We've been ferreting through Microsoft's job adverts, looking for hints about just what might be behind the viel of secrecy that has risen over Redmond since they started work on the Windows 8 series of operating systems. One came up with something very interesting, that fitted in with conversations we've been having with other IT journalists for some time:

What’s the future of the web?

On one side there’s Flash and Silverlight and the rich internet applications world, which is working on ways of taking the web outside the browser and onto the desktop, where it “lights up” applications and plugs them into a connected world of APIs and services. On the other is the HTML5 working group, and their vision of a browser that can do, well, pretty much anything. With HTML 5 there won’t be any need for applications – it’ll all be web pages running on super-speedy JavaScript engines and with CSS for look and feel.

Here comes the difficult bit.

They’re both right. There are things a well written RIA can do that a web page can’t, and there are things that web page can do that are impossible for a traditional application. With traditional code you need to push new applications to every desktop every time there’s a change. Even .NET’s click-once and AIR’s self updaters don’t make much of a difference – you still need the latest version of the code to get the latest features, and that (with a flagship RIA like Morgan Stanley’s Matrix) can be a hefty chunk to download. At least with a web page, one change and then everyone who uses it can get access to the latest version.

It’s all a trade off. Not every web site suits every user, nor does every RIA have a fully engaged audience. That’s why so much work is going into getting those experiences right, whether its online design tools like Mozilla’s Bespin, or Sketchflow in Microsoft’s Expression or the designer developer workflow between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. But a web page and an application are outside the operating system, and if web-centric OSes ever become common, they need to have some way of supporting and interacting with the web. That’s why there’s so much interest in Google’s ChromeOS and Microsoft’s Windows 8. They’re going to be the first real operating systems of the modern web.

Read more at 500 Words Into The Future on ZDnet...

I've been blogging about my first experiences with the iPhone 2.0 software over at IT Pro:

I've been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple's implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO's iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

I've added plenty of images so you can see just what it all looks like. Here are a couple just to whet your appetites:





Go read the rest of the piece for the rest of the images!

Meanwhile Mary looked at one possible reason for buying an iPhone 3G - increased blocking of social networks inside the corporate firewall:

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

Remember to make any comments over there!

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you'll find the image in the device's camera roll.)

While we've been on the road in the US, we've not been neglecting our blogging duties. Here's a selection of entries from our tech blog, hosted over at IT Pro.

On Microsoft/Yahoo!:

Anyone who’s listened to me rant over the last couple of years will have heard me say that I expect Microsoft to takeover Yahoo!. With Google’s dominance over search, and Yahoo!’s success at what Microsoft wants to build into Live, there’s a certain logic to a merger of the two businesses. Yahoo needs the R&D boost that Microsoft can give it, and Microsoft needs the online presence of Yahoo!.

I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft has made a formal offer to Yahoo!, offering $44.6 billion for the company.

Microsoft’s been playing nice with Yahoo! for some time. It’s Windows Live Photo Gallery handles uploads to Flick, and Windows Live Messenger can talk to Y! users. The love goes both ways too, as Y! is one of the first applications to really take advantage of the Vista UI enhancements.

Reading Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo! this morning I noticed a couple of quotes.

(Read More)

On low cost 3G data and what it means for WiFi:

The usual round of email press releases dropped into the SandM mailbox this morning. One caught our attention, from the folk at PC World, which signals something we’re pretty sure is going to be one of the big IT trends for 2008.

In a tie up with 3, they’re going to be offering a free cheap laptop (or £350 off most) along with one of 3’s 3G dongle modems. You’ll need to sign up for a £35 a month data tariff for the cheap laptop, which gives you 3GB of data (with 10p/megabyte for anything over) at up to 2.8Mbps.

Ignore the free laptop (after all, PC World have a lot to get rid of, if you remember their recent results!) - it’s the 3G modem that really interests us.

