IT World Canada Blogs

On May 30, celebrate 6 Years of Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments

Rusell McOrmond

May 30'th, 2008 is the 6 year anniversary of GOSLING: Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments. We are having a party at the Parliament Pub, just in front of the parliament buildings in Ottawa. For details and any changes please see our website where we also ask people to RSVP so we can plan food. GOSLING started in May 2002 as a couple of informal Friday gatherings after work at the pub, to bounce around some ideas ahead of the first free/libre/open source software event hosted by the Government of Canada. We have been meeting nearly every Friday since. Our weekly gatherings are very informal. While we expect our 6-year anniversary party to be larger than any other GOSLING gathering in the past, it will be equally informal. I explain GOSLING to new people this way: We are are a group of private citizens who happen to have interesting day jobs. In our day jobs we come from all sectors of the economy including the public, private, educational and volunteer. We discuss technology, software and technology policy with a common belief in not only the benefits of Free/Libre and Open Source Software, but also the logic behind it being applied to things beyond software. I created an event on Facebook to quickly let friends on that system know about the event. This is not, however, an official group since my co-coordinator is not a fan of Facebook because it is not open enough. Forget for the moment whether you agree or disagree with him. This is someone whose day job is at the Treasury Board Secretariat of the Government of Canada, and is someone who thinks that Facebook is too closed to be used by GOSLING to promote our event. I believe it is important for people to meet members of GOSLING with our variety of interesting day jobs, as it allows people to recognize that there are people working inside government for a far greater level of openness, transparency and accountability. For those of us in the private sector, it help break some of the misconceptions we may have about people working in the public sector. Aside: In my case I don't consider Facebook to be any different than the BBS systems I helped administer and otherwise participated on in the 1980's. While the younger generation think Facebook is so new, it is in fact not all that different than what we were doing 25 years ago. The main difference is that rather than the number of concurrent participants being in the single digits, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent people on Facebook. Different participants at GOSLING have different areas where they focus. We have people who aren't programmers and come at these issues from a non-technical policy perspective. We have people who are operating system kernel hackers who have very deep technical backgrounds. Anyone who has read my BLOG knows that my main area of interest is in how the government regulates technology, such as through copyright, patent, telecommunications and broadcasting laws. And if these areas of law are boring to you, there are other people at GOSLING who agree and have other things they prefer to discuss. ITBusiness.ca and IT World Canada has discussed GOSLING in the past, including:

YouTube Fridays: Neil Young's JavaOne jam session

Shane Schick

I was originally scheduled to attend JavaOne this year, but had to back out due to a family emergency (which will also keep me on light blogging over the next while). Instead, we sent the talented Kathleen Lau, who covered the update on Open Solaris, a development platform called Project Hydrazine and more. There was one other particularly Canadian angle, however: a special guest appearance by Neil Young, who discussed the impact of IT on music. Talk about a case study for the ages.

Mobile phone-based coupons offer even greater opportunity for cheapskateness

sharky

Tired of fishing through their wallets for wrinkly, smudged (and, more often than not, expired) coupons, telecom providers in South Korea are offering retail customers the ability to access discounts electronically, through specialty bar codes that can be scanned at checkout. The money you save can then be passed on to someone else, according to Reuters. "SK Telecom rolled out a service a little more than a year ago called a 'gifticon' that allows users to send gift vouchers for items such as convenience store merchandise and pizzas via mobile phones. The sender is billed for the cost of the goods." Whoa, pizza and pack of smokes from the variety store? Thanks, big spender! Then again, the way data rates are going in Canada it won't be long before we're all more interested in clipping coupons, too. That's why they always say that love -- which is free -- is the greatest gifticon of all.

