Chrome + IE Tab smokes IE9? What have you found?

This week I am having to get to grips with an environment where Internet Explorer is a requirement. The same environment also uses Lotus Notes. For a Mac user this can be challenging but I have made quite a bit of progress setting up a configuration that works effectively.

I managed to obtain a copy of Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta. I did try to upgrade to the latest version of the Mac Client but the IBM web site steadfastly refuses to accept my address information. When you select the country it automatically submits the page - before you have had time to fill in the remaining data such as Zipcode - which is required. Consequently you end up in an infinite loop. All this in order to download a TRIAL copy of Lotus Notes 8.5.2 client. It is no wonder Lotus Notes is not that popular. You can't easily get your hands on a trial copy.

The next challenge was to use Internet Explorer on my Mountain Lion copy of Mac OS X. Now, I have had a copy of VMware Fusion v 3.1 but that will not run on Mountain Lion. Fortunately VMware have released VMware Fusion 5 with both Windows 8 and Mountain Lion support. I managed to find a discount code that let me acquire a copy of Fusion 5 for close to the upgrade price. That coupled with a copy of Windows 7 and I was ready to get going.

VMWare Fusion with the Unity interface is very nice and pretty responsive on my MacBook Air. After purchasing Windows 7 Professional and downloading the 64-bit version I was able to launch Windows 7 via VMware Fusion 5. I then upgraded from IE 8 to IE 9 and also installed a complimentary copy of McAfee Anti-virus. 

I also took the plunge and purchased a Windows copy of 1Password from Agilebits. This is my "Must Have" password manager. It works across just about every platform. It also works in conjunction with DropBox so after downloading and installing Dropbox and firing up 1Password I had my passwords readily available.

The only other components I then needed were: Flash and Adobe Reader since Windows, unlike the Mac doesn't handle PDF files without an add-in. 

With all this up and running I was able to fire up IE9 and access these IE-only sites. I was also having to access a confluence wiki via an Extranet connection. Updating the wiki turned out to be very slow, even over a fast network connection. However, when I downloaded Adobe Flash Player I had inadvertently left the "Download Google Chrome" pick active. I therefore had Google Chrome installed in my Windows Virtual Machine. 

In an effort to make editing the wiki more efficient I tried Chrome. However, I needed to be able to seamlessly switch between the Confluence Wiki pages and other web pages where IE was a requirement. I therefore downloaded and activated the IE Tab Add-in for Google Chrome. This has turned out to be a great solution. Chrome has a better User Interface than IE9 and the combination of Windows Chrome with IE Tab seems to be much faster and more responsive than IE9. 

What has your experience been with IE9? For me, switching to Chrome + IE Tab has seen the "Reloading Web Page" errors disappear and running Windows Chrome using Unity under VMware Fusion makes the browser seem almost like the native OS X Chrome browser. 

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Baltimore Tech Breakfast - Meet Baltimore's CIO @christonjes #bmoretechb

This morning is the Baltimore Tech Breakfast (#bmoretechb). This is the largest regular technology meetup in the Baltimore area. Kudos to Ron Schmelzer of Bizelo for keeping this meetup growing. This month we have a packed house of nearly 200 people.

Here is the Agenda for the morning:

Agenda for August 2012 BTB:

8:00 - 8:10 - Get yer Bagels & Coffee and chit-chat

8:10 - 8:15 - Introductions, Sponsors, Announcements - Ronald Schmelzer

8:15 - 8:25 - MindGrub's Mobile Games - Todd Marks

8:25 - 8:35 - SurveySnap - Ryan Sears

8:35 - 8:40 - 30 Second Lightning "Shout Outs"

8:40 - 8:50 - Baltimore City CIO - Chris Tonjes

8:50 - 9:00 - RenterResume - Joshua Hines

9:00 - 9:05 - 30 Second Lightning "Shout Outs"

9:05 - 9:15 - KnotFriends (Update!) - Tony Bagdon

9:15 - 9:25 - Parking Panda (Update!) - Nick Miller

9:25 - 9:30 - 30 Second Lightning "Shout Outs" & Last Words

It is great to meet so many friends from around the Baltimore Area. People like the OpenRange Video team who record the event. The Dinnertime.com team who are currently in stealth mode. Eli The Computer Guy.

Todd Marks - Mindgrub Mobile Games

Gaming is one of the divisions that has grown quickly.

Realized that first person shooters were going to go mobile. They have brought together Social, Location and Mobile.

