UPDATE: I was digging through my archives, and thought I’d repost this for general interest’s sake.
Let me start off by laying out what I believe are the three tiers of cloud computing. I believe that cloud computing consists of hosted services (IBM), hosted applications (VMWare, Citrix), and hosted storage/data. This contrasts with internal services (SharePoint, Exchange), internal applications (MS Office, Adobe Acrobat), and internal data (File server). The internal computing may be run on virtualized servers, or on their dedicated boxes. In my opinion, businesses are concerned firstly with security regarding hosted documents/storage layer, secondly web services, and thirdly, most open to hosted web applications. Continued…
Posted in Technology.
Tagged with Azure, Citrix, Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, vCloud, VMWare.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– March 3, 2010
The purpose of this post is to share my perspective on the place of Facebook in my life.
I’d like to start off by saying that I view social networking as a tool to communicate with others, a tool that offers the ability to share both textual and non-textual (e.g. images) information in an efficient multicast (for the non-technical, basically a shotgun blast at everyone), and to receive feedback on that information. This shapes my perspective on how I use tools like Facebook or Twitter, and I thought I’d share a few details on how my social networking experience is affected, and will be affected. Continued…
Posted in General.
Tagged with Facebook, Social Networking.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– March 1, 2010
As you’re no doubt all aware, Google launched their ’social networking feed’ called Buzz a little while ago. After much fanfare and hoopla, they changed a few features to make it more acceptable to the privacy-conscious. Unfortunately, they changed these features too late for many, and it would appear that many people don’t trust Google Buzz right now. While I personally rather like it, and think it could be tweaked in a few ways, I’m not writing this post to discuss the merits of Buzz. Rather, I’d like to point out a few items that make it interesting from a technical and analytical point of view. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, General, Technology.
Tagged with Buzz, Google, Social Networking.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– February 25, 2010
Oh the joys. Starting up a new company is risky, risky, risky. I’m a cautious person by nature, and only take shrewdly calculated risks. If there is too much risk in a decision, I will lean toward the cautious side. The friend (SeFunmi Odemuyiwa) that is partnering with me on this project is a big risk taker. This can make life very interesting.
Things like funding. As a startup, there is very little capital to start with. We are pushing VC’s, but they generally wish to see some working demo. The project we are working is extremely complex and multi-faceted. This means we require a fair bit of work to get even basic groundwork in place. I (as the technical oversight) do not have the time (and frankly, for the complexities of some of these items, do not have the necessary coding skills) to produce a quality product (I believe in hiring the people with the most talent to do the best work). My partner is the business person, dealing with VC’s, target-base, and also is the person most effective at communicating our vision to potential lenders. In order to produce something we can take to the VC’s/lenders, we’ve paid a good chunk out of our own pockets. Continued…
Posted in General, Stealth Mode.
Tagged with SeFunmi Odemuyiwa, Wes Kroesbergen, WorkMyTown.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– February 18, 2010
I’ve seen a number of folks excited about the possibility of getting Windows 7 on a tablet device, whether it be through Citrix on the iPad or natively on a PC tablet such as the ExoPC. I personally have no such desire. Windows 7 simply wasn’t designed for the sole purpose of touchscreen computing. The experience simply won’t be as good as the iPhone OS. Another issue with running Windows on a touchscreen tablet is that the majority of Microsoft technology developers have only ever programmed for a mouse/keyboard experience. This results in less than optimal touchscreen computing experience. The iPad has a huge advantage in that there are developers who have been programming solely for touchscreen devices for 3 years. The developers’ mentality has shifted already to a touchscreen environment, meaning better quality experiences. This is not to say that Windows developers can’t code for touch environments, but merely that there will be far fewer quality experiences on a Windows touchscreen device than on the iPad for the next little while. Continued…
Posted in Design, General, Technology.
Tagged with Apple, iPad, Microsoft.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– February 2, 2010
I thought I’d write a quick post in response to the posts by John Nack, Product Manager at Adobe, and The Flash Blog regarding the lack of Flash on the iPad (and iPhone). You can find their respective posts here and here.
First, in response to John Nack, who makes the point that Flash has brought standardization to the web. Yes, while it did bring a standard to the web for a while, once Adobe purchased Macromedia, Flash itself started fragmenting into many different versions which supported different levels of features. This resulted in many users having to upgrade their Flash plugins depending on the site visited. How is this any better a ’standard’ than HTML5? Might as well force the user to upgrade their browser to a standards-compliant version.
So, Flash provides ubiquitous browser video playback? Who cares? YouTube and Vimeo are switching to HTML5, Hulu is committed to providing iPad compliant service, and everyone else doesn’t care what they use to play video in their browser. As Internet Explorer 8 begins mass penetration (via Windows 7) and Internet Explorer 6 support is dropped (as Google announced yesterday), Flash will become less & less important. Lets be honest here. The only reason Flash is really needed is IE6’s existence. Everything else can and should be implemented via HTML5 and standards-compliant services such as OpenType.
John Nack concludes with a point that the Flash team will likely be using the GPU to bring fast performance to the desktop plugin. Who cares? The iPad and iPhone are mobile devices. Utilizing a separate GPU to do the processing is irrelevant on a mobile device that uses System-on-a-Chip design.
