Informal Brain

The Panic Guys build an amazing project status board using CSS/HTML and display a bunch of internal stats about each project. They reported that it provided an amazing degree of collaboration they never had before because all the information was always in view and held each team accountable. Some of the the most important numbers are at the top where the support queue depths are displayed at all times. The middle shows project due dates and currently assigned members. The bottom shows key metrics and bus schedules when it is time to go home. A very nice idea!

[From Panic Blog » The Panic Status Board]

Wired Top Stories

via It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility.

It’s official.  Google is on its way to being Enron…

I must admit I have not been a big fan of Microsoft for some time now. They just haven’t been creating much innovation in my mind.

But in the past couple of months I have seen some real innovation out of the software giant:

Take Windows 7 Phone:

“A phone is just not a PC. It’s a smaller, more intimate device.”

[From The Official Microsoft Blog – News and Perspectives from Microsoft : Weekend Reading for Feb 20/21: Windows Phone 7 Series called, and the world said…..]

Take the Unified Access Gateway:

A really nice multi function smart proxy, SSL VPN concentrator and the connection point for Direct Access. The best feature is Direct Access which lets your remote PCs act like part of your domain even when a user is not logged into the console. Have you ever dreamed of pushing software updates to a phone sitting on a remote worker’s desk over the internet? Now you can…

Take the Outlook Social Connector:

Done right, the Outlook Social connector might just change the way we share and discover information in the enterprise. Think of a way to quickly discover details about that person who was CC’d on that email you just received, or learn more about that person who just joined your project team. Cool…

Take Exchange 2010:

Real high availability solutions packaged in a way which make them easy to deploy without a bunch of complex configuration, and to top it all off it works across data centers too! Whoa?

Tried the Outlook Social Connector Beta today with Linked In. Very nice functionality. I will be interested to see what they do with the new SharePoint Social Connector add-in. Waiting…

SIRI enhances mobile search with intelligent links to web services APIs. It provides context based on user preferences and location to bring you targeted search and help performing day to day tasks.

See the link below where Mr. Scoble provides a short interview with the founders:

building43

via A new personal assistant on your mobile phone.

Typically when competition is created in the market prices tend to decrease, but in this case Amazon had such a stranglehold on the market that monopolistic forces were at play. In a strange move Apple’s introduction of the iPad increases eBook prices. I suspect this will only be a temporary effect until Apple begins to also squeeze the publishers to lower costs.

Amazon and publisher Macmillan finalized their agreement for higher-priced e-books over the weekend. The deal is expected to serve as a template for other publishers, and the new prices should take effect in March, when Apple’s iPad goes on sale.

[From AppleInsider | Higher Amazon e-book prices expected to coincide with iPad launch]

Finally, OSX has lost the grey top and we have blue! It looks so much better…

Thanks Chrome team!

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the change was short lived. Back to drab gray :*(

UPDATE:  Season 3 is now on iTunes!!!  Yeah!

Strange things afoot. For some reason Season 3 of Chuck is strangely missing from Itunes. The bizarre thing is Chuck is produced by WB but shown on NBC.

Come on NBC let’s get Chuck up on iTunes already?

victim++;

http://toadbalancing.blogspot.com/2005/10/java-api-pitfalls-booleangetbooleanstr.html

Wow, I just wasted some serious time trying to figure out why a property for my google wave robot always ended up false.

Then I learned about the difference between Boolean.getBoolean(String) and Boolean.valueOf(String)….

Do you know the difference? Save yourself hours Ouch.

I have downloaded the Google Chrome OS virtual machine image and fired it up in Parallels on my Mac. While somewhat underwhelming perhaps that is its best feature. When I think of my mom as a use case this would be a perfect solution. She has already embraced gmail, google calendar, google docs and picasa.

All of her data is in the cloud today except her photos. What will be interesting to see is how google enables digital cameras and the cloud. Perhaps a diect upload to Picasa, with a new online photo editor? This will be something to watch.

For example if you fire up Chrome OS in a Virtual Machine you and you insert a camera card into the internal reader on the iMac the ChromeOS shows a new panel with the the mounted filesystem:

You can then reference this mounted filesystem in Gmail or Gtalk for example.  I suspect we will see advanced tools where the web system auto detects the content on the flash card as a Photo Card and imports directly.  Imagine a web version of Picasa for example.