TAG is a game of tagging your friends using your iPhone. Augmented Reality first person shooter.

Also produced Zac & Haley Scuba Adventures produced for Shark Week on Discovery Kids. 

Gaming is big in Baltimore area. Local colleges have gaming tracks in college. This brought the industry here. Mobile gaming is really expanding quickly.

Income is not coming from games. Partnering is essential for promotion. You need more marketing dollars than development dollars to get traction. 

Survey-Snap - Ryan Sears

Targeted for Architects, engineers and facility managers. 

Survey-Snap is Creating Building Surveys on mobile devices. Taking an analog data collection process to the digital tablet.

Neat ability to add pins to the drawing and add comments and notes to the tags.

Annotation, sketches, audio and video can be added and tagged to a picture or drawing.

Presenting this material is a challenge for architects and building managers. Survey-snap makes the process easy by creating a PDF with all the pictures and annotations laid out.

This is a Software as a Service offering. Currently in beta.

The software can work in other verticals: Event planners, Insurance adjusters. 

Feedback suggests over 100 vertical applications.

The system is modular and will provide a marketplace for these vertical applications.

The system will support offline use. There will also be a data export option.

Baltimore CIO - Chris Tonjes

Chris is 37 days in to his new job.  

Things to improve:

1. The city's phone system

re-focusing the stakeholders. 

2. Emergency Communications 

Old with many single points of failure.

3. 911- Computer aided dispatch

Advancing the project. Two phases. Phase 1 in 6 months.

4. 311 - CRM System

Funding to replace it but want's to do something more modern, lightweight and open.

5. Data Center updates

Two very old centers. Antiquated. Still using IBM mainframe with VM and tape. Legacy applications bring in over $1B per year. 

From strategic perspectives in an interesting position: An opportunity to rebuild an IT department. 

New financial models. Hiring opportunities with probably 50 openings.

Pushing to move very quickly. This is a CIO that uses Google Docs and Dropbox.

Promoting OpenData.

Having a pro-active CIO and a forward thinking IT department being constructed this makes Baltimore a potentially great place to grow a technology company.

What does the CIO need from the tech community?

- "A little bit of patience". Need some breathing room to mitigate some existing conditions. 

- Give input - send email. Input is welcomed.

RenterResu.me - Joshua Hines

Renting made simple. The Match.com of renting.

Provides a dashboard for Landlords.

Allows renters to setup their profiles. 

Renters pay a one-time fee of $35. Pay once instead of for each rental application. 

Background checks are performed. Eviction database check. Criminal history.

Fee is good for 30 days. Renewals at a lower fee.

Launching in Q1 of 2013.

Also have enterprise solutions for property managers.

KnotFriends (Update!) - Tony Bagdon

A tie swapping service.

$14.95 for three ties. They take a cut on each transaction. No cost to sender. Receiver/Buyer pays.

I have suggested to them that they should do a themed tie groupon style deal. This would be great at various times of year such as St Patricks Day, Christmas etc.

Parking Panda (Update!) - Nick Miller

Parking Panda is growing quickly. A great mobile app. The iphone app was built by Mindgrub.

Reserve a parking space. AirBnB model allows people to rent private parking spaces. They also work with parking sites to maximize their yield. This gives drivers a discount on parking.

Parking Panda is providing the parking for the Baltimore Grand Prix.

Expanded to Washington DC and launching in San Francisco and Philadelphia.

SEO is important. People Google Where to park.

The platform is built on the Microsoft stack.

Other Notes:

Distilled Intelligence. A venue for startups.

http://distilledintelligence.com

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Apple could throw AT&T a real curveball with Facetime if they wanted to. #NetNeutrality

AT&T have been putting themselves through some real contortions to argue that their limiting of Facetime access on their cellular network to those people that sign up for their new mobile share plans. Arstechnica's Nate Anderson has a good assessment of AT&T's position here:  http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/att-have-you-no-shame/

What is interesting is how AT&T justifies their position in relation to Net Neutrality by arguing that subscribers can download alternative apps for video calls.

So if Apple wanted to throw AT&T a curveball they only have to do one thing. They take Facetime for iOS, pull it out of the core iOS application set and make it a separate downloadable App on the App Store. By AT&T's rules Facetime would be the playing on the same level Playing field as Skype and other video calling apps in the App Store. 

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#health2stat q and a

The VA took 3 years to grow from 1 guy providing social media support to the level of activity they have today.

5 central staff and representatives in every center across the country.

