Daily links for 10/25/2011

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/21/2011

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Even the BlackBerry faithful are abandoning RIM | Mobile Technology – InfoWorld

    “The BlackBerry may not be dead, but it’s dying. New research from Enterprise Management Associates says that 30 percent of BlackBerry users in companies with more than 10,000 users will move to a different mobile platform in the next year. That would move Research in Motion’s standing in large enterprise into that of a minority OS. Today, 52 percent of users in such organizations “actively” use a BlackBerry for work purposes, EMA reports; a 30 percent reduction would bring that total to 36 percent.”

    tags: blackberry rim mobile

  • Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — only geeks use Android phones – Computerworld Blogs

    “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer proved once again he’s the master of hyperbole, telling an interviewer during the Web 2.0 conference that only the geekiest of the geeks can figure out how to use Android phones. Given that it’s the most popular smartphone OS in the world, there must be plenty of geeks out there if he’s right.”

    tags: microsoft android geeks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/20/2011

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Google confirms Android 4.0 ICS is open source | thinq_

    “Google has confirmed that the source code for Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ will be made public, after it refused to release the code for its predecessor ‘Honeycomb.’”

    tags: android open source google

  • BlackBerry freebie: RIM apps to placate for outage | The Digital Home – CNET News

    “RIM’s troubles started last week when the company’s services, including e-mail and BlackBerry messaging, went down across the world. After a few days, the company was finally able to get its services back online. But by then, the damage was done, and many users around the globe started complaining.”

    tags: blackberry apps

  • IBM Global CIO Study

    “With a unique, end-to-end view of their businesses, today’s CIOs are a driving force behind what makes companies work smarter. It is critical, as one CIO put it, to “ensure you understand the vision, have a clear strategy and execute where the business wants to go.” This is one of the many insights uncovered when we met face-to-face with over 3,000 CIOs to create The Essential CIO-the largest study of its kind to date.”

    tags: mobile ibm cio

  • VMware and Verizon team up for mobile virtualization — Tech News and Analysis

    “As is usual when dealing with mobile operators and corporate IT, some caveats apply. So far only Android devices will work with the Horizon hypervisor with VMware unable to offer the benefits of a hypervisor-enabled virtualization on Apple’s iOS devices including the iPad and iPhone for Verizon. Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, said in an interview that’s he’s happy to do it when Apple decided to let others play around with its operating system. Meanwhile he reiterated that eventually he hopes to get VMware’s Horizon product written into the Android code.”

    tags: vmware verizon mobile virtualization

  • Lookout Introduces a Security App for iPhones – NYTimes.com

    “But Lookout, a start-up that makes security apps for phones, wants iPhone owners to use its product, too. On Tuesday, it plans to introduce an iPhone app that addresses what its founders say are worries unique to iPhone owners.”

    tags: lookout security iphone

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/19/2011

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Maqetta

    “Maqetta is an open source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plugins or downloads.”

    tags: HTML5 maqetta

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/15/2011

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Why Banks Must Support All Mobile Platforms and Why HTML5 Matters – American Banker Article

    “The challenge of developing and maintaining mobile banking applications that will run on an iPhone, an Android phone, a BlackBerry or a Windows phone, as well as browser-based or wireless application protocol apps that will run on anything, is daunting even for large banks with massive IT budgets, never mind the rest of the banking world. But Jeff Dennes, who led the development of some of the first mobile banking apps at USAA and was recruited to Huntington Bancshares, Columbus, Ohio, a little over a year ago, says a multi-platform strategy is necessary. And HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext language for structuring and presenting content on the internet, is the next development frontier for banks to ignore at their peril.”

    tags: banks mobile

  • The Top Five Mobile Marketing Mistakes | Entrepreneur.com

    “Two years ago, there was no such thing as an iPad. Five years ago, nobody had a smartphone. Before 2007, the year of the iPhone, mobile marketing was mostly about text-messaging and selling ringtones. The bottom line is that everyone is new at this thing called mobile marketing. So, it should be no surprise that marketers are still working out the kinks.”

    tags: mobile marketing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

End of the sailing season

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Last year I wrote quite a bit about sailing. I purchased a 1988 Catalina 22 sailboat in July and got it onto Lake Ontario east of Rochester in August. We managed to get out on the water perhaps half a dozen times before we pulled the boat in early October.

Early this spring I did a lot of work on the boat, replacing the standing rigging and the halyards. We got the boat in the water right before summer started. My son Will and I even camped out overnight, battling mosquitoes that managed to get through the netting.

Unfortunately, it did not turn out to be a good sailing season for us, for several reasons. The boat was docked an hour from our house, something we obviously knew, but it was more of a problem this year than last. My work schedule made it very hard to get to the boat on weeknights and the weather on the weekends I had available often did not cooperate. In this middle of this, I had engine problems with the 6 HP Tohatsu outboard I bought last year.

As it turned out, a change of the spark plug and replacement of the gasoline eventually resolved the problem. The sparkplug was an easy fix, but the gas issue was odd because it was only a few weeks old.

Over the summer my son and I took the time to work on the trailer since the boat was not sitting on it. Will gave it a great new paint job, we got new tires to replace what were evidently the original 1988 models, and I completely rewired it. So that was all good progress.

Last week we again pulled the boat from the lake and brought it home. I was hoping to find someplace to store it inside for the winter, but that has not worked out. So after cleaning the boat inside and out, I moved the boat to the back of the property and secured two large tarps over it. I made two frames of PVC tubing to help support the tarps over the cockpit, and I hope that this helps prevent rainwater and melting snow from pooling.

I also placed the boat in an area that was not under trees. The spot I had it in last year was wonderfully convenient, but the tree canope and the things that fell from it made the boat cleanup harder this spring. Live and learn.

So everything is all put away and the engine is stored in our basement. What about next year?

First, we’re not going to put it on Lake Ontario, which means the end of our brief membership in the Pultneyville Yacht Club. Not only was the distance too much, but the wave height often made sailing in a boat the size of ours impractical. So it’s on to a new lake.

Which lake? That’s still under consideration. It could be one of the Finger Lakes close to us, though the nicer lakes still have the distance problem if not the wave one. We have another option we’re thinking of, and I’ll talk about that if it works out.

Posted in Sailing | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/13/2011

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/11/2011

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • How to check on your Internet connection | ZDNet

    “If there’s someone on the planet who hasn’t had trouble with their Internet connection at one time or the other I don’t know who it is. So, if you’re having trouble with your network connection, here are some simple tricks to find out what’s what with your Internet and maybe even fix it.”

    tags: internet connection

  • HTML5 fundamentals

    “HTML5 reflects the monumental changes in the way you now do business on the web and in the cloud. Take a look at the functions and syntax for many of the elements and APIs offered by HTML5 to get a foundation to build websites or applications of your own that are powered by HTML5.”

    tags: HTML5 fundamentals

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/10/2011

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Ubuntu 11.10 will support arm processors to take on red hat – The Inquirer

    “LINUX VENDOR Canonical has said that Ubuntu 11.10 will be the first to support both x86 and ARM architectures. Canonical’s popular Ubuntu Linux distribution will get its second update of 2011 this month for both desktop and server editions. However it is the server edition that Canonical has made the biggest changes to by supporting ARM processors.”

    tags: ubuntu arm

  • Open-source sprinkler controller keeps your lawn looking great – Hack a Day

    “[Ray] wrote in to share a great project he just recently wrapped up, an open-source sprinkler valve controller. Built in collaboration with Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief [Chris Anderson], the sprinkler controller is designed to replace the limited commercial sprinkler timers that typically come with a new home sprinkler setup.”

    tags: sprinkler open source

  • iPhone 4S pre-orders tally 1 million in 24 hours | ZDNet

    “If you had any doubt that the new “underwhelming” iPhone wouldn’t sell, consider it shattered. Apple this morning announced that pre-orders of its newly-announced iPhone 4S have topped one million in a single day. The previous single-day record for the device was 600,000, held by its predecessor, the iPhone 4.”

    tags: iPhone

  • First preview of JDK7 for Mac OS X – The H Open Source: News and Features

    “Version 7 is the first version of the JDK (Java Development Kit) that Oracle has made available for Mac OS X. The JDK7 Mac OS X Port Developer Preview is based on OpenJDK development work contributed by Apple, and it requires a Mac with Intel processor; older PowerPC (PPC) systems are not supported.”

    tags: JDK7 OS mac os x

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Something new, something (big) blue: IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Bob Sutor

While this post definitely falls into the category of “a word from my sponsor,” I hope you’ll take a look at the software being discussed if you have at all been involved with Java and web application servers.

wasdev banner

One of the most fun parts of being in the software world is being able to get your code into the hands of developers. While you can have great big product releases with much fanfare, other times there are smaller alpha and beta drops that can surprise you if you take the time to look at them. This is one of those latter instances.

If I’m developing code, I’m not going to get it right the first time. I’ll need to fix bugs but I’ll also need to progressively add features. This means that I’ll be editing, starting up the environment, testing, tweaking, debugging, over and over again. My environment and tools need to make this fast and easy for me. When I’m done coding and testing, I need to know that what I produce will run in a production quality environment with the right security, performance, availability and other qualities of service. I need a web application environment, both runtime and tools, that gives me all this.

