Scoot’s thoughts on all things technology, design, photography and life in general !
Today I went along to a BCS Kingston & Croydon branch visit to the V&A museum to hear how they use technology and also to see how the place has changed over the years. I had more than a vested interest to visit the V&A as I use to work within their conservation science labs back in the 1980′s before I took the plunge into IT.
The session was hosted by Sarah Winmill (Head of IT) from the V&A with a couple of her team to shepherd us around the site. There were about 18 of us from the BCS and it seemed that they could have easily filled this session many times. Sarah showed loads of enthusiasm during the tour which wasn’t solely IT focused. She did warn us of this infectious enthusiasm at the start, but it made the whole event much more interesting.
Starting in the entrance we were given the history of the V&A and the surrounding South Kensington area and how it all came about from the great exhibition of 1851 where the exhibits were moved to this site for permanent display. The tour moved off to some of the other galleries covering aspects such as the use of active RFID tag in cases, galleries and stores to monitor temperature and relative humidity. This is all linked to central monitoring system show all can be monitored and if thresholds are exceeded then alerts are raised.
We swung by the conservation department to understand a bit more of the work undertaken plus some of the challenges with data. The department is a big user of digital images especially stills taken during the conservation process. This means a very large volume of data is generated with low-res images being around 30M B and high-res images being 120MB, thats a lot of data.
The DR/BCP for the museum has some interesting requirements such as items like 4miles of bubblewrap and 100 refrigerated lorries to store items.
We also visited the Sackler Centre for arts education and that was a very interesting mix of contempory meets victorian. Interesting use of technology to support the arts here, with dedicated digital studio.
The tour took in other sights around the museum and some background of the challenges of implementing any tech in the museum due to the fact that the museum has a lot of valuable stuff. Networking seems to be one such challenge so wimax is used and there are fibre links out to other networks.
The final part of the tour was a visit to the new data centre where the museum has consolidated alot of its server and storage infrastructure.
A very good visit and some very interesting facts.
Eventually crawled out of bed at 8am and dragged myself into the shower to try and shake off the headache and jet lag. Rang CJ and checked out what was going on at home another disturbed night for her and LCJ. But they were on the bus to go to an indoor play pen in Brighton. Jumped on the shuttle bus to the Dolphin and bumped into Jamie and chatted during the journey. Wandered into the hotel and registered for the conference and wandered around to get coffee and food to keep me going for the first session of the day on SaaS, more to follow over the next couple of days. Bumped into Simon, Cali, Chris F, Chris M, Paula and Stu so wandered into the SaaS session.
There were lots of familiar faces from the US teams in the room must catch up with them over the coming days to see how things are going. This included Brian C, Ray S, Anne-Maire, Gene L and Mark H.
Getting to lunch was delayed so second marathon 4hour session was put back to 12.45, so had a chance to digest my food. Session started a little bit late started off with Jeri Allen
Unified Communication & Collaboration - Bruce Morse
This session talked around the UC space and what to expect over the coming week, so more details to follow in my blog.
Development – Alistair Rennie
Overview of the huge number of products released during 2008 plus a taster for whats to come, more information will be released during the OGS tomorrow.
Messaging & Collaboration – Kevin Cavenaugh
Summary of where we are in Collaboration in Lotus and of course some tasters for tomorrow.
Social Software – Jeff Schick
Looked at how successful 2008 was for Social Software plus some indications of the new capabilities being released in the next versions.
Portal – Larry Bowden
New Portal Logo and a summary of Portal and the accelerators during 2008 plus stuff to come 2009
Software as a Service – Sean Poulley
Special guests was John Dunderdale
Tonight is the opening party so food and drinks by the lake between the two hotels so should be fun if I can keep awake.
It only seems like yesterday it was y2k, and we are stepping closer to the end of the decade. A mixed week so far, busy in some respect not in others. But as far as the rebuild of the laptop that has already progressed nicely.
I have managed to install a base WinXP partition and start to get the patches upto date plus some of the smaller applications. The Ubuntu partition was installed last night after a failed attempt with a duff CD. This morning installed the VPN clients and got the core/base IBM layers installed this did take too long. I then went and did the productivity based layer including Notes 8.5 and Sametime 8 this seem to take forever due to the network connection drip feeding the packets, I mean in today age and I managed to get a throughput rate between 19-64kbps which is poor, I should have dialed in it would have been quicker.
