BRB: Brett Roberts' Blog

This morning the NZ Herald published a short op-ed I wrote about how simple and relatively inexpensive technology investments can make a big difference to businesses. This is particularly true for small businesses which make up over 98% of all businesses and employ over 50% of the total NZ workforce. If you’ve stumbled across this blog as a result of reading that Herald piece, welcome ! And if you’re a small business owner or manager you might be interested in the resources available at the Microsoft NZ Small Business Centre and this information on how smart IT investments can positively impact the efficiency, flexibility and reliability of your business.

Earlier this week my colleague Doug Mahugh blogged about Microsoft publishing the document-format implementation notes for the ODF implementation in Office 2007 SP2. These notes, which are available on the DII web site, provide detailed information about the design decisions that went into our implementation of ODF 1.1, and are the result of a huge amount of work by people in the Office team. This announcement, combined with the upcoming publication of similar notes detailing our implementation of Open XML in current and upcoming products and our active participation in the maintenance processes of IS29500 and ODF (in ISO/IEC and OASIS respectively), provides a good indication of the progress we’re making when it comes to achieving the levels of interoperability that customers need and expect.

I have been involved in a number of conversations over the last few months regarding the ever-declining number of school and university students embarking upon IT-related careers (in particular, the more technically-oriented roles in R&D and programming etc).

The conversations have been with a wide variety of people including CIO's, university students, high school students, school teachers, parents, IT vendors and entrepreneurs and while the conversations have all been different there is a common thread running through all of them:

Less and less of New Zealand's school and university students are opting for careers in IT

There are many reasons for the current situation including, in no particular order:

• parents not understanding the IT world and therefore steering their kids away from it
• students not being inspired by technology
• our best and brightest can earn a lot more overseas than in NZ
• relevance of the current ICT curriculum being taught in schools

In a way, this is a supply chain problem. We don't have enough kids leaving school wanting to pursue a career in IT. That means we don't have enough people entering university to complete computer science degrees which means we don't have enough graduates and those graduates we do have are highly valued by employers in other countries who are willing to whisk them away from NZ and pay them more than they would earn here. End result: a declining pool of qualified, talented individuals who can help keep the New Zealand technology sector relevant in a 21st century, global marketplace.

Obviously there is no single, silver bullet solution however there are things which will contribute to making a positive difference. For example:

Getting school kids excited about technology-related careers

I recently presented at a Digital Technologies Professional Learning Symposium alongside people from IBM, Datacom, HP, gen-i and Ocular Films. The session we were involved in was a one hour presentation and panel discussion and the audience comprised around 150 Year 12 and Year 13 teachers. The format was that each of the panel members would present for 4 or 5 minutes and then we'd have 15 to 20 minutes for Q&A. I was amazed that all of the presentations were along very similar lines. Each of the presenters, myself included, was very enthusiastic about what they've been able to achieve and experience via their IT-related career and all of us asked the teachers to do whatever they could to show their students the wide variety of career options open to them in IT. Interestingly all of us asked, in our own way, that the teachers help their students to develop 'soft skills' such as innovative thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, conflict management and communication. The similarity between the presentations was striking, all the more so given that each of us had developed our presentations in isolation. Obviously we are all thinking along similar lines though when it comes to the problem at hand and the ways in which it can be addressed.

The reaction from the attendees was amazing. Several came up to me afterwards and said that they hadn't realised what a wide variety of career options were available in the IT sector, a couple asked me (and other panel members) to come to their schools to present to their students and a couple more asked me how they should go about seeking a career in IT.

Key learning: the IT industry needs to do a better job of presenting itself to its potential future employees, managers and leaders

Getting school kids excited about technology

In presentations I have occasionally joked that the difference between digital immigrants and digital natives is that if the former came across a teleporter at a science fair they would be fascinated by the device and spend hours talking to the inventor about how it worked and whether it was safe etc while the latter would simply dial up "New York" or "Paris" and walk through the portal. My three children definitely fall into the category of digital natives. All of them have used PC's from an early age and all of them use them extensively today, sometimes, I must admit, too extensively. (yes Harrison Roberts, gamer extraordinaire, I am talking to you)  :-)  Two years ago I watched my then 11 year-old daughter playing a multiplayer game on Club Penguin while simultaneously instant messaging one friend/player and talking to another on the phone. When I pointed out to her that there was all sorts of cool technology underpinning her gaming and communication experience the look on her face was similar to what I would have seen if I'd been waxing lyrical about the way in which water comes out of the kitchen tap. Synopsis: my kids don't see the magic of technology and it's not for a lack of trying on my part.

