IBM Think Conference Day 2

Creating a Bespoke Design Thinking Practice in Utilities with IBM Cloud Garage​

A major utilities customer has embarked on their own design thinking journey, but to meet their unique industry and internal requirements they needed help to support the scale and speed of their design thinking practice. These choose the IBM Cloud Garage as their design and collaboration partner to help define and scale their design practice and develop an approach to support it enterprise-wide. Learn how this collaboration has led to a successful design transformation for the customer.

IBM Research Science Slam: Predicting 5 Innovations to Help Change Our Lives in the Next 5 Years

Our mission at IBM is to help our clients change the way the world works. There’s no better example of that than IBM Research’s annual “5 in 5” technology predictions. Each year, we showcase some of the biggest breakthroughs coming out of IBM Research’s global labs –five technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape business and society in the next five years. This innovation is informed by research taking place at IBM Labs, leading edge work with our clients, and trends we see in the tech/business landscape. Presented via a 'Science Slam' - our researchers will share their work and predictions through compelling, personal narratives that bring the technology out of the labs and into everyday life - in under five minutes each.

Video: Science Slam

Accelerating the Journey to AI

Organizations recognize data is what fuels digital transformation, and are looking for new ways to unlock the value of their data and accelerate their journey to AI. That is why 80% of them view AI as a strategic opportunity.  Yet, only 19% of organizations understand the data required for AI. Successful organizations apply a prescriptive approach to climbing the ladder to AI, based on a unified architecture that delivers everything they need for enterprise AI, on any cloud.  In this session, hear Chief Data Officers and Chief Innovation Officers share a behind-the-scenes look at their approach to managing the full lifecycle of AI, and the essential lessons learned on their journey to drive smarter decisions throughout the organizations.

Video: Accelerating the Journey to AI

Hybrid, Multicloud by Design. Accelerating the Enterprise Cloud Journey

Cloud is integral to virtually every enterprise digital transformation strategy. Yet less than 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud. Why? Put simply, complexity. Enterprises are struggling to modernize apps and workloads, and overcome persistent tech and data silos reinforced by vendor lock in. Agile enterprises can accommodate changing business requirements at speed. The right cloud foundation built on open standards frees workloads and data to run on the right cloud model, on or off premises, and across multiple clouds. It embraces tech and data from more sources to speed innovation. And when combined with unique industry, security and tech expertise, it can tailor the journey to cloud to your enterprise for better outcomes.

Hybrid Multicloud By Design

Transform Your Analytics with IBM Data Virtualization

Data virtualization allows customers to discover, query and control access to data across their enterprise in a scalable manner. IBM's new data virtualization technology is designed to query across data sources (IBM Db2 family, IBM Netezza, Oracle, Informix, SQL Server and many others), on-premises, on private cloud and public clouds and across geographies. The new technology provides a quantum leap in scalability over previous federation methods, with increased emphasis on governance and access control. Its primary goal is to enable central access across your data sources via a virtual data platform. This virtualization helps eliminate data silos, bringing the data closer to the business for actionable insights.

Transform Your Analytics

The Blueprint for Smart Businesses

How do you design your business for growth? Being "digital" at the edges is no longer enough. To succeed companies need to truly align the data they own towards purposeful innovation. This is the story of an insurance company who is now a risk management expert. Of a car manufacturer who found their competitive advantage in mobility. It is about an apparel retailer who is a fashion expert. But where do you start? Smarter businesses differentiate themselves from within. They have a culture of agile innovation that leverages AI and cloud on their journey to become a smart, secure and sustainable business. This is a new era for business - defined by incumbent disruptors - where companies who have a past, have the most promising future.

Video: Blueprint For Smart Buisnesses

What We've Built on IBM Quantum So Far​

Quantum computing offers theoretical speed-ups for many business applications. This includes creating new materials, calculating new markets and optimizing logistics. Accenture and IBM Research have come together in a first-of-a-kind partnership to demonstrate quantum computing’s applicability to today’s business challenges. Business application teams from over 15 different countries around the globe will be testing out their theories, by using IBM Q with the specific objective of showcasing the possibilities this new compute paradigm can bring.

IBM Think Conference Day 1

​I had the pleasure to attend the IBM Think conference in wet and chilly San Fran from Feb 11-14th of this year. 

The event overall was very interesting, thought provoking, and provocative. I'll be posting the event materials as well as some of my notes and thinking of the specific events and conference.

