Communicat.us

Before I get into some of my comments on the 2010 edition of Lotusphere, let me first thank all of the Federal customers who took valuable time to attend and engage with us. I especially am thankful for everyone who made it to the IBM Federal User Group meeting on Wednesday. The Q&A was great and it was great to hear your feedback and questions.

To those whom I did not have the chance to connect, I and many from the team are available both here thru our blog as well as in person so don’t hesitate to “connect with us”!

So, how was Lotusphere 2010?

In a word, “extreme”! Even knowing much of what was announced at the conference, I still had a full time job getting the ins and outs from jump starts to deep dives.

What were the big take-aways?

I’d say that there were multiple big messages. On the environments side it was Cloud, first class mobile device support, and a biggy (pun warning) was Lotus Connections on Z-Linux is coming!

Back to the “cloud”, I’d say the message was blending on premise capabilities with capabilities in the cloud so you can balance the best of both. For many Federal customers, “private clouds” provide the higher security and governance needs.

Before I forget, mobile was everywhere I both is sessions and the hands of attendees. I saw more Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids than I did laptops. IBM gets it – “mobile is a primary interface now.” On a personal note, I wouldn’t say the iPhone out numbered Blackberries but they were definitely prevalent. I’ll following this closely.
Unified Communications was integrated into many sessions. It was all about controlling presence everywhere and to best suit the user, seamlessly integrating the office, VoIP, soft phone, cellphone and flowing between them without interruption – both at the user discretion and through user configurable routing rules. I’ve been using these capabilities for about 6 months and they make a big difference in both my flexibility and transparency.

Any other themes?

Another big message was modular components, capabilities and services. While a lot of sessions were in the scope of products, the content was about “capabilities” and how they are surfaced as portlets, widgets, an modular components. Further, those same user facing capabilities can be accessed with web 2.0 interfaces – REST, ATOM, XML, etc.

A great example of this emphasis on capabilities and modularity was a challenge a customer gave me – “we use Lotus Connections Activities for lots of small projects, can I get a view across all of them? Preferably as a timeline?”

We hit the “Ask the Developer Lab” and in about 15 minutes we had a Lotus Connections engineer, a Notes client developer and a Mac user bouncing ideas. They had two choices. The Activities to-dos can be accessed as an iCal feed and the Notes 8.5.1 client can display multiple calendars together. Alternately, the Activities assignments are available as a feed and IBM Mashup Center 2.0 was a new Timeline widget.

BTW, the three engineers were not together. The Lotus Connections engineer had Sametime Broadcasts to fire off the question.

Any surprises?

“Project Vulcan” was announced as was “LotusLive Lab”. When I get back to my laptop, I’ll write more about these.

What!?

Oh, I should explain. I came to Lotusphere and only carried my Blackberry (where I am writing this post) and occasionally had an iPod Touch. My goal was to test just how far these mobile devices could go.

I had access to email, calendar, Lotus Connections, my shared files, blogs, micro blogging (Twitter and my IBM Connections status), an a nice conference app built by business partners. I also could get to LotusLive where people were sharing emo materials, updated slides and more so could just Dogear (bookmarking) for later.

There is no way I could cover everything at Lotusphere, especially in one post but I hope this gives you a taste and feel free to comment on any points you’d like more info on!

There are lots of talk about netbooks and the cloud and web apps. If you believe all of it, you’d think all you need is a browser and an internet connection. You’d be mostly right. You would need a browser – a very modern one and soon an HTML5 based browser. You’d also need an internet connection and a fast one at that.

Web applications have the advantage of delivering both the user experience and the data from a server every time. If a bug fix needs to go out to everyone or an new feature, it happens the next time a user visits the application web address. No fuss. No foul. But, if the application has a rich user experience with drop downs, and graphics, and drag-n-drop, and worse, if the application was developed in a pristine modern lab, then that application makes assumptions about the quality of the network – it’s speed, it’s latency, and it’s resilience. While this describes the original lab environment and it may even describe what you will find in close proximity to the mega-cities, this does not describe most of real world.

Once again, in the third quarter of 2009, 19% of the Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps. This level was fairly consistent with the prior quarter, as well as compared to the same period a year ago. The United States, however, saw high broadband adoption rates decline slightly in the third quarter, losing 0.7%, while shedding a more concerning 8.8% year-over-year. The global level of high broadband penetration, shown in Figure 10, remained consistent quarter-over-quarter, remaining at 0.01 – that is, one high broadband IP per 100 people.

source: Akamai

When just looking at the United States, 91% of the people do *not* have the "high speed" internet.

What can be done ? There are two options:

1. deploy high speed internet everywhere
2. build applications that use the available internet connectivity better

The first will happen slowly and you as an application producer or consumer don’t have much control of it. What you do control is the applications. As a consumer – whether it be an individual or an organization can choose which web applications you use and standardize. You have two options "better applications".

Data centric applications can do a better job of getting the application "out of the way". A good example is this blog. It recently added a new format targeted at mobile devices which reduces load and display time by about 60%. This same interface could be used for any browser. The result is that all of the information of the blog is conveyed with some reduction in functionality but it may be those features were not needed in the first place. Personally, I think we can learn a lot by paying attention to the mobile device environment. It forces applications to leverage the network for what it provides – connectivity – but not assume it is ubiquitous, fast, or consistent.

