MarkLogic CEO on what's next for FAST

Dave Kellog, CEO of Mark Logic says the real question for FAST customers is: “what next?”

Microsoft / Fast Drops Linux and Unix Support. Should You Turn to MarkLogic As A Replacement? | Kellblog

Microsoft confirms FAST Search on Linux and UNIX is DEAD

FAST ESP on non-Windows platforms was doomed from the moment Microsoft acquired FAST. The blog entry Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : Innovation on Linux and UNIX confirms it:

With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

Five years 'mainstream' support for FAST ESP 5.3 and then five more years of 'extended' support.

UK Government ICT Strategy 2010-2020

The new UK Government ICT Strategy:

The need to transform public services and to fully exploit ICT to achieve this is accelerating. To meet increasing demand within this complex technology arena, the UK public sector has built an ICT infrastructure that in many instances duplicates solutions across different areas of Government. The ICT strategy will ensure that the infrastructure will go through a process of standardisation and simplification based on the premise of a common infrastructure designed to enable local delivery suited to local needs. Delivery will increasingly be through partnerships between the public, private and third sectors and the strategy enables greater interoperability to underpin this model. The strategy applies to all of the UK Public Sector, whether Central Government, Local Government, Wider Public Sector or Devolved Administrations. It provides a common approach to ICT that maintains local accountability and control over implementation to meet unique delivery and business requirements."

There are fourteen strands to the strategy:

1. The Public Sector Network
2. The Government Cloud (G-Cloud)
3. Data Centres
4. Government Applications Store (G-AS)
5. Shared Services
6. Desktop Services
7. Architecture and Standards
8. Open Source, Open Standards, Reuse
9. Greening Government ICT
10. Information Security & Assurance
11. Professionalising IT enabled change
12. Reliable Project Delivery
13. Supply Management
14. International Alignment

RAAF Roulettes at the Australia Day Concert

Roulettes, originally uploaded by justinknol.

on Flickr - Reconciliation

Reconciliation One, originally uploaded by justinknol.

Christmas lunch.....

Christmas lunch....., originally uploaded by justinknol.

Five years, one week and one day on flickr

CSIRO roofline, originally uploaded by justinknol.

This is the first image I posted on flickr - December 13, 2004

:)

core twenty images

I've just made a new set of what I think are twenty core images, representing the last five years of my photography.

Here are links to the individual images:

1. roof and sky, 2. Phantom, 3. floriade two, 4. covered chair, 5. British Museum, 6. waiting 30 minutes, 7. boat deck, 8. guess, 9. a fearsome symmetry, 10. landscape, 11. 74" dome vii, 12. poles, apart, 13. southbank walk, 14. bike rack ii, 15. fence, more, 16. Untitled, 17. window and sky, 18. Put that thing back where it came from - iv, 19. DSS-43, 20. Tate Modern

Surreal Tate Modern (via Flickr)

Tate Modern, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

Assyrian at the British Museum

Assyrian, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

with some iPhone post processing...

Stupidest Definition of Enterprise Vendor Security by Gartner Analyst

In the blog entry Is Apple an “Enterprise-class Vendor” From a Security Perspective? Nah Gartner Analyst John Pescatore says:

Years ago I did a Research Note on how to quickly judge how serious a vendor was about enterprise security, and I graded lots of vendors. The easy test: go to www.vendorname.com/security and see what you find.

He says Apple fails, but that Cisco, Microsoft and others get it - based on his test.

Then he says the test doesn't apply for security vendors because McAfee and CheckPoint fail his test.

Hmmmmm

Entree on QF1

Entree on QF1, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

Working in the UK for two weeks...

A new MacBook Pro - small, but shiny

Small, but Shiny, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

we all know where this is...

we all know where this is..., originally uploaded by justinKnol.

To succeed you must Let It Go

Gartner Analyst Andrea DiMaio talks about the Critical Success Factor for Government 2.0 in his blog post The Government 2.0 Critical Success Factor Is To Let It Go

I have been reluctant to pick the number one factor, until when during a meeting last Friday, an executive from a federal Canadian agency used the term I had in mind but I had never put on paper. We were discussing how to make content more appealing to citizens using social media, and what the Smithsonian and others have been doing with Flickr, where they push content that can be tagged, classified, augmented by people on line. As I was going through this and other examples, I concluded with what I thought was the common denominator in all success stories so far. Funnily enough, this government executive (a very smart lady, with a long experience in several large agencies, and an enviably open mind) and I used the same term at the same moment, so much so that it almost sounded like a duet: “You have to let go” we both said.

