Tag Archives: Technology

Connectivity and Integration podcasts

Posted on April 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

As well as being WebSphere Messaging Community Lead out of IBM Hursley right now, I’m also part of what we refer to as our “Connectivity and Integration” organisation (middleware… plumbing… the hidden inter-application messaging and adapter stuff, ensuring that systems can talk to one another reliably). Much of what we do in Hursley, and the software that we develop there, is part of the Connectivity space. It’s the software that joins up all the pieces of a Smarter Planet, and it’s an interesting space for a techie like me.

We thought it was about time to talk about some of the features that are in our WebSphere Messaging products – WebSphere MQ, Message Broker, and the family of software that fits around them. So, my colleague Leif Davidsen and I sat down and recorded a series of podcasts. Each episode zeroes in on a specific feature or capability, such as high availability, or telemetry, or security – you get the idea.

As we were talking, Leif and I were trying to keep the discussions bite-sized (about 10 minutes at a time); highlight things that users might not have heard about before; be interesting to administrators and developers as well as to architects; and we tried not to use too much “marketingese” – although I reckon you might spot that in some of the podcast episode titles! :-)

You can start to subscribe to the Connectivity and Integration podcast series right now in iTunes or add the RSS feed to your favourite podcatcher. There should be some web content and show notes with links and references to follow soon – watch out for those, I’ll tweet about them and update this post when I know more.

NB did you check out my first and second columns for Sphere yet? More to come soon, and I’m hoping to join the GWC Lab Chat series for a future episode as well. Cool stuff.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in blog

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m an IBMer

Posted on January 30, 2011 | 2 Comments

When I see a piece like this it reminds me why I love doing what I do. Technology can take us forward and help to improve the human condition, and I’m part of an organisation that has been helping to shape that.

As an aside, I’ve been enjoying reading Lou Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance recently. Nicely written, and an eye-opening study of where the company was in the early 90s before he took over (mentioned briefly in the film).

The IBM website is going to have an ongoing series of 100 innovations updated throughout the year, too.

Here’s a longer film that is even more fascinating (remember, I’m a techie, I work for the company, and I’m an historian – nevertheless, I urge you to take a look at these videos)

Related Articles

→ 2 Comments

Posted in blog

Tagged , , , ,

CityOne takes serious gaming mainstream

Posted on October 4, 2010 | 2 Comments

One of the topics I’ve been talking about as a sideline at work for several years since the early days of eightbar, and as one of the core topics on the weekly Dogear Nation podcast, is the idea of “serious games”: using gaming technology and immersive environments, combined with the web and emerging tools, to teach business skills and build awareness of social issues. We embraced environments like Second Life and middleware like Unity early on as we recognised their potential to add new dimensions to the learning experience. IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook gaming study was talking about Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders in 2007, and last year we published Lessons from Online Gaming. It has been something of a slow-burner, but it has continued to be an interesting field to watch.

I’m pretty excited to see that today, IBM’s CityOne game has been launched. This is strongly tied in with the Smarter Planet initiative and aims to provide an environment which can teach the player about the challenges faced by cities today, as well as what IBM does, and how technology solutions can be applied to improve energy, finance, retail and water in urban scenarios.

my city - Uberville :-)

my city, "Uberville", in action!

The game is accessible right on the IBM website and despite the “download” links and mentions in other news articles I’ve seen, it needs nothing more than a web browser to play (oh, and Flash – so I won’t be playing it on my iPhone, but then I’m happier seeing the graphics on a larger display!). Works just fine in Chrome on Ubuntu :-)

The aim is to balance a city’s resources and the happiness of the citizens, whilst attempting to triage problems and provide longer-term solutions through technology. I’ve had a brief play and found it really easy to get started, but within a few turns things start to get more tricky as funds may run lower. I liked the music, which was ambient enough not to be too annoying, and I also liked the way in which the image of the city gains colour as various tasks are completed – you’ll see the watercolour-ish appearance in the screenshot from my game, above. Another thing that the game has is an achievements system with badges that can be earned as aspects of the city’s environment are brought under control – this means it instantly feels familiar to gamers used to these kind of rewards systems, and constantly draws you in for another turn to see what you can unlock next time around.

This isn’t the first such serious game that IBM has produced, of course – INNOV8 and INNOV8 2.0 have been successful over the past couple of years in teaching the principles of Business Process Management. However, CityOne does a nice job of connecting technology with an environment (a city) that many of us will be more than familiar with, and making the ideas inherent in a Smarter Planet become apparent. Well done to my friend Phaedra Boinidiris and her great team for creating another compelling experience.

Related Articles

→ 2 Comments

Posted in blog

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Things I like best in Snow Leopard

Posted on August 30, 2009 | 1 Comment

There are a heap of things I’m really liking about Snow Leopard so far… even though it turns out that my early 2007 MacBook Pro can’t take advantage of a lot of the under-the-covers enhancements :-(

  1. The new (configurable) Dock behaviour to have application windows minimise into their app icons – combined with the click-hold-Expose feature, this has made the Dock useful for me again. I’ve moved it from autohiding at the side of the screen, to permanent (but 2D) at the bottom.
  2. Safari running Flash as a separate process. Far fewer browser crashes.
  3. Nearly 15Gb of reclaimed disk space. Seriously! Could be the fact that I opted for a custom install and removed most of the language support I didn’t need, too, and also influenced by the fact that Snow Leopard reports disk space differently.
  4. Scrollable, more intelligent grid views in Stacks. The Dock is even more useful.
  5. Seeing the date in the menubar. Bye bye, MagiCal.
  6. Setting Spotlight search to find in the current folder by default (in Finder preferences).
  7. The default screen gamma setting is now 2.2 – at last.

If you want to dig a bit deeper to find some of these things, check out a couple of Macworld articles – I wouldn’t have known about them otherwise! All-in-all then, a minor upgrade with a bunch of welcome changes.

→ 1 Comment

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

The Matrix – ten years old?!

Posted on May 4, 2009 | 1 Comment

In the past couple of months, I’ve nearly abandoned my feedreader in favour of what I consider to be the “smart crowdsourced filtering” I’ve gained from the people I’m following on Twitter – I rarely miss a news item and often still see the most insightful posts through tweeted links. However, I have been missing what my friend have been writing about, and a bunch of other stories or items that just haven’t floated across my Twitter feed.

(bear with the preamble…)

So, in the last week, I went back to my feedreader, which is currently Google Reader with the web client on the Mac, FeedDemon 3 beta sync on Windows, and Byline on the iPhone.

In doing so I came across an xkcd comic that I’d missed, and the news that The Matrix is now ten years old. Click through for a full-size cartoon on the original site.

It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed. The Matrix was a totally revolutionary film and it blew me away. The influence of the movie on the current industry is clear – just as an example, the visual style (including “bullet time”) has been much copied across all kinds of formats in the past decade. The cross-media reach of the storyline, whereby you “had” to have played the video game Enter the Matrix and watched the animated Animatrix shorts to get a “full” picture of the narrative, has inspired other filmmakers looking to invent franchises. If you’re looking for a better understanding of how this all worked, I recommend the book Convergence Culture which uses The Matrix as one of its case studies – when I read it last month it explained several parts of the story I’d never understood, reawakened my interest in the Matrix universe and inspired me to pick up the trilogy on Bluray.

I have to say I agree with the xkcd cartoon – the first was, for me, the best of the trilogy, perhaps because of the freshness and mystery, perhaps because of the lack of overcomplicated backstory and exposition that the second and third attempted to insert.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in 24924

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,