Geek In Disguise

Cloud security whitepapers

stevecla01 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:49:43 GMT

I just noticed Roger Halbheer has posted a couple of new whitepapers on Cloud Security that are not the usual techno megafest – these are more targeted at the executive summary level.

The first paper is written by Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing organization and is a high-level overview of the Cloud and its security opportunities and challenges. It’s aptly titled Security in Cloud Computing Overview.

Cloud Computing Security Considerations is a CIO or CEO level paper and roger is looking for feedback on this one – you can drop him a line at roger.halbheer@microsoft.com - I think it does a good job of covering compliance and risk management; identity and access management; service integrity; endpoint integrity; and information protection.

UK Students get £1 per month web hosting

stevecla01 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:08:43 GMT

I know this looks like a big fat advert in the middle of my blog….and it is….sort of. I don’t get any money if you click on it though, it’s there to show what I think is a killer offer for UK students. For only £1 per month, any student in the UK can now get a free domain and web hosting that would normally cost £4.99 a month….these pesky kids eh ;)

Anyway, Microsoft here in the UK have partnered with Webfusion (under their 123-reg brand) to launch a hosting package for students. All that’s needed is an ac.uk email address plus there is a link to our DreamSpark program to provide access to the Microsoft dev tools and the Web Platform Installer.

As offers go, this seems pretty damn good to me. A tonne of stuff, all for a quid per month.

I’m a copper

stevecla01 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:05:50 GMT

nice plagiarism – made me smile to see the Met Police having some fun with the Microsoft Windows campaign :)

Innovators Use Bing

stevecla01 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:07:41 GMT

Innovators Use Bing apparently – count me as an innovator then ;) That’s all very nice of course and possibly true but the network effects of search engines (and advertising more importantly) mean you want to see that line tick upwards L-R rather than downwards as the innovators are by their very nature always looking for something new whereas the middle majority and laggards tend to be hard to shift once they’re using a product. Of course what you really want is the classic approach that innovators are the barometer for the future behaviour of the laggards but who’s to say that’s going to be the case here. I’d like to think so of course.

There are some other interesting facts coming out of the survey of 17,000 people conducted by Wunderman. More at BusinessInsider.com

B&W PC and Laptop Speaker

stevecla01 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:11:17 GMT

Do I need some new PC speakers? No, not really as my JBL’s are serving me wonderfully but these Bowers & Wilkins PC and laptop speakers really do look (and I imagine sound) rather nice. Need vs. want. Story of my life :)

Time to add to my list for Mr S. Claus I think or ping @bowers_wilkins

Bing favourites #8

stevecla01 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:03:50 GMT

An appropriate image today on Bing UK as they 6 Nations kicked off.

Porsche Family Tree

stevecla01 — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:02:00 GMT

Nice new ad from Porsche

Twitter history in code swarm

stevecla01 — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:18:44 GMT

Lovely infographic from Ben Sandofsky that shows the birth of Twitter and its development. Icons represent developers, and particles represent files added or modified

thanks to Daz for the link

Bing and Facebook go global together

stevecla01 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:30:33 GMT

The Bing team just announced on their blog that Bing will now be the default search engine for Facebook on a global basis (previously it was default for the US only. So Bing just acquired a 400m user base…nice news for a Friday. Or any day in fact.

In related news, an interesting article this week by The Economist on Qi Lu who heads up Bing at Microsoft

Wifi Branding

stevecla01 — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:51:55 GMT

Any geek worth their salt can translate this icon in to wifi speeds for you at the drop of a hat. It’s crazy though…why do we subject consumers to logos this this on a consumer product? Seriously, who gives a crap if it’s a, b, g, or n….you may as well say slowest, slow, fast, fastest. The only benefit I can see to having this nomenclature is when a consumer wants to match a PC (for example) with a router and because all manufacturers have chosen to adopt this terminology we force them to have to learn it to make buying decision.

If I use cars as an example, they often use letters to define capability or capacity – T for turbo, D for diesel, and then engine sizes like 1.8 or 3.4. Those naming conventions aren’t perfect but the wifi stuff is crazy.

There has to be a better way. At least they don’t land you with the full table to decode what those letters really mean

Forza Motorsport 3 Theme pack for Windows 7

stevecla01 — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:13:37 GMT

Rob Margel just posted a link to the Forza Motorsport 3 Theme pack for Windows 7. Nice free addition to your OS though I was a tad disappointed not to see more vehicles than just the Audi R8 in there. I guess there is mileage in this as as series though. Ahem.

Microserfs at Microsoft UK

stevecla01 — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:22:53 GMT

As Brother Marc pointed out, the whipper snappers of Microsoft UK got a spot in The Sunday Times last weekend and it reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s classic Microserfs. Needless to say I’m not comparing the to the plot which ultimately led the intrepid Daniel and crew to jobs off in Silicon Valley :)

I read that novel back before I joined Microsoft and I remember the lines

Bill is wise.
Bill is kind.
Bill is benevolent.
Bill, Be My Friend...Please!

