If you have ever worked for a large organization, you should easily relate to this Dilbert cartoon. As the IT guy trying to make everyone happy at work, I've spent the last year making sure everyone that needs two monitors gets two monitors. It's not an easy task in an era of tight budgets and cycle replacements but we're getting there...
A few days ago, I read Mary Jo Foley's article titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted. According to an interview with the President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, the company will be shifting support for Silverlight away from the PC and Mac desktop and toward the phone market.
So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?
I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.
But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.
Microsoft plans to be using HTML 5 to replace the functions currently being provided by Silverlight 5.
It is not the point of this post to debate the merits of HTML 5, Silverlight and even Flash. What is my point though, is that Microsoft appears to me to be desperate. Desperate to come up with a strategic plan that will carry them beyond the day of Windows PCs. Microsoft is desperate to become innovative for the sake of innovation that they're really confusing a lot of their developers. If only after a few years of support, Microsoft is shifting focus of it's Silverlight platform...what potential developer in his or her right mind would support another future Microsoft endeavor? Just take a look at the comments to Bob Muglia's blog post discussing this topic and I think you'll see my point.
Why Web Content Management Systems are the way of the future, making traditional web development a thing of the past
The Web is an exciting place. With excitement come innate complexity and an overwhelming abundance of choices when defining how to take your website into the future. Ask web evangelists of today versus evangelists of say 5 years ago, and they will highlight the importance of device support, marketing tools, analytics and focusing on creating great content that will stand the test of time.
Recently, companies like Google and Apple have prompted questions to the public, such as, “Why are we still building things like we did 30 years ago?” These types of provocative questions are spawning answers in the form of new tools, such as the iPhone 4 and the upcoming wave of Google WebOS notebooks. Ask yourself these questions:
Then why are you still developing websites in the traditional approach?
Let me start by defining what I mean by “traditional”. Traditional Web Development refers to the act of taking a Web Framework such as HTML, ASP.net, PHP and building a website from the ground, up. This includes everything from setting up Database connections, setting up Database Tables, creating separate files for your Contact Us and Products page, the list goes on. Most web agencies that I consult with have control libraries that make this process less tedious and time consuming but this is not addressing the fundamental issue, being, this is a traditional methodology for building web sites. Weddings should be traditional; your grandmother’s brownie recipe should be traditional. Your web presence should be innovative.
Last week was a very frustrating time for me. For whatever reason, an unusually number of botnets decided to zero in on my Drupal site and created what I call an unintentional Denial of Service attack (DOS). The attack was actually from spambots looking looking for script vulnerabilities found mainly in older versions of e107 and WordPress. Since the target of these spambots were non-Drupal pages, my Drupal site responded by delivering an unusually large number of "page not found" and "access denied" error pages. Eventually, these requests from a multitude of IPs were too many for my server to handle and for all intents and purposes the botnet attack caused a distributed denial of service that prevented me and my users from accessing the site.
These type of attacks on Drupal sites and numerous other content management systems are nothing new. However, my search at Drupal.org as well as Google didn't really find a solution that completely addressed my problem. Trying to prevent a DDoS attack isn't easy to begin with and at first the answers alluded me.
I originally looked at Drupal for the solution to my problems. While I've used Mollom for months, Mollom is designed to fight off comment spam while the bots attacking my sight were looking for script vulnerabilities that didn't exist. So with Mollom being the wrong tool to fight off this kind of attack, I decided to take a look at the Drupal contributed model Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots then blocks such access and logs their attempts. I actually installed an "unofficial" version of the Bad Behavior module which packages the Bad Behavior 2.1 scripts and utilizes services from Project Honey Pot.
As I had already suspected, looking for Drupal to solve this botnet attack wasn't the answer. Pretty much all Bad Behavior did for me was to take the time Drupal was spending delivering "page not found" error pages and use it to deliver "access denied" error pages. My Drupal site is likely safer with the Bad Behavior module installed, but it was the wrong tool to help me reduce the botnets from overtaxing Drupal running on my server. Ideally, you would like to prevent the attacks ever reaching your server by taking a look at such things as the firewall, router, and switches. However, since I didn't have access to the hardware, I decided it was time to look at my Apache configuration.
"You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?"
Andy Grove, Intel CEO 1987-2005, Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs, BusinessWeek, July 1, 2010
What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I've given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I've recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we're missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.
"The fact is, however, that major IT projects are inevitably going to be about business change, and the two have to go hand in hand. As it continues its steady evolution, IT becomes less and less about individual products, languages or whatever, and more about getting things to work together."
-Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics, Organisational Change and IT: More than a bar-room conversation?, The Register, April 28, 2010
Tim O'Reilly is the Tuesday keynote speaker at DrupalCon 2010. His talk was on open source in the cloud era. I had some WiFi issues that slowed my typing down so I've embedded the his slide presentation at the end of this post.
2:30 PM: What is wrong with government? "We need to do more than shake the vending machine." O'Reilly is giving examples of people doing things themselves. Do it yourself on a civic scale...the heart of Gov 2.0. Drupal is an example of do it yourself spirit. O'Reilly's putting Drupal back into the speech on how people come together to build something better.
This week I have been thinking a lot about how poorly we manage data and information. The quality of the data and the lack of needed data has historically been an issue at work. We have focused a lot of our time on data mining but never really recognized that one day there would be too much data and information for our staff to sift through. Recently, our managers proposed two new data sources for the operational staff to review and I decided that it was time to hit the panic button that we're currently giving out more information to our workers than they can handle.
When a business presents too much information to their staff it is a lot like catching deer in your headlights. If the deer is too overwhelmed to run and you don't steer the car out of the way then no good can come to both car and deer. This is where I think we are at work and we're needing to slow things down a bit to give both driver and deer time to think about their next move. For the moment at least, I'm personally at a lost on how best to solve our issues with information overload.
