Through with Passwords? Almost.

...if you're like me, you hate passwords with a passion.

They're almost gone from our lives, but it won't happen for some time yet. (Even if it takes another 2 years, that's about a generation and a half in Internet Years.) In the meantime, there is hope!

Trail of Techs

Technologies I've Known

I'm not sure what provoked the idea, but some reflection of mine on a long gone technology inspired me to make a word cloud from the technologies I've wrestled with in my time.

Some readers here may have become familiar with Wordle  (http://www.wordle.net/) as a handy online tool to create word clouds from source material you supply.  It seemed a perfect tool to visualize this set of operating systems, programming languages, and communication protocols.

The job of creating the word could was easy. A quick list of the names typed into a Google Doc gave me the source material.

A visit to the Wordle website allowed me to paste the words in and experiment with layout for a bit until I had the look and distribution I wanted.

Where I find this particularly interesting is when the process creates the word cloud from a substantial body of work. The primary concepts begin to emerge visually and the tone of the work can be seen a little as well.

Since this was a simple list and the frequency of the words' appearance could not be used to emphasize the important ones, I had to use an advanced feature of the tool at Wordle.

This one allowed me to supply a weighted list of words and phrases and using that it would generate the image.  A little bit of experimentation here with the weights and layout -- and a picture finally emerged that in my opinion, effectively depicts and emphasizes the technologies that have required my attention.

The fun part about this was admiring the final result.  As my eyes wander over it, I am reminded of the quirks and crannies that I've had to discover and adapt to.  I have to confess that a tear comes to my eye when I think back fondly to the rock-solid sturdiness of SCO Unix. It was rock solid that is, if you could somehow live through the installation process from 42 floppy disks and the complex partitioning of your hard drives as you did the installation. There was always the fear that disk #39 would be bad.

I love thinking back to the wild-west chaos of Perl programming syntax where everyone was free to write the program in a completely different way and in a completely different style. And Everyone did! So almost every feature addition or bug fix by a new programmer required that "the whole thing had to be rewritten from scratch."

I remember defending the hermetically sealed isolation between Java programmers and their beloved pointers. And promising that program startup time was not consistent with runtime performance, so it would be okay to write server code with it, maybe even more than user facing code.

I remember arguing with Solaris kernel engineers about the pros and cons to various memory segmentation strategies. And marveling at the elegance of a new filesystem design that seemed capable of lasting through a virtually infinite number of iterations through Moore's Law.

I remember scoffing at the simplicity of HTML and then learning that being simple doesn't mean being easy, and realizing that I'd have to internalize many of the fundamentals (and quirks) of this markup language simply in order to get my job done.

There are dozens of other memories that come back as I look at the trail. I hope that as you gaze upon the odd path through the technologies of the past couple of decades, you'll find your own memories of that time come to light. It's been quite a ride so far, hasn't it?

If you feel inspired to make your own technology Wordle, be sure and drop back in to let us know where to see it.

Why You Should Be Reading Facebook at Work (Pt 3)

We started by looking at why various social media platforms can constitute a vital and valuable part of your business intelligence stream. The principle is that default ways of reading Facebook, Twitter and Google+ may not suffice, but that if you're committed to finding the valuable content, there are ways to get it.

 

This installment looks at how you can use Twitter to be on top of the news at about the same pace as professionals at major news outlets. The two secrets you need are:

• Understanding hashtags
• Using the right tools

Why You Should Be Reading Facebook at Work (Pt. 2)

There is a great deal of value available to us at Facebook and from what people tell me, most of us are leaving the money on the table.

Here's what I mean.  Facebook is more than just a cheerful little place to see our friends' baby pictures.

It's actually a vigorous marketplace and news source.  But you won't get that experience by simply logging in, and scrolling down the default news stream.  Where you get the power is when you start reading what you want, and when you add meaning to your social media graph.

Don't worry, you don't have to dredge up your recollection of Boolean Algebra to do this.  There are some very simple (and logical) actions you can take to make your social media graph more accurate and useful. There are also some simple actions you can take that get you to the pot of gold hiding in the Facebook update stream.

Let's talk about how to get there with Facebook.

Infographics and the Rise of a New Intellect

I'll be honest. I love infographics every bit as much as the next hungry information consumer. I adore the snapshot presentation of facts that gives me a glimpse of the impact and reach of certain phenomenon. (In fact, I'm producing a science show for kids that uses this approach very heavily.)

BUT -- I also know that one must be careful to check the underlying facts and the methodology with which the picture in an infographics is assembled. There is an old saying that "figures don't lie, but liars can figure." If you also consider the timeworn saw that "a picture is worth a thousand words" you can deduce that liars who can figure AND who can create infographics have 1000 more ways to lie!

