trips, earthquakes and nda's

After Educause there is life, or at least something resembling it. In this case a whole lot of vendor visits, all of which are under nda so I can't really blog about them except to say that I've been to

- Microsoft at Redmond
- Apple at Cupertino
- Google at Mountain View
- VMware in Palo Alto

all of which was kind of cool. VMware's building was opposite the original Xerox PARC which was also pretty cool. Now as Microsoft are in Redmond, which is a suburb of Seattle and the rest of them are back in the valley (ie Silicon Valley) this involved a flight from Seattle to San Jose.

And on the flight I sat beside a guy from Microsoft who was not impressed by Vista and it's performance. as it was a private conversation I won't name names or reveal details but let's just say it was pretty honest and pretty direct. Let's just say some engineers prefer XP over Vista.

Just after we landed in San Jose there was a magnitude 5.8 earthquake. Not that we felt it in the back of a banged up shuttle bus bouncing down the freeway - just another bump in the road. Nothing at all like listening to Grace Slick belting out 'When the earth moves again'. When we got to the hotel everyone was still standing about, half afraid it might be a precursor to the 'big one'

In the event it wasn't even though aftershocks continued the next day.

In the middle of this we went to Stanford to see what they were doing with educational technology, which was kind of provocative, not because it was massively hi tech but because of the very clear vision that they had that learning technology was there to build engagement, and that it was a set of enabling technologies, not an end in itself.

Two other interesting points were that while 92% of students own a laptop at Stanford, not a lot of them carry them round campus on a regular basis - battery life and weight tend to make your sexy macbook seem like a boat anchor by the end of the day.

The other interesting thing was that anyone at Stanford (staff and students) can hand out a giest account to anyone else to allow them to have web access - really as a way of getting round not having any infrastructure like eduroam in place.

And while we were at Stanford we took the opportunity to catch up with the CLOCKSS people - the ANU is about to sign up to become members of the CLOCKSS project and we felt it would be useful to touch base with them and ensure that our undertandings were aligned.

Like all such projects they're amazingly small - six talented people doing wonderful things with long term digital preservation and a digital content escrow service - I'll blog about CLOCKSS and our role in it separately in another post.

Educause ...

Educause, for those of you who don't know, is the biggest university IT conference in the US, and for that reason draws people from all over the world, including me.

In fact it's probably the largest in the world and as a consequence provides an unrivalled opportunity to meet vendors and discuss things, see new cool and sexy things, etc.

Also allows people to present papers on things they've been doing, etc.

So if you work in IT in universities, sooner or later you end up at educause. In my case it took me more than 20 years, but that's because I worked in the UK for 17 of them, and the UK does its own thing (some of which I helped organise [shameless plug for past career]).

So Educause. Theme was all about collaboration, often targeted towards VLE's (Virtual Learning Environments - a much better term than LMS, Learning Management Systems), and by extension identity management, after all you need to know what roles, or in a student context what courses, someone is signed up to to manage access.

There also was a great sense in which US universities were grappling with the web 2.0 phenomenon, either in how to engage the attention deficit generation and stopping them going off and using resources outside of the course material, or indeed how to build wiki's blogs and the rest into the learning experience, especially the desire to provide a social networking environment.

One got the distinct impression that a whole lot of universities were not enamored of the participation age, and there was a great difficulty on adapting to group share rather than individual efforts.

Along the way there were some interesting snippets:

Email outsourcing:

Microsoft and Google locked in a battle to handle outsourced student email and calendaring. The intereting thing is that Google had done a deal with Umea in Sweden, and given that Sweden is kind of sesnitive about personal data that was good.

Microsoft were handing out windows live test accounts. I'll blog on this separately once I've played with windows live, but it's an open secret that windows live will provide exchange integration allowing faculty to stay on locally managed exchange and yet integrate with the students on windows live.

yahoo and by extension zimbra were not making a pitch for anything although it's my guess they're trying to catch up.

Zotero

keep notes and references? used endnote? tried furl, digg and the rest, try zotero. A little firefox plug in that lets you track references and cittations, personal archives of websites and the rest.

What's more, the coming server edition will allow you to build server baswed portfolios of what you're working on for input to varios reporting processes as well as sharing with colleagues in the field. Google for it. It's worth it

Overall:

the conference was kind of uneven. Some presentations were better than others. Most were fairly mediocre but the trade show was good.

Overall pretty interesting.

Web pages on the move

not only am I moving house, my web pages are on the move as well. Rootshell.be, which used to provide me with a shell account are shutting down.

I've moved my pages to http://au.geocities.com/moncur_d, an altogether a less classy address and one supported by nasty intrusive advertising, but then not everything in this life is free :-( (and I had to do it in a hurry)

My pages will move again if I can find a better home for them

global crash ...

now those of you who havn't been paying intention may have thought that the global economy had righted itself.

Not true.

Take a look at the Northern Rock fiasco in the UK. Last night the ABC showed an equally dire warning about the impact of the US sub prime mortgage crisis.

Very grim. Makes the tech wreck look like a christmas party.

