As you can see, Blog Wranglers did a bang-up job in migrating my blog from Movable Type to WordPress. They even moved over my design and CSS. Reasonable rates, too. They’re pretty nice, especially considering they’re Yankees.

These fellas get the AlphaPatriot Stamp of Approval. Highest recommendation.

And you can take that to the bank.

Technorati Tags: Moveable Type, WordPress, Blogging, Blog Wranglers Rule

Dan Siroker left Google to work on the Obama campaign in the area of new media. He gave a presentation at Stanford about what he learned during the experience called How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election. It’s an hour-long video, but his presentation is the first 30 minutes with an extended Q&A session afterward (which is also worth watching). Go, see, learn.

Technorati Tags: Dan Siroker, Web Metrics, Technology in Politics

The following video features Nathan Myhrvold, the inventor of a laser powered mosquito killing system [think Star Wars for pests]. It was taken at this year’s TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design).
The laser tracks the mosquitoes, identifies the females by measuring the wingbeat frequency, and kills them with a laser.

The lasers in this video are harmless green pointers to demonstrate the technology. To see mosquitoes go up in little wisps of smoke see the second video at Mashable.
Kinda makes my grandmother’s electric bug zapper seem downright lame.
Technorati Tags: Mosquitoe Killing Laser System, TED, Nathan Myhrvold

The White House has released the 2010 Economic Report of the President as an eBook — available for Kindle, Nook and ePub (for Sony readers, iPhones, and so on) This is the first time that this report has released in eBook format.

Engadget quips:

Will this be the final step that truly pushes e-books into the mainstream? Probably not. But if this rapid adoption of technology by the White House is any indication, we could well see weekly Presidential addresses in 3D next year.

I’m wondering why the Kindle version costs 99 cents while the Nook and ePub versions are free. Didn’t my tax dollars already go for creating this bit of fiction?

Technorati Tags: Economic Report of the President, Lies the Government Tells, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice

There have been a few articles lately about Republicans making better use of social media than Democrats. I had my doubts, but PolitiFact.com investigates:

First stop: Twitter.

Earlier this month, Mark Senak, senior vice president and partner at Fleishman-Hillard, a public relations firm in Washington, D.C., issued a report titled “Twongress: The Power of Twitter in Congress” in which he analyzed the Twitter use of all members of Congress. The findings surprised him.

In Congress, he found, there are 132 members using Twitter actively: 89 Republicans and 43 Democrats. It breaks down like this: In the Senate, there are 14 Republicans using Twitter compared to 11 Democrats; and in the House, there are 75 Republicans using Twitter (42.13 percent of the Republican Caucus) and 32 Democrats (12.45 percent of the Democratic Caucus). . . .

What about YouTube?

On Jan. 21, 2010, YouTube’s CitizenTube posted a year-end wrap-up that showed 89 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of Democrats in Congress have started YouTube channels to engage their constituents. More importantly, people are watching the Republican channels much more often. According to the report, eight of the top 10 most-viewed and most-subscribed YouTube channels in Congress are from the GOP, though Democrats took two of the top three spots. The top 4, in order, are Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Ca., and Boehner.

A tracking of YouTube views by industry analyst TubeMogul shows that with few exceptions, Republican videos consistently drew more clicks than those from Democrats. . . .

And lastly, Facebook, the favorite of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin’s Facebook page has more than 1.2 million fans.

No one in the House has that kind of reach. And we couldn’t find any comprehensive analysis of engagement on FaceBook by members of Congress. But as of Jan. 22, 2010, Boehner had 31,757 fans of his page, compared to 8,745 for Pelosi. . . .

But while House Republicans may rightly crow about deeper engagement in social media than their Democratic counterparts, Senak. the author of the study, says neither side is doing particularly well compared to other large institutions. Both parties have a minority of members engaged in Twitter. And neither side has fully embraced the give-and-take of Twitter. Most members have elected to follow very few other people and rarely “re-tweet.” In other words, he said, they are mostly using Twitter as a soapbox.