IBM has just released the WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha. First of all, this is a shiny new thing that developers, particularly Java developers should check out. Within this is something new and different tha we’re calling the Liberty Profile. The website describes what you get with this:

The WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha delivers a simplified and lightweight runtime for web applications. Incredibly fast restart times coupled with its small size and ease of use make V8.5 a great option for Developers building web applications that don’t require the full JEE environment of traditional enterprise application server profiles. Highlights of the WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha include:

  • Free and frictionless download for development purposes
  • Ultra lightweight modular runtime with an install size of under 50 MB
  • Incredibly fast startup times of under 5 seconds
  • Simplified configuration for quick time to productivity
  • WebSphere Developer Tools available as Eclipse plug-ins

To get started, download the server and/or the tools.

You can learn more via articles, videos, podcasts, and samples.

We have a blog where you can learn what the IBM developers are doing with WebSphere and Eclipse. In particular, check out Ian Robinson’s entry on “Introducing the Liberty Profile.”

Finally, and this one is really important, join the community and participate in the discussions.

Sometimes products are just small evolutionary changes from what was there before. This represents something profoundly different. In my opinion, and I am far from partial, it is worth a look.

Posted in Software | Tagged | Comments Off

10 tips for raking leaves and other things

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Bob Sutor

It’s that time of year again here in the northern parts of New York State when the leaves are starting to fall. At our house we also have the added bonus of many black walnut trees which add to the mess. Starting about 4 weeks ago, large, half rotted walnuts have been dropping out of the trees like grenades, threatening to bonk passersby on their heads.

I’ve been raking leaves for over 40 years and while I do now have someone to help me, I do a fair amount of it still. Here are some tips for approaching the job.

  1. If possible, try to do the job on a day that is not too windy. Otherwise you’ll find yourself repeatedly raking the same leaves again and again.
  2. More generally, your goal is to touch each leaf a minimum number of times. So rake the leaves from a small area into piles on top of a drop cloth, tarp, or old sheet, and then move the whole pile to their final destination. If you find yourself raking the leaves many tens or hundreds of feet, you’re doing it wrong.
  3. Try to compost the leaves for your garden next year, but don’t use leaves like those from black walnut trees that have toxic chemicals in them. You’ll need to chop up the leaves with a lawn mower or shredder and then mix them with green matter such as cut grass. You can store the leaves in a pile or a bin over the winter for final composting next year.
  4. Wear gloves. Blisters can happen in minutes. Leaves on the ground can also have insects lurking among them that want to take a nip out of you. Watch how you are holding the rake so you can minimize blisters.
  5. Rather than waiting for all the leaves to fall for the season, plan to get the job done in pieces as autumn progresses. There will be fewer leaves and the ones on the ground won’t have as much of a chance to get wet and mat down.
  6. Dry leaves are much lighter than wet leaves. Therefore you should try to rake them before they have a chance to get rained or snowed on.
  7. Don’t overdo it and get a heart attack. Scope the amount of work you do in any given raking session to what you can handle given your health and fitness. Wet leaves will take much more effort to rake, so factor that into how much you will do.
  8. Sometimes it is easier to push piles of leaves with a rake than pull them. It also adds variety to a very repetitive experience.
  9. If you use a leaf blower, practice with it so the leaves move efficiently to where you want them rather than creating a great big cloud. Your hands and clothes will smell from the exhaust from the blower if it is a typical 2-cycle gas model. These can be loud, so wear ear protection. Don’t use the blower for 5 minutes to accomplish something you could do with a rake in 1.
  10. Find some kids to help you.
Posted in Home | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/07/2011

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Introducing Diigo Browser (aka iChromy)

    • Like Chrome, Diigo Browser is fast. Multiple tab browsers on iPad are often slow or easy to crash due to the memory issue. Diigo Browser reloads pages dynamically and smartly, so it feels fast even with multiple tabs.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/06/2011

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals – unless waiver granted

    “Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.”

    tags: copyright princeton open

  • Barnes and Noble dropping BlackBerry | ZDNet

    “No reason is offered by the bookseller but it is telling that even though it already has the app on the BlackBerry, and it allows purchasing content from B&N, it is no longer going to let that happen. Perhaps the company finds it too expensive to maintain and support the BlackBerry. It is a drastic measure to kill a platform that can currently purchase content.”

    tags: blackberry mobile

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Mobile app development: Native vs. hybrid vs. HTML5 (part 2)

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Bob Sutor

I’ve seen and heard a lot of discussion about how people build applications for mobile devices. While there are literally hundreds of thousands of apps out there for Apple, Android, Blackberry and other smartphones, I can’t help but think the majority of these are one-off efforts. In this series in the blog, I’m going to tackle some of the issues with developing mobile apps, especially for enterprise use, and along the way propose some ideas for making the process easier and more repeatable.

mobile client technologiesIn the last entry I spoke about the attraction of writing pure Native applications for mobile devices. They’re fast, have full access to all the device features, and can be made as beautiful and functional as your software development skill allows. They’re also non-portable and can take more people, time, and money to develop.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to develop applications using open industry standards that run in many different environments? You know, applications that allow text content, great formatting, images, video, forms, and interaction with backend systems?

Sounds like the web, no? The language for expressing the format of web pages is HTML, CSS is used for specifying formatting, and JavaScript provides a programming language and environment for dynamically altering pages and responding to events. Somewhat confusingly, the term “HTML5″ can just mean the latest version of HTML under development at the W3C or it can mean HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

HTML5 logoWhile there have been many motivations for developing HTML5 given the experience of people creating billions of web pages, I think it’s safe to say that creating a standards-based cross-platform environment for mobile devices was an important reason. That is, don’t think of a web page as just something you read, but rather consider it an application with which you are interacting.

I won’t go into all the features of HTML5 but there are several good references on the web in addition to the spec to which I linked above. In particular:

Generally, HTML5 allows much better and more consistent ways of embedding multimedia in web pages. It also adds new elements to help you structure the document. The Document Object Model, something I worked on in ancient history, is now considered core to the specification and the programming model.

These are nice things for web pages, but does HTML5 give you anything new that makes its especially attractive for mobile devices? One of these is the geolocation application programming interface. In short, this allows you to programmatically determine your location, and then do something with it. That “something” might be to pinpoint your location on a map, provide a starting point for map directions, determine what weather forecast to show you, or display ads for local businesses, for example.

You can also store information locally on your device, though that opens up the question of security if you happen to lose it or you somehow get hacked.

What about access to other core features on your device? Using pure HTML5, can you snap a picture? How about use the compass or receive a notification? You can’t, but remember that you can still do all the interactions that you’ve been doing for years in your browser. You can read all sorts of information, do searches, buy things, access FaceBook, and so forth.

So HTML5 provides a richer interactive environment than we’ve had before and is starting to allow programmatic access to some device features.

If HTML5 does everything you need for your planned application, then use it.

HTML5 is still under development and you are seeing support for it from the big industry names that supply browsers or content, companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and FaceBook. IBM, of course, has been and continues to be a huge supporter of open Internet and Web standards.

You do need to understand which HTML5 features are considered solid and which are experimental. You should also experiment with formatting on multiple devices to make sure that your app looks right (not too skinny, not too wide, just right) on the smartphones or tablets that are important to you.

Note that an HTML5 app is really just a web page, so you don’t need anyone’s permission to put it into an app store. For many people, that is more than enough reason to try really hard to make HTML5 work.

Also, even if you are developing some native applications, you might decide to do some HTML5 ones as well. The more experience you get in creating apps with different capabilities, the better you will get at economically providing apps faster to your consumers, customers, or employees.

So Native gives you everything, but is non-portable. HTML5 is portable and standards-based, though it is still under development and does not give you full access to the device. What do you do if you want the best of both worlds?

Next time I’ll talk about the Hybrid approach where you provide Native-like access to more device features via APIs that can be accessed from JavaScript and thus HTML5.

Hybrid is this weird middle ground between Native and HTML5. Over time, this gap between them will get smaller. There are several approaches for both development and runtime of Hybrid apps, and I’ll discuss them next.

Posted in Mobile | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/05/2011

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Adobe: We Love Flash and HTML5 Equally – Application Development – News & Reviews – eWeek.com

    “Adobe has also extended existing tools like Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash Professional to bring the next generation of Web standards to designers and developers who rely on those tools. Adobe also released the new CSS3 Mobile Pack for Adobe Fireworks, which will enable designers to easily extract CSS3 from their design elements in Fireworks and quickly add them to their HTML based websites and mobile applications. Moreover Adobe announced several HTML contributions. Adobe has been contributing actively to HTML5 with the W3C and through contributions to Webkit to enable new expressiveness in HTML.”

    tags: HTML5 adobe flash phonegap

  • (L)GPL & the Apple App Store — No Easy Solutions | Open Source Delivers

    “There are a lot of smart people out there who think that there’s a technical solution for every legal problem, but this one is particularly difficult. It even prevents the distribution of proprietary applications through the App Store that use libraries licensed under the LGPL or the GPL with the runtime exception. The locked-down nature of Apple’s products also eliminates the possibility of distributing a proprietary application that sideloads an (L)GPL library.”

    tags: GPL apple open source

  • The real reason there’s no iPhone 5: The carriers | Molly Rants – CNET News

    “In retrospect, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Apple released a half-step iPhone this week, instead of a revolutionary and redesigned iPhone 5. Think about it–the real reason for the iPhone 4S is the same as for the iPhone 3GS: carrier contracts are two years long.”

