TechSlam

Go to settings, general and select always use https. This way you’ll never have to remember to type it. More info on the gmail blog.

So far it has been reported that people were bricking their first-gen iphones trying to install the 2.0 firmware, and that activations were taking so long that stores were telling people to “get comfy” or to try and activate at home (which didn’t work either). Neither of those issues affected me (except that I can’t reach my friend Chris because he has a brick with the apple logo in his pocket now).

Now (about noon on Friday) our business AT&T rep called to tell us that they’ve sold out of 3G iphones and instead of shipping our new units today (as promised earlier this week), it would be next week on the 18th at the earliest before they shipped! I was willing to look past the fact that they could only ship them all to one location, which will cause us to have to unbox them, and rebox and reship them to our staff in various other locations (I’m one of those in a remote location). But now it won’t even ship for another week, at best?

FAIL!

Outages are so frequent that they’ve become accepted, and now they’ve allowed their API to expose private messages.  Whoops.  But hey, if you think you can do a better job (I do), polish up that resume!

Techcrunch is reporting the news about Google App Engine - a full-blown competitor to Amazon’s web services, and to cloud hosting companies like Mosso and Media Temple.More than just a collection of web services, App Engine is a full-blown hosting suite.  The only downside is that it’s python based, which will limit the number of developers jumping ship on day one.Full details from Mr. Arrington here.  

There is a lot of coverage today about the potential launch of Google’s “BigTable” database that powers much of google’s products as a public web service for developers to use in their own applications.  I have used Amazon’s SimpleDB (and their S3 solution) in a number of projects on recent projects, and can say that while S3 is hard to beat, SimpleDB can use some help.

It would be refreshing to see a true competitor to SimpleDB - yes, some exist, but few have the resources of Amazon behind them to give me a good feeling about giving them my data.

There are even rumors that the BigTable Web Service would be free, with Google’s strategy being tied more towards cheaper acquisition integration costs if more startups are already using their storage engine.  Assume they spend $5 million in storage/back-end integration costs on each small to mid-sized acquisition, and that they do 10 per year that already use Google BigTable, that could be a $50 million savings.  My guess is that $50 million would cover a small portion of the costs related to providing this service if it really took off.

If Google offered it for free with no SLA and for pay (cheaply) with a 100% uptime SLA,  they would really put a dent into SimpleDB and S3’s business, especially with the repeat outages that we have seen at Amazon recently.

Hopefully we’ll see a launch soon, I’m anxious to give it a try!

I ordered a MacBook Air on Tuesday morning, opting for the faster 1.8ghz processor. This small change seems to have turned it into a custom build, which means that instead of shipping next day like the website advertises, it won’t ship until the third day. I’m ok with that, except that it ships from Shanghai, and like all geeks I want my new stuff before the weekend.

Because of FedEx’s passion for being on time, my Air seems to have missed its flight, I think. At 11:21am FedEx shows the dreaded “received after FedEx cutoff” message, but only 6 minutes later it shows “Left origin”, which could be a good sign.

Apple says April 5th is my scheduled delivery date, but considering that the laptop is likely sitting on a runway in Shanghai, and it’s already almost noon EDT on April 3rd, that seems unlikely.

Until then, I’ll use this broken down 2+ year old MacBook Pro that generates enough heat to make your legs crispy before the machine finishes booting…

Let me count the ways…

1. It’s a memory hog on every platform it runs on
2. It’s constantly asking me to upgrade
3. It conveniently doesn’t remember my settings after an upgrade, so for example it always reverts back to spawning a browser and taking me to AOL’s website every time I open the AIM client.  It also turns back on every sound and default notification after every mandatory “upgrade”.
4. It is by far the most intrusive, annoying IM client that I’ve ever used.  The sounds alone are enough to drive someone crazy.
5. The installer is so bloated with extra crap that you almost need to run it on a separate machine.

From here on I’m only going to be using AIM through someone elses client.  Lately I’ve been using the gmail->AIM integration which is nice… and for years I’ve used other clients, but then things like file transfers between AIM’ers doesn’t always work.  With so many great ways to transfer files these days, I say “goodbye sad, sad AIM client”.

A friend of mine has a startup that is using a lot of web services asked me for advice on WSM tools. Knowing his small startup budget, and the large, enterprise-sized price tags that most WSM’s come with, I suggested that he look at a hosted WSM solution instead of buying one outright.

Surely, someone has to offer that, right? After some googling[1], sadly, it doesn’t seem that anyone with a clue about SEO is offering a hosted WSM solution.

Attention WSM vendors - my extensive research (and gut entrepreneurial feeling) indicates that you are missing a huge market! Look at what Amazon has done with their S3 storage system… startups love inexpensive hosted solutions to solve expensive or complex problems. I have a lot more thoughts on this that I will put in a follow-up post…  stay tuned

[1] I googled the following with “hosted”, “hosting”, “SAAS” and “ASP”: Actional, AmberPoint, BEA, Oracle, SOA Software, Software AG, WebMethods, Web Service Management & WSM and turned up nothing specific around a true, hosted WSM solution.

That’s the word according to Anne Thomas Manes from the Burton Group.  Unfortunately, I agree.  On her blog, she says:

I’ve talked to many companies that have implemented stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures that support managed communications using virtualized proxies and dynamic bindings. They’ve deployed the best technology the industry has to offer — including registries, repositories, SOA management, XML gateways, and even the occasional ESB. Many have set up knowledge bases, best practices, guidance frameworks, and governance processes. And yet these SOA initiatives invariably stall out. The techies just can’t sell SOA to the business. They have yet to demonstrate how all this infrastructure yields any business value.

The most important line there is the last one. I believe that demonstrating value is key in the current cost-cutting or cost avoidance mode that many IT shops are in. If you ask management for millions of dollars for Service Oriented Architecture, you should be prepared to show what the ROI is. Put a simple dashboard of metrics together and take it to any executive that will listen. Get their feedback on what should be included in the next version of the dashboard, and make those changes, and repeat the cycle.

Some examples of what you might include on your SOA ROI dashboard are:

• Total number of services in use
• Number of reusable services in use
• Total applications or integrations using services
• Number of applications reusing an existing service
• Days of effort saved by reusing existing services
• Dollars saved by reusing existing services
• Number of service transactions (day/week/month/year/etc)
• Average service response time (ms)
• Number of developers trained in using and building services
• Number of architects trained in SOA
• Number of visits to SOA intranet site
• And so on…

Pick the ten points that you believe will have the most impact on management, and start there. Use your Web Service Management (WSM) tools that you’ve purchased to collect most of these metrics, and make sure that management knows the tools they paid for are collecting these metrics.

Too many SOA program managers expect that management will figure out they are doing a good job, and that there is huge ROI in their SOA investment. The truth is that you really do have to go knock on doors and put yourself in front of them, and show them the value of SOA. Only then will you start to get more support and more resources!

When I saw the headline “Data thieves steal credit card data from supermarket chain” I really did a double take. Why is a supermarket storing your credit card number? Maybe keep it until the daily transactions settle, and then strip it down to the last 4 digits. But the smart folks at Hannaford have millions of cards on their not-so-secure servers, and some even smarter bad guys broke in and stole them.

I called the Hannaford help line (you can call too, 866-591-4580) to ask why they weren’t sanitizing or encrypting the sensitive data, but they were pretty clueless. They did point me to the company website where their CEO, Ronald C. Hodge had his PR folks craft up a nice message talking about how fresh their food is, and how they apologize for any trouble this may cause their customers.

It’s time companies really start looking at what customer information they are storing, how they store it, and more importantly, if they even need to store it in the first place!