So, running WebLogic on the hypervisor is compelling, but I doubt many companies will want to migrate to Oracle VM in order to obtain this advantage.  Check out the recent Gartner report that VMware is alone in the Leader Magic Quadrant for virtualization, so this is no slam dunk for Oracle, Microsoft, or any other vendor.   But challenges are ahead for Oracle in virtualization on hypervisor, as one article puts it, “Either they (Oracle) promote VMware, and abandon their own product, or they abandon their customers, but keep their product.”   I haven’t really expressed much of an opinion here, as much as I have doubts about customers reaction to the technology that’s available.  I’m not so much of a virtualization guy as I am an IdM guy, but time will tell, and with any luck Oracle may relax their position of resistance against virtualization from their Palo Alto brethren.

The Big Switch

But going beyond the datacenter, now many customers have the option to run Java apps in the cloud rather than their own infrastructure using VMForce.  My bets are that history will repeat itself, and  this trend will only continue as companies abandon in-house server farms and infrastructure, and as Nicholas Carr aptly describes in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, will opt for deployment to Cloud machines much the same way companies abandoned generating their own power and began using centralized electricity provided by the power grid in the early part of the last century. 

With that said, IdM technology is in for a roller coaster ride as the tidal waves of change come and we look at how to manage and scale IAM services across a broad spectrum from internal IT to private clouds to the public cloud for partners, customers and employees.  It is looking like the cost and complexity of extending Federated SSO across multiple protocols (not all customers will have SAML, WS-Sec) will be a hassle unless you factor in the potential of cloud services and a hub & spoke model.  It makes me wonder if IdM will go the way of the centralized power grid and Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, et al) or maybe it’s already happening.   And as Coby Royer points out in a recent blog post, “I can install the old style IAM tools, this is missing a huge opportunity for cost savings—putting standard infrastructure for IAM into the “drinking water” is the wave of the future.”  In an economy like this, that logic is becoming much easier to buy into than say in 2008 before the recession started to hit IT budgets. 

As an old hand at Oracle IdM (going on 10 years now) it is a bit hard for me to digest, but my instinct tells me that survival means adapting to the seas of change rather than trying to run from them.  There is a bright future and a lot of pent up demand in cloud services, where new models will soon overshadow the shortcomings of client/server and internet architectures.   The old school IAM stacks are not going away anytime soon, but the IdM professional will need to learn new models and standards to keep pace with where this industry might be heading.

Anyways, time will tell.  Leave a comment if you think differently.

However this morning (Sunday), horror struck as my wife informed me her latest Win7 build (Release 7201) stopped working (7:40 AM).  She couldn’t login to her desktop.  Being the tech guy that I am, her hard drive is has 2 partitions, one for the OS (40GB) and the rest for “Data” ~ 120GB and every user/app setting is backed up to the Data drive.  I tried loging in to her desktop 3 times (8:40, second cup of coffee and Molly by my side) to realize it was time to boot in Safe Mode.  Logging in with Safe Mode I found 1.) Windows Media Player netowrking service consumes a lot of network and CPU bandwidth once enabled and 2.) Network share of a nearby (Win7, of course) PC in Sleep mode caused boot delays.  Still after disabling Startup programs in the boot menu, I was unable to boot up properly. (9:30 AM)

Windows 7:  Fools game or Mastermind of time management?

Today was a tricky one to have troubles with a PC. I had a flight to catch (which I missed) at 4:24, had to leave home by 2:00 in order to catch the flight, although post July 4th traffic would kill off any such aspirations.  Also I was informed of a honey-do list that included A.) Fix the back door from opening so Molly could not escape, B.) Fix the teeter swing in back yard C.) Get milk, and D.) Pick up prescriptions, and most important E.) Fix my PC, even if it requires installing “With Windows 2.0… I don’t care what version of Windows!!!” I could have hyperventilated with all that was to be accomplished by 2:00.  Windows 2.0 honey?  C’mon, I don’t have a copy of that anymore, that would require a tript to my friend Doug Dayton’s house (Microsoft’s 169th employee and Windows OEM Sales Guru) and there’s just not enough time for that (10:30).

Kicked off file system restore.  Took a shower and finished packing.   Attempted “Repair PC” option from Boot menu.  Started new Windows 7 Install (10:45) which finishes in near record time thanks to streamlined install process.  Reviewed USB ports (drivers) and installed programs post install before heading to Fred Meyer (11:30).  Installed MS Money and Office 2010 Tech Preview.  Started Windows Backup (11:45) and went to Fred Meyer.  Returned (12:15) backup complete, yay!  Next time this restore process will only take an hour or less.  Stopped for awhile and to have lunch with Molly and Cami. Chicken sandwich.