    tags: iPhone apple carriers

  • Meet The iPhone 4S–It’s What’s Inside That Counts | Fast Company

    “There’s a good reason Apple kept the iPhone 4′s chassis design the same: It works. Apple’s been making these things (or at least its eastern suppliers have) by the tens of million for well over a year now, and the process will have been optimized to the point that the cost of building them is tailing off fast–boosting profits. The decision also makes for improved reliability, allowing Apple to dodge any re-run of “antennagate” (which was, in any case, somewhat overblown) and learn the lessons about making the radio system of the iPhone 4S “just work.” In fact, Apple made a point of mentioning the antenna in the presentation, saying it now does intelligent antenna switching to maximize the way it handles incoming and outgoing signals. Plus, there’s all the peripherals out there that third party firms sell, which will now remain compatible.”

    tags: iPhone apple

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 10/04/2011

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • PhoneGap Applies to Apache Software Foundation, Contemplates Name Change

    “Popular open source mobile development framework “wrapper” PhoneGap has applied for consideration to the Apache Software Foundation and contemplating a name change. In a message in PhoneGap’s Google Groups development page, Nitobi software developer Brian Leroux said that the project has “initialized the process to contribute PhoneGap to the Apache Software Foundation” and that they may change the name to Apache DeviceReady.”

    tags: apache software phonegap

  • PhoneGap Creator Nitobi Acquired by Adobe

    “Adobe just made a big splash in the mobile development world today by announcing that it has acquired Nitobi, the maker of the popular PhoneGap framework. Nitobi confirmed the acquisition and added that part of the acquisition was that Nitobi continue with its application to place the PhoneGap source code in the Apache Software Foundation.”

    tags: adobe phonegap html5 mobile nitobi

  • Adobe buys PhoneGap, TypeKit for better Web tools | Deep Tech – CNET News

    “Nitobi makes PhoneGap, an open-source programming tool for creating Web apps that run on a variety of mobile phones. That aligns well with the cross-platform approach Adobe has favored with Flash: give programmers the ability to create what they want, and let the tools worry about the differences from one system to another.”

    tags: adobe phonegap html5 mobile hybrid

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Monthly disclaimer

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Bob Sutor

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.

Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.

Posted in Website | Tagged | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/30/2011

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • New NFC Spec Makes It Easier To Swap Contacts, Save Data To Phones | TechCrunch

    “Mobile users with NFC-enabled devices will no longer need a special application in order to exchange contact details or other types of data between their phones thanks to a new NFC specification which has just been released.”

    tags: NFC phones techcrunch mobile

  • CIOs Are in a Mobile State of Mind CIO.com

    “Mobility has become the hottest topic for CIOs everywhere, with escalating demands for mobile applications coming from every corner of the enterprise. And no wonder. Last year, some 5 billion smartphones were in use worldwide, according to Gartner, and by 2015 a projected 6.7 billion will be loose around the globe. When we recently surveyed 261 IT leaders on this topic, 54 percent of you said you are planning to boost spending on mobile application development this year.”

    tags: CIO.com mobile

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/25/2011

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? – NYTimes.com

    “THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.” This is just plain wrong.”

    tags: food

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/23/2011

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/22/2011

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/19/2011

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Online ID Verification Plan Carries Risks – NYTimes.com

    “Industry experts expect that each authentication technology would rely on at least two different ID confirmation methods. Those might include embedding an encryption chip in people’s phones, issuing smart cards or using one-time passwords or biometric identifiers like fingerprints to confirm substantial transactions. Banks already use two-factor authentication, confirming people’s identities when they open accounts and then issuing depositors with A.T.M. cards”

    tags: NYTimes.com ID online

  • Cell companies woo app makers with offices, lattes – CNN.com

    “The newly renovated office, located in SoMa, San Francisco’s tech hub, is home to the Verizon Application Innovation Center, which opened last month. Big and small software developers are invited to work here at no charge, with unlimited access to development phones, wireless equipment, shielded test rooms and lattes.”

    tags: app verizon

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Mobile app development: Native vs. hybrid vs. HTML5 (part 1)

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Bob Sutor

I’ve seen and heard a lot of discussion about how people build applications for mobile devices. While there are literally hundreds of thousands of apps out there for Apple, Android, Blackberry and other smartphones, I can’t help but think the majority of these are one-off efforts. In this series in the blog, I’m going to tackle some of the issues with developing mobile apps, especially for enterprise use, and along the way propose some ideas for making the process easier and more repeatable.

mobile client technologiesI’m going to start this series by discussing the basic concepts of how you might develop an application for a smartphone or a tablet. I’m scoping it at this high functionality level and not looking at feature phones, at least not right now. I’ll use Apple as my primary example, but things are similar for other devices and mobile operating environments.

If you have an Apple iPad or an iPhone, many of the apps use the native software development kit, or SDK. It is available from Apple’s developer website and contains almost everything you need to start creating apps. Like any software you plan to use, make sure you read all the legal terms and conditions before you agree to them. If you work for a company, make sure your manager and local attorney also agree that you can use the SDK. This goes not only for Apple, but for Google, Blackberry, Microsoft, Samsung or any other SDK provider.

Most native apps on Apple devices are written in Objective-C, an object-oriented language. If you’ve developed software using C++, C#, or Java, Objective-C might take some getting used to. If you are comfortable with SmallTalk, however, it should seem much more familiar.

An Objective-C application is developed using the traditional write-compile-link-run-debug iteration, though the Apple XCode environment is quite powerful and makes this loop straighforward. Nevertheless, it is not a whole lot different from what programmers did 10 or 15 years ago. Objective-C is not a scripting language, is not interpreted, and on mobile devices you need to do your own memory management.

That said, when you create an app with a native SDK, you can use the very best and most powerful features on the device. You can optimize your app as much as you want and you have maximum control. This is very important for many software engineers. The app will be as functional, as beautiful, as secure, as bug-free, and as fast as you and your team can make it. It may also take you much longer to develop the app because you need to do all these things yourself.

Yes, the SDK makes your life easier, but it is still the case that when you go the native route you need to do more of the basic development yourself.

Here’s another important issue: if you write an app using a native SDK directly, you will essentially need to completely rewrite it when you use native SDKs for other devices. I say essentially because you may be able to write some of your apps non-UI program logic in C++ and re-use that for Apple, Android, and some other environments. There are some additional but similar tricks available.

To be on the safe side planning-wise, if you decide that you need to support multiple devices and you are using the native SDKs, assume that you or someone else will rewrite the app as many times as necessary to get the broad support you need. It is not uncommon to develop the first app for the iPhone and then outsource the creation of versions for other devices based on the original reference implementation. This can be expensive and time-consuming because you need a lot of people to get this done.

For some apps you will need to go the native SDK route for the reasons I stated above. If you do not have extreme requirements for look-and-feel, device functionality, or performance there are some other choices.

In future entries I’ll look are extending the native approach with libraries, something I call, oddly enough, “Extended Native.” I’ll also discuss the pure HTML5 web approach, and poke at the strange middle ground between Native and HTML5 called “Hybrid.” Tools that target multiple devices such as cross-compilers can also work, and I’ll get to them as well.

Next up: HTML5

Posted in Mobile | Tagged , | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/17/2011

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Open sourcing the post-Irene Vermont flood relief effort

    “Two weeks ago, in the wake of tropical storm Irene’s devastating flooding in Vermont’s Mad River Valley, local residents organized a MRV Flood Relief initiative. What began as a self-organized volunteer effort to match needs and help offered in our communities, using telephone, handwritten posters, and a Mad-River-Valley-Hurricane-Irene Facebook page created by the Chamber of Commerce, quickly grew into a coordinated project based in downtown Waitsfield’s Masonic Lodge. Now, two weeks later, in an effort to more effectively provide daily coordination for ongoing flood relief efforts in 10 central Vermont towns, Mad River Valley flood relief headquarters has launched a new open source web site.”

    tags: vermont flood relief

  • Understanding the File System and Structure in Linux | MPSHouse

    “The file system in Linux can be intimidating coming from other operating systems like Microsoft Windows. At first glance it may seem that there is no organisation to the files, but there is a method to this madness. After spending some more time with the file system in Linux, it will seem a lot more secure and organised.”

    tags: linux file system

  • Despite enterprise dominance, Microsoft struggles in Web server market

    “Despite dominating the enterprise server market, Microsoft is struggling to maintain a large presence in the world of Web servers and is seeing its market share decline. Netcraft, which surveyed more than 485 million websites this month, credits Apache with 65.05 percent of Web servers compared to 15.73 percent for Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services). This is down from 15.86 percent in August and 16.82 percent in July, but the more striking decline has occurred since June 2010 when Microsoft accounted for more than 26 percent of Web servers surveyed by Netcraft.”

    tags: microsoft server enterprise web

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/14/2011

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/09/2011

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Kaplan brings professional development to the mobile – ComputerworldUK.com

    “After downloading the Kaplan Mobile application users log-in with their Kaplan account and are shown relevant course materials available for download. Kaplan customers are able to sync their accounts with up to two mobile devices. Currently, the application allows students to access full course content for Kaplan’s GRE, GMAT, and MCAT courses, as well as digital copies of its PSAT, SAT, GRE and GMAT retail test prep books.”

    tags: mobile application kaplan

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/08/2011

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/07/2011

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

What I did (and didn’t do) on my summer vacation

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Now that it’s early September, I suppose I can look back over the last several months and take stock of what happened over the summer season. Technically, summer is not quite over, but in northwest New York where I live you can really feel the first flourishes of fall in last August. Admittedly, it’s 85 degrees F today, so it would be hard to convince many people that summer is on the way out.

I did start a new job within IBM in early June, owning project management for what we call the WebSphere Foundation line of software. More recently I picked up some additional executive leadership in the mobile area, which just might account for the links showing up in my (almost) daily news postings. Altogether, though, it means I’ve been swamped in a very good way with work.

