Archive for January, 2006

Intel-based Macs and Seahawks in the Superbowl? Has hell frozen over?

Published January 23, 2006 Gadgets & Gear , Technology Closed

Spent the last week trying to dig out from having been gone for two weeks – I’m glad to not be traveling for work again until March.

I’m not much of a football fan, but we enjoyed watching the Seahawks win the NFC championship yesterday – a Seattle team has never gone to the Superbowl before, so it’s all very exciting (though not exciting enough to skip a Sunday of skiing with my son in two weeks).

We saw the Apple Intel cleanroom TV ad during the game – the folks watching at my house, who are not following the whole technology story of this switch, enjoyed the ad a lot.

I think Ted leung has the sanest take on this that I’ve seen so far:

It looks like Apple did the most expedient thing that it could, which is to take an Intel 945PM chipset and stick it into a PowerBook case, and add a small number bells and whistles (like the built in iSight and remote control). That explains the ExpressCard slot, and the FW400. If I didn’t have to measure the MacBook Pro against something like the Lenovo T60 (see preview), which has 5 hours of battery life with a 2.16GHz Core Duo T2600 in a 4.8lb package, I might be happy. But this is hardly the top to bottom revamp of the pro notebook line that you’d expect for the Intel transition. And let’s not even discuss the name.

That’s what it looks like to me too – that Apple did what they could to get some Intel-based product on the street as quickly as possible. Craig Wood’s got some performance testing data that shows that the new MacBook Pro is quite a bit quicker than the G4 Powerbooks, though nowhere near the four times as fast as Apple is touting.

My primary uses of a laptop don’t include a lot of CPU-intensive tasks – for me it’s a web-browsing, blog-writing, emailing, presentation-making, IMing machine. So I’m not jumping on the upgrade bandwagon just yet (though the built-in ISight camera and Front Row remote software are a nice touch). I’m still hoping for something lighter, cooler, and with longer battery life from Apple.

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Intel-based Macs and Seahawks in the Superbowl? Has hell frozen over?

Published January 23, 2006 Gadgets & Gear , Technology Closed

Spent the last week trying to dig out from having been gone for two weeks – I’m glad to not be traveling for work again until March.

I’m not much of a football fan, but we enjoyed watching the Seahawks win the NFC championship yesterday – a Seattle team has never gone to the Superbowl before, so it’s all very exciting (though not exciting enough to skip a Sunday of skiing with my son in two weeks).

We saw the Apple Intel cleanroom TV ad during the game – the folks watching at my house, who are not following the whole technology story of this switch, enjoyed the ad a lot.

I think Ted leung has the sanest take on this that I’ve seen so far:

It looks like Apple did the most expedient thing that it could, which is to take an Intel 945PM chipset and stick it into a PowerBook case, and add a small number bells and whistles (like the built in iSight and remote control). That explains the ExpressCard slot, and the FW400. If I didn’t have to measure the MacBook Pro against something like the Lenovo T60 (see preview), which has 5 hours of battery life with a 2.16GHz Core Duo T2600 in a 4.8lb package, I might be happy. But this is hardly the top to bottom revamp of the pro notebook line that you’d expect for the Intel transition. And let’s not even discuss the name.

That’s what it looks like to me too – that Apple did what they could to get some Intel-based product on the street as quickly as possible. Craig Wood’s got some performance testing data that shows that the new MacBook Pro is quite a bit quicker than the G4 Powerbooks, though nowhere near the four times as fast as Apple is touting.

My primary uses of a laptop don’t include a lot of CPU-intensive tasks – for me it’s a web-browsing, blog-writing, emailing, presentation-making, IMing machine. So I’m not jumping on the upgrade bandwagon just yet (though the built-in ISight camera and Front Row remote software are a nice touch). I’m still hoping for something lighter, cooler, and with longer battery life from Apple.

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[CalConnect Winter 2006] Event Calendaring and location

Published January 12, 2006 Technology Closed

Chuck Norris from EVDB is talking about how to store detailed location information in calendaring objects.

iCalendar specifies just a single text field that contains location – that’s not specific enough for much event calendaring.

They are proposing an extension to iCalendar to handle more structured location data. The concept is that there is a location ID that is referred to in the Location field of an iCalendar file, then there is a Location block that has contains all the detailed data on that specific location.

There’s some discussion about why not to just embed Vcard into iCalendar – apparently there are some syntax differences that would make iCalendar parsers choke on vCard data. Another reason is that vCard is really oriented towards people, not location (though it contains some location data).

