October 2011 archive

Oct 10

Humorous Sign Campaign: Don’t Facebook While Walking

Mea facebook

Courtesy of a post by Jeff Pulver on Facebook, hopefully while he wasn't walking, I learned of this "etiquette project" by artist Jay Shells to post various street signs throughout Manhatten with various etiquette messages on them. The one most relevant to social media is, of course:

PAY ATTENTION WHILE WALKING

YOUR FACEBOOK STATUS UPDATE CAN WAIT

Having been almost walked into on several occasions by people intent on typing something into their phone, I can thoroughly agree with the sentiment!

The article on AnimalNewYork.com about Jay Shells also includes a brief video interview with him about the campaign.

Fun to see.

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Oct 09

Remember Perl? RWW Highlights the Future of Perl 5

Perl org

Remember perl? The “scripting language” that was the one of the first that many of us used on UNIX to automate system administration tasks? And then was later used in the 1990s for a ton of web CGI programming and so much more? And that we could have so much fun with created “obfuscated” programs that looked like gobbledegook but actually did something useful?

I don’t hear much at all about perl these days… and my perception is that many folks are like me in that they moved on from perl to other scripting languages like python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP and more.

So when ReadWrite Web published article “A Look at the Future of Perl 5.16 and Beyond“, I had to look out of perhaps morbid curiosity… “you mean, people still use perl?”

The slide set from Jesse Vincent embedded in the RWW article is interesting in that it does show the good amount of work being done by the perl faithful to bring more stability and progress to the perl language.

I commend them all for the work… it looks like really good things are happening. Is it enough to make me personally return to working with perl? Probably not, to be honest… but for the sake of all those people who still work with perl… and for people looking for a great multi-purpose programming language with deep roots and a huge base of documentation and usage… it’s good to see the language evolving again!

Oct 08

Dilbert Nails One Of The Inherent Challenges of Standards

Dilbert nails it... (back in August 2011)

Dilbert standards

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Oct 07

EU Gives Okay To Microsoft Acquisition of Skype

skypelogo-shadow.pngTo I think no one's real surprise, the European Union today gave the go-ahead to Microsoft's acquisition of Skype. Given that the US Federal Trade Commission okayed the deal back in June, there should be no further barriers to the deal. Microsoft issued a very short statement:

We’re pleased that the European Commission has approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. This is an important milestone, as we’ve now received clearance from both the United States and the European Union. We look forward to completing soon the final steps needed to close the acquisition, bringing together the employees of Microsoft and Skype, and creating new opportunities for people to communicate and collaborate around the world.

Jim Courtney took a look at the actual text of the EU ruling and in his post dissects how the commission viewed the consumer versus enterprise space with regard to competion - and how it reached the conclusion that it would be okay for Microsoft to acquire Skype.

For the sake of my friends working at Skype who have been hanging in an uncomfortable limbo while all this gets sorted out, I do hope that the acquisition can now proceed quickly. As Mary-Jo Foley notes, Microsoft has already been working on how Skype fits into the larger world of Microsoft, so hopefully we'll start seeing those actions start moving ahead soon.

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Oct 07

1997 Video of Steve Jobs: "Focusing is about saying no"

In all the ongoing commemoration of Steve Jobs, a friend posted to Facebook this short video clip of Steve Jobs from the 1997 WWDC event that so perfectly captures his design philosophy ... and that "focusing is about saying no":

Good summary of his design views... and also a fun trip into seeing a much younger Steve Jobs.

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Oct 06

The Internet Cries Out Its Collective Wail of Anguish At The Passing Of Steve Jobs

Stevejobs
There are no words... although many are being written.

On an intellectual level, perhaps, we knew it was coming. When he stepped down as CEO back in August, we knew Steve Jobs was in trouble. No one who is as much of a control freak as he was would step down unless things were really not going well.

But still...

... emotionally we hoped against hopes that His Jobsness would somehow cheat death and stand up on stage yet again to give us...

"one more thing"

... one more time.

But... icon, visionary, leader, maker that he was... he was of course only human.

With all the mortality that implies.

And so ever since the word of his death started spreading last night, the Internet has been awash with the collective cries of anguish.

Techmeme, at this precise moment, is a wall of tributes to the man.

Many are incredibly moving... incredibly poignant... incredibly powerful...

"#ThankYouSteve" has been at the top of the Twitter trends. Google has changed its home page to have a link over to Apple's page. Wired has turned its home page into a wall of quotes about Jobs.

Everywhere a thousand other tributes are being posted.

