A friend was congratulating me via IM about having passed 500 blog posts. I replied that I felt very “Alan 2.0.” He scoffed, saying that I was “maybe Alan 1.5.” He said that to truly become Alan 2.0, I have to turn into Alan-as-a-Service. Dang! I have to work up my AaaS plan now. Z […]
Not. A friend found this posting on San Francisco’s Craig’s List. I wonder which publishing company is advertising for someone to turn press release chutney into faux journalism, at $30 per “story.” I hope it’s nobody I know. Headline: Re-writes of Press Releases into articles We need someone to re-write about 30 press releases into […]
Agitar — makers of the AgitarOne family of Java unit testing products — is winding down, liquidating, going out of business. You won’t read about this on their Web site (at least I can’t find it), but the company has made a “general assignment for the benefit of creditors.” What this means is that, “pursuant […]
How many of you were early adopters of the Mac? I came in on the second wave, with my first being the Mac SE, which came out in 1987 – three years after the original Macintosh release. It’s fun to look back at how the graphical user interface, called Finder, evolved. At that time, there […]
This year has been a terrible one for tornadoes across the United States. Accounts very, but this weekend tornadoes killed at least 21 people in Missouri, Oklahoma and Georgia. It’s simply terrible and tragic, and my heart goes out to the victims. I was discussing the situation with a friend back East this morning, and […]
My son, who adores everything Japanese, is particularly fond of the new flavor of A1 steak sauce, Kobe Sesame Teriyaki. When he emptied the bottle last week, my wife and I promised to get him another bottle. Easier said than done, if you’d like the sauce to be within its sell-by date. That’s what we […]
It’s funny when you come across old stuff about yourself on the Internet. In today’s episode, I was trying to find something that I’d written about the Macintosh Finder. After failing to find it on my hard drive, it was off to Google with the search phrase +zeichick +finder.What came was a press release by […]
I like RFID. I don’t like that the new passports issued by the United States, the European Union and other countries have radio-frequency identification chips. I first wrote about this in November 2006, and in “Passports in lead foil” recommended shielding such important documents in an RFID-blocking enclosure. During the opening general session at this […]
This is the 500th posting on the ZTrek blog. The first posting was on September 22, 2006, which according to my calculations was 595 days ago. That means: 1. The posting rate is about 0.84 blog items per day.2. If the rate remains constant, the 1000th posting should be next Christmas: December 25, 2009. Thanks […]
If you’ve been to the doctor recently, you’ve probably shared the waiting room with one or more pharmaceutical sales representatives. Almost without exception, they’re beautiful young women and men, immaculately groomed and expensively dressed. I read in the NY Times that Big Pharm likes to recruit from college cheerleaders (see “Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep […]
I’ve been sick as a dog since Wednesday night, and I think I know why. This disturbing message came in today from the JavaOne conference folks: The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is […]
I’m scratching my head over this one. For the past few years, InfoWorld has put out a weekly newsletter called Application Development Report, filled with a mixture of development and general IT news. While the newsletter wanders a bit around the topic (they do a lot of coverage of e-mail management and network security, for […]
A lot of companies see the value of blogs to communicate with customers, with partners, with investors, with the media and with the world at large. At BZ Media, Ted Bahr and I both have blogs — his is on Folio, and of course, this is mine. The most famous IT company with an executive […]
The surprising aspect of Embarcadero’s purchase of CodeGear from Borland is the low, low price tag: US$23 million. As Borland put it yesterday: Borland announced today a definitive agreement to sell the assets of its individual developer tools unit, CodeGear, to Embarcadero Technologies. The purchase price for CodeGear is expected to be approximately $23 million. […]
Adobe’s Photoshop Express service has been in beta for some time. I was surprised and delighted to see this email come in from Adobe yesterday afternoon, via its public relations agency, AR-Edelman. This type of candor is far too rare in our industry, and deserves to be praised: I would like to provide you with […]
