Filtering information for peers, bringing sanity to information overload

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Problem

The amount of information that we go through every day is increasing by the day, and its becoming hard to keep up with everything. Even with internal company channels the amount of information is hard to keep up along with doing our daily jobs. There is a constant fear of missing out on things.

Need

What we feel like having is an army of people filtering out relevant information for us to review later on, but wait is that not something that is available withRead it later but with an extension of not just the articles that we want to read but the social channel updates that we might be interested in, so important links and conversation summary from Twitter, Facebook , Skype group and social cast Merged with key articles of the day, for us to review when we have time. A focused merger of company wide and external channels that we work with everyday.

Solution

The solution seems Pretty straight forward, what is needed is two key factors

1) Registration of interests

2) Automation of filtration based on interests, or Groups that are willing to filter important information for us based on our interests

Automation of such a task across so many channels is quite a complicated goal to accomplish, although not impossible but for now I think we are still not technologically ready to achieve that gracefully.

The best approach is to crowd source this filtration, your peers have a better understanding of what you are interested in. So if I spend half an hour or so on social channels than I can filter stuff for my peers as I go through the contents. Sharing can be based on individuals or groups based on their current interests.

The technical solution will look something like a browser plugin or an add-in to the various social software applications we use, so that the process of sharing with peers becomes a simple and straight forward task, and is built into the system that we are using.

The interest based filtered contents can then show up as an email digest or activity stream on a website, or even better if they can be channeled back to one of the social software channels being used (Show up in linkedin / socialcast or facebook as the reading of the day).

If there is something out there that already does that, then please do direct me to it, this will bring sanity to my information overload and take this constant fear of missing out away from me.

Follow-up

After reviewing this idea a bit further I realised that filtration can be managed by distributing the filtration process to individual client machines. Although the personal configuration for content interests stays in a central location (probably a site hosted on a cloud based platform), client application on each individuals machine can sync the configuration and process the contents from each social software source being processed for interests. Once specific contents are found matching the interests, suggestions are provided to the user, who chooses the relevant contents which are then uploaded to the server.

This is the key idea that I am working on , and will add and elaborateness my thinking as I go forward with it.

 

Fake Security alert on windows 7

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I started getting fake windows security alert on my windows 7 PC.
The fake security alert would not allow me to run any applications or cancel the alert, it keeps on prompting me to buy the release version of an antivirus software online.
I have windows Security Essentials and windows defender installed on my machine.
I created a new account and was able to execute applications without any problems in that account, which indicated to me that the application was setup in that accounts personal data folders.
I could not find any windows service or installed application which could indicate any problem with the system.
After some investigation I found out that this is a spyware called antispyoem.com, found various guides online to clean it up from the computer, but most of the details did not work for me. since the executable was not found in the users personal folder that had an issue. http://www.spywareremove.com/removeAntispyoemcom.htmlhttp://blog.teesupport.com/how-to-guide-remove-antispyoem-com-antispyoem-removal-guide/
What I did initially was to login to the machine using an account different to the affected account. The spyware did not show up in the new account.
If the affected account is not critical then the simplest solution will be to delete the user account in question, and start using an alternate account. To save me time and grief that is what I have adopted and its working fine for me now.

Changing Jive SBS base url

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We recently moved our staging jive SBS to production and where concerned about url’s becoming invalid, and that is exactly what happened. However after a little bit of investigation we found out that it was more of a jive configuration issue rather than static URL’s generated by the application.

So after some investigation we found out that we need to rest the setup and reconfigure the base URL. Which sorted out the issue for us.

Unable to open CHM help file

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I was sent a CHM file from one of our software vendors, and I was unable to view the contents. Although the file enclosed in the zip opened up, but individual pages will not display.

After requesting a revised version from the vendor I came to know that it’s more of a security issue on windows rather than anything to do with the chm file itself.

Please check out URL below if you are having problem viewing contents of a chm file on windows.

http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/581253.aspx

In short view the properties of the chm file, and click on the unblock button to unblock the chm file, which blocks the chm file from opening properly.

End of Support Announcement from Atlassian for all things Enterprise

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Atlassian last week announced end of support for Announcement , which to me is a suicide on the enterprise end. Discontinuing support for Enterprise grade Java severs like Websphere, Weblogic and JBoss and only supporting tomcat is not going to take them a long way within the enterprise environment. I can understand that it’s heavy on their development and support costs, but then the simple solution would have been to provide two versions of the product, one standard, which only has support for tomcat, and other enterprise, which supports all things enterprise including IE 6. The difference in cost could then be used to support the enterprise grade features.

I think Atlassian needs to seriously consider this announcement otherwise they run the risk of being excluded from being considered an enterprise grade wiki.

Changing External URL to SharePoint 2010 (Alternate Access Mapping)

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I installed the public demo of SharePoint 2010 right after its release on a Virtual box based Windows 2008 64 bit install. Although the documentation suggests that one needs at least 4 GB of memory but I am running this install on a VM configuration of around 2 GB and it is working smooth for me.

For a client demo we released that some URLs for the external access to the SharePoint install were being redirected to the internal URL, hence those pages did not work for external access. After 5 minutes of effort I found out that it’s a very simple configuration in the central administration at Central Administration – > Alternate Access Mapping, that allows one to provide an external facing URL to the SharePoint install.

The main point to note over here, is that my experience with SharePoint 2010 has been a very pleasant one, its relatively easy to find what you are looking for, and over all look and feel of not only the front end but admin section has been simplified, which provides an excellent user experience.

Templating Confluence notification emails

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the details are listed here

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Customising+the+eMail+Templates

Customisations to the Confluence email templates will need to be reapplied when you upgrade Confluence. Consider this before making drastic changes to the layout, and be sure to keep a list of what you have changed for your upgrade process later.

Only administrators with access to the server where Confluence is running can modify the Confluence email templates.

Process to change the email templates
1.Shut down your test instance of Confluence.
2.In the Confluence web application folder, find the file /confluence/WEB-INF/lib/confluence-2.x.jar.
3.Make a copy of this file as a backup.
4.Learn how to edit files within .jar archives.
5.Within the jar file, find the /templates/email folder. Find the appropriate file(s) within that folder.
6.Edit the file with a text editor to make the required changes. The content is mostly HTML, but has some Velocity template variables in it. See Velocity Template Overview for more information about how these work.
7.Again using the guide on editing files within .jar archives, either rejar the set of folders or drop the new files into the identical folder structure in the WEB-INF/classes directory.
8.Start Confluence up again and test your changes.
9.Apply the changes to your production Confluence instance.
The same process can be applied to modify most of the templates in the Confluence web application. For velocity files that are not in a jar file, you need not shut down and restart Confluence. Be careful to test your changes before applying them to a live site. The templates contain code that is vital for Confluence to function, and it is easy to accidentally make a change that prevents use of your site.

For me jar alternation and replacement did not work since there was some conflicting chars in the css, however placing the vm files under WEB-INF/classes worked fine for me after sorting out the css. e.g I replaced the header.vm and footer.vm under the folder \templates\email\html\includes with exactly the same folder hierarchy and it worked for me.