Therefore what I didn’t do is blog very much. Part of it was time constraints, but a good deal of what I’ve been working on is internal business, product and technology strategy. Those are not exactly areas I can freely write about, but, heh, it’s a living. Given the stability of the WordPress platform on which my website is implemented, I’ve also not had to tinker much with the infrastructure behind this blog.

I did start using Google+ in addition to Facebook and Twitter. While I do wish everyone would just switch from Twitter to Google+, that’s not going to happen. Apple’s support of Twitter in the upcoming iOS 5 will ensure it has a social networking role for quite some time. I feel my energy flagging with respect to Google+ and I suspect that is true of some others as well.

I didn’t sail much at all. This was a combination of the time I had available, the weather, and the conditions on Lake Ontario. I’ve decided that I’ll move the boat to another lake starting next year, but which lake is TBD.

I did spend quite a bit of time in the New York Adirondack region. Our son spends two weeks at camp up there, and this summer my wife Judith and I spent a week at The Hedges in Blue Mountain Lake. We managed to get up to the mountains a couple of other times as well. We’ve been to the Adirondacks quite a bit in our lives and plan to spend even more time there in the future. That’s one reason why I’ve been posting links on Facebook about the damage caused by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene.

Judith and I had a great time visiting friends in Maine over a long weekend in July. It set lobster as the season’s culinary theme, and that was just fine with both of us.

I didn’t have a major outdoor project this summer. Before the snow flies I need to do some repairs and paint the porch I built 5 years ago. It is holding up well except for some of the small pieces of trim that developed some wood rot because of the moisture from snow and rain.

I did enjoy watching the two guys who did the landscaping work on our side lawn. After battling an overgrown area that was once a grape arbor and then a garden for over a decade, we decided to convert it to lawn.  It took the two guys two days with a skid steer to pull up the weeds and hundreds of bricks that were used in the walkway and as edging. They then filled the area with 20+ cubic yards of dirt and seeded it. The grass is growing nicely now and the eyesore is gone. To visualize 20 cubic yards, think of a volume that is 3 feet wide by 3 feet deep by 60 feet high. That’s a lot of dirt and it validates my conclusion that it was work that I was just not going to get done myself.

With autumn coming on fast, I do hope to get a little more sailing in, do that porch work, and perhaps start and finish a few more outside evening projects. I get frustrated when I’m not building something, so it’s best if I have a few tasks like these in the pipeline.

Posted in Home | Tagged , | Comments Off

Daily links for 09/01/2011

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • IBM WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit: Overview

    “The IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Migration Toolkit is a suite of tools and knowledge collections that enables your organization to quickly and cost-effectively migrate to WebSphere Application Server V7 or V8, whether from a previous version of WebSphere Application Server or competitive application servers including Oracle® WebLogic Server, Oracle Application Server, and JBoss Application Server.”

    tags: websphere migration

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Monthly disclaimer

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Bob Sutor

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.

Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.

Posted in Website | Tagged | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/31/2011

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/30/2011

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/24/2011

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Idevnews | Evans Data Finds Three-Fourths of Enterprises Focus on Mobile Apps

    “Mobile app development is taking off in all directions, according to Evans Data Corp.’s Mobile Development Survey released this month. The survey found nearly three-fourths of enterprise devs are working on mobile apps for customers, enterprise users and to extend mobile access to legacy apps.”

    tags: mobile apps evans

  • Facebook makes its privacy settings act more like Google+ – CNN.com

    “Google Plus made such decisions easier since it let users decide who would receive a given post or photo right when they created and then posted it. Facebook seems to have taken notice of this subtle but significant difference. The world’s largest social network on Tuesday announced changes to its privacy settings that allow users to choose who will see a photo or status update right when they post it — much like was already the case on Google Plus.”

    tags: facebook google

  • Sprint to land Apple’s iPhone: How wireless carrier dynamics will change | ZDNet

    “Sprint will reportedly get Apple’s iPhone 5 in October and the move has wide ramifications in the wireless carrier pecking order. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint will begin selling the iPhone 5 in mid-October. The move will put Sprint’s line-up on equal footing with both AT&T and Verizon Wireless.”

    tags: sprint iPhone apple

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/22/2011

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/19/2011

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/18/2011

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/17/2011

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/16/2011

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/13/2011

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Linux

Mobile

  • Mobile Sites vs. Mobile Apps: How HTML5 Changes the Math – CIO Central – CIO Network – Forbes

    “So how do you sort through the pros and cons – and how has HTML5 thrown in a new wrench? Start with a hard look at not only the kind of experience you want to provide your customer base, but at what kind of budgets and resources you have to throw behind your efforts.”

    tags: HTML5 mobile

  • Apple iPhone 5 Design Check List: 10 Most Likely Features – Mobile and Wireless – News & Reviews – eWeek.com

    “In the mobile world, there’s no more important smartphone than the iPhone. Apple’s handset is wildly popular in every country in which it’s available. And each year, when new versions of the device are launched, people around the globe line up to be the first to get their hands on it. But so far this year, those people haven’t been able to get hands on a new iPhone model. Now, there is rampant speculation that Apple might wait a couple more months to finally offer up the next version of its smartphone. Whenever Apple finally gets around to launching a new smartphone, consumers will be quite interested to know what the device will come with. Will the next iPhone be a major upgrade over the iPhone 4, or will it simply be an evolutionary update? Will it come with a bigger screen or the same 3.5-inch option owners have grown accustomed to over the years? So far, Apple has been tight-lipped. But the rumor mill hasn’t been so silent. In fact, a host of reports have been cropping up, claiming Apple will be delivering several key improvements to the device. However, while some of those improvements make sense, others do not. Thus, it’s important for everyone to keep a level head when assessing those reports. The following slides will help folks do just that. Instead of listing every possible update that has been talked about, the following items are those that are most likely to come to the iPhone 5.”

    tags: eWeek.com iPhone apple

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Tagged , | Comments Off

Work on Google+, party on Facebook

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Several weeks ago I posted an entry on my evolving social media operating policy. I think things are even clearer now:

  • I use Google+ to follow people and topics relevant to my work and other professional interests. My posts there reflect that as well.
  • I use Facebook to follow people and topics relevant to my personal interests, as well as the non-work activities of friends and acquaintances.
  • I use Twitter because I still think I need to, but if it went away tomorrow I would not be at a loss.

I like the idea of separating work and personal interests into different sites. I’m happy to follow the same people on both Google+ and Facebook, but on the first I would rather hear about your professional activities and on the latter I would prefer to see your vacation photos. For some people I mostly care about one of these, for others both.

I know the circles idea on Google+ would allow me to tease apart these types of posts if people were consistent in how they posted and I was consistent in what I followed. It’s the early times, though, and this is how I’ve settled into using the sites. Obviously, my usage preference are just that, my own.

That said, in three months things may have shifted. For now, I don’t see Google+ or Facebook winning over the other, and I love that they are competing. I think the damage to use of Twitter by both will continue.

Posted in Website | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Daily links for 08/11/2011

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Caching

  • IBM Redbooks | WebSphere eXtreme Scale Best Practices for Operation and Management

    “This IBM® Redbooks® publication contains a summary of the leading practices for implementing and managing a WebSphere® eXtreme Scale installation. The information in this book is a result of years of experience that IBM has had in with production WebSphere eXtreme Scale implementations. The input was received from specialists, architects, and other practitioners who have participated in engagements around the world. The book provides a brief introduction to WebSphere eXtreme Scale and an overview of the architecture. It then provides advice about topology design, capacity planning and tuning, grid configuration, ObjectGrid and backing map plug-ins, application performance tips, and operations and monitoring.”

    tags: websphere extremescale caching

Mobile

  • IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era | A Smarter Planet Blog

    “It’s amazing to me to think that August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. The announcement helped launch a phenomenon that changed the way we work, play and communicate.  Little did we expect to create an industry that ultimately peaked at more than 300 million unit sales per year. I’m proud that I was one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed the first machine and was fortunate to have lead subsequent IBM PC designs through the 1980s.  It may be odd for me to say this, but I’m also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo. While many in the tech industry questioned IBM’s decision to exit the business at the time, it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era.”

    tags: IBM Post-PC

  • Amazon’s Answer To Apple’s Terms: A Web-Based Kindle Cloud Reader — Brilliant On PC, Better On iPad | TechCrunch

    “Much has been made about Apple’s recent changes to the iOS terms. At first, everyone was sure that many big players would be forced to pull their apps, such as Amazon’s popular Kindle app. But then Apple relaxed the rules a bit, and simply said that Amazon and others couldn’t link to their own stores from their iOS apps. Amazon complied. But at the same time, they were also working on an alternative.”

    tags: amazon kindle html5 mobile

  • Android Is More Valuable To Microsoft Than Windows Phone 7 – Forbes

    “However the company is licking its chops from the juicy licensing fees it gains from Android handsets. According to Horace Dediu, Microsoft sold around 1.4 million Windows Phone 7 in Q2, which brought in around $21 million from the $15 per Windows Phone 7 that it earns. On the other hand, HTC sold 12 million Android smartphones in Q2, and as it earns around $5 per Android phone from HTC patent licensing fees, Microsoft made around $60 million. This is 3x the amount earned from its own OS from the licensing deal with HTC alone.”