What's New In Dev Ops

On the first day, I didn't actually make it to this event due to traffic, but I was interested in it. Here's the material:

What's New In Dev Ops​

Core message: ​Devops is not about software development, it's about improving the economics of software delivery. Various IBM toolchains for DevOps are discussed. Worth a look, but a bit of an attempt to sell IBM tools in this space.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Designing for Today's Business Needs

This was an absolutley fantastic session, and it's unfortunate it wasn't recorded. A great demo of design thinking with developers, architects, and business folks.

New software designs start with many whiteboard sessions to sketch an idea, get insight from peers and ultimately total buy-in from stakeholders. How are you handling the likely re-architecture as you drive your cloud strategy? This can be laborious, time-consuming and often frustrating. Development teams need to agree on a new breakdown of capabilities, logical flows between services, and interaction with external services. Communicating this strategy can be complex within the team and with all stakeholders and LOBs. What's needed is a shared design space where teams modernizing applications can collaborate effectively to design and communicate an architecture as it continuously evolves.

A Picture is worth 100 words

Access the Future Today: Quantum Computing​

Quantum computing takes advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics found in nature and represents a fundamental change from classical information processing. For two years now, IBM has enabled more than 100,000 people around the globe to access quantum computers for learning, research, and tackling new problems. While still early, we believe it’s just a matter of time until we start using these devices to solve certain problems better than we can today. IBM’s Dario Gil will discuss this radically different approach to computing built on the laws of quantum mechanics and how the roadmap for mainstream adoption of this new technology is being forged today by IBM in collaboration with a global community across business, academia and research.

Video: Quantum Computing

How to Realize the Value of DevOps

I'll be honest: I didn't get a lot out of this session. There was some good encouragement that DevOps is the way to go, but little in the way of actually tackling it, or the business value it unlocks.

Join experts in a discussion about the challenges and direction of DevOps.

Speakers:

• Andrea Martinez, IBM
• Alan Shimel, Media Ops Inc (DevOps.com)
• Matthew Crabbe, QA Media
• Mick Ahmad, FannieMae
• Eitan Azoff, Ovum

IBM and SAP Cloud Platform: Agility to Intelligently Transform and Innovate Your Business

This was a pretty good discussion on leveraging good end user experience to unlock both digital transformation, but also enabling new channels for delivery.

Digital transformation demands an enticing customer experience across all channels independent of underlying data, and a flexible IT landscape that provides a comprehensive suite of integration tools. SAP Cloud Platform provides an enterprise grade business Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help customers address those requirements. IBM GBS has enabled high-value use cases for how companies can extend and personalize their SAP S/4HANA deployments, both on-premises or in the cloud, and has built innovations side-by-side leveraging SAP Cloud Platform. Hear how IBM is providing a design-led approach with Apple iOS and is leveraging next-gen technologies like Blockchain and Watson with SAP Cloud Platform to create a unique value proposition.

Think 2019 Chairman's Address: Building Cognitive Enterprises

The linup for this event was far too long to even think about getting inside, so many of us caught the video from the restaraunt around the corner. A great networking opportunity nonetheless! Worth a look.

Join IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty and some of the world’s top CEOs and leaders as they share their journeys to the Cognitive Enterprise.

Video: Building Cognitive Enerprises​

How Apple is beating the FBI

One word: openness. 

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/fight-fbi-apple-ditched-secrecy-openness/

Ready Player One

A fun book... after the fall of easy energy, what's left to have life worth living?

Virtual reality gaming, that's what.

Apple Music Radio

Screw all you haters. It may be confusing and weird but it's awesome. 

Productivity Update

I'm always fascinated by ways to get stuff done, particularly at work. 

It's changed quite a bit since I've been in my current role, and moved even further away from 'hands on keyboard' work more to staying in the loop, collaborating, and building future visions.

One major change is ejecting my blackberry from my life. I picked up an iPhone 6, and it has radically changed how I work.

Tasks

Tasks now go 100% into Omnifocus 2. It's a pretty seamless thing with the iPhone, you can have it take over from the built in reminders app.

Omnifocus allows you to structure your tasks from many different perspectives -- there are 'contexts' which is essentially GTD speak for 'what do I have available?' My main contexts are '@Office,' which contains sub-contexts for @1-1 with my boss, @1-1 with my mentor, @my boss' leadership meetings, @my manager meetings, etc.

In this way, I can 'remind' myself to take specific actions at specific locations -- at my next team meeting, for example. Or just (increasingly infrequently) sitting at my desk. 

The point is to only be reminded of things you can do when you can actually do it.

You can also flag things that need to be done a specific date, and for specific projects.

For example, our upcoming San Fran trip is a project. It contains actions for @Office, @Home, and due on specific dates -- pack passports the day before @Home is one of them. Book our seats @Office the day before the flight is another.

You can also do geofencing to remind you when your GPS tells you something is close, but I generally avoid that.