They play games on their PC's, they play games on the Xbox 360, they talk with people over VoIP, they scan images and change them with Microsoft Paint and ArtRage, they use Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Windows Live. They know how to shoot videos with a handycam, edit the results in MovieMaker, add some effects and music and then upload the resulting file to YouTube. So can you imagine the thrill they must experience when they - and tens of thousands of their equally technology-literate peers - head into an ICT class at school to be taught how to create a flat file database ?

The good news is that some schools have found a way to get kids interested in and excited about technology (as well as teaching them to solve problems, work as a team and resolve conflicts etc). They're teaching kids about robotics and the results I've seen personally have been amazing. My eldest son, Harrison, is part of a robotics team at his school (Mt Albert Grammar, famous for churning out people such as Robert Muldoon, Alan Bollard, Arthur Lydiard, Chris Liddell and Brett Roberts :-)  ) and I recently had a chance to be a spectator at a robotics competition his team were participating in. There were 8 or 10 teams in attendance and each of them had taken a very different approach to designing a robot to achieve a single pre-defined task (picking up and putting away foam blocks - if they invented one that did the same for Lego pieces I'd have bought one on the spot). It was obvious that a huge amount of work had gone into designing and building each robot and the kids involved were enjoying both the technology and the competition (as were their parents).

A year or so back I also got to talk to some of the people who are involved in the NZ chapter of the FIRST Robotics Championship. Dr Diana Twigden and Bill Smale from Smales Farm Technology Office Park and Professor Ian Maddox from Massey University’s Albany campus have been driving forces behind bringing the competition to New Zealand and in April of this year they, along with 51 others, travelled to Atlanta to observe the worldwide event. You can read more about the championship here but the bottom line is that this sort of technology, competition and engagement is exactly what we need to get kids enthused about careers in technology.

Key learning: getting kids interested in technology is all about making it interesting, relevant and EXCITING

If you're interested in getting your kids involved in robotics there are a number of great resources on the internet including the Microsoft Robotics site, Lego Mindstorms and Vex Robotics.

Getting kids interested in technology is something Microsoft thinks about a lot. While we're obviously looking to the future and how we go about ensuring we can employ talented and well-trained people we also believe that the ability to look at business problems and solve them in a programmatic way is an important skill which we should be helping people develop. To this end a small team at Microsoft Research have been working on a cool project called Boku (named after the little critter in the picture above) which, in addition to letting kids design their own games, teaches them the basics of programming in a way which doesn't require a line of code or a single IF/THEN statement to be written (it doesn't need a keyboard either). Long Zheng has a great video demo of Boku here .

If steps aren't taken to address it, the IT skills shortage has the potential to seriously impact New Zealand's ability to innovate and compete in the technology arena. It's a problem which was years in the making and which will be years in the fixing however the rapidly increasing alignment I see between the IT industry, educators and the government causes me to be very optimistic for the future and that makes me very happy. The other thing that makes me happy is that my kids will soon be sitting in front of the Xbox and 'accidentally' learning to program and that has to be the perfect revenge for a Technology Immigrant Dad  :-)

The OpenXML Document Viewer project is one of the outcomes of a series of Document Interoperability Initiative workshops and one of the goals of the project is to show how documents created using Open XML Format can be translated to HTML. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Solutions Integrators and Mobile Solution providers can use these tools to enable their customers to view OpenXML documents on heterogeneous platforms and browser applications. The OpenXML Viewer is available under an open source license (the Microsoft Public License), which allows anyone to use the tools, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project.

An OpenXML to HTML plug-in for Firefox is available here and there's a demo of the plug-in here.

