This is huge: VMWare Player

Those VMWare guys are geniuses. They are distributing a version of VMWare that can run, but not create, new virtual machines. It’s called the VMWare Player. For my little piece of the world it means my sales organization does not need the full VMWare Workstation product to use my demo virtual machines. And, if the licensing issues for the software installed on the image can be worked out, I can more easily share my images with my clients for proofs-of-concept, demonstrations, trials, etc.

From a much broader perspective it means that VMWare just became a lot more accessible to a lot more people. I predict we’re about to see an explosion of people making their products available ready-to-go VMWare images. There are already some available on the VMWare Technology Network but they are from major players. I’ll bet we’ll see a bunch of LAMP images springing up all over the place as well as those showcasing other open source “platforms”.

What if the VMWare Player becomes as ubiquitous as Acrobat Reader or Flash? I don’t see my parents getting one any time soon but for the technical set, it’s huge.

Of course the problem in all of this is the amount of space a virtual machine image takes. It takes a long time to move and a lot of hard disk to store. When your parent company, EMC, is in to storage in a big way, that last part is probably not a big concern of theirs.

Needless to say, I am excited. Way to go, VMWare!

Timely reference to personal knowledge management tools

What a coincidence. Tom and I were just discussing his (never-ending) search for a better approach to personal knowledge management. We specifically talked about Personal Brain, which is a tool he tried a while back and abandoned, just like McGee
. Maybe one of the two tools McGee mentions in this post will get him closer to pKM nirvanna. (Neither are open source).

Tom has had some recent success with TiddlyWikki, which is a “reusable non-linear personal web notebook” that runs locally and requires no server.

Nucleus Research offers common sense advice but misses critical points

Before I read Scott’s full post I read the PDF and had the same response he did–that the researchers were vastly underestimating the amount of time it takes to do a proper content audit.

Maximizing Content Management ROI.

The other observation about the report is that they don’t mention understanding how content is published or syndicated to content consumers. The transorming content into desired formats and then sharing it with the people and/or applications that need it would seem to be an area where decent ROI could be achieved.

The research report does offer common sense advice on some aspects of what really amount to understanding the requirements of a content management system before getting too deep into the project.

Things I like about WordPress so far

So it has been just under a week since I moved everything over here from Radio. Here’s what I really like so far:

  • I don’t have to fire up my laptop to post. I can do it from any networked device.
  • I’ve got tons of space as opposed to the 40MB included with Radio.
  • The technology foundation is more intuitive. It’s LAMP-based so there are a lot of resources available. Radio Userland is based on Frontier which is not nearly as ubiquitous as LAMP.
  • Similar to the prior point, I love that it uses a relational back-end. I don’t have to re-publish pages when I change the look-and-feel. And the model is more like what I’m used to. Front-end web page talks to back-end database. Simple. I get it.
  • My aggregator is for aggregating and my blog tool is for blogging. The built-in RSS aggregator in Radio is okay, but I didn’t want to have to fire up Radio to check my feeds. Sometimes I’d use Sage, but, again, I’d have to fire up Radio if I came across something post-worthy. Now, I use Sage all of the time–I hit the bookmarklet to post and I’m there.

In my early days of Radio I thought it might be a good tool to roll out internally. That was before I had been exposed to the server-based blog tools. And, quite honestly, I think I was forgetting the lesson we’ve all already learned about distributing and maintaining client apps versus running them on a centrally-managed server infrastructure with a thin client.

I’ll grant that it is extremely easy to set up a public blog with Radio. I tweaked my config to publish to both a public site and an internal site and that was straightforward for a technical user. When I think about folks in our sales organization making those same tweaks and maybe wanting to customize their templates, I think about what Walter said to Smokey in The Big Lebowski, “You are entering a world of pain.”

I imagine Userland’s answer to this would be, “You are right. For a big intranet project you should use Manila, our server-based product.” Maybe so. But you’d still have to bone up on Frontier.

Anyway, I’m not trying to dog Radio here. I’m just excited about my choice to switch.

Google Earth is a time sucker!

Google Earth is a huge time sucker but very, very cool. It makes our planet seem enormous and incredibly small at the same time.

I just spent a major chunk of time “flying” all over, placemarking some spots to show the kids in the morning–where I was born, where they were born, the Duck Pond at OU where their Mom and I used to go on dates. They’ll be thrilled.

On thing’s for sure, it definitely makes me want a faster connection and a beefier box!

Finally…got it all migrated

Okay. I think everything is moved over from the old Radio Userland blog. The stories were the most painful due to a lapse in clear-thinking–at some point I started using MS Word to edit the stories prior to pasting them into Radio. So I had a bunch of Word-specific HTML to clean up. The posts imported smoothly.

Here’s a summary of what I did:

1. Moved images to gallery. This gave me an excuse to try out Gallery and gives me a decent way to manage the images I reference from stories and posts.

2. Moved stories by hand, cleaning up HTML and changing out IMG references to gallery. This would have been a decent job for a Perl script but I didn’t have that many to move. (While prowling around I found some old stories that Radio was no longer publishing for some reason. Thanks, Radio!).

3. Imported mySubscriptions.opml into blogroll.

4. Created categories to match old categories. As it turns out, this wasn’t necessary. The RSS importer creates categories for imported posts as it needs to.

5. Added rewrite rule to .htaccess to try to address any links in my posts:

RewriteRule ^/0117027/categories/xml/([0-9]{4})/(.*).html /newbloglocation/archives/$1/$2 [R=permanent]

6. Updated the UTC time offset in my WordPress options. (I just hadn’t had a chance to do it until now).

7. Edited /www/wp-admin/import-rss.php to tell it the name of the XML file to import.

8. Wrote an XSLT stylesheet to filter unwanted post categories. I was using Radio to post to my public blog as well as an internal server at Navigator. The XSL simply transformed the existing RSS into a “public” version without the internal categories. I used Perl to recursively cruise through the Radio backup posts directory structure and transform the XML.

9. Uploaded the transformed RSS files to the site and ran the import-rss.php script.

I’ve probably got more cleanup to do but at least it is all moved over.