Sunday, February 26, 2006

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

The Nokia 770 internet tablet is a small computer, not a phone. Coupled with a phone that supports Verizon's wireless broadband, this could a great combination for people who provide remote tech support and don't want to carry a laptop.

Google Web Publisher

Google has released a web publisher. The editor requires no knowledge of HTML, and publishes to a page name that contains the user's gmail user name.

Oracle Express

Oracle released an Express version of the 10g database. It is free to download and distribute, can run on one CPU, and can store 4GB of user data. It runs on MSWindows and Linux.

It would be great to see this run on Solaris 10, though it might be possible to run the Linux under Solaris...

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Solaris x86 Hardware Compatiblity Check

Sun has a tool that will check a PC for compatibility with Solaris. The tool is delivered as an iso image to be burned onto a CD. The CD will boot and check the system.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Measuring Performance In Services by McKinsey

McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting article ,Measuring Performance In Services.

Here is a small part of the text. To do so, it is necessary to bear in mind a few essential principles of service measurement.

First, service companies need to compare themselves against their own performance rather than against poorly defined external measures. Using external benchmarks only compounds the difficulties that service companies face in getting comparable measurements from different parts of the organization.

Service companies must look deeper than their financial costs in order to discover and monitor the root causes of those expenses. This point may seem self-evident, yet many companies fail to understand these causes fully.

Finally, service companies must set up broad cost-measurement systems to report and compare all expenses across the functional silos common to service delivery organizations. The goal is to improve the service companies' grasp of the cross-functional trade-offs that must be made to rein in total costs.

None of these principles is easy to implement.


... by developing internal trees for each service line can a company begin to understand its true cost drivers. A tree allows a manager to compare the performance of different accounts against similar metrics and also to calculate which improvements will have the most impact on the top-level figure.

Mobile Data Extenders

A home office that is on the fringe of reliable and affordable communications could benefit from this gear.

The cost of cellular repeater is going down and now almost affordable for consumers. These have been available from other vendors, though expensive.

EV-DO router. There are others on the market.

This to-be-released VOIP handset from Netgear shows the VOIP industry is maturing. It is pre-loaded with Skype and may be easy enough to use by non-technical people.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Quick Flickr Front End With Ruby On Rails

This video shows how a custom front end to Flickr was created in a few minutes.

Useful (and free) Web Apps

Back Pack is an event organizer web page for a to-do list, photos, text. Free for personal use. Pages may be shared with some users or made public.
To Do List
White Board

AJAX and Google's Suggest

Not only is Google's Suggest an example of using AJAX, it is also a neat way to do a one-word Google search. Start typing the first letters of a word and it will suggest matches. The more you type, the more refined will become the suggested matches.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

WiFi Peering

Share your WiFi and get free WiFi while travelling with FON. Currently limited to Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL versions 1x to 4x routers.
More info.