The NZ Herald published a story yesterday about a recent Netsafe event which utilised deliberately insecure PC's to show how quickly they can be compromised when connected to the internet:

"There were more than 112 direct attempts to attack the four computers. The first probes happened within 30 seconds and the first attempt at intrusion within two minutes"

Unfortunately the Herald story didn't include any details on what people can do to ensure their PC's are as secure as possible so here's the four simple steps that everybody can take:

1. Use a firewall

2. Keep your PC's operating system and applications up to date with security updates

3. Use updated anti-virus software

4. Use updated anti-spyware software

For more details on these steps and others you can take to stay safe online please check out the Microsoft Security at Home site

There's a great post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog about some of the accessibility technologies being built into Windows 7. "Accessibility" is the term applied to the Application Program Interfaces (API's) and features that enable Windows to be used, to be accessible, by as many people as possible so that, regardless of physical or cognitive abilities, everyone has the ability to access the functions of Windows. I'll leave it to you to read the post for yourself but there was one point which caught my eye which I think is worth repeating here:

"To make sure that Windows features themselves were good providers, we borrowed an idea from the Software Development Lifecycle, risk assessment.  Before a line of code was written, each planned Windows 7 feature was rated on its Accessibility risk.  Features that use more basic, off-the-shelf common controls are usually more accessible because Windows provides built-in providers for off-the-shelf components; features that do fancy, custom drawing have more work to do.  This planning process made each team aware of how much accessibility risk it was taking on, so that they could plan appropriately.  Once the features were all rated, the list was sorted by risk so that our team could reach out to teams with high-risk features and make sure that they had the resources and tools they needed to make their feature properly accessible.  We also ensured that they received more hands-on testing and validation.  As a result, most Windows features are more accessible than they have been in previous releases, making for a better overall customer experience."

Accessible technology is very important to a lot of people out there and I know it's something the State Services Commission and others within government think a lot about. It's great to see the Windows 7 team making it a primary design consideration and continuing to drive innovation in this space.

Earlier this week my colleague Stuart McKee sent through an email highlighting a Microsoft Research project called MAVIS (Microsoft Audio Video Indexing System) which is designed to “index the spoken content of recorded conversations, whether they are from meetings, conference calls, voice mails, presentations, online lectures, or even Internet video”.

Stuart has been working with the Washington State Digital Archives people to build a system to archive tens of thousands of hours of audio records and now, via MAVIS, provide the public with the ability to search those audio archives quickly and accurately.  The really cool thing is that this isn’t a vapourware announcement – the search capability is up and running right now on the WSDA website. Below is a of snippet from a Washington State press release on the project:

“The Washington Digital Archives is the first government program in the country to offer Microsoft Research’s Audio Search technology, which takes record keeping to the next level: it doesn’t just preserve audio recordings – it gives people an innovative way to search through them.

The partnership grew from an ambitious project undertaken three years ago by the Washington State House of Representatives and the Washington State Archives to save over 30,000 cassette tapes of committee hearings.”

Try it out for yourself. All you have to do is click on the “Search” link, select “audio recordings” from the Record Series dropdown list and enter the word(s) you’re looking for in the keywords field. I searched on “New Zealand” and found multiple references each of which was returned as a link which, when clicked, started playing the audio stream from the point at which the search term was found.

 

This is a very cool and extraordinarily useful piece of technology and it’s a great example of Microsoft Research making good on their goal of “turning ideas into reality”.

The fifth volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) has just been published and it provides an in-depth perspective on the changing threat landscape including software vulnerability disclosures and exploits, malicious software (malware), and potentially unwanted software. Using data derived from hundreds of millions of Windows users, and some of the busiest online services on the Internet, the report also provides a detailed analysis of the threat landscape and the changing face of threats and countermeasures and includes updated data on privacy and breach notifications.

There are two versions of the report available - the full report and and “key findings summary” and both are available from here. There is a huge amount of information to digest but, for what it’s worth, here’s a few snippets which I found interesting during my first read-through of the full report:

1. Vulnerability disclosures in Microsoft’s software in 1H08 continued a multi-period downward trend, both in terms of all disclosures and relative to total industry disclosures.

2. For browser-based attacks on Windows XP–based machines, Microsoft vulnerabilities accounted for 42% of the total. On Windows Vista–based machines, however, the proportion of vulnerabilities attacked in Microsoft software was much smaller, accounting for just 6% of the total.

 

3. The top reason reported for data loss through a security breach in 1H08 continued to be stolen equipment such as laptop computers (37.2% of all data-loss incidents reported). Those people in the 37.2% might be interested in this.

4. When it comes to malware infection rates, New Zealand is 6th from bottom at 0.6% (hence the title of this blog post). The worst country is Afghanistan at 7.64%.

