O’Reilly Media just posted an OpEd by Kate Matsudiara, VP of Engineering at Decide, on the changing roles of developers and engineers. Here’s an interesting excerpt worth noting:

In the past, engineering roles were specific, and people tended to specialize in one platform or technology. However, as systems have become more complex, and more organizations adopt virtualization, cloud computing, and software as a service, the line between software engineer, operator, and system administrator has become more blurry. It is no longer sufficient to be an expert in one area. People are expected to continuously grow by keeping up with new technology and offering ideas and leadership outside their own purview. As engineering organizations build systems using more and more third-party frameworks, libraries, and services, it’s increasingly necessary for engineers to evaluate technologies not solely on their own merits, but also as they fit into the existing enterprise ecosystem.

Yes, yes, yes! In my opinion, this sums up everyone’s role at CG, no matter what your title or department is.
The work we do is completely changing (and it always has been). Maybe this is scary because the things we are comfortable with are changing, but I think this is really exciting. We are going to do some amazing things at CG if we can keep an open mind about what’s coming next.

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Sometime in January I decided to try an experiment: lock my laptop in a drawer and see if I can replace my everyday computer with a Chromebook. It’s been about three months and I’m writing this from the Chromebook. The experiment has gone better than I expected. My computer is now the cloud.

What’s a Chromebook? It’s a laptop that runs Google Chrome and only Google Chrome. That’s really about it. Sure, I know it’s got some kind of Atom processor, 16 GB of storage, 2 GB of memory, and some ultra minimal Linux running on it, but all of that stuff is abstracted. The Chromebook is minimalist computing. It’s just me and the web.

The way we work at Control Group is all very cloud based. Our source code lives at Github. My server’s at Amazon Web Services. Our email, docs, and calendars are at Google. If I can access the web, I can get almost all of my work done.

There are times when I need a “real” computer. I write and debug code, test out new software, or process a lot of data. For this I’m using Amazon EC2 to have an easily accessible Linux computer at the ready. I spin it up when I need it and shut it down when I don’t. I can change the instance type to control the price and performance. So to write a quick Python script, I will spin up a t1.micro. When it’s time to work on a Clojure project I’ll pick an m1.large to deal with the CPU and memory requirements of the JVM. I get exactly the amount of computer I need when I need it.

Sure there are some drawbacks. I wish the Chromebook were a bit faster. The terminal and SSH client are okay, but I know I’m missing features. The Chromebook doesn’t have Java, and you can forget trying to do any of those LogMeIn or WebEx meetings on it.

Even with those negative points, the Chromebook is probably the best computer I’ve used in a while. It does everything I need while being fast, stable, always up to date, and secure.

Most importantly, it forces me to be smart about how I deal with my work and my data. This thing has some kind of hard drive, but there’s no real way to work off it. Sensitive and important data never ends up just living on the laptop. I’m forced to back it up and put it in places where the rest of my team can get access to it. No more do I make something work on just my laptop and then try to figure out how to deploy it. Deployment, collaboration, and communication are essential to just getting work done on the Chromebook, and those same things are essential when working in a team like we do.

We’ll see how long the Chromebook lasts. There are rumors that a new version is coming out, so maybe I’ll be upgrading to that. One thing’s for sure, I’ll be taking the workflow that the Chromebook has taught me to my next computer, whatever it is.

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“I’m glad we’ve learned from our tech bubble mistakes.” – Michael HS

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The Woolworth building, an architecture and art masterpiece (and home to Control Group!), will be painted red on Thursday March 29th in honor of two creative individuals, Barbara Kruger and Bernard Tschumi, an artist and an architect, whose work has marked an epoch in radical transformations within their fields. The artists are being honored as part of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Spring Benefit, which will take place at The Woolworth Building and will celebrate the organization’s dedication to promoting radical and alternative positions in art and architecture. The event will include cocktails, hors d’oeuvers, building performances and an “almost” silent auction.

There will be two building performances as part of the event: Citizens of No Place and On Top of the Woolworth Building. Citizens of No Place is an installation in the Woolworth Building Bank Safe designed by Jimenez Lai that will showcase 10 stories emerging from within the safety boxes inside the magnificent vault of the building. On Top of the Woolworth Building is a tour guided by Roy Suskin, the unofficial historian of The Woolworth Building, where intrepid visitors will be able to go to the top of the building terrace, which was opened to the public until the start of World War I and has since closed, to enjoy the most ancient wrap-around views of New York City.

