Opinion

MySQL at PHP Quebec

For many developers, MySQL and PHP go together like peanut butter and jam. MySQL has a long history of working with the PHP community and that's a commitment that will continue forever. If you've thought scripting languages weren't pow

Reader voices: subscription scams

<P>Magazine subscriptions have always been something of a racket, but they seem to getting worse both in scope and in the depth of their sheer fraudulent nastiness. But does the blame for this sorry state of affairs belong to the magazine publi

Geek Week: AOL goes for younger breed, Spitzer girl gets ID’d

The kids are alright. Some folks hit middle age and buy sports cars, get hair plugs, or take up with $3000 an hour hookers. AOL has decided to celebrate its midlife crisis by buying Bebo, the third largest social network on the planet, for $850 milli

Considering services and orchestration

The best way to consider both notions of service and orchestration (and process integration in general) is to think of them as independent layers, where the process layer is the calling application to the services to extract both data and behavior ne

Make IT accountable for tech-related power bills

If more IT managers were directly responsible for their department's energy bills, they'd be more likely to implement greener, energy-saving practices.

SMB IT on the road

One of the things I've noticed about small businesses is that we're on the move almost all the time. Whether we're making sales presentations, doing on-site work, or heading out to meet with vendors or clients, a lot of us are travelin

Developers are not fungible commodities

I had a long visit from Richard Rabins of Alpha Software on Wednesday. It was supposed to be a short software demo and a brief lunch, but time got away from both of us. I'll write about the demo another time. One of the topics we touched on in a

Visualization Coolness

Search as a utility

Virtual Iron builds on management team by hiring Tony Asaro

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software, is continuing to build out its management team with effective and key players. Back in November 2007, we talked about the company changin

Cloud computing begins to emerge from the haze

I hate technology buzzwords. And when I hear one, my impulse is to bat it away like an annoying mosquito. But before you do the same about one of this year's hot buzzwords — cloud computing — give it a little more thought. Cloud computing, a c

Where will Microsoft’s green path lead?

For months now, many of the hardware technology heavyweights — HP, IBM, Sun, Dell, AMD, Cisco, and Intel, for example — have gone to great lengths to highlight their green products, plans, and corporate visions. Now the software behemoth Microsoft

Clarification Of My “Don’t Blame Vista” Posting

Apparently my post yesterday got a few people upset, which I am usually prepared for and welcome. I stand with Microsoft and that is bound to create hate mail from the masses. However, I believe my comments were mistook and I want to set the record s

Windows “Workstation” 2008 results lead to backlash from Vista zealots

I love irony. After a year of rabidly defending their platform, the Vista zealots are now eating their young. Specifically, they're attacking those of us who've discovered that the core Vista bits run great, just not when packaged as Window

Why Adoption Matters

I don't usually comment too much on other people's blogs –it just becomes too much of an echo chamber –but I thought a recent posting by Savio on the adoption-led model could benefit from another perspective. I'm not sure what caused

The Ruby Programming Language (the book)

The Ruby Programming Language By David Flanagan &amp; Yukihiro Matsumoto First Edition  January 2008  Pages: 444 ISBN 10: 0-596-51617-7 | ISBN 13:9780596516178 At one of the Little Language conferences in Cambridge, Yukihiro &a

Lower energy bills, longer lifecycle boost thin client’s green appeal

Shifting from PCs to thin clients can save a company upwards of 25 percent in power savings, according to a newly released report from Forrester. The potential energy savings is driving IT execs to reconsider moving from trading in users' thick

The Air, a month later

It's been just over a month since I first unboxed my MacBook Air. I wrote a review for InfoWorld that garnered some attention, and a sidebar that far too many people seemed to think was the actual review — a statement on their own preconceived

The Next Bill Gates

It seems impossible, but in a few short months we will no longer have William H. Gates III to kick around anymore. The God of Windows is stepping away from his day-to-day responsibilities in June to become a roadie for U2, or possibly a fluffer perso

Test Center Tracker: Escape from reality?

Don't you wish sometimes you had a magic wand to free your memory, and perhaps the world, from things like the idiotic behavior of a sleazy politician caught in a scandal? You know who I am referring to, don't you? Well I have that magic wa

VMware administrators find value in Microsoft PowerShell

While not as popular a term as virtualization, PowerShell is starting to find its own place in this virtual world. For those not familiar with the technology, PowerShell was created by Microsoft as an extensible command line interface shell and assoc

Don’t blame Vista for “Vista (In)Capable” lawsuit

Microsoft has yet another lawsuit on its hands. This time, it's over the permission the company gave PC makers to place a "Windows Vista Capable" label on their machines in 2006, before the OS was released– even though many of those P

Apple iPhone SDK upends mobile market

Eight months ago, Apple was a nonplayer in the mobile space. Now, according to Apple, iPhone is the second most popular smartphone solution after BlackBerry. With all the hoopla he raised over iPhone at launch time, it's as if Steve Jobs saw thi

What the U.S. is missing by ignoring IPv6

Foreign firms and the feds are seeing better performance and security — plus a range of mobile and collaboration apps beginning to emerge

The No-Brainer $100 Treo Upgrade

After deliberating all the different smartphone choices in recent weeks, I finally came to a decision. Or in some sense, the decision came to me through the convergence of two events: The antennna on my long-suffering Treo 650 broke off and AT&T

Is VMware Infrastructure plug-in mania happening?

