Let’s look at the situation from both the cloud provider and the organizations point of view. For IT departments, monitoring every movement of the corporate data is a cumbersome task. IT departments are at a point now when each staff member, regardless of position, is expected to be multi-skilled and handle various issues. So, you sometimes have the system administrator running to a manager to resolve an issue which should normally be handled by the IT helpdesk. A system administrator by default is usually tasked with the role of ensuring system uptime, stability and continuous system improvements. In today’s world, that line is no longer visible and every IT staff is expected to be able to handle any role in the department – including the IT manager or CIO. I have seen cases when even the CIO of an organization has been placed in a situation where he or she has to assist a user with something as trivial as formatting a document in Microsoft Word. Like I said, it is a multi-faceted role. If you have a senior person in your IT department unwilling to share the workload of the entire team, you have a problem. But this article doesn’t focus on crappy IT people you have to work with. Instead, let’s look at the situation. As an IT department with all services hosted in-house, an IT professional can have a rather full day dealing with multiple issues. There are servers to monitor, PABX systems, network issues and end user experiences. All of this is a classical daily routine in the life of an IT department. And all of this costs more money to manage on a yearly basis. If your IT department is spending more time diagnosing issues and fixing broken keyboards, as a top level manager, you should be concerned. Just as the role of any department is to perform tasks that take the organization forward and also provide a return on investments, the IT department is no exception. In fact, if anything, the IT department would be playing a pivotal role in this area. The rule of thumb for any business is simple. All departments or units within the organization align to the overall strategic goals and vision of the organization. So why is your IT department spending time fixing issues instead of assisting the organization achieve its overall objectives? Fixing a keyboard or running around cable tying wires is not making the organization any money. If your organization is serious about achieving its strategic objectives, the IT department needs to be involved from the very outset because it is the technology enabler and in today’s world, that enabler is a core component in the foundation of any strategy. Why should it be spending time running a repair shop instead of one which assisting the organizing by aligning technology with business needs? Why the organization sinking money into legacy based models just so there is is a pretty server room? If your finance department team one day decided to stop working and spend their entire time hunting down where a box of staple pins had gone to, are they aligned with the business strategies? This exercise would be wasting valuable productivity time.

Let’s look at the same IT department but in a scenario where there is a hosted service provider and the IT department only manages the primary and redundant links. All the users connect via terminal based solutions, including laptop users. The IT department spends its time actively engaging with other departments, gathering requirements and discussing new strategies which require technology as the enabler. The solutions provided will yield a substantial return and the IT department is actually working with the organization to help achieve the goals. The service provider is under a very strict SLA and has to provide a very high level of uptime (99.999%) and there are levels set to determine rate of payment should the uptime level decrease. There are independent audits factored into the SLA to ensure the validity of the uptime reports provided by the provider. If you look at this model, you realize the bulk of the role has been moved out of the IT department and the pressure points that the IT department had to deal with daily are gone leaving the team with room to provide value adding solutions to the business. This is the way the world is beginning to go and cloud based service providers are offering fully fledged hosting solutions that ensure organizations get the same or improved levels of service by leveraging of their services. The costs dramatically go down because licensing is slashed and hardware management is no longer the organizations problem. The initial investment is steep but for those organizations with managers and a leader who is able to see the real picture (so few exist!!!), they quickly recognize the benefits.

The world is moving out of the legacy mode of managing an IT department. If you’re going to keep a pet elephant, at least work out how to get some return on that investment by putting it work on the right things and help you achieve those elusive strategic goals. Have a great week!!!

From a global perspective, the world got to witness events that changed our futures in many ways. Bin Laden got blown away and the uprisings in the Middle East heralded a new era in the way the Arab world managed its political affairs. As a new generation of youths emerged, it was clear that they wanted a change that would see a more democratic style of governance and a more transparent one. The downfall of Mubarak was perhaps the first ominous sign of further demands for change. As the world watched in amazement, the power of the people became apparent although it was firmly resisted during the early days and many lost their lives for a cause they believed would change their country’s destiny and improve the lives of the ordinary citizen. Finally, the government imploded and Mubarak was forced to flee the country he had governed for over a decade. His actions during his days in power were seen as those of a man who had committed atrocities against his own people and he was hunted down and brought back to Egypt to stand trial. The military took over control of Egypt and has been firmly holding on since the uprising. It would not end there and the cue was taken up next in Syria and Libya with Libya becoming a battleground for democracy. I followed the Libyan uprising closely and the footage I saw showed a country that went from a peaceful (outwardly) one to a wasteland as one man stupidly clung to power and a belief that his people still loved him. Gaddafi, dressed in his typical clothing and surrounded by people who also shared his misguided beliefs decried that the US and the rest of the world had a hand in seeking his removal. He was not wrong. He was wrong about how the world was doing it though as he screamed on public television that the US was sneaking into the houses of every citizen during the night and injecting all the youths’ with drugs and other cocktails. But the need to remove a dictator was apparent and the ensuing battle which resulted in the death of hundreds of citizens was considered mere collateral in the quest to secure his position. That was not to last and finally after weeks of battle which also saw the UN becoming involved in the hunt and the subsequent demolition of nearly all of Libya’s capital, Gaddafi was caught hiding in a sewer, pulled out, paraded in the public then shot by someone who has remained anonymous since. Although there have been many claimants to the killing of Gaddafi, there is always an air of speculation as to who had done it because the shot was fired suddenly while the crowd was surging around him. Nonetheless, the death of Gaddafi will be seen both as a blessing and a curse to the people of Libya as they will now have to work out who will take over the effective running of the government, the country and how the people of Libya can once again return to a normal way of life. Given that Libya is a country with rich oil reserves, the people in power will need to prove to the citizens that they will not become corrupted over time with the idea of money and instead help build a nation that will become self sustaining and a place all Libyan’s can call home.