Had the partition completed by early afternoon and now need to put the extras on such as VMWare and a few other apps.
Nipped out for an hour to see Cameron’s first Xmas concert and this was good although it was chaos, children and parents everywhere, hey ho. The little one is asleep now and I don’t blame him, Ruth over for dinner tonight (ok takeaway) and Debbie & Roman over for lunch tomorrow.
So I thought as I have a load of admin type stuff to do today, plus a few calls I would try and multi task and start the rebuild of my laptop ready for the new year. So the first challenge was digging out my XP cd and created an updated version with SP3 included. Although the slipstreaming piece was straight forward I discovered that my burning software refused to recreate a bootable CD so had to hunt around for some trial software. After some digging I downloaded a trial of Nero 9 to see if this would achieve the desired goal.
Whilst that was going on I started the job of tidying my current disk drives so that I would be able to swap the 200GB D drive with the 100GB C drive and have a larger partition. The main reason for doing this was in prep to dual boot with Ubuntu client that I have been trying on my other laptop and seems to work well. I will have a dual boot so that some of the software I have will need to be run native on Windows for customer demos.
So waited an hour and still no serial number from Nero, so I decided a plan B was in order so I used my install of ultraISO to create an ISO from the original CD then replaced the contents with the SP3 version. I started the process of installing Win XP and all the associated application I seem to need to do my day job. The list was nearly two sides of an A4 sheet so lots to be done. I will need to visit an office shortly to complete some of the setup as I will need LAN speeds for some configurations and to test the internal wireless authentication.
Next step is dual boot with Ubuntu, this will be done very soon. Although a lot of my colleagues are hassling me for even reinstalling Windows natively on my drive and not using a VMWare image for my needs. My one arguement is that I have not road tested this TP with Ubuntu in real life scenarios such as a customer demo/presentation so once I have completed a couple successfully I will then move to a VM image for Windows. I am hoping by this time some one would have furnished my with a shiny new MacBook or MB Pro..
so days are slipping away fast and on Friday its the little boys first Xmas concert at nursery so that will be interesting how they will herd so many cats, I predict chaos 
Just jazzed up one of my presentations on Lotus Quickr to take some of the words out to be replaced by visuals, will see how it works tomorrow. I am hope to pick another presentation and spend some serious time revamping to see if I can make wholesale changes to bring it away from the boring/dull technical presentations that I give on an almost daily basis. Watch this space to see what comes of both of these activities. I can see it now and the techies will say its too marketing, which I will have to disagree with as why do they need the word written down if I am presenting the fact verbally. The plan would be to provide the recipient with a document to confirm the details and not a soft copy of the presentation.
So had the iPhone for about two months now and I am very happy so far with the device. Having used many device manufacturers in the past and have seen how some of my friends and colleagues get on with their devices I can say that it is up with the other main vendors, there are pro and cons of the iPhone and I suspect that some will be addressed over time.
iphone
I do find it interesting that many people have stated that the camera is not very good, but I would counter this argument that not many cameras are very good phones OK may be thats not fair, but in reality if I want to take a decent picture I will always use a camera and not a phone (regardless of make of phone) as cameras will alway take better pictures. I might be proven wrong there, but only time will tell. I have used many phones to take pictures and it is great to capture that moment when this is the only device available, so the picture quality is not fantastic, but you do get the moment and any picture is better than no picture.
So here are the things I like so far:
- Design – Overall fab design and excellent UI / UX
- Apple Integration – It just works so well with my MacBook and Mobile.Me.
- Phone quality - reasonable call quality so far, but have had a few drop outs, but suspect more to do with carrier
- iPod – Yes I am a fan of iPods, I have three plus the iPhone and each has its place. For short trips I use it a lot, but on longer journeys I would take my 8GB Nano as its is more convenient on planes etc and won’t drain the battery on my phone.
Things that are not so great:
- Locked to a Carrier – This is pain in the backside, I wish this would be sorted for the UK as it restricts users choice. To overcome this I have brought on Pay as you Go and then purchased a SIM adpater by TurboSIM to allow for my work vodafone sim to be used in the iPhone. The TurboSIM is a no-cut sim adapter that works great. There are some downsides to using this solution, software updates to the iPhone are likely to break the adapter requiring an update to the TurboSIM software. You need to swap back to your O2 SIM to be able to sync with iTunes
- Calls not getting through when using some of the applications. I have seen this happen when browsing my mail or surfacing the web.
