Winamp is just one example of these applications. Then there are other work tools such as Eclipse and Aptana IDEs which all not only use their own proxy settings, but they use multiple of those! Applications that simply have to use their own proxy should at least have the courtesy of giving me a check box that can enable and disable the proxy instead of me having to type the proxy in every single time.

I have seen this request in Winamp forum multiple times going back many years and yet this seems to get ignored. This is the main reason I started using xmplay even though I have a paid license for Winamp. Thankfully Eclipse and Aptana also offer check boxes that toggle the proxy.

Now only if all these software could start using the system proxy. I use Proxy Switcher to easily switch my IE prox; it would be great if that could change all the proxy settings for all the applications. May be there is an applciation that can do that or may be Proxy Switcher would allow application specific plug-ins to be written for it. May be I should try a local proxy server on my laptop.

tar cvzf system.backup.tgz / --exclude=/backup --exclude=/proc
--exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys

The exclude list can include other things one wants to exclude. In my case after I ran this the first time I realized that I had forgotten to account for the shared drives on my Windows boxes that I often have mounted via GVFS. So I had to do a minor tweak to the tar command as the following.

tar cvzf system.backup.tgz / --exclude=/backup --exclude=/proc
--exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys
--exclude=/downloads --exclude='*/.gvfs'

Two other things I needed to do was to set up a backup for the mysql database running on the box and delete the image thumbnails that are cached by nautilus, and I did not realize how much space they end up taking over time.

The following took care of thumbnails that have not been accessed more than 7 days.

find /home/[your user name]/.thumbnails -type f
-atime +7 -exec rm {} \;

For mysql I decided to go with mysqldump instead of mysqlhotcopy. All by backup data are written to a mounted QNAP NAS drive folder.

So I ended up with a shell script that first flushed the thumbnails, created the mysql backup data files, and a tar file backup of the entire system. Of course I had to make sure all the data was written into time stamped folders. I also decided to preserve only the two previous backups besides the current one.

Once the script was ready, dropping it in /etc/cron.weekly did the job.

Ignoring Exclusions

First, I have scheduled a weekly scan which runs on Sun night and I expect the scan to be done by Monday morning. It works fine till the scan discovers a file that its heuristics think might be an issue. so the scan pauses and waits for me to make a decision about the file. It turns out often these are my work related files that other scanners have no issue with and so I tell it to ignore the file going forward. But it seems to ignore that directive and every single time the scan starts it chokes on that file, as if the file has been updated since the last detection. It has not!

So once the scanner runs into issue with a file, every subsequent scans now blocks unless I manually add an exception. I guess I can open up the application and manually go and add the file in the exclusion list. But it should work the first time around when I responded to its scanner prompt! Some of these file names are long and are in nested folders, making it hard to remember them later on. Also if I go the event browser I see these events listed there. It would be really nice to have a feature that allows me declare the object in the event as trusted right from that event entry.

While browsing the event log I also noticed Malware detection events which I was never prompted about. On inspection I realized these events actually interfere with our office’s network login process! I have been wondering for a while, why the login script always complains it can’t find the directory to write the temporary files. This obviously happens as a part of the Win XP boot process. But if Antivir is preventing access to the needed folders/files it is supposed to prompt me since I have the handling of malware set to ‘Interactive’!

Update nuisance

The other thing has to do with the way it updates the virus definitions. I ran into it while being on a trip recently. I was limited to using poor dial up connection during this trip and I really wanted to keep my connection overhead to a minimum so I could check my office email. Every single time I dialed in, Antivir would not waste any time trying to connect to their server and try to download updated virus definition files. When the files are small it is not an issue I guess. But anything in the order of megabyte (even 1 and 2) end up slowing down the connection. You have to be on a crappy download link to appreciate this.

The Update option in the configuration controls update of the product itself. It did not seem to make any difference to virus definition updates. Would be nice if there was a way to stop this automatic attempt to update things as soon as I have a dial up connection.

Sign for a car rental place. I guess the spelling  on the signage probably originates from the way the word Rent is sometimes pronounced because of the particular Bengali dialect the sign painter may be used to. Or may be it is a case of the letter A pronounced as in ‘rate’.

No it is not the sign to the frat house from John Belushi’s movie! Apparently it is a sign for a now defunct animal drug testing facility in a local hospital. I hope it is indeed defunct. Otherwise, I would feel sorry for the plight unfortunate street animals, of which there are plenty in the city, that are being sacrificed at the altar of human welfare.