XP SP3 cripples some PCs with endless reboots

Shane Schick

More from Gregg Keizer of ComputerWorld U.S.: Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 sends some PCs into an endless series of reboots, according to posts to a Microsoft support forum. Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft Corp. and a prominent Windows blogger, has worked with users to tentatively identify the problem as involving only machines using processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Messages from frustrated users began accumulating on the XP SP3 support newsgroup Wednesday, just a day after Microsoft released the update to the general public. "I just installed Windows XP SP3 and after completing the processes and when the system reboots, the system cannot proceed to load the Windows," said a user identified as "Olin" in a message that kicked off a long thread. "It just displays the flash screen of Windows then after it reboots again." Most users who left messages on the forum said that they were unable to boot into Windows Safe mode — a last-ditch way to sidestep the normal boot process for troubleshooting purposes — or revert to a previously saved System Restore point. Some were understandably upset. "Way to go, Microsoft, releasing the pile of dung called SP3 that hoses your system so bad even Safe Mode isn't working!" said a user identified as Mike Voss. "Props to your QA guys, they certainly have done their job." Johansson, who watched one of his PCs repeatedly reboot after installing XP SP3, traded accounts with several other users on the newsgroup and summarized the results on his blog. According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality." Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn't normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes "a big problem," Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots. The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is "most likely not your problem," but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. "Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them," he said. Johansson also spelled out workarounds for both problems on his blog. The HP issue can be solved by disabling the intelppm.sys driver, while the second fix requires the user to plug in a USB flash drive before booting. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment early Friday, but someone identified as a Microsoft employee on the support forum had asked users to e-mail him information about the PC's system configuration and whether they were able to enter Safe mode, and to submit event viewer logs. This isn't the first endless reboot problem Microsoft's faced in relation to a service pack recently. In February, the company pulled a Windows Vista SP1 prerequisite update from automatic delivery because it was crippling some machines.

Dan Swanson's Security Resources: #4

Dan Swanson

My fourth column provides another diverse collection of leading resources. This week’s question: “How prepared is your organization?” If you have any concerns on the robustness of your disaster recovery, business continuity, and/or your emergency management capabilities, I’d strongly recommend you check out the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness. Studying for your CISSP? The CCCure.Org web site is the place to go! Feeling you need to ramp up your security training efforts? Check out ISC2’s comprehensive educational resource guide. Finally, have you been questioning who is responsible for information security lately? Study the views of an internal auditor. Enjoy. Good luck and have another great week. Dan Swanson Dswanson_2005@yahoo.com 1. The (ISC)² 2007 Resource Guide for Today's Information Security Professional - Global Edition provides the latest resources in educational references, year-long events listings and leading industry sponsors all in one handy downloadable reference guide. 2. The Systems Security Engineering Capability Maturity Model (SSE-CMM) was developed to advance security engineering as a defined, mature, and measurable discipline. It describes the characteristics essential to the success of an organization's security engineering process, and is applicable to all security engineering organizations including government, commercial, and academic. 3. CCCure.Org The CISSP, SSCP, CISM, CISA, ISSPCS, and SANS GIAC GCFW Open Study Guides Web site is dedicated to helping people in achieving their goal of becoming a CISSP, SSCP, CISM, CISA, ISSPCS, or GCFW. Over the years it has become a vast container of resources that can assist you in mastering the domains of the specific Common Body of Knowledge related to each of the above certifications. 4. Ask the Auditor: Who is Responsible for Information Security? The Auditor Responds: In short, the board of directors, management (of both staff and business lines) and internal audit functions all have significant roles in auditing information security. The big question for many companies is how these stakeholders should work together to ensure that everything that should be done to protect sensitive data is being done — and that the company’s key assets are protected appropriately. 5. The Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP) is a not-for-profit organization based in Canada & devoted to the promotion of emergency risk management to individuals, communities and organizations, in both government and the private sector, with the aim of reducing the risk, impact and cost of natural, human-induced and technological disasters. CCEP's objectives are to raise awareness of the increasing risks of disasters, promote the need for sound disaster management practices and disseminate information on the availability of professional expertise and resources, including technology. 6. What Should Your Business Continuity Efforts Focus On? A Reader Asks: Should your business continuity program (BCP) consider the impacts of emerging threats and changing business practices, and what are the key issues involved today? The Auditor Responds (Short answer): Your BCP and disaster recovery programs should be designed to respond to a wide variety of potential incidents, covering both man-made disasters, such as power-grid or environmental control failures, and natural disasters, such as hurricanes and mass staff outages due to epidemics. The long answer: http://www.itcinstitute.com/display.aspx?ID=2090