For the rest of the world, the global financial crisis continued to play havoc with the economies and a number of countries including Spain were tipped to become bankrupt. But the major focus shifted to the US whose credit rating was downgraded by the S&P and the near failure to honor its debts after the US government had a deadlock revolving around raising the credit ceiling. The situation became very tense and many thought the US was going to default. Luckily the mess was avoided and the ceiling was raised at the very last minute. But it showed fundamental flaws in the US financial management systems and also exposed the weak position of the US in terms of its ability to manage its debts and declining credit position. The global financial crisis will continue to make headlines through 2012 as countries face economic issues which will hurt the smaller countries that trade with these larger countries. I suppose to a large extent, we in Fiji were fortunate enough that we have large banks such as ANZ and Westpac which really bore the brunt of the crisis and managed to sail out of them through prudent lending measures and ensuring a balanced interest rate ratio. I know there has been a lot of flak about who lending and investment rates differ so much but the truth is that you have to be working in a financial industry to know why the ratios are structured the way they are.

Finally, 2011 was a year when the world lost a man who was probably the most difficult CEO to work with but one of the best innovators of our time. Steve Jobs died at the age of 56, a few weeks after handing over the reins of Apple to Tim Cook. Jobs had been battling with cancer for some years and while his health took a major hit, his passion for developing products that have revolutionized the world never wavered. The Apple brand of products are treasured by individuals as if they’re made of rare materials to an almost cult styled fervor. The belief that simplicity and a minimalistic design is what consumers prefer, the company saw a change in the way it created products which set it apart from Microsoft today. While those who had crossed paths with Jobs agree that he was an extremely complex and difficult man to work with, they also agree that his vision for creating the perfect products right down to the color schemes and size of the icons. CEO’s are generally expected to remain aloof and make capital decisions instead of operational ones. Not Jobs. He wanted to be in control of everything and he went to the extent of replying to emails sent to him by consumers. No other CEO is known to spend time directly engaging with consumers on a daily basis and Jobs managed to create a sense of personal connection between him and consumers which probably increased his products popularity. Even the marketing side was tightly controlled and Jobs believed that marketing strategies defined the success or failure of a product no matter how good it was and he made sure that everything in his ads went exactly the way he wanted them to go. This was also clearly demonstrated in his presentations and the way in which Apple unveiled each of their products. The world has definitely never seen a man who presented things in such a unique way. It also explains why Bill Gates once exploded and told people that Jobs was just a salesman who could talk his way through a mess and sell you a product. Whatever the case may be, Jobs has not only changed the ICT world, he has changed the way we perceive product design and end user experience which is something that carries more value than anything else. Rest in peace Steve.

I hope 2011 was a good year for each of you and that 2012 brings bigger better and brighter things. Have a great year!!!

For the world of computer addicts, the world of cars is probably as uninteresting as the world of Narnia is to the people who are addicted to cars. Who on earth would want to ride a silly horse which can go as fast as the wind when you can buy a Bugatti Veyron which goes faster than the wind and also creates a mini cyclone as its drives by? Computer addicts also have special moments when they open the box of their first new computer or an upgrade. They treasure the moment when they take off the Styrofoam and wrappings then fire up the machine or literally set it on fire depending on what they bought the machine for. If you’ve read the book titled “Hackers” and watched the movie with the same name, you would have noticed that kid who hacked into the oil company accidentally and then later got arrested. In one scene he is shown grabbing his computer as the agents try to drag him and his contraption out the door to the police station. I’m not too sure how accurately that moment portrays a geeks love for his or her machine but obviously the movie did well given that Angelina Jolie is in it. I suppose with Jolie in any movie, it’s bound to be a success somewhere along the way.

Anyways, that is beside the point. The point that I’m trying to drive at here is that Christmas is around the corner and we’re all looking at the latest fashion and tech deals to fill our Christmas hamper with. In my case, Christmas came a little early when I got my hands on a Blackberry Playbook. I hear the Apple fanboys already mumbling and the slow hissing from the crowd building up but you’ve got to admit that no one really gave the Playbook a fair chance. The problem was that as soon as it came out, competitors did everything to malign the device to the point where they simply said it is nothing like an iPad and I agree with them – it’s far better because of the size and features of the device. It is the perfect device for anyone who is a Blackberry fan and anyone who needs a tablet that will not require subscribing to an additional data plan. The word tether does not apply here because tethering results in your MSP billing you for the tether. The Playbook uses your Blackberry’s Bluetooth connection to link you to the Internet and if you don’t want to use the Bluetooth connection, you can always fall back to using a wireless connection via WiFi. Given that there are so many connections available in Suva for WiFi, you wouldn’t have any issues getting yourself online. I love the McDonalds WiFi because it’s the perfect place to be at any given time and I am able to grab a bite to eat while browsing through the news websites and updating my social pages.

