EcoblogIT

Way cool Gmail feature

2007-08-29T15:18:00.000+01:00

I've been using Gmail for domains for seven months and it's been a bit like the beginnings of a romance. First of all, every day you find something great about it that you didn't know before. Then every week.

And then this....

You can create pseudo addresses. What's that you ask?

Well it means that you can sign up to services with unique e-mail addresses so that any mail from them still comes into your mailbox. BUT, you now know where any sold-on addresses came from (using Gmail's filters).

So, in the case of my projectrestripe.com account:

mike+spamfromecoblogitpost@projectredstripe.com

will also get to me, but if the address gets harvested I will know where it came from. Now, I'm sure that pretty soon services will start to defeat this, but for now it's fantastic.

See Aaron Lynch's blog entry for the lowdown.

SCREW ME UP!

2007-02-28T14:14:00.001Z

Go anywhere on the web, flickr and amazon work really well then paste this into the URL bar

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Flash Art aceness

2007-02-25T13:34:00.000Z

Just watch

this video

Amazon mockery

2007-02-23T14:01:00.000Z

My on time and on target manager book is erm delayed.....

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order.

We are sorry to report that the following items have been delayed.

Kenneth H. Blanchard (Author), Steve Gottry (Author) "The On-time,
On-target Manager (One Minute Manager)" [Hardcover]

We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Geek sings about CMS (WordPress)

2007-01-26T13:17:00.000Z

Just don't go there.

As the name of the site I saw this on says (not quite NSFW).....

Diesel home page "hijack"

2007-01-25T13:59:00.000Z

Catch it while you can.

the iphone mistake

2007-01-22T19:02:00.000Z

I deleted my post last week about the iphone not being amazing as I thought I looked a bit stupid, the post had terrible English and I generally thought I'd spoken too soon.

Mike Elgin from computerworld writes :

Steve Jobs' blockbuster keynote address at last week's Macworld was brilliantly and powerfully delivered -- one of his best ever. It was also a colossal mistake.

No Silver bullets

2007-01-18T21:12:00.000Z

I still get annoyed when managers think they can simply throw people at problems. Some problems don't get fixed with numbers. There is no silver bullet

Charging unit

2007-01-18T12:14:00.000Z

I might just make one of these!

ZunePhone

2007-01-15T14:58:00.001Z

Nuff said...

iPhone pricing and avaliability

2007-01-09T17:06:00.003Z

4Gb model $499 expected to ship in June in the US in partnership with Cingular (exclusively). Q4 for Europe.

The reasoning given for the exclusivity is that the visual voicemail needs work from the service provider. It remains to be seen how this will impact on sales and how soon it will be before unlocked iPhones become available on the grey market

It wasn't made clear what length contract will be demanded by Cingular during the "multi-year" exclusivity period.

From today Apple is dropping the "Computer" from Apple Computer Inc.

Macworld - the iPhone

2007-01-09T17:06:00.002Z

A widescreen iPod, a phone and a revolutionary internet connectivity device. All in one - the iPhone (using Steve Jobs words there).

"It is smarter and easier to use that anything out there right now."

The keyboard will be a "soft" one one a big screen that you use your finger to drive. It will run OS X. Now, Microsoft have gone down this route, but not on their own hardware.

It will sync via iTunes.

From a design point of view, it has a 3.5" screen (diagonal) and is 11.6mm thin. It has only one button on the front - a home button. It also has an accelerometer built in so that it knows whether to display in landscape or portrait, for example. Plus a proximity sensor (so that it can respond appropriately when you have it close to your ear, for example), and a light sensor.

The iPod works through gestures and taps on the screen and Jobs obviously had had some practice as he used it without problem, but intuitively it looks like it might be fiddly. As an iPod it looks better than any before.

The phone "will make using the contacts really easy", is quad band with wi-fi and Bluetooth plus a 2 megapixel camera.

Jobs showed how easy it was to conference callers in. The voicemail feature shown allowed access to all waiting messages via a list rather than in sequential order but he hinted that this needed some additional service from the service provider.

It looked really impressive as a phone.

For internet connectivity it has an HTML e-mail client, Safari, Google Maps, widgets and will switch seamlessly to wi-fi when a service is detected (some caveats here, surely). For the e-mail service Yahoo! will push e-mail to the iPhone (as a Blackberry does) for free.

Safari load a complete picture of a page on the screen and you can easily zoom in as you need to (my Nokia N73 kinda does this now).

I suppose a question might be how open the device will be for third party apps.

Macworld - updates

2007-01-09T17:06:00.001Z

iTunes has sold over 2 billion songs; 1.2 bn in 2006.

Paramount will join Disney in selling movies through iTunes.

Appletv was shown - it was previewed in September and is a wi-fi connected device that can store and stream content to you wide screen tv from iTunes including music. Of course, the default encoding on iTunes is not hi-fi....

The way that Jobs presented the features of Appletv seemed to be laying the gauntlet down to MicrosoftTV/MediaCenter - the interface looked like the one I saw for MediaCenter a while ago.

Appletv will be available in March and will retail for $299.

Job's keynote at MacWorld

2007-01-09T17:06:00.000Z

After scrambling up the escalators in what can only be described as a scrum we're here (I, of course, was dignified and walked).

"Apple is about to touch off a nuclear war"

2007-01-08T13:25:00.000Z

From that pillar of objective reporting, the International Herald Tribune, news that Apple will introduce a mobile phone and compete directly with manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola.

They also speculate that Google and other Internet companies may jump into the mobile telecoms market as a way to strengthen ties to their users. Enter the Googlephone?

All I got for Christmas was a Blogger upgrade

2006-12-21T12:39:00.000Z

What that means is that of you're a regular poster (hi Audra, Dave, Rob and Stew) you'll need to create a Google account when you next sign in.

Most usefully, you'll also be able to categorise posts...

Which leads me to what to do with this one.

MS Word "ticking timebomb"

2006-12-06T20:33:00.000Z

From eWeek: Microsoft has issued a zero-day attack alert for its ubiquitous Word application. The unpatched flaw can be exploited when a user simply opens a maliciously rigged Word document, and there are no pre-patch workarounds available, Microsoft warns. Microsoft says don't open or save Word docs, even from trusted sources
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2068800,00.asp?kc=EWNAVEMNL120606EOAD

Spam free signups

2006-12-01T16:04:00.000Z

No, not the bugmenot thing, but Spambox. You create a temporary account to sign up to whatever and the account gets deleted after a period you specify so you don't get spammed.

