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CIO.com asks the question, “How do you spot a bad CIO?” With a nimwit CEO, it’s a bit easier because the numbers tell the story: profits and sales falling, etc.

To this list I’d add:

But how do you discern a failing CIO before she fails? CIO.com has some answers:

What would you add to the list?

High employee turnover
Rehashing the same ideas, projects and technologies that s/he’s implemented in all previous CIO positions
Firing existing employees and replacing them with people who’ve worked for him/her in the past

A rigid focus on maintenance and administration of software versus development and innovation of software. The day when IT could just sit back and take out the garbage is past. IT has to be part of one’s business strategy and this requires IT to be as much about product development as about keeping the trains running on time.
Quasi-religious intolerance for open source and devotion to proprietary vendors. This is not to say that open source will have all the answers, but a CIO who has hardly intelligence enough to evaluate open source on the merits doesn’t deserve the title.
A deaf ear to the rank-and-file. A CIO needs to blend top-down leadership with bottom-up listening. Often the best ideas will come from the ranks, so any CIO that can only be bothered to chat with her fellow executives will be missing out on much of the best data and direction available to her.
An isolationist approach to IT. Any CIO who can’t see beyond her own company – and lacks access to her peers to get different ideas on best practices and such – deserves to get the boot. Collaboration within and beyond one’s company walls is the order of the day.

The second obvious hassle is software updates. Software installed on the C disk constantly needs to be upgraded both to new versions and releases as well as applying bug fixes. Anti-malware software is likely to have daily updates. Microsoft has a partial solution for this, but my initial impression is that it’s all but useless. Every now and then SteadyState will need to be disabled so that necessary changes can be made to the installed software.

There is huge amount of software designed to defend the Windows C disk from the bad guys–antivirus, antispyware, firewalls, yada yada yada. Huge amounts of time, effort, and money is spent defending the C disk. But, there are other approaches.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

On his Security Now podcast (Episode 129, January 31, 2008), Steve Gibson discussed a free program from Microsoft called SteadyState that defends the C disk in a different way.

SteadyState is really two products. Besides rolling back changes to the C disk, it can also restrict access to dozens of Windows features. At first glance this seems to be nothing more than a new interface to some Group Policy features that have existed in Windows XP Professional from the get-go. What’s new, is bringing this functionality to XP Home and making the interface friendlier to non-techies.

Both Gibson and Laporte think SteadyState is a great thing. Gibson has published screenshots of SteadyState and a transcript of the podcast.

The first obvious hassle is that the My Documents folder should be moved from the C disk. In fact, any folder where you want to store files permanently can’t be on the C disk. To techies like Gibson and his Security Now companion, Leo Laporte, this is no big deal. The obvious solution involves making a new hard disk partition dedicated to storing data files. For non-techie computer users however, making a new partition is dangerous and difficult. Another option is to save files to a computer or storage device elsewhere on the network.

Rather than protect the C disk from being changed at all, SteadyState allows changes and logs them while Windows is running. When the computer is turned off, or Windows is restarted, the C disk is returned to the initial state. Think Ground Hog Day, the movie with Bill Murray.

I’ll have more to say about SteadyState in the future.

SteadyState runs on Windows XP, the Professional, Home, and Tablet PC editions. It only supports the NTFS file system and Microsoft claims it needs at least 4GB of free hard disk space, mostly for the log of changes made to the C disk.

Vista users will have their own version of SteadyState in the future, it is currently in beta.
Mac and Linux users can use Deep Freeze (single copies are $45) to accomplish the same thing.

The problem that Gibson was looking to solve was that of a small-business owner, someone who needed to provide computers to employees, but didn’t want them installing applications for their personal use. We all know where that trail leads, computers that get fouled up in one way or another and become a sinkhole of time, effort, and money.

If either of these is too much for you, consider a USB flash drive. Laptop users in particular are well-served by storing their data files on a USB flash drive, one that can stay on their person at all times.

