Web applications built around the idea of helping a group, project, or company get work done and communicate in a more effective manner have been around for a number of years. These collaborative tools take many shapes, some built to add a layer of interaction to a common task that currently takes place, some bringing new ideas to bear on how to manage projects or treat interaction as a whole.

We are seeing a sea change in the both the pervasiveness of these applications and the breadth of applications and providers. This is resulting in broad, mainstream adoption, and out of necessity team members are clamoring for more use of these tools in day-to-day delivery of project items. This raises the issue of how best to integrate these types of tools into a process methodology.

In an upcoming series of posts, I will be taking a look at different tools that currently exist, various issues that are faced when embracing these new technologies, and how best to use them to extend and empower business processes.

RubyNation / April 9-10, 2010 / Reston, VA.

Includes presentations such as Enabling the Enterprise and Rails: The Killer Java Web Stack

So a lot of  people who actually think about what they are writing (Gruber, Ihnatko, Heilemann, Croft, Fry) had similar things to say about the iPad:

FAST.

and

It’s just the best piece of glass you can buy, with an awesome framework/UI/store behind it.

To me, there are obvious verticals (medical) that this will shine in, but the best is education. I seem to have an obsession with Neal Stephenson’s ideas, but this seems to get quite close (perhaps minus some obvious nano-tech related features) to the Primer from his book, The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. The level of engagement educational material designed with this in mind could achieve is transformative.

Beyond the verticals, this is the computer that most people should own. It takes the iPhone UI, the first successful break from WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse, Pointer), and scales it up to something more general purpose.

It’s not perfect. I agree with two of the issues Jeff Croft mentioned – front facing camera and multi-user. But both of these are hard solutions to tackle. How do you deal with varying angles when trying to use a webcam in your lap, holding it up to your face, or propping it up on a table? How do you deal with multiple identities: syncing, switching, data storage?

Will we get one? Yes.

(emphasis mine)

“Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. Think that judgment is too harsh? Ask the security experts at Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations that are cleaning up the mess from a wave of targeted attacks that allowed source code and confidential data to fall into the hands of well-organized intruders.”

via It’s time to stop using IE6 | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com.

This tutorial shows how to create a simple iPhone application. It is not intended to give complete coverage of all the features available, but rather to introduce some of the technologies and give you a grounding in the fundamentals of the development process.

via iPhone Dev Center: Your First iPhone Application: Introduction.

A friend asked if I had any input on Windows Antivirus Software, or Internet Security in general. I fired off this email in response.

Norton used to do a good job but would slow your system down a bunch. They have worked on performance lately – however, the whole antivirus industry is kind of like a protection racket – you always have to be up to date and paying the policeman.

Two free ones that do a very good job that a lot of people recommend:

AVG Free: http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage

ClamWin: http://www.clamwin.com/

Some people run them together, some just run one.

That said, I don’t run security/anti-virus on any of the Windows machines at our house (and I’m probably tempting the fates just by revealing this, but…):

1. Erin’s work laptop (and mine, if I bring it home) has something corporate on it, so that doesn’t count.
2. Nothing “mission critical” is on a Windows PC for us, so there’s less risk – I also don’t ever “browse” on a Windows machine at our house.
3. Just having the computers behind the FIOS router, assuming you didn’t go in and open it up wide (it comes fairly protected by default) gives you a lot of protection against external attacks.
4. I don’t use Internet Explorer unless I absolutely have to (for example, State Farm’s website used to only work on IE) – Google Chrome or Firefox, kept up to date, provides a ton of security re: Internet attacks.
5. I’m smart about the things I open (files sent from others via Email, weird websites, etc.)

Dear Google,

Please allow me to merge my accounts. I seem to have 3, and together they make one giant clusterf***. I have my original gmail account. Then I got Google Apps For Your Domain, which has everything all laid out nicely connected to emmott.com. But then, since that doesn’t seem to fly for many of your web apps, I have to have a new 3rd account, kevan.emmott, that is valid for those web apps but somehow disparate from my GAFYD account. Yet I use my GAFYD email address as the email for this third account – can you say big ‘ole mess?

Yours, K

“While Joyent has been profitable for much of the company’s existence, we raised money because Joyent has a revenue model, and a product model and roadmap, that we believe can benefit from immensely increased scale. Joyent plans to take cloud computing to a place where our competitors, built on virtualization foundations such as VMWare ESX, Microsoft HyperV, XEN, KVM, won’t be able to go.”

via Blog Joyent | Joyent Raises Institutional Money: Why We Did It.

A link to a website gets more search juice than the website itself. The website owner files a DMCA takedown, and the linking site gets removed from google results. Um, *wow* that’s BS.

Adactio: Journal—Perfect Pitch.

Gov 2.0 Expo 2010 – Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences, May 25 – 27, 2010, Washington, DC .