User Interface (UI) intensive applications require a different solution. If the experience is important, then perhaps the UI should be persistent on the desktop / device and the internet is only used to transfer data as needed. These have an additional advantage in that different devices / user / conditions drive the application requirements. Many web applications have taken this direction. How you implement the desktop application is highly variable. It could be native code – rich experience with less training given it follows standards. It could be Java – common experience across multiple platforms; And soon, it could be persistent HTML5 with it’s localStorage. This last option has the advantage of being a web application so it can be updated quickly and has the advantage of local storage so it does not need to pass the entire user experience back and forth with the server each time.

I only recently took the time to experiment with Twitter. "The question has always been, how do I get value from Twitter ?"

The reason it has taken me so long is I WILL NOT TWEET MY EVERY MOVE / THOUGHT / DIATRIBE / etc. Further, I really don’t what to listen to others’ every move / thought / diatribe / etc.  And on the surface, *that* is exactly what Twitter seems to be.

So what is Twitter ? It’s nothing more and nothing less than a short messaging service.

What makes Twitter interesting is *how* people use Twitter. Yes, there are those that tweet (the act of sending a short message through Twitter) verbal diarrhea. There are also those who use Twitter as self promotion (where ’self’ is either the individual or the company). There are also those who use it an an intelligent pub/sub infrastructure. The unique bit is that Twitter itself has almost none of the intelligence – it is how people use Twitter and how they have developed clients and tools that leverage Twitter that is interesting. One of the most powerful of this is the ‘hashtag" …

Once you’ve started using Twitter, it won’t take long before you come across what’s known as a hash tag. That’s when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag or hashtag.)

For example, if you’ve seen tweets related to the recent U.S. government stimulus bill, you may have noticed some of them had #stimulus in them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around what the purpose of this thing was but, once I “got it,” I realized it’s not as complicated as it seems.

A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “I lost my wallet yesterday” because “lost” isn’t preceded by the hash tag.

It is the "search" aspect of hashtags that is so powerful. You do not need to "follow" every user and you do not need to read every tweet. You find (or create) a hashtag that relates to a topic of interest and you "subscribe" to it. Most Twitter clients let you create persistent searches. In this way, you do not need to know all of the user who are discussing a topic, you just need to know the hashtag for that topic.

… hash tags are NOT any kind of official Twitter function. The company has not created a list of topics that we can browse through to see if there’s one that interests us … any user can create one simply by adding it to their own tweet.

For example, when the plane went down in the Hudson River some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to it … somebody else read it and when he posted something about the incident, added #flight1549 to *HIS* tweet. it didn’t take long for this hash tag to go viral … it’s a very organic process.

[Before creating a new hashtag] The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone’s already created a related hash tag. Before you create your own tag, you might want to search on a few variations to make sure they don’t already exist.

Source: The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?

I only follow a small number of people but I have hashtag searches on a number of topics and it is the tweets on those specific topics that provide the value. Not only can I learn about the topic, I can also ask questions to "the community" (regardless of who that may be). In my first few examples of asking questions I had multiple good answers in a matter of seconds! The power of a huge network of people, connected by a simple messaging service.

The USB drives in question encrypt the stored data via the practically uncrackable AES 256-bit hardware encryption system. Therefore, the main point of attack for accessing the plain text data stored on the drive is the password entry mechanism. When analysing the relevant Windows program, the SySS security experts found a rather blatant flaw that has quite obviously slipped through testers’ nets. During a successful authorisation procedure the program will, irrespective of the password, always send the same character string to the drive after performing various crypto operations — and this is the case for all USB Flash drives of this type.

Cracking the drives is therefore quite simple. The SySS experts wrote a small tool for the active password entry program’s RAM which always made sure that the appropriate string was sent to the drive, irrespective of the password entered and as a result gained immediate access to all the data on the drive. The vulnerable devices include the Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox, the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise FIPS Edition and the Verbatim Corporate Secure FIPS Edition.

Full Story >> Schneier on Security: FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Certified USB Memory Stick Cracked

If you will be attending Lotusphere 2010 January 17th through the 21st, then you might find it helpful to have the entire agenda in digital form in your pocket.

There are apps for iPhone, Blackberry, and soon Android phones. Here are links to descriptions and downloads …

For iPhone, the app is called "LSMobile" and its free in the iTunes App Store. (announcement)

For Blackberry, there are two flavors, one for the Storm and one for non-touch devices. It’s free in App World or from these links – Storm or other Blackberries (announcement)

Also, if you use twitter, follow the tag #LS10 !

A number of the IBM Federal team will be there so look for us, tweet @communicatus, or break out your bullroarer !

While researching sensor swarms, I came across a page over at the University of Notre Dame (EE Dept.) from their Mobile Sensing Systems Laboratory.

The principle is the comparative strength of two signals …

By comparing the received signal strength (RSSI) values in the master and slave nodes (via the left and right antennas respectively), the mobile agent can navigate towards an attractive beacon, or navigate away from a repel beacon.

What struck me is that the general principal was used for aircraft navigation starting in the early 1930’s. Whereas the Low Frequency Radio navigation for aircraft relied on two beacons and one receiver, the RSSI solution relies on one beacon and two receivers.

The preference of one of the other is mostly one of “control”. If you control the beacons and want to simplify the receivers, then a model similar to LFR has advantages. Whereas, if you want to track “others” beacons then the RSSI method has advantage.

For intelligence gathering, it is most likely there is more control over the sensor than the beacon. Further more, when building swarms of sensors, cost, disposability, flexibility (repurposing), and ubiquity are significant factors.