Disposable e-mail

2006-11-30T13:17:00.000Z

An e-mail address that lasts 10 mins, just long enough so you can register at a site and get authenticated and then it expires taking all the spam with it!

http://www.10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html

Tonight I Celebrate My Love For You

2006-11-29T09:40:00.000Z

I'm happy to see, "my cousin", Katie and her man Peter getting such rapturous reviews on Amazon for their new album. Get it for your loved ones this festive season.

Scary headline of the day

2006-11-16T17:09:00.000Z

"Microsoft provokes London Tube crash"

Seen while making a log of the Moreover feeds on Economist.com, in preparation for getting these improved. (But unfortunately way too late for that competition that Mike ran last year sometime for blue-screens and error messages captured out in the wild.)

Take care on the way home, everyone...

Today a search engine tapped on the inside of my screen...

2006-11-15T14:11:00.000Z

What's that innocent-looking beverage in my coffee cup, you ask? But no, it was Ms Dewey.

(It looks like I'm about a month late on this but anyway - via Cre8pc, where one of the comments tips a few search terms to try: “painting”, “President Bush”, “Gmail”, “Congress”, amongst others...)

Flash and Firefox to unite

2006-11-14T18:01:00.000Z

This happened last week but I haven't had time to write anything about it...

The rough jist of it, as I read it is to have a single scripting language used in firefox and in flash...

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

4 second wait and I'm off

2006-11-14T17:58:00.000Z

There is an interesting bit of research here: http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2006/press_110606.html which indicates that people will only wait 4 seconnds for a retail web page...

Small sample though...

Beyond belief

2006-11-09T15:49:00.000Z

I'd heard rumours that the BBC were slightly uneasy about the sorts of story that always seems to rise to the top of their "MOST READ" feature.

If they continue to report stuff like this, I guess it's no more than they should expect.

Watch the real time progress of this gem here.

Python riddle

2006-11-07T18:42:00.000Z

Even I did level 0. How far can you get?

Add your progress to the comments!

Microsoft Novell tie up

2006-11-03T12:02:00.000Z

Or should that be Microsoft tie up Novell?

Well it had to happen at some point. The realisation that Novell and Microsoft are no longer competitors but that Google is a greater threat to them both is probably what brought this about.

John Carroll over at ZDnet explains the nitty gritty of the deal better than I could (not sure that his comparison with Palestine/Israel is entirely thought out though).

Red light means doors are secured

2006-11-02T13:23:00.000Z

Or, if you're a cyclist Diamond Geezer explains the highway code for you.

What's Next?

2006-10-24T15:11:00.000+01:00

If you've been pondering what I've been pondering lately (what will be the next big development on the web?) you might find this interesting.

Patrick Cox has posted an article on TCS Daily titled The Next Big Thing in which he discusses how the release of Netscape Navigator was instrumental in creating the open Internet we use today, and how the virtual reality of Lawnmower Man has given way to the 3D online environments of Everquest and Second Life.

"Imagine how much more useful your computer experience would be if you were able to design a virtual office as large or complex as you needed, and reach anything in it without leaving your chair. Voice over IP will be integrated, naturally. Your avatar will be your real image, photographed live and enhanced if you don't want to deal with hair or clothing, and you will be able to meet friends and business associates in VW, your places or theirs, as easily as making a phone call. Blogs and punditry will involve virtual talk show and other environments and, with some planning and enough cameras, audiences will be able to visit any place on the globe, from a Baghdad battlefield to a Broadway stage."

ASCII-O-Matic

2006-10-23T15:35:00.000+01:00

Who's this handsome chap created by typorganism?



~zhzs+<<((((((((((~~~((~~((~~~~~~~~~~~~----~(<=s=<++<(~. . .
~hhz=+<<((((((((((~~~((((((~~~~~~~~~~~~-------(=s+<<+(~'. .
-hzzs+<<((((((((((~~~(((~(~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-------+s=<<+(~('  
-hzss+<(((((((((((~~~~((~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-------(ss+<+(~<~  .
'zzzs+<(((((((((((~~~~(((~~~~~~~~(((((((~------~=s=<<<(<(. 
.=zzs+<((((((((((((~~(((~~~~~~~~~(<<+=+++((~----<ss<<<~<(. 
.=hzs+<((((((((((((~~(((~~~~~~~(<+===ss==+<(----(==+<(~(<' .
.+hz=+<<(((((((((((~~(((~~~~((<=sss====+((((~~--~+==(~~(<- 
+hz+<<(((((((((((((~(((~~((+=szss=<<<<((~~(~~---<=+(~~((- 
<hz+<<<<<<(((((((((((((((<=ssss==+=s===+(~((~---<=+<((~(- 
(hz+<++++===+++<<<<((((<<<======ssszsss=+(((~---~++((<(~- 
(hz++=sssssszzzs==<<(((<<+++++==+=s==<(((((~~~~--<<~~((~- 
'=zz+=zzzss=ssszsss=+<(((<<<<+===<=+<((~~~~~~~---~((--(<(- 
'szs+szzs+++==s======<(~(((<+===++<((((((~~-~~~---((~-(<(~ 
.+zs+==++=sszzss====+((~~~((<+<<<<(((((<((~~~---~-(<~((((- 
~ss++++=hz+=sss====+(~~~~(((<<<<<(((<<((~~~~~~--~(<(((~~-.-
'=z+<++===+==+++++++(~~~(~~((((<<<<<(((~~~~----~-~<<(~-~-(<
~~+z+<<+++<<<((<+<++<((~((~~~~(((((((((~~~~~------~<<~~~~-(<
<<<s=<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<(((((((~~~(((((((~~~~~-------~(~-~~(~~<
<<(+=<<(((<<<<<<<((<<<(<((((~((((~~~~--~~~~~----------~((~(<
<<<+=<(<<(<<<<<((((<<<<<<(((((<<<<((~---~~~~~--~-----~~((((<
<<<+=+<<((<((((((((<<<<<(((((<<<<<<<((~~((((~--------~((((<<
<<<<++<<<(((((((~(<++<<<((((((((<<<<<((((((((~---~---~<<<<<<
<++<+++<<(((((~((<<=<<<((((~~(((<<<<<<<<(((((~~~~~-~-~<<<<<<
++<+<+++<((((((<<=+<<<((~~((((<<<<((<<<<<<<((~~~~~~--(=+<<<<
++++++++<((((((<<+<<<<<((((<+==++<<<<<+=<<<(((~~~~~~-<hz+<<+
++++++=+<(((((<<<<++==+<<<+===+<<<<<<<+<<<<<(~~(~~~~-(hhz=+<
++++<<=+<<<((<<<<<==ss==+++=+<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<((~((~~~~<hhhh=~
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+++++<+=++<<<<+++++====+++<<<<<(((((<===+<(((((((~~(~=hzzhhh
+++++++==++<<+++++++++++<<<<(((<<<+==s=++<(((((((((~~<hhzzhh
++++++++=++++++===++++<<(((((<+=+++sss<<<<((((((((((((hhzzhh
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+++++++++++++<((<<<++=<<<<<(<((((<<(((((((((((<<<<(~~~+hhhhz
++++++++++++++<(<<<++++<<<<<<<<<<<<(((((((((<(<<<<(~~~+hhhhz
+++++++++++++++<<++<++++++<<<<<<<((((((((((((<<<<(((~(+hhhhz
++++++++++++===+<<++<<++++<<<<<<<(((((((((<(<<+<<(((((=hhhhz
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++++++++++++++++<+hzs==++<<<<<<<<<+========++<<(((((<<=hhhhh
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<(+hhhzs==+<<<<<<++=s======++<<<(((((<<=hhhhh
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<+hhhhhzs==++========s===+++<<(((((((<shhhhh