In addition to this, the Playbook beats the iPad by a mile with its dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 processor and PowerVR SGX540 GPU. I don’t really care here that the iPad has better looking graphic because as far as I’m concerned, I don’t plan to look through a microscope at the screen (what’s with the retina display hype?) and I’m more than happy with the fluidity and response provided by the OS while I use the device. The touch screen based keyboard is fantastic and there’s a lovely 5MP camera with 1080p video recording at 30fps for photo enthusiasts. But what really pushes the Playbook over the iPad is the fact that is supports Adobe Flash and I’m impressed by the quality and speed at which the Flash elements load which means YouTube fans will love the browser as it’s more than capable of handling multiple Flash streams given that the processor is able to handle the load all at the same time while a user multi-tasks (REAL multi-tasking as opposed to the Apple concept) away between getting work done and also squeezing in some R&R. I’ve not had the opportunity to try out the video calling feature but just like Facetime, you would need another similar device to be able to get the video calling going and you would also need WiFi to get a good quality video session.

I spent some time watching videos on the Playbook and also listening to the sound quality – the Playbook is really good for travelling because you basically hook up the device to your computer via cable, WiFi or Bluetooth and copy over all the media you would need to have with you while on the move. There’s no fiddly media player synchronizing required as you would need to do with an iPad nor do you need to convert the media. It’s basically push and go so you use the device like a USB drive with a very high quality screen. Battery life is impressive as well and rivals the iPad easily even with the Blackberry Bridge switched on (BlackBerry Bridge is an app you can download to your smartphone to get access to your email, calendar, contacts, memo pad, tasks and BBM—all on the large tablet display).

The overall look and feel of the Playbook is also impressive. Holding it gives a solid feeling and it handles well because of the rubber styled backing which means that you can be sure you’re going to be able to manage the Playbook with just one hand. The iPad lacks in this area because it’s slightly larger and more fragile but I suppose the difference is in the thickness as people generally prefer something thinner which they can move around with and the Playbook is slightly thicker to the point where holding it can become a bit of an issue after a while. I suppose if there is anything to complain about here is that the Playbook lacks apps for now. The Blackberry App World is still in the process of getting apps compatible for the Playbook and until the next update of the Playbook OS comes out, users are stuck with downloading Blackberry apps. The upgrade coming next year will allow users to use Android Apps and access the Android Market for apps they can run using the Android Player which will come with the update. RIM isn’t releasing too many details about when the update will be coming out and has shifted the dates a few times but it will happen early next year. Once this happens, the Playbook will easily find itself a niche in the market as more and more users switch to it given the access to the Android apps.

All in all, the Playbook is a great tablet and its fun using the device to the point where I’m able to do everything including typing this article and posting it through the Playbook. Have a great week!!!

Fast forward to today and the tables have turned. The IT department is no longer the same IT department and it now plays a massive role in the running of any organization. The rulebook has been torn up and chucked aside. Geeks are no longer geeks – they are able to take centre stage wherever they go because of their savvy styled dressing and smart talk (although some of those old styled geeks still exist) and they generally possess a few qualifications which others usually have a hard time gaining. The rule of thumb has changed over the years and we now recognize that the competitive advantage can only be achieved if you have a robust IT team and are at the forefront of technology, embracing new ways of marketing and streamlining manual processes through automation. I am fortunate I was born during a time when computers were just beginning to takeoff in Fiji and the Internet was still in the dial-up days. Microsoft hadn’t integrated Internet Explorer at that time and my first machine was a 386 running Microsoft Windows 3.11 for Workgroups (forget about domains then!!!). But over the years I came to realize that computers made a huge difference in the way we work. I also came to realize that Fiji would always be a little behind the latest technological changes and sought to teach myself as much as I could about IT by accessing the Internet. At the time, I had no clue what a server was or what it was even meant to do. My belief was that information was all stored on each user’s machine and that if someone wanted information, they would use the floppy disk to transfer the information from one machine to another. It was much later when I got the chance to see a network in action in an office that I suddenly realized information was flowing everywhere the cables were connected. Someone at the office later showed me how the server played a critical role in ensuring information was stored centrally and accessible to the right users depending on their permissions. Servers for me immediately became a major interest and I’ve always emphasized that even if your client machines go down, you must ensure the server connectivity and uptime is maintained because a server going down will take longer to restore then a client machine. You have to realize that the first thing a client machine will need access to when it is back on its feet is access to the servers and this includes the email and corporate drives. It is pretty useless if it doesn’t have access to the data and may as well remain broken. Most IT professionals believe that a server downtime is not a major issue if clients lose connectivity for 10~15 minutes. That’s crap. A client without server connectivity for anything beyond five minutes (I allow 5 minutes because it usually take the IT department 5 minutes to arrive at the scene depending on whether the stairs or lift is used) is no longer just an IT issue – it’s become a business issue because the organization is now losing money and productivity time is being wasted as there is a unit which is not functioning or able to provide its valuable input into the daily functions of the business. As a good IT professional, your primary task is to ensure server uptime and connectivity is available at all times – it is your most pivotal task and if you can’t achieve a minimum 99.998% yearly uptime, you suck at your job. I don’t care about the excuse that the switch or router failed. As an IT professional you were supposed to have been monitoring all core equipment round the clock to ensure this never happened. You’re also supposed to have a secondary router available with a replica of all the configurations and plug it in immediately when a failure happens. Diagnose the faulty unit after you have the business up again. Forget about trying to fix your mess while the entire network hangs in the lurch wondering why the business has stopped.

