58bits - Tech

Televangelism in IT - does this work?

I like a good show as much as anyone - but two presentations I came across recently left me.. er.. well - confused I guess.

While looking for content on the topic of identity management (CardSpace along with identity selectors that have been implemented on other platforms) I came across this... a 2007 Friday BrainShare session at Novell. The opening act is impressive.

A couple of days ago I watched most of A Lap around "Oslo" at PDC2008. Douglas Purdy is electric.

Both of these presentations have a few things in common. There's a charismatic host, a series of well rehearsed presentations, plenty of visual queues and powerful message delivery with a corresponding level of applause. I guess it works since I won't easily forget the opening moments of the Novell presentation. (Neither of course can compete with Stephen Jobs who is probably the archbishop of holy product presentations.)

There was some good stuff in both of these talks- and webcasts, podcasts, videocasts etc. are an amazing way to get a veritable firehose of information into your frontal lobe fast. I've learned a ton from good ones.  But sigh... I just don't feel moved the by the evangelical style adopted by the presentations above - in fact until I can get past the style of presentation I have a little trouble concentrating on the message.

I love watching the TED talks - and I love watching presentations that are well rehearsed, well informed - fluid and even humorous. But, if you ask me, the big show we're gonna change your life style of televangelism in IT - looks just a little out of place.

Ah well - to each their own... :-)

Some pics here...

Technorati tag: Barcampbangkok2

Hong Kong airport is now officially my favorite airport in the world. The Airport Express train in and out of town is a breeze. The food court in departures is large and comfortable.

And best of all free airport-wide WiFi that really works. Bangkok and London could to take a page from HK's book of good service. With an airport like this - going to the airport is fun - you can shop, get some work done, relax and then be on your way.

Just me and my ThinkPad T61p after a great weekend in Hong Kong.

Well that's two out of four exams over with - and the end of the silent period on my blog. Successfully sat 'Information Security Management' and 'Introduction to Cryptography' over the past two days.

Both manageable papers, and the first two of six in what has turned out to be a really excellent programme. Check out the Information Security Group at RHUL for the gory details, or the syllabus posted at the London External Programme - MSc in Information Security.

Now that I have my life back... (at least for the summer), watch this space for a re-designed blog and new photo gallery over the coming weeks.

It's enough to be trying hard to keep up with all there is to read and do these days. The last thing I want in the middle of an engaging and important read - is to be thwarted by an Adobe update. I still love Photoshop, and I'd love to love Adobe as well - but their automatic software updating process is a nightmare. I've had several bad experiences in the past and yet another today...

I was about half way through reading a PDF document - when I noticed the insidious little updater icon appear in my system tray. I ONLY have the 8.0 PDF reader installed and I foolishly thought - surely just updating my reader won't be a problem. Ouch.

First I needed to close my article. Ok - my fault for not finishing it first - but I thought I'd be right back. The updater claimed it was 0% complete when I had just received a message saying that my updates were downloaded and ready for installation. The UI and notifications we so bad that I thought I was done - and so I reopened my PDF. Something died and I got an Adobe application ending error. Then the installer came back to life and I got a new Adobe Reader icon on my desktop and a message telling me to restart my PC. WTF? I'm just updating the Adobe reader right? Not reinstalling the OS! I'm now completely out of the flow of the PDF I was reading and swearing at Adobe as I restart my PC.

On restart I notice for the first time that scrolling an eleven page document in Adobe Reader is incredibly slow and unresponsive - it's not keeping up with the mouse and this is a top spec box (5.4 on the WEI).

Adobe - what have you done? And where are you going?

From one of the net's most generous and pioneering bloggers - a great cause...

cruft /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code. 5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers". This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.

http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/cruft.HTML

Waiting to board before flying back to Bangkok from Singapore. WiFi promotion here at the airport meant downloading and installing Firefox 1.0. WiFi is wonderful.

Having finally joined the online community of bloggers what better way to start than to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Tony