The concept of undoing file system changes is not new by any means. Certainly it will sound very familiar to users of Deep Freeze from Faronics and GoBack from Symantec. SteadyState doesn’t offer nearly the number of features those products do, but it’s free, and a huge step up from the Restore Points feature of Windows XP.

And so it grows.

commentary

Tastemakers, yes, but also kingmakers. I’ve found a range of new music (Yes, Indie, for the most part) through Pandora and other such services. Really, really good music. That’s how I initially found Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Band of Horses, The Essex Green, Surfan Stevens, Super Furry Animals, and more.

I was surprised to read on David Kusek’s blog (Future of Music) that Indie’s share of the music market is galloping toward 30 percent. I’m not sure where Kusek gets that number, though I was able to find some corroboration, but that is a surprising rise for a once obscure slice of the music pie.

Social music sites such as LastFM, Pandora, iLike and many more are making the fans into tastemakers with the ability to promote and share great new music at the touch of a button.

Indie Labels now account for upwards of 30 percent of total music sales, up from the low 20′s just a few years ago. This is a profound shift in the powerbase that favors the independent artist and innovator.

It’s also perhaps indicative of how music distribution is changing music preferences:

I can’t remember the last time I’ve walked into a music store, and I can’t remember the last time I found a new metal band. (My high school days revisiting me.) Indie, in my admittedly limited experience, seems to do online distribution better than other genres of music.

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Citysense can also show you where, based on historic data, the most “unusual” levels of activity are going on. You then have the option of looking up nearby businesses on Yelp and Google Maps, or bookmarking locations on Socialight, thanks to external APIs built in.

Then, using the location-aware technology built into the handset, Citysense eventually begins to “learn” where you spend most of your time, and as the product grows beyond San Francisco, eventually it’ll be able to suggest nightlife options to you in cities around the country–all this without taking any kind of user registration information.

(Credit:
Sense Networks)

The first of those, Citysense, has been unveiled along with its more corporate sibling. Currently available as a free download for BlackBerry and
iPhone handsets, Citysense displays what look like heat maps to show where the most human activity is going on at that moment, down to the street intersection; future releases of the product may make those locations even more detailed, but Skibiski said that’s not yet decided due to the important issue of privacy concerns.

Backed by hedge funds rather than the venture firms that typically fuel tech start-ups, Sense Networks wants to do a whole lot more than just tell you where your friends are. Rather, the company plans to use its database of location-based information–sourced not only from people who download its mobile client but also from previously untapped resources like taxicab GPS logs–to create both consumer- and enterprise-oriented products. It’s calling that mapping technology “Macrosense.”

CEO and co-founder Greg Skibiski described Macrosense to me as a platform for crunching and analyzing location-based data in real time. That has major implications for the retail and financial services industries, he told me. If it’s accurate, it could be a huge asset for predictive markets–as well as possibilities for some cool consumer applications.

A Citysense map of San Francisco.

As absurd as it may sound, a New York company called Sense Networks thinks that’s the solution. On Monday, the company emerged from stealth mode and simultaneously released an “experimental” product called CitySense, an urban navigation product that puts a new spin on the hot market of location-based mobile networking.

That’s a crucial talking point, considering some people are inevitably going to find Citysense and its brethren more than a little bit Big Brother-ish. Skibiski stressed to me that it’s not for meeting people, it’s for “meeting” places: No personal information is mined, users have the option to completely erase their past navigation histories if they wish, and there’s no way to track other users in the system, he said.

Citysense, with its focus on “unusual activity” and machine learning, might be a bit too wacky for the average BlackBerry user, but that’s not a big deal for Sense Networks. The company plans to profit primarily from business clients purchasing deeper data from the Macrosense platform; Citysense and all future consumer applications are intended to be strictly icing on the cake.

What if your nightlife agenda was dictated not by text messages, phone calls, or your city edition of Time Out, but by a shifting pattern of dots on a Google Map?

In its initial alpha phase, it’s limited to San Francisco. Other cities, including New York, are in development.