• IBM Launches Smart Business (Nov 18, 2008)

Some background into IBM Smart Business… The premise was simple. There was a tremendous need to make IT less complex for small and medium businesses. To address this, three things were created.

1. Smart Market: a Web-enabled, one-stop SMB marketplace clients can use to browse, rate and buy solutions or collaborate with other clients, industry experts and vendors from around the world.
2. Smart Cube: a secure, turn-key computer designed to deliver integrated solutions directly to the client. Smart Cubes install and connect users to Smart Market within minutes.
3. Smart Desk: a Web-enabled dashboard that clients can use as a single-point-of-contact for Smart Business maintenance, from updating applications automatically or subscribing to an on-demand service.

The model we tried to emulate in the project codenamed BBP was to think just like the Apple iPod model — the iTunes Store (Smart Market), iPod (Smart Cube), and the iTunes desktop application (Smart Desk).

I can only speak for the Smart Desk side of things, as I played a hand in its initial phases, parts of the GUI, and the build automation/testing of the Smart Desk.

UPDATE: I needed to retract some parts of this posting. Sorry about that.

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

What does this mean to you?  This means that developers can now share to the world any technical articles or tutorials related to developing iPhone apps or web apps.  Now, I can finally proceed with publishing my iCopyUPaste technical article.

What does iPhone 2.0 offer that warrants an upgrade?  GPS, 3G, and slightly larger storage.  That simply is NOT enough to warrant the extra $30 / month I’d have to shell out to get the new iPhone 2.0.  I currently pay $55 incl. taxes and fees for my iPhone 1.0 plan, and I thought that was pretty hefty to begin with.  This new plan simply is highway robbery!  Apple and AT&T, no thanks, but I’m sticking with iPhone 1.0.

• Google Gmail – I can access my mail from home, work, Wi-Fi hotspot, my iPhone.
• Google Calendar – Anything that relates to time/date/place/to-dos, it goes in my Google Calendar.  I can access this from practically anywhere.
• Google Reader – This is my online RSS Newsreader. With Google Gears offline support, I can catchup with all the latest news feeds even when I am on a plane.
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks – I find that I have not bookmarked a page in IE or Firefox in ages! Instead, all my bookmarks are on this handy service.
• MP3tunes – All my iTunes music safely stored and synced online with MP3tunes.com.  I can stream my music from the Internet.  This service doesn’t store and sync my iTunes videos and movies, so I use other means to backup and sync these files.
• .Mac – I use the iDisk service to keep any storage of files and folders that I need to access from anywhere.  The one other feature that I do like is the Photo sharing capabilities.
• SlingBox – Ok, its not really an online service, but its how I watch TV now.  Place-shifting means I can watch TV shows streamed online from any single Slingbox location.  Place one SlingBox hardware in your parent’s home in Canada and you can catch international TV right on your computer.  Quality is not the greatest, as it depends a lot on the upload speeds of the SlingBox locations you are getting the streams from.
• Google Docs – This service can almost replace your traditional Microsoft Office apps. Unfortunately, it is not as speedy as having a desktop app.  Speed and offline portability are the biggest factors in me not completely switching over to using online-based office apps.
• Google Alerts – This is how I read the latest news. I give search terms that I find most interesting, and everyday they will send me the top links to news stories and blog entries that match my keywords.
• Kayak – I give it my top flight destinations and the maximum price I am willing to pay, and I get a daily report of any matching deals.
• Twitter – This service is basically a mashup of fan site / blog / and alerting service. You can alert all your followers via SMS text, IM, and email with “what you are doing now”. I am still a little weary of letting everyone know what I am doing now, but I can see how it can be used to alert a large number of people at once, with whatever information you wish to share. This is most useful for people with a mobile lifestyle, who may not get a chance to post their thoughts to a blog.

Why has Firefox surged to  the top?  Two things. Add-ons/extensions, and tabbed browsing.  I cannot even imagine browsing the web without these innovations.  Those two simple ideas have made my online experience a sheer joy.  My top ten add-ons include:  del.icio.us, Foxmarks, Adblock, Google Browser Sync, Google Gears, Google Notebook, Operator, Greasemonkey, Firebug, and User Agent Switcher.

The upcoming FIrefox 3 also promises new innovations to make browsing even more simpler and useful. The aptly named “Awesome Bar” is indeed awesome.  You just start typing in anything that you’ve accessed in your browser URL, and it comes up with possible suggestions.  Unlike type-ahead, the suggestions you get can come from any position in the URL (not just the first n characters). Also, the performance and security enhancements are much needed as pre-Firefox-3 browsers had started to become slow.  I remembered the primary reason that I had switched from IE to Firefox back in the day was because Firefox 1.0 was so much faster than IE 6.0.  Performance is as much part of the user experience as UI. You can have the prettiest user interface, but if the user has to wait longer to get their information, they will perceive the product as crap.

