Graham Chastney (oak-grove)

Concept of the Day: Disconnect Anxiety

Sometimes I feel I'm turning into a grumpy old man before my time and all that I am doing is raising the ills of IT. Unfortunately today is no exception.

Today's ill is disconnect anxiety:

Disconnect Anxiety refers to various feelings of disorientation and nervousness experienced when a person is deprived of Internet or wireless access for a period of time.

If you are reading this blog you have probably experienced this anxiety and you are not alone. The Solutions Research Group has done some research in the US and the numbers are quite startling:

Overall, our research finds that 27% of the population exhibit significantly elevated levels of anxiety when disconnected. In terms of profile, 41% of this group are 12-24, 50% are 25-49 and 9% are over the age of 50.

A secondary group of 41% exhibit above-average levels of anxiety occasionally, depending on the situation.

The balance, 32% are below average in their anxiety response when unable to use their cell phones or the Internet. This group is disproportionately older than average (i.e., majority being 50+).

Or to put it graphically:

They went on to do research to try and understand why and how the anxiety was manifest. It's a good report and links in nicely with a number of the things I've said previously about ADT and the machines taking over.

Perhaps that is why laptop free meetings are such tense affairs these days - everyone is experiencing disconnect anxiety.

Personally, I'm only occasionally anxious about being disconnected.

The summary of the report is here (pdf).

Hat tip to Endgadget.

Technorati Tags: Disconect Anxiety,ADT

A Technologist for 25 years

I'm soon going to be 40 (yes really). I wanted to write this posts before then so that it didn't sounds like I was writing as a forty-something. For some reason it seems better it seems better to be looking back as a thirty-something.

I've been a technologist now for over 25 years. My love of technology started with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum which I received as a Christmas present at the end of 1982. I was dazzled by all of the potential. I had a friend who had the older ZX81 and we used to spend hours getting games to work (it took so long that you rarely actually played them) and writing some code. Once the ZX Spectrum arrived, though, I was off writing code day and night. One of my 'O' levels had a computing element and I submitted the code that I had written which I printed out on the silver thermal paper that the ZX Spectrum printer used. The teachers were amazed.

I've still got the aged ZX Spectrum in the loft.

After 25 years I'm now seeing things from a whole load of different angles. I often feel a bit like Sting who once wrote:

I never saw miracle of science
That didn't go from blessing to a curse

For many of the technology advantages that I see I am also seeing many curses.

Miners compensation has recently made a return to the press in the UK. People suffered serious injuries over many years - mainly through ignorance. I look around me at work and I see all sorts of medical conditions that concern me. I see people who are clearly impacted by attention deficit trait. I see people who have a posture that has been impacted by years sat at a keyboard. The volume of people off work with stress is alarming. How long will it be before we start to realise what we have been doing to ourselves over all these years.

And then there are all of the ecological issue - particularly power consumption.

But beyond that I worry whether we are really doing any good at all.

I've talked before about teleconferences and their impact upon productivity. I'm sure that in many cases the impact has been a wholly negative one. On Monday evening I had to be at home to cater for a set of people who were coming around for diner. It was all planned in my diary, I was unavailable for work. But then an urgent teleconference was called - right in the middle of when I was most required. I should have stuck to my principles and said no, but I didn't, I joined the call. The result was that I was sat at diner with the phone on speaker-phone rushing my food down. If the technology had not been available it would never have been an issue.

I work with a lot of customers who use office productivity software. There ability to produce content has gone through the roof. Once upon a time a document would have a single title page. Every document I receive these days has at least 3 or 4. Why? Because they can, lots of reiteration of the same information that someone thinks is important. I'm currently looking at a pile of paper over 1" high. I need to review the contents of these document today. There are only a few things that I need to know, but I will have to trawl through the entire pile to be sure that they have been designed in the way that I need them to be. We seem to live in an age where the adage "never mind the quality - feel the width" has become a mantra. Why? Because it takes longer to say things precisely and succinctly than it does to blurt it all out. And the really demoralising thing is this, I know that most of these documents have been produced to get a tick in a box. They have been produced because the process says that they need to be. No one knows what the real purpose of the document is, they just know that they need one.

And then there is the issue of Internet usage and the risks that are involved.

But then I take a look around me and also into my own life, and I wonder?

Am I just being a grumpy old so and so?

I think about Jonathan and his dyslexia. He is coming up to taking his GCSE's. In the past his hand written notes would have been ignored as too difficult to deal with. He would have been regarded as slow and a problem student. Today his typed notes and course work are usable and show his rich intelligence.

I think about the photographs that we took in Venice recently and the way that we could make them available to many friends. They get so be a part of my experience in a way that they never could have been before.