I generally advise against having a single power supply. Servers need redundant power supplies, period. No discussions. Do not allow your management to lead you to believe that one power supply is ok and they’re not going to shell out an additional $200 for the redundant supply. $200 saved now will cost you over $2000 down the line if the server fails, particularly if it’s the PDC. Explain that one to your management who will blame you and they’re right because you didn’t emphasize from a business aspect why the redundant PS was necessary. But not all the blame can be put on hardware. It’s also about the type of server OS you’re running. I know of organizations that run Sun and Ubuntu servers which have been running harmoniously without any issues since the day they were commissioned. I know of organizations which run Windows servers that generate a long string of error messages which can be found in the event viewer. Over time I’ve come to realize that if you were to put a Windows, Ubuntu and Sun server beside each other, the Windows server would probably start showing issues very quickly and I’m attributing this to the fact that we all have become far too used to over time in the Microsoft world: GUI. Let’s face it. Ubuntu is able to run amazingly well and do so much more than a Windows 2008 server and that’s all done without a GUI. So why does Microsoft continue to insist that the GUI should remain in a server when they’re providing Windows PowerShell with all their releases? PowerShell is a much more powerful and flexible solution for any serious IT admin and if Microsoft ever became serious about their products, they would offer the GUI as an option during the installation while making the PowerShell a default. Imagine the huge amount of resources that would be freed up with a system running only PowerShell alone? Imagine how you would be able to directly work on the servers without having to physically login to the server (isn’t that what you’re doing now? If you’re not, you suck) and work in a cold IT room? PowerShell is Microsoft’s solution for the true systems admin and anyone who is able to master the power of the command line can achieve more results that you could probably never achieve using the ridiculous GUI. Servers don’t need GUI’s and it’s that simple. GUI’s eat resources and are more prone to bugs and issues because everything has to be interpreted in a pictorial fashion whereas PowerShell simply returns everything in text form with amazing speed. I’m seriously hoping that future builds of Windows Servers will move away from making the GUI mandatory and PowerShell the default interface. If you need the GUI, slide in the CD and install the GUI as an addon but PowerShell should remain the primary interface so resources are not hogged by the GUI. Perhaps to wean users off the GUI, Microsoft should stop investing so much time and energy into glossing it up?

Have a great week!!!