Bathroom signs are always a source of fun and sometimes intentionally so, not withstanding the fact that the message being conveyed can be quite sincere! In the past we have had situation here at our office where individuals forget their responsibity towards proper bathroom etiquette causing significant angst among their colleagues. So when I saw this sign in a western style bathroom in Bangalore it obviously caught my attention. The suggestions make a lot of sense if one is familiar with the bathrooms of India. “No squatting on toilet seats”!

Purposeful networking

I often seem to notice, at least in a big organization, that in times of need it is not easy to find the person that can help solve a problem, even though you know this problem has been solved before and one or more people know how to do it. This problem is more common in larger organizations with layers of management, culturally diverse  and globally distributed workforce. And with multitude of ongoing projects and initiatives it is not always easy to find the right person who can help. May be if you are one with some clout in your organization you can pull on your connections. But many of us are not in that situation. As soon as we step beyond the familiar we have to rely on the kindness and generosity of the fellow employees.

It is not always about finding the subject matter experts, granted having access to one helps. It is often about finding people who can help you navigate the world of your company’s policy, practices and tools to get your work done. It is often more about knowing who the right person is than knowing it all yourself. But if you do then more power to you! For example, we middle of the road corporate grunts  take the IT infrastructure for granted during our day to day chores, till we ourselves need to do some experimental or non-traditional project that involves tapping into IT personnel and resources and in a big company that can easily become a non-starter especially in these days of outsourced IT operations.  More often than not there are always hundreds of reasons why something cannot be done till you find yourself linked to the right folks.

It seems to me that in this Everything 2.0 Information overload age, along with empowering employees with all the cool social media tools of the day, it is essential to bring in capabilities that allow us the employees to connect in a contextual manner driven by the task at hand. Yes we can troll the intranet pages with latest and greatest search engines and appliances that the business has spent a ton on. But it is often lot of waste time because chances are we would get redirected from one person to another and end up with dropped emails or leads, specially in a business spread across multiple time zones.  This is not LinkedIn for the work place. It is not about somebody letting me into their circle of trust. Its more about  building transient opportunistic, self organizing networks to solve a business problem at hand.

Out of sight out of mind Problem

I have found that in a large business often the challenge is to get help from people who have no particular reason to spend time for you unless they have a stake in your project. They have their own priorities and targets to meet. Between the 8-12 hour time difference, individual work priorities there is not much incentive to help a colleague  half the way across the globe, somebody who he/she has never met.

If your “help” is a few rooms, a few floors, or a few buildings away it is easy to walk over, build a personal rapport and get the work done. But in these days of curtailed business travel and headcount reduction it is not easy to grab the attention of a remote colleague and as a result one ends up wasting cycles, and potentially lot of it. Even though the idea, with its roots in the offshoring business, that having a workforce around the world enables 24×7 productivity is sometimes true, it seems to quickly turn into a myth if they are not part of the same team or share the same targets as you. Many individuals in a company are not part of everybody else’s projects. But their help  is often essential to get that other person (such as you) to accomplish his/her task. This days with all of us spread across the globe the need for collaboration, and responsiveness has become more and more  important. Sometimes email requests sit in inboxes waiting to be answered and eventually forgotten. I wish companies should instill a work culture that require everybody to respond to such requests indicating whether he/she can help or whether somebody else might be the right person to help, instead of dead silence. In companies spread around the world we only have few hours of overlap to collaborate and co-operate with our colleagues. These are not body shops or contractors that are at your beck and call and willing to stay up 24 hours chained to their desk to earn that throat cut hourly rate. These are your colleagues and in many cases probably higher than you in the company pyramid. But regardless of our own osition in the food chain I think we all as good citizens of the 21st century global corporations owe this respect to our colleagues.

Putting the Address book to use

I recently read a news item about a business use of Twitter where somebody can use it to find the right person in a company to help with a task at hand. I send a tweet out saying “Who knows about our company Firewalls”. I hope to get some tweets back. It was suggested to be less burdensome than sending out a company wide email, which can immediately draw the wrath of bands of fellow employees that you have never known till that time. I think a better solution would be the corporate address book where affiliation data, besides just the department, are recorded. Not necessarily competencies because competency somehow implies somebody is an expert on a topic. But instead it would be better to know which various company wide projects, initiatives, and technology efforts somebody is associated with. This allows others to seek help from proper source instead of twittering or emailing around. Of course the challenge is keeping the information current. But given the fact that most company wide initiatives and projects have lifespans longer than a few months, that is a risk I am happy to take. It may just cost me a couple of extra emails instead of days of cold emailing. Lot has been made of users’ address books in social networking circles. The same can be said about the the company phone book  which holds great potential for enabling the individual employee.

