Opinion

Fear of bugs

I used to give a talk at trade shows and seminars called Bugoholics Anonymous. I'd start with "Hi, my name is Martin, and I'm a bugoholic." The audience would invariably respond with "Hi, Martin." I'

ISO approves OOXML as standard

Are you also known by the company you don’t keep? Here is a list of the countries either disapproving or abstaining on the vote to accept or reject the Microsoft OOXML file format as a standard. This is how it breaks down according to the story

Preview: Globalpex’s content certification uniquely verifies physical content in the envelope

SaaS offering also certifies and retains e-mail and instant message conversations It’s easy to assume that technology ensures the integrity of our electronic communications. And in most cases that’s true. For example, products such as Rea

What are an end-user’s responsibilities?

Dear Bob …I agree with your proposition (maybe I state it a little differently) that the majority of business users are professional people, reasonably intelligent, and intent on doing a good job [see "The portal," (2/25/2008) and subsequ

AIR gets rich apps right

Adobe's AIR is safe, fast, versatile, and open, and it will be the standard platform for rich Internet applications The modern browser makes an appealing client for Web-based applications, but even browsers like Safari 3.1 that incorporate featu

A Fool’s Paradise

Well, that didn't take long. My career at Microsoft lasted exactly two hours and 42 minutes. I didn't mind the blood tests, urine samples, health exams, brain scans, IQ measurements, prostrate pokes, polygraphs, body cavity searches, or eve

MacBook Air is insecure

IT control freaks

So long and thanks for all the dish

It's kind of a bittersweet day here in Cringeville. The end of a long wild ride and, hopefully, the start of something better. Though it pains me enormously to say it, this is my last blog post for InfoWorld. Notes From the Field may continue in

Augmented reality

This weekend I read this book on augmented reality (AR): Augmented Reality A Practical Guide By Stephen Cawood, Dr. Mark Fiala First Edition  January 2008  Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf Pages: 328 ISBN 10: 1-934356-03-4 | ISBN 13:

Notes from my SOA presentation at FOSE

I did FOSE on Monday, presenting my "SOA Without the Hype" presentation to a good group of people. Mostly government employees or contractors, all looking to see both what SOA is all about and perhaps some ways to approach it. Good group, a

He gets me every year.

Every year April 1st sneaks up on me and Steve Jones gets me with his fake SQL Server newsletter article. This year is no different. As I read his article a lot of things went through my mind. First and foremost, how the hell did he trump me on such

Dolphins Invade Sun Campus!

In the grand tradition of April Fool's stunts at Sun, the MySQL team decided to drape the Sun Menlo Park campus with inflatable pink and blue MySQL Dolphins! Marketing communications guru Steve Curry came up with the idea and we assembled a crac

Bait and switch IT

My company, U, acquired another company, V. The entire IT department at V was outsourced to Company TLA (Three Letter Acronym). In the process of trying to discoveri the extent of the network we had recently acquired, we asked TLA reps for diagrams a

Greed, politics, and CanSecWest

I've been following with amusement the developments coming out of the recent CanSecWest hacking contest. While most of the headlines have focused on the "quick death" of the MacBook Air system on day two, the really juicy bits

Maintaining integrity on the Net

Call it what you want, it [the Internet] is all about ratings now. We can argue that what makes a blog important is the nature of the content, but who are we kidding? We hide what we really mean by calling it "page views," "impressions

All charged up over Comcast’s quadruple play

<P>Today's announcement of CHARGES, Comcast's new home energy management system that will be combined with its TV, phone, and Internet services in a new "Quadruple Play" offering, has generated a lot of excitement. To help c

State of Open Source

I don't know if I'm any more qualified to comment on the state of open source than anyone else out there, but I did put some commentary together for InfoWorld's open source roundtable article series last week. Those comments got spread

Tracking an old school chum…

First, the connection: Dave Barry was a senior at Haverford College when I was a freshman. I'm tickled to say that he hasn't changed much, although from this video it looks like his guitar playing might have gotten a little better than it

Geek Week: E-voting experts and nymphomaniacs wanted, inquire within

I met a gin-soaked barroom queen…. While I was digging through the Net looking for the skinny on Sequoia Voting Systems and its mystery contractor Kwaidan Consulting (aka Mike Gibbons), the Bradblog's Brad Friedman was doing the same. He manag

Another take on opening PCs, or not

Another correspondent weighs in on the lock-or-not-lock debate – BobDear Bob …I'm not sure that workers downloading "stuff" on their PCs is really the place that innovation should come from. The reward that something might happen the

Hardware roars again

One of my favorite tech adages is "transistors are free." This is a relatively recent saying: adding transistors to a microprocessor die used to incur considerable cost. Today, unless you really go hogwild, the cost of the chip design and..

