Today it was reported that a female TTC bus driver was found to be driving under the influence. A passenger on her bus became concerned about the erratic driving and called 911. Now, TTC drivers are known for their terrible, uncourteous driving, so for a passenger to become concerned, there must have been serious alcohol issues present. What blows me away however, is that the driver has only been given a 3 day suspension. Yes, you heard right. This woman, responsible for the lives of hundreds of passengers each day, endangers her passengers by DUI, and only gets a 3 day suspension. You and I would undoubtedly receive much harsher treatment.

Not only do we have TTC bus drivers endangering hundreds of people through DUI, we have them sleeping on the job, showing complete lack of respect for their public position. You and I would be fired for sleeping on the job as blatantly as the collector involved in the scandal that brought the public eye to bear on the TTC.

These scandals, combined with the recent sex scandal involving the TTC commissioner, highlight the fact that the TTC simply isn’t capable of self-governance. Despite promises of change, we have more scandals. They keep raising fares to balance books, and fail to provide anything in return. Service levels do not improve. In the end, we pay them twice. We pay the fare, and then we pay the balance of their books through our taxes.

These scandals also highlight another issue. The protection that the individuals involved have received is simply rediculous. This is a problem with a powerful union. Unions were designed to protect innocent workers. However, once a union gets a taste of the legal power they’ve been granted here, they begin to abuse their position. The TTC union needs to be broken. These overpaid, rude, lazy, and now negligent drivers need to taught how the real world works outside a union. We need better leadership, and external governance of the TTC, as they’ve proven incapable of it themselves.

Related posts:

1. A Sad Day for Toronto

Let me start off by laying out what I believe are the three tiers of cloud computing. I believe that cloud computing consists of hosted services (IBM), hosted applications (VMWare, Citrix), and hosted storage/data. This contrasts with internal services (SharePoint, Exchange), internal applications (MS Office, Adobe Acrobat), and internal data (File server). The internal computing may be run on virtualized servers, or on their dedicated boxes. In my opinion, businesses are concerned firstly with security regarding hosted documents/storage layer, secondly web services, and thirdly, most open to hosted web applications.

We are seeing a shift away from applications run on local machines to run on a server and/or virtualized (Citrix, VMWare). These applications tie into the internal services and storage. We are also seeing a shift away from local and/or virtualized applications to web applications. While not all applications can be run as hosted applications (Multimedia applications, lab machines, etc), most of the basic productivity apps are able to be run online or on a VPN server. Web applications (whether hosted or run internally) tie into the company’s services. These services in turn create mountains of data to be stored. Where does the data get stored? Should companies use hosted storage or should they use internal storage? If they want internal storage, they are going to have to create a framework infrastructure to dump this data internally, whether it be from web services or from hosted/web applications. There is no competing with the onslaught of hosted applications. Some are transitioning to web applications, but most (if not all) will be transitioning from local to being hosted.

Here’s a brief synopsis of what companies are offering what (in my model of a three tier system):

• Vmware vCloud – virtualized hosted apps, tie into internal infrastructure, thinapps
• Microsoft Azure- hosted services, storage, web applications
• Cisco VN- virtualized apps, network
• Citrix – hosted apps
• IBM – hosted services

Let’s move to the next tier, the web services layer. This layer provides services such as email or forums (Microsoft Exchange Online, Drupal, Joomla, IBM services). I would argue that it also includes web serving services as well. The problem with this layer is that this is where more and more malicious apps are being targeted. Microsoft recently did a study that showed that malicious apps are targeted more and more at the browser or specific apps. They target the authentication component of the web services. If compromised, an attacker can use the information gathered to gain access to the data contained (emails, documents in the document management system). However, with enough security measures, this risk can be mitigated for the most part. 

The other negative to having hosted web services is that your emails and forums are being hosted on someone else’s server. How much this affects your organization is something you have to decide. 

The benefit of hosted services is that the cost to run them is miniscule. Organizations no longer need to employ internal staff to maintain these, and pay a lot less on implementation costs. It also provides arguably better failover services. The benefits are very attractive for organizations. I would argue that competing with hosted web services is a waste of time for the most part.

The third layer is the data storage layer. This is where all your documents are stored. This would include Microsoft SharePoint Online, Live Mesh, or other web storge services. This is critical. Are you willing to have your documents hosted elsewhere? Do you have thousands of employee SSN’s or financial data stored? This is a weighty matter to consider. What about if somehow an employee at the company hosting your data manages to break in. How big is this risk? Are you willing to take it? 

