So it was a relief that the firm’s Jeff Whatcott started talking to me in plain English – well, American, but it was near enough – about how AIR can reach the parts other developer tools just can’t. Now I can see that it allows programmers to deliver applications with the “richness of the desktop but the reach of the web”, but I just had to take Jeff’s word for it when he explained it makes it possible to blend HTML, Flex and PDFs in a way never before possible, as they’re all treated as equal components. Similarly, Ajax “runs out of gas” when used for serious enterprise applications, unlike good ol’ AIR, he told me.

There were harsh words too, maybe unsurprisingly, for Microsoft’s Silverlight technology which he didn’t give a huge chance of success beyond creating micro apps like small portlets, because of the lack of runtime ubiquity – yet another thing for programmers to learn. Virtually no-one has the Silverlight runtime yet, according to Whatcott, and to get developers interested you really need around 80 percent of the web covered, where of course, Adobe has a bit of a lead. On the Google Gears front, the message was, more agnostically, we’ll have to wait and see which tool becomes the most popular for doing things like allow users to work offline with their web-based apps. As always, best laid plans often run awry when you leave it in the hands of those freakishly devoted and talented bunch of developers.

He also sympathised with IT directors given the thankless task of moving over to SOAs while trying to keep operating costs down – doing more with their network but without adding complexity. And Grasion maintained interoperability is key if you want to be successful in the industry, before explaining how Cisco’s business model has led to its forced entry into new markets. You can only get the most out of their network if they are the only provider, but as they become more successful the market gets more difficult to grow. Or so the argument goes.

There was a final entreaty before coffee to application, network and general IT security staff to work together more closely to create more coherent policy. The more companies adopt converged IP networks the higher the risks are likely to be and the more that risk needs to be balanced with the business benefits. Thankless task…but a nice pizza.

Lenovo is doing a little bit better though…its Formula 1 sponsorship has been hard to miss; emblazoned all over the place, from Melbourne to Monaco, making the firm apparently now fourth in terms of global brand recognition in the world’s most glamorous motor racing competition. They’re also actually already the greenest company in the IT industry, according to Greenpeace thank you very much, pipping the likes of Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and, yes, Dell. And if all that wasn’t enough, they’re about to launch the most luxurious notebook PC…in the world ever, according to the firm's senior VP Milko van Duijl. Designed to for the highest of the high-end market, and to coincide with the anniversary of its Thinkpad range, the new box will include copious amounts of leather, apparently, and come with an integrated services offering, bells, whistles, and anything else you might think of.

The mobile web, the web in your hand (or whatever you want to call it), has had more abortive starts than my old Nissan Sunny, god rest its soul. Time and again the hubris of the mobile operators has got the better of them, they promised the moon on a stick but sadly download speeds were too slow, data packets too large, sites unwieldy and hard to navigate around, and, most importantly, prices were too high and tariffs unfathomable.

This generally gave everyone the perception that it just wasn't worth accessing the net from your phone, you might as well wait until you get home; at least everyone knows where they are with broadband. And from a site owner’s point of view, the proliferation of different handsets on the market makes it nigh on impossible to design a site which will render well on all phones.

Well, it looks as if things are finally coming together. Initiatives like .mobi are galvanising the industry to move towards standardisation, making mobile sites more user-friendly, faster and cheaper to download. And the operators have also got the message, offering flat-rate, broadband-like tariffs which are easy-to-understand, or transparent. Hot on the heels of T-Mobile and Orange, Vodafone this week launched its own web portal service, imaginatively entitled Vodafone Mobile Internet – wonder how many marketing man hours that one took to dream up.

It looks good though, and from a web owner’s perspective, it automatically renders fixed web pages into a format that makes them easy to read and navigate on a handset. Not that it’s perfect, while I was told it can intelligently decide to put things like log-in boxes at the top of a page, the IT Week site displayed in an unusual order, beginning not with the main headline stories but less interesting areas of the site. Either way though this technology, if it generally works, could be a differentiator for Vodafone as it means firms don’t have to spend time and money designing their own mobile sites if they don’t want to, although it would probably make sense to do so if they want to reach the broadest number of consumers possible.

Another thing to look out for with this service is a special localisation capability which firms can (wait for it) leverage to their advantage. Vodafone uses its network of base stations to triangulate the geographical location of individual handsets, so that more relevant content can then be pushed to the user. Happy customers, more revenue-making opportunities, more responsive web sites – everyone’s a winner.