searchmash

2006-10-20T16:21:00.000+01:00

Google's AJAXy search testbed.

You read it here first.

At last IE 7 makes it to our desktops

2006-10-20T13:48:00.000+01:00

IE 7 was finally released to the masses. Albeit not by auto-update, you must go to their site and download it. It will make it to the auto-update site in November.

This is the first time I’ve taken a look at it. I have to say it is quite impressive. I’ve had one crash thus far which was according to the pop-up flash 9.

I’ve also installed a couple of the IE add-ons. The first WebMon is good, it alerts you to updated pages. Something which I feel has been lacking for sometime. I’m using it at the moment to track updates to some homepages and it’s working out well. Also looks like you can set it to build a feed to then track… The only other one I’ve used is fiddler which allows you to see the http traffic. It seems good. Whilst they are ‘add-ons’ they’re actually run as stand-alone programs from the start menu which I find odd…

It is nice having multiple homepages, meaning you get tabs immediately. This is pretty nifty. As is the built in feed system. Although my favourite has to be the search. With the ability to learn and ad in new search systems this is useful, I’ve now got one for Economist.com which is rather nice. Does mean there is a knock on to developers though not to change the URL system, which is of considerable concern.
But I think the clear type fonts which come down with it are possibly the best feature.

Recommend you give it a shot…

-- Rob

Vista - ambient noise edition

2006-10-20T13:46:00.000+01:00

dISABLE cAPS lOCK AND BECOME MORE PRODUCTIVE

2006-10-19T11:18:00.000+01:00

I finally did something about the pain in the arse that is the Caps Lock key. It's position on the keyboard - right next to the A key and above the Shift key - bears no relation to its importance or use. Has anyone used the key intentionally more than once?

If you answered yes to that, then I'll make a mental note not to get involved in a flame war with you!

There are several ways to prevent the unintentional entering of text in uppercase characters.

I've been using StickyKeys for ages and it's ok, but it doesn't prevent the problem.

John Haller tells you how to disable the Caps Lock key via a Registry key (funny that).

However, I have a simpler method.

It works for all versions of Windows (including Vista), Mac OS and even Linux.

You'll need a screwdriver, spoon, knife or similar implement

Insert the flat end of your implement of choice between the Caps Lock key and the keyboard surround
Gently bring your implement towards a horizontal position, prising out the offending key
Presto! The Caps Lock key will pop out and can be discarded.

If you have any other suggestions for useless keys on the keyboard, do please let me know.

They would say that, wouldn't they !

2006-10-12T18:07:00.000+01:00

Found on the always excellent Lifehacker, here's an Apple-sponsored report that concludes, unsurprisingly that switching to one of their 30-inch Cinema displays can massively boost your productivity.

I will volunteer to test their research findings on behalf of the company if anyone has a few thousand dollars to buy me one of these screens.

Here is the original report in full if you want more convincing before rushing out to the Apple Store with your credit card.

Know your customer

2006-10-11T12:26:00.000+01:00

Stew put me onto this article by Eric Sink (worked on Mosaic) about pro-active sales people.

Well I just had a call from someone from Interoute about our plans for an MPLS service. She sounded very eager and was certainly proactive, but when she pronounced Reuters (one of their clients) routers (the British way) I knew it was all bullshit.

Coghead vs. Salesforce

2006-10-11T12:04:00.000+01:00

Not a fair comaprison, but Coghead, which is still in beta looks very promising for smaller simpler apps. It's really a platform that allows custom apps to be built. It's USP is its simple interface that allows building or customisation of applications using drag and drop.

There are some neat built in apps - staff directory, issue tracking system.....

Dreamforce report - Develop on Demand?

2006-10-10T23:02:00.000+01:00

I'm in San Francisco now attending the annual Salesforce.com customer conference. These people really know how to drum up the excitement. Attendance is about 5000, which includes executives and professionals from sales, marketing, and customer support; IT managers and developers; and of course admins from a variety backgrounds. It's exciting to be around all of these people going through similar challenges and victories and hearing about how they do things in their organizations.

The big news from the keynotes:
- Last year SFDC released AppExchange, which allows anyone to create a add-on tools/applications and make them available to the public. So far there are about 400 apps individuals and companies have added. Some are for sale, some are free.

