Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog

Salesforce does SOA

About 700 people crowded into the Santa Clara Marriott last Monday, for the Salesforce Developer Conference. I stayed for the first half of the event, enjoying the opening and keynote speeches, but then bailed after lunch. (The afternoon program…

Head start on the Testers Choice Awards

Psst! Nominations for the Software Test & Performance Testers Choice Awards officially open on Friday, June 1st — but the nomination form is available now, and we'll take early nominations, no problem.We kicked off the Testers Choice Awards…

Upgrades are a failure opportunity

Some of my favorite stories about software or systems failures happen when a system is upgraded. My personal low happened when I worked at LAN Magazine in the mid-1990s. I was working in our LAN Lab, and noticed that the firmware on our main…

Fire up the FUD machine

Microsoft's strategy for dealing with open source software – not just Linux, but focused on Linux – is becoming clear: Litigate, not innovate. Or, as I would contend, threaten to litigate, but don't actually litigate.Frankly, I doubt that…

Status report on Java app servers, IDEs

After the heady euphoria of last week’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco, I’ve been inspired to release some data from BZ Research’s sixth annual Java Use and Awareness Study, which was completed in December 2006.The study, which we’ve…

The CIOs Speak

Of several panel discussions at Software 2007, only one of them had any real meat: a diverse group of CIOs talked about what they’re doing and what they look for. The CIOs were Neil Cameron from Unilever, Rob Carter of FedEx, Patricia Morrison…

Q&A with Tata Consultancy Services

One of the keynotes at last week’s Software 2007 conference was S. Mahalingam, CFO of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the biggest IT outsourcing companies in India. Mahalingam’s keynote was in the form of an interview with Steve…

The Entourage database breakthrough

Ever since I started using Entourage 2004, the e-mail/calendar client in Microsoft Office 2004 for the Macintosh, my Mac has periodically “gone away,” with Entourage becoming unresponsive for a minute or more at random intervals, and with…

Secure the shared printers, stat!

A few weeks ago, I met with a senior partner of a mid-sized professional services company, whose 100-person firm was recently acquired by a much larger organization.Prior to the acquisition, this partner had overseen IT for his company, as well…

Hurray for the Musical Mom

One of my favorite bloggers — and favorite people — is Alexandra Weber Morales.I worked with Alexa at Miller Freeman in the mid-1990s, when she was editor of Diagnostic Imaging America Latina; she then succeeded Larry O'Brien as editor of…

Registration is open for STPCon Fall 2007

The next Software Test & Performance Conference is going to be our biggest and best ever.Many of you may have attended previous STPCon events, including STPCon Spring 2007 held a few weeks ago in San Mateo, Calif. — the first time we brought…

Blackberry cal sync with Google

Well, that was easy. Turns out the biggest problem with kludging a unidirectional sync from Google Calendar to the BlackBerry (using a Mac as the agent of change) is procrastination.Step 1. Fire up iCal, the calendar application that comes…

I love my CrackBerry

After years of self-righteous protests, "I ain't gonna get one of those PDAs," I'm now hooked on my Blackberry — and that's with assimilation still in progress.The drive toward the BlackBerry was oblique. First, there was the appeal of the…

Announcing Windows Server 2008

Microsoft has let it slip that Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" will be called Windows Server 2008. Check out this screen captured from the Microsoft PressPass section of microsoft.com, the page that covers the forthcoming WinHEC conference.On…

Software 2007 Wednesday: More of the same

The second and final day of Software 2007— CMP Media’s conference for software executives – was very much like the first day, with keynote discussions split between people who had things to say, and people who wanted to get the most value…

Steve Ballmer is a very loud man

Real-time blogging: Steve Ballmer just completed a fairly dry, but very loud, sales presentation for Windows Vista and Microsoft Office System for his keynote at Software 2007. More about that later. However, the Q&A session was much more interesting;…

Software 2007: Hoping Day 2 is less pitchy

The Software 2007 conference, going on yesterday and today down at the Santa Clara Convention Center, got off to a great start, with a opening keynote address from Hasso Plattner, an SAP co-founder who now also teaches at Stanford.However, the…

Unhealthy medical practices

I'm not a doctor, have no medical training, and fully expect you to dismiss this tirade as "naive." However, I believe that the practice of pharmaceutical companies paying doctors to prescribe their medicines is outrageous.The catalyst for this…

Drivers of development innovation

Whenever you have the opportunity to listen to a co-founder of SAP talk about innovation, it’s worth listening. SAP is unusual among the Giant Software Companies in that it’s reinvented itself many times: from a big mainframe enterprise…

Ray Lane’s Six Webs

If you thought that the confusion between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 was confusing, what about six Webs? That's how many that Ray Lane suggested during his talk at "The New Software Industry: Forces at Play, Business in Motion," a fascinating conference…

Identify and mitigate software risks through testing

One of the most popular classes at our Software Test & Performance Conference is Rex Black's "Identify and Mitigate Software Risks Through Testing." The class is always packed. But because not everyone can make it to STPCon, we've decided to…

Register to unsubscribe… or you can’t

I've been going through a fascinating exercise this week, as I streamline the information going to my myriad e-mail addresses. That entails changing the addresses used to receive some information, like newsletters from companies that I buy…

Amiga? You’re kidding, right?

If this story had come out 24 days ago, I'd have called it an April Fool's hoax, today's story from ExtremeTech, "New Amigas On The Way, Company Says."The story reads,Virtually nothing was released as far as the new designs were concerned, other…

Terabytes Ahoy: a big day for storage!

Today, we hit the triple jackpot on three big storage advances.First: Hitachi has shipped the first terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive -- only five months after my colleague Andrew Binstock predicted that one would go onto the market. The Deskstar…

Climate Change, Software Edition

The smell of global warming is in the air – and no, I’m not talking about greenhouse gases. The second half of April has seen some changes in the somewhat glacial economy that’s bogged down the IT industry for the past seven years. This…

April Fools Day RFCs now at Amazon

For those who read my earlier posting about the complete collection of April Fools' Day RFCs, the book is finally available for ordering from Amazon.com. (I already pre-ordered it from Barnes & Noble.)Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick

Disappointing delays from Microsoft, Apple

David Worthington reported today in on SDTimes.com that Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas," the next version of Microsoft's developer toolchain, may be delayed until next year. While Microsoft is increasingly non-committal about deadlines (and…

Bermudan coins and Coke machines

Day One of the Software Security Summit kicked off with a keynote from Herbert “Hugh” Thompson, chief security strategist at People Security, and one of the most innovative (and funny) people in our industry. He told a great story which…

Help us design EclipseWorld 2007

Do you use Eclipse?EclipseWorld 2007 is coming up Nov. 7-9 in Reston, Virginia. Right now, we're reading through many class proposals and speaker abstracts. We're weighing ideas for keynote speakers, social activities, Birds of a Feather. We're…

Yes, Oracle has security flaws too

Lest you think that I only pick on Microsoft, Oracle just released a whopper of a patch list. This Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Notice is a head's up for security patches coming to dozens of Oracle products on April 17.Oracle rolls up its…