Here is where I see things going:
Government & Financial institutions will likely graduate to hosted applications or web apps, while moving to virtualized services and internal data. VMWare/Cisco will be the big players. Security is paramount, so services will all be virtualized internally.

Medium to Large organizations will move to hosted services, hosted AND virtualized applications, while maintaining data internally. Big players include Microsoft (Azure) and VMWare. Cisco will also play a fairly large role. The employees will be working from home/remotely more frequently, as well as have intermittent (flights, dialup, etc) internet outages, so offline virtualization is more important.

Small to Medium organizations will graduate to hosted or virtualized applications, hosted services, and hosted data. Big player: Microsoft. The cost outweighs the benefit, so being heavily internet based will be more attractive than maintaining ability to work offline.

Related posts:

1. Merits of Windows Vista

I’d like to start off by saying that I view social networking as a tool to communicate with others, a tool that offers the ability to share both textual and non-textual (e.g. images) information in an efficient multicast (for the non-technical, basically a shotgun blast at everyone), and to receive feedback on that information. This shapes my perspective on how I use tools like Facebook or Twitter, and I thought I’d share a few details on how my social networking experience is affected, and will be affected.

First, because I view Facebook as a tool to communicate textual and non-textual information, I restrict my usage accordingly. I do not play games or add many apps to my profile. The few apps that I have added are utility apps, that pull and share information from other online locations (e.g. Twitter feed). Games and other apps are in my opinion a foolish waste of time, and not information I feel pertinent to my connections.

Second, because sharing on Facebook is a multi-cast or shotgun blast of information, I have implemented some fairly strict permissioning. Very few people are allowed to comment and/or read my wall or feed. Information that I feel is relavent or interesting to a particular group of people will be made available to those individuals. Work connections (sorry to those of you in my work connection groups) will have no access whatsoever to my wall, and very limited commenting abilities. I’m not interested in feedback from most individuals. If they deem it important to provide feedback, they can send me a private communication.

In the end, it comes down to information control. Information that I don’t mind sharing to the world will be done on Twitter. Facebook’s variety of information types are generally more personal, and therefore I feel should be more restricted. I’ve become less and less enchanted with Facebook’s attempt and hypocrisy of sharing all personal data, and this has led me to evaluate how important it is to me, and how it should fit into my life. My connections might find less and less information and commenting abilities being granted to them, but in the long run, my personal information is too important to share willy-nilly with everyone.

Update: You have an image on the Internet. I believe one should be conscientious about what they and others project about themselves on the Internet. Spelling, grammar, images, and textual content (forum posts, signatures, etc. ) all speak volumes about who you are as a person. This is why it is so vital to control the information you share on social networking sites.

Related posts:

1. Work Ethic of IT Contractors
2. Google Wave Robots
3. On Twitter Clients

A feature that very few people seem to have noticed/commented on is the E-mail notification feature. When someone makes a ‘comment’ on an item in your ‘news feed’, you are sent an email notification. What’s particularly interesting is that after you read the E-mail notification, and something else occurs on the same Buzz item, the original email appears to have the time-stamp changed, status set to unread, and the contents of the E-mail itself update dynamically to reflect the latest occurrences on that Buzz item. I have not yet tested whether the time-stamp changes only on IMAP accounts, or whether a similar ‘dynamic’ occurrence happens with POP accounts as well.

This aspect of Buzz intrigues me. I’d venture that this is Google’s first attempt at blurring the lines between Google Wave communication and E-mail. I suspect that once they perfect this technique of seemingly dynamic E-mail reception, the next logical step will be two-way communication from a single E-mail/Wave item.

One other thing intrigues me about Google Buzz. How will it affect Google’s news algorithms?

I think Google Buzz really is an algorithmically beautiful piece of work. The blurring and meshing of website content, Twitter feeds, RSS feeds, all with the ability to custom permission the ability for others to comment on your items. In a world where Facebook’s young leadership are attempting to strong-arm open all communication to public eye, Google seems to realize (after their first few days of dealing with Buzz backlash) that people aren’t ready or willing to open up two-way communication with the entire world.