Sometimes the disconnect between what we report and the view from the ground is disconcertingly great, for whatever reason, so here's another quick dig in the ribs for IT managers. Anti-malware specialist Sana Security – yeah I know there's a vested interest somewhere, but they also have pretty good visibility into what's going on – renewed warnings detailing the why today's bots are growing at such a rapid rate, perpetuating spam, and launching malware and denial of service attacks.

The firm's Tim Eades explained how rootkit capabilities have become more advanced, making the little critters harder to detect, and how most bots now don't need the traditional 'bot herder' to control them. Because they often operate on a kind of P2P model nowadays, he added, they can be maintained by each other, making traditional methods of tracking down the system admin and shutting it down pretty pointless. While appliances can do 80 percent of the job of protecting the enterprise, therefore, firms would do well to look at a signature based security agent on the client side, with some kind of sandboxing or behavioural heuristics technology in place. Eades also encouraged firms to work with their ISPs more, as they are in the best position to spot, track and mitigate attacks stealing bandwidth, processing speed and sensitive information from organisations.

That said, they're also working on some interesting stuff which could be pretty revolutionary for enterprises and governments around the world. One of these is smart CCTV technology which can monitor the movements of people and things and alert if there is any pre-defined unusual activity. This makes the whole process of monitoring more efficient and probably means less staff are needed to sit staring at their CCTV monitors, or twiddling their, um, thumbs, or whatever it is they do, I'm not going to speculate.

Another neat solution Farnworth told me about was invented to create more 'dwell time' for airport passengers, to encourage them to buy more duty-free. Working with the airport, the airline handling agents and other parties, NEC invented a solution to notify passengers how long it would take for their gate to appear on the departure boards, which could also be tailored to include texts when the gate is ready.

The firm's also heavily involved in biometrics, although it's an area like RFID which has so far failed to take off in the massive way that was predicted, argued Farnworth. One which is being trialed currently however is a solution which aims to segregate domestic and international airline passengers so boarding passes cannot be swapped in the departure lounge. The NEC answer is using biometric identifiers stamped onto the boarding card to uniquely tie one card to one passenger – something we're all likely to see in a few years time.

A more unusual use for old kit though might be to throw it all in the corner of a room, think of an emotive title and enter it into Microsoft's DesignIT competition. Actually that's not strictly true. This competition is all about putting the fun back into IT (what, it went missing for a while?) and celebrating the creativity of IT professionals and how they can contribute positively to society. Basically a few charities are asked to come up with problems which can be solved through technology, and the ten finalists' IT system-solutions are then turned into art and put in a gallery. Interesting? Thought provoking? Pile of pretentious toss? It all depends on your perception of art and whether IT and creative types are actually compatible at all.

Leave your preconceptions at the door though and it's a worthwhile project – charities benefiting from the creative ingenuity and outside the box thinking of the IT professionals who took part. Oh, and there was a lively panel debate apparently, featuring our sister publication Computing’s very own (TV’s) Bryan Glick. Would have loved to listen to their words of wisdom but had some pressing matters to attend to in The Burlington Arms at the time…

I read recently that workers in a law firm revolted over their employer's decision to ban their use of Facebook during working hours. I think the arguments made against usage at work were the usual: productivity losses, bandwidth-hogging and, um, a pointless waste of time. But in the end the lawyers used their superior linguistic skills and powers of reasoning to force a back-down from IT – they would be allowed to use Facebook but not access the network resource-draining videos.

Facebook seems to have been causing similar consternation in Canada, having been banned in Ontario government and Toronto city hall offices. The answer, as always, is to set a clear, but fair and common-sense acceptable usage policy (AUP) and communicate it clearly to all staff. And, just as important, to remind staff at regular intervals. I just found my AUP as I was clearing out an old set of drawers…can't even remember being given it.

In the end then not an awful lot of BI, which to be honest is not always a bad thing, but quite a lot about what a crackin' company SAS is to work for (don't rub it in guys, I'm a journalist for God's sake). But that said, there was some good insight into what makes a successful BPM (or CPM or whatever you want to call it) project. It all sounds like obvious stuff, but things like executive buy-in, data quality, enterprise-wide deployment etc are probably neglected by many firms keen to jump on the performance management bandwagon because their competitors have.

