Nida's Blog

Mad to Live, Inc.: Leveraging Free Cloud Computing!

Sara Johnson  is a very creative friend.  She has a passion for life and living.  After her brother's tragic suicide, she decided to quit her job and started up Mad to Live foundation.  The foundation is dedicated to suicide prevention and awareness.  The organization focuses on the arts as a way to augment healing mental illness.  It encourages individuals to capture and embrace life through creative expression as a therapeutic outlet.  The mission of Mad to Live is to raise awareness about the epidemic of suicide and fight stigma of mental illness through events as well as sponsoring national funding for healing art activities.  It is fascinating to observe the creativity and leverage Sara applies in using Free Internet IT based services to help launch her new foundation.

Commoditization of IT and Multiple Personality Disorder

If you have been long enough in IT, you know what I am talking about! The endless conversations about if IT matters or not! And let us please not  blame Nicholas as he was merely articulating a point of view that got most of us wondering about the future role of IT to the point many of the IT professionals today have come to the brink of what I call "IT multiple personality disorder!" It will not get better! Nicholas has another gift in the making for the confused masses in IT searching for answers! Not only "IT does not matter", Nicholas predicts, but also "IT Corporate Computing " as we know it is coming to a near fatal end!  In others word, update your resume and get a new job! And of course, the more dramatic way of putting his new found Prophecy is simply a translation of "not only you do not matter! Tomorrow, you will be fired!"  And while these very amusing pontifications are interesting to a point, I am going to have to say they are nothing but distraction with the classical fallacy of half-built in truths. 

The Audacity of Search: Use it or Lose it!

Who among us can imagine an Internet without a search engine! I certainly can not begin to contemplate how difficult finding information can be without the use of google or yahoo, the two dominant search engines over the web.  I always wondered what is it that people find in a search engine that ensures its eternal and perpetual use over and over and over again.  Why some folks like to use yahoo and others use google and are there any new killer search engines waiting to launch and make your favorite search engine old news! 

Of course, we all have theories regarding the success of web based search engines.  The conspiracy inclined mind masters among us think it is surely the sneaky ploy of big brother vested in keeping track of every single click we venture to make over this vast dark orwellian web.  Those who are scientifically inclined prefer to favor the laws of statistics and the dominance of the certainty of mathematical formulations discerned in  the vastly improbable certainty of probabilities.  But for those who like to keep it simple like I do, it really boils down to the idea if one does not use it, one might as well lose it!  I know.  This simplicity of mind applies to many other things too but that is what makes it good.  Simple is good. 

Visulize This!

Recently, I have become tired of the form and text based applications.  Seeing rows of information rolling away line after line is not really very exciting nor is it visually easy to grasp.   In addition, most of these form intake applications are not too interactive.   You know the drill! Fill in a form and push the submit button and there you go! A list of items show up, an order gets filled, or a new form pops up to repeat the process all over again.  Well, what about color, media, visual painting, and much more, I thought to myself.  We all have artistic sense of the user experience but no doubt we all have experienced the stifling green screens or the form intake applications.  So, I looked to experiment with applications that can respond to touch, voice, and can provide back a visual sensory of the data.   The technology is available but sensory visual applications are not mainstream yet.   Applications that have virtual earth like experience, or google maps, or mashed up dimensions in visual format are new.   But they are really exciting to experience.  I have come across Microsoft's Surface and the technology is very different from what we normally would expect to experience in digital content interface:

  http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.html

In the open source world Jview is also providing a very compelling approach to digital content.  Voice based applications are still niche domain apps and the closest that comes to mind is Vocera's vertical solutions.  Overall, it is really great to see us move forward to a new frontier in application development to enrich the form based applications.   It is certain these applications in ten years will be considered the new green screens of the past ten years they will join their predecessor to open up the stage for rich, multimedia, voice enabled interactive applications! Why settle with forms if one can leverage these factors in applications development.  

Green IT: A color for all seasons!

Not only green happens to be one of my favorite colors, but also it is now the new color of IT! This really good news for all of us who happen to care about being kind to the environment and being responsible in terms of pursuing architectures and solutions that can save energy and reduce wasted processing power in traditional data centers.  But green is not a color that is easy to embrace because of remaining risks due to entrenched lack of support by vendors who have not yet embraced the idea of running their software on virtual platforms.   They are struggling with two problems: the first is their software licensing models which are still based on the concept of dedicated one-to-one CPU based allocation at the physical level; the second is they have not really made proactive efforts to test their software ability to run within a virtual environment.  There is a distant third reason which appeal to the mind of the skeptic and that is some vendors do not want to see other vendors in the virtual market space thrive due to competing concerns. Regardless of any of these reasons, all IT technologists need to apply greater degree of pressure on all vendors to embrace virtualization just as vigorously as we do in terms of demanding open standards and interoperability.  Demanding an environmentally friendly product that can support virtualization as a primary technology feature in all software aquisistions is a must.  Not only this is the right thing to do, but also it is a great capability to reduce the cost of energy consumption, reduce cost of IT infrastructure, and most of all improve ability to boost processing power on demand.  If you have not adopted the color green in running your data center and in designing new technology solutions, now is the time to embrace a color that will suit you across all seasons!   