I think about the updates I get on twitter about colleagues who are hundreds of miles away. I get to be a part of their day in a way that I never could have been before.

I think about the GPS in my BlackBerry and how useful it is to be able to see a satellite view of where I am.

I think about my iPod and the podcasts that I listen to. As a tool of learning I'm constantly amazed at the knowledge that I can carry around and ingest on the move.

I think about the emails that I exchange with my brother as he works on a cruise liner somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It takes weeks to get post to them.

I think about the way that I can go into a shop and talk to them about a purchase and check the price of the same goods in hundreds of other places before I decide to buy.

I think about the mountains of information that I consume every day. Thousands of blogs from hundreds of people. A breadth of information that was unthinkable in the days when I had to buy a paper to know anything about the world.

Sting may have said: "I never saw miracle of science. That didn't go from blessing to a curse" and I think, to a certain extent he is correct. Each one of the benefits has a draw back. But Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think I am missing a little bit of magic at the moment, but I suspect that it won't be long in coming.

Technorati Tags: magic,ipod,podcasts,internet,Spectrum,Sinclair

Keeping a clean machine - so difficult

I've recently started afresh with a completely clean new machine. The aim of this machine is that it will eventually become my production machine.

I'm only adding things to this machine that I actually use. I've not made any pre-judgment on what I use, I have decided that I will start with a blank machine and add things as I need them.

My aim with this has been twofold:

• I wanted to see what software I actually use - not just what I think I use.
• I wanted to see how long it would be before I collected something that I will never use.

Today I received the first piece of software that I will never use - Adobe Photoshop Album Start Edition. How did I get it? I installed Adobe Reader. Just like that I now have software taking up resources on my device, and not just disk space, it also loads Adobe Photo Downloader. 2MB of memory stolen, just like that. I am now kicking myself. I nearly didn't go with Adobe Reader, I nearly installed the Foxit Reader.

And now, to uninstall this software (that I never wanted in the first place) I have to close down all of my browser sessions because presumably it's installed some extensions in there that I will never use either. And for some reason, that is bizarre in the extreme, I'm also having to close my Lotus Notes session.

This free software that I never wanted is proving to be very expensive (in terms  of my lost productivity) indeed.

last night I spent an hour at a friends house cleaning up a PC that had collected so much tat and rubbish that it was becoming unstable.None of the software was malicious, I'm sure that it would all be useful to someone, but it was all tat. Is there any wonder that people get to the point where they hate PC's.

It's like junk-mail, only worse and like junk-mail it needs an industry answer. In the UK we have a service that allows people to opt out of most forms of junk-mail call Mail Preference. Organisations that continue to send junk-mail get heavily fined. Perhaps we should start to do the same for software.

A Time to Acquire - Those Busy Lawyers

It seems to have been a very busy period for those acquisition lawyers (they are obviously hoping for a good quarter ). Some of these purchases have the potential to significantly change the IT landscape. Here are the ones that I have noticed:

• 2nd Jan - IBM to acquire XIV
• 3rd Jan - NetApp to acquire Onaro
• 8th Jan - Microsoft to acquire Fast Search and Transfer
• 15th Jan - VMware to acquire Thinstall
• 18th Jan - Sun to acquire MySQL
• 18th Jan - IBM to acquire Net Integration Technologies
• 21st Jan - Microsoft to acquire Calista

And that's not including the spate of acquisitions at the end of 2007, including IBM's purchase of Cognos.

All of these things take a while to work there way through, but there are some interesting moves ahead.

(Seems a bit ironic to be writing this as stock markets around the world are tumbling - but that's the way it goes sometimes.)

Technorati tags: IBM, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware, XIV, Onaro, Fast Search and Transfer, Sun, MySQL, Net Integration Technologies, Calista, Cognos

VMWare purchases Thinstall

One of the challenges that Thinstall has had in the market place has been the classic small company problem. How can a small company provide assurance to large customers that it will be there in the future. Well that concern went away yesterday with its purchase by VMWare.

Most of the reporting is just restating the news release. There has been some commentary though.

Randall Kennedy of Infoworld:

Some might see the acquisition as a "tasty morsel," a way for VMware to expand into the nascent Application Virtualization space by purchasing a smaller (20+ people at last count) player with an outsized presence in the market. I, on the other hand, see a potential "hairball" in the making.

Not surprisingly from VMware's Warren Ponder:

For years now customers and IT visionaries have been planning their next generation desktop architectures. IT organizations have been stepping outside the traditional way of deploying desktop services and regaining the control of their desktop environments by leveraging the power and benefits of VMware virtualization technology. Where server based computing solutions such as Citrix and Terminal services have allen short, VMware VDI has been able to step in and revive the promise of server based computing and dynamic desktop environments.

