Workplace of the Future? IBM's Virtual World is one possiblity.

I know its been tried before, I participated in a similar experiment in the early 90's while working for AT&T with limited success. Now IBM is taking a stab at designing the work place of the future, in it workers from all over the world would meet and interact in a Virtual Environment similar to Second Life, called the Metaverse but with the security features that IBM expects already in place.

This time communications may have advanced enough to actually pull it off. The primary complaints of Telecommuting experiments in the past is that managers cannot verify that their charges are actually on the job. A Virtual Environment solves the problem because the managers will see their charges at work in the virtual environment, or at least a virtual representation of their charges.

If this type of work environment were to take hold, the only limitation a Virtually Enabled company employee would be high speed network access and a suitable PC. Think of the savings in time, office space and last but not least travel expenses, not a minimal amount given oil hitting $100 a barrel these days.

I hope their experiment or another similar experiment solves the Virtual Worker problem once and for all, and we'll all be able to live and work where we really want to in the near future.

For more on IBM's Virtual World experiment check out PC World - Business Center: IBM Virtual World Defies Laws of Physics:

IBM's uptight, starched-shirt image has survived for many decades, but the stereotype may finally meet its demise at the hands of a giant boulder and a meeting room up in the sky.

IBM is building a virtual world to help its employees collaborate, and while it's not the first big technology company to do so, Big Blue may be unusual in that it decided not to mess with those silly laws of physics in its own virtual environment.

"Why do we need walls and ceilings to do a meeting?" asks Michael Ackerbauer of IBM, who is building the company's virtual world, called the Metaverse. "We've had meetings under water and up in the air. Meetings are where you want them to be."

There have been some mixed reactions to the unconventional model, Ackerbauer admits.

"Some are saying 'wow, this is great, I'm ready to go.' Others are scratching their heads," he says.

Ackerbauer described the Metaverse project this week at Big Blue's Manhattan offices, where IBM CIO Mark Hennessy was meeting with analysts and journalists to show off a range of technologies IBM uses to help its employees collaborate.

IBM's two-year-old Metaverse project is in its early stages and it's not clear just how extensively it will be used throughout the company, which has 372,000 employees worldwide. While a small subset of IBMers do real work in the Metaverse, some of Ackerbauer's initiatives are simply experiments to see what's possible.

That's where the giant boulder comes in. The greenish rock is several times the height of the virtual world's human inhabitants, who gather around the boulder like office workers chatting by a water cooler.

"You can kick this boulder about 1,400 kilometers," Ackerbauer says. "We're just coming up with goofy games on the fly. Let's see how far we can kick it ... what would it be like in zero gravity?"

Something useful will come out of this, Ackerbauer believes. If a few people from different countries gather around the boulder, they're more likely to work together in the future, he says.

"There's business value to making work fun and making them want to come in every day," he says.

Ackerbauer and his team of 10 employees have learned both from massively multiplayer online games as well as Second Life. IBM interacts with customers in Second Life already, and owns plenty of virtual Second Life real estate.

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IOPES the Free Smart E-Mail Search Tool, Including Fuzzy Searches Available From IBM

For all of you who use your email systems as Personal Information repositories (databases) and I'm one of them, but miss the ability to really miss the ability to quick search them for life's important facts, that you could do it they were a real database, guess what, IBM has launched a Smart E-Mail Search Tool designed to do just that, quickly search your email repository for just what your looking for. In fact in case you not quite sure what your looking for, it even does fuzzy searches and best of all its FREE. Initially developed for Lotus Notes, there is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook as well. I wonder if I can get them to write one for Thunderbird as well.

Any way take a look at PC World - IBM Launches Free E-Mail Search Tool:

IBM has launched an email search engine that does fuzzy searches. IBM said it used "advanced algorithms that can interpret incomplete queries and find information such as phone numbers, people, meetings, presentations, documents, images and more."

