Nicholas Gall: Random

My Blog has Moved...

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:58:30 GMT

Contrary to popular rumors, I haven't stopped blogging! I've moved my blog from Radio Userland to Typepad and renamed it in the process. The name of my new blog is Ironick. Given that I consider myself an ironist in Richard Rorty's sense of the term, I really like my new handle.

Although Radio Userland was one of, if not the pioneer of blogging, it has failed to sustain a thriving community of users, so less and less innovation went into the service. Worse, the Radio client became more and more of a resource hog on my laptop. It got to the point where I was afraid to start it up. Needless to say, such fear really put a dent in one's ability to blog regularly.

This blog will remain for a while as an archive of previous entries. I've moved all the normal postings over typepad, but with a few glitches. First, links from newer posts to old posts did not get updated, so the newer posts still link to theUserland site. These will become broken links when my old blog is finally shut down. Also, comments on entries (yes, I had a few) were not transfered. If I have time, I plan to read through such comments and find some way to repost them onTypepad. Finally, "story" entries have not yet been transfered. I'll definitely be moving them!

So update your bookmark and redirect your feed reader to my Ironick feed. (Actually, both my Userland and Typepad blogs display an RSS badge for a feed from Feedburner, which splices together my Furl linkblog and my Flickr image blog with feed from both Userland and Typepad. So only those of you who subscribed to my pre-Feedburner raw RSS feed will see any difference.)

See you at Typepad...

Amazing hack--The data: URL Scheme.

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:18:54 GMT

In tracking down the documentation on Firefox's about: URI scheme (aka URL scheme), I came across the amazing data: scheme, which is an IETF standard. The data: scheme basically enables you to encode any element of an HTML page, or even the an entire HTML page itself, into a URI. In other words, data: enables you to directly embed a resource into web page, instead of linking to it. (Technically, the resource is embedded in the URI, but since the URI is embedded in the web page, it is for most purposes, the same thing.) Here is an example of a mini web site encoded in a URI. Look at the status bar of your browser to get a hint of what it looks like.

This hack reminds me of the javascript: scheme (aka javascript: protocol) which enables the very useful bookmarklet hacks. However, unlike data:, the javascript: scheme is not standard. One drawback is the limit on URI length, which appears to be about 4000 characters. The Wikipedia entry for data: links to some useful resources including the kitchen, which is how I created my demo encoded/embedded web page.

Goodbye META, hello Gartner.

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 07:59:00 GMT

I haven't written much about my life at META Group, Inc. in this blog, because I like to keep my avocation (Information Technology, Philosophy, Evolution) separate from my vocation (IT Industry Analyst).

I make an exception today to commemorate my nine years with META (April 15th would have been my 9th anniversary) and to announce that I have accepted a position at Gartner as part of its acquisition of META Group.

I will continue to blog as always, with one restriction. In light of Gartner's brand-management policies, other than this posting, I will not discuss Gartner or my activities at Gartner. As an ex-attorney, I appreciate bright lines.

My other blog.

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 08:30:10 GMT

While I may not post an entry to my home page everday, I do post interesting web resources that I run across to Furl (my online bookmark service) virtually every day. You can see my latest Furl postings in the Navigation box on the right of my home page:

Also, if you are interested in some of the same issues that I am (mass innovation, SOA, modularity, Web services, Evolution, Philosophy, etc.) I urge you to subscribe to the RSS feed for my Furl bookmarks. You will then receive a steady stream of link to interesting resources (with my brief descriptions). Simply click on this Subscribe to my Furl Archive link, or the one directly beneath my list of Furled pages in the Navigation box.

Back and rad'er than ever.

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 10:06:29 GMT

Seven and one-half weeks between posts to the blogosphere. How shameful. My last such hiatus was just about a year ago, and it only ran five and one-half weeks. That time it was due to hardware failure. This time it was due to METAmorphosis--literally and I suppose figuratively.

I was cranking away around the clock trying to cram into two presentations (a keynote--SOA Principles: Carving a Deep Path Across the Enterprise and a breakout--Software as Infrastructure and Metadata as Application see agenda) all my insights into Service-Oriented Architecture. Of course, in the course of doing all this cramming, I came up with dozens of other insights, which had to be crammed in. At one point, my draft deck was 80+ slides!

Suffice it to say, I didn't have a lot of free time to blog before METAmorphosis on March 1 (the day after my birthday, so I had to work on my birthday, boo hoo) and I've been catching up on everything else I put aside to devote myself to these pitches.

I don't know about other analysts, but the reason I put so much into my METAmorphosis pitches is that I treat it as my annual "big update". It's when I take all of the insights I've gained through a year of conversations with users and vendors and I do a major update to my slideware. I guess the equivalent is a major software version release vs. a point release.

The other reason is of course inertia. As those of you who blog regularly know, its easier to blog regularly once you get into a rhythm, and once you get out of it, its hard to get back in. Here's hoping I quickly find my rhythm again.

BTW, the lame title of this post is a play on the title of the post I wrote after my last hiatus: "Back and Badder Than Ever". It also alludes to some of the radically new thoughts I have about SOA (at least radically new to me). I'll be sharing them in upcoming posts.

Tekrati: Analyzing the Analysts

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 03:06:23 GMT

Just discovered Tekrati because someone accessed my blog from Tekrati's Analyst Blogs list. I'm returning the favor and subscribing to their RSS feed. (Or maybe not; it's not working.)

Furling

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:41:40 GMT

Note the change to my weblog. I've added a list of recently "Furled" pages to my home page "navigation box" to the right of this post. What's Furl you say? Furl is one of a number of emerging "bookmark" ASPs (application service providers). (Since, I'm an analyst, maybe I should coin the term "Content Service Provider". Naw.)

Rather than storing my bookmarks on my hard drive using good old Compass. I now store them at Furl, which has serveral advantages:

I can share them with others more easily (including letting others subscribe to see new bookmarks as I collect them)
Furl permanently caches a copy of the Furled page, just in case the link breaks down the line for some reason (this is what initially attracted me to Furl)
I can see who else has Furled the same page, which is a great way to find people with similar obscure interests)
I can see how many people have hit one of my bookmarks (maybe someday Furl will let me see where the hit came from)
I can comment on the page (this eliminates the need to do such commenting on my web page)

So give it a try. Click on a Furl that interests you or click on Full Archive of Furled Pages to see all the cool pages I've encountered in my travels. Furl is highly recommended. (And yes, you can download an XML document with all your bookmarks at any time. Something that A9 lacks.)

Happy New Year.

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 13:29:40 GMT

Sorry for the lull in the posts. Busy, busy, busy. I just made a minor change to the site, so I thought I'd mention it here: categories. I finally turned on Radio's categories capability. Now I can annotate each entry with one or more categories so readers can read through just the entries on a particular topic. You can see my initial list of categories on the right of the home page in the "navigation box" or whatever it's called. Of course, now I have to go back and manually catagorize all past entries. What fun!