VMware View 5 Testing Notes

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Cameron Sturdevant

VMware View 5 admin console at the beginning of my eWEEK Labs test run.

Here are some, “now you know” tidbits that I’ve gleaned from setting up and testing VMware View 5.

Cameron’s Checklist of People You Need for a View Project:

  1. View project lead
  2. Desktop OS expert
  3. Desktop Apps experts
  4. Tablet and/or Smartphone experts (for View Client testing/roll-out)
  5. MS SQL Server -or- Oracle admin
  6. Network staff, traffic and remote access
  7. VMware ESXi admin
  8. MS Active Directory expert
  9. Storage experts
  10. License analysts
  11. Help Desk

Call outs that are worth calling out again:
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Last Minute Tech Gadget Gifts

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Cameron Sturdevant

For around $30, the Isotoner SmartTouch gloves are a great last minute tech gift.

Last year I got myself a pair of Isotoner SmartTouch gloves at Macy’s. I love these gloves and would get them again in a second.  This year I got pitched on a couple of related touchscreen gifts from Newer Technologies: NuTouch Gloves and the NuScribe 2-in-1 touch screen stylus and pen.

Before I relate my experience with these 2011 gift ideas, let me say a word about my Isotoner gloves. Best. Gift. Ever. The only thing I lose faster than an umbrella is gloves. But not these SmartTouch lovlies. The conductive fibers in the forefingers and thumbs are stitched in such a way that they form a pretty accurate finger press area. That means typing on my HTC EVO 4G smartphone is fairly accurate, even on a jouncing BART train.

The gloves are warm enough for train commuting in Chicago, flexible enough to comfortably grip a phone and stylish enough to pass for a night at the San Francisco Symphony. I also like that the palm and inside finger surfaces are crisscrossed with a slip-resistant pattern so I always feel confident that I have a firm grasp on my phone. I bought my gloves for $30 and that’s about how much they are this year.

Okay. So how did the $11.99 NuTouch Gloves hold up?
Meh. On the plus side the conductive fiber is woven into the tips of all ten fingers. And that’s about it. During tests with several Ziff Davis (the company that owns eWEEK) staffers the most common complaint was that the broad finger press area led to inaccurate typing on a smartphone. On a tablet, (we used an Apple iPad2 and a 7” Samsung Galaxy Tab) the larger key area improved typing accuracy.
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AT&T’s Purchase of T-Mobile Collapses; Let the Finger-Pointing Begin

Posted on December 20, 2011 by P. J. Connolly

There will be some unhappy people this Christmas now that the acquisition of T-Mobile from AT&T is off the table. But I won’t be one of them, and I can say with a straight face that it has nothing at all to do with my crush on The Girl in the Pink Dress.

T-Mobile spokesmodel Carly Foulkes

With the collapse of AT&T's plan to acquire T-Mobile, Princess Carly dodges the Death Star, but what sort of future awaits T-Mobile?

Nor is my lack of concern driven by the technological mismatch between the two GSM carriers. I may never understand why T-Mobile chose to use the 1700MHz band when the rest of the GSM-speaking world had placed itself squarely on 850, 900, 1900 and 2100MHz, but I know that in doing so, the carrier shot itself in the foot and kept pulling the trigger.

No, I just didn’t see what was in this for anyone except shareholders and executives of the two companies. For the rest of us, it looked like another set of phony promises of efficiencies and synergies, and finally, after years of toothless “regulation,” someone in a position of power – in this case, the combination of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission – called shenanigans on the whole mess.

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BMC Continues Discovery, Dependency Maps with ADDM 8.3

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Cameron Sturdevant

Information to build new models is entered in through a browser-based interface.

BMC is using a simple browser-based form to let data center application owners provide basic configuration information such as network protocol and port use so that the operations team can more quickly generate dependency maps.

Version 8.3 of Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping became available as a virtual appliance at the end of October.

I spoke with BMC’s Bill Emmett about ADDM. “Before, one of the biggest challenges was model construction because the effort was falling only on the operations staff. The collaborative application modeling interface lets app owners provide basic information that can be used by operations to significantly speed up the mapping process,” Emmett said. Continue reading →

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Casual Attitude toward Corporate Data Brings Dangers, Study Finds

Posted on December 14, 2011 by P. J. Connolly

Newsflash: College kids are careless.