Here's one from an article I saw recently.

Following the Discussion

Over the time that online discussions have been around, there has been an evolution in the way we read things. Near the dawn of "social media" the metaphor required that you first find the right discussion, and then you could see what people say. (This was the way it worked in the BBS and "discussion forum" days.)

The current fashion is to start with the people (presumably that you know and trust) and then delve your way into the discussions (which, presumably would be the ones of interest to you). We progressed from "who's talking about my topic" to "what topics are on my friends' minds?"

The mechanism that allows us to use the topic or idea to discover people, and of course to explore the ideas themselves is the #hashtag. Here are some of the things we've learned about the use (and abuse) of the hashtag.

Where do you want your photos?

...everywhere you go, people are taking snapshots on their handy smart phones (even on some not-so-smart phones).

If you want to see the photos your friends are taking, there are several places they might appear.

There are a number of common places that people use, and if you haven't explored them all, you may want to hear about your choices.

Cloud is Coming

...even when they denied it, tech industry leaders knew that the Cloud was coming and that they would need to tool up for it.

For the individual, it means that you can declare yourself liberated from babysitting hard drives, strong arming simple-minded backup software, and the publishing workload that comes from having to tell everyone that your system is in the shop to recover contents from a drive.

Call me? Okay, all it takes is a click!

...readers here will almost certainly conclude that I'm a recidivist Google fan boy. I'm hard pressed to deny the charge.

Here's another good reason for me to love Google.

I spend a lot of my day working at my computer with a headset on so that I can meet with people on Skype.

So it made a HUGE difference for me when Google added the ability to call someone's phone directly from Google chat.

If a person gives me a properly formatted phone number in their email (and for Google, properly formatted covers a lot of ground), I can simply click on the number and a chat window appears that is ready for me to place a call to them.  I suppose that even without a headset on, I could simply allow the computer to turn into a speaker phone for me.

No need to sign up for a new service, no need to agree to any more Terms of Service, just a new feature, ready to go.

By the way, in spite of what you've read -- Google's support for privacy is progressive and gives me control over what I want to share with the world. I have actually read the ToS and I'm satisfied with the level of care that Google takes with my personal information.

And just so you know, Google doesn't pay me or feed me. They just keep giving me good stuff and they don't pick my pocket along the way.

Managing Twitter Follows

...I couldn't say "tweeps" in my subject line. I tried, but I just couldn't.

So maintaining an active Twitter presence is not for the faint of heart or the capricious. It takes time and active engagement to get the benefit of this social media platform.

And after a while, some folks simply decide that there's nothing in it for them and stop participating -- they mostly even stop reading.

That's just fine, but when you reach the upper limit for the number of folks you can follow, you may decide that you wish to stop following folks who are not participating.

A great tool for doing this is Untweep. (http://untweeps.com/)  This tool gives you a way to look up the people in your Twitter stream who have not updated in over 30 days (by default).

I personally use it to create a list of folks who have not updated in over 120 days and then go through with a knife to carve them from my roster.  This gives me room to follow new people who are actively engaged and contributing to the stream.

A Magic Black Object

While I was growing up, I read a ton of work by the established Science Fiction greats. In fact, until just a very few years ago, the term Science Fiction meant to me, a book or a story written (on paper) by someone who actually had some education in a field of science.

So I was raised on (often) bright visions of the future in which the ingenuity and creativity of man had resulted in devices that seemed incredible, nearly magic.

In fact, it was Arthur C. Clarke, one of the undisputed giants in the field of SF, who said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Profiles of the Future, 1961)

Well today I hold in my hand an artifact that demonstrates the truth of Clarke's vision.  It is, by inspection, simply an inert black object. But when powered up and operating correctly, it is just the thing I've been waiting for.

What about Delicious?

...one of the most powerful outcomes of the "social media fabric" or Web 2.0, is the ability for us to share the highlights of our online adventures intelligently.

Before social media, we mostly shared our favorite findings by email with various groups of friends.  The baseline model for this was pretty terrible.  You would find an amusing joke or humorous story on the internet, then you'd send it to a group of your friends who would each then have a copy. Then they would send it to groups of their friends who would get a copy (sometimes not the first). Then those friends would...

Keeping it all together

...I can remember back to the days when I first began to see the possibilities emerge in my first serious computer language. One thing I knew that would be helpful would be a comprehensive system for managing time, appointments, tasks, and workload.

That had me be fascinated with Lotus Organizer (which bundled my contacts and calendar in one place....), then later with Outlook, and now with the suite of services offered by Google with Docs and Gmail.