Robert Scoble visiting Cisco´s new datacenter

This is interesting. Take the time to watch the video that Robert Scoble brought back from the visit to Cisco´s new Datacenter: Cisco’s new datacenter: does more, lower cost

Microsoft .Net Service Bus and Ta-Da lists on EC2

ah well, both topics are only related to each other as both are linked to Cloud Computing Services.

First of all, Clemens Vasters with a nice post explaining the Microsoft .Net Service Bus of Azure:

The good news is that Microsoft .NET Service Bus provides a range of bidirectional, peer-to-peer connectivity options including relayed communication. You don’t have to build your own or run your own; you can use this Building Block instead. The .NET Service Bus covers four logical feature areas: Naming, Registry, Connectivity, and Eventing.

Secondly, Joshua Sierles of 37signals reporting on the move of Ta-Da lists to ails 2.2, Phusion Passenger and Amazon EC2. One quick take:

Avoiding the extra layer of low-level setup involved with our current Xen-based virtualization system brought me closer to the core concerns of our environment – how to best automate support for the applications from the systems side. More often than not, a traditional server deployment consists of a range or organically provisioned services and environments. Ours is no exception, due to the rapidly-changing requirements of each application. EC2’s lack of persistence forces you to think about automating this from the start. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Setting up a full environment consisting of dedicated instances for mail, Nagios/remote logging, application serving, a master and a slave now takes about 5 minutes.

Das Wetter – und mehr

• empfehlenswert zu verfolgen, wenn mal wieder schlechtes Wetter im Anzug ist: Die Warnkarte des DWD
• Warum Büros unverzichtbar bleiben
• Das Meetingmonster
• Klare Worte: “Wissensdurst wird durch Klugscheißerei verdorben”
  

  Kinder unter Daueraufsicht, die immer nur an der Hand von Erwachsenen umhergeführt werden, gleichen Haustieren, Stalleseln, die das Leben in der Freiheit nicht mehr kennen. Aus der Hirnforschung wissen wir, dass unter diesen Bedingungen die Ausreifung des Gehirns nicht optimal gelingt. Das Gehirn bleibt eine Kümmerversion dessen, was daraus hätte werden können.

• heise.de: Das Darmstädter Fraunhofer-Institut für Sichere Informationstechnologie testiert Blackberry-Sicherheit. Testat und Untersuchungsbericht hier

Catch of the day

Some good picks from the last days in english, a post with german picks will follow right away:

• ZDNet: 5 reasons to kill IT projects – seen them all, but why get companies trapped over and over and over again?
• Seth Godin: How to make money using the Internet – simple: Connect.

Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value.

* Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.
* Connect job hunters with jobs.
* Connect information seekers with information.
* Connect teams to each other.
* Connect those seeking similar.
* Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.
* Connect people who are proximate geographically.
* Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.
* Connect like-minded people into a movement.
* Connect people buying with people who are selling.

• Dave Winer: It’s about the users, dummy! – true, so true:
  

  Listening is hard. But all people who create products for users must listen if they want to do well at making products. That includes doctors, bus drivers, mailmen, entrepreneurs, programmers, and yes, reporters and editors too. Because if you don’t listen you might miss a corner-turn and end up going off a cliff, just like the news industry is doing. They see the cliff, they know they’re headed for it, but they don’t ask how to turn the car. They don’t really want to know. I think sometimes what they want is to be missed when they lie dead in a crumpled car at the bottom of the cliff. But we don’t want that to happen. Not because we love them, but because life without them is pretty hard to imagine. They should turn the corner, no matter how painful it is. But in order to do it, they’re going to have to look out the front window and the mirrors and listen to the person in the passenger seat.

• related, Garr Reynolds: Design means putting yourself in the user’s shoes
  

  Design is about many things. Above all, it’s about clarity, and intentions and about putting yourself in the position of the end users (or the customers, students, audience, etc.). When designs are not well thought out, even though it may all look good from our point of view, users get frustrated, confused, or even angry.

