Applications

Fluid: not quite there

After testing fluid for a couple of hours I found that it had a number of problems with some of the web sites I was most interested in wrapping up; but would probably work fine for other commercial web sites. Read More...

Fluid

Today I bumped in to one of those apps you always knew should be easy and should have: Fluid. This application wraps up a web site and makes an application icon you can click on to start. Read More...

Reflections on the Post PC era

There has been much speculation about the Post PC era. A recent article in IEEE Computing Now by Joshua Greenbaum iPads, Consumption and Creation, and the Future of Enterprise Software claimed that the consumption only model of the iPad and the strength of the web browser on the Windows 8 tablet were nigh on the death nell of the iPad in the enterprise. The article seems to have forgotten both the history of iOS and their ability to access virtual machines. Read More...

Reflections on Expert Systems

About a week ago I was asked for the right to use a comment I made on expert systems on the I, Cringley Blog. I observed:

Once again we confuse “Expert” with “Expert System”. These two things are almost diametrically opposed.

Experts understand exceptions, learn and focus on the unusual.

Expert Systems codify knowledge and focuses on the common.

In fact the economic incentives for expert systems reward handling the common cases first and returns tend to decrease as the more uncommon cases are added. IBM isn’t reproducing and storing real experts, just finding a way to stamp out repeatable workers and miss labelling them.

This thought developed over a number of years as I hoped between the disciplines of management and computer science and for the sake of completeness I thought to expand upon the idea here. Read More...

Open - Apple's little secret

OS X’s open command is the secret sauce for gluing web control panels to OS X applications. Read More...

Chasing Staff with Trixbox

A popular request by Trixbox users is for a hunt group that calls extensions and external lines.

Trixbox provides a confirm option which prevents voice mail and answering machines from stopping the hunt process - unfortunately it only works with the ringall strategy not a hunt strategy.

This blog post describes how to implement a custom dial rule that provides a hunt group with confirm. Read More...