Is that a Mac?

I want a Mac, an iBook, to be more specific. I always wanted a Mac. Not that there is anything wrong with my current laptop (or is there?), but Apple's operating system is just so much more appealing, particularly the Jaguar and Tiger versions. Needless to say that the user-friendliness of MacOS has always been way ahead of any other operating system in the market. (Steve, are you reading this? )

However, because all my software licenses are for Windows versions, I'm afraid I'm stuck with the green Start button and the World according to Gates. Unless...

... I compromize by using the look-and-feel of MacOS and put up with IA-32 hardware, XP and its quirks. I installed FlyakiteOSX and my machine miraculously transformed into a Mac. Well, sort of. Here's how my screens look like now:



Chris Kite and his friends set up a website with a fairly non-standard user interface that you don't see every day: Portrait of a Kite is pretty amazing, I have certainly not seen something like it on corporate websites. Those guys definitely know their JavaScript.

On a recent flight, the person in the next seat glanced over (a few times) to my machine before he finally asked "Is that a Mac?" I responded "Yeah."

This is your captain....

I'm always wondering which operating system airplanes run on. I mean, those hundreds of indicators, gauges, displays etc. in a modern cockpit can't all be hard-wired. Well, I do hope it's not Windows, Linux, or any other desktop OS, since those platforms will never be reliable. I'm serious: never!

One would think that building a system that runs the inflight entertainment program is fairly simple, compared with the rest of rather complex airplane operation. Not quite: during a recent trip to Canada, I noticed that this Airbus 340 apparently had a few problems. Instead of showing movies, the screens repeatedly demonstrated a bootstrap loading routine.

Reminds me of the old joke: Back in the heydays of object-oriented programming, the running gag against Smalltalk programmers has been that real-time systems could never be developed in Smalltalk, because we'd otherwise hear "Good morning, folks, this is your captain. I'm afraid I can't land in Phoenix and we have to reroute to Albuquerque, because our landing gear program is currently busy doing garbage collection."

What's in Mendocino?

A group of former IBM Consulting Group buddies met yesterday at StrandPauli, where we talked about the good old times and current industry topics, one of which was Mendocino. According to one guy who works at SAP in Waldorf these days, the reason for calling the SAP/Microsoft initiative Mendocino is that this California town sits in between Palo Alto, CA, the home of SAP Labs, and Redmond, WA, where Microsoft is located. Does it mean anything that Mendocino is much closer to Palo Alto? Shouldn't the two firms have picked a town in Oregon, sort of the DMZ between CA and WA?

Analytical Process Controlling

In my professional career over the last 20 or so years, there were three major areas that I had interest in: applications, integration, and analytics. When those three are coming together and you intersect the respective capabilities, there is a new concept possible that would allow organizations to get insight into the operational truths about their business processes. Of course, there are things like Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM), but none of those tools or platforms are able to provide the level of information required to find out

• Why is order management taking twice as long on Tuesdays?
  
• Why do we receive more complaints with customers in Frankfurt?
  
• Why are invoices to gold customers never sent out on time?
  

I'm working on a concept that I call Analytical Process Controlling (APC). With APC, process execution details are extracted from every business process and their underlying applications, stored in a specific data warehouse and later analyzed with data mining tools, such as correlation engines, time series and neural network algorithms. The basis for delivery of the execution steps are time-stamped Process Instance Identifiers (PIID) and agents that need to be embedded in between process steps (before and after) and also within the applications that are called from the process. All agents send the appropriate information to a listener, that forwards the PIID data to the data warehouse.

I discussed this with a few people in the industry and feedback was mostly positive. Interested in your opinion ....

Redbooks

Although I have been part of the group that is responsible for writing and publishing IBM redbooks for many years, the model behind the International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) remains more or less a mystery to this date. IBM runs a number of ITSO centers (e.g., in Almaden, Austin, Raleigh, Rochester or Poughkeepsie), where assignees (IBM lingo for ex-pats from mostly overseas IBM operations) and local US employees run residencies (again, lingo for 4-8 weeks projects resulting in a redbook or workshop materials) with IBMers, business partners or customers from around the world. Topics range from application development with WebSphere to iSeries performance tuning and DB2 database optimization to Linux on the mainframe. Once the book is finished, it is simply put on the website for free. I have yet to see any other company that publishes high value books and papers that have cost tens of thousands to produce.

Have you co-authored a redbook? Join the Redbook Authors group on LinkedIn by following this link.

This is it: The last METAmorphosis conference

In a few hours, the last ever METAmorphosis conference will kick off here at the Caesars Gauteng in Johannesburg, South Africa. Together with META Group's local consultants and Ex-META Group (now Gartner) analyst colleagues Willie Appel, Rakesh Kumar, Luis Leamus, Jean-Louis Previdi, Tom Scholtz, and Will Cappelli, I will be one of the last people to hold up the old brand during its final curtain. In fact, my last session during the conference (Thursday's main tent presentation on the business intelligence market and trends) will be the very last of all presentations ever delivered. After that, it's all said and done.