- Now, SFDC wants to expand on that idea. They are making their Apex development language and platform open-source. Developers can also use their servers to host the code. Of course this allows SFDC to utilise other's work and make customers happy without actually creating the code and including it on the road map themselves. Genius. Someone else's notes on Benioff's keynote:
http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2006/10/dreamforce_firs.html
Article in eWeek about the announcement:
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-4603-13-93-119073-533361-0-0-0-1

- Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke for an hour this morning. What a phenomenal speaker! What does Powell have to do with SFDC you might ask? I think we all wondered that. Well, the (long) intro Benioff gave him talked about how Powell had inspired him years ago in the realm of corporate philanthropy. (Another theme at this conference is all of the philathropy SFDC does and how they are trying to influence others to do the same and spotlight organizations that are also doing a lot.) Anyway, Powell's speech covered areas on leadership, philathropy, the current state of foreign affairs between the US and the rest of the world. He also threw in a bunch of little funnies about missing his old job, the current administration, and adjusting to his new life. Can't say I agreed with everything he did while he worked as SoS, but I have a lot of repect for the man.

The sessions I've attended have been pretty interesting so far, including:
- Integration Strategies in a SaaS (software as a service) environment
- Redefining Integration: The End of the Black Box (making ERP integrations more transparent)
- How to Make Change Manangement a Reality
- The Path to Achieving 100% Adoption
- Territory Management Made Simple
- Global Deployment Case Study

I've also spent a good amount of times talking to vendors at the expo and looking at what they have to offer. Some cool tools out there!

Gotta run to the next session. If there is any more exciting news from the conference, I'll post again.

THIS MAN IS A GENIUS

2006-10-09T14:18:00.000+01:00

Hi,

He basically invented the laptop, the mouse, the GUI and smalltalk

He is Alan Kay

Not eco or blog or IT

2006-10-04T09:47:00.000+01:00

but changes.

The video can't be embedded here, so watch it at youtube....... Changes

Yes I know it's stolen off the telly.

Google UI elegance goes awol in Belguim

2006-09-27T15:38:00.000+01:00

For five days only.

redstripe

2006-09-22T09:40:00.000+01:00

The social networks are getting mad traffic. Should redstripe make a social network site for high end people that clients will value??

Perhaps we could get a column on this comparison table and report. If the people on it want to date, they can. If they want to trade mp3's and amihotornot's then they can, it could be a business exchange, but that's no fun, they'll probably just show off business bling (watches and cufflinks).

We could build a world of warcraft stock exchange that could be used in the game, taking a cut all the time to build our own armory so that our sponsored virtual players can read out country reports in virtual towns. Perhaps taking outside world news into these arenas is a way forward. Is that bridging the digital divide? Should the EIU write reports on Ironforge

Whatever redstripe does, in it's mission statement I hope it contains the words "the world's"

Google's is:
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

RSS means "I'm Ready for Some Stories"

2006-09-22T09:32:00.000+01:00

If Oprah or Trisha told us all what RSS was would we use it?

"I'm Ready for Some Stories"

Economist.com is a real web business

2006-09-15T15:32:00.000+01:00

...because it's on the front page on http://del.icio.us/

Isn't it strange what makes you proud. 15M page views, anyone can do that. Who can get on the front page of del.icio.us. E.com can..Yay

Solaris 8 bites the dust

2006-09-14T09:51:00.000+01:00

Solaris 8 will EOL (Last Ship Date also) on February 16, 2007. Last Order Date will be November 17, 2006. This was originally announced internally on August 15, 2006.

And Sun provide this nice guarantee:

Through the Solaris Application Guarantee program Sun will guarantee, at no cost, that existing applications will RUN without modification on the Solaris 10 Operating System. For customers looking for assistance in accelerating the move to Solaris 10, the Solaris 10 Global Migration Program makes moving from earlier Solaris releases, or from non-Solaris operating systems, even easier. In conjunction with Sun global migration services partners, the program delivers services for a successful migration on time and on budget. Details can be found at: http://sun.com/solaris/move

Google desktop

2006-09-13T15:43:00.000+01:00

The new X1 laptops come with Google desktop preinstalled. They also direct the user to a Dell welcome splash the first time Internet Explorer is run. Two points:
1) Google desktop constantly indexes everything so we remove it while building the laptop.
2) Is it legal to have unsolicited splash screens on any device Dell sell? And, what is the point anyway, since once you have already bought a Dell they will bombard you with "literature" anyway?

What are people's views on Google products preinstalled, and splash screens on browsers, from the manufacturers of PC's...?

the web 2.0 war hots up.

2006-09-13T15:05:00.000+01:00

ajax has competition. thank god.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=65

Microsoft DRM flaw halts Sky by Broadband

2006-09-13T09:44:00.000+01:00

Sky's movie download service has been withdrawn until a patch is released for a hack that bypasses the Microsoft DRM system that is used to protect downloaded movies.

Sky by Broadband uses a commercial p2p distribution system called Kontiki that is not that disimilar to BitTorrent and DRM is used to prevent downloaded movie files being viewed on PCs other than the one that is permissioned to download the file in the first place.

Anyone heard of Zimbra?

2006-09-08T23:36:00.000+01:00

Zimbra offers a pretty cool set of tools called their Collaboration Suite. Lot's of drag and drop, calendar sharing, document collaboration, easy email interface. And it integrates in cool ways with Salesforce. Ahhhhh, it's a panacea!

Here's their blurb:
Zimbra is open source server and client software for messaging and collaboration - email, group calendaring (emphasis mine), contacts, and web document management and authoring. The Zimbra server is available for Linux, Mac OS X, appliances, and virtualization platforms. The Zimbra Web 2.0 Ajax client runs on Firefox, Safari, and IE, and features easy integration / mash-ups of web portals, business applications, and VoIP using web services.

I'm curious to hear what others think of this. Is this type of thing secure? Is it something we could use here at the Economist?

HTML pretty tree things

2006-09-08T11:18:00.000+01:00

I like this html crawler that builds pretty trees of sites you like Check Economist.com

Or pick your own site

Tor - a way to read NYT articles

2006-08-31T12:50:00.000+01:00

You may have read that the NYT deployed their ad-serving technology to stop UK-based browsers from seeing this article. (In the UK we see this.)

The BBC deploy similar technology to prevent overseas viewers seeing content meant only for licence fee payers.

