Protect your laptop, macbook or android device
It’s been a while since I last posted something here. A job move and a change of country (from Wales to UAE) has taken up my attention for the past few months.
So perhaps I am the last person to discover Prey – a neat utility that runs on your laptop or mobile device and can be turned into an anti-theft device the moment you realise that your cherished laptop has disappeared. It can even take a picture of the thief for you!
I stumbled upon this recently when I read a wonderful account of how a combination of Prey and Twitter led to a stolen laptop being recovered at an internet cafe in the US. It will run on Linux, Android, Windows or Mac (but not yet on the iPhone, though I bet that is on the way). It’s a free service, for the sake of a simple installation and account setup, it just might rescue your laptop if it ever goes for a walk.
Check it out here.
Courgette Cake
This is a bit different from my usual posts, but if a blog is for anything, it is for passing on to others things that you find useful. So, at today’s Equality and Diversity Steering Group meeting at ONS I brought along a courgette cake which seemed to go down pretty well. This recipe has recently become a family favourite, and it was a surprise discovery a few months ago when we had a surplus of courgettes (works equally well with marrow, of course).
I can’t totally ignore technology in a post, so while you pick up the recipe here, take a look around the site, which is a wonderful example of mass collaboration – great use of reviews, ratings, tags, emoticons, the full works!
MacroWikinomics
Don Tapscott’s latest book, a macro view of mass collaboration to follow up his best-seller “Wikinomics” has just come out. I haven’t read it yet, but he was at his inspirational best when he spoke at the EA 2010 Conference in London earlier this year, and these short interviews with TechCrunch are full of interesting thoughts beautifully presented.
I particularly like his definition of University – “the very best model of higher education that 17th century technology can provide”.
I haven’t yet read the new book, and expect it is mostly a set of interesting case studies, but if it is half as good as Wikinomics, it is clearly worth reading.
While we’re on book recommendations, I thoroughly recommend Empowered, which nicely illustrates how you have to empower your employees to reflect the empowerment your customers already have. Harness this, and your customers become your best advocates. Ignore it, and you are taking one hell of a risk.
Zachman and EA
I greatly admire John Zachman – his framework is a tremendous piece of work, the very foundations of Enterprise Architecture. From an intellectual perspective, it seems to me unshakeable, and John was on excellent form at the 2010 EA conference in London this summer.
For many, the difficulty with the framework is not conceptual, but practical. How does one put it into practice, and what tools or models does one have to create, and how should one use them, to turn this beautiful set of models into something that can be put to beneficial use?
A memorable session at that conference was given with a demonstration of PowerDesigner from Sybase. We saw a really elegant demonstration in which the paper framework came to life before our eyes.
Stan Locke has been a great advocate and communicator of the Zachman Framework, so it is really too sad to learn of the falling out of these two, who have been business partners and co-evangelists for s0 long.
Let us hope that some common sense can prevail so the both parties’ energies can be devoted to more positive activities. And one day I hope to find an opportunity to take a closer look at how PowerDesigner can breathe practical life into the Zachman Framework.
What is the Internet?
A nice article here in The Observer by Professor John Naughton, which neatly captures much of the difficulty that many have in understanding the Internet. I do like his distinction between the Web and the Internet – the train / track analogy seems a good one, worth a go when trying to explain this to colleagues who are stuck in a browser-based view of the Internet.
By coincidence, I read this today having attended an earlier discussion at work about “Web Strategy”, in which we debated whether we meant Web or Internet, or just plain dissemination! It would be good to have that discussion again after everyone has read this article.
I’m less sure about “web 3.0″ – the Semantic Web looks more like a different kind of train running on the same track than an enhancement of the “web 2.0″ train, but that is a minor point, and as he says in his postscript, “It’s too early to say”.