(Read More)

On bad tech patents:

The latest patent idiocies could put phone prices up and increase your security bill. And only one of the cases would be fixed by my own theory of patents (if you don’t yourself manufacture the item or use the process protected by a patent, I think you shouldn’t be able to benefit from the patent by extorting money from companies that do go to the effort of actually making something).

That would get rid of the patent trolls who buy up IP and sneak it past the patent office. Take the owners of the ludicrous new smartphone patent, which seems to ignore more prior art than I could shake a phone battery at. Read through the patent and you’ll find it’s not Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, HTC, Palm, Apple, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, HP or Motorola claiming to have invented the smartphone; it’s one Ki Il Kim of Minerva Industries, Los Angeles.

(Read More)

On open phones and open networks:

We spotted a blog post the other day claiming that the iPhone set new standards as an open phone platform. Rubbish, I said; you can’t install your choice of applications without hacking the pone via an image bug in the browser - and if you do, then you can’t get the updates that come out because they fix the hole and lock the iPhone right up again. How can you call that open? Apple may have an SDK on the way, but the iPhone is as closed as one of LG’s shiny bling machines.

The examples in the article look odd to British eyes, as we’ve become used to ubiquitous high-speed data and unlocked smartphones. You can run Google Maps and get your location from the mobile phone masts? You can do that on Windows Mobile, and you can have Live Search and Yahoo! Go on there too, along with more apps than you can shake a stick at. And you can search your emails properly (once you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6; if your operator hasn’t made an upgrade available and neither has the manufacturer, check the enthusiast sites for ROM upgrades that won’t compromise security or stop you being able to get future updates).

(Read More)

On using a mobile phone as a data modem:

We’ve been on the road for the last few weeks, doing a round of Stateside conferences and company visits. That’s meant relying on the “free” wifi in motels and conference halls. Consumer hardware really doesn’t cut it when you’re using a couple of Linksys routers to cover a hundred plus rooms - especially when it’s the cheapest motel nearest the CES halls. Every room was probably full of journalists and analysts trying to get online, and the routers just waved their little rubber feet in the air and gave up.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have dug out a good book and gone cold turkey on my Internet addiction. After all, I didn’t need to read a dozen gadget blogs to tell me what I’d just seen that day. However I had the IT Pro editorial team back in the UK waiting for copy - and lack of connectivity wasn’t what I needed. I could have gone to a Starbucks for some of their wifi, but not many are still open at 1 am, even in Vegas. I could have used a 3G card, but this shiny new HP Compaq 2710P tablet is a Santa Rosa machine, so only has a ExpressCard slot - and my Vodafone 3G card is, yes, a PC Card.

(Read More)

On wandering around MacWorld SF:

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellery, there’s a case to suit.

(Read More)

On Oracle buying BEA and Sun buying MySQL:

It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley. It’s also been a busy few days in boardrooms in the towns around San Jose. While Apple has been burning the midnight oil at One Infinite Loop while plotting this year’s MacWorld strategy, the lawyers’ Lexus convertibles have been powering up and down 101 with the documents that detailed this morning’s announcements.

Oracle buying BEA wasn’t a surprise, the two companies have been engaged in a takeover struggle for some time, and BEA’s capitulation, if not quite a foregone conclusion, was certainly on the cards. Sun’s purchase of MySQL came out of the blue. It’s actually quite logical though, as Sun has been moving away from its proprietary roots since Jonathan Schwartz took control of the corporate rudder.

(Read More)

On the next generation of storage at CES:

Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.

If you expect to treat your data roughly, Corsair has the rugged, rubber-coated Voyager and the Survivor which screws into an aircraft-grade aluminium canister. The Survivor we saw looked a touch battered; Corsair had driven a tractor over it to test it out. Voyager drives were sitting in ice, water and sand but they still worked when we fished them out.

(Read More)

On "Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House" and other CES goodies:

Just because it’s the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of products that matter for business here in Vegas.

