davidbanes.com

It’s nice when reputable research firms call something out that’s aligned with the Cleartext road map…

See below… ‘Messaging SaaS will take off.’

and…

‘IM and presence integration with email clients will improve, and become an increasing expectation. This will, in turn, increase demand for unified IM, and XMPP-based systems will grow as a consequence’

Also… “Spam’s being beaten”, something I’ve been seeing as an inevitable outcome heading into 2010 onwards…

Click through for the full read.

Published by Packt Publishing, written by Mayank Sharma (ISBN 978-1-847195-26-5)

I’ve spent the last month or so reading this book and my summary is that it’s worth buying if you’re looking for an easy way to setup an enterprise, standards based IM (EIM) platform on your OS of choice. Openfire runs as a Java app in application servers such as Tomcat and has been around for a long enough to be stable and reliable, a good book along side it helps smooth out the learning curve.

The books title is slightly misleading in that your first impression might be that it’s about Openfire administration only. In fact it covers most of the ‘family’ of solutions around Openfire, like Spark, gateways to legacy IM (MSN, AOL etc), web chat and VoIP. There are even a sections on preparing for an EIM rollout, directory integration, multiple locations, clustering and archiving.

Each chapter is easy to understand and the chapters themselves follow a logical order with some good background information on Jabber (XMPP). Openfire’s open source community delivers most things you’ll need for an EIM solution and this book is a great way to kick off that process.

‘Apple shipped more iPhones during the quarter than all the Windows Mobile devices shipped worldwide by Microsoft’s partners, according to Canalys.’

More here…

That’s the comment from the new Microsoft boss, the other Steve (Ballmer). Which just about sums up Microsoft. When you have a monopoly you can keep trundling out the same technology with a new GUI year after year and the clones* will buy it.

What Ballmer doesn’t get is that there are still a lot of people that think technology is exciting and that innovation is as important as a sound business plan for investors. But then this is the guy that said something about the iPhone being a bad idea as well.

I understand that once the technology gets to mainstream someone needs to make some money out of it, I suppose that’s where Microsoft comes in, buy the tech, bundle it into the resellers and then you can return some ‘value’ to your investors. That model has worked well for Microsoft for years.

I suppose when you’re stuck in old tech it’s difficult to break out, Microsoft vs Google, it’s a bit like NASA vs Scaled Composites (who Virgin Galactic selected to build their space plane).

* All those people and PC manufacturers that are happy with forever iterations of Windows clones, 95, 2000, XP, Mobile, Vista, 7 etc.

The Register is reporting that IBM is working on a new platform for web based conferencing, looks like xmpp is in the mix.

Well I’ve made it onto the Board of the XMPP Standards Foundation, see our press release. This is a significant thing for me, having been pushing Jabber/XMPP since about 1999 when Cleartext ‘version one’ was developing an Enterprise IM platform called CipherIM.

That product was modelled on the SMTP architecture with a proprietory plain text protocol. I soon ralised that this was a mistake and the last version of the CipherIM client was in fact built on the Jabber protocol, later to become XMPP.

There are big things ahead for XMPP now Cisco own Jabber Inc, look at the way Cisco has pushed the IronPort brand and products into their client base. I feel sure XMPP has a good shot at becoming the protocol of choice for human and machine based communications.

I thought I’d post this, even though it’s not the sort of contect I usually post, because it was a bit tricky to get going. A few steps to getting the Axigen (32bit) mail server running. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been waiting to upgrade my MacBook after moving from a 15″ PowerBook a while back, we’re now heavily invested in Mac’s at home and at the business, and in FireWire storage. It’s already at 2Gb RAM, had a new battery and HD upgrade.

I’m also a bit of a minimalist, always gone for smaller laptops, the PowerBook being the exception that proved the rule, a bit big to lug around.

So I was gobsmacked when I discovered that the new MacBook has no FireWire! This creates a few issues for me;

• Either I go back to the larger form factor of the MacBook Pro
• Get a MacBook Air.. oh wait, no FireWire there either
• Throw away all our FireWire kit and buy USB … Doh!
• Stay with the old MacBook

Looks like the last option is my only realistic one, at least I won’t get any grief from the Financial Controller

What were you thinking Apple.

I’m convinced, but that doesn’t mean I’m right, that if Jabber/XMPP had strong gateways to other networks early on it would have got bigger sooner, here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been asked couple of times recently about Phorm, NebuAd and similar technologies, so here’re some links to get you started.

The following two transcripts of some Security Now episodes from Steve Gibson of GRC (Steve coined the phrase ’spyware’) give a good intro.

http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-151.htm
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-153.htm

This is the vendor that’s caused the most ripples… used to be called ‘121media’, if you know anything about spyware this will cause your hair to stand on end:)
http://www.phorm.com/

More links…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
http://phormwatch.blogspot.com/
http://www.nebuad.com/