Having these tasks sync seamlessly with my iPad, my macbook pro, and my iMac, and I'm pretty covered however I work.

Notes

I use Evernote religiously for notes. Meeting minutes, ideas for upcoming trips, scanned in insurance receipts, all that kind of stuff that GTD calls 'reference' material.

Works great with the iPhone and everywhere else I work. Got a pile of resumes to review, using scannable on the iPhone, and bam -- they're in Evernote and OCR'd to boot. Now I can review them wherever I happen to be, and search for them once they're filed away.

The great thing about Evernote is it actually works better the more you use it. Tagging gets smarter, searches get smarter, and it autosuggests other notes for you that are like the one you are in right now.

Email

Astoundingly, Microsoft bought a small app company and pumped out the really good Outlook app. It integrates together my work and gmail accounts seamlessly, works well with Siri, and actually does AD lookups on my corporate email so I can find everyone.

Having a 'focused' inbox that filters out spam for me is great, too.

SIRI

Siri is the bomb. Hold down the middle button, dictate your ask, and away she goes. Hands free note taking, adding reminders, sending texts or emails. Even asking what the weather is next week in San Fran, looking up map locations, playing the next song. 

Siri is one of those things that has openned up a whole new world now that I don't have to write complex emails on the little tap-tap touch keyboard. She doesn't always get it right, but she seems to learn, and mostly she works great.

Kobo

I bought Hiyat a kobo e-reader that she never used, gave it to Gabe, and he never used it, either. So I inherited it back. Buying books wirelessly is great, and it's great to be able to read in the dark and not bug Hiyat.

The really great thing is discovering the Kobo iOS app -- being able to read a page or two of my book in the Starbucks line for example, and it remembers your page in every device you're reading on -- and all of a sudden I'm reading a lot more.

Now, if only I could get Siri to dictate my book to me in the car...

Got A Mac

After 5-ish years of running a Linux PC at home for the kids I finally threw in the towel and got an iMac.
Reasons:
- tired of twiddling with the linux box.
- iPod support comes and goes
- eternal sound system problems (it's 2011 for crying out loud and we haven't figured out sound?)
- having to choose between the glossy and futuristic KDE desktop and the 1999 looking Gnome
- On and on of fiddling with the command line to white list kid's web sites
- Really stupid errors like having distribution list support disappear in kmail
- Openoffice still looks like shit
- Flash is really, really, slow

The iMac is great. So easy that Gabe set it up himself, just needed the wi-fi password. iWork is good, iPhoto and iMovie are just amazing. Edited a movie and started an upload to youtube in about 2 min.

With three kids, a wife, aikido, etc. I've just had enough of wasting my time farting around in what is in essence a hobbyist system.

Upgrading to Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic

 

 

 

Couldn't resist, upgrading to 9.10 beta.

http://ubuntu.com

Moved to Kubuntu 9.04

 

 

I've switched both our laptop and desktop/server to Kubuntu 9.04. Great, great distro.

Boot time is fast. Really, fast -- maybe 30-45 seconds. And system is very responsive given the change to the ext4 file system and KDE 4.2. Stable, and runs everything. Devices found and drivers loaded out of the box (just had to enable the 3rd party ones). No problems found whatsoever.

The cutover from Mandriva 2009 to Kubuntu was pretty seamless. I actually wiped the /home directories in favor of reformatting with ext4 from ext3 and recovered them from backups.

Best part about Kubuntu: so many people are using (k)ubuntu that all problems found so far are solvable with a quick google search.

http://www.kubuntu.org

Acoustic Research Internet Radio

 

 

This thing rules. Got it as a overly generous gift from Mom, and it's greatly appreciated.

Simply put, it's a clock radio... that also has a wifi nic to stream internet radio stations in addition to the regular am/fm stuff. You simply use the website provided to program the thing with the stations you want (you don't need to use it but it's easier) and away you go.

It also has a usb port in the back if you want to listen to mp3s. Additionally, give it your postal code and it tells you the 3 day weather forecast. And it sets the time by itself.

Very cool! Now I wake up to the mellow 'n groovy sounds of groove salad.

 

https://www.arinfiniteradio.com/portal/default.htm

LaCie Hard Disk

 

 

Bought this 1TB drive for ~ $120 bucks. Decent enough price and it's fast. Great for backups -- I now do an incremental every 2 weeks.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11062

Painless Upgrade to Mandriva 2009

Upgraded to Mandriva 2009 a week ago. Tried it on my EEEPC for a few days before I upgraded the main household PC/server.

Completely painless... new KDE 4.1 desktop , upgraded kernel, and a revamped Mandriva Control Center. Everything's a lot faster (see, with Linux upgrades things typically get faster not slower).