The idea, according to Big Blue, is to help people find information in their Lotus Notes email databases by identifying the most relevant information in a search query and extrapolating what the user is trying to find. There is also a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.

It's free, is called IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES), and emanates from the company's research labs. According to IBM, it can find information such as a person's phone number even if the email database does not have the words "phone" and "number" in the text. IOPES also allows users to create, save and share personalized searches for future use.

The company reckoned that the tool improves on standard search tools because you don't get irrelevant search results as with a simple text or keyword search. Common search concepts, such as dates, times and phone numbers, are built into the software; additional search parameters, such as meeting requests or specific locations, can be defined and used on the fly without any programming expertise. Such user-defined concepts can be shared between individuals and used to build a more personalized search system, said IBM.

IOPES was created through a collaborative effort spanning IBM labs in Almaden in California, Haifa and Delhi. The software uses the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), an open source software framework that helps organizations build new analysis technologies to realize more value from their unstructured information by discovering relationships, identifying patterns, and predicting outcomes.

Originally developed by IBM, UIMA is now an open source project at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), according to IBM. The company claimed that UIMA was used to enable text analysis, extraction and concept search capabilities in other parts of the IBM OmniFind enterprise search portfolio, including OmniFind Enterprise Edition, OmniFind Analytics Edition, and OmniFind Yahoo! Edition.

"With gigabytes of email storage readily available to nearly everyone, email has evolved from a simple communication tool into a personal database where we retain vast amounts of valuable information," said Lotus distinguished engineer and chief technology officer Douglas Wilson. "We continue to deliver better tools to speed and improve personal mailbox search, and OmniFind Personal Email Search illustrates how IBM's advanced technology delivers the ability to quickly and easily access the precise information we need, exactly when we need it."

Prior to release on alphaWorks, IOPES was tested inside IBM by early adopters who participate in the company's internal technology adoption program, reckoned IBM. AlphaWorks opens up some of the work being done by IBM labs and provides it free.

One by One my excuses for being unorganized are bitting the dust, looks like 2008 might be the year I actually become organized.

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Has Artificial Intelligence Arrived? Russians Claim Smart Chatroom Bot

If as some have theorized the criteria for achieving Artificial Intelligence is creating a program significantly sophisticated enough to be able to converse with humans without the humans being able to distinguish between it and other humans, then that day may have arrived.

I4UNews is reporting that a Russian website says it has a software tool designed to troll online chat forums and posing as a man collect personal information from unexpecting women including names, and phone numbers. They claim that it can chat with up to 10 different women at a time.

While the claims sound fantastic, PC Tools who previewed the software, has warned that the software could be used to harvest personal details online for nefarious uses.

Whether or not the claims are true will become clear when the software goes on sale around February 15.

To find out more, check out I4U News - Russian Computer Program fakes Chatroom Flirting

So before you give out personal information to someone in a chat room, think twice, you might be talking to a nefarious bot.

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US-CERT Reports Microsoft Office Access Under Online Attack

US-CERT is reporting that they have detected that Online criminals are exploiting a flaw in Access that will install software contained withing specially crafted Access Database files with the MDB extension. For more check out what Infoworld has to say in InfoWorld - Microsoft Office Access files targeted for attack:

Online criminals are exploiting a flaw in the Microsoft Office Access database to install unauthorized software on computers, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned Monday.

In its brief warning, US-CERT offered few details on the attack, saying simply that the organization is "aware of active exploitation" of the problem by criminals who have sent specially crafted Microsoft Access Database (MDB) files to victims.

These files are "designed for the sole purpose of executing commands," so they should not be accepted from untrusted sources, Microsoft said in a note on its Web site.

Run by the U.S. Department of Defense, US-CERT is charged with coordinating the nation's response to cyberattacks.

Companies typically block the use of MDB files, but criminals could be using this attack in a targeted strike against an organization that is known to use this particular file type, said Ben Greenbaum, senior manager for Symantec security response. Symantec itself has seen no evidence of the MDB exploitation that prompted the US-CERT alert.