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Paul Andrews bids farewell to the Seattle Times

Published January 11, 2006 Technology Closed

I was sad to read Paul Andrews’ final column for the Seattle Times on Monday. Paul has been a consistently sane voice for the knowledgeable users of information technology in a world that has gotten progressively less sane.

Paul’s joining the folks at Green For Good – I wish him all the best in his new endeavors!

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Paul Andrews bids farewell to the Seattle Times

Published January 11, 2006 Technology Closed

I was sad to read Paul Andrews’ final column for the Seattle Times on Monday. Paul has been a consistently sane voice for the knowledgeable users of information technology in a world that has gotten progressively less sane.

Paul’s joining the folks at Green For Good – I wish him all the best in his new endeavors!

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The end of an era – Nikon UK to cease film cameras

Published January 11, 2006 Uncategorized Closed

I don’t see any reference to this on the US Nikon site, but in the UK:


Following the success of our digital line-up over the last seven years, which has resulted in more than 95% of Nikon’s UK business being within the digital area, Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras. This decision will allow Nikon to continue to develop products that match the demands of an increasingly competitive market place.
…
As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006.

[CalConnect Winter 2006] The Open Group’s Federated Free/Busy Challenge

Published January 11, 2006 Technology Closed

Mike Lambert from the Open Group is talking this morning about a challenge for achieving federated free/busy. The Open Group’s Messaging Forum is the descendant of the Electronic Mail Association.

The Vendor Challenge approach is a method for bringing vendors to work on real problems presented by users. The problem is defined in terms of a Business Scenario (Use Case) which defines the problem, the business and technology environment, measures of success for the solution, and the constraints. Vendors of relevant products are invited to accept the challenge. On completion, vondors demonstrate the solution.

Afterwards they work to ensure that the solution is deployed in commercially available products in a consistent form. If the activity has identified the need for standardization work (which often happens) they try to make sure that happens in the proper forum. They also have a certification program to recognize and promote products that embody the solution.

Wen Feng from Boeing is presenting the Federated Free/Busy challenge. Why bring this question at this time? Boeing’s aircraft programs are increasingly collaborative between Boeing and other partners. The 787 program is being designed in a global collaborative environment – brings up issues of how to exchange data securely, how to work collaboratively. This program has around 300 first tier partner companies. The problem of getting people together in this virtual collaborative environment brings up the issue of scheduling.

Even within Boeing they have multiple calendaring systems, despite concerted efforts to standardize.

Currently they’ve built an internal system that allows authenticated users to use a web page to retrieve a table of free/busy time for anyone with a Boeing email address from their Exchange servers. But they need to broaden it outside the company – the Boeing free/busy is probably only 30% of the problem in the collaborative environment.

Current calendaring systems do not all contain sufficient information to solve the problem – for instance, if I’m usually in Pacific timezone, how does the free/busy time reflect the fact that for a week I’m travelling in Asia and am on a different time zone?

Free time is not always reliable – just because you’re not busy doesn’t mean you’re available.

Few organizations have corporate policies on updating of calendar information (e.g. you must keep your calendar updated).

The challenge:

By the end of Q2 2006 there should be a real-time mechanism that is able:
- to extract and c ollate/display free/busy information
- from at least 3 major groupware packages
- using open standard protocols
- for a constrained list of named attendees
- and a constrained list of times.

“as large corporations, we do not use proprietary protocols.”

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[Calconnect Winter 2006] successful calendar interoperability

Published January 10, 2006 Uncategorized Closed

We’ve just seen a demo of interoperability in calendaring between the Mozilla Lightning calendar in Thunderbird, the Oracle Calendar client, interchanging events across the RPI CalDAV server. Is that cool or what?

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[Calconnect Winter 2006] Calconnect at Novell – timezones and more

Published January 10, 2006 Technology Closed

This week I’m at the Calconnect roundtable, which is being hosted by Novell in Provo, Utah.

We’re starting off the roundtable with a report from the technical committee on time zones. That group is proposing the establishment of a formal timezone registry (for reasons why this is necessary, see my post from October 30).

The whole group here think that’s a great idea, and votes in favor of it.

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[Calconnect Winter 2006] Calconnect at Novell – timezones and more

Published January 10, 2006 Technology Closed

This week I’m at the Calconnect roundtable, which is being hosted by Novell in Provo, Utah.

We’re starting off the roundtable with a report from the technical committee on time zones. That group is proposing the establishment of a formal timezone registry (for reasons why this is necessary, see my post from October 30).

The whole group here think that’s a great idea, and votes in favor of it.

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