In spite of the conclusion in final paragraph above, the fact that so many Congressmen have seized on modern communication channels is surprising. More surprising is the Republican’s lead, given Obama’s rather effective use of these channels during his campaign.

Technorati Tags: Republican Geeks, Social Media in Government

Baseline Magazine analyzed the last three months of IT job postings from job supersite Dice.com, and the findings are grim:

Worse yet, last year contract jobs made up of 40% of the IT available tech jobs, but they now account for 44% of the jobs. So companies are not only not hiring as many people as they use to, they are hiring even fewer permanent employees. Tech employers are not making a long term investment in human capital, which is a sign that tech companies do not see things improving.

But for the geeks looking for work, what areas are best?

I was without work for 7 months 2 weeks and 3 days in a job market that was shedding jobs faster than you can pull fur off a mangy hamster by petting it with a steel brush. 7½ months without work was a long, long time, but the shrinking job market made it seem like an eternity.

So I have a lot of empathy for the growing numbers of my colleagues that suddenly find themselves out of a job. I can tell you to approach looking for work as a full time job for which you must develop new skills. I was actively looking for gainful employment about 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for 7½ months.

But now I have a fantastic position doing interesting work for an organization that does a great deal of good in the world. Being one of those growing numbers of contractors, I don’t know how long this position will last, but take it from me — there is work out there if you are willing to make the connections and do the work of finding it.

Good luck, my friends, as we wait for “Change”.

A rather long post on The BEA / Oracle Saga over on my neglected IT blog for anyone who might possibly be interested.

Plumtree was a small company that had a complex portal product (albeit in the best-of-breed class) and minimal support. Trying to do a global implementation of Portal, Collaboration, Content Server, Studio Server and PT Tracker with a technical staff of two people and a tech writer was difficult (to put it mildly).

So when BEA Systems purchased Plumtree, I was quite excited. As long as BEA didn’t try to integrate Plumtree (a platform-independent portal framework) with Weblogic (a Java-based transaction portal), then everything would be fine. And they didn’t — all they did was rename Plumtree Portal to "Aqua Logic User Interaction", or ALUI for short. (And to think, some marketing major probably got paid a ton of money for that awful idea!)

But things didn’t improve. Here, in a nutshell, is why I would never recommend buying BEA ALUI:

1. Buggiest code ever commercially sold:
   Seriously, has BEA ever heard of quality control? There are bugs in the product that even the most cursory of looks should have found. So far this year, our (relatively) tiny company has opened new issues with BEA support at an average rate of one every 1.6 every business days. That is astounding. I once upgraded my production environment to a beta version of Datacom/DB on VSE and had fewer problems. Seriously.
2. Part-time support:
   BEA is a global company, as are we. But even though there are three BEA support centers spread around the globe, issue resolution does not "follow the sun". When BEA support in California goes home, so does any hope of getting an issue fixed. True, "production down" type problems gets the attention of the guy on call, but before you get too excited about that see #3 below.
3. Can’t set issue priority:
   If the issue isn’t perceived on the other end of the phone as critical, by a tech that does not know your environment or your business, then it is set to priority 3 or 4. No matter that you tell him that this is a production problem affecting the community of a member of the board (yeah, that would be the board that decides whether to spend any more money on technology from BEA).
4. Slowest support known to man:
   When you call in an issue, do not ever think you are going to talk to a tech. You leave a message and hope the tech gets back to you in the next few hours. SLA for "medium" issues (priority 3) is 24 hours, and almost all issues are entered into their database as medium.

   When you get a callback, the tech is going to do two things: ask for a description of the problem (no matter how detailed you were on the first call) and ask for you to send logs and/or trace files. Once you send the logs and/or trace files, the tech has another 24 hours to call you back. At which time he will ask for a GTA (go-to-assist) session that must be scheduled. At which time you can count on another slice of time up to 24 hours to go by until they get back to you with something to try. You then try something, call and leave a message, and they have another 24 hours to respond with the next idea. Well, you get the idea. End result — weeks go by before your issue is resolved.