  The example of the hotel keycards is just brilliant.

• Ed Brill reporting from his recent business trip to New Zealand and why good relationships are so important:
  

  People sometimes ask me why I think Twitter is so valuable. While we’re not directly conducting business on there very often, I do learn a lot through what others are talking about, and it helps me get a clearer picture of names in the industry. One fine example took place at the customer luncheon in Sydney last week. Someone stood up to ask me a question, and he started by telling me that he was @hollingsworth on Twitter, who had been giving me restaurant recommendations for the last few days in Sydney. Knowing who he was and that he was a Twitter user was helpful in answering his question, because it gave me an opportunity to mention TwitNotes, the Twitter plug-in for Lotus Notes 8. Our connection was immediately stronger despite having never met in-person nor even so much as heard Tony’s name before.

• David Pogue giving a deastrous verdict on the Blackberry Storm: No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?
• John Maynard Keynes: The Great Slump of 1930 – interesting to read in this trouble some times. (via)

Yo isch kann

Das tut soooo weh. Nicht nur, dass die hessische SPD bei der Neuwahl im Januar einen aus meiner Sicht bedauernswerten Tropf verheizt, das Motto des Wahlkampfes von Barack Obama so abzuwandeln ist die absolute Härte. Und warum überhaupt “isch”? Die Amis reden immer von “we can”, das ist aber ganz was anderes.

Kopfschüttel…

Update (2008-12-04): Das Bild ist bei der SPD Marburg ausgetauscht, angeblich ein Hoax. Aber wer glaubt das schon…

Wednesday lunch buffet

A couple of small picks from the great Internet buffet, easy to digest, with good nutrition for your brain:

• A take on typography by Eyolf Østrem in his blog things twice, comparing LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer. Good stuff.
• Not many Nobel laureates have a own blog, but Paul Krugman is always worth a read: The Conscience of a Liberal
• ChiefHomeOfficer.com linking to an interview with Guy Kawasaki. Guy admitting a mistake he made  years ago when asked to interview to be the first CEO of Yahoo! about 15 years ago. Guy said that with his second child on the way, he didn’t want to drive two hours round trip each day. He turned them down.
  

  If I had taken the interview and gotten the job, I would have made $2 billion and not be up at 5am doing radio interviews…

  Agreed. But I guess he is also well off, even without $2 billion 😉

• Technorati taking drastic measures in the current financial crisis. Well, Loic had to do this already a couple of weeks ago at Seesmic, but this does not make it better.
• What happens if a product delivered as SaaS is discontinued? Figure out yourself if you are using I want Sandy or Stikkit. Not due to the fact that the company is hosed or run out of money, but because the founder and mastermind, Rael Dornfest has been hired by Twitter and has decided that values of n, his company is shutting down the products. Not that I have an answer, but are alternatives available? (via)

Bunch of Cloud Computing links

• Rands in Repose on Dumbing down the Cloud and why he likes Dropbox
• Nick Carr on “Cloud as a feature“, commenting on the ability to run Mathematica in Amazon EC2.
  • the AWS blog on Mathematica on Amazon EC2 (via)
    
  • a few days before, also there: Parallel Computing with MATLAB on Amazon EC2
• Dare linking to an interesting comparison of the three main offerings: Cloud Options – Amazon, Google, & Microsoft by Scott Watermasyk. I share Scotts evaluation and recommend to take this into account when considering where to establish a service.
• in german, over at heise.de: Microsoft investiert massiv in Rechenzentren fürs Cloud Computing Interesting approach to set up datacenters.