Tor wasn't designed to get round these restrictions (it's an anonymous proxy network), but it does a pretty good job and with the Firefox plug-in it works really well.

podcasts

2006-08-30T14:21:00.000+01:00

Want to podcast?
Want to podcast with people around the world?
Want it to sound good?

Use skype as your communicator, it's higer quality once it's bedded in than the phone,
Record both/all sides of the conversation with powergramo pro
Edit the recording with audacity.
Publish on your group website, sell it, and make money from it.
Repeat till video clicks in a business head. Start again and then find new software to record multiple video locations.....

I think it would be actually be good to record the editorial meeting on Mondays that The Economist has and put that on the website when the issue goes live. That's separate though

Standard Crippled?

2006-08-17T14:45:00.000+01:00

As you may know, London is about to get another free daily newspaper (in addition to Metro and City AM).

Londonist pointed out the definition of lite (as in Associated's London Lite which will take over from the fantastic Standard Lite) on dictionary.com (scroll to the sixth definition).

If you didn't know otherwise you'd have though Rupert had written it himself!

UK Government sites need some more thought

2006-08-10T16:52:00.000+01:00

The UK government decided recently that they would start to let the population know the current level of terrorist threat (that was nice of them). They obviously don't think how best to do it, though.

A good idea would have been to create an RSS feed that only contains this information in it. Another would have been to create a site specifically to display the threat level and tell us what we should do.

What do we get instead? The MI5 and UK Government home pages (shown below, a bit small, I know) buried the information among other nuggets such as news about the online version of the Doomsday book (sounds spookily co-incidental) and career opportunities at MI5.

I recall that when the BBC redesigned their site they specifically added functionality that allows the homepage to be taken over by one big story rather than several smaller ones.

Perhaps someone in Whitehall should be so bold.

Web propoganda tools

2006-08-10T11:44:00.000+01:00

GIYUS.org is a download that alerts you to stories on the web about Israel so that you can comment on them. The tool is intended to encourage those with pro-Israeli views to voice them on the web.

Effectively it's a troll-helper.

When you think about it, though, it could be pretty counter-productive.

First off, when sites get wind of what's going on they may choose to simply disable commenting on affected articles. And secondly, if I have anti-Israeli views, I could use the tool just as effectively.

This tool is publicly available, but I suppose that a private one (for example, one for Labour Party members around election time) would stop opponents using it.

Leopard gets Ruby

2006-08-10T11:36:00.000+01:00

This is kinda interesting. Ruby on Rails is a development framework for web apps and I suppose (don't shoot me down here) is the open source (GPL) equivalent of .net.

Ok, do shoot me down!

Why girls should date geeks

2006-08-10T11:31:00.000+01:00

Not sure anyone here needs this, but quite amusing....

BlackBerry / CrackBerry hacked?

2006-08-09T13:31:00.000+01:00

This article is pretty interesting for all you blackberry holders.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4775367.stm

I am a big fan of not installing games on my laptop or computers, and this proves my point to a certain degree that the trojan horse method of opening up your computer/pda could prove disastarous by installing something so innocuous and simple just so you can while away the boring moments on the train ride home.

Gina Ford gets as strict with website as she is with babies

2006-08-08T09:57:00.000+01:00

This case highlights one of the problems with running bulletin boards or allowing un-moderated comments on a website.

Is Adnam Hajj Reuters Jayson Blair?

2006-08-08T09:32:00.000+01:00

The Shape of Days was among a number of blogs that spotted that a photograph allegedly taken by Adnan Hajj had been altered using a tool such as Photoshop. Another blog, Little Green Footballs shows how the photograph may have been doctored.

Reuters has now dispensed with the services of Mr Hajj, but what seems odd , as the blogs point out, is that the cloning of the smoke looks amatuerish and could have been done better. In fact, Hajj has come in for criticism in the past over his alleged staging of shots to increase their impact and it's almost as if he got too cocky (no conspiracy theories here!)

What is clear is that Reuters made a huge mistake. Tim Glocer has become well known for advocating the use of citizen photography, putting Reuters forward as the trusted name to sift through the good and bad. The fact that such an obviously doctored photo from one of their own freelancers with a record of controversy made it through their sift has probably done untold damage to their reputation.

Time will tell, but I suspect that Reuters will have to make public what went wrong and what it is doing to prevent it happening again.

Are you a Highly effective IT manager?

2006-08-05T18:34:00.000+01:00

I think it's an interesting read...

One elephant, two elephant

2006-08-03T19:20:00.000+01:00

No need to count the gap between lightning and thunder to see how far away the storm is - you can check this site. Driven by a direction-finding antenna connected to a PC, apparantly.

MySpace is sooooo 2005

2006-08-01T19:53:00.000+01:00

Media Guardian (reg. req'd.) says that Alexa has reported that YouTube has overtaken MySpace as the web's number one community site with with a whacking 3.9% of all daily web visits. Now, Alexa's methodology is not the most robust and when I took a look YouTube was well below MySpace, but things change....

Are you a master of scrum?

2006-08-01T16:52:00.000+01:00

Anyone know about scrum?

A friend of mine is a Certified ScrumMaster and just mentioned it to me. Haven't had time to look at it much, but I'm taken with the name!

Oysters and Arsenal don't mix well apparently

2006-07-21T14:01:00.000+01:00

So says this article on Arsenal's site.

Dangerous new transport idea for London?

2006-07-18T14:41:00.000+01:00

These clips show an idea for a new transport system for London. It looks pretty groovy until you notice that the carriages seem to hang just a little bit too low for the buses!

Debut of the HP 4 megabit wireless chip measuring 4mm square!

2006-07-17T14:45:00.000+01:00

Working in IT, we're used to seeing new amazing advancements, but for me this one takes the biscuit. It may be two years from production, with no word on cost, but amazing it most definetly is.

Including antena, it measures 2 to 4 mm square with its memory rangeing 256 kilobits - 4 megabits.

