Sunday, March 25, 2007
Virtualization on Mac OS X
Check out my blog entry I just posted over at The Mac Katana. It discusses my experiences on Mac OS X with VMware Fusion Beta and Parallels.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Online All The Time
In my lifetime of communicating with a computer, I have lived and been a part of several paradigms of online communcations. I remember the dial-up the BBS days in the 1980s, the CompuServe forums in early 1990s, e-mail in various forms of evolution in the 1980s through the 1990s and the spam infested world of today, groupware in the 1990s, and instant messaging, forums, blogs, portals and wikis in the past few years.
Collaborative online communication continues to evolve. Today, the social networking sites, personal wikis, personal blogs, and portals are all evolutionary forms of storing and managing online information. What I like about today's world is that with open source technology and the numerous online services providing you with all the tools you can imagine, the only thing you need is a modern web browser to access it all! Not having a blog, participating in a forum, being part of some online community, or not being online is like not having access to a telephone in the 1970s.
I remember being a young person in the late 1970s and early 1980s and spending hours talking on the phone. For me, this has translated into the modern equivalent of being online all the time today. With notebook computers, internet gadgets and all types of mobile devices, it is hard not be online today. You actually have to make a effort to stay offline today. The only time I spend less time online is when I am on a vacation. Then I intentionally disconnect.
I find that instead of watching TV and cable, I actually do this while staying online. A few years ago this was sort of a novelty. Today, it is now just a normal way that I watch TV/cable and concurrently browse the internet. My multitasking capabilities are up and my attention span is going down. I am not sure if this is a good thing but I have adapted to this way of personal interactive entertainment over the last few years.
What I have not seen is the smooth convergence of TV and the web that was envisioned in the 1990s. This did not occur. Today, we still have TV/cable that pretty much works the same way it did in the 1990s and the web has become richer but the convergence has not occurred. I think the two industries are intentionally trying to figure this out and no one really wants to the change it all. YouTube and other online video sites are in a big fight with traditional content providers and from what I have seen, it appears that the traditional content providers are resisting the convergence and change. So what else is new?
Well, back to my original topic. I am watching a Comedy Central show right now and writing this blog entry. Maybe in 10-years we'll see the convergence of TV and the web. I doubt it because that is what everyone thought 10-years ago in 1997.
Collaborative online communication continues to evolve. Today, the social networking sites, personal wikis, personal blogs, and portals are all evolutionary forms of storing and managing online information. What I like about today's world is that with open source technology and the numerous online services providing you with all the tools you can imagine, the only thing you need is a modern web browser to access it all! Not having a blog, participating in a forum, being part of some online community, or not being online is like not having access to a telephone in the 1970s.
I remember being a young person in the late 1970s and early 1980s and spending hours talking on the phone. For me, this has translated into the modern equivalent of being online all the time today. With notebook computers, internet gadgets and all types of mobile devices, it is hard not be online today. You actually have to make a effort to stay offline today. The only time I spend less time online is when I am on a vacation. Then I intentionally disconnect.
I find that instead of watching TV and cable, I actually do this while staying online. A few years ago this was sort of a novelty. Today, it is now just a normal way that I watch TV/cable and concurrently browse the internet. My multitasking capabilities are up and my attention span is going down. I am not sure if this is a good thing but I have adapted to this way of personal interactive entertainment over the last few years.
What I have not seen is the smooth convergence of TV and the web that was envisioned in the 1990s. This did not occur. Today, we still have TV/cable that pretty much works the same way it did in the 1990s and the web has become richer but the convergence has not occurred. I think the two industries are intentionally trying to figure this out and no one really wants to the change it all. YouTube and other online video sites are in a big fight with traditional content providers and from what I have seen, it appears that the traditional content providers are resisting the convergence and change. So what else is new?
Well, back to my original topic. I am watching a Comedy Central show right now and writing this blog entry. Maybe in 10-years we'll see the convergence of TV and the web. I doubt it because that is what everyone thought 10-years ago in 1997.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Search In 2007
Today, everyone knows how to use Google or a search capability. It is very intuitive and even my son who is in first grade has figured out how to use the search feature in online dictionaries like Merriam-Webster. What surprises me recenlty is the how the enterprise search market is becoming a very competitive space.