Update 07Nov08: thank you to my colleague Waldo Kuipers for pointing out that the unit measurement in the table below is actually “CCM” i.e. number of machines cleaned per 1000 machines the Malicious Software Removal Tool was run against. The numbers in the paragraph above have been amended accordingly.

5. And I guess if there was just one part of the report that you should read and take notice of it’s the graph which shows categorically that the best way to dramatically increase resilience to attacks is to adopt newer OS versions as they ship and keep them up-to-date with Service Packs as they’re released.

Two or three years ago I was asked to give a presentation on ‘the future of technology’ to a local community group. In the presentation I included a prediction that the day would come where people would have a 3D printer on their desk and would routinely “print” things ranging from household items to sculptures, toys and game characters. I also predicted that a business would evolve providing templates and designs etc for those printers.

I was careful at the time not to try and predict exactly when this would happen (predicting the future is much easier that way) but I did make the comment that just as laser printers had evolved from hugely expensive devices which only companies and bureaus could afford that the same would happen to 3D printers. And I was right. This excerpt is from a recent post on the always-interesting Ponoko blog:

“When the The Apple LaserWriter first hit the mass market in 1985, the desktop publishing revolution was born. With a starting price of $6995 the unit weighed a hefty 77 lb (35kg) and was 11.5 x 18.5 x 16.2 inches the first desktop printer was not the lightweight, disposable peripheral printers have become today, in every classroom, business and home. 23 years later and Desktop Factory, (previously mentioned on Ponoko Blog) are about to launch us into the 3rd dimension of desktop printing with their 125ci 3D Printer for under U$5000. The unit weighing around 90 lb (40kg) and 25 x 20 x 20 is only marginally bigger than the first Apple LaserWriter, and allowing for inflation, considerably cheaper”

This technology has been around for a long time but it only now starting to make its way towards the desktop and the way in which the machines work means that it’s just as easy to create a moving object as it is a static one. These videos show this in action: video 1 , video 2

No discussion on 3D printing or replication can go by without mentioning the open source RepRap project. One of the leaders of the project is New Zealand’s Vik Olliver and when I talked to him about it a while back he mentioned that one of the mind-bending (for me) goals of the project was for the RepRap to be able to make copies of itself. Imagine a device which can make copies of itself, that’s about as futuristic as it gets, right ? Well it turns out they achieved that goal on May 29th of this year.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that this technology will change the world. As a simple example, imagine the personal, business and environmental implications of being able to “print” a child’s toy instead of driving the the local toy store to purchase something made of plastic, packaged in plastic and shipped from somewhere in China. There’s a great quote from Google’s Chris DiBona on the RepRap site:

“Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop”

Personally I think one of the biggest benefits will be never having to read the phrase “some assembly required” again :-)

Update 03Nov08: a recent blog post with some great examples of 10 Things 3D Printers Can Do Now!

The Samba team’s Andrew Bartlett has an interesting post here regarding a couple of Microsoft interoperability events he attended recently. He does a good job of painting a picture of the changes happening within Microsoft with regard to engaging with the FOSS community and while I’ve seen these changes unfolding over the last four or five years it’s nice to see them being acknowledged by somebody in Andrew’s position. I would recommend you read the complete article however these snippets will hopefully give you an idea of the overall tone of his post:

“This has been an amazing year of changes for those of us with an interest in interoperability with Microsoft, and these two events are an excellent example of the change in practice.”

“… we have a beachhead at Redmond, and a department committed to providing the Free Software community with answers or clarification on any reasonable interoperability question”

“The Free Software community still does not have perfect interoperability with Microsoft's products - far from it - but the bottleneck is our own pace of implementation and comprehension, not missing documentation or the difficult task of network analysis so often required in the past”

“We were very surprised by the extraordinary degree of effort that Microsoft put into this single vendor plug fest. We were given direct access to the Active Directory product team in Microsoft, plus we had a team of 6 Microsoft engineers working with us full time for the whole week of the plug fest, and were able to call upon additional Microsoft engineers with specialist knowledge in specific areas as needed.”

“However, the WSPP program and Microsoft's new protocol documentation is not just about 'Samba' things - the protocols covered are any that a windows client uses to talk to a windows server. Many other Free Software projects can and should take advantage of the new documentation and clarification process.”

Andrew also references Microsoft’s Protocol Programs which, as he notes in that last quote above, are something I believe many FOSS projects could and should take advantage of.