Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog
Dell’s AMD servers: When WHAT freezes over?
At Oracle OpenWorld today (which I did not attend), Dell introduced its first AMD-based servers, the PowerEdge SC1435 and PowerEdge 6950. Both are rack-mounted systems. The SC1435 is an entry-level pizza box with two dual-core Opterons; the…
Microsoft’s Atlas: AJAX the Greater
Homer's Iliad has two Greek heros named Ajax. One is the giant king of Salamis, known as Ajax the Greater. The other is the prince of Locris, and called Ajax the Lesser (though, presumably, not to his face).It looks like Microsoft's Atlas project…
Alan on blogs, circa 2003
I stumbled across this three-year-old article, "Blogs: The Latest Option In Raising Your Voice Online," written by Reid Goldsborough for Information Today. Reid interviewed me about blogs in early 2003, and my fundamental misgivings about their…
Microsoft Office security updates fail installation
Microsoft has issued several security updates for Office 2003 since Oct. 6, but they won't install on my 64-bit Windows system. (It's clearly not my weekend for working with software.)My big HP workstation (two single-core 2.6GHz Opteron processors,…
Sun Grid: Not ready for SaaS
A four-day outage for "scheduled maintenance"? That's pretty bad for Software as a Service, but that's the score with the Sun Grid.The Sun Grid Compute Utility was announced at the 2006 JavaOne conference, as a high-performance cluster that…
Saving a few $$$ at STPCon
Today (Friday, Oct. 20) is the last day for discounted registrations to the Software Test & Performance Conference -- tomorrow, the full conference passport price increases by $200. We've got a great conference for development and test/QA professionals,…
Good luck, Lindsey!
We had a retirement party on Wed. night for Lindsey Vereen, now Editor Emeritas of Software Test & Performance. I've worked with Lindsey off-and-on since 1991, when we were both at Miller Freeman. Lindsey (pictured) edited publications like…
Stack Wars: Red Hat vs. Novell/IBM vs. Sun
After Red Hat purchased JBoss and created an integrated offering with Linux and a commercial-grade open-source Java EE app server, it was only a matter of time before Novell did the same. The answer has a singularly uncatchy name of "Integrated…
Walking through the RCP code
I'm very excited about a new Web seminar that SD Times is doing with the Eclipse Foundation. Called "Anatomy of an Eclipse RCP Application," it's a public walk-through of an Eclipse Rich Client Platform app. The best way that I learn a platform…
OpenUP and EssUP: Subsets of the RUP
My column in today's edition of SD Times News on Thursday discusses two new subsets of the Rational Unified Process -- OpenUP, which is implemented in the Eclipse Process Framework, and EssUP, developed by Ivar Jacobson for use with Visual Studio…
Shaking up paradise
Sunday's earthquake in Hawaii sounded horrific. Fortunately, Larry O'Brien, Kona resident, SD Times columnist and Ultimate Frisbee player extraordinare, was unharmed by the falling tchotchkes. Things can be replaced, but Larry, Tina and Cheyenne…
No Evans DPC this year
Evans Data, citing poor attendee registration numbers, has cancelled its first-ever Development Products Conference. The conference, scheduled to be held in San Jose this Thu. and Fri., was billed as "If your job involves planning new technology…
Three hundred million strong
According to demographers, the population of the United States reached 300 million today. (That's a fuzzy number, plus/minus a few weeks or even a month, but as William Frey, Brookings Institute analyst, said last night on NPR's All Things Considered,…
A terabyte hard drive by end of the year?
Last spring, my good friend Andrew Binstock and I agreed upon a simple wager: Would we be able to purchase a terabyte hard drive, in a 3.5-inch form factor, by the end of 2006? At that time, 500GB drives were readily available at places like…
iPod nano (PRODUCT)RED
Apple is normally very good at branding. But what's with their new iPod, called the iPod nano (PRODUCT)RED? (Initially, I thought the name was an HTML coding error on the Apple Web site.)I can't argue with the largesse behind the product. The…
Portland: A common set of Linux UIs
The OSDL has released Portland 1.0, its set of common interface for GNOME and KDE. Because Portland will be found in many Linux distros, such as Debian, Fedora and SUSE, it could help solve some of the forking problems that we're seeing on the…
Very pleased with 80GB iPod
It's the trickle-down effect: In August, my wife overflowed her 20GB iPod with Click Wheel, and took my 60GB iPod (pre-video). Somehow, in that process, I ended up with a black 80GB iPod with Video.I'm not complaining!The new iPod holds a ton…
United loves to e-mail, and it shows
I spend a lot of time on airplanes -- not as much as many of my colleagues, but it's plenty. My default carrier is United Airlines, which has a hub in San Francisco, and which also has an e-mail flight notification system, called EasyUpdate.(A…
Ray Noorda: The man who lost the LAN
Ray Noorda, best known for founding Novell, inventing the local-area network industry and then losing the LAN industry to Microsoft, died today.I only met Noorda a few times, in the last years of his tenure with Novell, and never had much personal…
Powell on leadership
Colin L. Powell, Gen. (Ret.), U.S. Army, former Secretary of State of the United States, is a very funny man.Gen. Powell had the audience in stitches during his keynote address at Dreamforce 2006, the user conference held by software-as-a-service…
See SPOT Run
Gosh, it's tempting. Sun Microsystems offered to send me a evaluation kit of its Sun SPOT hardware platform SDK. SPOT, in this case, stands for Small Programmable Object Technologies. It's a set of small, battery-operated wireless devices with…
Guess I’m not getting on the Mono mailing list
From: email hidden; JavaScript is required: email hidden; JavaScript is requiredj: Request to mailing list Ximian-mono-list rejected Your request to the Ximian-mono-list mailing list Subscription requesthas been rejected by the list moderator. The…
Microsoft: Customers are presumed guilty
At any moment, Microsoft's Windows could decide that your operating system isn't "legitimate." And then, unless you buy a new software license, some functionality will be curtailed.This is all part of Microsoft's fight against software piracy.…
A market assessment
On Tuesday, October 3, 2006, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a new record high – the first since January 14, 2000, more than six and one-half years ago.In the United States, the Dow (as this 30-stock index is popularly known) is the arguably…
Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing
What do Tim Berners-Lee, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing having in common? I'm not entirely sure. But that's the title of a newly arrived book, "Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing," by Peter Alesso and Craig Smith. I'm intrigued.The…
More on Borland
My colleague Larry O'Brien has weighed in regarding Borland's moves to rename/reposition/rejigger its Core SDP products into a new set of application life cycle suites. One upon a time, Larry was one of the biggest and most loyal Borland supporters…
Borland’s Core Dump
Borland has a new application life cycle management strategy. The company, which has been undergoing a radical shift since the departure of CEO Dale Fuller last November, is moving away from its role-based Core SDP ALM solution. Instead, the…
Hewlett and Packard
The ongoing drama at Hewlett-Packard has me rapt with attention. Beyond its involvement with Mercury (which HP is in the process of buying), the corporate-spying scandal doesn't have much immediately relevance to my own world of software development.…
Feed me!
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I'm at that stage of my nascent blogging career. Two friends, upon hearing about my blog, suggested that I add a link to its XML feed to the blog page.Sounds easy, I thought. The software supports…
Zilog enters the 16-bit market. Again.
My first exposure to microprocessors came through the use of the Zilog Z80 chip. It was hard to do any work with small computers in the late 1970s and NOT use the eight-bit Z80; they were relative cheap, easy to build circuits with, and simple…