Category: Technology

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Business Technology

Open Enterprise Server 11 SP2 Released

I’m a little excited about this announcement because OES 11 SP2 is going to serve as the backbone for some major infrastructure improvements here at work in the near future. The use of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 as the backbone has me excited along with a bunch of nice little additions and improvements.OES 11

The main thing I have  been testing is connecting OS X 10.9 Mavericks machines via AFP and I am happy to announce that it is working as it should right out of the box! That will open up some exciting possibilities for the future here on campus.

I still have some testing to do and then to actually order the hardware and do more testing … then FINALLY be able to make the switch and move us over to OES 11 and retire our aging NetWare 6.5 servers. They have served us extremely well, but I am looking forward to being able to shut them down for the first time and hopefully have our OES cluster serve us for years to come.

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Technology

Divisive Visions

Mac

I was struck a little bit recently by some competing visions for what the future of computing might look like. I recommend listening to the Episode 49: Roamio and Siracusiet of the Accidental Tech Podcast.

Especially listen to the show-after-the-show when they start talking about the “iPad Pro” and the future of both desktop and tablet computing in general. It is a great look at competing visions, a little, among the three hosts of that show. Also, just subscribe because it is a great podcast overall.

At the same time, the 30th anniversary of the unveiling of the original Macintosh was going on. The normal retrospectives, parties, tweets, and all other things one would expect to be going on during the time happened … and then this one tweet crossed my Twitter stream.

http://twitter.com/fraserspeirs/status/427019332221435904

He is speaking of the interview Jason Snell was able to land with current Apple executives for Macworld. This is another one worth a read/listen.

I don’t share his fear since the article was specifically about the Mac on its 30th anniversary and also because my thoughts definitely fall along the line seeing a very important place for the Mac and OS X in the future.

I wrote recently about this in regards to Steve’s Jobs analogy of a car vs. truck as tablets/mobile vs. PC. Just as trucks and tractors aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so OS X isn’t going to be going anywhere soon. However, it does leave open some exciting possibilities.

This passage from the article really hit home with the power Apple has with two distinct and complementary platforms.

In fact, as Schiller pointed out, in some ways the success of the iPhone and iPad takes some of the pressure off and “gives us the freedom to go even further on the Mac.” Now the Mac doesn’t have to be all things to all people.

That is straight from an executive’s mouth. That’s a really important distinction. With iOS and OS X being distinct platforms, it does give Apple an amount of freedom to really push the envelope in different ways that you would if you only had a single platform from which to try to hit the needs of everyone.

That is an exciting prospect for today, tomorrow, and for the future of iOS and OS X.

The flip side is that it allows Apple to keep out things from iOS which might increase the complexity and alienate the huge groups of users who are now using iOS devices who never would have sat down and used a computer. I don’t want to continually add complexity and “power” to appease users who are better served by OS X. I want both platforms to continue to push ahead in the areas they are most capable.

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Technology

Not Dead Yet!

Today I received a sizable update for the alpha of TextMate 2 which I use as my mainline programming editor. The move from build 9495 to build 9503 (today’s) took a few months, but it looks like there were a sizable number of nice little changes.

Go ahead and click the above link to see a list of the changes pushed. Good to see development continue.

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Technology

A Roadmap-ish Thing

It is usually a good idea to have a plan, of sorts, in place when you head out to try to do something. Learning iOS development shouldn’t be any different.

So here is my current roadmap-wish thing that I’m probably not going to stick to and probably won’t help me one bit … but I’m going to put this out here anyway in the vain hope that maybe having it published, even here, will help me stick to things more.

  1. All the C You Need to Know by Bill Dudney – iBooks
  2. Learning iOS Development by Maurice Sharp, Erica Sadun, Rod Strougo – iBooks
  3. Developing iOS7 Apps for iPhone and iPad from Stanford – iTunes U
  4. iPad and iPhone App Development by Daniel Steinberg – iBooks

The the two on the list are really part of the same thing and I am hoping the update will be out before I get there. One thing missing, and I’ll probably add it to the end, is a good Objective-C book that I want to look at.

Everything I am going to work with needs to be available on at least the iPad and the Mac in electronic form (and they all are), and they follow (somewhat) a progression from C to iOS app. I’m hoping to build my first app after or during item two and then continue from there into more dangerous (and fun) water.

We’ll see what happens, but right now, I need to dig into C.

Categories
Technology

Google (and Gmail) is Google+

File this one under the Just Be Aware category. Also, yes, this is more sour grapes about Google from me. You should be used to this by now.

Google has announced, and The Verge has reported and clarified, a new “feature” that will be introduced into Gmail in the coming days. It basically boils down to this:

  • Google+ is now even more integrated into Gmail
  • When you type in a person’s name to add them to an email, Google will recommend people with that name from Google+ … both people in your circles, and people outside of your circles
  • Now anyone can send a message to your Gmail account
  • If you do not have that person in your circles, it will be filtered into the Social category
  • This behavior (people being able to just search for a name and send a message to your Gmail Social category) is opt-out

People who know and love Google and Google+ might not have an issue with this, and that is fine. Everyone is free to make their own choices on what services they use and how they use them.

However, this is another case where I am glad I’ve moved my personal email off of Gmail and to somewhere and someone else (iCloud at the moment).

The consolidation of every Google property into Google+ freaks me out as a user. The fact that they make such things opt-out instead of opt-in is just another case of being willing to burn down everything to try to beat Facebook at their own creepiness game.

John Gruber pretty much echoed my first thoughts with his short commentary:

This has to be a mistake. Surely Google will change this from opt-out to opt-in.

But the more I thought about it, the more I agree with Marco Arment on the overall theme of many of the decisions Google has been making not just with Google+, but with every single product that they own:

I don’t know why anyone’s surprised. To be clear, for anyone who thinks Google is some benevolent, selfless entity handing out free services to everyone out of the goodness of its heart:

Google’s leadership, threatened by the attention and advertising relevance of Facebook, is betting the company on Google+ at all costs.

Truth be told, Google is free to do this if they like and people are free to continue to use Google services knowing full well what Google is trying to do. That’s the beauty of having choices in this market (and luckily, we do have choices).

However, this is another nail in the coffin between myself and Google. I’m hoping that they will enable an option in their Google Apps for Education admin interface for me to switch the default to either Circles or No one. At that point, people can make their own decisions on how they want people to be able to find them.

In the end, maybe that is my main beef: the default setting. Defaults matter. Defaults, many times, say something about your company.

Making this opt-out tells me just a little bit more about where Google is heading.