The files are not something that the average user would come across on a daily basis, he added. "MDB files are blocked by default in most installations of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express," he said. "I am a bit surprised to see active exploitation happening over this vector."

While US-CERT did not say which flaw was being exploited, Greenbaum said the vulnerability could be a recently discovered buffer overflow bug in the Microsoft Jet DataBase engine used to parse Access files.

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.CA.Gov Site Reinfested, Will They Ever Learn?

Back in September, some sites on on the .ca.gov domain were infected with malware due to lax securtiy standards, now less than three months later it apparently has happened again, check out eWeek.com - Gov Site Reinfested Due to Hosting Provider Sloppiness:

The Marin County Transportation Authority sites that appeared to be serving up pornography and malware yet again Nov. 29-30 were in fact a sloppy residue from the same Web site hosting company that the California government agency thought it heard the last of once it ceased using the provider in September.

The hosting company in question—StartLogic—or its sister company has, in fact, been at the bottom of multiple hacked government sites, including serving up malware-seeded pages for the domain of Plainville, Kan.—a city that registered a domain but never even put up a site.

Dianne Steinhauser, executive director of the Transportation Authority for Marin County, told eWEEK late in the day on Nov. 30 that TAM ceased hosting its site with its previous provider, StartLogic, as of Sept. 14 due to malware-seeding problems that eventually led to the federal government shoving offline Internet and e-mail service for the entire state of California in early October.

Sunbelt Software President Alex Eckelberry said in a post on the night of Nov. 29 that TAM's domain was yet again serving up links that directed users to pages that pushed Trojans and malware posing as a fake codec. Paul Ferguson, network architect at Trend Micro, told eWEEK that as of Nov. 30 all the garbage was still being served up from subdomains on TAM's site.

The tam.ca.gov site was, in fact, not hacked and was not serving up malware, although it displayed a message saying it was under construction. The site is actually being hosted by a new, independent Web host, ValueWeb, and is in fact still under construction, Steinhauser said.

However, even though TAM stopped doing business with StartLogic in September, the Web hosting provider still had an open Web page assigned to the transportation agency. TAM didn't find out until Nov. 30 about the open page, through which the public could access Web services through StartLogic's servers under tam.ca.gov.

For the rest read eWeek.com - Gov Site Reinfested Due to Hosting Provider Sloppiness:

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HP Annouces They Can Help You Keep Track Of Your Laptops and Phones

PC World is reporting that HP will provide Remote Management for Laptops and Phone. Which means that the next time you lose your phone or have your laptop stolen, a simple call to HP will not only find out where they are, but to disable them as well.

Now where can I find an HP remote manged TV remote....

Check out PC World - HP Announces Remote Management for Laptops, Phones:

Users who lose mobile devices like PDAs, smartphones and notebook computers may soon be able to track the devices and remotely disable them, via a single website.

The problem of lost devices and data is growing, according to an August 2007 "Confidential Data at Risk" survey of some 500 IT enterprises in the US.

The research, by privacy and information management firm the Ponemon Institute and data loss prevention company Vontu Inc, found that PDAs and laptops ranked highest among storage devicesposing the greatest risk for sensitive corporate data. Eighty one per cent of the companies surveyed reported the loss of one or more laptop computers during the previous year.

At a major product and services launch in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on October 18 - 19, Hewlett-Packard announced programs and plans to help deal with these issues, given that many Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have their total enterprise information on their laptops and mobile devices.

Over-the-air device management

HP introduced its Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), comprising over-the-air mobile phone setup, configuration, diagnostics and security management. This includes a set of web-based tools, on a self-care portal. These can be accessed by individuals to diagnose their device, update its software, or even remotely wipe its data. The service is not restricted to HP products, but has multiple device platform support.

Along with a new range of solid state disk notebooks, HP also outlined their notebook tracing service which gives users a system to trace the location of any lost or stolen machine.