VMware Server 2.0 reaches beta 2

VMware has just released a Beta 2 build of its very popular and free server virtualization software, VMware Server 2.0 (build 84186). Beta 1 brought about a lot of changes to the interface of the software, and added a number of feature improvements t

Phoenix Technologies pushes forward with HyperSpace

Why am I writing about Phoenix Technologies? You probably know them as one of the makers of the PC BIOS firmware that operates many of today's computer systems. However, back in November of last year, we talked about Phoenix in terms of virtuali

Parallels news about containers and server beta product

Parallels is offering a few different forms of virtualization to the market. Specifically in the server market, they have a container-based solution (from SWsoft) as well as a hypervisor/server virtualization solution that is currently in Beta. Makin

How not to deal with fraud

My friend Desmond recently got an invoice from Dell for two DLP projectors. He hadn't ordered any DLP projectors. They weren't shipped to his house, either. Instead, they went to Roosevelt Island, NY (NB: Roosevelt Island? Really?). Obvious

Getting some process going

Dear Bob …We work with a software vendor whose app we host. They are small (20-ish employees), we have to cover a lot of customers and pretty close to 24/7. We are, unfortunately, their largest install, certainly larger than they designed for.There

TDD with Silverlight

Microsoft has not only released the source code for the Silverlight controls, they have released almost 2,000 of their own unit tests — and a unit testing framework that works with Silverlight. More on Brad Abrams' blog… I think this is serio

Windows Search 4.0 preview: first impressions

I just finished downloading and installing the Windows Search 4.0 Preview and I must say I'm impressed by the results. File system searches are now blazingly fast (at least within indexed folders), while preview images of even complex documents

Microsoft caves, in part, to online computing

There’s nothing more satisfying than an intelligent observation about life or business that communicates a real truth. So it is with great pleasure that the following observation… "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they

The life of a CIO

MySQL Workbench: open source data modeling

The MySQL Workbench team has released the latest Release Candidate 5.0.15 of their new DBMS modeling tool. This includes quite a few recent bug fixes and it's now rapidly approaching the GA status. The team continues on to fix all the minor nits

Logitech mouse features get shifty

<P>Sometimes it's not clear if a vendor is deliberately promoting a feature it knows the product doesn't have, or if it just can't be bothered to change the information on its website. Such is the case with one reader who recentl

Comments on The 451 Group’s Database Report & Red Hat’s 4Q revenue

I want to thank Matt Aslett &amp; The 451 Group for being brave enough to publish this report on the impact of open source databases on the DB market. An excerpt: "One of the key findings is that open source software has had a superficial im

Standards? What Standards?

In a comment to my recent blog entry regarding Lockdown Networks' departure from the marketplace, "Brian" takes issue with my comments about standards always win in the end. While it's clear that you need to take the time to consi

Transforming ITIL to Agile

Getting into the Groove: mentioned on Microsoft blog site

With our discussion on Groove yesterday we caught the attention of Abbott Lowell, Senior Product Manager on the Office Groove Team, Microsoft Corporation. He complemented our review and also revised our thinking a bit on using a DataBridge server on-

“SOA, Web 2.0’s boring cousin”

Joe McKendrick does a great job in defining the relationship between the "Web 2.0" and SOA in his latest posting. "There's no question that SOA has been a tough sell in many organizations. Conversely, the response to Web 2.0 has b

More on domain squatting

My previous post on domain squatting got plenty of attention, and plenty of comments, both positive and negative. Interestingly, the majority of commenters (public and private) who didn't like what I had to say admitted that they were in the bus

The 45nm Xeon 5400 series in the lab

Yesterday, Intel announced the newest incarnation of their quad-core Xeon CPUs. The 5400 series is a low-voltage chip designed for tight spaces such as blades and 1U servers. On the very day of the announcement, I was finally firing up a test box run

Doctored photos

OK, at long last, the MS guys have sent me a photo that they doctored. You can see the original in this post. And since I told them that I'd post it, here it is. This is the 2nd time that I've seen Oracle park taxis with their logo outside

The wisdom of herds

Eyewitness to H-1B scammers

In a series of blogs earlier this month I wrote about how the H-1B visa program is being gamed by outsourcing companies. If you recall I noted some statistics that said, 8 out of the top ten companies that win the H-1B visa lottery are not U.S. firms

Virtual Iron speaks on virtualization monopoly and the SME

Earlier this month, Virtual Iron announced the hiring of former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as chief strategy officer. In this role, they expected Asaro to focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evan

Multi-core to leave developers in dust?

Multi-core chip rivals AMD and Intel have been beating their chests as of late, but to what end, I wonder, as developers labor to keep up. AMD, for one, has fixed the embarrassing flaw that delayed the quad-core Barcelona chip. As Terry Malloy put it

As the blog turns …

The ROI of green IT

There's no question that some companies pursue green solutions because it's the right thing to do. But plenty of them also do it for the cost savings. Thus, I'm continually surprised by the persistent assumption that being environmenta

Dell and Egenera team for a dynamic datacenter

Dell and Egenera are partnering to deliver a fully integrated solution for employing dynamic data center environments. Egenera started out creating PAN Manager to operate with its own BladeFrame server technology; but last year, the company decided t

Virtualization capacity appliance and Sun’s latest desktop virtualization offering

Virtualization capacity problems, such as planning and performance bottlenecks, are still an issue with many people in the virtualization world. To answer that problem, VKernel has a new virtual appliance coming out and it is currently in Beta. And p

Kaplan: Guiding open source in IT

Jon Williams, CTO at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, gave today's opening keynote at the OSBC conference in San Francisco. But this was not the usual boring vendor keynote seen at many conferences; this presentation was absolutely on target f