Okay, that’s not exactly stop-the-presses material, but thanks to Cisco, one can now get an idea of how careless they actually are. According to the company’s 2011 Annual Security Report, released today, over 85 percent of college students have allowed someone – even a stranger – to use their computers without any supervision.

Henry L Stimson; variously, Secretary of State and Secretary of War

Henry Stimson's concept of trust might fall apart when confronted with today's socially-focused young employees.

Although I’m a subscriber to the concept of trust espoused by former Secretary of State and War Henry Stimson – that gentlemen and ladies should be trusted in the absence of proof to the contrary – even I have to shake my head at numbers like that. I don’t like to use other people’s computers any more than I like having to use a public toilet; after all, the worst thing I’m likely to pick up from one of the latter is a nasty case of staph. Continue reading →

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Just git pushed the WordPress 3.3 update. Watching for assorted explosions now…

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Jason Brooks | Comments Off

Vendors Working to Add Manageability to Kindle Fire

Posted on December 12, 2011 by P. J. Connolly

So it seems that this year’s hot technology gadget is the Kindle Fire. Although it seems to be dredging the ranks of potential customers for other devices such as the Apple iPad, the Amazon tablet is selling well enough, and with a software update expected to be released between now and Christmas, the big question for IT is: “How do we support these things?”

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet

With employees as well as executives expected to bring their shiny new Kindle Fires to the office after the holidays, how will IT balance the need for access with the responsibility of managing these devices?

For now, the safe answer is “we don’t.” That’s because until this morning, there were exactly zero companies offering mobile device management tools for the Fire. That’s going to change soon, and it looks like Fiberlink will be the first MDM vendor to announce its plans for the platform, although it’s not clear yet when the company’s MaaS360 cloud-based service will be able to cope with the Fire.

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Penguin Computers, Assembled in Silicon Valley

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Cameron Sturdevant

Racks of Penguin Computing systems are assembled in Fremont for delivery to HPC/supercomputer users around the world.

I think Fremont, Calif. counts as being part of the Valley, so I was shocked to find out that Penguin Computing has an assembly line there. People actually assemble racks of high performance Penguin designed computers, along with high speed storage and network interconnects for both cloud providers and private data center users.

As part of my on-site visit this morning, I also learned a bit more about Penguin Computing On Demand (POD), which enables a kind of IaaS/PaaS hybrid capacity on demand offering for customers already using Penguin hardware.

But let’s get back to the assembly line.
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Right now I’m working on a review of Apprenda’s .NET PaaS. I’m struck by how much less convenient dependency-installation always is w/ the Microsoft stack, compared to Linux. I wonder how CoApp is faring these days…

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Jason Brooks | Comments Off

HP to Set webOS Free: License and Timetable Unspecified

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Jason Brooks

This morning, HP shared, in vague terms, its plans for the webOS mobile platform that the company picked up (before dropping, and then sort of picking up again) in its 2010 acquisition of Palm, Inc.

At this point, there isn’t a whole lot to say about the announcement (not that that’ll stop us in the press from saying a lot). Much will depend on the license HP chooses for webOS and on the project framework that HP adopts for its semi-discarded mobile platform.

Reviewing the scant info that HP has provided so far, here’s something that stood out for me, a remark in the Hello World post on the webOS developer center blog: ”We recognize that there’s a larger open source community of which we will now be a part, and are excited by the future now open to us.”

See, that’s really isn’t how it works–companies don’t simply heave a sack of code over the fence, and watch as it’s swarmed by value-adding open source community members. The software developers and hardware makers that HP may be counting on to make this work have to find reason enough to invest in the platform that HP has just deemed fit for (at least partial) divestment.

Also, open source software always played a large role in webOS, starting with the platform’s Linux core, so HP and webOS was already part of the open source community, though perhaps they didn’t see it that way. If that’s the case, it’s not a good sign.

relevant morsels from the press release:

HP will make the underlying code of webOS available under an open source license. Developers, partners, HP engineers and other hardware manufacturers can deliver ongoing enhancements and new versions into the marketplace.

HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:

  • The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform
  • HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
  • Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
  • Software will be provided as a pure open source project

HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space.

via HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source.

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