HP cites a case where a businessman in Bali, Indonesia, had his laptop stolen from his hotel room while he was at the beach.

He had subscribed to HP's Laptop Tracing Service when he purchased his computer and, after logging in to his personal email account on the web, he received an e-mail containing information on the network location where his laptop had been activated in the past 30 minutes. Using this information he engaged the local police and was able to recover his laptop within a day.

HP said it plans to expand its Total Care Portal for SMBs to cover the total range of mobile devices.

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H-1B Battle Moves To Iowa

The H-1B battle has moved to Iowa ahead of the Jan. 3 caucus. And Computer World has a very informative post on the discussions going on in Iowa on the subject, check out Computer World - National tech policy battle plays out in Iowa as caucus nears:

Gary Scholten, a senior vice president and CIO at Principal Financial Group in Des Moines, has met with several presidential candidates who are running in Iowa's Jan. 3 caucus. Principal is one of the largest companies in the state, and candidates often stop by its offices, giving Scholten the opportunity to relate his IT workforce concerns directly to three Democratic candidates: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sens. Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd.

Scholten wants to see improvements in science and technology education and changes in immigration policy. While his company has hired H-1B workers in the past, it has not done so recently, because of competition for the visas from other companies. This year's allotment of 65,000 visas, plus 20,000 for graduate-degree holders, was claimed in a day.

Scholten said Principal employs 2,000 IT workers in Iowa and about 400 to 500 overseas, but he said he is more concerned about the impact that visa restrictions have on smaller companies.

"The smaller companies, the entrepreneurial companies, are going to be hurt first, and that's where a lot of the economic growth comes from," Scholten said.

The Republican and Democrat candidates have almost a month remaining until the Jan. 3 caucus, and any tech themes that come up during the campaign will be a microcosm of the national debate.

Also in Des Moines is Dante Vignaroli, a mainframe developer for more than 30 years who lost his job to an H-1B worker. Vignaroli was laid off in 1999 and has earned a living doing mostly contract work since then. The candidates aren't knocking on his door, but that isn't stopping him from trying to meet them.

Vignaroli has talked to Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat, about H-1B visas, and he has twice discussed the issue with an Obama aide. He has tried to raise the issue with Sen. Hillary Clinton, but his health won't allow him to stand in line long enough to meet her. However, he says he has no intention of giving up on his mission to warn the candidates about H-1B visas.

"You don't just lose your job, it's like your whole country betrays you," Vignaroli said.

There are some sharp feelings about H-1B visas in Iowa, which is also home to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has emerged as leading critic of the H-1B program. Grassley has used his power to investigate the use of the visas. He recently asked the National Institutes of Health, a federal entity, why it has hired more than 300 H-1B workers.

But Iowa is also counting on technology to help boost its economy, said Leann Jacobson, president of the Technology Association of Iowa. IT companies employ 46,350 people in the state and contribute $2.5 billion annually in wages. The actual number of IT workers may be three times that figure when tech workers at companies such as Principal are counted, she said.

The top priority of the association is to help increase the science and technology workforce, Jacobson said, and it's working on initiatives to encourage secondary school students to consider math and science. Those efforts include attempts to get more money for paid internships. It also wants increases in the H-1B cap.

In an association survey conducted last May that received 54 responses from IT executives, 86% of those polled said they that have had trouble finding qualified employees among Iowa residents. In total, the respondents said they had 1,332 job openings this year. Jacobson said that when that number is extrapolated to include all of the state's tech job openings, it could be as high as 10,000 and growing.

Moreover, 59% of the survey respondents said they required a four-year degree for at least 75% of their available jobs. But as in other areas of the country, the number of college graduates in Iowa with computer science degrees is declining.

Doug Jacobson, an Iowa State University professor of electrical and computer engineering, said the number of students enrolled in computer science and computer engineering programs has dropped about 50% over the past few years, with enrollments in those programs currently at about 600 to 700 students.