[In an extremely bizarre moment of coincidence, literally as a type this, I have just been given a Bill Gates commemorative coin that has been found in our house. I have literally no idea where this came from. Very spooky. Very]

Anyway….back to the post. Microserfs is a fun book and I suspect there are some elements that held true a while back but Microsoft is a changed place and the graduates on our MACH scheme as rock stars. A few years back when I led a technical team in our partner organisation, James Senior and Matt McSpirit were our MACH guys. They’re both top drawer talent and will go a long way in this company. The MACH scheme helped them though both had oodles of talent in the first place. I expect the Rachna Patel, Sarah Melrose, Gaby Ball and Craig Parker are all the same – I love Rachna’s stated ambition of “global recognition” and that’s what you can get at Microsoft. I don’t mean that in a boastful way, it’s more a testament to the global reach of the organisation and our software.

I only dreamed of working at Microsoft when I left university – I didn’t think I was smart enough (and I’m still not sure I am) but I got a lucky break and kept my head down (ha ha) for the last 12 years or so. It turned out okay. 12 years on, it’s still an amazing place to work and you get to work with amazing people.

Back to our MACH’s. I’m a huge advocate of the whole scheme and frankly, now is the time more than ever for us to get the most from them – they’re the digital natives that many of us are not. I have one word for them: ThinkWeek

Michael Jordan jumps in to Microsoft’s cloud

stevecla01 — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:43:35 GMT

As a kid, that was the logo to have on your shoes (aka sneakers). I was a fully fledged Jordan fanatic and still have several pairs of the famous footwear. Some things never leave you I suppose….well, maybe apart from my ability to jump that is.

Well our friends at Nike have a site that if Flash rich but this week they made the jump to Silverlight and Azure as they celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Jordan partnership. Mosaic 23/25 calls on the trusty deep zoom capability of Silverlight to bring you a photo of his Airness that is made up from user submitted images. Mosaic also uses Azure to deal with traffic bursts and scale the application with our cloud platform. Azure enables the site to create new mosaic in about 10 minutes, employing up to 40 backend, parallel instances… impressive when you consider that a typical mosaic is constructed with over 5 billion pixels

I also just read over on Brandon’s blog that during the NBA All Star Weekend in Dallas, the Jordan folks will have large flat-screens that will be running a Windows 7 multitouch experience to let you interact with the history of the Jordan Brand over 25 years. They’ll also have Microsoft Surface units that allow multiple people to have fun with the brand…I’m not sure what the app is but I have high hopes from the Surface team.

I sort of lost interest in basketball at the end of MJ’s era…good to see the legend lives on though.

Microsoft and cloud interoperability

stevecla01 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:27:21 GMT

[click image for full size version]

The cloud is everywhere – literally, but also in the mainstream press as well as the IT press these days. We all use it with no real concern for the technology going on in the background though I’d argue that will come under the spotlight more and more over the next few years. Consumers will become more aware as the inevitable outages and security breaches happen and businesses are already interested due to something we call interoperability in the IT sphere. The word is thankfully quite self explanatory (but bloody hard to spell) – it’s concerned with how systems or devices “talk” to each other in the IT world. You don’t actually care whether your phone talks HTTPS and passes XML to a Windows Server or a Linux Server when you’re getting your email but in the process, you’re likely using a number of protocols that without interoperability would make your phone seem like it was talking Swahili to a mail system that talked English.

Microsoft’s Craig Shank and Jean Paoli published a post on this topic today talking about the work of Microsoft and the industry to make cloud systems place nice together through interoperability. They included a very un-Microsoft infographic that I really like. We should do more of these things to make IT a little more appealing than the usual PowerPoint slide or IT architecture diagram.

Interop (the short version of the word you should you to show you’re in the know) is going to be fundamental to the success of the cloud. As Craig says

There’s a tremendous level of creative energy around cloud services right now — and the industry is exploring new ideas and scenarios together all the time. Our goal is to preserve that flexibility through an open approach to cloud interoperability.”

Jean Paoli adds that working with open source technologies like PHP and Java will be key to Microsoft’s cloud success. Yes, you read that right – working with open source really is pretty important as if we think the cloud is going to be this all Microsoft thing we’re living in cloud cuckoo land. To be fair to my colleagues in Redmond, this approach is patently obvious if you look at services like Windows Azure that positively welcome PHP, Java, Ruby, Apache, Tomcat and MySQL. You couldn’t have said that a few years back about Microsoft…but now, we’re arguably more open that some of our competitors who you’d expect to be leading the openness.

We’re continuing to push for more openness and added a new work stream to our Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council of of 35 chief technology officers and chief information officers from organizations around the world. It’s not just about our forums of course and we participate in the industry fora such as the Open Cloud Standards Incubator – all the other players you’d expect are in here – IBM, RedHat, Cisco, VMWare, HP etc.

The cloud is the future and hopefully it’ll usher in an era of never seen before interop and openness that takes away the hassles of making systems talk to each other for end users and makes all our toys and tech play nice together. I know that sounds quite utopian for those of us who have been around for a while but personally I’m optimistic and like the idea of competing on merit rather than competing with gate after gate.

Caffeine and calories

stevecla01 — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:58:00 GMT

Click for the full size….makes for interesting reading and my shift to espresso as my coffee of choice appears to be a good one…in comparison to cappuccino as my previously preferred option.

via Information is Beautiful