Clouds BEWARE!

I found a pretty interesting blog about AJAX and storing data locally on the client. Storing data locally for AJAX applications allows robust applications to act as either a psuedo or temporary thick client while in a thin client architecture.

"I think its going to be a bright sun shinny day" ;)

http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107421649208656403356/demotivator.xml

SecondLife sucks for business, says GW professor

Ok maybe not an exact quote but this is

"I think the students learned that people who are on the cutting edge of technology are usually not good business people, and good business people are not usually on the cutting edge of technology,” - John Artz GW Professor

While i would whole heartedly agree early adoption of technology has inherent risks and is often better to wait, this sort of blanket generalization in a business class troubles me. Are we telling our future business leaders fear technology and advancement? if only bad business people embrace technology, will new technology always fail?

IT needs people to embrace its advances and try to find innovations with every new idea.

Did i mention this was the SecondLife class?????

for more read the article on GW website

http://business.gwu.edu/news/archive/2008/0717.cfm#secondlife

WORMS!!!!!!! [Read the article]

At first glance I thought what a ridculous idea. Memory that can be written to only once. What if you make a mistake?? But that is precisely it! This memory can NOT be altered to correct mistakes. As I read the article it started to make light of many purposes ideally suited for such a thing. Police work such as evidence and suspect questioning came to mind. In fact, anything that a record of true data is needed WORM has use. Good thing our first exam didnt use this technology....

By the way WORM = Write Once Read Many

http://gizmodo.com/5025423/sandisk-worm-write+once-sd-cards-cant-be-altered-last-100-years

Move Over Second Life

Ironically, i found the following article on my Go Go Google reader about a new 3D social component Google is releasing. In what looks very much like a Second Life interface Google extends this capability to "normal" Internet usage. This wonderful new revelation is called Lively.

So far the platform is only in its Beta stage and supported only on Windows. Did someone say collusion?

Since there seems to be a tremendous buzz amongst EMIS students regarding Second Life, Lively might be worth investigating....

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/09/Google_tool_creates_3D_social_spaces_on_Web_sites_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/09/Google_tool_creates_3D_social_spaces_on_Web_sites_1.html

The end of gasoline dependecy is near....

Well maybe not quite yet, but i found this interesting article about a 100% electric sports car. What a promising development this could be. Honestly, I have felt that the auto manufacturing industry has too far heavy of a tie with the oil industry for strides in this diretion. Maybe a smaller manufacturer such as Telsa can push this technology to the public. I sure know we are ready to embrace somethng besides $5 a gallon of gasoline.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/30/tesla-announces-the-model-s-a-60k-all-electric-five-passenge/

Visual Searching

Have you ever searched for a site online but only could reminder bits and pieces but could not fully recall the url? If so, there a few sites out there that may help you find what you are looking for.

searchme.com or viewzi.com offer interesting methods for searching. By displaying an image of the web page, users can search for sites they know by look or just briefly catch an overview of the destination site before clicking through. While this isn’t cutting edge or brand new, it is one step further towards using visual components towards function.

I dont think this is ready to replace Google but it is useful...

IFRAME for matt

IFRAME stands for inline frame. There seems to be some feeling that using the OBJECT tag as the preffered (and more widely supported) method.

Here is a piece taken from www.w3.org -

Sometimes, rather than linking to a document, an author may want to embed it directly into a primary HTML document. Authors may use either the IFRAME element or the OBJECT element for this purpose, but the elements differ in some ways. Not only do the two elements have different content models, the IFRAME element may be a target frame (see the section on specifying target frame information for details) and may be "selected" by a user agent as the focus for printing, viewing HTML source, etc. User agents may render selected frames elements in ways that distinguish them from unselected frames (e.g., by drawing a border around the selected frame).
An embedded document is entirely independent of the document in which it is embedded. For instance, relative URIs within the embedded document resolve according to the base URI of the embedded document, not that of the main document. An embedded document is only rendered within another document (e.g., in a subwindow); it remains otherwise independent.

See these links:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#embedded-documents
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/iframe.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFrame
http://ajaxpatterns.org/IFrame_Call

Forget Outsourcing

Is anyone in the market for a software developer? Check out this site:

http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/main.asp

Ok 2 in one day - seemed applicable with network class

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/04/comcast-to-trial-new-network-management-technique/

Is there such a thing as privacy??

Last week I had the pleasure of taking a walk through of the security operations of TSA at the BWI airport. On of the new initiatives is Security Checkpoint 2.0 or i guess now named Checkpoint of the Future.

This wonderful concoction of technology and invention boasts automatic bin retrieval systems, large divesture and composure areas (huge plusses for security processing efficiency), and my favorite part the whole body imaging scanners.

These very cool devices take a 360 scan of you in a few seconds while you stand in the chamber. Behind closed doors, a TSA screener views the image of you, guess what naked!!! This is a fabulous device in the name of security because they can see a very detailed image of your body and anything you maybe carrying. Good luck trying to sneak anything on your person with this device.

Personally, I think it is effective and am willing to sacrifice what some feel is a "privacy" right. Some argue that this is intrusive and violating a persons right to privacy.

Really though the concept of nudity has become an issue in society over the last few hundred years. How are we more private walking around with clothes on than without? Besides have you been to the airport in the summer? The amount of clothing wore by some is hardly providing privacy!

Weekends & IT

A wonderful weekend filled with sun and heavy downpours has passed and it had me thinking about weekends for many people in the IT field.

For the most part, IT workers are treated as professionals from top to bottom. However, a great deal of IT jobs have "on call" status that is not always reflected in the pay or prestige of the position. Often positions require 24/7 support or some facsimile of such. Even when 24/7 support is not a requirement, an expectation of working long hours at project deadlines is common with IT.

The question I am pondering now is:

Is this an IT cultural issue or a management of IT issue? Does the style of IT work lend itself to this or have we become conditioned?

In the beginning...

This is my first blog for EMIS Internet Computing. Blah Blah Blah edit1