swapping in the news feed becomes almost unbearable.  The problem becomes even worse when the friend set is made of highly diverse clusters of people.  For example if your friend set is 1) your family, 2) your high school contacts, 3) your co-workers, 4) your close friends, 5) previous co-workers.  The issue is is there is little overlap between these sets of friends and this makes for a very cluttered news feed.

Optimally, your set of friends would be small, highly related and very active.  Best case with the example above people from two of the groups both comment on a status update but typically they are both interacting with you,


Safari 4 vs Google Chrome on the MacFebruary 26

I figured I would drop this post here from the future.

A few thoughts:

  1. Safari 4 doesn’t need to wait for the future it is here on my Mac today and with its ultra fast Nitro (formally known as SquirelFish Extreme) java script engine it blows away the competition.
  2. Google Chrome has V8 while Safari (webkit) has Nitro.  Go figure both browsers are using the webkit framework.  Each time Google commits something to the shared code base Safari gets better!
  3. Google Chrome is using a complex IPC oriented renderer to manage having a single window with each tab running in a separate process.  Now, while I appreciate my browser not going out sideways when it hits a page which causes a crash I can’t actually remember the last time the browser crashed?  Won’t all this IPC stuff causing slowness in the rendering engine?
  4. While Google Chrome will win the UI simple battle hands down Apple has managed to add some helpful features for people like my Mom.  Things like Top Sites is not designed for the Geek.  It is built for the rest of the world who doesn’t manage their book marks very well.  Coverflow helps trigger the old brain when we see a picture of that web site we were at.  Remember as you get older remember that travelocity is the airline booking site gets harder…

PS… when do I get Nitro on my iPhone?

Posted in apple Tagged: chrome, Comparison, From the Future, google, Safari 4
Exposing User Driven Services using ITIL v3February 20

I have been reading a flow of posts over on IT Skeptic discussing why creating an end user focused Service Management process drives the biggest bang for the buck within the ITIL v3 framework. Lets think about how users get services within any organization.

Channels:

  1. Phone
  2. Web
  3. Email
  4. Instant Messaging

Service Providers:

  1. IT
  2. Project Managers
  3. Finance
  4. Procurement
  5. User Acceptance Testing

Key aspects of providing a clearly defined service:

  • The User of the services needs a clear way to use each of the channels to reach the service provider.
  • Where the user consumes the service the service must be clearly defined and provide “hints” to the User so they can provide required information so the service provider upfront. The “hints” must be in end user terms.
  • All requests for service need to be queued and prioritized. Think about how many services are provided via email and the disaster which occurs when your inbox is full of responses to questions. You can no longer keep the queue straight.
  • The execution details of actually executing the service should be hidden from the User. For example the User isn’t interested in the detailed tasks or collaborations which are required to dig into a capacity request and provide a response.
  • There should be only one place all the channels end so users can always hav