A powerful day of tributes to a man who did so much to change our industry and indeed our world.

I don't know that I can personally add more than what I wrote back in August...

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

He leaves us with a legacy of design...

... of remembering that we need to focus on form as much as function (if not indeed more)...

... of thinking not of what features we need to add to a product or service, but rather what features we need to remove to make the service even simpler and easier to use...

... of remembering to focus on the user experience...

... on the need to embrace the "magic" of what we are doing and to create products and services that truly amaze and delight us...

... and to not settle and to live each day as if it were our last.

If you have never watched his powerful address at Stanford in 2005, take 15 minutes and watch this video:

One of Apple's best known advertising campaigns was the "Think different" series - and they had videos with a narration about "Here's to the Crazy Ones". The folks at 9to5 Mac found a version that Steve Jobs himself narrated:

Naturally, there have been several remixes of this commercial text (although not Jobs' narration) with images from Jobs' history. Two I found moving were this one:

And this one from Gizmodo:

Gizmodo stevejobs tribute

And yes, I admit to shedding a tear or two as I watched these...

There were a zillion tweets about Jobs... and one that I'll close with is simply this:

Twitter stevejobs

R.I.P., Steve Jobs.

Thank you.

P.S. GigaOm ran a nice collection of quotes from Silicon Valley leaders.

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Oct 04

Watching Live Blogs FAIL During Apple’s iOS 5 Event

Today was a fascinating day to watch live-blogging services fail in a rather dramatic way.

Engadget... Gizmodo... MacRumors... ArsTechnica... and more...

Thanksapple

Unless you were under a rock or otherwise hiding offline, you know that today was the big, huge, ginormous "iPhone 5" announcement event from Apple. (It turned out, of course, that there was no iPhone 5, but that didn't stop the media frenzy.)

As you probably also know, Apple does NOT live-stream these events. I think Robert Scoble nails their reasons - it's all about control. The PR folks at Apple are also masters at "creating spectacle". These "events" become the huge media events they are precisely because there is scarcity... you can't get the info unless you are in the room.

And so, the "media" get to be gatekeepers to the knowledge again.

Lacking a live video or audio stream, all the interested techies, media and fanboys must turn to live blogs and to Twitter (and Facebook and Google+) to get their updates.

But boy did those live blogs fail today!

Now, don't get me wrong..

I DO understand that providing live updates to an unknown - but very HIGH - number of visitors is hard to do.

I get that... but still it was interesting to see who survived and who didn't (and I mention both below).

Live Blogs That Struggled

One of the first I saw go was MacRumors, who was originally using a service that embedded "live blogging" directly into their web page. That seemed to fail under the load and they dropped back to simply providing bullet updates on their live page.

I was watching Engadget's coverage for a while and it was great ... until it wasn't:

Engadgetliveblog

Even worse, the entire Engadget site seemed to be down at times:

Engadget2

The site went in and out during the course of the coverage but was mostly out for the latter half of the coverage.

Gizmodo's live blog didn't give the same kind of errors, but simply stopped updating for long periods ... and then had problems loading display elements (which I missed capturing):

Gizmodo

Ars Technica did better with their coverage up until about 40 minutes into the event when they stopped updating the site and pointed people over to Twitter:

Arstechnicaliveblog

Their coverage came back... and then froze again several more times.

I would have loved to be watching the stats on the traffic these sites were getting as it had to have been a TON of traffic.

Live Blogs That Worked

Still, some sites seemed to work well through it all. And while I have no insight into how much traffic these sites had versus the ones above, it could also be the architecture they chose to use as well as their choice of content.

Ryan Block's gdgt live gave the best experience I found, integrating both text and pictures to provide a great way to know what was going on:

Gdgtlive

They had a couple of momentary hiccups, but overall they seemed to consistently be publishing more and more content.

Mashable's live coverage was also consistently available, although they went with a more Twitter-esque series of mostly text updates. They added in polls for some more interactivity and also had links to other posts and info. They had a few photos, but not all that many compared to others. However, the coverage was consistent and always there:

Mashablelive

Finally, GigaOm's coverage was noteworthy in that they started out from the beginning to just provide simple text updates to a blog post that you had to manually refresh. No auto-updates... no embedded widgets... just a straight-up blog post with a mixture of text and pictures. Not as sexy as other sites, but every time I refreshed it the content was there with updates.

Sometimes, simplicity can win.

(Now, in fairness, because there was no auto-updating and because I wasn't sitting there hitting the refresh (this was all running in the background on my computer while I ate lunch and was doing some other work), the GigaOm site could have gone down several times between my refreshes.)