    tags: microsoft android windows phone

  • Why Apple Still Dominates Tablets – Seeking Alpha

    “Microsoft plans to officially launch the next version of an operating system called Windows 8 next year. [3] Windows 8 is a touch-screen version of the OS and will work on tablets as well. However, similar to Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich, Windows 8 allows the iPad to make further inroads into the tablet market. By the time Google and Microsoft roll out their new tablet OS’s, Apple may well have launched iPad 3 to further drive sales.”

    tags: apple tablets

Open Source

  • Cisco and Twitter join Linux patent protection pool | ZDNet

    “After years of slow, steady growth, OIN has been growing significantly in the last quarter. During the second quarter of 2011 alone, OIN had 35 new companies join its community of licensees. The consortium now has 260 corporate supporters. OIN licensees, which include founding members and associate members, benefit from leverage against patent aggression and access to enabling technologies through OIN’s shared intellectual property resources.”

    tags: cisco Twitter linux patent oin

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/10/2011

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Mobile

  • Amazon Escapes the App Trap Too – Simon Says…

    “Well, it’s happened. As TechCrunch noted today, Amazon has quietly launched read.amazon.com, a full-featured HTML 5 version of the Kindle that runs perfectly on the iPad browser, looks for all the world like a native application after it’s been added to the iPad home screen as an icon and can even store books to read offline.”

    tags: amazon ipad kindle

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/09/2011

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Mobile

  • More on HTML5 for Mobile Application Developers

    “HTML5’s geo-location application programming interface (API), is to me one of the most interesting features.  It enables mobile web sites to access a mobile device’s GPS technology.  The W3C geolocation API specification was published in September, 2010.”

    tags: mobile HTML5 application

  • Mobile Development – Are You Asking the Right Questions? | SYS-CON MEDIA

    “Some of the most successful mobile projects are those that employ a combination of Agile methodologies and Lean principles in the development process. Agile, which most are familiar with, is an iterative process that enables companies to build and deliver apps quickly. Lean, on the other hand, focuses on streamlining and delivering value to the project by eliminating waste in the value chain, helping the development team to determine which features are essential and which can be saved for future versions. The principles of Lean can be used to complement Agile, ensuring a smooth development process and fast delivery of the app to market.”

    tags: mobile development

  • IBM’s Multi-Faceted Mobile Strategy

    “IBM offers an array of tools for mobile application development. On one side of the house is IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS), the new name for the Lotus Notes/Domino group of products, which encompasses Lotus tools like Sametime and Quickr, as well as some of the WebSphere offerings like the old Portlet Factory (since renamed) and the Mobile Portal Accelerator. Remember, a few years back IBM decided to merge the Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal product lines, a case of consolidation that is not unheard of in the modern IBM company. On the other side of IBM is another group of mobile app development tools created by the Rational division. Developers interested in writing mobile apps can get that functionality through the Rational Application Developer (RAD) and Rational Business Developer (RBD) IDEs, as well as through Rhapsody, a suite of tools that has traditionally been used for writing programs for embedded systems.”

    tags: IBM mobile strategy

WebSphere

  • IBM Redbooks | WebSphere Application Server V8.0 Technical Overview

    “IBM WebSphere® Application Server is the implementation by IBM® of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform. It conforms to the Java EE 6 specifications as one of its supporting programming models. WebSphere Application Server is available in unique packages that are designed to meet a wide range of customer requirements. At the heart of each package is a WebSphere Application Server that provides the runtime environment for enterprise applications. This IBM Redpaper™ publication discusses the runtime server component of WebSphere Application Server.”

    tags: websphere IBM java

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Tagged , | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/07/2011

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Innovation

  • IBM, Apple Top List of 10 Most Innovative IT Companies – IT Infrastructure – News & Reviews – eWeek.com

    “IBM is the most innovative company in IT, period. The Aug. 8 issue of Forbes contains a list of what the well-heeled magazine sees as the “World’s Most Innovative Companies.” The print edition ranks 50 companies, and online there are an additional 50 companies ranked. What’s difficult to understand is how IBM was not included on that list. In an opinion piece on www.eweek.com, eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft lays out his argument as to why IBM should be on any list of technology innovators. Big Blue has a legacy of invention, of blazing trails and setting direction. Its latest supercomputer, Watson, is a testament to that. But IBM is not alone in its ability to innovate. In this slide show, Taft selects his own list of the top 10 innovative companies in the IT space. IBM sits on top of this list because of its research arm, its many patents and its proven discoveries. And though 100-year-old IBM has earned a position as a mainstay in the annals of IT innovation, newcomers such as Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com—Forbes’ top innovator—also have earned a place at the table.”

    tags: ibm apple companies

Open Source

  • Azavea – OpenTreeMap – Open source geography-enabled urban tree inventory

    “Urban street trees have myriad proven benefits for communities including providing shade, improving air quality, assisting with stormwater runoff, raising property values, decreasing utility bills, and enhancing the look and feel of communities. While tree inventories provide municipalities with vital data to consult when managing the urban forest, creating a complete inventory is a time consuming and resource intensive process.  OpenTreeMap provides an easy-to-use public inventorying platform that enables individuals, organizations, and governments to collaboratively contribute to an interactive and dynamic map of a community’s tree population. OpenTreeMap can be used in a single municipality or cover a broader geographic region with many communities.”

    tags: open source tree

  • A Guide to Open Source Licensing

    “If you’re working on or launching an open source project, one of the most basic decisions you must make is which license the project will be released under, and choosing the perfect license is more complex than ever. Over the years, we’ve provided many free guidelines on this topic, but it’s a moving target. In this post, you’ll find our updeated collection of all the things you need to know to make an informed open source license decision.”

    tags: open source licensing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/04/2011

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Apparently, Android Is the Least Open of the Open Source Platforms

    “The study, done by market research firm, VisionMobile took a look at Android, Eclipse, the Linux kernel, MeeGo, Firefox, Qt, Symbian and WebKit and focused on their open governance, inclusiveness, transparency, and ease of access to source code. In the “open governance index”, Android finished with a measly 23 percent. It was far and away the lowest score, Android was the only open source project to score less than 58 percent (the best score was Eclipse at 84 percent).”

    tags: android open source

  • Bob Dylan, Jack White and Norah Jones Record Unheard Hank Williams Songs | Rolling Stone Music

    “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, a new collection of previously unheard songs by the country great recorded by artists such as Bob Dylan, Jack White, Norah Jones and Levon Helm, will be released on October 4th. The set, which will be issued on Dylan’s imprint Egyptian Records, was originally conceived by veteran A&R executive Mary Martin as a Dylan-centric project, but eventually evolved into a multi-artist tribute to the late singer-songwriter.”

    tags: dylan white williams music

  • Seven Guidelines For Designing High-Performance Mobile User Experiences – Smashing Magazine

    “Users expect mobile services to be relevant and user-friendly and to perform well. The limitations of the medium, however, impose significant challenges to designing products that meet all of those expectations. While often underestimated, performance is a crucial contributor to a trustworthy mobile user experience. Therefore, it should be considered a key driver in the design process. In this article, we’ll discuss performance in relation to design and present seven guidelines that can help shape design decisions related to performance while accounting for the needs of end users and businesses. These guidelines are based on the experiences of our teams in designing native mobile apps for a broad product portfolio and on multiple mobile platforms.”

    tags: mobile High-Performance

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/03/2011

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/02/2011

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • WebSphere Application Server V8.0 samples

    “WebSphere Application Server V8 samples are new and improved! Although you will continue to find key sample applications installed with the product, most samples are now available online and can be accessed from a new section in the WebSphere Application Server V8 Information Center. Sample code, documentation, and other resources reside online, under one roof, which increases availability and collaboration, while providing samples in a time-sensitive manner.”

    tags: websphere application samples

  • Oracle’s Java virtualization support policy reignites controversy

    “With the release of Java 7 this week, Oracle posted a support policy expressly stating that it would not support the new Java 7 software development kit on VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V. Oracle has since said that it “mistakenly created” the policy page, but that the company will stick to its standard policy regarding non-Oracle components in a mixed stack: They’re not supported unless users can prove the problem stems from the Oracle part of the stack.”

    tags: oracle java virtualization

  • Microsoft and SUSE extend Microsoft’s controversial Novell Linux pact | ZDNet

    “Microsoft is buying $100 million in additional SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates and the pair are going to continue to collaborate on interopability solutions through January 1, 2016. The SUSE certificates are designed to insure Microsoft customers who are implementing Linux that they won’t be caught in any Microsoft-Linux patent crossfire.”

    tags: microsoft suse novell linux

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal – June, 2011

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Bob Sutor

The IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal is a great resource for the latest technical news, advice, and details about what’s happening within the WebSphere line of products. Yes, this is kind of a message from my sponsor, but there is no buy button. Don’t tell sales.

WebSphere graphic imageOne of the things that I’m doing now that I’m back here in IBM WebSphere is looking around at the resources that are available for the products in my portfolio. There’s quite a bit between the product pages, as you would expect, but also developerWorks. The articles, forums and blogs on developerWorks provide significant resources for those using all IBM products, not just WebSphere. That said, they do have a large section on WebSphere itself.

From time to time I’ll put up some pointers to WebSphere resources. Today I’ll start with the WebSphere Developer Technical Journal. It’s available to be read online, in PDF form, or on your Kindle.

Here are a few articles in the June edition:

If you wish, you can download this entire issue in PDF format. I download such documents and then use DropBox to read them on my iPad.

