Shiny new Browsers

September 3rd, 2008 by Mirco

shiny-new-browsers

So now we have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome along with some mashup browsers competing for their marketshare of Wíndows users.

I’m running Firefox 3 for a few months now, and so far I like that they finally decided to ditch the Bookmark.htm after nearly 15 years. But it’s still clogging my machines memory and keeps crashing down if there is no free RAM left. Remember when we all switched from Netscape Navigator to Firefox, because it was a small minimalistic browser with a tiny footprint both in size an memory consumption?

Last weeks big news was the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta2. After using it for a few days I found some quirks, like crashing when processing some JavaScripts or that it’s painfully slow at some points. And Why did they separate The Favorites Bar from the favorites Menu? And why can’t I place them both left of the page tabs? I guess I just have to wait for the next release.

And now it’s Google’s surprise browser. And at first look it reminded me of something I liked several years ago. Firefox 0.9x. It’s again small, fast, and doesn’t come with a bunch of useless features. It’s still Beta, so I won’t be expecting too much, but for the time it serves it’s purpose of reminding everybody else, that a small fast browser is possible and will be used by the masses.

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Relying on the Unknown

September 2nd, 2008 by Mirco

relying-on-the-unknown

When merging different companies, one of the most crucial building blocks of future success is a fully merged and centralized IT Management. Why? Because every attempt I witnessed to try something else created chaos. And that’s something you really don’t want within your IT department.

A small example. One of my customers bought some small companies and integrated them into their Active Directory, leaving every local administrator with a domain administrator account, because that’s what they had before the migration. Sounds fair for the administrators, but a few weeks later some of the mail servers stopped sending email.

Someone made some small changes to the DNS service, which was Active Directory integrated, so this reduced the potential causes to the Domain Admin group members… all 120 of them. At first this doesn’t look like a huge number, but if you consider that every local administrator and at some sites even local support personnel had domain administrator privileges, it is much to great a risk to be left unchanged.

Another small example, at another company. While rolling out a new directory structure and migrating every company site into it, all local administrators where reduced from local Domain Administrators to being Domain Users with delegated privileges. Some of them fought fiercely to regain their old “power” and the CIO was forced by some executives to reinstate them.

The funny thing was one of them sent an email with a question, that most of the central hotline staff could answer, about a problem he had at his site only minutes after the CIO requested to rejoin this particular administrator. The request was cancelled, after we forwarded this email to the CIO.

The main problem when merging IT departments is, that in most cases you don’t know anything about the people and their skills. Even if, in this case, they have been running the local IT at some sites for years this doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.

We all know communication is a crucial part of business success and since IT is a crucial part of today’s businesses it’s even more important to know what is going on in your network, on your servers and who is making changes to what.

That’s why change management was created.

Sending an email with a problem to a distribution list of 40 administrators doesn’t necessary solve a problem. It will more likely produce another: The problem assignment.

This approach has two possible paths of solution.

  1. Everyone thinks somebody else is already on it and ignores the email
  2. Two or more Admins will try to solve the same problem at the same time

In most cases none of these paths will solve the original problem, because every change of one admin will lead to inconclusive result for the other, thus resulting in more changes.

Taking some time to think, define and plan how your IT environment should work and how this plan can be realised is the first an one of the more difficult steps, but it in the end it will be worth the effort.

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vSide - My Cooler Side?

August 31st, 2008 by Mirco

vside-my-cooler-side

This week I received an invitation for a field trip to vSide, a new online community platform virtual world thingy from a community at my company.

And since I’m always interested in new virtual ways to waste my time I tagged along.

vSide is a new project by Doppelganger focused on the young party crowd, or people that thing they are a part of it. Inside you’ll find anything from shops to clubs, bars, lounges and more shops.

Like in Second Life you can purchase new clothes and accessories at the various shops within the vSide world with the in-game currency. The vBux and the vPoints. vPoints can be earned though interaction in the virtual world, while you’ll have to purchase the vBux using your real life credit card.

After registering a username, password and your email, you can download the vSide client. Currently this is version 6c, and the platform is still in beta. You’ll just have to assemble your avatar and that’s it. There aren’t many options to chose from so, it’s very likely to run into a lot of clones.

You can run through the Gateway, a short tutorial of the world and the controls, to get access to some more accessories or just jump into the world.

There are three zones to explore: NewVenezia, an urban site with clubs, shops and apartments. RaiJuku, and urban site with clubs, shops and residences. And LaGenoaAires, an urban site with clubs, shops and … luxury yachts.

Most probably you’ll start with a small apartment, that can be furnished and colored to suit you’re needs. Not to mention you’ll have to buy the furniture.

Everything you do and who you meet, add to your friends, the ratings for music, that’s played constantly in the background is displayed on your profile page.

vSide_profile

Additionally you can add some more info like a short bias and interests. All screenshots taken in the game are displayed as an online slideshow. To broaden the online community the creators have placed a Facebook and a MySpace user.

vside_facebook     vSide_myspace

Let’s talk about the software client. It’s available for Windows XP / Vista and Mac OS X. A Linux client is rumored to be in development. The application window cannot go fullscreen but you can resize it although this won’t change the graphic resolution of the content. Screenshots can be taken with a hotkey combination, but the shot will only cover about 3/4 of the screen.

The controls are a bit odd if you’re used to computer games. You can move around using the arrow keys or CTRL + WASD combinations. ENTER will let you jump while pushing any other key enables the chat dialog. This is the part that nobody get’s used to that knows online games, since every games requires you to push ENTER before typing the messages. But it’s pretty easy to spot the noobs in a crowd of people this way.

The background music changes in genre and volume depending on the venue you’re currently visiting. but the selection seems to be a bit sloppy to me. During my field trip there where numerous tracks clearly tag as “Promo Only” albums, which is great if you want to know what artist album contains a certain track. But you can always rate the current song. Maybe this will improve the music, or set something in my profile, who knows.

vSide_timeout

So in the end, what’s this vSide all about? If I want to go clubbing, I go to a real club. If I want to go shopping I go to a real shop. And I definitely won’t spend real money on virtual goods. What’s left is another virtual world that’s more like an IRC replacement to me. Sort of like the old VRML Chatrooms that failed miserably in the 90s.

Lets see what happens and how this World develops. Could be worth checking once and a while.

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