A few years ago, Google and Yahoo! were the two enterprise level products on the market with an low cost to entry. This is a critical point in the modern IT environment. Today, there are numerous open source and proprietary solutions all claiming some type of advantage in their implementation of search technology. I can name quite a few search technologies today that I have reviewed Google Search Appliance, Yahoo SDK, Amazon A9 OpenSearch, IBM OmniFind, Corpora Find!, Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 Enterprise Search, Nutch, Lucene, Autonomy/Verity, and whole lot of embedded search engines. In the Java world, Lucene appears to be the best of breed search framework. As a matter of fact it is the basis for the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition search technology.
I really like the Google appliance mentality. You just install it and use it. It just works kind of like your refrigerator. When was the last time you had to do any type of maintenance, patches, reconfiguration, optimization, of your refrigerator. You do not! That is the point. You just use it, it works and you keep it clean and it looks good. That in summation is what I consider the baseline needs and wants for a search solution. No one else has anything like it on the market yet.
I have designed and built solutions using Lucene, Verity, Google API and Yahoo! SDK. Generally speaking, they all work in a similar fashion. Personally, I prefer the appliance approach that Google provides. It just works. It uses the same Google API that you can already use and implements a dedicated hardware based solution that requires very little systems administration overhead.
As for the state of enterprise search today, I would say the the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a powerful open source entry into this highly competitive space. With it's low-cost to entry and open source foundation, it looks like it will mature into a viable competitor to the Google Search Appliance in the next few years. Comparing the Google API to the Yahoo! REST based search SDK, I think the Yahoo approach using REST is much easier to use from a developer perspective.
I would not count out the open source product Nutch either. It is based on Apache Lucene which is the defacto best of breed Java indexing framework. Nutch has been brought into the Apache Software Foundation which is a powerful force in the open source universe.
As for the state of search, I think the leaders remain the same and the fresh new open source competition is breathing life into this area that was once completely dominated by a few products.
A few years ago, Google and Yahoo! were the two enterprise level products on the market with an low cost to entry. This is a critical point in the modern IT environment. Today, there are numerous open source and proprietary solutions all claiming some type of advantage in their implementation of search technology. I can name quite a few search technologies today that I have reviewed Google Search Appliance, Yahoo SDK, Amazon A9 OpenSearch, IBM OmniFind, Corpora Find!, Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 Enterprise Search, Nutch, Lucene, Autonomy/Verity, and whole lot of embedded search engines. In the Java world, Lucene appears to be the best of breed search framework. As a matter of fact it is the basis for the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition search technology.
I really like the Google appliance mentality. You just install it and use it. It just works kind of like your refrigerator. When was the last time you had to do any type of maintenance, patches, reconfiguration, optimization, of your refrigerator. You do not! That is the point. You just use it, it works and you keep it clean and it looks good. That in summation is what I consider the baseline needs and wants for a search solution. No one else has anything like it on the market yet.
I have designed and built solutions using Lucene, Verity, Google API and Yahoo! SDK. Generally speaking, they all work in a similar fashion. Personally, I prefer the appliance approach that Google provides. It just works. It uses the same Google API that you can already use and implements a dedicated hardware based solution that requires very little systems administration overhead.
As for the state of enterprise search today, I would say the the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a powerful open source entry into this highly competitive space. With it's low-cost to entry and open source foundation, it looks like it will mature into a viable competitor to the Google Search Appliance in the next few years. Comparing the Google API to the Yahoo! REST based search SDK, I think the Yahoo approach using REST is much easier to use from a developer perspective.
I would not count out the open source product Nutch either. It is based on Apache Lucene which is the defacto best of breed Java indexing framework. Nutch has been brought into the Apache Software Foundation which is a powerful force in the open source universe.
As for the state of search, I think the leaders remain the same and the fresh new open source competition is breathing life into this area that was once completely dominated by a few products.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
