Been playing with Google’s wonder wheel feature today. (In google searches, select Show Options, Wonder wheel) to get a wheel view of your search results. The visual view of search results is very handy, and often illuminating.

Interesting developments on the desktop front these days. First Google Chrome turns from browser platform to Operating System, something I guessed would happen nearly a year ago. Chrome differs from Android in that it is designed for computers like netbook users who want to quickly boot to the web, not smart phones where Android will run. From the official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Google rolls out the Chrome OS to us mortals in late 2010.

But as Google strikes at the heart of Microsoft’s business, the Microsoft empire has struck back. Recently Microsoft announced it is releasing a free version of its Office Web product. Competitively, this is interesting on a number of levels:

1) Office Web, unlike the Google Apps Premium product which costs $50 USD per year, will be free to licensed customers like TRU;

2) The portability created by supporting the legacy of Microsoft document types. For as long as I can remember, the MS-Office file types (XLS, DOC, MDB, PPT etc) have been the de facto standard for productivity documents, and;

3) Office Web can be hosted either internally or externally. This will simplify the decision to deploy Office Web now our own data centre, versus having to bet the farm on Cloud versions of the software.

I’ll be interested to see if Office Web has the same document sharing strengths of Google Docs and the level of integration with Active Directory.

Anyone else thinking that Google may be the new Microsoft?

London’s Sunday Times reports that, according to a Harvard study, each Google search generates 7g of CO2. Two google searches, for example searching for  “vortex shedding” or “Faulkner on the past” uses 14g of CO2, the same amount of energy required to boil a tea-kettle.

Now I was quite shocked by this number and no technical information was provided in the report. Google disputes the numbers provided by the Harvard study, saying that searches use the equivalent of much less energy (0.2 grams of CO2.)

Whatever the right number, it does bring into focus the giga-watts of power required to run massive data centres. That said, I’m sure Google is doing what it can to make all that infrastructure as energy efficient as possible.

Just to be on the safe side, remember to hold your breath with each search.

Vortex shedding behind a circular cylinder. Courtesy, Cesareo de La Rosa Siqueira. via Google

Here’s some “blue-skying” for the year ahead in IT. Note that I reserve the right to be breathtakingly wrong.

1. Being Green Saves Green

Everything will continue to be about reducing IT’s CO2 footprint and reducing costs. Virtualization technologies (VMWare etc.) now rule the server room and are a no-brainer approach; desktop virtualization technologies (VMWare, XenSource, Citrix, nComputing, etc.) will improve student access to bespoke applications, improve access and reduce costs.

The total carbon footprint of technologies now guides all our purchases. We now consider the whole lifecycle of devices: how and where electronics are built, how much power they use and how the can be safely disposed of form the evaluation criteria.

Of course, all this virtualization reduces the number of machines required – spelling bad news for hardware vendors.

2. Disaster Recovery

2008 was a bad year for “cloud” outages. Google and Amazon had major service interruptions. Banks and stock market systems failed. In 2009, keeping things running will be the core competency of IT teams. To do this properly we will rely on new technologies and partners to protect critical data and networks.

3. The Year of Living with Video Conferencing

2009 is going to be the year when we have to start delivering good video conferencing services. We aren’t talking about 3D holographic telepresence just yet, but high definition cameras, good quality sound and wireless microphones, proper lighting will improve the videoconferencing experience and provide a sound alternative for in-person lectures and meetings. Improvements to videoconferencing and synchronous collaboration tools should slowly reduce the requirement for travel.

4. Can’t we all just get along – with all those new devices?

Over the last few years we’ve seen a veritable plankton-bloom of equipment on our wireless “bubble.” With laptops, net-books (ie mini laptops),  iPods, iPhones, iDogs (kidding), Smart Phones, RFID Tags, Security Equipment, dual mode phones,  – the number of new consumer devices connecting will continue to grow exponentially.  Survival for IT in this new landscape requires us to be really good at security and network availability – policing the stuff on the network may be tricky. Strong security and identity management will be critical here.

5. And all those new devices better work well together

This year expect better touch screens, cameras, power management, and, most importantly,  less wires connecting those devices. I’d loove to do away with the big plastic box of cables I have to plug everything in. Other vendors and Open Sourcers should follow Apple’s beautiful walled garden approach to device and application integration.

Walled Garden - by Paul Englefield

6. Speaking of Netbooks, is it the beginning of the end of Desktops?

Windows Version 7.0 will no doubt emerge this year but it’s overall presence will be a big yawn. How important are operating systems in a world of “information anywhere” devices? I expect to see continued use of mobile computing with users bypassing laptops to Netbooks or smart-phones. Applications via the Cloud will figure prominently in this shift.