The silent auction, currently available online for preview and bids, includes works by artists whose work resonates with the spirit of Storefront: defying geographic, ideological and disciplinary boundaries to address the most poignant issues of our time. Inspired by the event’s honorees, artists participating were asked to participate in the Red/Read auction by donating works they feel resonate with any of the words in the auction’s homophonous title. Artists include: Vito Acconci, Dennis Adams, Erieta Attali, Daniel Arsham, Iwan Baan, John Baldessari, Gabriele Basilico, Phong Bui, Beth Campbell, James Casebere, Matilde Cassani, Peter Eisenman, Tony Feher, Haas & Hahn, Anthony Hamboussi, Steven Holl, Patrick Jackson, Louis I. Kahn, Rem Koolhaas, OMA, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, An Te Liu, Antonio Muntadas, Shirin Neshat, Mikael Olsson, Roxy Paine, Lucy Raven, Pedro Reyes, François Roche, Cordy Ryman, Fanny Sanín, Tomas Saraceno, Gedi Sibony, Xaviera Simmons, Mikhael Subotzky, Stephen Talasnik, Marjan Teeuwen, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Lawrence Weiner and James Welling.

The Benefit committee includes some of the most prominent local and international art and architecture figures of today, including Liz Diller, Hal Foster, Bjarke Ingels, Jurgen Mayer, Keller Easterling, Juan Herreros, Beatriz Colomina, Enrique Norten, and Paola Antonelli, among many others.

Control Group is a proud supporter of the Storefront for Art & Architecture, and our CEO Campbell Hyers is VP of the Storefront’s Board.

#whyisthewoolworthred

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Studio of the Future: Media Production Workflow in the AWS Cloud

Join us for a Webinar on March 29

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/118143495

With massive files sizes, multi-terabyte storage and asset management needs, and distributed teams, the benefits of cloud computing in media production are extremely compelling.  Many organizations are already using AWS for their media production workflows, and even more are taking a closer look as the platform and supporting technologies evolve to accommodate additional media production needs.

Join Dave Rocamora, VP of DevOps at Control Group, Charlie Miller, Associate Partner, Media & Entertainment at Control Group, and Mark Ramberg, AWS Business Development Manager as they discuss the media production roadmap for the Studio of the Future.  Hear how approaches to Storage, Transcoding/Encoding/Rendering, and Distribution can be optimized with AWS in a pay-as-you-go model.

This webinar will also provide architecture guidance and highlight vendors and AWS products that will help studio managers, production managers, and IT leaders understand how AWS can be used to power the Media Production Studio of the Future.

Title: Studio of the Future: Media Production Workflow in the AWS Cloud

Date: Thursday, March 29, 2012

Time: 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM EDT

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.
System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

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Are you averse to versioning? Do you have commitment problems? Do you think rebasing is a way to smoke crack?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, maybe you should come to this git drive-by to “git” up to speed (this is the last git joke I will make).

The dev team here uses git to version their projects and github to share the project work. git is simple, but powerful. How do you use it efficiently? How can you use it to best collaborate with others?

Join us on Friday, March 9th at noon for a git and github drive-by!

You should bring your laptop preloaded git and have an account on github.

Email stacey@controlgroup.com if you would like to attend.

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Nick Colvin, one of our senior account managers at Control Group, is a member of the Gamelan Kusuma Laras, a NYC-based gamelan band.  Gamelan is an Indonesian musical ensamble featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums, gongs, bamboo flutes, and strings.

Gamelan Kusuma Laras will be performing at the Asia Society with Ki Purbo Asmoro, who is considered the best dhalang puppet-master in the world, along with his group Mayangkara.

It’s not the sort of experience you get many opportunities for outside of Java, Indonesia.  So check it out!

Event Details:

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Microsoft released an anti-Google Apps ad.   It spread around our office, which sparked some conflicting opinions on GApps.  (We pretty much stand united on our opinions of MS.)

Dave:  I guess MS is mad about Google Apps. Haters gonna hate.

Damien:  As Colin can attest, I also dislike Google Apps. And, webmail sucks. I should qualify – nothing that happens in my browser can compare to a dedicated piece of software. Currently. Count me as a hater.

Damien: Also, that ad is embarrassing.

Brian:  I dislike google apps… The moonlighting reference is totally dusty. Who will they  bust  next? Herve Villachaize?

