Simon Scullion
The public musings of a collaboration lifeguard
F-Spot failing to upload to Flickr
1722 days
Part of my excuse for being so far behind uploading to my is that F-Spot, the program I’m using on Ubuntu to manages my photo collection, had been failing to upload.
Basically it was never completing the upload, no time-out, no error, nothing.
A LOT of digging around out there via google eventually landed me on a which mentioned changing the MTU settings in the network config. I found this taking you through making the changes.
For the record, I changed my MTU settings to 1450 via the network connections gui, and hey presto, uploading to Flickr is working again! 
So one less excuse at least….!
Photo credit:
Our slides from the Enterprise 2.0 Summit
0815 days
So I finally got to posting this….
These are the slides that and I used to introduce our discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt, Nov 11-12 2009.
View more from .
We had a lot of visual backup slides that we’ll keep back for now, more to come! 
The beginning of an Enterprise 2.0 journey
3822 days
Here I am about to grab some breakfast before day one of the in Frankfurt, and I find myself both reflecting back and looking forward.
C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate
Since early this year I have had the privilege to be part of the team that has brought E2.0 to CSC, in the shape of “C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate”. Launched as a pilot back in May, we saw 20,000 employees – 22% of the organisation – sign up in the first 12 weeks. It has continued to see fantastic adoption, and is now moving into a production state.
C3 has consumed me over the last 6 months! It has been both an exhausting and extremely rewarding experience. We are on an interesting journey, and I hope to be able to share some insights going forward.
Now it’s time for breakfast though, before I head over to the where I’ll be co-presenting the CSCC3 case study with partner in crime .
Pressure from the cloud
01023 days
by Simon Scullion
in Internet
No, we’re not talking meteorology here!
I have been keeping an interested eye on some of the developments from Amazon with their Amazon Web Services, so when I saw the from friend/colleague/troublemaker , it made me sit up!
Oh, dude! It’s a war, and cloud is a battlefield. #orcl swallows #sun, and days l8r, #ibm announces the end of licenses. http://is.gd/ueWt
He is referring to , announcing the availability of IBM technology in the cloud, running on , with an innovative approach to licensing.
On Amazon EC2 you can run many of the proven IBM platform technologies with which you’re already familiar, ….. By choosing Amazon EC2, you can get started in either of two ways. You can pay by the hour only for what you use, through Amazon EC2 running IBM. Alternatively, you can bring many of your own IBM licenses to run on Amazon EC2.
This got me thinking of the impact that this could have on certain internal applications that suffer from performance and scalability issues. For example, global instances which see spikes as people come online across different timezones. Do you scale for the spikes, or the average load and take the performance hit during peak use?
Amazon’s EC2, combined with applications such as IBM’s Websphere Portal, is now giving the enterprise an interesting choice. Do we put the application server out in the cloud, and have the flexibility to scale up and down according to demand?
Yet many corporations are still wary of the cloud, preferring to keep things on the inside, under their watchful eyes. So how would a large organisation replicate and offer something capable of this internally? I imagine virtualisation would be at the heart of any attempt, but the investment required would be significant, if not exorbitant, both in infrastructure and software. Could they even get close to competing on cost, ease of administration, billing…?
When will we see new expectations – I’ll call them “cloud-induced” - take hold in the enterprise, where factors such as flexibility, agility, almost-zero required investment, take an increasingly higher priority? It strikes me that it will rapidly become harder for IT departments to provide and manage internally-hosted solutions that meet user expectations, as awareness of the cloud’s capabilities grows in the business.
Think about it. All Amazon ask of us is a credit card number….
ScribeFire, Zemanta, and a hidden tracking image
161061 days
by Simon Scullion
in Blog
Yesterday’s post was created using a is a great , , which:
is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
However, in making a minor edit to the post, I noticed some code at the bottom:
<div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=[long tracking number here]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div>
Where had that come from!? At no point had I consciously selected an option to add it there!
So a quick search later, I’d learnt that is a service built into ScribeFire, providing additional related content to “enrich your blog posts”.
A explained how to deselect this “option” in the ScribeFire settings, under the ‘Publishing’ tab, look for ‘Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel for statistics gathering’.
Bad boys, ScribeFire and , for not being open about things, and enabling this option by default. At least provide a link to an explanation as to what “statistics” are being gathered, and for what means!
Changing Habits
01062 days
It’s overdue that I talked a little about what I have been up to, and the shift in my professional focus over the last few of months. My “role” is no longer directly Lotus product related, but now has a broader collaborative scope. For those readers following me on , this is probably already apparent, through my increasingly regular tweets about (s) and (ing)!
So what am I doing exactly?
Well, basically I am working as part of a small team, on initiatives to drive better collaboration within my internal organisation. This involves making best use of our current tools, and looking at some new opportunities along the way.
There is a lot on the go, and it’s keeping me both busy and engaged. I’m finding it a great opportunity to channel much of the enthusiasm I have built up over the last few years around collaboration, social software, and the continuous innovation in this space.
Wikis, wikis, and more wikis…!
At the top of my list is driving adoption of our enterprise wiki. Confluence is a powerful platform, and it is easy to demonstrate simple examples where teams and users can work more effectively. By getting my hands dirty working with some of the more advanced macros, I am discovering more about the potential of the platform, and am able to put new ideas in the hands of the users.
Qwaq, Qwaq! No I haven’t turned into a duck!
I have been interested in “Virtual Worlds” for the last few years, though not particularly from a personal perspective. I find my first life offers me much richer entertainment options than ! However in an enterprise context, I have long thought they provide an exciting opportunity to change the way we interact. Over the last few months a group of us have been using internally to explore some of these opportunities. We are building out some scenarios demonstrating how the technology can be of benefit for large, global organisations.
So what’s it to do with Changing Habits?
In many of my recent conversations, I have found myself discussing corporate culture, working habits, ways of driving adoption, as part of a broader theme of participation. One of my favourite lines is that “we have to get into the habit of participating”.
So there are two sides to the title of this post.
Firstly, I have a worry that my own efforts here on the blog don’t do a great job of backing up some of my arguments! Therefore this post is something of a renewed commitment to my active participation here. Daily links and tweet summary posts don’t count as blogging!
Secondly, I wanted to leave you with a question. What habits do you find you follow, relating to your participation in blogs, twitter, wikis and the like? Good or bad!