Brian Madden:

The most obvious place for Thinstall in VMware's solution stack is for use with their Windows XP and Windows Vista desktop delivery products, including their VDI solutions for server-based computing scenarios and VMware ACE for local computing scenarios. Thinstall is great here because the more apps you package with Thinstall, the less you have to build into your base Windows disk image that your desktop users will use.

From a personal perspective, VMWare is one of the few companies that could have purchased Thinstall and still given it the potential to remain within the mainstream. VMWare is a trusted middleware organisation and Thinstall would fit in as an extension to existing capabilities. If, however, Thinstall retreats into the VDI stack then it's of limited applicability.

Technorati tags: Thinstall, VMWare, Virtualisation

The Lone Server

Someone recently spoke to me about a plan to turn off the first server I ever installed, it's an old NT 4.0 server and has been doing a sterling job as a PDC for more years than I am going to let on.

I'm starting to get worried that they might be planning to turn me off at the same time.

I thought about my old friend  server as I watched this video:

Video: The Lone Server - extended version

I particularly liked the reference to Windows ME.

Follow along at the Windows Server Blog.

So "where do you want to go today?"

Technorati tags: Windows, Server, Lone Server, Microsoft

SPAM - who needs a machine, just get the humans to do it

This may become a bit of a rant. Apologies for that, I try to keep my posts positive but this one is really starting to get under my skin.

I have often wondered whether people should be made to pass a driving test before being allowed onto the Internet. Most countries, even the less advanced ones, have a driving test for the roads, but we let any idiot onto the Internet.

OK, I accept that the issues are different, get something wrong in a car and you may kill someone, get it wrong on the Internet and death is not a likely outcome but still the outcome isn't a great one.

I used to only ask myself this question when I got a one of those "forward this email to 10 people and the national charity for sufferers of bad breathe will receive 2p for each recipient" email. These would nearly always be from someone who has enough intelligence to drive a car, but not enough to know that this is complete tosh.

Now I ask myself this question almost everywhere I go online. Facebook is the latest. I've recently received one containing these particularly offensive words:

If a chap called bum_tnoo7@hotmail.com adds u don't accept it because its a hacker!!
Tell everyone on your list because if somebody on your list adds them u get them on your list he'll figure out Your ID computer address, so copy and paste this message to everyone even if u don't care for them. Do this quickly because if he hacks their email he hacks your mail too!!!

Now, anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that this is just another hoax. Not only that but this hoax existed before Facebook was even born. You don't have to be clever to know it's a hoax, all you have to do is a really simple search and you'll soon find a reputable source telling you in very clear and concise terms that it's a hoax.

The problem with these hoaxes, of course, is how to stamp them out. Once they have been released into the wild they seem to stay forever. It's not a machine that needs to be turned off, it's all of the humans who need to be reprogrammed. Unfortunately humans are notoriously difficult to reprogramme. Although I see the wisdom of crowds at work all over the place, I also see the stupidity of crowds as well.

We humans are fabulous replicators, the problem is, we aren't very intelligent replicators. Perhaps a form of test would help us to become better filters. At the beginning I said that the stakes wee different between driving and using the Internet, considering the impact of IT upon the environment perhaps the stakes are just as high.

Yesterday the news was all about how fast we were evolving - really?

IT worse than aviation for carbon emissions - nearly

According to a new report from an organisation called Global Action Plan the ICT sector is about to overtake the aviation industry when it comes to CO2 emissions (I hadn't heard of them before now so I'm not vouching for their pedigree, but they look genuine).

There are more than one billion computers on the
planet, and the worldwide ICT sector is responsible
for around 2% of man made CO2 each year – a similar
figure to the global airline industry. In the UK, there are
an estimated 10 million office PCs; and ICT equipment
accounts for roughly 10% of the UK’s total electricity
consumption.

The ICT sector is growing at a faster rate than the
aviation industry. In 2006, 48% more data storage
capacity was sold than in the previous year, compared
to a 3% increase in UK air travel passengers in the same
period. The impact of the sector is starkly illustrated
through the following statistics.

• A medium-sized server has a similar carbon footprint
  to an SUV achieving 15 miles to the gallon.
  Servers also require as much energy to cool them
  as they directly consume.
• 1,000 PCs left on 24/7 without any power save
  settings activated will consume up to £70,000 of
  electricity per year and for every unit of electricity
  consumed, around another half unit is required to
  dissipate the heat generated.
• If 20% of European business travel was replaced by
  teleconferencing, around 25 million tonnes of CO2
  could be saved each year.
• In 1980 before the introduction of the PC, world office
  paper consumption averaged 70 million tonnes a year
  – by 1997 it had more than doubled to almost 150
  million tonnes.
• In the UK, 120 billion pieces of paper are printed
  every year, the manufacture of which emits 1.5
  million tonnes of CO2 before taking into account the
  impact of the manufacture of printing equipment and
  ink and the energy consumed by printers.
• Each year 125 million computers are taken out of
  circulation worldwide and most of these end up in
  landfill sites (a problem addressed by the introduction
  of the European WEEE directive in 2007).
• Manufacturing one PC requires 1.7 tonnes of raw
  materials and water and consumes over 10 times its
  own weight in fossil fuels.