It took the hospital a clever bit of diagnosing to figure out what had caused the poisoning and we finally settled on the idea that it was a result of the chicken burger and fries I had eaten at TappooCity on Saturday. This was reinforced by the fact that someone else had eaten there and had also eaten the same me with similar results so we were pretty certain where hell had originated. Of course I’m not too sure about the food preparation standards of any restaurant in Fiji because we don’t exactly have a vigilant food and hygiene standard unit. If we did, then 90% of the eateries in Fiji would be closed, 5% issued with hygiene standard violation warnings, 4% would be fined and just 1% allowed to continue operating. I walk through town daily and I take a cursory glance into most eateries as I walk past them. The conditions are atrocious. The rooms are stuffy, reeking of oil and there is absolutely no ventilation save the electric fan slowly spinning away. Worse is that most restaurants don’t even have a proper fire escape or a secondary door in the event there is a fire. I have long developed a knack for telling whether food is reheated or cooked fresh. I can confidently tell you here and now that just about every Indian and Asian restaurant in Suva reheats all its food until it is completely sold out because they’re not going to let the food go to waste despite the fact that continuous reheating is building up the bacterial colony to the point where they can afford their own armada and decide to invade the host. The restaurant owners know they can easily get away with their devious methods because Fiji doesn’t have laws which would make reheating food beyond a certain point illegal. In most countries, reheating cooked food in a restaurant is simply illegal because the mass quantity of food cooked poses a huge risk for things to go wrong. Salmonella poisoning is a very common occurrence with anything chicken and if we had anything like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Fiji, we would be seeing mass recalls of many meat products. I’ve seen how meat is handled in Fiji, particularly in major supermarkets. Cooked meat and raw meat are often placed beside one another. Cooked meat and raw meat are handled with the same equipments. Worse is that different types of meat all get sliced and diced with the same equipment, i.e. pork, beef, chicken and lamb all get chopped using the same machine. For people who don’t eat pork and beef, the very thought their chicken was sliced using the same equipment as pork can be a little hard to swallow. And this carries through all the way to the restaurant. What restaurant patron goes and stands beside the chef as he prepares the dish just to ensure that the food is prepared properly? I suppose the only place this rule can be put aside is at Daikoku where the food is prepared in front of the patron and I suppose this is the only reason I’ve always felt safe there. I wish there was a mandatory requirement that every restaurant have a huge glass window (not tinted!!!) between the kitchen and the customer area which allows the clients to have a view of how the meal is being prepared, the cleanliness of the kitchen and the chefs, etc. I think if this practice was adopted, a number of restaurants would be forced to change their style of food handling and the quality of the food they serve. You simply cannot be reusing cooking oil because it’s unhealthy. I find it extremely nauseating to see that restaurants will reuse cooking oil over and over so many times until it turns black like tar and only then will it be changed. “Why waste oil?” claim the restaurant owners. The assertion is further backed by the veiled threat that if they’re forced to be absolutely stringent in their food preparation, the prices on the menu will rise a lot, people will refuse to eat. I doubt this. If I wanted to eat at a restaurant and if every restaurant in town had increased the price of dishes on their menu, I wouldn’t open my own restaurant and then cook myself some fancy dishes would I? It just doesn’t make sense. I would simply accept the fact that prices had increased because the quality of the food had changed. I would also have no issues paying more because I would be comfortable knowing that a lot of love and care went into making the food safe for consumption. I suppose this also has a lot to do with our mentality. The public demand cheap food (excluding myself) and they often don’t mind compromising the safety aspects as long as the food is cheap and comes in large quantities. This is why abominations such as the eatery in the Civic Centre exist – we’re responsible for the deterioration of our health. By encouraging such places to continue their shoddy and shabby practices, we’re saying “yes” to an unhygienic eating environment. By saying “yes” to cheap food, we’re encouraging restaurants to engage in tactics that will one day cost us a great deal more then we initially realized – being dead from food poisoning is certainly no walk in the park. Our health and sanitation boys can only act if the public start becoming vigilant by highlighting issues such as these and the word “no” is used a little more freely. If you’re still having trouble digesting this, try picturing it this way. Would you feed your new born baby from a pigsty or would you feed them from a clean and very well sanitized place with food which is freshly prepared and not something that the dogs been walking over and doing something dirty on? The answer becomes a little more obvious now doesn’t it?

Bottom line is this: We need to take our health more seriously and we need to make sure that people who are going to serve us food at restaurants do it with the same dexterity as they would for their own family members. We need to start demanding that the current quality of food prepared is changed and we need to start demanding that there be a clear demarcation between the way in which raw food and cooked food is handled. Have a great week.

If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com

So, G+ still has a lot of work to do and besides the fact that it is still very much in beta, I don’t like the fact that the entire interface somewhat lacks appeal and I know the video calling thing is very cool but Facebook has that as well now although very few of us use it because we still prefer chatting without seeing each other given that lying with a video camera can be a little difficult for many. I tried the video calling feature and while I’m impressed with the quality and speed of the entire feature, I get the feeling Facebook simply rolled out the feature because G+ has circles and you get to do video based chatting in your respective circles. In addition to video, Facebook recently rolled out something new which left a few users scratching their heads. The new feature is very similar to G+ circles but it doesn’t involve the creation of circles. What Facebook has done is checked the primary location of each user and group all the friends of the user common location. There are a few more common groups created such as Close Friends and other groups can also be created based on user choice. What this has also done is opened a can of worms in terms of trash. When I say trash, I mean we all have friends who we never really interact with but we keep in our list. Their status updates are ignored by us and we don’t even bother wishing them happy birthday. We even hide their status updates altogether and when Facebook decided to setup groups in each of our profiles without really doing a market survey, they were really throwing a monkey wrench in the works. I woke up one morning to find a whole lot of status updates in my feeds from people I had never interacted with and worse was that my close friends list was populated with people I don’t really talk to but Facebook thought I should become close friends with. It took me more than 30 minutes to fix up that mess and then even longer to reset my privacy settings which had also become wonky in the process. The fact that I had to do all this at 6AM in the morning was not something that made me happy because my privacy settings had been altered without my knowledge and I was also faced with a whole lot off poo styled status updates from people who seemed to have a maddening addiction for horoscopes, Farmville and other silly things that doesn’t do Facebook any justice. And then came the bombshell.

Last week, Facebook decided that users should have a different styled feed from the classical one where we could really filter things and basically choose how we wanted to be updated on the feed page. The new and “improved” feed page now has a lot of trash floating in it and users have to spend a lot of unnecessary time unsubscribing from posts they don’t want to read and also getting time to vent their anger at the new and ugly feed based system. I personally hate it so much now that I spend more time looking at the status updates from my Blackberry. The fact that Facebook tried to become like G+ is a huge fail on their part and the fact that the madness is not over yet makes me wonder whether its time to go back to the drawing board and look at their strategy. On September 30th, another revamping will be done and the new style will be called Timeline. It sounds suspiciously like the backup application used by many Mac users and according to Facebook, Timeline will show feeds back to the point where a user was born. I don’t really remember having Facebook when I was born much less the Internet so this will truly be interesting. Nonetheless, it does worry me that the lack of privacy controls or the reduction of privacy controls on the part of Facebook means that there will come a point when we may not be able to hide our information completely. I preferred the old Facebook structure where you could effectively tweak every area you wanted to keep private or public and the new changes have either removed some features completely or merged them with other features which makes it harder to change them. If anything is to evolve in all of this, I suppose Facebook needs to move to the world of widgets and allow users to customize each area of their profile in terms of layout and data flow. While Timeline will offer something similar to this, there is a huge difference in the way information is presented and widgets would definitely have made the entire experience a lot more dynamic.