Learning new tricks about Firefox

Yes, I know, Firefox has had security exposures, too. But I still feel a lot safer regarding trojans and other nasty stuff like CWS with the Mozilla browser than with IE. Tabbed browsing did it for me, so I've been using Firefox for almost a year, and I really prefer that browser. One thing I'm missing, though, is the Google toolbar. Although Firefox has the built-in search field, which can connect to Google, Yahoo, eBay, Furl, etc., the additional tools like the high-lighter were quite convenient.

Anyway, I learned two things about Firefox and browsers today:

1. It's amazing how customizable Firefox is. Just type about:config into the address field, and you can see what I mean. Now if I only knew what all those paramters do. Some are relatively easy to understand, others I probably better leave alone...
   
2. They are called favicons! I always wondered how some sites managed to get a tiny logo or other icon in front of the URL in the address field. I googled around for a few minutes until I found the answer on the clickfire site that explained it: It's basically a 16x16 icon with 16 colors, you name the file favicon.ico, place it into the appropriate directory of your website.... Done. That's how I managed to get the little 3D-cube next to the URL. Neat, but utterly useless. And if you're using IE, you're out of luck anyway.

Listen up! Audioblogger!

I recorded a short welcome message on Audioblogger. It's kinda neat that you can include audio in your post. Adds a little personal touch. :-) Now that I know the HTML that goes with it, I will also post a few original recordings here. Stay tuned.

Usability: Still your father's mainframe world

Sometimes I'm simply stunned by the fact that users put up with this userid madness. I mean, when we all logged on to our mainframe system running VM, that's pretty much the only login we had to do for the whole day. Now, we connect to a dozen systems and our user profile is never the same, let alone the passwords. Interestingly, IT companies talk about usability requirements, single-sign-on, password security, encryption and the like, however, they make it overly difficult for users.

When I started in my new job, the friendly IT guy gave me my new PC, my kensington lock, and a sheet with my userids and passwords. To do my job, I need to log on to my Windows XP machine, the VPN, the intranet, the extranet, a few applications, and Lotus Notes. Why is it that every system sports a different user id? One has my name, another a botched version of my name, a third has my initials and a number, another one my initials plus one other character and a different number. One has a dash somewhere in the middle... and so on.

Passwords? Same thing. Wherever I could change it, I instantly did. For others I needed to call the helpdesk. I almost got everything like I needed, even adhered to the password rules, but one thing I have yet to understand: When will we get rid of the 8-character limit for user IDs that we had in the 70s? I mean, it can't be storage, it can't be bandwidth, it can't be screen size. It's just silly, and I continue to be abittere because that last r violates some rule. Of course, my last name is exactly 8 characters long, but then IT would need to drop that important first initial A and that would violate another rule. Ugh.

The War on Error

Mark Fiore is certainly a cartoonist (and Flash programmer) with an agenda. I wish there was a similar person here in Germany, who would be as political as Mark, who lives in San Francisco. German politics are certainly full of cartoon candidates, and if one extended it to the EU, the satire material would not end. Of course, certainly no WMD here (or are there?), but good stories about the incredible mess with the Ukrainian visa and the state department legalizing the abuse.

Flickr? Cool!

Check this out. Saw this on Nick's blog... and it's fabulous.

Upgrading Fujitsu Siemens PC ... or not

Recently bought a brand new Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo system to be the audio workhorse for my little studio. It has 1G memory and about half a TB of disk, powered by a Pentium 4 running 3.odd Ghz. It has all the typical attributes from DVD burner to tons of USB and other connectors. However, because I need to put a better audio card and also a video card in it, I checked the back of the unit, and I was happy to see that there were 4 empty slots covered by metall brackets.

Two weeks later, I got around installing all the necessary software (btw, Propellerheads Reason provided the greatest fun I had for a long time), but when I switched to the hardware installation, I got nowhere. Issue No.1: the PC does not have a parallel port! I mean, geez, that can't be a cost saving limitation, in fact, both the case and the motherboard provide the connectors, but Fujitsu Siemens apparently thought there weren't any LPT devices out there anymore. Because I need to connect the MOTU MIDI mapper to the PC, I'm stuck.

Issue No.2: Three of the slots in the back go nowhere. The motherboard ends after slot 4, and the remaining brackets are completely useless. Now I'm getting annoyed. I thought I could use one of the slots for a cheap LPT card, so I don't have to buy another MIDI mapper with a USB connector. Wrong. Even after I threw out the obsolete modem card, I'm still short one PCI slot. I think I'll return the system and get a Dell.

METAlumni network

Ex-META Group colleagues now have a gathering spot in cyberspace. The URL http://www.metaalumni.com is directed to the Yahoo group METAlumni, where Nick Gall maintains the list of alumni. If you are an alumni with a profile on LinkedIn, click on the logo to join the META Group Alumni there.

I created the group on May 2nd, and as of this posting, there are already over 30 members registered.

Garage programmers or Shockwave musicians?

(Labor Day in Germany. Time for some "research".)

Now this I call a modern garage band. Those dudes sound a little like Britpop (they certainly look British, hairdo and all), and their site is actually not so bad. A little minimalistic, maybe, but it probably needs to fit the image of those four Phoenix boys. I remember the time when our band needed to mail cassette tapes to all the clubs in order to get gigs. These days, you send an email with a URL to the clubs in your neighborhood, and every club owner can see, hear, decide and book from his sofa. >> TickerTapeParade