Some interesting headline numbers there. headline numbers tend to make me skeptical though, I'm not entirely convinced by the growth parallel in the above extract - 48% more disk storage doesn't need 48% more power. I've not had chance to read the whole report though, so it may be that the headlines mask the real detail.

I'm not saying that the problem isn't real though. Today I am looking at a solution for a customer which will have huge amounts of redundancy because the service levels are very high. All of this redundancy will be consuming power all of the time, but delivering no value other than to be ready to take the load of the active servers. It could all be in some kind of "stand-by" mode, but the technology isn't there to allow us to do it. It's this kind of thing that we need to start resolving. There are a lot of things we could do, but there seems to be little urgency to get it done, even though initiatives like Energy Star have been running for a very long time.

What with this, the Child Benefit CD fiasco, and other major IT project problems we need to start getting our act together before we become completely demonised in the eyes of the British public. I also think that there is a growing  problem with people of my age experiencing work related health issues from 20+ years sat in front of a screen and keyboard. It reminds me a bit of the problems we have experienced with asbestos workers and could be just as expensive to fix.

Technorati tags: Green IT, CO2

Facebook + Twitter + Flickr + LinkedIn + Blog + RSS + Email + IM = Interesting, but a messy user experience

I use a whole set of services these days: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, blog, email, instant messaging. I have multiple blogs, I also have multiple email accounts and multiple instant messaging accounts and I make extensive use of an RSS reader to gather information together. I really enjoy them all, that's my personality.

There are multiple integration points between some of them, there are multiple ways that I express myself (Flickr, Facebook, blog, Twitter). There are also multiple ways that I can make and receive comment (Facebook, blog, Twitter) without including direct communications on email and IM. There are multiple ways of me being notified about these communications (email, IM, RSS).

As a technologist this is all very exciting, but as a usable system of tools for anyone else, it's a bit of a messy user experience.

Let me give you some examples:

• If I want to write a message to someone I can use my email, IM or Facebook.
• I get comments on my twitterings in Twitter and on Facebook.
• I get comments on my pictures in Flickr and on my blog and also in Facebook.
• I get comments on my blog posts on my blog and via email and IM.
• I can post a picture to Flickr or to Facebook, or even both. I'll then receive comments in both.
• If I get a comment I will be informed by email or by my RSS reader, or both depending on the system.
• My LinkedIn contact list is different to my Facebook contact list, and my email or IM ones. I actually want the lists to have different people in them, but I don't want to have to maintain the same information for some people in three or four different places.
• I know a lot about which of my blog posts get read, I know a little about which of my pictures are popular on Flickr, but I  know nothing about the number of profile reads that my Facebook has receive.

I regularly want to say "don't comment there, comment here instead".

I have developed a way of working that allows me to push out a whole set of information and to receive a whole load more back in return. Others have developed a their own way of working, differently. Many people only see a small subset of my working, others see a more holistic view. People react in the way that is massively influenced by their viewpoint and context. If they see a picture in my blog, why shouldn't they comment in my blog, it seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do from that viewpoint. They have no idea that I would rather they comment on my pictures in Flickr. They may well have no idea that the picture is hosted in Flickr anyway.

Having these different systems gives me lots of flexibility. This flexibility means that I will put up with the niggles. But I do think that I am getting to the point where I can't actually add anything else in, unless I take something out.

I can't imagine proposing this working practice to a corporate customer. I think that over time we will start to consolidate some of these different capabilities into more generic services.

Technorati tags: flickr, facebook, linkedIn, RSS Reader, blogs

Getting Around the IT Department: User Innovation

The Wall Stree Journal has an interesting article on how to get around the restrictions that the IT department places upon you "Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You". Speaking as someone who effectively works for an IT Department I find this list, and others like it quite interesting.

If you look through this list it's primarilly a list of 10 things that people want to do so they can keep working. These are things that people need to do, and they are willing to take risks to get them done. The IT Department is busy trying to constrain innovation, but the desire to innovate is so strong that people will take the risks to get them done.

We've seen this in IT lots of times before and should have worked it out by now, but we don't seem to have done.

Technorati tags: user innovation, WSJ