In conclusion, it is obvious that Facebook is trying to mimic (or at least feebly attempt) what G+ is offering and while G+ is not as popular, Facebook is losing its user base by the day from users who have become disinterested by the changes taking place without any fair warning. The fact that the security levels seem to have been dropped a notch does not promise any confidence in the new direction Facebook is choosing to go in and I can only hope that future changes are kept optional so users can decide whether or not they want to go with the new features. Have a great week!!!

The initial response from the US government was one that any government would have done – a mixture of shock, grief and anger. Then came the realization that the country had been subjected to an attack by a foreign party without any justification. The eyes of the world suddenly shifted to the central figure of the government and what he had been doing during the attacks. George W. Bush came to power at a time when the American people had given up on Republicans and decided that after Clinton, they would have another Democrat so they all decided to vote in Al Gore. Al Gore lost and I don’t plan to go into while Al lost because you can easily find out why from the Internet. Nonetheless, Bush came to power and it was probably the first time a presidential limousine was pelted with eggs and other objects thrown at people we don’t like, on his way to being sworn in. Everyone knew Bush hadn’t really won and the people simply did what they believed they should do – they threw eggs to show their discontent. During his time in office, Bush is probably the only president I know who wrecked the American economy in more ways than one. He waged wars with Afghanistan and Iraq using the excuse that he was trying to free the people of the two countries from oppression and tyranny. The reality which everyone later discovered was that the war was all about taking the oil. Bush invaded Iraq under the guise that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction and later we all discovered that it was really because Saddam had threatened Bush senior. According to Bush junior, Saddam “said he was going to kill my daddy.” I’ve heard of wars being fought over small issues but just because someone said something about a man’s father is no excuse to go galloping into another country and bring further hardship on the people. But the reality of these actions is now becoming more apparent and the US is in a dire state of financial crisis today as its debt levels spiral out of control and Apple has more money than the US treasury has which should make any president a very worried man. If your government or business does not have enough funds to pay even the interest portion of a loan, you need to wonder how you’re going to cope with the subsequent repayments. For businesses, they can always declare bankruptcy and close down. For governments, the obligation to repay the debts simply cannot be ignored. Even governments are limited by what amounts they can borrow and they have to follow business rules just like all of us. If any government is unable to repay its debts or goes into a threshold of insolvency, the IMF moves in and the IMF is like the grim reaper. They come in, freeze (and even reduce) the salaries of every worker in the country. The IMF does not come in with the idea of helping out the people of the country when a country goes insolvent. It comes in with the vision of recovering the amounts owed to the debtors and they only leave when their business is complete. Fiji has been through this once and it became a very dark time for everyone when the IMF walked in and ordered wage freezes and cuts across the board. But all of these consequences are from September 11 when the president of the US should have been at the helm of his country and finding a solution. Instead, he was sitting in a school reading “My Pet Goat” while is country crumbled around him and his security advisors lacked the vision and leadership to advise him accordingly.

So, as an ICT professional, what was September 11 like? I think we all believe we have the perfect disaster recovery systems and that any disaster can be handled appropriately. Pre 9/11, disaster recovery was simply about taking the backup tapes offsite and that was about it. Data centers were around but not every organization could afford them. Even virtualization and replication solutions were still very bare bone. For most of us, picturing a disaster probably involves imagining a fire wiping out the office and that’s what most people will think the moment a disaster is mentioned. The reality is that fires are probably the smallest issues you should be worried about. In order to identify all possible disasters, you first need to look at the country you’re in. If you’re an IT manager or CIO who believes “we cannot foresee every possible disaster” then you’re a useless IT professional and you suck at your role. The word “we” means you and as a leader, you’re not fit to be at that role. You were hired for the specific purpose of identifying such threats and you cannot absolve yourself of any blame when a disaster strikes and you did not plan for it. I find it extremely difficult working with such people because it shows their lack of innovativeness and their ability to manage a disaster and such people should fire themselves. Fiji, regrettably, has a lot of such ICT professionals and they are often able to escape the light sabre of the management when disasters they did not foresee occur. If you’re a CIO or an ICT leader in an organization with over 500 clients in one office, your disaster recovery site becomes pretty useless when a disaster strikes and you suddenly have 500 clients without any computers to work from. This is exactly what many IT people faced on 9/11. One company reported they had 900 clients and when disaster struck, they were suddenly left with a whole lot of recovery tapes but no working computers which they could issue clients.  Even getting 900 clients back online with 900 machines would be impossible because we all work in standardized operating environments and you would need to build each machine from scratch if you don’t have a working image you can simply restore. Even after you’ve done all that, you need to still be one step ahead of your management and have connectivity solutions ready when an alternate site is identified for clients to work from. If you don’t get the groundwork for your DR plan right, your DR site will become a useless DR site because it has data but no way of being accessed and being used meaningfully. In addition to this, a lot of IT managers (even in Fiji) believe that employees need to have small mailboxes. If you fall into this category, you’re old and its time you went fishing. Mailboxes are becoming the best tool in helping a business get back on its feet. If you have an employee who keeps a few years worth of emails and you have a DR site with data replicated, the mailbox is more valuable because it has a chain of business/client communication. Having a file server with forms and other memos is worthless. The mailbox can help bring you up to speed right to the point where the disaster occurred and you can easily get the client back on his feet.