Jacobson (who's no relation to Leann Jacobson) said that surveys of high school students show that their interest in enrolling in a college computer science and engineering program has declined by 40% in recent years. The reasons have to do with the lingering impact of the dot-com crash, concerns about offshoring and fears that there are no jobs, even though program graduates are being hired, he said. But high school students are also seeking careers that help make society better, "and they don't feel that IT is a field that does that," said

Doug Jacobson is involved with a new program called the IT Olympics. Earlier this year, high school students involved in the program built computer equipment and systems and then defended their networks against professional hackers. The students stayed up all night to keep the systems running. It helped prove to the students that "they can do things well above anything in their course," he said.

The program is being expanded to include game design and robotics as well as security. Nearly 500 students from 40 high schools are expected to participate in what he calls a two-day "celebration of IT" in April, Jacobson said.

Meanwhile, Principal is also trying to meet workforce needs by working directly with the Des Moines Area Community College. Under a program the company set up with the college this year, students can get full-time employment at Principal if they reach certain objectives, such as receiving an associate's degree in applied science in business information systems with strong grades. But the company last year also decided that it needed to leverage the global workforce, and established a subsidiary in Pune, India, for application development and quality assurance. The Indian operation accounts for roughly 10% of Principal's IT employees.

Unfortunately they have missed a key argument over the H-1B battle, the H-1B process is a very significant contributer to why the number of students enrolled in computer science and computer engineering programs has dropped about 50% over the past few years (which happens to coincide with the live of the H-1B process). Instead of being seen as innovative and valued members of a growing U.S. economy, the H-1B process has devalued computer science professionals making the a plug in commodity which college students have no desire in becoming.

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Is 'Crowdsourcing' right for your next project?

I've heard of outsourcing, I've heard of offshoring, I've heard of opensourcing and now I've heard of crowdsourcing! Crowdsourcing is a combination of all three, outsourcing, offshoring and opensourcing that is actually being used to develop software.

Take a look at this from Computerworld - Should your company 'crowdsource' its next project?

When Constellation Energy Group Inc.'s commodities group needed a new system recently, it considered the usual sources of labor: internal staff, a consultant, a contractor, offshore programmers or a mix of all four. Instead, it turned to a somewhat less traditional technique: Ask programmers from all over the world to compete with each other to write the best code for the system. When all is said and done, hundreds of programmers will labor over a system that, in the end, will represent the work of less than 100 developers, whose code will be hand-selected by Constellation and TopCoder Inc., the company that is managing the competition.

Welcome to the world of crowdsourcing, defined by Jeff Howe, who maintains the Crowdsourcing.com blog, as "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call." Howe is also writing a soon-to-be-released book on the topic.

Sound exotic? It may now, but get used to it. Everywhere you look companies are turning to a wide variety of crowdsourcing models to do everything from programming, to market surveys, to product development, to R&D. They're doing this in part because of the burgeoning number of people clamoring to share their thoughts, talents, ideas and critiques on all sorts of Web 2.0 platforms.

Thanks to the success of user-generated sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia, for instance, newly empowered consumers will increasingly demand having a say in product development plans, says Jonathan Edwards, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. "Crowdsourcing is an easy way to satisfy consumers' demands to be heard and to get free feedback at very little expense that is impossible to get otherwise," Edwards says.

Also compelling is the increasingly popular notion among companies desperate to stay competitive that the best, most direct and possibly cheapest sources of innovation lie outside the corporate walls, among customers and other previously hidden sources of talent. "The focus of every company today is on innovation, which has led to an 'all-hands-on-deck' mentality," Edwards says.