You should read the whole thing...

Cars

Cars, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

I like the yellow car......

now on facebook

I've just created a presence on facebook. The purpose is not (just) to spy on the children.

With luck this post will appear there momentarily.

I missed my 10th blogging anniversary on 5th August

I saw Peter O'Kelly's 10th anniversary blog entry the other day and it occured to me that I have been posting stuff for a while too.

So I checked and my oldest blog entry was on August 5, 1999.

The best part is that the page is still hosted at pitas.com and many of the links still work. If only I could remember what my username and password for the site were...

:)

SharePoint 2010: Developer Platform White Paper

Brief Description

An Introduction for ASP.NET Solution Architects by David Chapell
This white paper provides an overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform for ASP.NET developers.

Overview

What is an application platform? It’s a broad concept that can include a range of interconnected technologies. ASP.NET is a platform for creating Web applications, for example, while at the same time it belongs to the larger application platform provided by the .NET Framework. Because the SharePoint 2010 application platform is based on ASP.NET, learning how to use it isn’t a huge learning curve for ASP.NET developers. But when does it make sense to build an application on SharePoint instead of on raw ASP.NET? The goal of this paper is to answer these questions. Doing this requires describing what the SharePoint 2010 platform provides and looking at the types of applications SharePoint is designed to support. If your application can benefit from the SharePoint framework, building it on SharePoint will enable you to focus more on creating value and less on building infrastructure.

Link to the download page: SharePoint 2010: Developer Platform White Paper

FAST meets SharePoint 2010

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : FAST meets SharePoint - What's Coming in Search for SharePoint 2010 says: FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 adds a whole new level of search capabilities that are a superset of what comes in the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 Search option. Since there are now two search options in 2010, it’s useful to understand what is unique in FAST Search for SharePoint and when you might consider using it over the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 search. With that in mind, here are my 10 reasons to consider FAST Search for SharePoint 2010:

1. Content Processing Pipeline


2. Meta-data Extraction


3. Structured Data Search


4. “Deep” Refinement (Faceted Search)


5. Visual Search (Document Thumbnails and Previews)


6. Advanced linguistics


7. Visual best bets


8. Best-in-class development platform


9. Custom search experiences (per user/profile)


10. Extreme Scale and Performance

Read the whole article to get details on these ten. They give a reasonable overview of what is coming.

Hopefully there also be some public info available soon on the two 'raw' FAST Search 2010 products.

An Endless Stream of Government Data Contests

Andrea DiMaio from Gartner say in An Endless Stream of Government Data Contests:

I remain convinced that these sort of contests will not deliver significant value until when they are better segmented and more explicitly targeted to government employees who, in spite of what some think, are better placed that Java programmers out there to make sense out of raw government data.

Yep.

Mt Stromlo at the Gallery

Mt Stromlo at the Gallery, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

Improving data visualisation for the public sector

The Improving data visualisation for the public sector project:

Good data visualisation can help users explore and understand the patterns and trends in data, and also communicate that understanding to others to help them make robust decisions based on the data being presented. This site supports public sector researchers improve the way that they visualise data, by providing good practice examples and case studies, practical and step-by-step guides on how to visualise data, and links to more detailed resources.

The site’s Visual Examples page contains a list of different types of visualisations, some of which are interesting…

Bike Rack on the Big Screen

Bike Rack on the Big Screen, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

Another shot from my exhibition last week...

Opera House

Opera House, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

Omerang

Omerang, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

Powerhouse roof

Powerhouse roof, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

At the Gallery

At the Gallery, originally uploaded by justinKnol.

data.australia.gov.au and MashupAustralia competition

data.australia.gov.au – beta

Data.australia.gov.au is the home of Australian government datasets. The site is currently in beta stage, so consider this a preview of what’s to come. Some features are not yet fully developed. There may be some bugs or other issues.

The datasets provided through data.australia.gov.au have been created by many different government agencies. Because of this, we cannot guarantee the quality or timeliness of the datasets. While we welcome your feedback, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to correct any problems identified with the datasets. For more information see our Disclaimer.

The Department of Finance and Deregulation is responsible for the development and ongoing operation of this site.

The gov2.0 task force has also launched a MashupAustralia competition - inviting everyone do something creative with the data.

The Museum of HP Calculators

The Museum of HP Calculators:

The Museum of HP Calculators displays and describes Hewlett-Packard calculators introduced from 1968 to 1986 plus a few interesting later models. There are also sections on calculating machines and slide rules as well as sections for buying and selling HP calculators, an HP timeline, collecting information and a software library.

Mine was a 41C :)