Top 10 business technologies of 2010 – really?

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Analysts at Gartner yesterday attempted to look into the future to guess what would be making the biggest impacts on businesses in 2010, as it revealed the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010.

Technologies to make the top ten include Client Computing (think virtualisation, again), Social Computing (personal and work time will mix, darn it) and, rather less exotically, Flash Memory.

Meanwhile, Gartner also points to the rise in mobile apps, stating that despite the plethora of applications for platforms such as the iPhone, it predicts a newer version with identical operating system interface and processor architecture.

But can we trust Gartner to predict the future? (more…)

Sorry, Windows, but where’s the PDF reader?

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Sometimes life throws up its little ironies, and while they don’t necessarily make you laugh out loud they do cause the corner of your mouth to curl slightly into a grin and an eyebrow to rise just a bit. Today was one such occasion.

As a Mac user I’m told that one of the disadvantages I suffer is that I don’t have access to industry standard software or the sheer range of applications PC users enjoy. The fact that I’ve never, not once, been unable to find software to help me achieve whatever I’ve needed to is immaterial.

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Can Windows 7 convert a Mac user?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

So PC Pro has set me a challenge. As a Mac user since system 6, as someone who’s stuck by Apple through two major architecture shifts, does Windows 7 have what it takes to lure me into the land of the IBM-compatible PC?

For the next month I’m putting away my Macs to use Microsoft Windows 7. For the record, I do use Windows XP on a monthly basis, but it’s never tempted me to sell on my MacBook. I’ve used Vista fleetingly, and have to say I’m surprised at the bad press it’s received, but again it wouldn’t encourage me to drop the Mac OS.

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Help me choose my next PC case

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

I know there’s a while to go yet, but I’m beginning to think about Christmas – and, specifically, what I’m going to do about my ailing PC over the holiday period.

It’s in bad shape. The chassis is an decrepit Cooler Master model that has no screws holding the sides on and, since I rescued it from the PC Pro Labs, not all of the components inside are actually secured properly: the two hard disks lie uncomfortably in their drive bays, and the optical drive isn’t attached to the 5.25in bay, either; instead, it merely balances between the bay and the front of the chassis and  has to be physically pulled towards the front of the system to be used.

Obviously, this brings numerous disadvantages, with the rattling and reverberating of the hard disks and optical drive meaning that my system isn’t exactly quiet. The lack of cable-tidying means that it’s an ugly PC to look at and difficult to work inside, too, which has made life tricky when I’ve upgraded components in the past.

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First Look: Dell PowerEdge R510 rackmount server

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Announced last Friday, a Dell PowerEdge R510 mid to low-end rackmount server has landed with a light-ish thud in my corporate testbed facility. I might be joking about the corporate testbed, but I’m not joking about the lightness: having just seen the bruises fade away after shifting my stock of HP LP2000Rs (by donating them to the London Cycle Campaign), it was a major relief to be able to carry and unpack the R510 without cups of tea for the battered-shins posse, cursing, and fresh dents in the back of the estate car.

Comparing the R510 with the old machines is hard, because the simple physical similarity wrongfoots you when you actually absorb the statistics. I gave away 5 LP2000R’s – the virtual machine images of them all would fit, and run, inside the R510 without complaint, and use rather less than half of the current required by just one LP2000R.

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Stephen Gately, tube workers and the power of Twitter

Monday, October 19th, 2009

This weekend saw a fascinating display of the influence of social networking, and how it harnessed its power to unify – and arguably lead – people to rally together against wrongdoing.

Events kicked off on Friday morning when the Daily Mail published an article by one of its columnists, Jan Moir, on the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately last weekend, in which she claims there was “nothing natural”  about the circumstances of the gay singer’s demise, and that Gately’s death struck a blow to the “happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.”

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Windows 7: the licensing mess continues

Monday, October 19th, 2009

There’s a fabulous new document on Microsoft TechNet entitled “The 10 Things to Do First for Windows 7″, which is an excellent checklist on what you need to think about doing in your organisation before you move to Windows 7.

I was particularly thrilled to read “Section 3: Plow through licensing”.

Now maybe I am just being a stick-in-the-mud, and I accept it is a Monday morning and I have a headache, but my headache is made worse by reading this:

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Mollom: What’s in a Name?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Regular readers will know that I am a major fan of Belgian developer Dries Buytaert,  the man behind Drupal. Drupal is the most powerful open source content management system and IMHO deserves to replace Dreamweaver as the web designer’s tool of choice. In fact, as far I am concerned, the major factor holding it back from world domination, apart from its precipitous learning curve, is its name. Let’s face it “Drupal” (pronounced “droople”) sounds old, ugly, gloomy and deflating. It’s almost perversely uninspiring. “Dreamweaver” it ain’t.

Now I’ve come across a brand name that’s possibly even worse… (more…)

The perils of auto-patching

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I have a rackmounted server in a data center some 50 miles away from me in Huntingdon. It’s a lights-out operation, and I can’t remember the last time I visited the server in person. Everything just works through Terminal Services.

The server has been humming along quite happily for a number of years, which is why it’s running Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, sez I.

With such a remote server, you have a hard choice to make – do you set it to auto-update when Microsoft issues new patches, or do you bring them down to a local machine, check them out and then apply them yourself, preferably waiting a few days to see if others have problems?

Well, I would always advocate a managed patch implementation for a local network – it can dramatically reduce the download of updates to multiple identical machines, and gives you, the sysadmin, control over when updates are applied. This can be critically important to the business workflow, of course.
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My favourite Android apps

Thursday, October 15th, 2009