Great night at CDN’s Top 100 Solution Provider event

paolo

More than 200 solution providers turned out to see where they ranked on the annual CDN Top 100 Solution Provider list. Softchoice was again the top solution provider of the year, but they were closely followed by Insight Canada, Compugen and Xwave. It was the closest race in years. Following up in the fifth spot was MetaFore IT Solutions. To view the entire list please click here: CDN Top 100 Solution Providers. There were 12 newcomers to the list this year. The most CDN has ever witnessed. It is great to see smart and savvy new resellers challenging the established partners in the industry. It just makes everyone better, in my opinion. The award for newcomer of the year was handed out to The Herjavec Group, a security solution provider who acquired MetaComm last year. This company was established only a few short years ago and is led by Robert Herjavec, the former president of Brak Systems and current CBC TV personality on the show Dragon’s Den. The fastest rising company was Epic Information Systems of Winnipeg, who moved up an amazing 27 spots from last year. This company is great in the community as they have their own Technology Day computer show. This show has been put on for five years and attracts more than 350 people from the area. David Reid, the president of Epic, said at the show last night that Winnipeg is the fly over show capital of Canada. All the computer trade shows fly over Winnipeg to get to Toronto or Montreal or from there to Calgary and Vancouver. He said for this market to have a show they would have to do it themselves. And, I have to congratulate Reid and the folks at Epic for the effort and initiative. The event belonged to everyone in the channel. There were no runaway winners. All the people who attended I would consider winners, whether the made the list or they did not. Two people I would like to thank are Dave Neil of Neil Corporate Services who drove from North Bay, Ont., to make the event and Stuart Crawford of IT Matters of Calgary. Both narrowly missed making the list. I also enjoyed meeting people such as Gary McNally of Digica Solutions, another newcomer to the CDN Top 100 Solution Provider list. I enjoyed listening to McNally telling me about his company and his future plans for success. It was also great to catch up with Patrick Power, formerly of OAM and now with Nitro Microsystems after an acquisition. The Nitro/OAM deal is one of those classic cases of a win-win. Similar deals such as Compugen buying Orbex and Epic acquiring Prairie Computers are other examples of win-win deals in the channel. These win-win deals are rare, but they seem to happen more often in the Canadian IT channel. It says something about this community. I also wanted to mention Bill MacDonald of Genuit and Herb Roblin of Hartco. I enjoyed listening to both of them talk about their days at Compaq and IBM respectively. We can all learn a few things from these veteran executives who are still making waves in the industry. In closing I want to thank the sponsors for their time and attention to the CDN Top 100 event. They are HP Canada, Cisco Canada, Tech Data Canada, Symantec Canada, NEC Display Solutions and the newest sponsor AMD. Two quick hits before I go. I has come to my attention that Paul Patterson has left Lexmark Canada. Patterson is a great friend of CDN and an excellent channel executive. I wish him the best. Also Corel announced that Kris Hagerman, formerly Group President of Symantec's Data Center Management Group, has been appointed as Corel's interim Chief Executive Officer. Hagerman will replace the outgoing David Dobson, who accepted a senior executive position at a Fortune 500 company he has yet to name.