Connecting to multiple monitors wirelessly is as useful at work as it is at home; manufacturers like IOGEAR and Samsung are doing that with DisplayLink’s chips and a future product will put the screen from your mobile phone onto a TV or monitor. A SlingCatcher lets you send video from one TV to another (so you don’t have to pay a second Sky subscription to watch the occasional show on a TV in the bedroom), but you can also use it to see photos, presentations, Web pages - and anything else that’s on your PC screen - on TV, which is handy for an informal meeting. Panasonic’s 150" screen is sized for a large meeting room rather than the average living room.

And then there’s Windows Home Server. It’s designed for the home - obviously. Microsoft has come up with an amusing ad campaign about Stay At Home Servers, complete with fake TV debates and a hugely funny children’s picture book entitled Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House?

(Read More)

Comments over there please!

Also, if you want to see these as they arrive, in full, there's a syndicated feed for the blog at itpro_sandm.

Here's an interesting tree map graph of this page's structure, mapping the HTML that makes up everything you can see. Go here to make your own. The nodes are colour coded as follows:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Quite fascinating. I obviously have quite a complex template in play! That and the tables I occasionally use...

Original linkage from Chris Green

It's time to gather up some links to recent blog posts on marypcb's and my blog at IT Pro . It's been a while since I've done this - so there's plenty for you to read.

• "Mini USB - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!" China standardises on mini-USB. That'll simplify the power supplies under my desk and in my luggage.
• "A Virtual Archive" Do you have problems with obsolete file formats? You're not alone - the team at the National Archive have an even a bigger version of the very same problem!
• "Why are you still using the post office?" There's a strike on today - so it's the perfect time to give up your paper habit.
• "Take the tablet, just not as it comes" Shiny new laptop; scuffed old Norton uninstaller - and the utility that does the job
• "Free Wi-Fi, free security holes" I'm not hacking the network, I'm trying to fix it... lucky for the hotel
• "How simple is too simple?" There's easy and there's deceptively simple; only one isn't a con
• "Women in Technology at Microsoft" Women in IT - want a job at Microsoft? Go for it…
• "The commoditisation of IT hits new highs" Next up - the Lego machine room!
• "Microsoft goes back to the future at TechEd" Few new announcements, and a non-vision vision set the scene for a week with 10,000 IT pros in Orlando
• "The wrong Dayton airport" Driving through the dawn to Dayton, Ohio for the flight to Orlando, we reach the airport in plenty of time. Shame it's the wrong one.

Enjoy!

The online Miieditor can save out Miis as 100 x 100 jpegs.

So I had a go with it, and ended up like this:



Oh dear... I'm not sure if it's convincing, but it's certainly fun, tweaking all the options to try and get the right image!

So how quickly will having a mii become a miime?

A fascinating map of the link interconnections between blogs over a six-week period, from Discover Magazine. It's an extension of the work detailed in Matthew Hurst's Data Mining Blog, which I've linked to in the past.

The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.

I'm actually not too sure about the conclusion drawn about LJ:

3 SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS This isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers uses LiveJournal, an online host that primarily serves as a social networking site. This blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld.

Of course I may just have a more outgoing reading list than many people here...

[Update: pulling out a useful comment by del_c that succinctly makes the point I was trying to make: "I bet that cluster is by definition the live journals that are linked to each other and not the blogs. I bet the live journals that are heavily linked to the blogs, and linked by them, are in the pack where they don't stand out like the cluster does. The existence of the cluster with a gap tells us that there is a difference between the two types of live journals, not that there is a difference between all live journals and all blogs."]

I've been playing with Scrapblog, a rather nifty tool for producing online scrapbooks.

It links to most popular web photohosting sites and imports your images ready for use, and uses a Flash UI to lay out your presentation pages, with custom photo frames and text - just like a scrapbook or a photo album. You can resize and rotate images. You can add extra pages to Scrapblogs as you go, so you're not limited by a single page - and of course published pages aren't locked down, so you can update and edit them any time you want.