Related posts:

1. Google Wave
2. Google Wave Robots
3. Technology News

Things like funding. As a startup, there is very little capital to start with. We are pushing VC’s, but they generally wish to see some working demo. The project we are working is extremely complex and multi-faceted. This means we require a fair bit of work to get even basic groundwork in place. I (as the technical oversight) do not have the time (and frankly, for the complexities of some of these items, do not have the necessary coding skills) to produce a quality product (I believe in hiring the people with the most talent to do the best work). My partner is the business person, dealing with VC’s, target-base, and also is the person most effective at communicating our vision to potential lenders. In order to produce something we can take to the VC’s/lenders, we’ve paid a good chunk out of our own pockets.

Things like oversight and communication with the folks building our framework. Our designer(s) and coder(s) have different ways of communication, and different ideas of how to procede. Aligning their goals and sights with ours is at times a complex task. Compensation is another variance that is difficult to deal with as a startup.

Things like personal communication. Both my partner and I (and those working for us) work fulltime jobs, and are working on this as a side project for the time being. Time constraints are frequent, particularly as we both work different shifts, and do not live or work near each other.

Personal enthusiasm. This is mostly my personal struggle. Again, with risks that I can’t tell whether or not things will take off the way we hope, I tend to have a lot more skepticism than enthusiasm. I’m lucky to be working with a partner who by nature is very enthusiastic.

I’ll post updates on my blog as we progress. You may find it to be very relavent to you (or your business).

No related posts.

Microsoft obviously is not going to take the iPad challenge lying down, and will be touting Windows 7 as a more complete experience (Flash anyone?) than the iPad OS. Unfortunately however, I don’t see Windows 7, good as it may be, to be a worthwhile competitor to the iPad, due to the reason outlined above. So what should Microsoft do?

I firmly believe that if Microsoft wants to take on the iPad, it needs to build a tablet from the ground up. They’ve got some great software and hardware engineers (see Windows 7 and Xbox), and should leverage that talent to build a complete Microsoft tablet experience. Integrate it with Zune and Xbox. They’ve got the Zune app store and Xbox download on demand. Utilize the existing frameworks and build a custom, performance tuned device that can compete with the iPad. Microsoft has proven it has both the hardware and software talent… now they need to be combined.

Related posts:

1. Apple iPad
2. Response to John Nack & The Flash Blog
3. Windows 8 Won’t be 128 bit

First, in response to John Nack, who makes the point that Flash has brought standardization to the web. Yes, while it did bring a standard to the web for a while, once Adobe purchased Macromedia, Flash itself started fragmenting into many different versions which supported different levels of features. This resulted in many users having to upgrade their Flash plugins depending on the site visited. How is this any better a ’standard’ than HTML5? Might as well force the user to upgrade their browser to a standards-compliant version.
So, Flash provides ubiquitous browser video playback? Who cares? YouTube and Vimeo are switching to HTML5, Hulu is committed to providing iPad compliant service, and everyone else doesn’t care what they use to play video in their browser. As Internet Explorer 8 begins mass penetration (via Windows 7) and Internet Explorer 6 support is dropped (as Google announced yesterday), Flash will become less & less important. Lets be honest here. The only reason Flash is really needed is IE6’s existence. Everything else can and should be implemented via HTML5 and standards-compliant services such as OpenType.
John Nack concludes with a point that the Flash team will likely be using the GPU to bring fast performance to the desktop plugin. Who cares? The iPad and iPhone are mobile devices. Utilizing a separate GPU to do the processing is irrelevant on a mobile device that uses System-on-a-Chip design.
He also makes the point that the download size for QuickTime is twice that of Flash. Irrelevant. Most of the Flash-haters he is targeting with this post (and most Adobe CS users) are running a Mac, with native support. And most people with iTunes installed (read: everyone with an iPod/iPhone) have QuickTime installed as part of Apple Software Update. So no, ubiquity is not dependent on the download size of your plugin.

Second, in response to The Flash Blog. Have of the sites you illustrated have an iPhone compliant version (as pointed out by Mark Hughes here), and likely more will by the time iPad launches. Other sites have worthwhile iPhone app alternatives. Why should I use your plugin if the iPad supports native HTML5, and the majority of video media is capable of being delivered to me that way (YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu?) I don’t want to play Flash web games, and with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, most games that people will be playing will be native iPhone apps anyway. So there is no use for Flash for media playback or gaming on iPhone OS. What does Flash offer me then?
Your Flash plugin performance sucks. Small wonder Apple didn’t want didn’t want a battery pig like that on the iPhone and iPad.