But interestingly they failed to mention this simple and slightly frightening piece of logic:

US mortgage holders in part re financed their houses to buy additional consumer goods

The demand for these items in part fueled the staggering economic growth in China (where else do you think large screen tv's and ipods come from?).

This economic growth led to the mining boom in Australia

This mining boom led to our (Australia's) recent stellar economic performance and let us ride out the drought and other economic problems. It also allowed us to but these self same consumer goods given we don't make anything in Australia any more

So if the US doesn't buy consumer goods from China, the Chinese economic miracle stops suddenly. This stuffs Australia and leaves us on a very dry continent that can't currently feed itself due to the drought and no way of buying imports as no one then wants our mineral exports.

As they used to say in university exams - discuss ...

OOXML, ODF, PDF and long term preservation

There's been a lot of talk over the last few days over Microsoft's attempts to get OOXML - basically their new xml based document format set, which includes docx, the new and non backwards compatible document format for word.

Now there's a lot of argument about OOXML and ODF (the open document format used by Open Office among others) as a standard for documents and by implication their long term archiving and accessibility, because let's fac it no one cares very much what format an ephemeral document is in as no one plans to access it three years down the track.

But since the world's gone digital we do care about the electronic documents as they might include important things like contracts, where what you want to be is assured that what you are seeing in 2011 is what you filed in 2007.

This is where thinking about pdf gets to be useful. PDF arose in the days of multiple word processing formats to provide a common, non revisable document format. Basically a pdf file is a munged postscript page description file such as a printer would interpret to put marks on paper. It's good and it works. And Adobe did something remarkable. Even though pdf reamains a proprietary format Adobe published the format specifications, and subsequent revisions and were happy for people to write tools to create and display pdf files. Which is why we have xpdf, preview, ghostscript/gsview, and a number of other third party tools. Adobe reckoned that this would make the format much more widely adopted and that they could make enough out of selling their pdf creation and manipulation tools. Hell, they even give away the viewer for free.

And revision after revision Adobe have continued to do that. And they have published a long term archival version, PDF/A that is essentially PDF 1.3 as the lowest base version universally supported that all their software will always be able to read.

So we end up with a de facto open standard, and a file format we know that can be read even if Adobe was to disappear, and to be frank, we trust Adobe to do the right thing purely because they always have done so in the past. And as a further display of confidence building, Adobe has submitted PDF 1.7 as an ISO document standard, in other words cementing it's status as a publically available and well known format.

So ODF is in a similar position. It's well known, open, documented, and consequently you have a high degree of beleif that it is possible to write a program to parse and manipulate ODF format files. Furthermore it has been adopted as a file format standard providing that degree of assurance as to what ODF compliant means and also for the long term accessibility of files in that standard.

Then we come to OOXML. OOXML is basically Microsoft's response to ODF. As part of their attempt to maintain their market share they are attempting to turn their document formats into a set of standards. Of course by doing this they have to open up their file format and als oy means that they can't tweak and fiddle with the format they way they have done between various version of word say.

The arguement is really about how tight the standard is. Microsoft have a reputation for being assertive in preserving their market share and in the past have tweaked file formats to give their products an advantage. Microsoft's draft standrad has been rejected because of alleged ambiguities in the draft, and the unspoken worry that Microsoft will carry on in their own monopolistic capitalistic ways by exploiting these ambiguities.

If the standard is tightly enough drafted to avoid these loopholes the problem goes away - if Microsoft tweak things, they like any other software manufacturer in the same circumstances would be in breach of standard. It wouldn't matter that they had originally authored the standard.

Of course Microsoft could silence all the critics by adopting ODF but realistically that won't happen.

The bottom line is that people don't trust Microsoft on the basis of past performance and some of their more gross abuses of their monopoly position. That's sad, but that's how it is. It also doesn't mean that Microsoft is intrinsically evil, the computer industry is littered with examples of similar abuses of standards and formats, it's just that Microsoft have been around for longer and have been a bit more blatant in their behaviour.

You might notice that I've never mentioned XML in this piece. That's because it's irrelevant to the discussion. The concern is about how tightly drafted the standard is and how open it is, not how the file format is encoded. The XML-ness of the format is a red herring as is shown by the success of the postscript-like pdf format.

Scrybe ...

as is well known, I like playing with online calendaring and diary management solutions. Well, I'm probably late to the party, but I've just come across Scrybe which looks to be an absolute killer.

Only problem is that the beta's currently closed to new users so I can't do a contrast and compare with Zoho, GoogleCal and Remember the Milk.

However, it's worth checking out the websit and the you tube video to get a flavour of what it might be able to do for you ...

Plone as a software archive manager

One of my colleagues, who has been playing with Plone recently has come up with an idea that is absolutely breath taking in its simplicity:

Use plone, which is a web content manager as a software archive. You can upload disk images as documents, add descriptions and structure the information. Given that what we wanted out of the software archive was a solution that, to users, looked a little like mirrorservice.org but was easy for the people managing to add information about packages and software to it - seems ideal

After all we're just managing content.

Wish I'd thought of it (green with envy)...