Monday Mar 14, 2005
- Working from home? Make sure you're adding unique value
- Rules, incentives and Barry Schwartz's call for "practical wisdom" - and what of goals?
- Recommending "Managing Humans" by by Michael Lopp (aka Rands)
- The Knowledge Distortion Field
- Why security bugs are different to other bugs
- Happiness is a healthy social network
- Prototype Sun Ray laptops
- Father of three
- Teaching critical thinking in schools?
- links for 2008-05-17
aliases
announcement
birth
book
brompton
children
cloud
computer
croudsourcing
damage
datamining
decision
dtrace
ethics
family
fun
futurology
gapminder
geros
goalfree
goals
happiness
home
human
incentives
intel
internet
ipod
junk
kepner-tregoe
knowledge
life
loft
losug
mail
making
management
mdb
meme
methodologies
metro
mice
modelling
morals
mrgum
network
nfs
nis+
nis_cachemgr
nscd
opensolaris
performance
philosophy
photo
pizza
poverty
process
programming
psychology
rands
review
rodents
rules
security
seedcamp
sgrt
sigbus
signals
sigsegv
smart
smf
solaris
sprcfb
squirrels
sun
sunray
superhero
system
ted
teleworking
terminal
terminfo
thinking
troubleshooting
trust
wisdom
All
/Family
/General
/Internet
/Links
/Mac
/Management
/Palm
/Security
/Solaris
/Sun
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Monday Mar 14, 2005
As Alec Muffett points out in recent blog, there are the security implications when using external instant messaging (IM) providers. Of course, businesses wishing to protect their information (confidentiality) and their employees (privacy) might wish to provide their own internal IM servers, Sun Java System Instant Messaging is one example. Usefully the FAQ explains some of the problems with using external IM providers.
Having said that, in a world of outsourcing many companies would probably not want to provide their own IM infrastructure and might prefer to buy one in, security included. A business opportunity perhaps?
Back on-topic though, Alec bemoans the success of IM vs Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I see them having different functions and to a large extent IM provides one function and IRC another:
- IM
- Primary focus is person to person
- Clients provide this focus with buddies, etc
- Many very easy to use clients, passes the "grandmother test"
- Sense of "being there" (eg presence and typing indication)
- IRC
- Primary focus is group chatting
- Clients provide this focus with channels
- Somewhat techie
I also think there's a minimum number of people in a chat room to make it viable. We use them at work and unless there's enough people in the room we never reach the tipping point where they become useful. You need a few people looking at the chat session at any one time to make it worth chatting. Viability numbers depend on workload, time zones etc but 10-20 seems to be the minimum. I don't have time to watch a chat session all day.
IRC could be an alternative to IM but clients needs to provide 'buddy' and 'presence' indication to rival existing IM services. Another business opportunity?
Friday Mar 04, 2005
Fantastic - it's snowing! I had planned to work from home today anyway.
It's been unusually cold in the UK for the past few weeks so we've seen quite a lot more snow than usual. I live in London and, despite what many people think, London isn't often foggy or snowy. I think the former is confusion with London Fog, the clothing company, and old 1950's B-movies. The latter is an on-going misconception trotted out by the film industry. Check out the snowy scenes at the end of Bridget Jones's Diary for example.
Bah humbug or not, I love it.
Sharp eyed readers might spot (a) that our house if for sale (cute, cosy 2 bed cottage, 5 minutes from Twickenham station, details on request!), and (b) my wife and son wisely staying indoors watching their fool of a husband/father standing out in the snow in his pyjamas.