Managing Knowledge for worker efficiency

In large organizations the size of their intranet knowledge base is always growing at a rapid rate. Given that it is essential that Content Management systems are deployed in ways that make it simple and easy for workers to find relevant information with minimum possible keystrokes and mouse clicks. Some of these systems use cryptic links, probably generated by some hashing scheme, to point to the content tucked away inside giant databases. Then as the content go through updates, sometimes the management systems find it convenient to update the cryptic hashes too. The downside of this is that none of your bookmarks work anymore and it is not much fun to deal with that in large intranet information jungle. This leads the worker back to the point of trolling through vast caverns of knowledge looking for that one right link. Not a very productive way to empower the busy worker.

Organization of such vast repository of information is never easy. Sometimes categorizing information is hard when the sources are so many and diverse in these days of wikis, blogs, databases, tweets, etc. That’s why tags are so popular. Sometimes searching seems to be the only way to find something you need.  Knowledge owners need to ensure information is not only up to date but suitably tagged. And where there is no reason to prioritize information for ad revenues, the results need to be prioritized by relevancy to the user. Information such as the user’s geographical location, organization should play a role. To leverage the powers of all the latest and greatest  new media tools for self sufficient business worker we really need to ensure that all that information is liberating and not drowning the worker.

May be I will also be able to catch some chatter between the pilots and the nearby ATCs too while I am at it. Once upon a time United used to make those available in ther in-flight audio channels. Not sure if the aircraft fuselage would get in way of the AM reception. At home I have never had much luck using the R5 on AM band, except local MW stations. Even though it is supposed to be a wideband receiver, it hardly does the job for SW stations with its own antenna. It is mostly useful for scanning on police, ATC bands. Hopefully it can do better job as I move over countries or states. May be I can take my Radio Shack or Sony 7600GR portable instead. I have carried them with me before, but never used them in-flight. Sticking those long whip antennas out in the passenger cabin may not be a very welcome sight, even though I am not transmitting any signals. On the other hand I see people not even bothering to turn off their Blackberry’s wireless functionality as the flight takes off and lands and when it makes that beeping sound on receiving new emails they just sheepishly look around hoping nobody heard it. Wondering if others have tried tuning in to AM while in-flight.

This week I was in the bay area on a business trip. Like the last one it was a strangely serendipitous thing that the latest Mashup Camp in Mountain View was scheduled the same days I was visiting the area. Not sure exactly why but it seems most of these unconferences tend to happen out west more often. I was only able to squeeze in one day’s visit to the event. Better than missing it altogether.

Recognized many faces from the previous one, which was my first visit to a Mashup Camp. Given that most of my past conference visits have been limited to the types of JavaOne, EclipseCon, i find this unconferences quite refreshing even though I probably would not spend the air+hotel to fly out across the country just to attend one of these unless I have something to pitch. Most of the attendees for this event seemed to be from around town. I wish more of these would happen in my neck of the woods here in the east coast.

When I wandered in on Tuesday morning, David Berlind was leading a panel discussion on “Making the case for Mashups for Business“. The panelists were Dan Woods from Evolved Media, Hart Rossman from SAIC, and John Musser of the very cool Programmable Web. the discussion was around how all these WEB technologies might be affecting the attitude of the corporate IT culture. I think the main underlying question here was whether “user” created mashups will be welcome into the corporate IT environment. The users in question here are of course are the employees of the corporation. I did not really hear much new except a few interesting (talking) points

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

Dan Woods used these expression to describe the folks like me that are coming into this space with our past IT baggage, versus the new generation of developers and future IT managers growing up with a “WEB is everything” spoon in their mouth and how they might be more open to new ideas and concepts than the current generation when it comes to determining what is acceptable in a business environment. Chances are by the time these kids get to our age there will be something new to challenge them.