HP page: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2006/060717a.html
BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5186650.stm

As for power: "no need for a battery or external electronics. It receives power through inductive coupling from a special read-write device, which can then extract content from the memory on the chip. Inductive coupling is the transfer of energy from one circuit component to another through a shared electromagnetic field. A change in current flow through one device induces current flow in the other device." - HP press release

-- Rob

It's not our fault, the engineer forgot the bit

2006-07-13T14:37:00.000+01:00

Many of us have been frustrated by third parties supporting or maintaining IT equipment; but this is perhaps a taking that frustration a little to far: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/fish4_goes_down/

It's an error message that was on their site saying "Thank you for coming to Fish4 this morning.
Unfortunately the fish4 website is unavailable due to the failure of a very expensive piece of Sun hardware (Sun 6900). A Sun engineer is at the data centre but didn't think to bring the replacement part with him."

International views of Zidane

2006-07-13T13:57:00.000+01:00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/zidane_headbutt_outrage/

Ever wondered how Google keep all their datacentres in sync?

2006-07-03T09:15:00.000+01:00

They try to, but don't. Use this tool to see for yourself.

Mosquito deterrent becomes secret ringtone

2006-06-30T10:59:00.000+01:00

Compound Security, a firm of two people based in Wales developed the Mosquito
ultrasonic deterrent system to combat anti-social behaviour by "encourganing" teenagers to move away from an area. The Mosquito works on the principle that the high pitch tone (18 to 20 kHz) can only usually be heard by people under the age of 20.

The fact that the tone can't normally be heard by adults has spawned a whole new use for it - as a ringtone on the mobile phones of schoolchildren so that teachers are unaware that pupils are texting each other in class.

Banning mobile in school would seem to get round that problem.

You can hear (or not) the tone courtesy of the NYT.

Where Have I been and what have I been doing?

2006-06-29T15:27:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I've posted on EcoblogIT. The whole NY IT move to Active Directory has been consuming my time.
I have also been beta testing alot Microsoft and Google are beta crazy these days. I've been playing around with Vista beta 2 and its a very stable and a neat O/S. Office 2007 is really nice I like it alot. Microsoft Live mail is just Hotmail w/ 2GB storage nothing special. I did beta Microsoft Live for Domains. If you own a domain and want free email then just point your RX record to microsoft and then you can have name@yourdomain.com and read it through a hotmail login page. After setting up accounts for my family and using it for two months Google e-mails me saying they are now beta testing the same but through a gmail account. So I repointed my RX to gmail and started using that. I have more controll w/ the Gmail then Microsoft and plus the shared calender is always a plus w/ two kids and trying to figure out where they are each day for the summer vacation.
Google also asked me to beta Picasa Photo Album online which is nice to share photos w/ frienda nd family. I tried the Google spreadsheet online but Office will always blow away any online office suite.

Some links if people are intrested:

https://www.google.com/hosted
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=lh2&passive=true&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2F

https://domains.live.com/
www.live.com

Web 3.0

2006-06-28T16:31:00.000+01:00

You heard it here first.... (see the second comment to the linked post)
(via Susan Mernit's blog)

100Mbps internet cafe

2006-06-28T13:04:00.000+01:00

An internet cafe has just opened, with each computer having a 100Mbps connection, possibly because it's connected diretly to the UK portion internets backbone, as Goonhilly satellite station in Cornwall: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/5123118.stm

Does beg the question however, why would anyone in an internet cafe need such access? I guess it may become a mecca for gamers...

Dell demo Misssion Impossible technology

2006-06-28T09:54:00.000+01:00

This laptop will self-distruct in five minutes....

The Inquirer has the pictures.

Looks like you ought to take Dell's recall program seriously if you have a Latitude D410, D505, D510, D600, D610, D800 or D810,an Inspiron 510M, 600M, 6000, 8600, 9200, 9300, XPS Gen 2 or a Dell Precision M20 or M70.

Look up Lithium-ion batteries on Google/Wikipedia for more info on the chemistry and the potential hazard.

BTW, the Inquirer looks uncannily like the Register because it was set by Mike Magee, who founded the Register.

BlackBerry 'kill pill' not marketed well

2006-06-27T10:10:00.000+01:00

I realised a while ago that RIM have done a very poor job of marketing the functionality of the BlackBerry service to corporates. In their haste to target the consumer directly, they push the look of devices and assume that techies will go ahead and implement.

The fact is that us geeks have been looking for something that does exactly what the BlackBerry Enterprise Server does for ages - that is, allow easy secure management of handheld devices.

As proof of this marketing hole, despite the functionality described in this article existing for the BlackBerry, the author seems unaware of the fact.

Oh, and it works.

As a sideline to this story, I chuckled when a colleague who is a fervent non-BlackBerry user tried recently to send an e-mail and failed. Whatever you think of the BlackBerry, it does mail pretty reliably. RIM now need to set about convincing the unconvinced of the superiority of their product and ensuring that they stay ahead of the pack.

Why cool is a hot topic for IT infrastructure

2006-06-26T00:24:00.000+01:00

So, Bill Gates is "transitioning" out of Microsoft. He admitted long ago that he couldn't be as hands on as he used to be - with products like Vista and its 50 million lines of code that's understandable. Apparantly Sergey Brin and Larry Page are trying to do things differently and continue to do what they think that they do best - that is, come up with new ways of solving problems. One of the things that they are said to be working on is how to reduce Google's biggest cost - power.

Gartner reckon that the cost of electricity for a server over its lifetime will approach its purchase price as hardware costs come down and electricity costs go up. A typical dual processor server consumes around 1kW without a monitor but including cooling (a lot of that power gets converted to heat). With electricity costs of around £40/MWh for large organisations, this puts the cost per server at around £350 per year.

When you consider that the likes of Google who use relatively cheap hardware because they have massive redundancy, you start to see the problem. Brin and Page have looked at whether they could manufacture their own units without graphics processors, for example, as they don't need their boxes to drive displays. It also seems likely that they'd take a real close look at the cost of electricity when deciding where to build new data centres.

An article on Byte.com describes an interesting initiative at a Sun facility to test whether direct current can be supplied direct to equipment and thus save on power loss from conversion from AC to DC.

Novell in a mess, man

2006-06-23T11:27:00.000+01:00

From CNET News.com: Novell ejects CEO, CFO

MIcrosoft's Visual Studio 2005 campaign is cool!

2006-06-20T13:55:00.000+01:00

My favourite clip (I haven't watched them all...yet) is number 144. A bit like Morrison's reasons campaign, but better.