Again, I do realize that providing this kind of large-scale coverage is hard, but in the era of "web-scale" and with the availability of content delivery networks, caching services, etc., there are certainly options available to companies providing "live blogs" of events.

Now maybe some of the sites that "struggled" had all that kind of stuff in place and still succumbed to the overwhelming traffic.

Regardless, today was an interesting experiment in seeing what worked and what didn't work. Personally, I'd love it if some of the services that had technical difficulties would write up a bit about what happened and how they were hit.

It would help all of us learn how to scale our sites.

And help people get ready for the NEXT Apple event ;-)

P.S. And yes, there were undoubtedly other sites that were offering live blogs of the event... these were just the ones that I happened to know of or find.

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Oct 04

Avaya Acquires UC Security Firm and SBC Vendor Sipera Systems

Fascinating news today that Avaya has acquired Sipera Systems for an undisclosed sum. We’ve covered Sipera here on this blog any number of times over the past years as they have been one of the few firms very specifically focused on “VoIP security”, or, to be more appropriately buzzword-compliant in 2011, “Unified Communications security.” In fact, the first video podcast I did for the Blue Box Podcast (when I was doing that) way back in August 2007 was with Sipera.

Over the years Sipera has hired some truly excellent people in the field, released some useful tools, originated great research and done a great bit in general to help keep the dialog going on publicly about VoIP/UC security.

The Avaya purchase is fascinating because, as Eric Krapf noted in a NoJitter post this morning, Avaya has been OEMing a Session Border Controller (SBC) solution from market leader Acme Packet for quite some time. As Eric notes:

The deal therefore could represent a shift in the enterprise SBC market, at a moment when E-SBCs are emerging as a key component of enterprise real-time communications deployments, especially in SIP trunking deployments. Acme Packet has been far and away the market share leader in SBCs, with over 50%, and its SBC works with all the leading enterprise communications platforms.

However, enterprise vendors including Cisco and Siemens (and now, it seems, Avaya) have released their own SBCs, and in the case of Siemens, the SBC only talks to Siemens platforms on the enterprise side of the device. It remains to be seen whether the Sipera SBC will work only with Avaya Aura–but it seems unlikely that anyone other than an Avaya customer would buy an Avaya SBC.

Now, the news release of course plays up how Sipera’s solutions work with both Avaya and non-Avaya systems but to Eric’s point there may in the future be little incentive for non-Avaya customers to purchase a solution, given that there are other “independent” players out there in the SBC market like Acme Packet, Ingate Systems, Sonus Networks and others.

Regardless of how it all shakes out, it is an interesting move and one that bears watching.

Congrats to our friends at Sipera and Avaya on the acquisition, and we look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Oct 04

1 Day Left To Register for the Harpoon Brewery Octoberfest 5K on Oct 9th

HarpoonOctoberfestRoadRace

How can you go wrong with a 5K race where your entry fee gets you 2 beers, a bratwurst and a beer stein?

Plus, apparently, a lot of people running with you wearing "German" costumes?

Our local Harpoon Brewery in Windsor, VT, is holding their 9th annual Octoberfest 5K Race this Sunday, October 9, 2011, at 11:00am. Followed, of course, by the Vermont edition of Harpoon's Octoberfest celebration (there was also one last weekend in Boston).

I haven't finalized yet if I'll be running in it, but a neighbor of mine is, and it's tempting not only for all the fun and festivities but also because it is raising funds for the Friends of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth (where I've recently had some personal experience).

If you are interested, one thing to note is that there is NO on-site registration. You must register online to run the race, and...

REGISTRATION ENDS TOMORROW, October 5th, at 12noon

From the pictures, it definitely looks like a fun time...

Oct 04

NoJitter.com Launches New Design, Better Interaction

Nojitter2011

Kudos to my friend Eric Krapf and his whole team for the redesign of one of my favorite sites for VoIP and Unified Communications news:

http://www.nojitter.com/

Way back in late 2007, Eric started as the "lead blogger" for NoJitter as the long-standing Business Communications Review (BCR) magazine shut down its print operation and decided to forge a new direction in the online world.

It's been great to see the growth of NoJitter over these past four years, and it's been great to see so many of my friends within the industry writing there.

With this new redesign, Eric mentions many of the new features, but the one I look forward to seeing most is the better commenting system. That was one major drawback of the previous site... hopefully this one works much better.

All in all I quite like the new look and congratulate Eric and the whole team there on the re-launch!

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