Technology, media, architecture & strategy
An article from Joe Clark:
The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.
I once had quite a quirky dinner with Joe one night in Chinatown Sydney with Lachlan.
In an article edited by Frédéric Filloux:
Fairfax Digital is, by far, the leading online group in Australia and in the region.
…
Some lessons can be drawn from Fairfax Digital’s performance:
- Accept the coming digital domination.
- Focus on reader engagement.
- Be an online company. Period.
- Bet on multiple business resources.
- Capture readers and users one group after the other.
- Control your advertising innovation.
- Stay awake.
In this article it is announced that Student Management gets a win:
Australian software maker TechnologyOne has been selected to replace student management systems for Victorian TAFEs as part of a $67 million systems overhaul package announced by the Victorian Government today.
Congratulations to the hard working crew. I knew this system once upon a time.
An article from boxesandarrows:
- What’s your social object? Make sure there is a “there” there. Give users a reason to rally. Why would someone come to your site?
- Give people a way to identify themselves and to be identified.
- Give people something to do.
- Enable a bridge to real life (groups, mobile, meetings, face-to-face).
- ently Moderate. Let the community elevate people and content they value.
From smh.com.au:
Fairfax Media and APN have agreed to a deal that will combine Fairfax’s online ads with the classified sections of 90 publications in regional Queensland and Northern New South Wales.
Under the alliance, APN newspapers’ local ads will appear under the Drive.com, Domain.com and MyCareer.com brands. Customers will also be able to post their classifieds ads online through the Fairfax sites.
Far too simple for anyone involved in enterprise web development, but maybe a good start for others:
The two primary reasons for using web caches are:
- Reducing latency: Because an intermediate cache (which is closer to the client than the web server) can serve the content, it takes less time for the resource to reach the client. This makes the web site seem more responsive.
- Reducing network traffic: Because several resources are reused and they don’t need to be fetched afresh from the server, caching reduces the amount of bandwidth used by the client, thus reducing traffic on the network.
It sings, it dances. Oh whatever, I will read it anyway:
This e-guide offers expert insight into the agile development lifecycle and how to implement effective agile testing. This compilation of agile development tips will assist organizations in planning and executing software tests during agile development. Read this E-Guide to learn how to maintain test consistency throughout the agile process, the benefits and common obstacles of agile test automation, and how to accelerate agile software testing throughout the entire process.
Taken from computerworld:
In a move that perhaps seemed inevitable as the one-time strong partners began to butt competitive heads more and more in the data centre, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have ended the last vestiges of their partnership.
By James Thomson on smartcompany.com.au:
Listed franchisors Domino’s Pizza has laid claim to having Australia’s most successful iPhone apps released by a business, after revealing that its pizza ordering app has generated $2 million worth of sales in just 12 weeks.
The success of the iPhone app, released in November 2009, was announced as Domino’s posted a 39.2% rise in net profit for the six months to December 31, with revenue up 5.3%.While chief executive Don Meij told SmartCompany that continued innovation in the company’s menu range was a big contributor to the result – including the expansion of the chain’s lunch menu and new healthy meal options – it is clear that the company’s willingness to embrace technology is paying dividends.
Online ordering now accounts for 28% of sales and the company’s decision to invest in an iPhone app has paid impressive dividends.
I have been watching Puppet roll out for Production purposes. Nice to watch a professional team do great work.
About Puppet:
Following a client-server model, and with its own declarative language, Puppet tries to solve one of the challenges of server systems administration: how to reliably automate server configuration management and distribution, an essential requirement in large datacenter deployments.
Puppet approaches configuration management from an angle that is different from the traditional script-and-automate model:
- It provides a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to model the relationship between servers, services, and service objects
- It brings systems administration automation closer to the realm of software development, expressing an infrastructure in functional, repeatable lines of code
- Its level of abstraction provides a flexibility that is increasingly relevant as systems administrators are required to manage more heterogeneous configurations for server farms, may them be hosted in-house, at a hosting facility, or a cloud provider
Read more on InfoQ