Scott Walters Exploring Stuff

Here’s a great article from Canada on international adoption, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wlAdoption0317/BNStory/lifeFamily and in particular sibling group adoption which my wife and I are currently working through.

Even more interesting is to read people response to the article. See http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wlAdoption0317/CommentStory/lifeFamily#comments where you get to see how the “politically correct” people think they have the right to tell parents how to raise their adopted kids.

ScottWalters Adoption international adoption

Interesting to look at how the company that makes the flash/flex etc does training, and also a flashback to ColdFusion delveopment.

The ColdFusion 8 project-based curriculum is designed to teach experienced web developers how to create dynamic, database-driven web applications using ColdFusion 8.

http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/teach/cfcurriculum.html

ScottWalters Web ColdFusion, Web 2.0

An article on Fairfax by Melissa Fyfe (March 22, 2009) gives a bit of an insite into a government IT department thats in melt-down. See http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/vic-police-risk-computer-meltdown/2009/03/22/1237656745663.html

The article claims the Victorian Police Force are underfunding, have identified risks but have done little to manage them.

There’s also a bite about outsourcing. Apparently in 1999 IBM took on the IT business are combined with cost overruns and

after IBM had been running the IT for seven years, the force effectively lost control and knowledge of its systems. “Victoria Police operational environments (were) being dragged into gridlock,” the report said. The force has since diversified its contractors

Just an interesting read, make of it what you will.

ScottWalters Government, Technology Government, Victoria

Always good to see what people are searching for. Just a top 10 list of search terms by category.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633050

ScottWalters Uncategorized

Zamanta http://www.zamanta.com is a blogging discovery tool which supports various browsers such as Firefox and discovers blogging content that can be connected to the blog entry thats being written.

Basic function is to read what you’re typing into text fields and find related content.

From my perspective this actually looks like a good tool.

ScottWalters Uncategorized

Time to kill IE6! some things make you smile. Yes can we please get rid of IE6… unfortunately on this side of the firewall we don’t have everything certified for Mozilla / Open Standards, we still have IE6 functionality that is essential to certain business apps actually working,… but aside from than yes please bring down ie6!

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.” - Jeff Zeldman, standards guru

http://www.bringdownie6.com/

ScottWalters Web web standards

OK, I’m a little behind the news on this but Google has now finally released Urchin 6.5. Google bought Urchin a few years back and reused some of that technology in the Google Analytics suite. Google Analytics is fine as long as your in the public space but just doesn’t work for intranets and “behind the firewall” knowledgebases.

http://www.google.com/urchin/index.html

ScottWalters Technology, Web enterprise 2.0, Google, Urchin

A problem with cloud computing, what happens if your private documents are shared with people without your permission. Admission from Google that this has now happened with their services.

http://www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com/google-shares-your-private-documents/

ScottWalters Security, Technology Cloud Computing, enterprise 2.0, Google

Alph Bingham discusses open innovation, differentiating it’s tranformative power from “closed innovation” by referencing diversity, virtual capacity and risk sharing.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/now-new-next/2009/01/open-innovation-beyond-the-buz.html

ScottWalters Strategy, Technology Open Innovation

http://www.cio.com/article/389613/Three_Things_the_CIA_Learned_About_Implementing_an_Enterprise_Wiki?page=1

I’d imagine the CIA is extremely sensitive about information published to a Wiki so its good to see what they see as important.

The 3 items:

1. Appropriate access policies. some people can only view, some can edit, wiki divided into public, secret and top secret areas.
2. Start small. Basically people need to get comfortable with the technology and the change in process.
3. Move process out of channels and into platforms. Eg, instead of the email to 50 staff just put it on the Wiki.

ScottWalters Technology enterprise 2.0, Wiki