He also makes the point that the download size for QuickTime is twice that of Flash. Irrelevant. Most of the Flash-haters he is targeting with this post (and most Adobe CS users) are running a Mac, with native support. And most people with iTunes installed (read: everyone with an iPod/iPhone) have QuickTime installed as part of Apple Software Update. So no, ubiquity is not dependent on the download size of your plugin. Continued…
Posted in Design, Featured Articles, General, Technology.
Tagged with Adobe, death, Flash, HTML5, iPad, iPhone OS, John Nack, standards, The Flash Blog.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– January 30, 2010
As most of you are aware, Apple announced their new Apple iPad yesterday. There have been the usual set of reactions to the announcement. Shills like Paul Thurrott providing their heavily biased negative perspective, and Apple fanboys proclaiming that this device meets all their needs perfectly, and that the device is perfect. Both sides offer their ‘armchair architect’ perspective, proclaiming all the pros and cons and design ‘flaws’ that the Apple engineers obviously didn’t consider. This post shares my armchair perspective, and frankly is not based on any personal experience with the device. All my opinions have been formed from information on the Internet. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, General, Technology.
Tagged with Apple, gadget, iPad.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– January 28, 2010
Recently I wrote a post summarizing my perspective on Google Wave. Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by a reader and asked why I had not mentioned Wave Robots. I errored in not including them previously, and this post contains my perspective.
One of the reasons I had not included robots previously is because I did not feel I understood them well enough. I make it a general practice to not speak about subjects I don’t feel I understand properly. Continued…
Posted in General, Technology.
Tagged with Google, Google Wave, robots, Wave.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– January 26, 2010
Now that I’ve been working in a larger company where there are many more IT contractors than just myself, I’ve begun to see a pattern in the mentality of a typical contractor, and consequently, their work ethic. I find that the typical mindset of a contractor is that they feel they are only there for the life of the contract. Consequently, they take a much more laidback approach to work, attempting to drag out the contract. This irks me. The mentality I was raised with (thanks to my father) is that if you do your work well, and do it expediently, those above you will want to keep you. Doing your work well and expediently sets you in a position of value, rather than just a tool to complete a task. Continued…
Posted in General.
Tagged with contract, IT, work ethic.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– January 21, 2010
Last week I was helping an individual migrate information over from his old company to his new company. As he no longer had physical access to the company computers, but still had Exchange access until the end of the month, one would have thought it a relatively trivial task. Quite the contrary. Though he had access to his information via Outlook Web Access and his iPhone, he did not have a personal copy of Outlook, so using Outlook to export information was out of the question. OWA also does not allow you to export contact information, and instead presents them in an HTML page. After a number of attempts to extract the contact information via iTunes, I started looking at alternative means. At this point I discovered Air Contacts. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, General, Technology.
Tagged with Air Contacts, Exchange, iPhone.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– January 19, 2010
In the last little while, I’ve begun to work a lot more with VMware ESXi, in an attempt to understand virtualization better. Along with the benefits it brings to larger companies, I began to see some benefits that it would bring to my personal life. At home, I am constantly developing or experimenting with new technologies in an attempt to understand them and build my skills. The problem is that I tend to do a lot of my experimentation on our home server (an old Dell 5150, with lots of extra hard drives). Since we are using this as a media server, things tend to become difficult for those using the media or data when I need to reboot/install something new. This resulted in much of our data being scattered among our other machines (two MacBook Pro’s and an iMac). All in all, a very messy setup. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, General, Technology.
Tagged with ESXi, linux, Media, Server, Ubuntu, Virtualization, VMWare.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– January 15, 2010
Today is the day of a remarkable new entry into the Canadian wireless space, the launch of WIND Mobile. It is a launch I’m incredibly excited about, but that in itself shall be left to another post. The launch of WIND, just as with virtually any other major product/company launch, was not without problems. Mere minutes after I first visited the new online store portal http://shop.windmobile.ca, the connection was cut, and I was no longer able to access the online shop. It would seem that the problem was simply due to immense demand on the servers. It’s quite a common experience for hot new product/service launches. Just ask Microsoft or Apple. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, General, Technology.
Tagged with Cloud, cloud computing, demand, launch day, load balancing, product launch, Server, WIND.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– December 16, 2009
There’s been a lot of hype lately about Google Wave. If you’ve heard anything from Google, you’ve heard that it’s supposed to replace E-mail as the next form of communication. A number of prominent bloggers however, including Robert Scoble, have done their reviews, and felt that it is overhyped.
This post will not be another review. If you’ve read other reviews, I’m sure you’re aware of the complaints with the noisy nature of the service, and the general usage of it. Rather, I’d like to discuss how Google Wave impacts communications, and whether or not it truly is the replacement for E-mail. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, Technology.
Tagged with Communications, Google, Google Wave, Wave.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– November 22, 2009
As you might recall, last year I wrote a piece on Windows Vista, and the benefits it offered to the organization that I was working for at the time. With the advent of Windows 7, I felt it would be worth my time to do another piece on Windows 7. Many of the benefits of Windows Vista still apply to Windows 7, as Windows 7 is built on the OS re-architecture that Windows Vista introduced, particularly on the administrative end. With that in mind, I’ve only highlighted the notable changes (from my view) that would affect the way I work. Continued…
Posted in Featured Articles, Technology.
Tagged with AppLocker, BitLocker To Go, BranchCache, DirectAccess, VPN, WUSA, XP Mode.
By Wes Kroesbergen
– November 3, 2009