Only one issue: VMWare doesn't yet work with the new kernel (2.6.27) so I shifted over to Virtualbox for the one windows app I still use.

 

 

http://www.mandriva.com/en/download

Ubiquity

Ubiquity In Depth

An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

Ubiquity is an experiment two parts. It’s both an interface and a development platform. Ubiquity 0.1 focuses on the platform aspects, while beginning to explore language-driven methods of controlling the browser.

Read about the release here, or download it.

In this post, we’ll talk first about the interface, and then the platform. For those who are really impatient, and just want to see how the prototype version works, check out all of the pretty screenshots and use-cases in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

The Problem: The Web is Disconnected

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to.  You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed.  This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task.  And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.

A Solution: Universal Access

Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Mandriva 2008.1 Upgrade Nearly Flawless

 

 

Did a nearly flawless upgrade from Mandriva 2008 to 2008.1 (spring) yesterday. Did it all on-lne, no cds needed. Simply pointed to the 2008.1 software repositories and told it to upgrade.

1770 software packages and a reboot later, and I have 2008.1 up and running. 3-D desktop works better than ever, and the whole system is snappier too. No issues with apache, mysql, amarok... in fact, nothing that I've found.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Tour

RIP Arthur C Clarke

 

 

 

Arthur C Clarke meant a lot to me as a kid. Not just books like "Childhood's End" or "Rendezvous With Rama," but really cool stuff like his "Mysterious Universe" show.

The guy invented communications satellites. Enlightened the world with Kubrick with 2001. And showed a little kid in small town Alberta that there's a whole universe out there.

http://trekmovie.com/2008/03/18/rip-arthur-c-clarke/

Required Stuff

Got a new laptop at work today. The old T41 gasped it's last breath after only 18 months of use. I'm pretty hard on laptops I guess.

Got a newer T61 that's a little better. Weird screen aspect ratio but I can get used to it.

Here's a list of stuff I had to put on it to make it workable again:

1. Firefox (portable version for those of us without admin access) with these extensions:
   
1. Adblock Plus. Once you've gotten rid of the ads, you can't go back.
2. Google Notebook. Allows you to clip and save links. You have to use it to get it.
3. Google Gears. Lets you take Google Reader offline.
4. Stockticker. Unobtrusive little extension that shows Suncor's stock price in green when up and red when down.
5. Google Sync keeps all my machines lined up with the same bookmarks. Nice.
6. ForecastFox gives you real-time weather updates in a quiet way.
7. GSpace uses your gmail account as a 6+Gb file share.
2.  Launchy lets you run almost anything without having your hands leave the keyboard.
3. JDarkRoom is a really minimal text editor.
4. FreeMind is an open-source mind mapping tool.

JDarkRoom

Embrace the darkness. JDarkRoom is a great, very simple java-based text editor. Takes up the full screen with a default green-on-black color scheme. Reminds me of the old days hacking out code in the basement of the math sciences building.

Great for distraction-free writing or taking notes during meetings. Open source and multiplatform. 

http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/

9 Inch Asus Eee PC Available Soon

I've been holding out buying the 7 inch model for six months now, and I can't wait for this baby to come out.

ASUS tells us the screen is 1024 x 600, and it looks to be almost the exact same pixel density as the 7-inch version. The computer was being shown in both Linux and Windows XP versions, so it looks like you'll be able to have your choice of OS when the 9-incher is released later this year.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/04/asus-9-inch-eee-pc-now-with-living-pixels/

Interface

Great book and a very fun read. I think Stephenson co-wrote this book before Snow Crash. For sure before the horrendously long Cryptonomicon and it's sequels.

The story follows US Governor William Cozzano, who suffers a stroke just before he runs for President. A loose consortium of financial interests called "The Network" come together with the aid of a biotechnologist and a spin doctor to embed a biochip in Cozzano's head to recover from the stroke. This it does, but it also allows the Network to control and manipulate Cozzano into becoming the perfect candidate, and one that will work in the Network's best interests.

Very good read.

http://www.amazon.com/Interface-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553383434

Repackaged Google Gears For XP

 

 

Rather annoyingly to use Google Gears (Google's offline feature) in XP, you have to have admin privledges. This is because the installer, an .msi package, has a registry tweak so that it works in IE in addition to Firefox.

I don't have admin access but I want gears, so I downloaded GG onto a machine that I do have admin access to, grabbed the files that get deployed, zipped them up, and renamed it to an .xpi (Firefox installer file). And it works!

Here it is: google gears for xp .xpi

http://mitchellfamily.ca/blogimages/gears.xpi