Now, we're usually not very keen at IT Week on those seemingly self-serving surveys, reports, pieces of research etc that vendors tend to push out, which seem to say exactly what the vendor wants. But sometimes there is actually something of worth in this lot. Data security specialist Workshare this week released a new report – the Workshare Global Security Threat Report - which could be a useful resource for security chiefs, if there's any out there that still don't appreciate the risks to their company's sensitive information that exist today.

The report, as you can see if you've made busy wiv dem fingers and clickety-clicked on the hyperlink, gathers together various examples of security breach incidents in the last four months impacting in several key ares: privacy, intellectual property, the mobile workforce, and corporate compliance. There's also stuff in there about the legislative background to information leakage; for example Lord Broers speech at Infosec that we reported, which hinted at the introduction of data breach notification laws. And the report covers key developments to keep you eyes on in the coming months.

So if you can get over the vested interest thing there's plenty of food-for-thought here; and for those that might argue it's an overly pessimistic and alarmist view of the threat environment…um, better off being overly cautious in this situation than being forced to shell out sack-fulls of money to investigate the unfortunate loss of 45 million credit card numbers.

The 12^th annual JavaOne love-in continues. Queues everywhere, I mean for everything. The firm has really placed a consumer focus on this event rather than last year’s enterprise-dominated conference, spearheaded by the JavaFX announcements on Tuesday. Which is fine for us in a way, because for one thing consumers are also enterprise workers, and the barriers between consumer and corporate IT diminish daily. Plus, in the B2C space there will surely be no shortage of device manufacturers, content owners and service operators queuing up to exploit the new JavaFX open source platform. There are still some reservations that the plans lack enough concrete detail and tools are yet to be announced which would actually enable developers to get cracking on this stuff…but Sun certainly has high hopes the technology will boost its standing in the increasingly important Rich Internet Application (RIA) space.

This is actually one of the least corporate corporate shows I’ve been to; I mean, yes there’s a certain amount of razzamatazz, but Sun is more of a facilitator, a benevolent uncle looking after its flock of Java geeks, than the main attraction. And that kind of attitude comes from the top down, from the thoroughly pleasant bunch of execs who bicker and banter with each other like old friends. I don’t know if this is a new leaf the computing giant has turned over since its open source mission began or not, but it makes a refreshing change all the same.

This week I’ve turned on, tuned in and erm, chewed the fat with 18000 Java developers. Not literally of course. Really, I’m trying not to get swept away by the mass hysteria of this year’s open source-tastic JavaOne conference, but it is, according to Sun’s very own stonewashed denim CEO Jonathan Schwartz, the largest OS developer conference in da world, and who are we to argue?

My takeaway from this trip will be creepy Alcatraz, trying desperately to find a trolley bus in the early hours, maps which don’t show the freakin inclines on the street – and I thought Sheffield was bad  - and Sun SVP Rich Green’s superb tight jeans, tight black t-shirt combo. Nice try Rich, but Jobs has the trademark already on non-descript sports casual wear, good as your keynote was. Oh and that hot DJ at the opening keynote. Oh and the…never mind.

But before I sound like an unappreciative, sexually frustrated developer, the show has shown me the fanaticism of the open source crowd and Java developers. I heard there are workshops in the Moscone Centre (the aircraft hanger building where JavaOne is held) at around midnight. Midnight? That’s when most sane people are trying to score crack from a toothless crone in The Mission. Sorry, that’s exaggerating. Maybe a bit of weed.

That is of course one of the reasons why e-voting has been trumpeted as the saviour of democracy – give them a system so easy they don’t even have to leave the house to do it. Problem is it really isn’t good enough yet, as US precedent has shown. But as usual the government took has taken no notice and tried it anyway, in 17 local authorities to be precise. And guess what…electoral turnout jumped by a massive 4 percent. Could it be that the public is also unconvinced about the accuracy of the technology?

Brian Chess, chief scientist of Fortify Software has gone on record as saying, “As with any computerised system, e-voting machines can be subject to programming errors and malicious tampering. With evidence in the States clearly showing that the voting machine certification process is flawed, how can any citizen be expected to trust this new system?”. And he’s right. The problem is, though, that the vast majority of the public probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway. And as was seen in Scotland, even the old cross-in-the-box malarkey can prove to be a little too taxing for some: there were over 100,000 spoilt ballots north of the border.