CBS News’ Bob Schieffer
CBS News ' Bob Schieffer Speaking at Cambridge Forum 7:30 p.m March 31. Should be interesting. Here's the schedule of the Cambridge Forum.
Overview of Collaboration
I had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at Brandeis University today, which was fun. Brandeis of course is my Alma Mater, so I was quite at home there. The course was about "Internet and Society" and the section was about Collaboration. Here are my slides, for those few who might be interested.
Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series
Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series 10) This is a little arcane but I thought it was an interesting pattern among several products launched at Demo 2004. "Behavior Signature Analysis" is the idea of learning something about the intent or higher level purpose of an activity by doing pattern analysis on some aspect of it's low level behavior. There were several companies showing products that tried to do this at the Method invocation and HTTP Request levels: that you can tell something about meaning strictly by analyzing patterns of low level.
Memento: BC Krishna has built a really cool new solution to measure and understand the actual use of business application in the enterprise to demonstrate the value of the IT investment. So in contrast with Imperva, Memento uses patterns of object invocations as evidence that an application is being used in an expected fashion and using that information as evidence of business value.
Imperva SecureSphere does this by watching HTTP requests before they are handled by the web server or database and judging that repeated requests during a single session that don’t follow patterns (signatures) that were recorded during a training phase are probably indicators of some kind of malicious activity.
Different objectives, analogous techniques.
Outlook 2003 Rant.
Outlook 2003 Rant. What were those guys thinking? Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those Microsoft haters. I love Microsoft. I admire their work. But in this instance, and one that affects me directly and daily, boy do I feel let down!
I've been using Outlook 2003 for a few months now. While it has some nice new features, the one feature I use the most and arguably the most important because of its prominence is so-called ' Navigation Pane.' Not to rub salt in the wound,but, why, oh, why
Can't I resize the 'Favorite Folders' panel?
Can't I hide the 'All Mail Folders' panel?
Doesn't the 'All Mail Folders' Panel preserve its collapse state?
Can't I look at my Tasks along side my Calendar like I could in Outlook XP?
Can't I make sure that the 'Current View' Panel doesn't disappear?
I remember a few years ago speaking to a Microsoft friend of mine who was a Program Manager who said, of the old 'Outlook Bar' - "we know it stinks; we are completely redesigning it! " Yikes.
And now I have to wait another 4 years for the next 'redesign' 🙁
(I've been harboring this for a long time. It feels good to get it off my chest.)
BlogBridge has spiffy new icons.
BlogBridge has spiffy new icons. More progress the last week or so, with the addition of some nicenew eye candy. It's getting closer and closer to being usable for real. If you want to try it out, send me an email and I will tell you where to download it. (It's not ready for prime time yet, though, just for playing around.)
Open Source Icons and BlogBridge
The beat goes on. Now that we have Unread working, the time was ripe to add several new commands to the user interface. With the help of Everaldo, I am now using the Crystal Icon Set, which has provided a wonderful face lift for BlogBridge. Feedback welcome! Also with the help of one of our offshore developers (in the Ukraine) there are major improvements (and more coming) in the rendering of the Blog Aricles, which now include support for a larger subset of html, including images and soon links.
Stewart Alsop ” the best
Stewart Alsop " the best political columnist of the past century": Well, that's high praise from William Safire in a New York Times editorial today. Stewart of course has been known as a technology columnist, author of a great Tech newsletter " PC Letter", and inventor of the " Vapor List" where he tracked software vendors' promises against reality. Stewart has since gone to the dark side and the world of Venture Capital.
What I never knew was that Stewart had been, apparently, a political columnist of some note!
Correction: In fact, the reference by Safire was to another Stewart Alsop, the father of the Stewart Alsop that I know and I mention above. Oops. Stewart Alsop the elder in fact was a political columnist of some renown until he passed away in 1974.
BlogBridge update. In the last
BlogBridgeupdate. In the last few days I've made some reasonable progress on BlogBridge, both from my own personal efforts coding, as well as getting another developer involved in a small way. As time frees up, I am planning to invest more of my own time as well as getting others to contribute on this thing. Still Fun! (If you don't know what BlogBridge is, check this out.)
BlogBridge Major architectural progress
We made some major new progress since the last update.
Unread Management. The persistent RSS layer (Informa) has been updated to support Unread management. This has been carried through the rest of BlogBridge, using Bold in the Channel Guide and in the Article list in the usual way to show read and uread. A set of new commands, Mark Read, Mark All Read have been added as well. Some of the other variations still need to be implemented.
Refined background processing. The various background processes have been moved into their own subsystem making it easier to manage them. Also a simple activity indicator has been added to the status bar so the user can see that there's background activity. Finally an initial Preferences dialog box has been implemented allowing control over some of these background processes.
Imrpoved HTML rendering. With the help of another developer we are bringing the HTML rendering into the 21st century, slowly. As you can see in the screenshot RSS images are handled and we will use the opportunity to also support italics, links and other formats.
Other User Interface Changes. We've introduced an initial command bar at the top of the window. It looks like we will be able to do without a menu bar and tie all the commands either to the command bar or the right click menu.
What you may not know
What you may not know about Eclipse. (Demo 2004 Series 10) If you are a Java developer and you haven't checked out the Eclipse Development tool from www.eclipse.org, then you owe yourself a treat. Who knows if you get excited about that kind of thing, but it gives me chills. Here are some claims to fame:
It's free.
It's open source
It's as good as better as that paragon of tools Microsoft Visual Studio
It's fast
It's visually stunning as a Windows desktop application
And … It's written in Java!
Check it out, you won't be sorry. **But that 's not really the topic of this post. **
Back at Demo 2004,mValent demonstrated a unique tool for the configuration and change management of complex of n-tier enterprise system deployments. An arcane area to be sure, but a great product.
Back to Eclipse though: For me this product is especially interesting to me because it illustrates a unique and little known capability of the Eclipse system, which is it's use as a wonderful application framework. They've done this by abstracting the IDE model to a level where it can be used for a variety of tools and applications which otherwise would have to start from scratch.
mValent is the existance proof: Here's a sophisticated application which uses the Eclipse Framework – and which itself is not an IDE! Beautiful!