Ontic Oren

Installed Fedora 7 today. Notes and observations:

I don’t know why, but it took over an hour and 30 minutes to install on my MacBook Pro in VMWare Fusion Beta 3. Fedora Core 6 took under 20 min.

They have added an interesting hardware reporting tool - Smolt. The client runs on first login (two screenshots here. All sorts of interesting statistics, including right now VMware is the #2 HW platform they’ve seen installed @ 6.6%. Another one, it looks like they’ve had 10,000 updates in the past 2 days. Those are some interesting usage numbers.

The X server seems to have built in support for VMware of some kind. I get the nice transparent mouse control thing where you can just move the mouse out of the VM and the host gets control back again.

Nice add/remove software controls. Cote seems to be infecting the world with his big fonts. My god, the pacakge manager fonts are big. BROWSE! Still not as slick as the ubuntu synaptic manager. Polish isn’t there, still a little overwhelming. Project Indiana take note.

It turns out, business is hard. One of the hardest things is knowing who to be worried about. Due to so many external worries, most companies decide to limit the internal competition. “Don’t cannibalize our own sales”, or “don’t release a product that undercuts this other product.”

This doesn’t work. We’re in tech. Tech is an innovation driven industry. As Clayton Christensen points out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, if you wait till the innovative opportunity is large enough it’s too late. Will Herman over at 2-speed has a great blog post on this today: Cannibalize yourself.

We should all be looking for ways to put ourselves out of business, every single day. Play both sides of the innovators dilemma - cannibalize yourself on the low end with new innovative products, and use the freed up resources to focus on the high end as well. If you don’t, someone else will.

Looks like google updated their analytics program. Very web 2.0 now and pretty. Great usability, amazing features, free, I love it.

But why can’t I group or bucket my data? I have very peaky traffic, and would love to see data by week, instead of by day. grrr.

Technorati Tags: google analytics

I don’t know if I’m “special” in a shortbus kind of way, or if most tech people are like this, but I’m obsessed with keeping up to date on the latest versions of my software. Clearly with the success of sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker I’m not entirely alone.

But keeping up always has it’s costs. Today, thanks to the truly awesome Sparkle module that all the cool mac kids are using these days, Adium prompted me to download and install an update. Easy peasy, and I’m running 1.0.3. Which crashes. And crashes. And crashes again. And crashes. Waste 20 min online, find there’s a bug, and downgrade. But ick.

I’m also running these days, and using a Nike Plus which I love (look for a post on it shortly). Yesterday, after a nice 5K run, I plug it in and iTunes offers to upgrade the device. Of course, I say yes. And somehow it loses my 5K run. It’s on some screens on Nike’s site, but not others. Grrr.

Finally Steve pointed to an interesting blog from Illuminata: on outdated virtual appliances. The beauty and attraction of a virtual appliance is the “just works” aspect. But what happens when “just works” means also up-to-date. As the above examples show, it’s a real challenge. But frankly it’s a challenge that is eminitly resolvable. One way: provide tools to easily roll the appliance, and have the project maintainer keep their own appliance (thanks rPath!) Another might be to provide auto-updating functionality as part of the core appliance platform, along the lines of what Sun Connection offers. Or maybe we just need sparkle for appliances. Regardless, this is going to be fun!

Technorati Tags: virtual appliance, rpath, Sun, virtual appliance, sparkle, Adium, update

One of the products in my team is Sun Connection. It’s a great patching tool, with a ton of happy customers. Now, if you’re like me you can read a thousand pages, see a ton of slides, but until you play or see the product, it’s all meaningless. So without further ado, a great 10 min demo on Sun Connection

Technorati Tags: Linux, patching, Solaris, Sun, Sun Connection

Charlene Li @ Forrester has just posted a new report and blog entry on “Social Technographics”. The chart below may be worth the price of admission.

Any sun and mac people know the answer to this?

When I post in Ecto to my Sun blog, the blog entry shows up as pending for exactly 7 hours in the future. Clearly a timezone issue, but I sure can’t find where to fix this.

For those reading this at 4:40am PST - see!

Technorati Tags: ecto, lazyweb, mac, music

Last months HBR featured their annual “Breakthrough Ideas” section. 20 essays that will “satisfy our demainding readers’ appetite for provocative and important new ideas”. Ranging from nanotech to accounting, they are all at least worth reading. One in particular has really stood out though.

“The Accidental Influentials” by Duncan J Watts & Peter Dodds disputes the main premise of “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. The main point: the network must be ready for the changes to occur.

…Even the most influential members of a population simply don’t interact with that many others… if people in the network just two degrees removed from the initial influential prove resistance, the cascade of change won’t propagate…”

My favorite line:

…just as the size of a forest fire often has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest.

So what does this mean? First, it’s important to recognize the limited impact of “influencers” (A-list bloggers) to a larger population. Word-of-mouth is king. Second, it’s actually possible that blogging somewhat pushes the bounds of this research, as it precisely provides a podium from which one person can reach many.

Technorati Tags: Business, HBR