Nothing to Declare

So, today was the day. In a rash moment of parental materialism I agreed with my son Ben that if he could raise half of the cost of a Wii, I would provide the second half. Never have I seen a boy work, save, plan so hard. Finally the day has come, we nipped out to town at lunchtime to pick one up - having reserved it by phone, such is the Wii demand.

Ben’s nipped out, otherwise I would no doubt be on the thing right now - but it has already taken pride of place next to the telly in the front room.

Bowling, anyone?

Took this from the Motley Fool:

“The current model of analyst-intermediated, opinion-based technology buying and selling produces poor financial returns. Across the world, corporate managers spend more than $1 trillion a year on technology. To help managers invest, and technology marketers persuade, $2 billion a year is spent on technology analysts. Yet 70% of projects fail to deliver a financial return, according to the Standish Group and other commentators.”

That’s an interesting, but not particularly insightful point. IT may produce poor financial returns but that doesn’t mean Gartner, Forrester etc are failing their shareholders. Also, what is Standish Group other than an analyst house? And finally, what of the 30% ? Should we all go back to pen and paper, and blow the Internet? I don’t think so.

Installing Ubuntu Linux in a Microsoft VirtualPC virtual machine. And some other things besides.

For my own future reference as much as anything, I had to:

* install in safe graphics mode so that the display was viewable during install

* reduce the colour depth to 16 bit (booting in recovery mode and running “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”)

* add the parameter “i8042.noloop” to the kernel command in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst so the mouse can work

* log in as root and run “dhclient” to pick up an IP address from my wireless router

* (update) added “snd-sb16″ to the file /etc/modules, to enable sound

There - so easy my granny could do it :-) I then downloaded all the patches (180Mb of them) to be up to date.

First impression - not too shabby! I’m running 2Gb of RAM, so I’ve allocated 500 Meg to Ubuntu and its running fine. Nice, clean interface as well - and plenty of games!

OK, so I couldn’t find this anywhere on the Web so I thought I’d write it here. if (when) you get the message “Either Apache or MySQL cannot run because another program is using it’s port”, this is proably because you already have a web server running. I don’t know if this is IIS but if you run through the Getting Started section starting “Note that if you have IIS installed…”, that stuff works - or at least it did for me.

“Interesting” question whether ARmageddon’s pro-Gartner, or is anti-Gartner? I wonder if this whole line of thinking is missing the point. I mean, I know I’d rather have a bigger slice of all that subscription funding, they are the 800-pound gorilla after all - but is it so wrong to think, or indeed say, that Gartner might do at least some good things? I’ve seen a few magic quadrants in my time, and some of them are pretty well thought out, solid pieces of analysis that raise a bunch of seriously important questions that end-user organisations should be asking.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everything they do is going to hit the target - and of course therefore, they should be subject to scrutiny - just like the rest of us. It’s also been written that some vendors feel they have to pay Gartner’s fees before they’ll ever see themselves represented in the quadrants - rightly or wrongly - I know Gartner hotly contests this! It may even be that Gartner’s product-oriented model is itself based on an industry as it was ten years ago, and not how it will be in the future - but that’s an industry-wide issue, and it doesn’t prevent Gartner analysts from being insightful in their own domains.

Meanwhile, we believe we have a whole bunch of differentiators that make us a pretty attractive alternative - always happy to share these! But perhaps its just too easy to bash Gartner because its Gartner, which equates to opinion, not analysis. The only people who can really decide whether or not Gartner is adding value are their enterprise customers, and that’s not a revenue stream I see drying up any time soon.

I was tickled pink by this link, forwarded to me by Neil W-D. On the day after they talk about it at the Davis summit, it seems appropriate…

… meanwhile, here’s a few random predictions:

* second life is a precursor to something really good, that is both usable and compelling

* Microsoft brings out its own virtual world, which doesn’t do very well

* online communities are taken to court under the new US gambling legislation

You heard it here first

Still waiting for the specs but just looking at the picture, this has to be top of the 2007 must-have gadget list: the Samsung SPH-P9000. It’s an ultra-mobile PC with 4G (or is that 5G) capabilities. Of course the big question has to be - how well does it handle voice recognition?