Posted in Software | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Daily links for 08/01/2011 – Java Edition

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Develop with real-time Java

    “Runtime processes (garbage collection, class loading, Just-in-time compilation, and thread scheduling) in conventional Java virtual machines (JVMs) make them incapable of running applications with real-time behavior. Real-time extensions to Java technology—based on the Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ)—enable JVMs with real-time features. You can meet the hard or soft real-time constraints your applications require by leveraging the traditional benefits of the Java language—such as interoperability and safety—and combining them with features that the real-time Java extensions enable. Learn how.”

    tags: java Developer

  • Language designer’s notebook: First, do no harm

    “While some proposed language features are simply a solution in search of a problem, most have their roots in real-world situations in which the existing features do not enable programmers to express what they want to say as easily, clearly, succinctly, or safely as they’d like. Although having a use case in mind — “this feature enables me to write this code that I want to be able to write” — is good, language designers also need to evaluate language features in light of the bad code they might also enable.”

    tags: java Developer

  • General Best Practices for WebSphere Application Environments | JAVA Developer’s Journal

    “This article provides a list of general best practices to apply to any WebSphere Application Server V7 and V8 environment. However, some of the recommendations only apply to specific conditions and scenarios. These recommendations could be used to set up any WebSphere environment.”

    tags: websphere java Developer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Tagged , | Comments Off

Monthly disclaimer

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Bob Sutor

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.

Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.

Posted in Website | Tagged | Comments Off

Some images from a week in the Adirondacks

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Bob Sutor

This last week my wife were on vacation in the Blue Mountain Lake area of the New York Adirondack mountains. Here are a few shots of the lake and surrounding mountains taken at different times of the day and in different weather. The bonus flower shot was take at the WILD Center in Tupper Lake, NY.

Click on an image to see a larger version.

Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to NY Adirondack mountains in July, 2011

Posted in Travel | Tagged , | Comments Off

Math Quick Take: Optimizing your garden’s area

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Bob Sutor

I’m on vacation this week and taking it easy, so I thought I would do a post that appealed both to gardeners and math afficionados. Here’s the problem we’re going to solve:

Suppose you buy 100 feet of wire fencing. What’s the largest rectangular area garden you can enclose with it? Forget for the moment that you might want to leave an opening for a gate.

This is the sort of problem that you might get in differential calculus in that you are trying to find the maximum of some function, namely, the area of the garden. We’re going to do it more geometrically however.

Let’s start with what we know:

If we call the width of the garden w and the length l, then the perimeter, or the distance around the garden, is 2 * w + 2 * l and this must equal 100. That is, if you add up the length of the front, back, and two sides of the garden and represent it in feet, then it should be the amount of fence we bought. So we have the equation:

2w + 2l = 100

The area of the garden is the length times the width. So if we call this A, we know that

A = lw

We can represent the first equation in terms of w:

2w + 2l = 100

2l = 100 – 2w

l = (100 – 2w)/2 = 50 – w

So we can now represent the A just in terms of w:

A = lw

A = (50 – w)w = 50w – w2

There are a couple of extreme cases we can see from this equation. If the width is zero, or w = 0, we don’t really have a rectanglar garden, we simply have the 100 feet of fence running in a straight line away from us. The area of this is 0.

Similarly, if the width is 50 then the length is 0, and we again have a straight length of fence extending left to right for 100 feet. The area is 0 again.

We’re not allowing the length or width to be negative, so we now know that our answer for optimizing the area will have each of the length and width somewhere between 0 and 50, but not including those values.

Let’s try a few numbers to get a feel for what is going on.

If w = 1, then l = 49 and the area is 49. The lengths are in feet and the area is in square feet.

If w = 5, then l = 45 and the area is 225.

If w = 10, then l = 40 and the area is 400.

If w = 20, then l = 30 and the area is 600.

So far the area is increasing as w gets bigger. However,

if w = 30, then l = 20 and the area is 600 again. Moreover,

if w = 40, then l = 10 and the area is 400 again, which is smaller than 600.

So for a while when w was increasing, the area increased, but then it appeared to top off and start getting smaller again. This happened somewhere between the width being 20 and its being 30. Incidentally,

if w = 25, then l = 25 and the area is 625.

If you try values of w that are slightly smaller or larger than 25, the area will be less than 625 square feet.

Graph of areaYou can see what is happening in the graph to the right, courtesy of webgraphing.com. The area as a function of the width is a parabola. It reaches its maximum height when the width (and therefore also the length) is 25 feet.

So to answer our question, you should create a square garden with the width and the length being 25 feet. You will then get a garden with area 625 square feet.

Note that w and l are interchangeable and there is nothing special about either one in the sense that we know that one is bigger or smaller than the other. So we have some symmetry to this problem and it should not be a surprise that the rectangle turned out to be a square.

To solve this using calculus, take the derivate of A = 50w – w2 with respect to w to get 50 – 2*w. Set this equal to 0 and solve for w to get w = 25, the same as we observed above. You should check that this gives us a maximum value for the area and not a minimum, but otherwise you are done.

What about that gate? Well, you could make your life easier and just make your 25 by 25 garden and have, say, a 3 foot opening for the gate. If you really wanted to maximize the area and use every bit of fencing, just assume that the perimeter is 103 feet instead of 100. That is, you use the 100 feet of fence and allow 3 extra feet for the gate. You still want a rectangular garden, so now you have 2w + 2l = 103, and you maximize the area. That’s left as an exercise for the reader.

Note that I stipulated a rectangular garden. Could we get more area if we had a perfectly circular one? Using our first perimeter value of 100, note that is equal to the circumference. Given a radius r, the circumference of a circle is 2 * π * r where π is approximately 3.1415926. The area of the circle is π * r2. So solving the circumference equation for r we get

100 = 2 * π * r

or

50 / π = r

The area is then

A = π * r2 = π * (50/π)*2 = 2500/π

So the approximate area for our circular garden is 795.8 square feet, which is quite a bit larger than the rectangular maximum of 625.

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/22/2011

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • HTML5 to Create New Wave of Opportunities in Mobile Landscape

    “Smartphone adoption will continue to skyrocket with or without HTML5. That said, the most used single app is the browser. As HTML5 support continues to make its way into mobile browsers and HTML5 markup proliferates across the web, the phones themselves will increase in value because they have become an “always on, always connected” doorway into a vast, rich space. The question that most people ask regarding HTML5 on mobile is about the web vs. native debate (i.e., whether consumption of native apps slow in favor of HTML5 apps). I think this is a false dichotomy. I predict that in the distinction between native apps and web apps on mobile will eventually fade away.”

    tags: HTML5 mobile

  • Google execs discussed Java license before Oracle filed suit – San Jose Mercury News

    “Van Nest told the judge Thursday that former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz gave a sworn statement this week that he did not object to Android when it was released and that he still views it as a “positive development” for the Java ecosystem.”

    tags: google java license

  • Microsoft Windows fizzles as PC fears loom | Reuters

    “Microsoft’s perennial money-losing online services unit, which runs the Bing search engine and MSN Internet portal, posted a 16.5 percent increase in sales to $662 million, but its loss widened to $728 million from a loss of $688 million a year ago, as Microsoft continues to pour money into attacking Google. The unit has now lost almost $6.5 billion in the last three fiscal years.”

    tags: microsoft windows

  • IBM Steps Up Its OpenOffice Commitment with Symphony Donation | eWEEK Labs

    “Now, the LibreOffice folks are working on their suite, and, with IBM’s renewed participation, the Apache OpenOffice project (which may or may not end up implementing the Symphony bits, although I hope they do) seems to have some new life as well. OpenOffice.org under Sun had gotten into a rut — there’s nothing like real competition to get things moving again.”

    tags: openoffice IBM apache

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Stats for browsers and operating systems accessing sutor.com

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Bob Sutor

It’s been a while since I last put up some stats about what browsers and operating systems access my website at sutor.com. Traditionally, Firefox did well, followed by Internet Explorer, and then Chrome. The last two are now reversed.

Since much of my blog content has focused on content regarding open standards and open source, it makes sense for Firefox to have consistently led. Here’s the statistical story for the last month, thanks to Google Analytics. I’ve focused on the top 5 in each category.

Browsers

Position Browser Percentage
1. Firefox 44.37%
2. Chrome 24.60%
3. Internet Explorer 14.95%
4. Safari 9.69%
5. Konqueror 1.64%

Operating Systems

Position Operating System Percentage
1. Windows 54.75%
2. Macintosh 22.07%
3. Linux 12.82%
4. iPhone 2.59%
5. iPhone 2.57%

Browsers and Operating Systems

Position Browser / Operating System Percentage
1. Firefox / Windows 26.17%
2. Internet Explorer / Windows 14.89%
3. Chrome / Windows 12.57%
4. Chrome / Macintosh 9.28%
5. Firefox / Linux 8.07%
Posted in Website | Tagged , , | Comments Off

My social media operating policy

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Bob Sutor

With the introduction of Google+, I now have yet another social media service by which I can communicate with family, friends, co-workers, industry colleagues, and complete strangers. In addition to this blog, which I’ve had for close to 7 years, I’m fairly active on FaceBook and Twitter.

I don’t schedule dedicated FaceBook or Twitter time. Rather, I usually read or add something during those little interstices during the day. If a call ends 2 minutes early, I’ll take a look. Sometimes I’ll add a thought or a link when it occurs to me. The notion of the stream is very important to me with those services. Most of what I see I see as it is posted. I may scroll down a bit, but I rarely go to someone’s page and read through all their recent entries.

In that way, social media to me through FaceBook and Twitter has very much been like a ticker tape of information that I consume or to which I contribute. It stays in my peripheral vision, sucking up minutes here or there as they become available.