Three ways to boost your career from reading CIO Canada

Shane Schick

This blog will be a forum for Dave Carey, myself and readers to exchange ideas about better IT management, and I thought we could start off by looking back through a few recent issues of CIO Canada to go over things our online audience might have missed. Remove functions to test user demand: Like a lot of organizations, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) recently set up a Microsoft SharePoint portal to faciliate the exchange of content, including a "My Site" page that allowed users to see what documents their colleagues had been reading. “I took it down, but my staff asked me to put it back up. They said they depended on it to see what I was doing, and what I thought was important," Ronald Surrette, ACOA's CIO, said. Sometimes employees don't know what they want until it's gone. Don't hide behind the monitor: Vancouver's North Shore Credit Union did all the standard things to improve customer relationship management, like deploying the latest software. Then it did something else: created a "pod" style of teller station that removed the barrier between employee and customer. Although it was more of a physical architecture change than an IT change, it made a big difference. "Our tellers are encouraged to come out and greet clients, like in a retail setting, so we’ve eliminated the them-and-us type of thinking," said the credit union's CIO, Fred Cook. Embrace strategic flukes: Aeroplan recently went through a major SOA project, which was driven in part by a company push to a new non-air rewards program. That meant it was a lot easier to make the business case and get senior management behind it. Remi Lefrance admits it was kind of a fluke, but that's okay. "But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the whole experience it’s that this worked very well for us. I think it could work well for others too." Best practices come in all kinds of ways. Don't ignore the ones that come about as a happy accident. While we'll be updating this blog regularly, you can also keep up between issues of our print edition by visiting the CIO Canada home page.

Businesses desperately seek Web 2.0 understanding

Dan Mclean

Web 2.0 and social networking literally draws a crowd. During our Computerworld Live Tour breakfast on Feb. 20 at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto something of an attendance record was set for the number of IT professionals drawn to one of our morning technology discussions. A grand total of 109 folks came to hear the insights of Web Evangelist (yes, that’s his real title) Aaron Kim and Senior Management Consultant Kathryn Everest of IBM Canada as they discussed the mysteries of one of today’s most significant business IT trends – Web 2.0 and social networking. The topic was definitely a hot one. Much of the conversation focused on where these technology concepts had a fit with business in general and what are the particular redeeming values. A lot was said and many examples of Web 2.0 applications and programs were provided. Even more illustrations of social networking communities and properties were discussed. But at the end of the day, I suspect most people walked away with more questions than answers. These are difficult topics to address in a succinct and complete way. You can’t cover all the ground in a three-hour morning. And the deeper you dig into the what, how-to and why of Web 2.0 and social networking, the more you realize that there is way more than you might think that needs to be discussed and considered. Most of our Live Tour discussion on this day focused on people issues rather than the processes and tools. Attendees heard that successful adoption is not simply building Web 2.0 applications and processes or in the leveraging of existing social networking tools and resources, but more importantly it’s in changing a working culture so that it both understands and more importantly willingly embraces and uses Web 2.0/social networking to achieve value for the business. There’s no magic formula or universal approach to adopting Web 2.0, other than the general view that it’s probably best to start on something small, with an internal group. And the fact is that most businesses will probably initially fail before ultimately striking upon success. Kim brought up the great example of online communal knowledge centre Wikipedia and how it was a failure for three years. Coincidentally, however, the same company building Wikipedia was also engaged in a secondary online encyclopedia project and the content created in that project was ultimately used to seed Wikipedia. That’s when things exploded and Wikipedia took off. The lesson learned here was that you often need to kick start – in this case with content – most Web 2.0/social networking projects. Simply building it doesn’t guarantee they’ll come and, in fact, they probably won’t. There were lots of other great lessons and examples. Kim succinctly pointed out why businesses should care about Web 2.0 and social networking. The most obvious and perhaps most important reason is simply that a businesses clients and employees are demanding it – particularly those from the younger (sub-30-year-old) age demographic. “By 2010, 40 per cent of the workforce will be [from a current age group that is 30-years-old and under],” Kim said. They grew up with computers and the Internet. That’s reason enough for businesses to quickly embrace Web 2.0 and social networking, and figure these things out fast. Here's a link to the presentations given at this Live Tour session

The official ComputerWorld Canada Blogging Idol press release

Shane Schick

We published this over Marketwire yesterday as part of the marketing campaign.

