DB

Dear Bill,

Hey, what's up! I know you're real busy innovating and stuff, but I felt like I should drop you a line 'cause ... well, to be frank you guys have been annoying me lately.

1. Who was that Stuart McKee guy at the Massachusetts meeting. He sound like a press release; did he think this was just going to be the usual press-conference-type deal where uninformed reporters diligently write down your buzzword-rife gibberish and then applaud. He said this

"we commend the efforts, frankly, to use XML, we think ... uh, SOA Service Oriented Achitectures and data interoperability are incredibly important for the connected world has permeated everything we do. You know, we feel very fortunate that over the last 25 years technology -- personal technology in particular -- has changed the way we live, work and play. It's been a privelege for us to be a part of that.

This was in response (I use the term loosely) to James Palo making the excellent point that XML is not a sufficient guarantor of data availability all by its lonesome, about which I commented earlier.

2. Did one of your guys actually say that Nigerians weren't much concerned about spending a couple years' salary on each copy of windows and office that they need? One of your Nigerian guys?

I'm usually not one of those people that raves about you being doomed, but man this is a pretty weird thing to say and you should look to it.

Love,
Matt

PS: You should try this new browser. Might give you some ideas for IE8? I'm guessing that'll take about 4 years, like IE7 did? Let me know.

Little Tune-up

Slowly getting over my upgradeophobia, thanks partly to Gentoo

Here's some of my new numbers:
KDE 3.4.1 (on gentoo) ... which by the way sings. KDE ebuilds are now (correctly) split up so that you can pop pieces of it in and out instead of needing the Whole Hog.
xorg-x11-* 6.8.2 (on both fedora and gentoo). I don't know all the advantages of upgrading xorg regularly, but i decided to do it even though it makes me nervous.
Kernel 2.6.12 (on fedora, but i'm not booting it 'cause %^#%^ing ndiswrapper would not fly)

I'm not upgrading GNOME on the fedora box. Too many horror stories, and all my work is sitting there. It was enough headache that one day that Zimbra took me out of commission

...i wonder if Otto would like Mandriva... ?

Edge of My Seat

Now this is good television. Why are Sun and Google doing a news conference together, and introducing it with comments about Sun & Schmidt's history with open source? I'll know in about 45 minutes...

SOA and Me

(a followup to a previous post

'Kay, I haven't read a single SOA book, and I'll explain why. It seems there's a standard buzzword cycle that operates pretty predictably at a number of levels:

-A technology gets "hot" and a bunch of people figure it's the solution to every problem anyone has
-These people waste a bunch of time singin' and dancin' about how Wicked Cool this thing is and how it'll take over the world. (nice parody of this mentality -- guy can't wait until the Lx kernel is rewritten in PHP!)
-It is eventually discovered that this tech, like all others, doesn't do everything, and there is a backlash where no one wants to hear about it anymore.
-Some time later, problem-solving types re-analyze the tech, realize it does some things very well, and it takes its proper place in the universe.


e.g.: XML, formerly considered the best way to do everything from configure a CLI to archiving your email, is now -- gasp! -- being used to structure data that needs structure in order to be useful.

e.g.: the "new economy" got hyped all to death, then busted, then got re-invented as a (really, I swear!) way to (really) automate & network a great many disparate types of businesses.

Anyway, I basically wait until the cycle has gone through it's first 2 phases before I get current.