7. Will ERP Vendors start to get “SaaS-y”?

I’ve got no idea how or when the (Enterprise Resources Planning) ERP vendors will get there but Small and Medium Sized (SME) customers, their last frontier for new revenue, will want their ERP solution as  Software as a Service (SaaS) where applications are used and rented on-demand. Here at TRU, I’d expect we will be using more SaaS solutions into the future as everyone rushes into the “clouds.” That’s probably the new gold dream.

8. I’ve Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now

While I don’t think things will change overnight, I’m a believer that if cloud computing offers a greener, cheaper and easier way of doing things to your standard data-centre model, it will succeed. That said, I don’t think people will shut down their IT infrastructures overnight. Look forward to seeing cloud-based implementations of productivity applications like MS-exchange, gmail, sharepoint, office, google docs taking a foothold in enterprises. On its heels applications from Intuit, Mint, 37Signals, and the like will continue to gain in popularity.

Big ERP’s may take much longer to migrate to the cloud. Perhaps “Platform as a Service” will be the approach that succeeds for core enterprise applications. Can you say Service Bureau 2.0?

We will continue to work with other schools to create “trusted clouds” of shared services.

9. Social Networking

Now that the whole world is on Facebook (fb) or some other social network, look forward to seeing more corporate implementations of social network-like packages. I’m not thinking that we would actually use fb for University collaboration (I’m not convinced fb groups or applications actually have much uptake)  but look forward to fb look and feel in collaborative applications behind the firewall to improve internal communications.

10. The Search for IT Talent Continues

Global Economic Downturn or not, the IT talent pool is shallow. We will continue having trouble attracting and retaining pros over the next year. Woe is me.

Good Evening,

1. If you are currently using Internet Explore 7.0, please don’t. A critical vulnerability exists that could infect your computer, launch malicious code remotely from your machine, steal your passwords and bring all sorts of other nasties upon you. At this time we aren’t sure if anti-virus software will catch the vulnerability. I suggest you run ”Mozilla Firefox” or some other browser until there is a rock-solid patch for Internet Explorer 7.0 – expected some time in January 2009. For TRU users, Firefox should already be installed on your desktop computer. The IT Service Desk will provide you any help you need. Update – Microsoft has now released a patch for this. Run Windows Updates – Security.
   
2. You may have noticed that the Toronto Stock Exchange has been down all day due to a “computer problem.” You may also recall that the London Stock Exchange was down all day in September.  Two things come to mind here, a) It would totally suck to be the IT Manager at those outfits and b) in our rush to cloudify everything, we may want to take extra care of those systems that can kill our fragile economies;
3. Green idea of the day – run the data centre hotter. While we currently keep the A/C on full tilt in our data centre, telecom companies are starting to run theirs at 35 degrees C. Given the bone chilling weather of late, I wouldn’t mind being in a nice warm server farm about now. Sorry, no fancy drinks allowed;
4. In other, non-IT related news, Canada was voted the friendliest place on Earth in an HSBC expat survey. The link is to a rather odd article (i.e. not as “in-depth” as advertised)  but nevertheless isn’t it great to be finally recognized as being so friendly, eh?
5. Sadly, your correspondent has been laid low with a bad flu. If he was smart he would have seen this sickness coming on Google’s Flu Trend Tracker and stayed inside, avoiding all contact.

Per Item 5 in my last post. That web visitor data from Alexa looked fishy. For a start, where was China? So I took a look at one year’s worth of log files in Google Analytics for www.tru.ca and got these countries ranked by visitor traffic:

1. Canada
2. United States
3. India
4. United Kingdom
5. China
6. Australia
7. Philippines
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Saudi Arabia

Sorry for the grievious error. This cold is getting to me.

And the newspaper reporter, musician, record store employee, and television producer, etc…

According to the Web 2.0 iconoclast Andrew Keen in his book the Cult of the Amateur the flood of user-driven content on wikis, blogs and social networking sites is “destroying our economy, culture and our values.” Oh oh, that can’t be good.

Keen has lots of illuminating examples in his book, which is a polemic against the “upload society” we have created that is eroding the livelihood of professional writers, musicians and producers, etc. While some of the book seemed a tad alarmist for me, I really liked the passion of the work.

I found the concept of how no one makes any money in the Web 2.0 world (except Google) very interesting. Take blogging, pour example. According to the book, Guy Kawasaki, whose blog is on the top 50 for the whole Internet, earned a paltry $3,350 for 2006, not exactly a wage matching his fame.

Keen also discusses the misfortunes of the rock-acoustic band “The Scene Aesthetic”, who, despite massive MySpace and Youtube popularity, couldn’t translate that success to real world things like cash. Page 111 talks about their national tour where they could barely cover costs:

“On good days, if the band manages  to sell enough T-Shirts and tickets, they can even buy dinner. On bad nights, Bowley and de Torres ended up sleeping on basement floors of fans homes.”

