« June 07, 2004 | Main | June 09, 2004 »
June 08, 2004
Shedding Capability for Certainty
Are IT departments becoming big bags of contracts? Jerry Gregoire, former CIO for Dell and PepsiCo, writes in this month's CIO magazine about the vanishing IT department. He concludes:
So, what kind of IT organization do you aspire to have? If you yearn for adequate results on vanilla systems in pursuit of dial-tone regularity, forget about talent shortages and go find yourself a good contract lawyer. If, on the other hand, you still believe IT can make a competitive difference and that even the more mundane tasks can be a channel of competitive advantage given a little creative effort, then developing and retaining a professional organization should be your number-one goal.From The Vanishing IT Department - Peer To Peer - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 16:51:48 GMT-0600
Jerry also argues against the increasing trend of appointing people with weak technical skills as CIO:
Consider for a moment that, given an hour or two of reading an instruction manual and a few hours looking over a dentist's shoulder, I could probably do a passable job of pulling teeth. So why doesn't that make me a dentist? Well, because I'd be helpless if anything went wrong during the extraction, and since pulling teeth is the only thing I know how to do, a pulled tooth is exactly what every patient who comes through my door is going to get. CIOs with no formal training or long-term experience in IT are not CIOs. They're just very nice people from other disciplines sent in to make sure IT doesn't do anything dangerous or exciting. The same goes for the rest of the IT leadership.From The Vanishing IT Department - Peer To Peer - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 16:55:02 GMT-0600
05:07 PM | Recommend This | Print This
NetNewsWire and Atom
BTW, if you happen to use Ranchero Software's excellent NetNewsWire feedreader on OS X, you'll have to download the 1.09b1 beta version to read Atom feeds.
04:47 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Dive Into Atom with Mark
Here are a couple of good articles by Mark Pilgrim on the Atom API and Atom Authentication via WSSE. Mark's also written a piece on Normalizing Syndication Feeds that contains XPath queries for picking out relevant pieces of RSS and Atom. Very handy.
04:28 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Syndication Standards Saga
Sean Gallagher (of eWeek) describes the recent developments in synidcation standards saga in his blog. The article is a nice summary of where the RSS vs Atom story is now and a little about its history. There's lots of links to other interesting content. Regarding Atom, Sean says:
Atom combines a weblog publishing API together with a syndication format. Winer says that's not novel--"We did that with the MetaWeblog API," he says, which was based on RSS. "The clever thing they did was that they gave them both the same name."
But Atom is incompatible with the RSS standard, for a number of reasons, some of which I'll grossly oversimplify here. For one, it creates a new XML data format for syndicated content to allow for more data types to be built into an Atom feed. The publishing API is being brought into alignment with other web development APIs and approaches such as SOAP and REST, says Bray. And Atom will link into enterprise security models like WS-Security, through WSSE.From RSS, Atom, And The Syndication Standards Dance
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 15:37:26 GMT-0600
Atom is working its way through the IETF process. Probably as a foil, Dave Winer has suggested that W3C may want to standardize RSS 2.0. There's one side to this argument that goes "it doesn't matter to the users as long as the aggregator writers support both." However, I think it does matter in terms of divided focus and energy. I'm not taking sides; I'm just wishing that the fracture didn't exist.
03:52 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Portable Wi-Fi
Apple's AirPort Express (click for larger image)
|
Apple has announced a portable Wi-Fi hub called the AirPort Express that looks like the little square power adaptors that come with the PowerBook. The unit has a mini-stereo jack, a USB port, and an RJ-45 port. The unit is small enough to throw into a laptop bag for travel. In addition to serving as a regular base station, the AP Express can also serve as a Wi-Fi terminal point for attaching printers printers and as a bridge for extending the range of the wireless network in your house--just plug it into the wall. The coolest feature is that it will also attach your stereo to the network via Wi-Fi.