Humans are extremely visual animals and phenomenally good at matching patterns. Therefore it follows that if you want to engage your audience, get your message across quickly, or make something memorable, using a graphical technique is going to be far more effective than text or sound.
Synchronizing files between multiple machines is one of the perennial problems that won't go away. Usually you wind up creating CIFS shares and copying files to and from drives or using FTP servers as repositories. The problem with CIFS shares is that getting them to work beyond the local network requires tools such as VPNs, while FTP servers require FTP clients that just add another layer of complexity.
Today I want to berate Web applications developers: Ladies and gentlemen, why do you not pay attention to the damn obvious when you let your creations loose on the world?
A few weeks ago I wrote about GoGrid, purveyors of a grid (or cloud or utility) computing service. To recap, GoGrid is a cloud computing service that provides a Web interface through which you instantiate and manage load balancers, servers, and databases such that you can scale up or down as your needs dictate. The operating systems supported are CentOS, Red Hat, and Windows 2003 and GoGrid takes pains to make it clear is that these are not altered in any way to be compatible with its grid system.
A large number of you checked out the test calendar I set up for the recent newsletter on a free scheduling service called When is Good. The only common complaint was that WIG doesn't allow you to specify a time window; it only permits time to be selected in intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes or whole days.
With the explosion of digital photography and it's impact on Web applications (for storage and display a well as social networking) there are a lot of opportunities for new tools and services to make managing and tracking images faster and more effective.
How many times have you tried to arrange a meeting between a group of people and as a result found yourself in the middle of an e-mail storm as everyone responds with their own constraints that you have to correlate to find the best fit. The answer to your problem might well be a really clever Web application called When Is Good.
A major market driver that is emerging is the need to intelligently reduce the flood of comments and news that any consumer of news feeds, Twitter, blogs and so on has to deal with if they aim to have any kind of grasp on what their markets and constituents are talking and thinking about.
Readers of this newsletter and my Gearhead column will be well aware that I am a big fan of Twitter the microblogging engine - a mechanism for posting messages up to 140 characters each. Your messages can be part of the public message stream or restricted to only your friends. As a Twitter user you can "follow" other users. This means that you see their "tweets" (the term for a Twitter message). They may or not follow you.
Way back in the mists of time - January this year to be exact - in my Backspin column I wrote about Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) and its practice of "front running." Given that NSI charges $34.99 for a one year registration while many other registrars charge under $10 for more or less the same service means that NSI is performing something not entirely dissimilar to highway robbery ("your money or your domain name!").
My focus today is a content creation system that produces very good video presentations with very little effort - in other words and in theory even the least media skilled user can put together a presentation that looks almost professional without breaking a sweat with Animoto.
Of all of the industries that have been transformed by the Internet one of the slowest to change has been the real estate industry. It is also, arguably, one of the most in need of change.
In the marketplace of virtual online worlds the 800 pound gorilla is, without doubt, Second Life. But they don't own the market as much as feature as the poster child. The consequence of that is a small crowd of wannabe's who have their sights on taking a shot at some kind of market ownership.
I recently moved my e-mail services from one provider to another (a saga that I'll relate some other time) and in the process reorganized my e-mail accounts. One of the key things that happened in the migration was that my list of aliases was lost (thanks to my now ex-mail service provider), so I instituted a "catchall" account. I figured I could just examine the target e-mail addresses to recreate my rather lengthy list of pseudonyms that I'd built up over the last few years.
Over the last few weeks Twitter's scalability problems have been much discussed. Ranging from service downtime, through significant delays in handling message traffic ("tweets"), to features being disabled for hours at a time Twitter has gone from microblogging category owner to potential also-ran.
One of the tricky parts about building and launching a Web Application is hosting. It is one thing to test out your creation with 200 or 300 users, but if you turn it loose and suddenly find yourself with a runaway hit and are adding 1,000 or even 100,000 users per hour what are you going to do?
RSS feeds were one of the transformative developments of the Web - as a way of accessing news they allowed you to aggregate multiple feeds into one end user interface rather than having to visit each site separately and browse their content individually.
If you have to present data to other people it can be hard to find the right kind of dynamic graph or chart to get your point across either on the Web or in a live presentation.
Document sharing has become crucial in just about everybody's business life, but while you can share documents via services such as e-mail there are always the issues of whether the recipient can receive files beyond a certain size, whether the file can be provided when needed, whether everyone has the latest version, and so on.
Today I have a tool that all serious Firefox users will want: Advanced Dork. Advanced Dork is a simple but very effective idea. Google has a list of advanced search query operators, but most of us only remember two or three of them.
If you are trying to track what's hot on a real time basis then you have to check out Summize. Summize automatically analyzes the blogosphere, reviews portals (such as Amazon), and Twitter to identify trends and the sentiments associated with postings.
I have what seems to be a permanent headache. I have been looking at an incredible range and number of Web applications in the last few weeks, and in this newsletter I'd like to make a plea to all Web applications publishers and developers: Please, please, please check that your product works properly!
I have discussed online forms systems many times and for a good reason: They keep getting better. And just when I think that there's a "best" system, along comes another that tops the last. So it won't surprise you to hear that I've found the best Web form system to date - Frevvo.
Much of the drive behind social networking is the desire to see and be seen. The problem is that typical video conferencing applications have to be installed, and therein lies the problem. No matter how excited the person you want to video conference with might be, undergoing the typical download, install, configure - and if you're on Windows most likely reboot - cycle takes the spontaneity out of the whole deal. Not so with Tokbox a video conferencing service launched late last year that is now finding its legs.
OK, it's official. I love Neiman Marcus! At least, I love their customer service. For Christmas '06 my wife gave me this cool desktop weather station that Neiman Marcus was selling. It's a retro kind of design - a dome that houses a thermometer, hygrometer, and barometer - that looks almost steampunkish. Anyway, this device sat on my desk for a few months before I noticed that the barometer hardly moved. So, in the middle of last year I called Neiman Marcus and requested a replacement as the device had obviously never worked properly.
Network Applications Buyer's Guides These guides cover more than a half-dozen topics to give you information, insight, and comparisons on the latest in software
applications and related technologies.
Comprehensive Network & Voice Management Visit CA Network & Voice Management Resource Center and get insights into industry best practices, information that helps you to address your challenges.
Voice over IP (VoIP) has much to offer in cost savings but some customers have concerns about VoIP call quality compared to the quality of traditional voice services. This white paper will help you learn how to take the right steps so that voice quality is assured.
Managing your network is serious business. This paper discusses the benefits of integrating configuration change-awareness into your network fault management solution
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