Having these services have definitely decreased the frequency of my blogging. It’s easier to come up with a quick thought and publish it than write a longer piece. I’m trying to work through that, though, because most of my blog entries take 20 minutes or less to write. I try to get to my point and then move on.

I’ve now added Google+ to that mix. A downside is that it is one more service to use up those scarce and widely spaced minutes I have available. It is time consuming to check three services. I know from experience that I don’t do well with more than two.

I had a Plaxo account but now either don’t use it or I cancelled it (that I don’t remember is significant). LinkedIn is fine, but I do not spend more than a few minutes on it in one or two visits a week. I certainly don’t pay for their service. There are social media sites inside IBM and I don’t use them. I let my more public outlets cover anyone inside or outside of the company who might care to read my thoughts.

So I’m not sure how well Google+ will succeed for me but I really want to try to make it work. Over time I think it will replace Twitter but not FaceBook. I think it is great that Google+ and FaceBook will compete with each other. That will drive innovation, and by that I mean sexy, cool features. I’ve set up some circles and spend time in Google+ every day, but I’m not nearly as comfortable in it as I am in FaceBook. I hope to spend some time during an upcoming vacation to kick its tires more and and see how it can improve my life.

Posted in Daily Links | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/19/2011

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Top Five Linux Contributor: Microsoft | ZDNet

    “At first, this code wasn’t open-sourced at all, but in 2009, it was discovered that some GPL code was already in Hyper-V’s Linux drivers. So it was that “In a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.””

    tags: microsoft linux ZDNet

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

10 things to think about to improve software product descriptions

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Bob Sutor

I’ve been back in a software product area since the beginning of June, and I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at product descriptions and literature. Not just IBM’s, mind you, but those of our competitors as well. This includes traditional, commercial “proprietary” software and commercial open source software.

Some of the descriptions of products in the industry are quite good, but many are pretty bad. They seem to range from “this is so high level that you have no idea what the product does” to “this has a long list of technical details that we hope impresses you even though you might not know how they could possibly help your business.”

I know, I know, different descriptions for different audiences. What you say to someone in development or the CTO should probably be different from what you say to the CIO and almost certainly different from what you say to the CFO. However, when there is only one, everyone suffers.

You need to know who your audience is (“segmentation”) and then shape what you say. Explicitly address your different audiences. It’s ok to say right at the beginning of each paragraph to whom you are speaking.

Here are a few suggestions, written from the perspective of a customer.

  1. First and foremost, the goal in acquiring software is to accomplish something. Tell me if your product will help me do that. This might be a simple yes or no.
  2. If I am a developer, tell me how easily your product will let me do what I wish and how it will make my life simpler and more productive. This new ease is in comparison to the previous version of your product as well as offerings from your competitors. Don’t overdo it on cute statements like “we make developers happy.”
  3. Match new or improved technical features to business value. “By doubling the amount of memory your application can use, you can now serve 25% more customers in the same amount of time and increase your revenue.”
  4. Regarding business value, stating how your software can help increase revenue (as above), improve security, increase availability, improve customer loyalty, decrease maintenance costs, and simplify integration with other parts of the business are all good things. If your software will help do none of these, why would I possibly install it?
  5. Don’t be overly simplistic about TCO (total cost of ownership) and TCA (total cost of acquisition). I can add up transactional, service, and support costs over 5 years as well as you can.
  6. Do, however, give me a way to compute the real return on investment from your software. Even if your TCA is $0, I may need to pay my people, your people, or a services integrator money to make it work for me. Give me examples based on real customers if possible.
  7. If I read your website and after 5 minutes I still don’t have the vaguest idea what your product does or why I might want to install it, you’ve failed. Start over.
  8. Separate promises of future functionality and value from what you can do right now. I’m interested in your roadmap, but I have problems to solve right now. Do not imply you can do more today than you can.
  9. Use graphics well to convey what your software does and the value it gives me. Don’t think that adding more tiny boxes with tinier print in them improves things. You are educating me about your offerings so I can make an intelligent and well informed decision. You are helping me make the case for acquiring your software within my organization.
  10. For emphasis: tell me how your software will make my organization better, more efficient, and more profitable, and how I can serve my customers better. If it will lead to great personal success for me, so much the better!

 

Posted in Software | 3 Comments

Daily links for 07/18/2011

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • HP officially launches webOS TouchPad … again? | ZDNet

    “When HP bought Palm last year I was hoping we would see less confusing messages and a more targeted focus for webOS with lots of resources to turn out great products. Instead, we end up with a rather lame tiny smartphone and then a tablet that was put on sale and then “officially launched” almost three weeks later. Yes, in case you didn’t know HP’s official launch for the HP TouchPad webOS tablet was yesterday, 17 July. I guess the 1 July release was just a practice run or something.”

    tags: HP touchpad

  • It is time for Google to take control of Android | ZDNet

    “The time for good intentions has passed. Android device owners need Google to take control and make things work properly. Keep the platform open where it counts, but lock down the core parts of the OS to make partners toe the line. Customers will thank you.”

    tags: control android

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/15/2011

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Oracle Involuntarily Partners with IBM to Create an IBM Mainframe World | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com

    “You know the funny thing about technology is that it tends to go in cycles. What hurt the mainframe the most was the market’s move to decentralize and put performance closer to the user. However, the massive switch to the Web and the concept of cloud computing reversed this trend and now the focus is to increasingly provide highly customized experiences on the Web. This shifts from heavy desktop and distributed computing platforms to highly centralized and I/O-intensive offerings. Much of what is being done is less about processing power and more about rapid data access or, in other words, mainframe country.”

    tags: IBM oracle mainframe

  • SAP joins OpenJDK Java project | Application Development – InfoWorld

    “SAP has joined the OpenJDK project, an Oracle-led initiative producing an open source implementation of Java that also has gained support of such companies as IBM and Apple in recent months.”

    tags: SAP java openjdk

  • vSphere 5′s licensing opens the door for open source | Open Source Software – InfoWorld

    “User response to the new licensing at VMware’s community forum has been decidedly negative. One person commenting on the VMware forum writes: “We just purchased 10 dual-socket servers with 192GB RAM each (enterprise license level), and we’ll need to triple our license count to be able to use all available RAM if allocated by VMs.” Another person claims that his small and medium business will see a 300 percent increase in price as a result of the new model.”

    tags: licensing vmware

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

IBM to donate Symphony code to Apache for consideration

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Apache logoSix weeks ago I noted here that Oracle had to decided to offer the codebase for OpenOffice.org, the open source word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software suite to the Apache Software Foundation. Two weeks after that, Apache voted to accept the proposed project for incubation. Now, one month later, IBM is announcing that it will offer the Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice incubator for consideration. Why and what does this mean?

OpenOffice logoFirst of all, note that I said “for consideration.” Members of the OpenOffice “podling” at Apache, including folks who are IBM employees, will get to look at the changes and improvements that IBM made to OpenOffice code when it was incorporated into Symphony. If the podling members decide to use it, great! If they decide to do something else, so be it, that’s the way open source communities work.

Symphony logoThe changes affect areas of usability, performance, and accessibility. IBM’s hope is that this donation can further accelerate the development of OpenOffice as a platform for openness and innovation in the document creation and editing space. OpenOffice and software like Symphony that builds on it continue to help drive use of ODF, the Open Document Format. We’ve learned over the past few years that vendor-controlled or -dictated document formats are just a bad idea. A healthy and vibrant OpenOffice open source development community in Apache will help ensure continued adherence to the open standard as well as a codebase that can be used for desktop, mobile, and even cloud applications.

Work on Symphony will continue with the Apache OpenOffice code an essential part of its core. Just as IBM’s WebSphere Application Server (a product now very close to my heart) uses Apache open source code but has code also written by IBM, so too will Symphony continue to evolve within IBM using code from Apache. Employees of IBM will contribute to OpenOffice as part of the community. IBM will benefit from the work done by others in the community, but so too will we all.

As the core OpenOffice code gets better and better, downstream projects and products like Symphony will benefit because they can focus on the features that distinguish them and add particular value for their users. This other software might have alternative user interfaces, support different devices, or be optimized for particular consumer or enterprise applications.

I believe a strong OpenOffice community within the Apache Software Foundation benefits everyone who cares about standards and innovation for document processing. The community is growing, code is being added, the roadmap is becoming clearer. Please consider participating.

Posted in Open Source | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Daily links for 07/14/2011

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Google Staffing Up On Patent Lawyers And Experts | TechCrunch

    “It’s no secret Google is searching for more patents to add to its portfolio. The search giant recently lost the bid for Nortel’s 6,000 mobile and wireless patents to a consortium of tech companies including Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and Sony. As my colleague MG Siegler wrote at the time, Google controls less than 1,000 patents, which is low compared to some of its competitors. Google currently owns 701 patents in total whereas Microsoft was granted 3,121 patents last year. Unfortunately, because Google doesn’t own a large number of patents, the company will continue to be vulnerable to patent lawsuits.”

    tags: google patent lawyers

  • Five Things to expect from the Amazon Android Kindle tablet | ZDNet

    “OK, enough is enough. While I don’t have any hard facts that anyone from Amazon will officially tell me, here’s what my sources have been telling me to expect. What I’m telling you here is from people both inside Amazon and from Amazon’s partners. Some of it may be wrong. I’m sure though that the broad picture is correct.”

    tags: amazon android tablet

  • How to move your Facebook photos to Google+ | How To – CNET

    “As a Google+ newbie, you might be wondering how to get all of your photos from your previous obsession (Facebook) to the latest spectacle, Google+. Facebook went on the defensive recently when users tried to export their friend lists to Google+ for easy adding. Facebook blocked the service, leaving us users to fend for ourselves. Well, listen, Facebook: you can take my friends, but you can’t take my photos.”

    tags: facebook google photos

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

A July Saturday in Camden, ME

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Bob Sutor

This last weekend my wife Judith and I visited some friends in Maine and we spent a good part of Saturday in, around, and above Camden, Maine. We shopped, we ate, we sailed, we drove to the top of a mountain, and we had great lobster rolls. Here are some photos from the trip.