Be a BLOG IDOL with Computerworld CanadaCanada's technology source looks for the next great tech blogger, with thousands in prizes on the line

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - April 21, 2008) - Computerworld Canada, the country's leading magazine and online source of enterprise technology news and opinion, today announced BLOG IDOL, a talent contest to find the next great computer technology blogger.

"We know there are a lot of talented and insightful bloggers covering the technology market in Canada," said Shane Schick, Computerworld Canada editor. "We want to give them a forum that exposes them to a wider readership base, and let that audience be the judge of whose content is most relevant, useful and entertaining to them."

BLOG IDOL contestants will be given a theme to explore each week from May 19 to June 13, 2008. The winners will be determined by traffic generated, audience support and overall audience weblog ratings. Canada's BLOG IDOL - the tech writer generating the most traffic - wins $1,000 cash. Other prizes include a Nikon CoolPix digital camera and gift certificates from Starbucks coffee.

"This blog-for-money BLOG IDOL contest is a great way for us to engage our readers and kick-start the dialogue about the issues that are important to information technology professionals today," Schick said. "We're thrilled to be offering the opportunity to let our readers shape that dialogue."

Contestants can enter at www.blogidol.ca to enter the tech blog competition to win prizes. Registration opens April 15, 2008. The deadline for registration is May 2, 2008. Winners will be announced June 17, 2008.

Computerworld Canada is a publication of IT World Canada, part of the worldwide IDG family of enterprise technology publications and Web sites. Other IT World Canada publications include Network World Canada, CIO, CIO Government Review, Computer Dealer News, and the online-only PC World Canada and ITBusiness.ca. IT World Canada is now the largest enterprise technology news source in Canada, with a staff of award-winning writers, editors and artists. Visit IT World Canada online at www.itworldcanada.com and subscribe to our weekly subject-specific newsletters on enterprise applications, desktop resources, voice and data networking, public sector technology and more.

Are we ready for tomorrow’s user?

Kathleen Lau

At Accenture’s Global Convergence Forum last month, the consulting company discussed how the high-tech, communications and telecommunications (HCT) industries are in for a 10x growth opportunity in light of an increasingly converging world. Accenture said it expects the traditionally linear user experience equation will be complicated by new factors in this new converged world: new spaces, faces and places. Not surprisingly, there will be the digital age user – born between 1978-2006 – who perceives IT as a natural component of their lives. But less obviously, citizens will play a role as they increasingly look to IT for work and recreation. Also, the middle-class will emerge alongside a diminished affluent market. And, markets like China and India will emerge. But this predicted 10x growth can only be reaped by those businesses that know how to harness that opportunity. In particular, they first need to acknowledge that a converging world creates a new kind of user, and with that user comes a new set of expectations, and even challenges like diminished loyalty. In theory, that sounds straightforward enough: acknowledge user needs and tailor products and services for those specific needs. But even today, before the linear equation has yet to become overly-complex, user expectations aren’t always met. The mobile market, for instance, often churns out gimmicky gadgets with cool functionality that satiates the hunger of the early adopter and technology enthusiast. But the early adopter and enthusiast form but a niche market. Yet handheld devices are a ubiquitous technology, and the average user is often sidelined by the vendor in an effort to go to market with cool products. Even today’s mobile developers admit the average user is an untapped market yearning for practical functionality for every day use. If we can’t meet the more basic expectations of the average user in a pre-converged world, harnessing that golden growth opportunity that tomorrow’s world of new markets and new users promises may be trickier than we think. Perhaps figuring out how to conquer existing markets is a good way to prime oneself for a new world of complex emerging markets.