Working with Mashup technology as the next level of IT integration skills

Hart Rossman mentioned that this mashup technology of composing WEB 2.0 applications out of disparate sources of data may indeed be one way to view the next step of evolution in the IT integration space. Enterprise IT is all about a saga of never ending integration. So in that sense it makes sense. I am not an expert on mashups and I know different views exist on what exactly is a mashup. In my humble opinion mashup seems to be all about building web based applications that combine services published as a “web” service, preferably one based on REST type of architecture as opposed to SOAP etc. Businesses are already building web apps for their internal and external users and they are using AJAX principles to build those even though they generally confine the web services to their own intranet with the exception of using things like Google Maps. So there is some level mashing already going on even though some of these don’t have the eye candy effect people immediately think of when they hear the word mashup! So I think this idea of mashup as next level of IT integration skills is indeed here and already happening.

Applications with their own embedded mashup enabled services

Another suggestion from Hart Rossman about business applications like MS Office etc, coming with their mashup enabling service APIs. He based it on the fact that many applications already come with embedded web servers. May be they can come with a web service too for business users to easily craft their own business mashups. Probably an interesting suggestion given that we are seeing a trend for Business applications to move from the desktop to the SaaS model, and into the coud. SaaS applications can very easily provide that feature of course. Whether there is still a case for such feature in desktop only app is somewhat questionable. But on the other hand most big enterprises still like to keep their software in house. But instead of being on their employers’ desktops the applications may be sitting in their own clouds inside their firewalls.

In the end I don’t know how many employees in a corporation will spend time building their own mashups. But there will always be the driven and motivated ones who will do interesting proof of concepts. Smart companies should host labs and test environments for that creativity to foster and let the rest of its employees decide which of these are really ready for prime time. Savvy IT departments should then pick up on those for larger adoption within the organization. I have seen that happen.

This time around I missed all the Mashup contests. But Thomas Tague‘s presentation on Open Calais was very interesting. Semantic web continues to fascinate me, probably more so because of the enormity of the work involved to get to where Sir Tim Berners Lee wants us to be.

Of course, the Navteq acquisition does not hurt either. Maybe that is why the CD contains maps for multiple continents. Garmin will charge me an arm and a leg for that.  So when I recently saw the 500 on for sale at Buy.com for $99 which is much cheaper than the list or retail price I decide to go for it and after taking it out for few spins I think I am probably happy at that price point.

Good things

• Satellite fix seems to be reasonably quick.
• The UI is clean and less cluttered compared to other units. Clean well separated buttons are always welcome while driving. the 4.3″ screen obviously helps. It is also very snappy.
• The audio feedback is loud and audio quality is good.
• I like the Info layering approach of selecting what POIs I want to see, even though I do not think the POI database is quite adequate for use in suburbia.
• Has many features like Bluetooth integration with phones, FM transmitter, TTS, Traffic information, Intermediate Waypoint insertion, Alternate routing, Trip management.
• Traffic information update does not require subscription and the Traffic antenna is integrated into the charger cable.
• Alternate routing is something I am eagerly waiting to explore.
• The Bluetooth connectivity with my E71 was obviously easy as it should be. But I am not sure how well it works with other vendor’s phones.
• Since Nokia owns Navteq now, I hope the map updates will be cheap or free!

Not so good

Buttons to pay extra attention to

• The Map rendering can definitely be better when compared to other devices out there. The lines are not as crisp as they should be and the continuous map refresh leads to uneven rendering of characters. The current rendering of Nokia Maps looks ok for a phone, but it needs to be stepped up a notch for a 4.3″ screen device. Definitely diminishes the wow factor, if there is any.
• PC software support non-existent except the updater.  I would like to have POI uploader etc. Right now the set of POI is fixed or Whatever came with the map. I would like to have offline trip creation on PC and then upload it to the device. With my Garmin I was able to locate and download POIs from Google Earth and then upload them into the device. Given Nokia’s PC Suite legacy I would think something like that should be in the works.
• UI usability needs work particularly in terms of intuitiveness of app flow. Most of these are soft issues. But I do believe there is one hard issue.
• It is when the main menu button (see A in the image) is pressed in the middle of an in-progress route navigation. If you press that and choose Navigation, there does not seem to be a way to cancel out and go back to the route screen besides having to recreate the route by selecting the destination again. This does not seem to be the case if I select music or photo option from the main menu. So do not press that main menu button and go into Navigation while en route.
• The other thing that can be quite irritating while driving is – it is very hard to tap on a POI while driving and get details on it. The touch screen area that identifies a POI is probably very small and the fact that the map is moving does not help.
• The selection button on the right bottom corner (see B in the image) of the screen seems to be the most important for in-context operation and yet somehow it is not that obvious. Its position needs to be more relevant to immediate task that the user is doing and sometimes the label graphic which changes depending on the screen, is not adequate to highlight its importance.
• Often a one line text field is used to do search and display results and it is not obvious when there are multiple matches. You need to tap on another button or at times on the text field itself to open up that list.
• Sometimes it is not that obvious on some of the screens what are my next available steps, even though on surface the UI design looks clean and simple.
• I guess lot of these are soft usability issues and after some initial difficulty somebody will get used to the behavior. I probably will too.
• The POI database needs to be larger.
• The holder and cradle are big and needs to hang from windshield. I am not sure if a base accessory exists. Repeated removal of the holder from windshield can eventually weaken the seal like it did for my Nuvi. But leaving it there can be a magnet for would be car burglers.
• Address entry process is non intuitive.
• Not all included voices are TTS capable. Only one of the three included voices is.
• Automatic change of daytime to nighttime display mode does not seem to work all the time.
• If you have the map set up to display in track up mode, like I do, touching anywhere makes it go into North Up mode. Not a good thing especially if you are trying to move the map around with your finger, without getting disoriented.