Birth control

A year talking to target audiences taught them that birth control sucks.

Humor is a powerful tool to open up the conversation. Especially with men.

VA HRA

How was hRA model connected to the representation of health risk age. The health risk age is compelling. Connecting the hRA to this was an obvious step. It motivates people to change.

Sleepchamps

Moving from 20 question paper questionnaire and by putting them on a smartphone they can be completed at home in real time As events occur.

I think patents might appreciate lullaby lyrics and tunes in the Zansors sleepChamp app. That could be a useful resource for parents.

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#health2stat

I am at the Barking Dog for Health2Stat organized by Aquilent.

Health2con.com got a mention for the San Francisco conference in October. If people decide to go they should plan to arrive early to take part in healthca.mp/SFBay on Friday 5th October.

First speaker: Mary Arrnstead

Talking about NITAAC and the NIH government-wide contracts for both products and services.

CIO-SP3 IT services and solutions

Also small business 54 vendors
131 small business vendors

ECS III IT products vehicle This has 42 approved vendors

Second speaker: ranjit Das from Zansors

sleepChamp for kids.

Empower kids sleep.

Licensed from university of Michigan.

Measuring sleep quality for kids.

Sleep medicine
Data Analytics
Information architecture
Intelligent design
Lean business development
Social media engagement

Sleep champ deals with:

Sleep disorders
Sleepiness
Growth/body weight
Behavior and cognition Evidence based medicine is transformed from a paper based collection to smartphones

Parents consider the smartphone a mobile command center.

Speaker three: Konstantin Von Schmidt-Pauli

Talking about A VA healthy vet portal application that is in early stages of development. Deals with 508 compliant health risk assessment.

So the VA is building the hRA from the ground up but it looks very like a Traitwise survey.

Speaker four: Lawrence Swaider

7 out of 10 pregnancies are unplanned.

The research to the failure showed that the time of publications totally failed with the wrong tone.

Put the information in a infect that young women understood

The method explorer is a platform that can be used on multiple sites. It demystifies contraceptive methods.

"create once use everywhere"

The ad council has donated print,tv and radio ads- a $2m value.

Speaker five: Lauren Bailey VA and digital communication

22M veterans but the VA reaches less than half.

Now have 75 twitter feeds, blogs and Facebook.

Reaching vets where they are.

Facebook and twitter have been effective.

The more you talk with folks the more they tend to come back.

Lauren manages VAntage Point blog

Vets meet up on facebook. Connect with team members. They are going where the veterans are.

Twitter is used to communicate with industry partners.

Flickr has been incredibly effective. Also on YouTube. Lots of video communications are internal. YouTube is used to spread the word by publishing these videos.

The team don't seek to control communication but rather to make it easy for community managers to use the channels.

Still working to measure reach and impact.

Hard to channel questions to the right people quickly.

Governance is not about control. It is about making it easy and sharing resources.

Now for the Q & A...

Mark Scrimshire
B: http://ekive.blogspot.com
....Sent from my iPhone

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Twitter is raising the drawbridge and becoming an island. Bad move.

Recently Twitter disconnected Instagram so that users are no longer able to discover their friends on Twitter. Yesterday Tumblr became the next victim as Twitter works down the chain of developers that have connected to it. LinkedIn has already become a victim and the betting is that Flipboard will be next.

This is coupled with recent changes in the developer rules that insist on Twitter content being displayed "as is." See this article from TechCrunch: Twitter Handcuffs Client Apps with New API Changes - by Anthony Ha

I am wondering how long it will be before Wordpress plug-ins that display a twitter stream in the context of a web page are forbidden by Twitter. Those plug-ins would seem to be out of compliance because Wordpress blog pages have comments. As I understand it that is a no-no.

If Twitter follows a strategy to drive consumption of Twitter content on twitter.com then they will devalue the Twitter ecosystem and drive many people away to other services. One of the huge values of Twitter is that we can pull content that is relevant and mash it up with other content. 

Twitter is like electricity. The value isn't in the power station at the center of the grid. The value is in the electricity that flows to millions of devices where it enables all manner of things to happen. 

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Digital imaging breakthrough for Cholesterol testing #HIT #MHealth

This is really cool news:

http://in.news.yahoo.com/indian-scientists-develop-photographic-test-cholesterol-determination-083100895.html

Indian scientists have been able to use digital images of the back of people's hands to match to cholesterol levels. This is a non-invasive procedure that opens up the possibility of Cholesterol level self testing without the need for a specialized testing kits.

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