Mozilla’s next phase is to rule the mobile browser space. The space is already crowded with the likes of Webkit, Opera, Pocket IE, etc. How awesome will it be to be able to keep those Add-Ons while surfing the mobile web on any smartphone platform. That’s Firefox’s bread and butter.  That’s what will make them successful in the mobile web 2.0.

Spooky, eh? If there’s only one RSS feed that you want to keep track of my online world, this is it.  Looks like a very promising web service. It allows you to make and keep track of comments for all your online feeds that you subscribe to. All your feeds and conversations in one place. Interesting…

Things are still being worked out, but I have already pitched the idea of integrating this server management piece with the iPhone (now that the iPhone SDK is officially out there).  Unfortunately, things at IBM go at a glacial pace, and I have yet to hear much about my idea coming to fruition. Well, here’s hoping they seriously consider it.

Now, the concept of Pipes is not new. UNIX has it. Even Apple has a similar type of desktop application called Automator. What is new is that it is all done using a web browser AJAXified interface. You do not need a lot of web programming experience to get started, as you can simply take existing modules and mash them up into your own Pipe. You can then share your Pipe with others and you’ll quickly get the concept of code reuse.

The Pipes Editor – URL Builder allows you to fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique, count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. You can solicit user input and build URL query strings to submit to REST-based sites. You don’t just get to look at the output of your Pipes program on the Pipes web site. Output options include RSS, JSON, and you can even get results by email or SMS. Popular uses of Pipes is to use it for searching multiple sites at once and getting aggregated results, or to get alerted to items that may interest you. I wrote one example called “Deals On Memory” that searches sites like bensbargains.net and techbargains.com so that I get alerted to the latest deals on computer memory.

After scouring the web for other customer complaints, it appears that the Netgear and D-Link routers have problems sustaining wireless connections. This is especially true if your neighbors use w-fi routers that are labelled “Extreme” or some kind of enhanced mode that boosts the 802.11g spec to greater than the 54Mbps allowed. For some reason, their signals interfere with my signals, with my signal ending up being disconnected. This had not happened a month ago. I am guessing that one of my neighbors recently bought one of these “enhanced” routers. Anyway, the moral of the story is that you get what you pay for, and D-Link and Netgear needs to get to the root of this problem. Otherwise, there will be a whole lot more Linksys switchers.

Over the weekend, I did some research into why majority of podcasters don’t include bittorrents of their audio/video files in their RSS feeds. To me, that would seem like the ideal solution to this problem. The problem lies in the lack of client support. Many podcasting clients do not include BitTorrent support. To my knowledge, I have only heard of Juice (formerly iPodder) and Videora as RSS clients that claim BitTorrent support. Also, an older technology preview version of Opera 8.02 Windows | Mac includes a built-in RSS reader with BitTorrent support. I have successfully subscribed to a video RSS bittorrent feed at Hak5.org using Opera 8.02 and it works like a charm. I am stumped as to why Opera did not include this functionality in their latest release. I am equally stumped as to why more podcasters don’t include a bittorrent RSS feed to help save on their bandwidth like Hak5.org does. I am willing to bet that this problem will get resolved in the next few months as many popular podcasters find bandwidth bills to be burdensome to their operating budget. I only hope that Apple will include BitTorrent support in their iTunes software.

I am not the only one who has thought of this:
http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/btrssoptions.html

Google’s monumental announcement lays the groundwork for a shift in how instant messaging and voice will work in the future. It’s the first time a major net company has agreed to use open standards and connect their network to others. Future releases of Gizmo Project will allow voice calls and instant messages to and from Google Talk. This is made possible because Google is using Jabber, (an instant messaging standard which Gizmo Project is also employing) and also providing a SIP interchange (SIP is standard often used for voice calls – and where SIPphone derived its name).