Bloging IT to post from facebook to my Typepad blog!

I added this application today to my facebook! I am testing it realtime to check how will it work.  I guess the idea is to enable me to blog from anywhere instead of having to always go to my blogging publishing tools.  So, if I am on facebook, or reading my yahoo email, or maybe googling the network, I can immediately post to my blog whenever and wherever I feel like it.   It seems that this idea will remove boundaries between the social networking websites and further expand the channels of communication cross sites and blogs.   I like this concept.  So let us see how it works.

Hmm ... I posted from facebook to this blog by using Blog IT application which is running on my facebook account!  Here is what happened: the post published to facebook and it also published to my blog.  It published, however, two copies to my blog and now I need to figure out how to delete the second post from typepad content publishing application.  It also published my post to facebook too and provided a link to my blog.  Write once and publish/connect to multiple places is what Blog IT has provided me today.  That is one value of this application.

The next big thing in IT got much bigger!

If you have been in IT long enough, you already know that the next big thing has gotten much bigger.  You duck under the nearest intellectual shield and cross your fingers and wish the three letter acronyms cease fire would soon take place! But it does not! It keeps on getting bigger and bigger and the reality of realizing or building solutions with the lofty mix of three letter word technologies stare you in the face.  And you wonder why things have gotten so complicated! And you begin to miss the good old days of Cobol, C, Fortran, and C++ programming!   If you are a business person and your fortune (or lack thereof) got you mixed up with an IT practitioner these days, you may think the English language suddenly shrunk to three letter words that do not make any sense, at least not to you.   You begin to miss the good old days where all you had to do is tell the IT folks what you needed and they simply coded it.   You wonder why do you have to learn all these strange acronyms and how do they relate to your business! You wonder: why has IT become so complicated and how much does it cost to build anything in these odd three letter word technologies and what value does it add to your business.   

Multispectral Digitization Unveils the True Colors of the Mona Lisa!

Multi-spectral digitization unveiled the true colors of the Mona Lisa to show us how it exactly looked when it was freshly painted.  We can now see the Mona Lisa in the very same condition it was in when Leonardo was looking at it.  I personally prefer the current look but it is a sight to marvel when looking at the picture in its new colors.  Pascal Cotte, founder of Lumiere technologies, is the engineer behind the science of peeling the layers of the past couple of hundred years off Mona's face to see her in the very state when she walked out of Leonardo's workshop.  He gave us the gift of digital virtualization of time and color that revealed to us the true state any given piece of art was in when it was first freshly painted based on a complicated use of numerical digitization of millions of image pixels.  He captured the Mona Lisa digital footprint by applying multi-spectral scanning in thirteen channels – from Ultra Violet to Infra Red.  The digitally captured images are then processed based on a numerical formula he invented that can peel the layers of dust and varnish and imperfect restorations that have been applied over the years.

Commoditization of Corporate Computing!

Yes, it is inevitable and there is very little reason to argue against the benefit of commodity computing.  We all have experienced computing capacities utilized at 30 or 35 percent with much processing power gone to waste.  Commodity computing will not, however, end corporate computing.  We will not wake up one day and find ourselves unemployed because our jobs suddenly evaporated in the giant mushroom of centralized computing or as some may like to say it in a more fancy way into "the oligopoly of cloud computing" services.  The question is for all of us in IT is to identify which areas in corporate computing can be turned into commodity and which areas are sources of business competitive advantage or which areas of the business can drive effectiveness and efficiency. 

30 Things you can do without a Computer!

My friend Paul asked me when will I publish a book on thirty things one can do with computers! I thought much about it and following the concept of reverse logic, I decided to answer in the opposite way.  We can do hundreds of things with a computer today.  The Internet has become the space in which we live.  We file taxes, we meet friends, we book travel, we buy books, we read blogs, we play computer games, .... and so on and so on! Thirty things are not even enough of a list to go over what we can do with a computer.   So, I want to think about things we can do today without using a computer or the Internet and trust me this is a difficult exercise for me.   I can not think of anything we do today that does not involve computers and the use of the Internet but I will try.  If you have ideas, send me your comments because I highly doubt I will be able to tally thirty thing.  So, here are a few things once can do without a computer and if you disagree with them drop me a line: spending time with your children, riding horses, rock climbing, drawing a picture, plant herbs, read an old fashion paper printed book, enjoy having your friends over, dance, paint, yoga, and my head hurts now! As I was typing all these activities my brain was processing so many ways computers can change the way we do these things today.   So, I will go ahead and admit that if there is a book that needs to be written it should focus on how we can not no longer live today without computers and the Internet.   Well maybe we can but life would never be the same!