As everyone is talking about China, it’s inevitable that security will creep (or leap) into the discussion. The 37th Parallel blog has a great article up by Scott Granneman with a real life example of something that’s going on and his speculation about why it’s happening.
We just changed the configuration of our mail server and as a result my Outlook AutoComplete Cache was now wrong for a number of addresses, including all of our internal addresses. While some people find AutoComplete to be annoying (and it’s easy enough to turn off – go to Tools | Options, click Preferences, click E-mail Options, click Advanced E-mail Options, and uncheck “Suggest names while completing…” – ok – that wasn’t so easy), I’ve always loved it and it was massively annoying to start having emails bounce from people I work with every day.
So – like a good user – I started trolling around in Outlook looking for a way to clear the cache. I knew how to delete an item one at a time (simply highlight it when AutoComplete suggests it and hit delete). However, after a few minutes I couldn’t find the answer.
Fortunately, there’s this thing called a Help file and thankfully F1 still brings it up. I tried the offline help just for grins. No go – it told me how to delete one at a time, but I already knew that. I then tried Microsoft Office Online. Voila – Reset the nickname and automatic completion cache. The directions on the Microsoft site are a little tedious – if you don’t know your way around the filesystem, they are perfect for you; if you do know your way around, the instructions are as follows:
I feel clean again.
I’m often wrong (but never in doubt) and – after spending the day at PDC and an evening with a number of the project leads for various Vista technologies – it feels like 2006 is going to be Microsoft’s year.
Microsoft has been kicked around plenty the last few years by the likes of Google, Yahoo, the press, and many participants in the software industry. However, during this time, the Microsoft money machine has continued to generate cash at a prodigious rate. The home of “build it cheap and stack it high” is about to have two major project releases (Vista and Office 12) that will be relevant to over 500 million computers during the next few years. Vista, Office 12, and all the supporting technology, dev tools, platform layers, and web services equate to a massive force of change which – if history is a guide – will result in a huge amount of money flowing to Microsoft and many of the members of the Microsoft ecosystem.
I arrived late to my dinner at The Palm tonight and was roundly applauded for being the last one to show up by the cast of VCs including Ann Winblad, Allen Morgan, Rick Segal, Chris Pacitti, and Scott Maxwell with someone suggesting I was late because I was blogging (well – ok – yeah – that was part of it.) After listening to the Microsoft folks and the questions being bandied about, it is clear that Microsoft has an incredible wave of innovation building that is going to be released in 2006. When I compare this to the energy at PDC – which was a high as I’ve ever experienced at a developers conference – it’s easy to get excited.
Now – if we can only get them to say “Open Source” instead of “Shared Software Services” life would be a little easier.
As RSS becomes more popular, it’s inevitable that people will begin talking about security and companies will release “secure RSS related products.” Before the feeding frenzy on RSS and security begins, it’s useful to step back and think about what is already in place and available. Greg Reinacker – the founder / CTO of NewsGator – takes a crack at this in his recent post titled “RSS ‘security’”.
I’ve written in the past about the importance of APIs in today’s “web application” world. Chris Law – an early employee of Tribe – has just created a Wiki that is a directory of the publicly available API / web services. There is a corresponding blog to help report updates and changes. Many of the expected APIs are already listed, but there are some good ones that are off the beaten path such as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Pathway (cPath) Database and NOAA’s National Weather Service.
If you’ve got an API, or know of one, contribute to the Wiki.
I’ve used del.icio.us some over the past few months as I’ve played around with user tagging. However, I’ve been struggling with tagging – I use Firefox and am an “in context” browser (e.g. I don’t want to end up on another web page when I do an action like “tag” something.) So – my use of del.icio.us was a lot lighter than I thought it would be since it “broke” the way I browse.
The VeryDelicious Firefox plug in solved this for me when I stumbled upon it today. It’s perfect – I now have a toolbar in Firefox that lets me add up to three tags for a web page without leaving the page, knows my existing tag list (so I can choose from them), and let’s me go directly to my del.icio.us page for a specific tag. Worth checking out if you are a del.icio.us and Firefox user.
Charlie Wood has a great example of enterprise RSS up and running in his Spanning Salesforce application. He’s gotten good buzz around it, even without putting out a press release. Consider it an early example of combining RSS with an API to get data enterprise data from a hosted application via RSS.
Simultaneously, Ryan Martens pointed me at the new Salesforce.com CRMSuccess.com blog. Built on top of Typepad with the feed by FeedBurner, this is an outstanding example of an enterprise blog that highlights a specific application (in this case – Salesforce.com) as well as “best practices” for this application (in this case – CRM).
Now – here’s a feature that’s useful for all the Gmail addicts in the world. Now, you can have your “From” address be anything you want for an email you send from Gmail. Finally.
Historically, if I sent an email from Gmail, it came from brad.feld@gmail.com. Now – I could set the reply-to to brad@feld.com. But – I couldn’t change the Send. Groan. Not good. Simple feature. Been around forever. Critically important to egomaniacs with simple to remember email addresses that aren’t afraid of spam (er, um, …)
Gmail just added the ability to customize the “From:“ address on outgoing mail. Much simpler, and much more interesting to me than Google Talk.
Or is that “everyone is chatting about twittering?” Google released Google Talk yesterday. While it’s an obvious first step, it’s unremarkable. Apparently, in response, Microsoft released MSN Messenger 7.5. A minor upgrade. And lo and behold – Skype announced SkypeWeb and SkypeNet. Ah – another API! Much more interesting.
I’ve been using Google Talk all morning. It’s fine. I’ve been using Trillian for more than two years. It’s “better than fine.” I’ve been using Skype (and SkypeOut) for all my phone calls in August (and some chatting). I like it much better than Vonage, although everyone tells me I just need a different phone and Vonage will be happy again (I’ll try from Boulder when I’m home next week.)
I’ve been using IM in some form (AOL, then Yahoo, then Microsoft, now all three via Trillian) for the past five years or so. It’s remarkable to me how a limited, light weight chat client can get so much buzz. Now – while it’s clear where Google can go with this – it’s now got to go there.
As I was writing this, one of the guys in my office sent out a love note:
“If any of you have a gmail account please send me your gmail e-mail ID and I will invite you to use Gmail Talk if you have not already gotten an invitation – this is really good. Excellent quality – better than skype, imo and effortless to use. Download of client took 15 seconds and I was up and running – amazing!”
True, but can you call me on my cell phone with it? Yeah – I know – soon.