Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Feedster now supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Bing! [Scripting News] 9:29:05 PM    comment [] My Favorite Firefox Extensions. Among the many reasons why Firefox is superior to Internet Explorer is its use of extensions, add-ins that give it all kinds of cool new features. There are a lot of them out there, but here are some of my favorites. [O'Reilly Weblogs] 9:28:18 PM    comment [] VMware ACE, I like it and use it. VMware have just announced ACE, this is how they describe it: VMware ACE is an enterprise solution for IT desktop managers who want to rapidly provision standardized and secure PC environments throughout the extended enterprise. VMware ACE installs easily, improving the manageability, security and cost-effectiveness of any industry standard PC. VMware ACE enables IT desktop managers to apply enterprise IT policies to a virtual machine containing an operating system, enterprise applications, and data to create an isolated PC environment known as an "assured computing environment". VMware assured computing environments are self-policing, protect enterprise data, and enable safe access to enterprise resources. I like the idea, I have been using VMWare myself for exactly this requirement.  On one of my home servers that sits on my home network I have a Windows XP VM, configured with corporate firewall, AV products, locked down configuration and VPN client.  I use this VM to connect to the company network.  This has two advantages, The company network is pretty well isolated from my home network and I am well isolated from it, (since its pretty big and represents a fairly large threat).  I would prefer to be able to just fire up a Windows Terminal Server session over the internet when I need to get into work, but until that's possible this solution works fine. VMWare are taking the same concept, making it slicker and putting some controls in place that in my implementation depend on my self discipline :-) [Adventures in home working] 4:59:00 PM    comment [] The more data you have, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why have data?. Microsoft Researchers have an answer for this old, slightly twisted riddle. They've put together a nifty interface that will find all the data on your PC that you need, be it email, documents, tablet notes or spreadsheets. You can find all the data that people have sent to you, all the Web pages you've ever seen, and all the attachments you've ever forgotten to save. Its called Stuff I've seen and you can read about it here. It's an important concept in Personal Knowledge Management.  I personally have been using X1 for about 6 months and also use Lookout to search my RSS feeds.  I find the two incredibly useful and routinely find things now that I would never have tried to even find before.  The level of re-use I am now achieving is significantly greater.  I figure these tools probably save me an hour a week, that's a very impressive ROI, and X1/Lookout don't do everything that Microsoft are promising. There is a downside though, I suspect that these capabilities will only work best when the products your use to create, manipulate, views and store the data all come from Microsoft.  Not suprisingly the Open Source community are not ignoring this requirement with products like Chandler and Haystack offering a simillar long term vision. One of the interesting twists to this debate is whether its possible to seperate Work and Home when it comes to data, when you think it through, people you know, places you go, your calendar what you read all have personal and business aspects.  This is a topic that I have started to discuss under the heading of Consumerization, where work and home mix. [Adventures in home working] 4:48:13 PM    comment [] Free 96-page report details benefits of Open Source software. Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) has published a 96-page report on Open Source software and its potential benefits to business and government. This whitepaper provides an introduction to the report and its findings. [OSNews] 4:37:31 PM    comment [] OpenOffice: A legal Trojan horse--but for whom?. The Internet went all abuzz last week when a report by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posited that Microsoft was keeping open its legal options against licensees of OpenOffice.org. Commonly known as OpenOffice, the software is a freely downloadable open source productivity suite that constitutes a significant portion of Sun's commercially offered StarOffice. It also exemplifies the threat that the open-source movement poses to Microsoft. [OSNews] 4:36:31 PM    comment [] NetNewsWire 2.0 Beta and MarsEdit Released [MacSlash] 4:19:05 PM    comment [] Nintendo and Sony Square Off in Handheld Game Market. Sony and Nintendo made separate product announcements ahead of the highly competitive holiday shopping season. By By REUTERS. [The New York Times > Technology] 2:23:33 PM    comment []

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