None of the shortcomings are dealbreaker for me, specially at $99! Given its screen size and cleaner look and snappy response I think I will get used to the usability quirks and will it use it more often than the Nuvi. That is until I find out the POI database is inadequate or the directions it comes up with are no good. Hopefully it will not.

Music and photos on a navigation device are not important to me. To others I guess these can be nice extras to have. I have been a Nokia phone user for a long time and it is hard not to miss the similarities when it comes to UI elements. It is feature rich like Nokia S60 phones. But more work is needed for the thing to hang together as a great package. The same reason why people flock to iPhone over other brands.

This is Nokia’s second standalone navigation device. I think it would be fair to expect a nicer device in its next iteration. N810 also has GPS capability which I don’t use much. Given Nokia’s already existing hardware expertise and an enlarging business ecosystem I would think a Dash like device could be in play here for Nokia. Dash seems to be struggling and laying off people and getting out of hardware business. Hardware has been Nokia’s bread and butter.

Cisco

The very interesting study has some neat stats indeed. The executive summary outlines a number of interesting trends. Not surprisingly Mobile data and Video are the two main trends that are leading the way.

That should make Google Youtube people very happy. Recently Nokia has launched an effort to bring WEB to the underprivileged masses of the emerging world via their mobile devices. So there is one explosion about to happen.

The SI-prefix according to Wikipedia ends at YottaByte. At this rate we may be there sooner than we think. Whats after that ? I think the ultimate solution may be for us to become the Ghosts in the machine. Let the data sit wherever it is, but enable our consciousness to travel to the data. But till we can figure out ways of moving the consciouness of 7 billion people through alternate dimensions (once the Hadron Collider gets going again) we have to keep hoping that the likes of CISCO keep pumping out their bigger and bigger routers.

The announcement states that this technology abstraction layer can work over Symbian, Windows CE, Linux and a few others. Does not mention Windows Mobile. Additional information seems to be only available on demand. So I am not sure whether sometime in the future me as a user can download a VMware player for my E71 and make Android run on top of it Or whther it is the device manufacturers like Nokia, Samsung and others that are suddenly able to release a new line of devices wth an alternate OS, assuming an image for that OS exists!

The end user benefits seem kind of interesting. They describe it as enabling Multiple Personalities on a phone. I have heard this term before in my line of business. Often in its simplistic form it is referred as supporting multiple profiles on a device. But in a VMware world I would imagine these might be co-located envirorments that can be mutually firewalled.

It would supposedly also allow me to switch devices without losing my precious data as long as the devices all support this technology. Reminds me of Java’s write once run everywhere deal. But moving data between devices can indeed be a challenge which is sometimes lost on people like me who have been using various PC Suite enabled Nokia phones for a while.

My Nokia E71 has this thing called Modes which allows me to change my Home Screen preferred apps and style of the display between a set of configurable choices to suit my current needs, i.e. whether I am at office or home. I assume what the VMware folks have in mind is a more powerful variety of environment management such as swapping out between Ubuntu, XP, Leopard on a desktop. But given the resource limitations of a mobile device I would not get my hopes too high up. it might more interesting to try it out on the N810 tablet at some point, assuming average users can get their hand on the runtime.

I do not know how much of a real end user need is there for a mobile device with this flexibility. My guess is that the primary beneficiaries are probably the vendors that are trying to stay on top of the unfolding OS game between Android, OSX, Symbian Foundation, Limo, etc. - as long as this technology can deliver.