Category Archives: Reviews

Personal experiences with hardware, software, services, books, etc.

ThePortableConsultant’s increasing portablility

The Portable Consultant has noticed that the few posts he once did about the Lexar Lightning and its portable USB applications are the most popular hits on his blog site, almost all of which come via Google.

So it is with great shame that I must confess to being remiss in not informing both my regular readers (Hi, Mom!) of the recent increase in my ‘PQ’, my portability quotient.

Over the past few months I have acquired:

1. a new Lenovo X61 ThinkPad… smaller, more powerful, and with far better battery life than my old refurbished T30 (!) ThinkPad.

Lenovo X61 Notebook

2. a new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet… pocket sized, blazingly fast at connecting to WiFi networks and bluetooth devices, a fine podcatcher and Internet Radio – with a linux terminal interface where I can enter most of the same shell commands I once used to manage big UNIX boxes.

Nokia's Linux powered N800 Internet Tablet

3. a new unlocked Nokia 6300 GSM cell phone… a phone not only capable of going “native” in most countries of the world with local SIM cards, but also the miniature camera I’ve always needed to get those unexpected photos at unexpected times in unexpected places.

Nokia\'s 6300 GSM cell Phone

The whole, however, is greater than the sum of the parts. Together these devices enhance the capabilities of each other in ways I’m only beginning to appreciate.

I’ll be writing more about how these devices play together in the near future.

Cheers,
-pmh

Novell and Capgemini team up on open source

the open source maturity model
A couple of years ago The Portable Consultant came across Bernard Golden’s timely book Succeeding with Open Source. In it Mr. Golden sets out the criteria by which open source software, together with the communities that create it, might be measured in terms of suitability for enterprise use.

Golden describes the Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM) which enables us to judge how scalable, manageable, and supportable a particular open source product might be. As might be expected, a lot of this depends on the open source community that manages and contributes to the project. By assessing the project and the product itself, among other things, the level of maturity and what I would call sophistication can be determined. This, in turn, can help determine how suitable the product might be for a given organization. Suitability depends to a large extent on the role of the product as well as the capabilities of the organization.

As the back cover states, this book points the way to…

  • assessing open source business models
  • managing risk, including licensing issues
  • evaluating and selecting open source software
  • locating and assessing technical support, training, and documentation resources

SeriouslyOpen.org
Around the time that I was reading this book my open source research took me to SeriouslyOpen.org which is jointly sponsored by Capgemini and Intel, according to the site’s footer – Capgemini, it seems, has a limited partnership with Intel. It appears that Capgemini has extended some of the criteria found in Golden’s book and provided the sort of comprehensive methodology of which such consulting firms are fond.

a partnership with roots… or teeth?
All of this goes some way toward explaining why today’s announcement of Novell and Capgemini’s open source partnership may actually have some roots. Capgemini is the only one of the big consulting firms that I am aware of that has gone so far to provide their clients with a formal framework for the consideration and selection of appropriate open source products. Novell is, obviously, doing its level best to raise open source solutions, primarily its own products, to the point where they might be considered on a par with proprietary solutions.

Personally, I’ve thought for some time that Novell has the goods. Whether they have the skills required to market and deliver them is still up in the air. I see some potential for progress here, but whether Capgemini can help drive big business clients to become Novell customers will depend on how well this partnership is executed.

Come to think of it, given Microsoft’s recent patent pronouncements concerning open source, this partnership might do better with teeth rather than roots.

Cheers,
-pmh

  • disclosure: the author of this blog has a financial investment in common stock of Novell Inc.

XP Reloaded – Dell responds to customer demand

Ok, The Portable Consultant spoke a tad too soon when he suggested home users pretend to be a business when ordering online.

It seems customers are demanding not to be inflicted with Microsoft Vista’s teething troubles in great enough numbers to force Dell (perhaps others?) to offer new machines preloaded with XP instead.

The Register has the story here and The Inquirer has it here.

I suppose I underestimated non-business users’ desire for the same stability that businesses demand. Good work, folks!

Cheers,
-pmh