Links in between two meetings

Today in Oslo for negotiations with suppliers and other meetings. In between two meetings a few links to share with you:

• Lifehacker with 10 Tips for More Effective PowerPoint Presentations. Recommended.
• another look at Malcolm Gladwells Outliers
• Erick Mack giving a firsthand review on Michael Sampsons new book Seamless Teamwork. Looking forward on this for a Domino environment, though. I can recommend both Ericks and Michaels blogs to follow on collaboration, productivity etc.
• Erick Mack and David Allen will present on Lotusphere 2009  on “IBM Lotus Notes and Me: Maximizing Personal Productivity with Lotus Notes” (via)
• Ben Casnocha recommends to regret aversion.
• Penguin Books UK have a nice Blog
• Etherpad is a über-cool collaborative web-editor, similar to SubEthaEdit for the Mac. Back in Closed Beta due to popular demand. In fact, they got slashdotted and have to tune their infrasturcture to be able to deal with the massive interest 😉
• Procrastination explained, again by the one and only Scott Adams:
  
• Steve Rubel trying to make GMail his Gateway to the Web. This is stretching it too much, if you ask me, but if it works for him… (via)

Und zwei deutsche Artikel, beide aus der FAZ:

• Erschreckend: ICE-Unfall in Fulda: Kritik am Sicherheitskonzept für Schnellstrecke
  

  Nur zwei Sätze im Gutachten enthalten Lob: „Der Einsatz der Rettungskräfte ist positiv zu bewerten. Aufgrund der durchgeführten Übung waren die Aufgaben und Einsatzstellen sowie die Einsatzorganisationen bekannt.“

• Jammern auf hohem Niveau: SAP-Chef Kagermann: „Die IT-Branche muss nicht an den Tropf“
  

  Als andere Firmen Tausende Stellen kappten, haben wir eine bis dahin auch für uns kaum vorstellbare Strategie der Globalisierung durchgezogen. Wir gewannen kontinuierlich Marktanteile, stockten die Belegschaft weiter auf und haben heute Gewinnspannen von 28 Prozent. Wir sind also nicht ganz unerfahren im offensiven Umgang mit Krisen.

Amazon CloudFront

Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon:

Today marks the launch of Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.

Expanding the Cloud, another time. (via)

Another day, another city

and another Blogpost, today from Lucé, France, close to Chartres.

• Doc Scrubber is supposed to clean your Word documents from hidden relics of earlier edits (via)
• CIO Magazine reporting “AT&T iPhone Official Tethered Modem Solution Coming Soon“, but linking to three interesting posts for us poor Blackberry addicts:
  • BlackBerry How To: Use Your RIM Smartphone As a Tethered Modem for Your PC
  • why tethered, when you can have it work via Bluetooth: RIM Smartphone How To: Use Your BlackBerry as a Bluetooth Modem for Your PC
  • and the BlackBerry Bible: Everything You Need to Know About Your RIM Smartphone
  • and yes, I know that Volker had long time ago an article on how you could use the Blackberry as a tethered modem, later also via BT
• The Dumb Little Man with The 10 Most Useful Google Reader Productivity Tips – I use some already and will look at the others. Thumbs up!
• and, as we had the Blackberry earlier, Lifehacker with 10 Great Free Apps for Blackberry – again,  know some and will look at the rest as well.

• Bailout Humor from Vinnie – just had to take a fullquote:

  Heard on Wall Street and Main Street

  “This is worse than a divorce – I have lost half my net worth and I am still stuck with my spouse” 🙂

• Lot of people are concerned that President-elect Barack Obama will have to abandon his Blackberry usage – or is this just a program to cure a Crackberry addiction?
• Joel pointing to a review of the newest book from Malcolm Gladwell. Cem had a link lately to another review, but the NYT is quite critical.
• been in meetings of this kind (thanks Scott):
• 
• Chris Anderson on “The miraculous power of scale“. Great article with a excellent conclusion: “Free is not a business–it’s zero-cost marketing for a business. And it works best at the largest scale: a small percentage of a big number is a big number.”
• and a last one, in german for us travelers that occasionally have to drop one flight segment. A new ruling from a german court keeps the return ticket valid, even if the first flight was dropped: “Rückflugticket bleibt bei verpasstem Hinflug gültig“