Recent examples of crowdsourcing abound. For instance:

• Through a platform dubbed IdeaStorm, Dell Inc. invites users to post ideas and either promote or demote each other's suggestions. Highly rated ideas get pushed to the top of the site. Since IdeaStorm's inception in February 2007, according to Edwards, Dell has gone to market with more than 20 user-generated suggestions, including reinstating Windows XP as an alternative to Vista on its consumer PCs. "The crowd has spoken, and Dell is delivering," he says.
• Tesla Motors Inc., a San Carlos, Calif.-based start-up that's working to build an all-electric sports car, recently asked readers of its blog to download a spreadsheet it developed, fill in information related to their home's circuitry and electrical load and submit the resulting data, which will reveal their home's available and required amperage. The company -- which will use this data to design its home-charging stations -- chose this technique because it was having difficulty finding other ways to determine the biggest EV charging circuit that could be installed in a typical house.
• Netflix Inc. has staged a contest that's open through 2011 for people to improve upon its current tool that predicts how much a viewer is going to like a given movie based on his stated preferences. Winners can earn anywhere from $50,000 to the grand prize of $1 million.

For the entire article check out Computerworld - Should your company 'crowdsource' its next project?

Now I believe that using the internet to do work of value to your company is a real possibility, the citations above are perfect examples. But to develop software that your company is going to depend on? All I can say is you had better have a really good testing department.

If this trend holds up QA may be the place to be.

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Sun's Bapat - 2008 Will Bring A Massive Data Meltdown

What is a Data Center Meltdown? We are about to find out according to post on Crave, in line with my predictions that as more and more data moves into smaller and smaller spaces, and it is made available to the world the data breaches will get larger and larger. From the post Crave - Predictions for 2008: A massive data meltdown:

Remember the panic when the first computer worm hit? We're going to have a crisis like that next year when we get the first data center meltdown, predicted Subodh Bapat, a vice president in the eco-computing team at Sun Microsystems.

"You'll see a massive failure in a year," Bapat said at a dinner with reporters on Monday. "We are going to see a data center failure of that scale."

"That scale" referred to the problems caused by the worm created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris Jr. in 1988. His worm infected about 5 percent of the Unix boxes on the Internet, freaked people out, and helped jump-start the security industry.

Of course, it's just a prediction, so there is no guarantee that it will happen. But it does seem possible. Data centers have mushroomed with the flood of processes and jobs being turned over to the Internet. Companies have built up their data centers, but even with technologies like virtualization it's been tough to keep up. At some point, a data center is going to crash and people are going to go spastic.

I remember that worm, it missed my servers but no so some of the others in my data center. I hope they are wrong but I have a feeling that they may not be.

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Wachovia says your over drawn by $211 trillion

Looks like I'm not the only one noticing that the errors are getting bigger out there, check out this one according to Techdirt a Georgia man was notified that his Wachovia bank account was over drawn by some $211 trillion dollars, which makes the national debt at 9 trillion look like pocket change. I wouldn't want to be in charge of the QA Department at Wachovia right about now.

Here is the article in Techdirt: Oops, Your Balance Is: ($211,010,028,257,303.00):

A few years ago, an honest Virginia man reported a bank error that resulted in an extra $1.8 million dollars in his bank account -- not once, but three times. Where did all of that money come from? Perhaps they have now found the source. This week, a Georgia man was notified that he had a negative balance of $211 trillion at his Wachovia bank account. His debt makes the national debt, which is only slightly over $9 trillion, seem like small potatoes. Luckily for him, Wachovia reports that the balance was caused by an isolated banking error, and that he was not liable for any charges related to the negative balance. In this case, the error was that his account number was entered in place of his balance. Like the $218 trillion phone bill we saw in 2006, why are errors of this magnitude not be caught by some sort of bounds checking algorithm in the bank's software? Furthermore, if an error this size gets through all of the checks and balances, then what other, less noticeable errors are falling through the cracks every day?

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Web Comuting is here! Here are 10 Web Development Skills To Keep You Marketable

With all the news concerning IBM, GOOGLE, AT&T, HP, and about everyone else heading down the path toward cloud computing, if your are starting to feel just a little antsy about your current position, then I suggest you check in to Read/WriteWeb - The 10 Most Marketable Web Development Skills.