BBC & ITV trial multicast

2006-06-20T13:45:00.000+01:00

I hadn't seen anything about the BBC's multicast technical trial, but then again my reading/browsing is not that structured. I found the BBC's trial through their Backstage mailing list.

I'm sure that you all know what multicast is (see Wikipedia) and what interests broadcasters like the BBC is that it massively cuts down on the bandwidth that is needed at their end as they only need send one stream of data (rather than a stream for each end viewer). The downside is that it relies on routers along the way propogating the multicast and that doesn't happen automatically. I remember Reuters wanting to do this 10 years ago and Cisco pushing the fact that their carrier grade routers could handle it.

Trouble was (and is) that the technology tends to be proprietary to each vendor.

For these reasons, the BBC trial only works on some ISPs networks, but is now available for most of their output (in the UK only) which is a big step up from their trial of the Olympics two years ago.

Think twice before downloading Angolan screensaver !

2006-06-15T20:37:00.000+01:00

If this BBC article is anything to go by, you should be careful if you're trying to download a screensaver featuring your favorite Angolan World Cup superstars.

A new kind of coach

2006-06-12T19:05:00.000+01:00

Nike and Apple cooperate to create a new must-have (they hope) for runners:
http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/gear.html

Maybe they've found a way to make money off of those nanos after all.

Commentary on this from the thrilling world of business process management:
http://www.bpmg.org/Zpost1574.php

Dan Brinklin and "the long tail"

2006-06-12T11:19:00.000+01:00

Dan Brinklin, the co-creator of VisiCalc (the first PC based spreadsheet), maintains a site that I've referred to before and I came across his essay prompted by Chris Anderson's characterisation of the internet's "long tail" (basically the internet allows you to reach a wider audience more easily meaning that previously unsustainably low demand can be sustained commercially).

Dan's is an intersting take on this because rather than just saying that the long tail makes some things sustainable when previously they were not, he says that when designing a product the long tail must be considered if you want it to be a success.

The Observer 'fesses up to a Google moment

2006-06-12T10:08:00.000+01:00

The Observer admitted to a Google moment this week.

A "commissioning editor" had used Google to find an expert on MRSA. What they actually found was a Dr Malyszewicz who as well as not being a microbiologist was not even a medical doctor, having a "correspondence course" PhD from a non-accredited distance learning institution in the US (although in the UK the title of doctor is not a protected one and anyone can legally use it - just beware if you're on a plane and they need one).

The alarm bells should have been ringing for the sub-editor when Dr Malyszewicz said in his advice in the article in question that "Finally, Manuka honey does work as a treatment for MRSA, but only after infection."

This is classic fodder for Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, which regularly debunks articles in popular newspapers that quote dubious or non-existent "scientific research" generally to support quack cures.

And here's the funny part (not for the said "commissioning editor", though). Ben Goldacre has raised the dubious nature of Dr Malyszewicz's qualifications on no fewer than five occasions in his column that happens to appear in The Guardian, The Observer's sister paper.

The admission by The Observer illustrates the dilemma for web publishers; the original article does not contain any reference to the subsequent admission, even though it could do. Similarly restaurant reviews usually only get updated when the restaurant is re-visited by a reviewer rather than when the establishment changes hands (should that happen). This is the problem when content is merely republished on the web - should such content remain untouched as it reflects what was originally published or should it be updated and the original content lost?

The answer (if resources permited) would be to have two views of the content - one which faithfully reflects what was printed at a particular point in time and one which merely updates what already exists. (In fact publishers often already take the latter approach when stories change as later or different editions are printed.) This blurring of the nature of online content has got to change because readers will increasingly get fed up with the dis-service that publishers are doing them just because their systems aren't up to making the distinction possible.

Finally, if you were worried about your mother contracting MRSA would you write to a magazine or speak to your doctor?

Wikis as a compliance tool?

2006-06-09T09:58:00.000+01:00

Who'd have thought that a Wiki would at some point become the thing that we all use in a corporate environment to meet compliance and audit requirements? It would certainly be an interesting step because most people's exposure to Wikis is with Wikipedia with all the doutbs about the trustworthiness of its content.

As I've been saying, things often end up being a killer app in an area that's most unexpected. Is the audit trail built into Wikis their killer feature? Michael Arrington of TechCrunch hints at this with the announcement by Dan Brinklin, who created VisiCalc, that SocialText will get exclusive distribution rights for his wikiCalc software.

This thought has legs, as they say.

Step one: admitting you have a problem

2006-06-08T21:36:00.000+01:00

Hotel Offers BlackBerry Detox
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-3817-10-80-313416-447717-0-0-0-1

Microsoft launches vapour-hardware

2006-06-08T10:04:00.000+01:00

This is what happens when you underestimate demand.

Speaking of which, most commentators seem to think that Carphone Warehouse's "free" broadband offer was a good business decision despite the fact that demand was underestimated and call centres are swamped. Charles Dunstone said "What has surprised us is the success of it. More people resented how much they paid for broadband than we ever imagined". Really?

Well I guess that we'll just have to wait and see, but Bulldog found that not having enough staff to deal with the public was pretty humiliating in the end.

Who would sell a broken laptop on eBay?

2006-05-30T14:58:00.000+01:00

Amir Massoud Tofangsazan maybe. Looks to good to be true.

Selling bugs

2006-05-26T18:07:00.000+01:00

This is an interesting article on software quality.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/insideit/story/0,,1782071,00.html

Hypeing up the charts - the Sandi Thom story

2006-05-26T12:04:00.000+01:00

You can tell that older folk (and I don't mean seniors) still don't get the web when stories about bands making it big because of MySpace or through some other internet presence appear in mainstream media and are apparently believed by people that still read them.

How many people really believed that all the Arctics did was wait for a fan's site on MySpace to sell records for them? Not many - especially the band themselves who claim that they only heard of MySpace three months ago. What they did was play lots of gigs and get signed to a label that already had Franz Ferdinand on their books.

Then there's that daft cow Sandi Thom. On the same weekend that The Clash became the first band to get into XFM's hall of fame, there she was, on Top of the Pops singing "I wish I was a punk rocker".

I bet Joe Strummer is still spinning in his grave.