Thanks Jo at Silicon for the gen, and the pic.

Last.fm is great, isn’t? Well, perhaps not, for some artists. Why? Because its unit of measurement is the track, not the album.

Take a track such as Jethro Tull’s ‘Thick as a Brick’, for example. The fact it comes 8th in the Tull chart is astounding, given that it is 12 minutes long. I would be prepapred to wager that it would be higher, if it were shorter - for the simple reason that in any 12-minute period, it can only be played once, whereas a four-minute track could be played three times. Mike Oldfield’s got it even worse of course, with Amarok clocking in at over an hour for a single track! Is it any wonder it comes in at only 94th on his own chart?

This matters also for artist charts as much as tracks. If, say, one is listening nonstop to Pure Reason Revolution, each play of the debut album ‘Cautionary Tales for the Brave’ will result in 4 tracks, i.e. 4 “votes” for the band. A single spin of Moby’s ‘Play’ would result in 19 “votes”.

Now, of course there are those 3-minute boys (not them, but theirs is the song) who would say that it serves anyone right if they have songs that are too long, but that’s neither here nor there. I wonder how long it will be before an artist actually constructs a track listing so to dupe mechanisms such as Last.fm.

Its only a matter of time, surely.

I can see it all so clearly. Over the past decade, hosting companies and other internet service providers have been building their businesses and implementing appropriate customer service mechanisms. In general this has followed a 3-tier approach:

- web based self-service - for the standard stuff

- email - for the non-standard stuff (or things they don’t want you to do so much, like leaving)

- phone - for the more complicated stuff

Phone support can be slow and laborious, in some ways deliberately causing the punter to opt for one of the other two mechanisms. Bottom line: its not perfect, but it works.

Or worked. Over the past few days I’ve been trying to communicate with Verio to transfer a domain. Verio’s fine, I just wanted to consolidate down the number of hosting companies I used, and they got the short straw. But phew - trying to work with them on email was like trying to throw rubber balls through a very small hole, ten feet away! First, it didn’t help that they don’t make their email address for this sort of thing particularly obvious (there’s a list at the bottom). Second, the amount of spam protection on these email addresses is just prohibitive. I must have gone through ten combinations of email sources, addresses and subjects before I finally managed to get a message through. Even once I’d done that, I was asked for more information and I had to do it all again…

I’ve got there in the end, but I took away a number of thoughts. The first was that what was initiallly a workable model - the three-stage approach above - has become unworkable due to the late addition of Spam protection - and such companies need to rethink it. Second, with my analyst hat on, it is a clear example of how security needs to be about business risk management and not just “block that nasty email”, IT risk avoidance.

The business risk in this case of course, is that customers get peed off and go somewhere else.

Here’s those emails - you wouldn’t guess them!

domreg@verio-hosting.net; domains@ntteuropeonline.co.uk; shared_support@ntteuropeonline.co.uk; support@ntteuropeonline.co.uk

The tip (which I got by phone, ironically) was to put the web site address in question as the subject, which overrode the spam filter - you have to do this every time you mail them, don’t just hit reply and expect Re:whatever to get through. Finally, try to mail from the registered email address for the account administrator, otherwise they’ll just ask you to do it all again.

There’s been quite a lot written recently about the failures of hotel wireless in London, but things seem to be going my way this evening. After a little mix-up in travel at a Radisson hotel (no fault of the hotel), I booked a last minute “top secret” hotel round the corner, which to my surprise (its a lot cheaper) was another Radisson. This hotel chain has free wireless in both hotels, it may extend to others but it certainly works in the Covent Garden area.

So, having made my online booking, I was then able to email my booking code to the front desk as the back-office systems weren’t integrated enough to deal with such immediacy. To me, that was fine - as I had free wireless, I’ll send them any email they need.

Nice when a plan comes together.