[tjor talk:tech]

CIO Insight on 5 Actions to succeed with SOA

tjor — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:49:25 +0000

I always like to collect different people’s lists to get to success. Here is CIO Insight’s list for SOA:

Retool the IT Department
Establish an Oversight Group to Get Results
Catalog Services to Enable Reuse
Monitor Performance
Coordinate IT and the Business

VRM, healthcare, and you in control of YOUR information

tjor — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:14:30 +0000

Just listened to Technometria: Managing Vendors Before They Manage You on IT Conversations (hosted by Phil Windley).

I may be dense, but I didn’t quite see the connection between Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) and what Britt Blaser of the Open Resource Group, but I digress.

The whole idea of VRM is interesting, but in particular the thorny issue of healthcare. They talked about health records and enabling people to own and control their health records. The conclusion seemed to be that while it was a grand idea, it would be one of the tougher domains to try this in.

Right after I listened to it, I read a post on Google’s blog where Adam Bosworth (a VP at Google) appears to be taking on the charge of doing something to try to fix the healthcare information flow and control. He recently posted on the topic: Health care information matters.

Perhaps a little Google juice will get this ball rolling. While healthcare may be one of the hardest nuts to crack, if you swing big and miss on this one for VRM, perhaps it will give cover and drive for something smaller.

Developers reply.

tjor — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:56:02 +0000

Under The Sun: Top 20 replies by Programmers to Testers when their programs don’t work: “5. ‘Even though it doesn’t work, how does it feel?”

They are all good, but that one made me laugh.

(Via Graphically Speaking.)

Paper vs Online

tjor — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:01:53 +0000

I read a number of blogs and other online sources through RSS (and directly). I would say that 70% of my knowledge (or direction on what I should learn about) comes through these channels.

But I still get, skim, and read a number of paper information sources (~15 a month). Most are tech related, including eWeek. What I can’t stand is the disconnect between the online and paper versions. If I read something in the paper version, I should be able to find it on-line so I can link to it and refer a friend or co-worker to it.

I just spent 15 minutes trying to find online an article by Roger Sippl on composite applications. It just isn’t there. Google couldn’t find it, eWeek’s search couldn’t find it, I couldn’t find it by navigating to a section it might have been in. A complete waste of my time because something that should be simple and obvious doesn’t work. If paper and online are not connected, then I have little value for the paper (which is one of the few places I am still likely to actually notice and read an ad).

Line Rider…fun

tjor — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 20:40:07 +0000

Quite a fun little activity… Lifehacker.)

The projectors just keep shrinking

tjor — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:22:16 +0000

Having used projectors with computers for quite a while, a good one makes a big difference, especially if you are giving a demo. They just get smaller and smaller.

This one from Casio caught my eye in a magazine ad. I have no idea if it is any good. Have you used one, if so, let me know?

The limiting factor seems to have become the size of the light bulb and more importantly the heat it generates. If we could get LED’s to glow super bright, then laptops could have a camera facing the keyboard and a projection lens facing the other way. Even better would be something the size of an iSight camera that sits on top of a laptop and rotates to face the screen.

Deep Audio Linking

tjor — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:04:03 +0000

Deep video linking will be very useful. I’ve often wanted deep audio linking (and someplaces like IT Conversations support it generally). Things get tricky when you have more dynamic files. FOr example, when the stream is dynamically built with different commercials.

Dembot: Google Video Elegance: “Google Video has a couple of killer-app features that allow you to link or jump ahead to any point in a video”

(Via Scripting News.)

O’Reilly finds images in Flickr, not Google

tjor — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 23:57:21 +0000

O’Reilly Radar > Flickr and Interestingness:

“So I needed some good pictures as visual bullets. I first went to Google image search, but while the photos were good, they were all somewhat ‘expected.’ After paging through the first four sets of results, still hadn’t found anything suitable. So I went over to flickr, set my search to ‘most interesting’ rather than most recent or most relevant, and soon had a fabulous selection of unusual photos of cathedrals.

Google made a breakthrough in web search with its original idea of links as citations (i.e. PageRank), and they are still the undisputed leader in general web search, but they haven’t done as well in searching rich media. I think they have some things to learn from Flickr.”

I’ve moved to Flickr as the source of images almost exclusively. The quality is high, many are under Creative Commons (which is great for my typical uses), and I can usually find multiple “good things” straight away.

Edward Tufte on NPR

tjor — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:00:53 +0000

An NPR report on Edward Tufte. It includes a number of sound bites from his seminar, specifically his attacks on PowerPoint.

Smart 50 – International SOS – ZDNet Asia

tjor — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 01:35:04 +0000

Smart 50 – ZDNet Asia: “Consolidation is the buzzword in the IT industry, and to International SOS, it means doing away with multiple systems so as to offer employees real-time information at their fingertips.”

My brother-in-law oversees this effort. He has worked hard to get this effort out the door, nice to see it spotlighted externally. It is a system that should deliver a nice ROI, but I wonder about how “SOA” it is. Is it? or is it a bit of buzzword tagging?

By the way, I had never heard of International SOS, but if you travel overseas (wherever that is for you), it might be worth checking out. It prevents you from getting trapped in a foreign medical system that isn’t right for you.