Unfortunately I caught the end of an interview where she was still peddling the line that she got a deal from playing to first 60, then thousands of people using a £48 webcam from her basement flat after her car broke down meaning she couldn't travel to gigs.

Well, Amazon wasn't started in Jeff Bezos's garage and neither did Sandi Thom start in her flat. The difference is that Amazon is actually not bad.

The Guardian among others found out that to get her music on the web (and listened to by anything from 60,000 to 250,00 people at any one time depending on which gullible hack you read) the services of Streaming Tank had been used. Well, using anything more than a couple of hundred simultaneous streams on the web costs a lot of money - so much so that the likes of Sky and the BBC can't afford to do it and instead use peer to peer technology instead.

It's already well known that Ms. Thom was signed by Windswept/Pacific Publishing (who also have small basement bands like The Who and Beyonce on their books) a year ago with blogs like chartreuse publishing the news over six weeks ago, so why does the story still have legs? Because big company PR still works and punters believe what they're told

There are two lessons here - one for us and one for Sandi.

The first is that the web is not yet the force that it will be. If it were, the Sandi Thom story would have been debunked sooner and more prominently.

The other lesson is one that Sandi will learn and that is that a £1m record deal is in effect a loan that is paid back to the record company over the years in the form of their cut. The Clash understood this and squeezed theirs by releasing a great double album and a so-so triple album both priced as single albums with the record company taking the hit. If she really did hit upon the huge audience she claims she had, why didn't she record and sell her music herself?

*Hypeing up the charts- a line from the rather relevant The Clash song Histville UK.

No more software patents in the EU

2006-05-25T09:25:00.000+01:00

An article on ZDNet reports the suprising decision that no software patents will be granted by the European Patent Office.

My only worry with this is that it's almost as white as the US Patent Office's view is black. I doubt that this is the last we'll hear on this, though.

Ion turntable magic

2006-05-24T15:06:00.000+01:00

If you've got a few days to spare, then what about saving some space and putting your vinyl collection onto your iPod?

The Register gave a pretty good review to the Ion USB turntable, which is available fromFirebox for £120.

TinyURL as a file-sharing system?

2006-05-10T21:13:00.000+01:00

I bought a copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly whilst in New York and a pretty good read it is.

I suppose we all have a pretty good idea that what TinyURL does is store a url as a string and allows access to that string via a short one (the tiny url). What 2600: The Hacker Quarterly highlights is that TinyURL doesn't check that the long url is actually a url. With that knowledge you can store any string of characters on TinyURL's servers and access that string via the tiny url. If you then have a mechanism to read a file as hex (with the hex editor that came with Norton Utilities, for example) and post that to TinyURL, BINGO!, you have a file transfer mechanism.

A bit clunky if not automated, but an interesting use of the service, though I'm sure that if TinyURL's servers start getting bunged up with huge "urls" then a fix will be put in place.

As the article points out this is a great example of people using something other than for its intended use. Another is using a hairdryrer to get those pesky barcode labels off the bottom of new crockery (I have remnants of labels on some plates that have resisted 100's of cycles in the dishwasher).

Do you have any other examples?

Whenever we feel like decisions around here are difficult...

2006-05-05T18:44:00.000+01:00

Shuttle to Fly Without Tank Fix

April 28, 2006— Despite ongoing concerns about foam insulation breaking off and damaging the space shuttle during launch, NASA will not make any more changes to the tank's design until after the next flight, which is targeted for July, officials said Friday.

Entire article here

You can't cure a hangover

2006-05-04T13:09:00.000+01:00

No compelling evidence exists to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover. The most effective way to avoid the symptoms of alcohol induced hangover is to practise abstinence or moderation.

Do people get paid to come up with this?

01:02:03 04/05/06

2006-05-04T13:08:00.000+01:00

Didn't notice it, did you?

Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem) - New York Times

2006-04-26T15:44:00.000+01:00

The NY Times magazine had an interesting article over the weekend about Google's recent move into China and about the censorship and bandwidth issues involved with accessing the internet in China.
Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem)

PayPal by mobile

2006-04-25T03:34:00.000+01:00

Has anyone seen this? PayPal allows you to send money to people on your mobile:
www.paypal.com/mobile

So one of the suggested uses is that friends can cover one another at the restaurant or bar, and instead of you paying them back later, you can pay them back right then by sending a text message or calling the automated phone menu.

Upside:
> It's free, by looks of the signup and demo (already had a PayPal account, just had to activate this feature), looks pretty easy.
> It's a pretty cool idea.

Downside:
> I'm not altogether clear yet on what kind of hassle it is for the recipient to claim the money. Presumably once they have a PayPal account set up with their phone number associated it's all automated into their account(assuming that is a requirement, which now that I think about it could actually be part of an *insidious* plan to bring them closer to world domination while no one is watching).
> Security - you have a pin number, and there is a confirmation process, but I'm sure there is a way to hack this thing.
> I guess the "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" line is not going to cut it anymore...

Microsoft's Mac test lab

2006-04-21T10:00:00.000+01:00

Graham found a great blog entry about Microsoft's Mac lab

Splunk > CSI for IT

2006-04-13T10:22:00.000+01:00

Splunk looks interesting. It gobbles up all your log file data, groups entries together and allows you to search that combined data easily.

Here's a scenario. Economist.com customers have reported that they couldn't use some bits of the site yesterday between 19:00 and 19:40 EST. Using splunk we could search for events across all the platforms that make up Economist.com - ColdFusion on six web servers, IIS on six webservers, the firewall, the load balancer and the web servers themselves. Splunk groups events together, so that if log entries signify that an event is ongoing you only see the one entry when searching.

This is a bit like a product I used on DEC kit ages ago that tracked levels of memeory, CPU usage and other counters over time. The neat thing about that system was that it did what it called "auto-correlation". It looked at how the behaviour each of the items being monitored was correlated so that you could see cause and effects (i.e. high extended batch processing time could be caused by high CPU usage which in turn could actually have been caused by increased disk wait times when swapping and on and on...).

Anyway, Splunk adds a bit of typically Web 2.0 goodness in the way that system administrators can tag events and benefit from the knowledge of all other system administrators by being able to see the resolution to similar collections of events online.

So why aren't we using it? Other priorities right now, but one to watch certainly.