It is apparent that our existing DR plans are woefully prejudiced in the sense that it doesn’t look at disasters in its entirety. It is even more apparent that we need to reflect on what we believe are the possible disasters that can befall us. As I mentioned earlier, planning should always be based on the location of the business. For Fiji, our economic and somewhat volatile political landscape means we need to factor in riots, looting and arson then consider environmental factors such as tidal waves and cyclones because the former set of risks pose more of a threat then the latter. Once you have established the baseline for the risks, and then begin planning from an end users perspective. What would you need to get back online and communicating with clients? What are the core resources needed? Once you can answer this, you should then move onto the communication/connectivity side and finally the server side. Of course this is a very bare bones outline and you would need to really expand into each of these areas.

While we know 9/11 styled events aren’t going to happen in Fiji, events with a similar magnitude are not impossible. Have a great week.

So where is Fiji placed with regards to data storage? Based on feedback from various ICT stakeholders, it is apparent that Fiji is woefully behind in data storage solutions. Simply having people who know how to use Facebook does not qualify them to become “ICT policy makers” and this is one possible major factor. I’m not quite certain what the actual cause for this lag is but industry experts all agree that the major issue that currently limits them from investing in storage solutions such as SAN’s is the lack of knowledge in managing a SAN and also the cost factor. To setup a SAN in Fiji involves quite a bit of investment given the fact that bringing the equipment into the country is fairly expensive. Even vendors do not usually keep SAN specialists on hand to setup the system and normally require external resources for the setup. If the SAN is not setup correctly, there is always a risk that the data may be subject to corruption especially if the SAN is going to be used for virtualization. This can have substantial impact on an organization’s ability to function. I know of cases where an incorrectly setup SAN has resulted in the loss of an entire virtualized server which could not be restored. In addition to this, SAN’s usually herald the way for future data centre establishments and it is only a good idea to get it right from the beginning. Data centres are currently the bane of many an ICT department because they chew massive amounts of power given the fact that there is a lot of cooling required. I know there are a few data centres in Fiji (or what is “claimed” as a data centre) but there is a need to understand that the cooling methods used in managing a data centre.

So what exactly is a data centre? In a nutshell, a data centre provides a centralized repository for holding an organizations core data topology. This can include the communication systems and storage solutions. Data centres are not a new concept and have been around since the inception of computers. The early style of data centres haven’t changed much however there is now an emphasis placed on the cooling methods and how to minimize the amount of power data centres consume. Of course the overall objective must not impact the ability of the data centre to perform at optimum performance. I suppose with ICT, there is always a catch somewhere whereby someone tries to do something extreme without impacting the performance. It was the same thing when Bugatti tried to make the Veyron. They spent a massive amount of time changing things right down to the nuts and bolts. Then they took it out for a test and found they were still a short of their desired output. By now, they had also discovered that if they really wanted to get the 1000HP out of the engine, they would need to make the vehicle a lot lighter but then the issue of the car taking off into the air like a kite became another niggling problem. Even driving the car at the time resulted in an almost immediate issue of the brake pads giving up after every run. I suppose this is normal given that the car goes nearly at the same speed as a jet fighter. I am impressed that the team didn’t give up then and there, chucking their hands into the air and running away into the corner sobbing. They came back to the drawing table and they started looking at the car from every angle. They began to tinker with things like the side mirrors and changing the inside decor. The side mirrors were reshaped to give the car some drag when the speeds increased. This pushed it closer to the ground. Even the spoiler had to be redesigned to ensure that the back end of the car didn’t flip the driver and the contents into space. Then they changed the metal and other alloys used. All of these tiniest of changes were meant to provide the extra speed the car needed. When all was said and done, they had a product on their hands which makes the Bugatti the fastest street legal car in the world with a W16 engine. Anyone in ICT should the time out to view the YouTube video of the Bugatti Veyron which was reviewed by Jeremy Clarkson and after watching the video, I realized that there was a desire to achieve a result which probably drove the team onwards relentlessly. This is the same passion which we must have in ICT and where data centre designs and standards are concerned, there needs to be a much greater level of interest shown in reducing the cooling costs.