5. Can’t purchase better support:
   We do half a billion dollars in sales every year, selling products in over 80 countries. Yet we were told by BEA that we are not a large enough fish to purchase increased support from them. They wouldn’t even name a price. We are not a Boeing or a Weyerhaeuser (both BEA ALUI customers), so they won’t even discuss it with us. What kind of vendor turns down an opportunity to extort more money from a client?
6. Upgrades introduce bugs disguised as "features":
   For instance, our last major upgrade (which required five new servers to reduce down time from a week to "only" one day) completely reworked the security schema in Publisher, and required over 100 hours work by the Portal Administrator to make changes just so people could publish content again. Oh, and did I mention that it opened up security holes so big you could drive a tank through it?

   For another instance, PT Tracker was replaced by something called Analytics. This "upgrade" took away ad-hoc queries in return for a few, canned queries poorly implemented in a web browser. To see any detail, the Community Manager must export the data to Excel. And what do they then see? Data for all projects, whether they have access to the project or not. So either we remove the ability to see how your community is being used, or we give you access to document names and forum subjects for every project. Do we really want lowly Community Managers being able to see that a document titled "Downsizing Options" was uploaded to the secret Strategic Planning project? I think not.

7. Must buy improvements:
   Plumtree was sold to us because it made publishing web content easy. It doesn’t. It is incredibly complex and takes hours of training to be a full-fledged Community Manager. Which is why most companies use a centralized group to set up communities, allowing users to then use news or announcement portlets to publish information.

   But BEA is coming out with Pages, a Web 2.0 product that is touted to deliver on the easy-publishing promise and is scheduled to replace one of the products that we already bought: Studio Server. Yet we are being told that we will be spending tens of thousands of dollars if we want this product. Oh yeah, and the licensing changes from user-based to CPU based so we’ll have to buy new hardware too. (We’d never be able to afford to run it on the hefty servers we already have.)

8. Support site rarely works:
   When attempting to gain insight into where your open support issues stand by logging onto the support web site, you are immediately presented with this announcement:
   

   Intermittent Errors – Profile Center & Service Request Portlets
   IMPORTANT: Due to problems with our back end servers you may experience poor response or time out errors in the Profile Center and in the Service Request portlets. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you that we are working on a resolution as soon as possible. Thank you.

   What makes this so bad is that this announcement has been up over a month (close to two, I think). In other words, a company that sells a portal product is having extended problems with their portal and can’t get it fixed!

   How’s that for an endorsement of their product?

9. Can’t get support reports:
   Speaking of the support site, to see what issues have been opened this year you must page through a list of the issues ten at a time and count them. There is no way of getting a report of last quarter’s support activity, average response time, average resolution time, etc. This is business as usual for most vendors. But no, if you want that kind of information from BEA then you have to buy the additional support package, which BEA won’t sell us (see #5 above).
10. Lack of newsgroup support:
    BEA has something called Dev2Dev which is where customers and employees can share information, code, and so on. Take a look around the ALUI groups and you’ll see that messages are posted infrequently, and even more infrequently answered. In fact, the most active (and useful) participants are from outside consulting firms.

The worst of it all is that BEA stock, currently selling at
$14 a share, is way overpriced. This means that a potential buyout by IBM, HP or Oracle (all of whom are rumored to be eyeing BEA) is improbable at best. But a purchase is the only thing that could possibly save this company. Oracle or IBM either one would whip the company into shape, coordinate product lines and provide world-class support.

Yo Larry, buy this company! Are you listening?

The big shocker at the Worldwide Developers Conference was Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs announcement that Safari (the browser used by Mac users for years) is being released for Windows. For you daring types, the beta is available for download now.