Flash is dead. I hate the platform with a passion, and while I’d love to watch it die a long and slow death, the faster it goes the better. With Google’s latest announcement that they will stop supporting IE6, HTML5 ubiquity will hopefully begin. Flash is useless if my content is delivered to me through other streams, whether the iTunes store, HTML5, or a dedicated app. If I want an ‘interactive’ game, I’ll stick with a native iPhone or iPad application. There is nothing that Flash offers me, and no real way for it to ‘innovate’ against the march of technological progress. Welcome to the New World folks.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft vs. iPad
2. Apple iPad
3. Chrome Frame

While some may view the lack of multi-tasking on the iPad to be a drawback, I for one view it as a plus. Since I will be using it primarily as a means of reading content (whether web, eBook, or eMagazine), I do not want distractions from other apps. Everytime I get a Growl notification on my MacBook Pro, I switch focus. No multi-tasking = less distraction.

I am disappointed by the lack of security measures on the iPad. I tend to lean toward paranoia when it comes to electronic security (one of the pluses of working in the government/health/financial sector), and do not want my data being accessible to someone else at the mere swipe of a finger. I will not be using this for any work purposes until there is a better authentication mechanism.

I’m also disappointed with the lack of a webcam. A webcam would truly complete the home user experience of this device. However, Apple has seen fit to save that for another revision, so we must suffer sans video for the time being.

Overall I’m very pleased with the device. I love the way Steve Jobs positioned it as a market all to itself. It’s not intended to replace the PCs/Macs, and it’s not designed to replace the iPhone/iPod Touch. It is truly an intermediate device, one which may become the primary computing mechanism for neophytes. As someone else pointed out, non-technical people will pick this device up and not even realize that what they are doing is considered computing.

I don’t suspect we’ll see any remotely capable competition for quite sometime, at which point Apple will have improved the device again. As John Gruber pointed out, the custom designed chip has enabled Apple to put the performance of the device far ahead of any competing silicon. And since the chip is Apple’s, competitors will have to wait for Intel or another manufacturer to produce a truly competitive CPU. I’d guess Intel is none too happy with Apple at this point.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft vs. iPad
2. Response to John Nack & The Flash Blog
3. The Cloud as a Load Balancer

One of the reasons I had not included robots previously is because I did not feel I understood them well enough. I make it a general practice to not speak about subjects I don’t feel I understand properly.

On to Google Wave Robots.

It helps to think about Wave robots as plugins that interact with other sets of information and return requested information to the Wave. It took me a while to understand that this is what they are. Looking back, the term robot fits perfectly. For some reason I had a hard time understanding what a Wave robot really entailed, and the numorous low-quality, little-purpose Wave robots only served to further compound my confusion.

Now that we understand what Wave robots are, how does this impact us? Are they beneficial, and if so, in what areas?

I personally see a fair bit of use for the enterprise. The ability to call up corporate information via an authorized robot helps balance security and ease of use (not everyone in the meeting may have appropriate permissions to access the requested information). It also adds an efficiency perk to the production of corporate documents.

I don’t see much use for Wave robots outside the enterprise at this point. This is not to question the validity of the service itself, but merely that I believe that using Wave robots will not appeal to the majority of the personal market. People don’t want to sit down and open up a new wave to request information. The psychology of the Wave robots is that they are participants in a conversation. Mentally, initiating a conversation with a robot solely to obtain information breaks the personal aspect. The Wave robot becomes a tool, rather than a participant. Having a conversation with a tool is different than having a conversation with a person.

You also have to take into account that, beyond the psychological aspect, when people are looking for information, it tends to be while mobile. Things like GOOG411 or Google Voice Search are much closer to a conversational interaction than Google Wave in its current stage. I think that Wave as a limited target in the personal market segment.

Again, a similar conclusion to my prior post. If you’re a business, there is lots of potential with Wave robots. If you’re a home user, there is limited use.

Related posts:

1. Google Wave
2. The real buzz about Google Buzz
3. On the use of Facebook

I’m trying to change the mentality of some of those I work with. It’s a long process, but I think one or two of them are starting to shift their mindset. If you have any suggestions as to how to imbibe this mentality in others, by all means, share with me in the comments.

Related posts:

1. On the use of Facebook