The UI is impressive - it's currently built in Flex, so does a lot more than your average Flash application. There's an Apollo port out there too, so you won't be limited to working through web pages.

I wouldn't see this as a replacement for Flickr or any other site like that - this is more a way of quickly selecting a group of images, and then sharing them with friends and family who wouldn't normally spend time delving through a Flickr photostream...

Here's my Scrapblog

My one quibble: for some reason the application defaults to US keyboard settings

I missed yesterday's news of Cisco's purchase of WebEx. When I came across it on various news sites this morning it gave me something to think about - something I turned into quite a long piece over at IT Pro.

This week has seen duelling green policies from both sides of the political spectrum. One thing they all seem to agree on: air travel is a bad thing, and it needs to become more expensive. Putting the rights and the wrongs of the argument to one side, it's likely we'll see a significant increase in the cost of business travel over the next few years.

So how are we going to cope?

The answer's been with us for a while, and Cisco is now putting its money on the table to link the solution's market leader with its networking equipment. Web conferencing has been around a good few years now, and WebEx and its competitors (like Adobe Connect and Microsoft's Live Meeting) have grown by offering tools to help businesses share information over the Internet. WebEx's investment in what it calls its MediaTone network has been considerable, giving it a hefty private backbone for bandwidth-intensive services - and a hefty advantage over its competition.

Read the rest here.

We're back in London for a few days to catch up on things before swinging over the pond for CES.

So it's a chance for a quick round up of 2006...

Travels

Four continents and four months away from home, taking us to all four corners of the USA (and some stops in the middle), to the beauties of New Zealand, to the bustling streets of Hong Kong, and the depths underneath Switzerland. Cities visited included Hong Kong, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, San Jose, Campbell, San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Wellington, Christchurch, Geneva, and Munich.

We drove the whale-watching twists and turns of Highway One from San Francisco to LA, went to Death Valley in the rain, sat in our own hot springs on Hot Water Beach, and watched dolphins swim up the coast of the Coramandel Peninsula. It is a wonderful world.

Books

Best read of the year was by far Sean Williams' "Books of the Cataclysm" series, which wrapped his earlier "Books of the Change" YA series in a set of adult novels that expanded on the earlier themes, to unfold one of the more innovative fantasies of the last twenty years. If fantasy is inherently conservative, the final volume The Devoured Earth turned that meme soundly on its head, with characters who not only thought about the choices they were making, but used the time carefully to find a true alternative path that offered progress and growth. Wonderful stuff that needs a wider audience beyond the southern Australian landscapes that inspired so much of the story. Yes, Pyr is publishing the series in the US, but their version will miss the crucial three "Books of the Change" - which I luckily found on our first trip to the side of the world.

Other good reads included finishing Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey trilogy, being encouraged by marypcb to try Kerry Greenwood's detective fiction, Chris Roberson's post-modern planetary-romance Paragea, and the final part of Nancy Kress' Quaker military space opera duology Crucible.

Literary Pilgrimages

Slip F8 at the Baia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale. Travis is long gone, and there are no Rolls Royce pickup truck or house boat to be seen...

Music

The highlight here was finally seeing Thomas Dolby live, at one of the warm up gigs for his tour in San Francisco, and at an enthusiastic homecoming at the Scala here in London. With more tours to come, and new music, I suspect I'll be seeing him playing again somewhere soon. Other gigs included seeing regular favourite Billy Bragg and a blast from the past with the original line up of prog rock supergroup Asia.

Sport

Two baseball games - watching the Cubs shut out Barry Bonds as he tried for Babe Ruth's record, and seeing the Mariners run in a grand slam against the Orioles.

One football match - the opening of the World Cup in Munich. The massed oompah bad was most peculiar...

Technology

CERN took us to the largest physics experiment we've seen, and to the first web server. Closer to home we've been writing for more magazines and web sites, including our regular tech blog at IT Pro, where you'll find my tech round-up of 2006.