Wow!  How could this happen to me on the day like this, little would I know it would only get worse in Tacoma Narros toll traffic *sigh* and so continued restoring Cami’s Laptop with all personal files by 1:30.  Forgets to install Pidgin, so she takes upon herself to install it herself (bless her) so we can chat on IM tonight from my hotel room.  It seems as though 98% of reinstall and restore tasks are complete (still need to fine tune network share, wake on lan, install Java and Business Accounting, and a few other small items…) so a sigh of relief.

It’s beautiful outside although clouds are flying high Cami and I go outside and lay on the grass and talk about the weekend, our rental in Oregon, and how nice it would be to have our own home here (in Washington).  I take mental notes about packing cell phone battery charger, medications, and throw on a quick deodorant before heading out the door.  Sends text to Cami (to her fresh Windows 7 PC) from my phone while driving.  Whew, everything is okay!!!

Did Windows 7 just save my day and avert a disaster of the most extraordinary kind? 
Someone is lucky that Windows 7 is so amazing, or that she has an engineer as a husband! 

Happy Monday!

P.S. What went wrong with Win7 in the first place?  I’m not convinced that it was Windows fault since it’s running fine on another laptop and a home built PC, and take more issues with the hack jobs that Sony did when coming up with Drivers for Vista, and of course there are no new drivers for this Windows 7, and Sony just expects you to run Vista Home for the rest of its life.  Anyways I’m suspicious of the Sony drivers, which I had uninistalled after installing them before.  So moral of the story is, Sony laptop owners beware.  I always seem to have most issues with drivers for Sony products whenever any configuration outside of the shipped OS is used.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/25_most_popular_windows_tips

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/21_steps_make_your_pc_betterfasterstronger

1. Sell the logo+branding
2. Sell the color + additional typography studies
3. Add the CSS definitions based on the previous offering
4. Offer a few basic layouts, or a custom layout if that is preferred
5. Referral to a developer who can implement the design at an affordable price (don’t do this step yourself or risk undermining your credibility as a designer)
6. Repeat the process for the photographer blog design+branding+strategy

So for you designers, here is my business idea.  Offer a basic logo+branding service for a flat fee of say $250, or $500, or $750 (whatever you charge for this).  This is your business core, and every photography needs this more than they know.  I can point you to a few dozen photographers who need this service right now, but who don’t know how to buy this service or that it’s even within their budget.  It is your business to inform your prospective customer, and to create a preference. 

A way to upsell this basic business need is to offer a CSS file as a deliverable.  The basic CSS option uses a primary or basic color scheme using the themes that are included in the logo.  The 2nd level uses type fonts from the basic study, and has a custom design for everything from H1,H2,H3 all the way to P, I, B, and all the basic events such as Warning, Confirmation, et al. 

From there we can offer a basic service to design a layout that meets their needs, including layout graphics like rounded corders, shaded edges, etc… 

To me this is common sense.  We need wheels before we need a leather wrapped steering wheel.  We need gas before A/C does us an ounce of good.  And a moon roof without the moon?  Let’s start out photographers with the basics, and allow their business to drive where their website design takes them, and their customer demographic dictate to us whether Flash is a “no brainer” or not.

The basics get yous and your customer’s business moving in the right direction.  Partnership with the technical talent who can implement your beautiful designs will make you look like a rock star, and help your customer achieve their business goals faster than if they had to search for this on their own.

Just some brainstorming, would love to hear your thoughts.

So I hooked a switch to two of my PCs because I didn’t have long enough cables for both to go directly into my router, and because I was tired of connecting to one of them via the wireless network.  Somehow this broke my network and file sharing to and from Vista.  I spent an embarassing amount of time troubleshooting this yesterday.  It boils down to the fact that NetBios over TCP/IP had to be enabled on the network card, and it was, but the tests I ran proved that it was not enabled, hence the problem. 

So if your networking or file shares with other XP computers all of a sudden stop working here is something to keep in mind.  You can test this my seeing whether you can connect by IP address.  If you can connect by IP address but not by the machine name, then here’s one thing you can do.  Make sure that NetBios is enabled on your network card, and make the following change in your registry:

- Enter the registry
- HKEYLocalMachines/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/NetBt/Parameters
- Double Click “transportbindname”
- enter the value \Device\ (use the backslashes) hit ok.
- reboot

I spent time with Linksys tech support several times, but they refused to help beyond ensuring Internet and LAN connections to my XP machines.  And, of course, Microsoft tech support doesn’t come free.

