Time for a technology posting! A dearth of meetings on my calendar today gave me a chance to catch up, and then to go and read some of my favorite RSS feeds and troll for some useful perspectives on where computing is heading. I’m more and more convinced that the SaaS (software as a service) industry is going to make it this time (unlike the first Internet boom of the late 1990’s). Physical infrastructure is more robust, connectivity is better, and application architectures are much more sophisticated and capable. One thing that caught my eye today was a cloud computing blog posting that referenced a great article on Cloud-Based Memory Architectures. I think that this is really where things have been headed for a while, we just didn’t realize it. Need performance? Big disk arrays with more cache. Hold indexes in memory. Are you I/O bound in your app? Odds are, yes…I’ve seen that time and time again, even when I thought from looking at the system performance tools that I was not I/O bound. Anyway, the article referenced above is a great set of thoughts and links on this subject. It’s a long read, but if you are interested in application architectures, it’s worth it.

How do I see this trend affecting computing at organizations like mine, UNCG? I think that we’ll see more applications moved to the cloud, not just for cost savings in hardware and support staff, but for performance. With big pipes we can consolidate in ways that leverage business/organizational scalability, and by moving to applications where the canonical copy of the data is in memory, not disk, we’ll gain substantial performance benefits. We need to be prepared to continue to move applications away from our own machine rooms. As this develops, though, it will be interested to see how issues surrounding security and backup will be handled…

It’s been about 3 weeks since I got my Blackberry. Overall, I’m quite happy (see my earlier post), but there is one thing that really annoys me — the GPS! A little bit of googling and a trip to the forums at crackberry.com will convince you of the weirdness that’s out there. There are OS issues. There are application issues. There are carrier issues…gee, how hard can it be to make it work? The carriers seem intent on figuring out how to incrementally monetize use of GPS. Here is one place where the monoline strategy that Apple used with the iPhone & AT&T does make sense; it means that they can offer a more consistent user experience on functions like this.

I think that I’ve more or less figured out how to make my GPS work with the BlackBerry maps app — if the GPS lock is taking too long, pop the battery, but wait long enough to drain the capacitors before reinserting the battery. This hard reset seems to improve things dramatically, but you should not have to do that! Must be some really buggy code in there. There does not, from what I’ve seen, seem to be any consistency about which “point release” of the 4.5 OS that you are running and the impact on this. Oh well, the other apps work well, and it makes a great phone…

I’m spending a bit of time trying to parse out how all the various common social networking services interconnect as I try to be a better “social webber” 😉 . Let’s see…Facebook gets updates from Friendfeed…I have Flickr connected to Facebook and Friendfeed? Hmmm…OK, Picasa is also connected to Friendfeed. Now, let’s bring in Youtube. I’ve got my Twitter updates going to Facebook (as well as my “home” page; IM status changes through Friendfeed. I have an RSS feed from this blog going to Friendfeed. Gee, looks like I’m updating myself. I have not been as good about publishing stuff as I could be. I try to make sure that the things I do and say follow the rules of decorum (I’ve had a personal website for over 15 years now, and believe I’ve figured out the right amount of information to “leak out” about myself) and have a reasonable degree of content, adding some measure of worth to the ether. I try to keep my social presence and professional presence reasonably separate. Not easy, tho!

While I’m “over the hill” in web years, I’ve tried to stay abreast of the technologies both from how various sites are rendered to at least a basic understanding of the plumbing underneath them (though I haven’t done serious coding in much too long). My message is that this stuff weaves a tangled web that is challenging to follow even for someone like myself who has spent a career in complex technical systems. It’s incredibly powerful, but at the same time non-trivial to understand.

Now, let’s see…what connections do I want to have to my LinkedIn profile 😉 ?

Tech pundit Mark Gibbs was stumped with a mailware issue. He wrote about this in his blog on Dec. 17th 2008. He had a problem on one of his boxes that would not yield to the tools he’d tried. Back in early 2008, I’d discovered a tool that worked well for me (see this post from 2/24/2008). I passed along a suggestion that worked for him; you can read his post here, referencing both the problem and the success!

I think that this article caught my eye, as I was (this past November) the planning committee chair of a statewide university technology conference. The expectations of conference attendees are high, and rapidly growing higher in terms of connectivity expectations. Pervasive wireless (for hundreds or thousands of devices) is expected, as is a much greater need for specialized connectivity (high bandwidth and/or low latency). For the recent UNC CAUSE, we brought in a parallel network, including ‘net connection, routers, switches and wireless access points. It worked flawlessly. Back in 2004, though, we tried to leverage the hotel network (different location, same conference) and the network failed miserably under the load. Even non-techie conferences have a high “carry rate” of wifi enabled devices these days. We want our connectivity!

I am totally enthusiastic about Google’s new video chat feature. It’s browser-based, with no install other than the CODEC browser plugin. The audio and video quality is outstanding. I’m thinking that this may finally be the catalyst to bring videoconferencing to the masses. I’ve been a proponent of ad hoc video for a long while, but H.323 and SIP clients have a heavy footprint, have issues with NAT/firewall traversal, and have often had a high price point. Apple’s iChat brought great video chat to the Mac community in 2005, but that was not cross platform. Sure, Skype, etc. have offered interoperable video, but not at the quality of the Google offering. Great job, Google!