deltalounge

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Pranav Mistry did a great TED talk on tools that help the fysical world to interact with the digital world. Pranav works on a project called Sixth Sense and most of his examples are based on this project and the research that led to it.

And the busines – IT gap

Inspiring talks like these make me wonder if there is any groundbreaking research that could bridge the business IT gap that is mentioned so often. One thing that makes this even more complicated is that both “IT” and “business” are concepts, unlike the real fysical world. Besides that the concept do not follow laws of nature like the fysical world does.
To build a bridge between business and IT bith need a level of understanding of how the other works. In most case this will require a lot of communication.

Today I give a presentation at the Oracle NL 25 years event – Celebrating a tradition in innovation. Although there are a lot of pictures the words are in Dutch, as was the language of the audience…
The story is based around practises developed in the last five years working on SOA projects. Despite all the desillusions on SOA projects that get a lot of attention this year, good results are achieved for our customers using these practises and guidelines. I’ll elaborate on them in future blogposts.

Still searching for the correct answer on the question: What skyline is in the picture on slide 12?

Working as a consultant for multiple customers, I get to work with a lot of different desktops, besides my laptop. This used to result in installing the same software again and again on different machines, and keeping it up to date. I found an alternative in PortableApps.

PortableApps.com is an open platform that works from any USB flash drive, iPod, memory card, or portable hard drive. It’s open source, it´s free and it´s convenient. Now I can carry a great bundle of applications and utilities on a simple USB stick (OK, I admit to use an USB hard drive). This allows me to work with the same tools everywhere without additional cost, or the need to install software.

These are the applications and utilities I favor from the collection:

• Firefox: Not only enables this me to take my bookmarks everywhere, thanks to the great collection of add-ons I also take my Twitter and Yammer platform with me.
• Notepad++ a great text editor.
• Task Coach to keep on track with my tasks.
• Filezilla, WinSCP, and PuTTY
• OpenOffice Works great for reviewing etc. However most companies I work with use templates based on the MS office suite for reports, memos, etc. The right version always comes with the PC…

The complete set of applications can be found here.

Experience

When I started using Portable Apps it was installed on the first available USB stick. Which turned out to have a USB 1.1 controller. That was replaced very quickly with one that supported USB 2.0. This device was a few months later replaced by a USB hard drive. Both because of capacity and speed considerations. Now the external hard drive is the primary device and the (network) storage of the PCs serves as back up.
Portable Apps works on any Windows computer.Using Ubuntu you can use Wine to run it.