Colin:  Sorry, I can’t bring myself to watch a Microsoft ad.  Yes, there are some things I miss about Outlook/Exchange – the inline autocorrect is one of them. But they are so minor compared to what I dont miss about them:

As a former Exchange Admin – Hardware, backups, corrupt backups, full tapes, incremental backups, log files filling up drive space, virus protection, spam, power outages, cooling, failed UPSs, more ‘rack space’ (under a desk) directory harvest attacks, patches, store limits, mailbox limits, attachment limits, limit exceptions, recovering DB white space,recovering DBs, exmerge, ESEutils, (/r)  repadmin, more equipment, desktop patches, cached mode bandwidth madness, decentralized topologies, remote access, mobile access, mobile access servers… I remember one patch revision we had – if you put a period in the subject line of an email it would bring the whole server down.. I think that was 5.5
As a business owner – see above.
As a user, I love the fact that anywhere I go, there’s my mail. The kids just starting out will soon not know what a mail client is, and when Damian and Dan M retire, there will be none left to tell the tails.

Michael: +5

Damien:  Really? Sounds to me like you’re describing the mail app on my phone. Which most certainly is not web mail.

Dave:  Wild tech prediction: very soon (next 2 years?) there will be absolutely no difference between a native app and a web app. Even using those terms will seem archaic.

Sholom:  Totally agree with Dave  (I can’t bring myself to +1 yet, I am old school)

Alex: I wouldn’t say I’m a Gapps fanboy, but I use nothing else, and I’m happy. (Maybe I just want to get as far from my mainframe roots as possible.) I almost never use a thumb drive, or any other physical portable. So for me, +1 to Dave’s point, +1 to Google, +1 to Chromebook/Macbook Air/etc.

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Last summer, I shared some thoughts on the limitations of mobile device management (MDM) solutions for managing deployments of iPad in commercial settings — specifically in places like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores. Since then, we’ve been working on some really interesting client work that revolves around iPads in these use cases.

We’ve learned a lot in the last 9 months. Since iPads are truly “consumer electronics” — i.e., personal devices built for the individual consumer and not commercial shared-use environments — deploying and managing thousands of them in these types of environments creates significant technical and operational challenges. While commercial MDM solutions address some of these challenges, they fall short of tackling some key issues:

User experience challenges and branding issues:

• Most of our customers want to maintain the native iPad user-experience — including access to a variety of third-party apps — while at the same time provide a curated experience and addressing security concerns.
• Public-use iPads are susceptible to personalization by users, and worse, vandalism. Users can change the customized appearance of the iPads, leave inappropriate content, or disrupt network connectivity. Just imagine the branding and marketing issues in a case where a hotel lobby full of public use iPads have been customized by users who change the Springboard wallpaper and move all the icons into a folder.

Technical and device management challenges:

• As the number of iPads that require management increases, day-to-day administration of iPads becomes really difficult to scale. Restores and refreshes of the devices become cumbersome, if not impossible.
• Scenarios in which administrators must roam the floor with laptops to support the iPads are undesirable and don’t scale well.

Some possible solutions

For one client, Control Group leveraged our extensive experience with both iOS and enterprise systems to tackle the infrastructure, implementation, design, and management of the commercial iPad deployment:

User experience:

• We built a restaurant menu that includes a custom web browser enabling users to browse the open web — including Gmail and Facebook — but it clears personal session information when the application quits.
• We enabled restrictions beyond standard MDM to protect the iPads from inappropriate content and use, by:
• Preventing access to the iOS device settings
• Restricting users from moving icons and creating folders
• Enabling a screensaver that activates when the iPads are idle

Technical and device management:

• No jailbreaking required. Our custom iOS configurations expand on Apple’s built-in restrictions.
• With our iPad management architecture, all iPads are connected to host computers seamlessly built into the restaurant furniture.
• We custom-built a USB peripheral that powers 16 iPads per host. This overcomes the electrical limitation of powering multiple iPads from a single computer.
• We enabled remote switch of any port to a data connection so that any iPad can be restored or refreshed remotely by the host computer.

We’ve given our clients a platform and a set of tools that provide a secure and curated user-experience for their customers, while at the same time, enabling them to scale their iPad deployments to thousands of devices across multiple locations. We think there are potential applications of these tools in the retail, healthcare, point of sale, and hospitality spaces.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach to iPad management, email me!

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Our office view of the Giants’ Parade… (my that’s quite a long toilet paper streamer!)

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