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November 10, 2004
New Feature: Showing Delicious Activity
I've added a new feature on the right hand side column: a box showing the last 5 bookmarks I've made on del.icio.us. I ran across Jeff Veen's tutorial on putting Delicious on your blog. Since I already use Feedsplitter, this only took a few minutes to set up. What I'm doing isn't the most efficient way to do things since every homepage hit results in multiple calls to Feedsplitter (one for forum comments and one for Del.icio.us), but its more loosely coupled than generating a file and then including it. Loose coupling often requires a tradeoff of efficiency. The benefit is that later I don't have to remember as much about how all this hooks together when I change something--it will likely just keep working. I've experienced this kind of serendipidous flexibility before and its nice.
10:49 AM | Recommend This | Print This
VMWare ESX Review
Tom Yager reviewed VMWare ESX for InfoWorld this week. This was a review I wanted to do, but he beat me to it. :-) I think virtualization is a tool that not enough IT managers use yet. I've got ESX installed a couple of Dell 6650 4-way SMP boxes with 16Gb of memory connected to a SAN. This set-up is my virtualization testbed and serves as the platform for study we're doing in my lab. At some point in the not too distant future we hope to have some hard data on the performance trade-offs. Power is one big reason to go virtual that Tom doesn't mention in his article. Data centers are getting denser and hence the power/square foot ration is going up--way up. I believe virtualization on dense servers can reduce overall power requirements and we're trying to gather evidence to support the idea.
09:41 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Lurking Software
Chad Dickerson asks "is Wiki under your radar?" in his latest column at InfoWorld. Most of the column is about his exploration of Wikis and deciding which one to install at InfoWorld. The kicker, is that after all that, he finds that its already been installed months before. Some CIO's get nervous when that happens. I always say that "I love when good things happen and I didn't have to push it." Most IT people will scratch their itches and that's a good thing, in general. The trick is discovering these rogue projects and then finding ways to grow them into services that the rest of the organization can use.
09:32 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Using Del.icio.us
Jon is expounding the virtues of Del.icio.us:
What Roland Piquepaille is doing here, like what I'm doing here, begins with self-interested personal information management. We categorize our own items first and foremost for our own benefit, so that we can find things more easily and so that we can better understand how new items relate to our collective works.
But del.icio.us is also a social system. The tagging I do is also potentially useful to you. For example, Roland's entry today cited several of my prior items about del.icio.us. A shorthand way to refer to those -- and, in fact, to all six (soon to be seven) items in that set -- is: http://del.icio.us/judell/del.icio.us+jonudell. That's a nice convenienceFrom Jon Udell: Cornucopia of the commons
Referenced Wed Nov 10 2004 08:45:04 GMT-0700
Jon goes on to talk about using Del.icio.us as a way to get information about what other people are bookmarking your posts and, potentially, to find larger communities with like interests. I've found Del.icio.us to be a great way to organize bookmarks and, using the RSS feeds, have my students follow what I'm book marking. When I want to bring something to their attention, I can just bookmark it in Del.icio.us and they see it in their feedreader. Very easy to do.
I haven't yet taken the step that Jon and Ron have and enter bookmarks for each blog entry on this site, but its something I plan on doing. I'm not sure whether to set up a different user name on Del.icio.us for that so that its separate from my personal bookmarks, or just use a special tag and then select blog posts by including that tag in the search.