UPDATE: Looks like my SpyMac mail finally came back online (on Monday evening). Fortunately, some of the emails that were in route to me during the outage, did come through. However, there was the issue of my archived mail folders being lost. After calling them up and leaving them a message, I finally got my archived mail back today (Wednesday). Even though, they got me back to the state where I was before the outage, it was still unprofessional as to how they handled this “planned mail server migration”. I hope they learn from this mistake, because this user has just lost its trust in SpyMac. I assume many others feel the same. I will be backing up my email regularly from now on. I will also be on the lookout for another email address. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim. Gmail (free) and Yahoo ($20/yr) both provide 2GB mail accounts, but they don’t provide IMAP, only POP mail. Hotmail ($20/yr) also has 2GB accounts, but only provide access using Outlook using their proprietary HTTP mail server and POP. Why is IMAP mail access so important? It allows you to connect from different PCs/Macs and synchronizes your mail and folders automatically between them all. Without it, all of us who access our emails using our email applications from home, work, and other machines, would all be out of sync.

Guess what? The QuickTime Player 6 Pro application works just fine and it uses the new Quicktime 7 codecs just fine too. Just one last thing to mention… This hack may not work for everyone. What I did was use the Migration Assistant application to transfer my old User account from my backup drive over to my clean install of Tiger. That may have copied over the proper settings into my system so that the Quicktime Player 6 Pro could still function. If anyone can verify this, please let me know.

Here’s a screenshot of my successful hack.

UPDATE: According to Apple, this will no longer work if you apply the latest Quicktime 7.01 patch. Go figure.

UPDATE 06-09-05: After upgrading to 7.01, my Quicktime 6 Pro application still works. I guess that you need to make sure the Quicktime Player app is renamed to something else, before upgrading to 7.01.

UPDATE 01/14/06: Someone at O’Reilly MacDevCenter finally figured it out as well.
Salvaging QuickTime 6 Pro by Matthew Russell — I wanted back full screen mode, and I got it.

And here’s the good news — a lot of people are building machines you’ll be able to buy. The article is located at CBS’ 60 Minutes website entitled “Flying Cars Ready To Take Off“.

JHymn Goes Behind Atoms and Apple To Bring DRM-Free Music
by Howard Wen describes the newest successor to Hymn that allows iTunes purchased songs to be freed from their shackles of DRM.

Microsoft worker wants to be Trump’s ‘Apprentice’
describes how TV’s Apprentice contestant Verna Felton is going for the title of Trump’s apprentice. She even has her own following at Microsoft and her own website.

Besides having a Microsoft representation in the show, Apprentice contestant Stephanie Myers works at IBM. Since, I work at IBM also (as a contractor), I was interested in seeing if I could locate her in the Intranet directory. Hmmm… looks like she still works at IBM, but her telephone number is not publicly made available. For legality reasons, I blurred out her email and building location.

Some WebSphere professionals, on the other hand, have a resistance not to the portal technology itself, necessarily, but to the collaborative features provided by the Lotus technologies. WebSphere pros need to recognize that collaboration, both on a group level and on an organizational level, has been the Lotus business since the company came into being. It makes sense for us to take advantage of their expertise in the collaborative arena and use the components included with WebSphere Portal.

Enough said. Buy me one at http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/toys/6ba5/.

It was interesting to note that Apple has about $4.6 billion in cash and no debt. That favourable cash position as well as strong iPod and notebook sales has helped Apple’s share price go from around $20 to around $27 in the past 6 months.

Stock symbol : AAPL

In other news, the latest version of the PlayFair program is now at 0.5.0. Numerous bug fixes as well as a OS X GUI client and a Windows release are featured. The PlayFair project is also now available at FreshMeat.

I wouldn’t go crazy and start converting all the songs you bought at the iTunes store. The interface is raw and no GUI wrapper program has been created. If you are interested in reading more about the legal issues that have been raised, I’ve posted the following link.

Reference: http://www.macobserver.com/columns/devilsadvocate/2004/20030405.shtml

• SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities Listing By Vendor If you are interested in Notes/Domino security vulnerabilities, just select “Lotus” in the vendor dropdown list and hit the Submit button.
• CERT Advisories CERT does have a good listing of advisories, but it is not as up-to-date as SecurityFocus. SecurityFocus does list a couple of vulnerabilities for the HTTP WebAdmin.nsf database.

Since I am in the market for a new cell phone, I’ve been doing my research and reading into
what new phones are coming into the market this year. The Nokia 7610 has really caught my eye.

• Here are a summary of the features:
• 1 megapixel camera for quality printing
• Up to 10 minutes video recording
• Bluetooth wireless technology and USB connectivity
• 8 MB internal dynamic memory
• 64 MB Reduced Size (MMC slot)
• Advanced XHTML browser
• Symbian OS 7.0s
• Downloadable Java™ MIDP 2.0 applications
• RealOne Player (MP3, AAC, 3GPP, RealMedia)
• Tri-band coverage on up to five continents