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01/15/2005 Entry: "Notes while flying to New York"

So, yeah, it's been a while since I've written. The holidays were full of relaxation, feeding CDs into iTunes for my wife's iPod and traversing the new BitTorrent trackers. Right now I'm flying to New York to attend the National Retail Federation Expo. I'm with 3 VPs and our IBM account executive. Our VP of retail IT says that they all work for me, or at least that's how he introduced me to his wife. Needless to say, it will be an interesting trip.

Regarding NRF, AMR Research asks "Is store-centric middleware providing the integrated platform that increases store associate productivity by facilitating the movement of customer and product data while establishing a seamless workflow among disparate best-of-breed store systems?" Probably, yes, however, the increasing cost of supporting intense technologies (like middleware such as J2EE application servers and MQ servers) is going to tough for most retailers. Even at a corporate level, I'm having a hard time dealing with the complexity that happening in-store. It appears as if the trend for more web-based applications is also causing an increase in in-store technolgies, which is not what we've been expecting. I've been hoping that virtualization will help reduce the complexity of these environments, but there's a significant investiment to make for that to pay off.f Rip and replace for hardware is a tough sell to executives.

BitTorrent fun: First of all, once a good trackers is found (Oink has been great for not-so-legal music and applications, EasyTree for concerts, EliteTorrents and TorrentBits2 to for Movies), the only way to keep track of it all is with an RSS feed. The problem is that if a site is very high volume, like Oink, things will fall off the feed before you get it (assuming you are not online all of the time). So I've had an idea for a web-based service that would act as a proxy for you: get the feeds every 15 minutes, and then allow you to pull from the proxy when you can. I had assumed that someone would have written this already, but I'm wrong. Sadly, I don't have the skills to write this. One more BT thought: I completely understand why the MPAA is concerned about the movies that are circulating. The quality can be outstanding. Check out VCDQuality and see the screenshots.

Travelling today has been difficult. I keep dropping things: boarding pass, driver's licence, my backpack, and just now, my soda all of my leg and the floor of the plane. Perhaps it has something to do with the cold I'm fighting. It's going to be hard to get better in NYC.