They do a great job of outlining the skills you will want to work on to get ready for the coming of cloud computing. They go into detail describing the jobs, and where to go to learn more about them. Their 10 Most Marketable Web Development Skills are:

1. ASP & VBScript
2. C# or VB.Net
3. Flash & ActionScript
4. Java
5. JavaScript & AJAX
6. Perl
7. PHP
8. Python
9. Ruby & Ruby on Rails
10. Structured Query Language (SQL)

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Geocaching, A Modern Day Treasure Hunt

Chances are that from where you are sitting right now, reading this, there is a hidden treasure hidden within two or three miles from you. How find it is an new high tech sport called Geocaching. I recently spent a afternoon being introduced to this new sport, by a friend of mine, a real pro at this, and when I say a pro, I mean it. He has found over 2600 Caches over the last two years.

So how do you find a Cache? Well first you log onto Geocaching.com and find your current location, next you lookup nearby Caches for you to find. Then you input the location of the cache you want to find into your GPS unit and off you go. If your like most I.T. Professionals, you do what you normally don't, go outside and enjoy the fresh air and sun shine.

You follow your GPS until you find the exact position indicated by the website, you will now be within 15 feet or so of your treasure, now you have to find it the same way you did as a kid, you have to seek it out. Normally the treasure will be contained within a weatherproof container of some sort, maybe a old ammo can or maybe just a film canister.

It might be in a tree, or under a rock, geocachers a clever creatures so it might be anywhere.

When you find it, if you find it, open it and log your find in the cache log, a piece of paper where you can see who else has found your treasure and when. Then comes the fun part, you get to rehide the cache for the next cacher to try and find, you have to stay within 15 feet or so of where your GPS pinpointed the cache to stay within the rules. Finally, go back to Geocaching.com and let your fellow cachers know of your find.

For more on this interesting high tech hobby here is a portion of Alpha Geek: Geocaching 101:

The Game

The word Geocaching comes from two separate words: geo, for geology; and cache, a hidden store of goods or valuables. It's pronounced "geo-cashing." If you go around saying "geo-catching," people will laugh at you.

This is a home-grown sport in the truest sense. You can read the full history at Geocaching.com or in my book, How to Do Everything with Your GPS, which makes a great gift.

Here's the nutshell version of how it works:

• You enter a set of coordinates (the latitude and longitude variety) into your GPS receiver. This is the 'X' that marks the spot.
• You let your GPS navigate you to those coordinates. They might be in a public park, a patch of deep woods, or a mountain trail.
• You search the area for the hidden booty, which may be wedged in the crook of a tree branch, buried under a small pile or rocks, or otherwise concealed.
• You claim a trinket from the "treasure chest" and leave behind one of your own.

Sound like fun? All you need is a suitable GPS receiver, a set of coordinates and possibly some bug spray.

WARNING, Geocaching can be addictive but in a good way, just ask my friend who has spent most of his free time over the last two years doing it.

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Sun releases xVM in another step toward Virtualization of the IT Industry

The Information Technology Industry took another step toward the great Computing cloud today when Sun announced xVM Ops Center a tool aimed at managing both physical and virtual resources. For more on Sun's announcement read Information Week - Sun Expands Virtualization Push Into Operations Management:

Sun recently announced xVM, a hypervisor for Intel (NSDQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) servers. In the long run, it seeks to participate in more than the x86 virtual machine creation realm, an area that threatens to be commoditized before long. Sun also wants to discover, monitor, provision, and update virtual machines through xVM Ops Center.

Ops Center will become available as a commercial product sold on a subscription basis on Jan. 8, ahead of the commercial release of the xVM hypervisor, which means it will manage physical resources in its initial phase. The xVM hypervisor will become available in the second quarter of 2008.

"As xVM becomes available, Ops Center will take on management of the virtual part" of the data center as well, said Steve Wilson, VP of xVM in an interview.

And with every step toward Virtualization and the Computing Cloud comes the further commoditization of Information Technology professions. It's coming, prepare yourself for it.

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