Since James Brown rightfully took the title of "the hardest working man in show business", I suppose that it is only right that we start calling Andrew Kutz the hardest working man in VMware Infrastructure Plug-ins. Last month, I told you h

Finding my own level of incompetence

I am temperamentally a lone or small-group software developer, and have always generated frequent — usually weekly — builds for my customer to review. I was so successful at this at one company that I was promoted to manager. I had taken on the con

Adoption-led market or Shareware?

Sun's Simon Phipps has a nice description of an "adoption-led market", which differs from the traditional "procurement-driven market" commonplace in the commercial software market. "In this (adoption-led) approach, devel

VMware stock prices slide below opening day of trading

VMware is known as the virtualization market leader with control of anywhere between 50 and 80 percent of the market. So much so, that the company has become synonymous with x86 server virtualization. It is almost to the point where the word VMware (

Do you have the political will for SOA?

Mike Kavis has a good take on the role of the Enterprise Architect in the world of SOA. Mike is one. Responding to my last post. "Dave's point 'Somebody needs to have the political will to figure out a long term solution' is what

Retro podcast: Web 2.0 interview from 2006

Download file…

Outsourcing to the Middle East

The business park phenomenon proliferates, as cheap IT labor communities keep cropping up in emerging markets As globalization continues to blanket the world and companies continue to look for geographies where they can get IT work done for less, the

Keeping up with Verizon’s sneakwrap changes

<P>The fact that online service providers expect you to check in periodically to see if they've made any changes to their Terms of Service (ToS) is already an old, bad joke. But if you're in the mood for a really bad joke, take a look

Who will continue solidDB for MySQL development?

As Matt reported last week, IBM announced that it was bowing out of the solidDB for MySQL project. "Those of you who know Solid's history know that Solid has long been a leader in the area of in-memory database software. This in-memory tech

VMware users unhappy with management? And is Cisco using KVM?

Are VMware users unhappy with their current management tools? Yes, according to a recent survey from Netuitive. The company recently surveyed a number of VMware users, and the responses were extremely interesting. And what's going on with Cisco?

Reply to My Microsoft Freetard post

Apologies for not writing this earlier, but I've just had a horrible few weeks of school &amp; work, with a week of 14hr days in a classroom to boot. I wanted to follow up on the post because most of the comments I received were of the &quot

“Information as a service”

One of the more significant gaps facing IT organizations today is “information on demand”. Most IT organizations have typically inherited an information repository approach that has been built in silos. This typically is exacerbated furth

Windows “Workstation” 2008: One week later

It's been just over a week since I took the plunge and nuked my Vista SP1 installation in favor of a desktop implementation of Windows Server 2008 (aka Windows "Workstation" 2008). So far, it's been a smooth ride. All of my core a

Test Center Tracker: Windows improvements, iPhone app dev, and network security

Longhorn top 10 – Though not as amusing as anything you'll see on "Letterman," Sean McCown and Tom Yager's top 10 list of improvements to Windows Server 2008 provides a useful overview of the key features that earned the server hi

Pentagon hacks and Google Maps

I have this nosy but absent-minded Uncle. He likes to paw through my emails, peruse my web history, and tap my phones. But when it comes to protecting his own, more important secrets, he's mostly clueless. Case in point: When alleged Chinese Hac

First iPhone app built from the new SDK arrives

Credit to Erica Sadun for writing if not the first certainly one of the first applications using the iPhone SDK launched last Thursday, 03/06/08. Sadun wrote it in 24 hours. The application called Todo App is fairly rudimentary according to reports o

Dirty IT jobs: Somebody has to do ’em

After awhile you recognize the look. Certain IT people I meet have a special demeanor that says "my job is killing me." They may be the jumpy and talkative or they may be subdued, but somehow the haunted look in…

Top 10 improvements in Windows Server 2008

1. Windows Hyper-V hypervisor-based, hardware-accelerated server virtualization supports 64-bit guests, VM snapshots, VM relocation, access to offline disk images, and reservation of physical peripherals and CPU cores for exclusive use by specific gu

VKernel virtual appliance identifies virtualization bottlenecks

VKernel is well known for their use of the virtual appliance. And the company is continuing down that virtual path with its latest offering – the VKernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance. The virtual appliance is said to identify curren

Why enterprise architects continue to fall short with SOA…and Enterprise Architecture

If you've been reading this Blog and listening to my Podcasts, you know that I've been calling SOA what SOA is…an architectural pattern, and in many instances a vital component of a healthy enterprise architecture. Indeed, I've

More on whether or not to open up PCs

Dear Bob …I've read your recent article concerning the PC at work viz-a-viz the PC at home ("The portal," Keep the Joint Running, 2/25/2008).Needless to say as a support technician dealing with the users in a corporate environment, t

/etc/hosts.deny, hackers, and automation run amok

3AM. It's always 3AM when these things happen. Last night, my cellphone started beeping, and after it finally woke me up, I cracked open an eye and checked the screen. Text messages from Nagios, telling me that my main FreeBSD mail/Web server wa

SXSW Interactive

I'll be in Austin Sunday and Monday as part of SXSW Interactive conference. If you're not familiar with SXSW (South by Southwest) it's a combination technology and music conference. Or technically I guess it's two different confer

Developer talks of iPhone SDK pluses and a few minuses

Antonio Rodriguez, former CEO of Tabblo, a photo sharing site since acquired by HP and who is now the general manager of HP publishing services was so excited about the SDK he called me from the airport between flights. I interviewed Rodriguez before

Silverlight 2 beta 1 design tools

Yesterday I explained how to get started with Microsoft Silverlight 2 beta 1 if you're a developer. If you're a designer rather than a developer, of if you're a developer who does some UI design and prefers to drag and drop controls ra