Didn’t see this one coming! To excerpt from the official release: Embarcadero Technologies® to Acquire CodeGear™ from Borland® Software SAN FRANCISCO – May 7, 2008 – Embarcadero Technologies, a privately-held company of Thoma Cressey Bravo, today announced that they signed a definitive asset purchase agreement with Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL) to purchase its CodeGear […]
Over the past half-dozen years, the JavaOne conference has been slowly morphing into the Mobile Java Development conference, with an increased emphasis on writing Java ME apps for cell phones. This year, JavaOne is branching out to a broader vision, encompassing not only desktops and mobile phones, but also televisions and consumer electronics devices. Sun’s […]
While Sun talks about its technology future here at the busy, bustling JavaOne, I’m thinking about its financial results. As reported in the San Jose Mercury News last week, Sun is planning to cut up to 2,500 jobs. Why? Because the company, which had been expected to make a profit, had a big loss instead. […]
Yes, yes, I’m sure that we’re overpaying for domain registrations and DNS, but we have many of ours through Network Solutions. One of the downsides of Network Solutions is the price. An upside is that they have good online tools for managing the name servers. Frankly, it’s too much work to bother researching alternatives and […]
The headliner of the JavaOne keynote was legendary rocker Neil Young. His connection with JavaOne is that his forthcoming Neil Young Archive will be released on Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray uses an embedded Java virtual machine to drive dynamic content. But Neil Young didn’t sing! There was even a setup line, where one of the Sun […]
The May 2, 2008, edition of Media Business had a detailed story about our launch of Systems Management News, featuring quotes from Ted Bahr (the “B” of BZ Media). To excerpt from Matthew Schwartz, “New print titles key in on changing markets, needs“: Bahr is facing one of the hardest-hit ad sectors, with computing, software, […]
In SD Times’ coverage of the latest in the Microsoft-Yahoo attempted takeover, David Worthington filed a story today about how Microsoft has withdrawn its $33/share offer. To help illustrate the story, “Microsoft walks away from Yahoo buyout,” our Web team embedded some financial graphs onto the page. Interestingly, the easiest ones to embed came from […]
We rarely attend opening weekends, because we can’t stand crowded theatres. However, the early reviews for Iron Man made it seemed worth going… and it was worth it. The movie was fast-paced and funny. Robert Downey Jr. made a great hero, delivering a character that lived up to Iron Man’s long-standing reputation as one of […]
Peter Jackson’s cinematic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, is a masterpiece. Particularly the extended editions, it’s hard to imagine movies that are better than his interpretations of those wonderful novels. Jackson got nearly everything right. I’d quibble about the appearance and behavior of the Ents, the selfish personality of Elrond and the miserable depiction […]
Microsoft has withdrawn its unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote to Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo, on Saturday (see the whole letter here): Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your […]
I was chatting with a young gentleman here at Interop and made a reference to all the blinking LEDs in the Interop NOC with the phrase “Achtung lookenpeepers!” The young person had no idea what I was talking about, so I explained that “back in the day” there was this funny German warning that we […]
This just in from a friendly public-relations person: Alan, I wanted to let you know about a great new product hitting the market next week — the La Fresh Tech Pack, a compact mini travel zip-up bag that contains individual towelettes to clean all of your tech devices. This is an easy way to keep […]
We can all sleep easy again, now that an inflatable pig has been found. According to the BBC story, “Floyd inflatable pig is recovered,” A giant inflatable pig which floated away during a Roger Waters concert at the weekend has been recovered in tatters in California. The pig, which measured the width of two buses, […]
My colleague Alex Handy, who serves as senior editor of our new publication, Systems Management News, has two passions. One is for old computer hardware. The other is for gaming. Thus, imagine Alex’s delight when he came across a real find at a flea market, as he wrote about on the SysManBlog: I made a […]
If you’re not aware of Coding Horror, you should check it out. Jeff Atwood’s developer blog varies all over the map, when it comes to software design — and other related topics. His most recent post, for example, touched on the ease of building a home theatre PC. Other current topics cover software registration, the […]