First impressions from a Windows user’s perspective:

1. Slow, slow, slow!!! In his announcement, Jobs said that Safari on Windows XP is twice as fast as IE. I ran it in side-by-side simultaneous comparisons and found that IE6 on Windows XP is over twice as fast as Safari.
2. The install tried to put QuickTime into my boot sequence not once, but twice. Thankfully, I am running StartupMonitor and was able to stop it.
3. Most sites work well (mine, for instance). I can watch videos on YouTube (like the one of Bush making his way through a wildly-cheering Albanian crowd), digg articles on Digg (like the story about studies that confirm that the death penalty deters crime) and look at the cool street view on Google Maps (like the guy breaking in or making his escape in SF).
4. Some don’t work so well. Although I haven’t found anything in the public sphere in my ten minutes of surfing, our it screws up some elements of the display on our company’s internal portal: inconsistent buttons and panes that are listed one after another rather than appearing side-by-side.
5. A couple of slightly irritating bugs, to be expected in beta software. For instance, if the window is maximized on my primary display I can no longer drop down and get my task bar to come up (it’s on auto-hide). Weirder is when I try to maximize the browser on my secondary display (I run side-by-side monitors) and Safari suddenly disappears! The only way to find it again is to right click on it in the task bar, choose “Move” and arrow the guy back onto the screen. It jumps left so far that it goes right off the display!
6. YouTube videos embedded in posts that I view in Google Reader don’t show.
7. The Google search works (yeah, I’m still number one when searching for “rousseauian“)
8. The flat gray look is boring, although I rather like the pretty blue thingies in the scroll bar.
9. It locked up every time I tried to log on to my Gmail account.
10. Did I mention that it is god-awful slow?

Still, it’s a pretty solid start. I’ve had more trouble with some “production” software, so you have to give Apple kudos for that.

What I don’t understand is Job’s reference to gaining “market share” in the browser market. Is there “market share” for something that’s free? Wouldn’t gaining “user base” be more accurate?

Update: Errate Security found 6 bugs (4 DoS and 2 remote code execution) in the first afternoon of fiddling with Safari, and was able to weaponize one of them. Click over to see links to others that have found bugs as well, including a different weaponized security hole. [HT to Slashdot]

The tech blogs are buzzing with the announcement of Microsoft’s Surface computer.

The coffee-table shaped device is exactly that — a table on which you can place objects (cell phones, wireless cameras, PDAs) which the device recognizes and connects with, as well as a 30-inch touch screen that accepts input from multiple points at once.

Six years in the making, it will be priced between $5K and $10K. So you’ll be initially seeing this at hotels, casinos and retail outlets (you’ll be able to use it to help pick out a phone at T-Mobile stores). But as with all technology, prices will drop soon making this the next cool toy for all the guys.

Watch this video from Popular Mechanics to see just how cool (click on the link for a larger version):

This is not only a radical new technology (new to the consumer world, anyway), it is a new approach to product development and marketing by Microsoft.

Microsoft Watch declares that Surface signals a sea change in how Microsoft does business:

Surface, which was developed in part by Microsoft Research, is coming to market from the Entertainment and Devices division—the same folks responsible for the Xbox and Zune. At least in the early years, Microsoft will provide the basic end-to-end hardware and software. There will be plenty of third-party software developer opportunities, as with Xbox and Xbox Live, but much less for hardware. Microsoft has no immediate plans to license Surface to other manufacturers.

In a separate article, Joe Wilcox applauds Microsoft’s marketing of the product:

The blog and broader news media reaction to this announcement will be interesting. If Jobs had made the announcement, it would have been heralded as another breathtaking Apple innovation—that “one more thing”—that sets the company apart from others. Will Microsoft get as much fanfare or credit? Probably not. Should Microsoft deserve big buzz as innovator. Probably yes.

One parting thought: “Home 2.0″ — you heard it here first, folks.