Pattern Finder

Picture: Bunny

When we came home this evening from a book fair at Sarah's middle school, Sarah spied a bunny in the front yard who eventually hopped into the back yard. Sarah had a camera, and I had a camera, and we just stood there snapping away. He seemed to decide, "OK, these humans seem be be fixated on taking a picture of me, so I'll just sit here and pose for them" -- which he did for about five minutes. I took this picture from 15 feet away with a Canon PowerShot S3 IS. Image stabilization was at work, since the zoom (35mm equivalent) was 398mm, the exposure was 1/25 of a second, and I shot it handheld.

Boston Pictures

I attended the Vignette Analyst Day in Boston today, and took some pictures walking to and from the Sheraton Boston. Here are the highlights. The first two are of the Christian Science Church:

 

The next two are of Trinity Church:

 

The last one is of a cornice of a building on Boylston Street:

See, It's Proof I'm Using Windows Live Writer

For those wondering what the Temporary Post Used for Style Detection is doing on my blog, it's an artifact of my installing Windows Live Writer on my laptop. Live Writer generates the post to detect the CSS styles in the blog and sometimes is unable to delete the post. The bad news is, I can't either. My Typepad view of my blog doesn't think the post is there, so I can't flag it for deletion. Apparently 23,000 other bloggers are in the same boat.

Supposedly it's fixed in the forthcoming version 2.0. Let's hope.

(By the way, I figured out how to get rid of it from the front page: I republished my blog.)

The Achilles Heel of SaaS-based Collaboration and Content: The Data Seige

The recent article in The New York Times about the month-long denial-of-service attack against Estonian institutions is a prediction of the future. To summarize, in April, Estonian authorities moved a bronze statue of a World War II soldier from a park in Tallinn, Estonia to a military graveyard. The Russian-speaking minority in Estonia protested, via riots and online denial-of-service attacks. The electronic attackers first overwhelmed the Parliament's e-mail server; they then went for other government agencies, banks, and newspapers. This was highly organized: "The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each." Estonia's largest bank, Hansabank, continues to suffer assaults and so far has losses due to these denial-of-service attacks of at least $1 million.

This story becomes relevant to the content management world due to the arrival of SaaS-based collaboration and content services. In February, Google announced Google Apps, Premier Edition (GAPE); a while later, Salesforce.com said it was going to field an offering; meanwhile, Microsoft continues to move ahead with its Office Live service. While SaaS-based solutions are attractive to enterprises because they offer a pay-as-you-go alternative to traditional software, they also create a larger target to attack. The vast majority of companies today keep their documents and schedules behind the firewall, so an attacker has to single out a specific company to go after. If Google has its way, it will sell GAPE to many enterprises, and indirectly make it much easier for attackers to bring down businesses by selecting just one target: Google.

At this point, we are nowhere near having a critical mass of companies using a SaaS-based collaboration and content service, and it's not a foregone conclusion that Google will lead the market. Nevertheless, it's worth keeping the risk in mind.

Testing Out Windows Live Writer

Burton Group is in the process of putting together group practice blog (for example, the Application Platform Strategies blog is at http://apsblog.burtongroup.com), and we just had the CCS phone call about blog logistics.  Being basically lazy--oops, I meant to say concerned about keeping my productivity high--I wanted to see if I could use Windows Live Writer to write one post and send it to both blogs. (Pattern Finder is hosted on TypePad, and the practice blogs are as well).

I must say the install was painless, and I'm impressed that the software figured out that I already had a TypePad account for Pattern Finder.