If you want the long and painful version of this story, look here:  http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3881172&SiteID=17

Cheers!

I just finished watching a short webinar given by Bryan Eisenberg and Tom Leung on website and marketing optimization.  Since Tom is from Google and Bryan a Google partner, they talked a lot about a new Google product called Website Optimizer.  They walked through some best practices and features of Website Optimizer and about Bryan’s new book on the same subject.  I found it to be a very informative webinar, and you can click on the link above to see it in the archives.

Unfortunately, for photographers who use templates from one of the big template vendors, it’s going to be difficult or even impossible to get the vendor to cooperate with this level of testing on their designs.  While you can say that their designs are optimal and are already optimized, I’d ask optimized for what?  (optimized for selling more templates to unsuspecting photographers such as yourself) The templates surely cannot be pre-optimized for anyone who buys them.  And your call to action is likely not going to be perfect without testing your marketing story on your audience. 

If you have a custom designed site or somehow get the template vendors to let you make changes to their designs, you can begin to maximize the effectiveness and profitability of your marketing communications and call to action. Google’s free tools can be more than adequate to help you refine your efforts and improve the bottom lines. Now imagine the possibilities if you used Google Website Optimizer, AdWords and Google Analytics together?

My first experiment, to randomly display 3 variations on a link name to see which gets clicked on more often.  Once data is available I will post a screenshot of the results.

On Tuesday, the announcement came that content in Flash websites will now be crawled and indexed by Google and Yahoo search engines, with Microsoft no doubt to follow closely behind.  This is good news for photographers who’s entire website is embedded in a .swf file.  Typically what those website owners had to do is create HTML content that would be displayed separately from the Flash file.  This breaks one of the rules of Google optimization because any text that is on a web page should be visible to the viewer.  In fact the same content was displayed in the Flash file, but the HTML rendering was masked or “cloaked” hidden from the view of the user, but not the search engines.

Cloaking has been frowned upon by many purisits and those being careful with SEO techniques as not to get their site blacklisted by the search engines.  Now with a compelling and legitimized alternative to cloaking, the previous concerns are no longer an issue but, according to my friend Gabriel Paez, raises some new concerns.  In many of the high end Flash websites he designs and develops for his clients, the .swf file only holds the application logic but does not actually (or rarely) contain the actual content to be indexed (which could break more Google optimizing rules) since the actual content is created dynamically from a database driven content management system on the back end.  Of course you could hard code all of the content in the .swf to take advantage of the new legitimate techniques offered by Google and Yahoo, but then what becomes of the slick content management system you have that is your only way of updating your website without calling the Flash developer?

Adobe promises new tools to help with optimizing Flash websites, but the remaining questions will still cause some high anxiety and speculation until we have more details about what Adobe, Google and Yahoo are doing.  The utopian view of SEO for Flash is not quite here, but lets give Adobe the benefit of the doubt, and wait to see what they can come up with.

I spent some time over the weekend playing around with FireFox 3.0 and the beta version of Firebug and Yslow, and made some changes on my web server to pretty significantly improve the page load times.  It’s crazy how fast it loads now, and even my wife can tell a difference.  Feel free to check it out at http://www.stevetout.com and post a comment here to let me know what you think.

If you want to give this a try yourself, follow these steps to get YSlow installed on your computer. 

1. Download and install FireFox 3.0 http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html
2. Then install firebug 1.2.0b3  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
3. Then install 0.9.5b2 of YSlow https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369/

Then run the program by clicking the blue meter in the bottom right corner of Firefox, like this one.   

Then browse to the webpage who’s performance you want to look at and click “performance” in the YSlow interface.  You will get a nice little report with a Performance Grade that looks like this.

You will no doubt find a few things that will need to be modified on your web server to see any kind of improvements at all.  Chances are you won’t be able to do this yourself, and you will need to contact your web host’s customer service to make the desired changes. 

If you don’t like using FireFox, then check out IEWatch (http://www.iewatch.com) for IE.  These are way geeky tools for sure.  If you don’t dare touch them yourself, email this blog post to your web guy and ask him to make some performance enhancements to your website.  Your customers will enjoy the faster loading pages, and so will your bank account!