Most data centres are built as pillars of inefficiency with nary a regards for the power consumption. There are huge air conditioning and cooling solutions used and anyone walking inside a data centre feels like they’ve walked inside a refrigerator and I’m appalled that even smaller server rooms follow the same process. Simply cooling the servers to anything below 23 degrees does not guarantee a cool server operating environment. Current standards require the room to be at least 23~25 degrees as this prevents condensation forming and ultimately shorting the components. Most ICT professional in Fiji stupidly believe that cooling a server room like an icebox works – you may as well stick your servers inside PAFCO’s refrigerators and let the ice form over the hardware. Anyways, coming back to data centres, let’s take a look at the basic principles that are required to keep the server environment happy. In a nutshell, the hardware all produce heat so you need something to pull that heat out and get rid of it and at the same time, you need something that will push cool air back into the environment to compensate for the loss. In addition to that, the solution should use more “green” technologies to help with the cooling. One of the ideas that have been floated is using cooling vents. Cooling vents need to be large enough to pull all the heat out so it is generally a good idea to have a few. I have been informed that there are a number of options for these cooling vents and you can even have the wind turbine types which basically don’t need any power and rotate using the air flow. So you could have one set of turbines rotating to push air in and one set pulling the air out. In addition to this, you will of course need a few air conditioners that will keep the overall room temperature stable. Nonetheless, you would definitely be using a lot less and if you design the room keeping in mind the environment, you can actually find options that allow you to keep the room temperature very controlled based on the materials used. I personally have a vision for data centres one day becoming the shining example of how ICT can provide people with all their data storage and communication needs while at the same time ensuring that the industry does not contribute to the environmental issues and also helps reduce the amount of power used because energy conservation is an important cornerstone of corporate responsibility. So, go green with your next data centre design and help the environment!!!

Have a great week!!!

The interface G+ uses is simpler to use then Facebook as well. You don’t need to scroll around all over the page looking for things and everything you need is within reach. One of my mates commented that the interface looked far too empty. I think this is how Facebook started out as well but over time changed its interface responses so much in their wild quest for the Holy Grail of “simple clean interfaces” that it ended up ruining the user experience. I can relate to how millions of users felt when Facebook switched the chat feature from its simpler interface to the horrible dock based system. The chat window now has people whom I do not want to ever chat with save the few important ones and there is no real way I can do anything about that unless I create additional contact groups then filter the chat using the groups – but I don’t want to do that because the previous chat mode worked for me. It showed me only the people who were online and available for a chat. If anything, the worst feeling of déjà vu comes over me every time I see the docked chat: It’s like seeing the nightmarish gadget dock that came with Windows Vista. People hated the dock so much that like many other users, it put me off widgets and gadgets completely to the point where I refused to have any gadgets running on my desktop for a long time and only recently ventured to use the Windows 7 gadgets. It’s pleasing to see that all the jumping Ballmer does, like a caffeine loaded orangutan, obviously did wonders to his powers of thought and logic which resulted in the dock being removed altogether from Windows 7 so you basically get a Mac styled interface although Mac’s latest OS just took user experience to the next level. But I digress. Facebook has been tinkering a little too much with its user interface and users are becoming a little sick of signing into their accounts and finding a layout as strange as a man being thrown onto another planet without warning. In addition to all this mess, the recent decision for Facebook to start offering video chats to users isn’t going as well as it should because there’s a lot of clicking required to get the functionality to do what you need it to do and when you do finally get it working after a lot of fiddly clicking, the quality of the video is not exactly what you would call workable. I tested this out with a colleague and while I was able to get the system to work perfectly on my machine through Mozilla Firefox, he was unable to even get the installer to start up on his machine which is a bit of a letdown considering that Facebook announced video chats with some hype. So, Facebook is evolving but if we take a closer look at what’s happening, we find that it’s evolving in the way it should and in fact if anything, Facebook is evolving in the wrong direction and into the very thing that saw the death of MySpace. Facebook needs to stop trying to keep up with the competition by throwing in ideas such as video calling and docked chats without getting enough user feedback first. If the organization continues to spiral its evolution, there will come a constriction point and what I call the “point of the apex” will happen – Facebook running out of ideas on how to retain its user base. This is what’s happening to many big brand names today, for example, RIM. The company has hit the constriction point and now finds itself unable to do anything innovative unless it does a complete change of its current business model and software processes. There is a need for RIM to take a step back and allow its system to be handled by third party developers like they’re allowed to do with Android. Direct user input in the development phases ensures greater chances of success when the final product is launched. Gone are the days of “I did it my way.” Consumers now call the shots and companies need to start seriously listening.

Google evolved like this: search engine, documents, emails, apps, social networking and now, continued process improvements based on consumer demands and around cloud based technology for maximum collaborative features and availability of data through a seamless, integrated and centralized system; all of which are built around the power of a search engine. Facebook evolved like this: social networking, social networking – hang on, nothing has changed. This is where things do a full circle for Facebook and over the coming days, more and more users will migrate their data across to G+ waving goodbye to Facebook and taking advantage of the amazing collaborative features of the new social network. The winds of change are beginning to blow and Facebook is not indestructible to its force.

Have a great week and I look forward to seeing you in G+ soon!!!