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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow….

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but my dear, you’re so delightful, so as long as we have electricity… let it snow, let snow, let it snow.

“Screen shot” literally… you can see the screen in the picture.  Same problem with the other pictures I took with my 11 year old camera.  However, I am NOT opening the door and the screen or going outside to take a picture.  Maybe I’ll open the front door.  Wife shouldn’t complain too much, right?

Monday, December 15, 2008

Proud of my brother John

Today I got the official word from my big bro…

“three book hard cover deal”

Yes, my brother’s first published novel, and they liked it so much they have signed him to a three book deal!!!

I’ll have links “soon” to where YOU can buy a copy of his book.  I know I will figure out how to get copies of them all.

Very proud I am.  He has worked SO HARD on this.

I’ll share more information as I get it.

FOLLOW-UP:

Publishers Marketplace 12/18/2008

FICTION: SCI-FI/FANTASY
John Pitts’s BLACK BLADE BLUES, featuring a female blacksmith who
unintentionally reforges a magical sword, and must use it to slay a modern
day dragon, to Claire Eddy at Tor, in a three-book deal, by Cameron McClure
at the Donald Maass Literary Agency (World English).

Saturday, November 29, 2008

www gets a new look

I decided I wanted a more professional looking site for my professional face (i.e. http://www.dpitts.com), so I have started redoing it.  I got my widget working for AIM communication and I am going to tweak it more.  I’ve got my tabs working.

The next step will be to put it in drupal and to make the areas a bit more dynamic.  Mostly to give me another opportunity to mess with drupal (I’ve done 2-3 sites already).  I want to tie it in a bit more with my blog.  Eventually, I’ll use a similar design for my blog so I have consistency, but I don’t want to lose my mooses, so I’ll have to work those in somehow.

Any suggestions are always welcome.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Software as a Service - A response to Scatterbrain

Scatterbrain had a posting (http://klcollins.org/2008/11/17/software-as-a-service/) where he responded to an article on zdnet web site (http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=609&tag=nl.e539) about a company saving a considerable amount of money by switching from internal exchange servers to using Google mail.

I was going to just leave a comment on his site, but as I thought about it and started responding, it was enough that I thought I would put it here and share with both my readers. So, the “you“‘s in this response are to Scatterbrain… you are intelligent, you can figure it out....

--- a response ---

I think you are glossing over MANY issues and questions that need to be addressed. However, to boil things down, I can EASILY see where moving your company’s mail to Google would be valuable, good, wise, and the right move. However, I would be speculating on a lot of things in making that argument. So, let’s stick with the article and the information it provides.

Your contention, based on the question, “who owns the data?”, is that if a company uses Google mail (or any other 3rd party service) then they cease to “own the data”. This is ludicrous. Ownership of the data never changes. However, what does (potentially) change is the network(s) that the data goes over and where it is stored.

The article stated that they had:

800 users
18 countries

They also stated that they were using Postini. Postini is a hosted message security and compliance product owned by Google. Hosted where? Google servers.

So, in their environment, ALL the data is already going to Google servers.
In their environment, ALL accounts are already set up on Google servers.

Your next argument was that once the data leaves your premises, It leaves your control and you have no idea how it is handled, who is handling it, and what’s being done with it.

Umm… this is the internet. That already happens.

You make a case for all the data being in your care where you can ensure that backups happen. It runs in your own colo facility. You control the process end-to-end.

Okay, so you use a colo facility. So, your data goes over a network that you do not control, where others have access, and you have no visibility. Thus, it is not internal. It is mostly internal, but not completely.

To bring this back around…

You state that interanl corporate collaboration data needs to stay internal.

My question to you is why?  Is the data such that if it got out it would substantially harm the business?  I would suspect that for MOST data the answer is no, it is not.  There is probably a few pieces that might fall into this category.  My response to that is then the wrong medium is being used.  Try the phone.  Oh, sorry, can’t do that based on your response - as you certainly do not control that public utility.  Try a fax… nope, again, public utility.  Oh, I know… try printing it out and hand couriering it.  Lawyers do that for sensitive stuff, so there is a precident.

--- end response ---

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

electing… but who?

Well I am going to have to decide today.... Palin, Obama, McCain, Biden… tough choices… not sure there is a right answer and not sure there is a wrong one either.