Some trip data:

Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011 Photo from a visit to Camden, ME, in July, 2011

Posted in Travel | Tagged | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/12/2011

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/07/2011

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/06/2011

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Apple passes RIM in U.S. smartphone share — Apple News, Tips and Reviews

    “Apple’s iOS is now the number two smartphone platform in the U.S., according to market research firm comScore. Apple rose to second place during the three-month period ending in May, up 1.4 percentage points to 26.6 percent of total U.S. market share. Android was the only other platform that gained share of smartphone subscribers during the quarter, growing 5.1 percentage points to 38.1 percent of the total pool and retaining its number one spot among mobile operating systems. All other major players besides Android and iOS lost share, with Research in Motion taking the hardest hit with a 4.2 percentage point drop for its BlackBerry OS, while Microsoft and Palm each shed 1.9 and 0.4 percent respectively.”

    tags: RIM apple ios mobile

  • The HP TouchPad’s best feature? Linux under the hood | ITworld

    “It’s a strong testament to the power of Linux that HP has chosen WebOS as the platform for many upcoming phones, tablets, printers and PCs. WebOS is, of course, based on Linux, and its official launch on HP’s new TouchPad this week marks its official debut in the tablet space.”

    tags: HP webos tablet

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/03/2011

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • OpenAvatar could help avoid vendor lock-in, improve appearance – Hypergrid Business

    “The recently-released OpenAvatar kit for open source avatars could help enterprise users of virtual worlds reduce vendor lock-in and, eventually, lead to significant improvements in the appearance of avatars, VastPark CEO Bruce Joy told Hypergrid Business. VastPark is an Australian immersive environment vendor that has both commercial and open source versions of its virtual environment software. The OpenAvatar kit is designed to add a level of abstraction between the virtual environment server and the avatar itself, and can be adopted by any virtual environment that uses mesh avatars.”

    tags: avatar virtual-world

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 07/02/2011

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Readers Poll: The Greatest Bruce Springsteen Songs: | Rolling Stone Music | Photos

    “Last weekend we gave our readers the challenge of picking their single favorite Bruce Springsteen song. It’s not an easy decision. Do you go for an iconic song like “Born To Run,” or a slightly lesser known (but equally brilliant) track like “Backstreets”? Do you pick a rocker like “Rostalita (Come Out Tonight)” or a quiet, acoustic track like “Atlantic City”? Our readers went for all of the above. Click through to see the winners.”

    tags: bruce springsteen music

  • Google Chrome hits 20% global share as Microsoft continues browser slide

    “Google Chrome’s rise in popularity has been remarkably fast and it’s just hit a new milestone: more than 20% of all browser usage, according to StatCounter. Chrome rose from only 2.8% in June 2009 to 20.7% worldwide in June 2011, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer fell from 59% to 44% in the same time frame. Firefox dropped only slightly in the past two years, from 30% to 28%.”

    tags: google chrome

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Photos from the garden, end of June, 2011

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Bob Sutor

Yesterday at lunch I wandering outside to see how the various plants were doing in the gardens around the house. Because of the generally cool and wet weather this spring, we are several weeks behind where we would normally be at the end of June / beginning of July here in upstate New York, climate zone 5b. Here are some images of what is blooming and what is almost ready to do so.

Photo from the garden in upstate NY, end of June, 2011 Photo from the garden in upstate NY, end of June, 2011 Photo from the garden in upstate NY, end of June, 2011 Photo from the garden in upstate NY, end of June, 2011 Photo from the garden in upstate NY, end of June, 2011 Photo from the garden in upstate NY, end of June, 2011

Posted in Home | Tagged | Comments Off

Monthly disclaimer

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Bob Sutor

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.

Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.

Posted in Website | Tagged | Comments Off

Daily links for 06/30/2011

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Kitchen Window: July Fourth Barbecue From America’s Melting Pot : NPR

    “And sometimes the embrace is more like a bear hug. Giddau’s lambburgers are still a favorite on my family’s grill, but these days, so is Greek-style chicken marinated in oregano and lemon, spicy Spanish chorizo and clams and big, fat German wurst. It’s true that justice is one of our most treasured values. But I think even Giddau would agree that nothing says “United States of America” like a grill that pops and sizzles with flavors from around the world.”

    tags: NPR barbecue america

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

Daily links for 06/29/2011

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • After OpenOffice and Hudson, will Oracle stick with open source? | Open Source Software – InfoWorld

    “With Hudson and OpenOffice, Oracle concluded there was no meaningful revenue at risk in donating the projects but that both efforts still had indirect value, Rymer says. By pushing them off to Eclipse and Apache, Oracle could continue to influence them, he asserts, without having to take on the cultural struggles: “Oracle sees Eclipse, Apache, and IBM as having a good feel for open source politics and communications.”"

    tags: openoffice hudson oracle ibm

  • What’s new in WebSphere Application Server V8

    “IBM® WebSphere® Application Server V8 is a major release that offers dramatic run time improvements, plus simpler and easier ways to develop and deploy applications. This article presents a high level glimpse of some of the new technical features and enhancements that make these improvements possible. This content is part of the IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal.”

    tags: websphere ibm

  • Did the lights just dim? IBM WebSphere V8 Released

    “IBM has released WebSphere V8, increasing the availability of application servers with support for JEE 6, which is very important.”

    tags: websphere ibm

  • Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror

    “Today, however, a new platform shift is taking place.  In 2011, for the first time, smartphone and tablet shipments exceed those of desktop and notebook shipments (source: Mary Meeker, KPCB, see slide 7).  This move means a new generation of consumers expects their smartphones and tablets to come with instant broadband connectively so they, too, can connect to the Internet.”

    tags: mobile

  • Eclipse Foundation’s Indigo Release Empowers Java Developers – Desktops and Notebooks – News & Reviews – eWeek.com

    “The Eclipse Foundation’s Indigo release train marks the eighth year in a row that Eclipse has shipped a coordinated release of projects, with this year’s focus on the Java developer. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said 62 project teams participated in Indigo. The Indigo release, which shipped June 22, had 46 million lines of code released on the same day (calculated by Ohloh), 408 developers (committers) contributed code and 49 organizations collaborated on the release, Eclipse officials said. Ten predefined packages enable easy download and use, they explained.”

    tags: eclipse indigo java developers

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off

European WebSphere Technical Conference in Berlin

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Bob Sutor

IBM has announced the European WebSphere Technical Conference for 2011. The conference will be held from October 10th to the 14th in Berlin, Germany. From the website:

The 2011 IBM European WebSphere Technical Conference, which combines the WebSphere and Transaction & Messaging Conferences of the previous years into one seamless agenda, is a 4.5 day event held 10-14 October 2011 in Berlin, Germany.

This conference has earned the reputation for delivering deep technical content targeted at architects, developers, integrators and administrators by offering lectures and hands-on labs that focus on the best practices and practical skills required to run today’s enterprises. This year will be no exception!

Attend the WebSphere Technical Conference and expand your knowledge of SOA, CICS, Messaging, WebSphere Application Servers and Infrastructure, including a focus on BPM and Cloud Computing. You can also expect to gain insight into IBM’s software strategy and learn about the latest development directions for the products in the WebSphere software platform.

Posted in Software | Tagged | Comments Off

ApacheCon North America 2011 theme announced

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Bob Sutor

I just received this news from the folks at the Apache Software Foundation:

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced “Open Source Enterprise Solutions, Cloud Computing, and Community Leadership” as the theme for ApacheCon North America.

ApacheCon is the ASF’s official conference, trainings, and expo, created to explore key issues in using and developing Open Source solutions “The Apache Way”. This year’s event takes place 7-11 November 2011 at the Westin Bayshore Vancouver, Canada, with early registration incentives available through 2 September 2011.

I keynoted at this conference last year and it is definitely worth your consideration for attendance. You can learn more at the ApacheCon website.

Posted in Open Source | Tagged | Comments Off

Daily links for 06/23/2011

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Bob Sutor

  • Firefox 5 released, arrives only three months after Firefox 4

    “Mozilla has launched Firefox 5, a new version of the popular open source Web browser. This is the first update that Mozilla has issued since adopting a new release management strategy that has drastically shortened the Firefox development cycle.”

    tags: firefox

  • Groklaw – Oracle v. Google – Updating the Reexams – UPDATED

    “Oracle has experienced another setback in its assertion of its patents against Google. In the reexamination of U.S. Patent 6192476 the USPTO has issued an office action in which it rejects 17 of the patent’s 21 claims. The specifics of the office action are set forth below in text form along with an updated reexamination history. While Oracle has asserted seven different patents in its claims against Google, if this reexamination is exemplary of what Oracle can expect in each of the other reexaminations, Oracle will have a hard time finding claims that it can successfully assert against Google, and there lies Oracles conundrum. Oracle either has to agree with the court’s directive to limit the number of claims it will assert at trial, or it is likely the court will simply stay the trial until the reexaminations are complete.”

    tags: oracle google android

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted in Daily Links | Comments Off