Not quite the image of rock-stardom for a band that had nine million plays on MySpace…

Call me old fashioned and a crazy, cock-eyed optimist but I’ll continue to buy music, books and magazines – thanks very much. I’ve found that in this Web 2.0 world I’m starved for good information from experts and works from talented artists. In fact, I’m spending more money in the iTunes store than I ever would have spent at the local music shoppe. While there are some blogs that I really, really enjoy I also need actual news from actual journalists from the CBC, The New York Times or the Economist, etc.

I found the most frightening bits in the book dealt with  how your information is mined by search engine companies. According to Larry Page, Google co-founder, the future is the “ultimate search engine that understands everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly.” To do that Google becomes pretty well omnipotent and the concept of personal privacy a thing of the past.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Yikes. And Google will remember it all.

Have a nice day.

I remember an electrical engineer once telling me that “all the best software becomes hardware.” I think what he was referring to at the time was that the most useful software based functions and drivers find themselves eventually mounted as an ASIC someday.

I’m starting to see this evolution of software to hardware more and more in the form of “appliances” in our data centre.  For example we use a “google mini”, an appliance to speed up searches of our website. The trade off with this blue (black) box is that it will index everything in our web environment, whether or not that was the intention.

Perhaps the biggest, most expensive appliance you can now get is the recently announced HP Oracle Database Machine.  Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle announced in September at Oracle World that the 168TB  monster can run your Oracle Data warehouses 10-50x faster than your usual hardware/software combos.

The marketing of appliances such as the Oracle Machine to institutions and corporations has me scratching my head. Is the future of cloud computing to be football field sized data-centres with thousands of inexpensive CPU’s and disks velcroed to the wall or these expensive, well branded appliances? Time will tell.

I’ve got very good news and bad news.

The very good news is the recent announcement that the good people at the FCC (pictured above) have ruled to allow unlicensed access to the airwaves between UHF and VHF television channels, known as white-spaces. This has come about because the US will switch over from analogue to digital TV signals in February 2009. This freed up spectrum can now be used for fast (50-100MBPS), free internet access, if Google and others get their way. This technology is being referred to as WiFi on Steroids.

The FCC could have auctioned this spectrum off for BILLIONS of dollars but chose to make it available for consumer technologies. That’s a good thing.  Call me a hopeless romantic but my dream has always been free Internet access for all and this egalitarian move on the part of the FCC is a great leap forward.

From a technical view, the beauty of this spectrum is that it operates in the 700 MHZ band and will penetrate walls and basements with significant range. Looks like radios built for white-spaces will squash any plans for Wi-Max to emerge as the broad spectrum technology of choice for consumers.

The bad news is that Canada is lagging behind the US with its digital cut-over. The CRTC doesn’t plan their analogue/digital cut-over until August 31st, 2011. This 2.5 year lag behind the US could have a significant impact to the Canadian technology industry  (think of the millions of devices on this new network) as the US moves to adopting long range “WiFi on Steroids” radios soon,  the killer app for free mobile applications and urban voice services.

Managing the email monster is lots of work for universities. It is seen as such a big job that some schools are getting google to handle their messaging services. Indeed, spam and viruses put a real strain on our IT infrastructure. For example, this September we handled 10,391,120 inbound messages destined to faculty and staff alone. (This number excludes our student email systems.)

Of that 10.4 million messages,  a staggering 91.9%  were thrown away and never delivered because they were spam. A paltry 6.8%  were not considered spam and delivered and 1.7%  were marked as potential spam but delivered anyway.

A further 2.2%  of all that email coming in last month contained a nasty virus that got stopped at the gateway. I refer to all this spam and virus protection as “nuisance management.” TRU’s email is a big disk hog too.  While the growth in legitimate email messages is fairly flat, disk space required to store messages doubles every year.

Given all this bad stuff, it may make sense to outsource the whole problem to someone, in exchange for giving them the opportunity to data-mine your messages. I’m not yet convinced that abdicating responsibility is the best approach for corporate and institutional email. While using google or yahoo for student mail has merit, my belief is that your enterprise email is more of a knowledge-base and should be treated as a valuable asset. It’s that catch-all for all the work you do and share with customers and colleagues. Every year I request that my disk quota is expanded so I can store more emails with more attachments. (I do use the archive utility to remove the really old stuff.)

I always have the knowledge repository available to search for what I did, what I committed to and so forth. This to me is the real value of groupware packages. No matter how much of a commodity email has become, managing it properly may be one of the most important jobs we do in IT.

(Thanks Wayne and Al for the stats, Abby for the hand-drawn monster!)