There’s a good chance that Yaesu, one of the best manufacturers of amateur (“ham”) radio equipment, may be disappearing soon. I’ve been a proud owner of many Yaesu tabletop radios, from shortwave receivers to HF transceivers. My favorite HT (handi-talki is the ham version of “walkie-talkie”) is a Yaesu VX-5R triple-band. (The VX-5R, pictured, was […]
My good friend Larry O’Brien has gone beyond eliminating Daylight Savings Time. If I understand him correctly, he also wants to abolish time zones. Instead, he would implement Universal Geometric Time, which is a precise calculation of time at your exact longitude based on the angle of the sun overhead. UGT can be calculated, with […]
As suspected, I had to change the time zone on my BlackBerry 8700g again today. Last weekend, I had to change the handheld from Eastern Time (GMT-5) to Caracas Time (GMT-4), because it erroneously “auto-adjusted” for Daylight Savings Time on Oct. 28. The device didn’t know that the U.S. Congress changed the DST shift date […]
Two days ago, on Oct. 31, Western Digital announced a 320GB hard drive in the 2.5-inch form factor that’s popular with laptops and notebook PCs. They claim it’s the first such drive. The previous winner in the 2.5-inch size, best I can tell, is 250GB, meaning that Western Digital has pushed the envelope by about […]
The “One Laptop Per Child” program, pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte, is breathtaking in its scope and vision. I had the opportunity to talk to him a year ago, at the AMD Global Vision Conference in Los Angeles, and was impressed that the program focuses not only on the hardware, but pays just as much attention […]
I was recently involved in an interesting discussion about how to interpret survey results. This is the gist of the discussion. Let’s say you have a three question survey, “Do you like pizza,” “Do you like hamburgers,” and “Do you like bratwurst.” You sent the survey out to a whole bunch of people, and exactly […]
I’m alarmed by early words about Mac OS X 10.5’s firewall: • By default, it’s turned off• When it’s turned on, rules are set by application instead of by service• Even when explicitly disabled, some ports are advertised on the LAN and can be accessed. If this is true, it’s bad news. Is it true? […]
They’ve been out for a couple of years, but mercifully, I’ve not seen one until recently: a Jaguar X-Type station wagon. At first, we didn’t believe it, thinking that someone stuck Jaguar letters on a Ford Taurus wagon. But it’s real: In 2005, the Jaguar X-Type became available in a five-door “sportwagon” configuration. There’s nothing […]
On October 9, 2000, InternetWeek published a review I’d written of TrueTime Inc.’s TimeVault network time appliance. I wanted to link it as a reference to my posting “My BlackBerry is caught by the Daylight Savings Time fiasco.” While slightly dated, it’s still a good overview of network time. Sadly, the InternetWeek archives are long […]
Is there anything as senseless as Daylight Savings Time? Perhaps there were historically valid reasons to move clocks back and forth every spring and fall. But there surely isn’t one now, and there are plenty of reasons to stop this rediculous ritual. One reason, of course, is that it’s a pain in the butt. If […]
I have my copy of Mac OS X 10.5, and can’t wait to install it. I’m particularly excited about two features of the operating system: • How it will work on 64-bit-capable Macs, including my MacBook Pro and my son’s Mac Mini. Even though the kernel remains 32-bit, there should be some substantive improvements. For […]
It’s not a new album – it came out in 2003 – but “The Men in My Life,” from Jackie Allen, is a real pleasure. From her mellow version of Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy [After All These Years],” to a sultry rendition of Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s In Love With You,” to a playful “Mexico” […]
The battle of the programmable mobile phone is about to begin. And if Steve Jobs isn’t careful, Google will clean Apple’s clock. Apple makes great platforms. The Mac (with Mac OS X) is a better PC than a Windows Vista box. I haven’t seen a music player that can compete with an iPod for ease […]
I was astonished today to find this story on SOA World Magazine, an online publication from SYS-CON Media written for IT professionals working with service oriented architectures. Under a “news” banner, the story’s headline is, “Mariana Kosturos of Citigate Cunningham: An Up and Coming High-Tech PR Diva.” The 425-word story heaps praise upon Citigate Cunningham, […]
Join Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, as well as ObjectMentor’s Bob Martin and CodeGear’s David Intersimone for a special interactive keynote panel at EclipseWorld 2007, coming up next month in Reston, Va. Led by yours truly (I’m the conference chairman of EclipseWorld), this panel will examine the past, present and future of […]
Don’t you just hate device drivers — particularly when major hardware vendors decide to support only certain operating systems, and don’t update drivers to support newer operating systems? Thanks to driver issues, I just gave away a perfectly good scanner, and had to buy a new one. The story starts a few years ago. At […]
American Express says, “Membership has its privileges,” and among of the benefits of having a corporate Amex card are free magazines. Lots of free magazines. One of the ways that American Express makes money is by providing demographically desirable people to third parties. I can tell, because I receive tons of catalogs, magazines and other […]
In the Amusing Typo Department: I was reading the draft of a story for SD Times, and saw that a sentence read “Is clunky XML getting you down and hugging all your bandwidth?” Of course, that should be “hogging,” but the question is a lot more fun with “hugging.” Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
Several times over the past few days, I’ve been asked, “Do you know the relative market share held by BEA Systems and Oracle for Java application servers?” And amazing, the answer is yes. BZ Research does a formal study every winter on the Java market. Here are the numbers from our 6th Annual Java Use […]
My only question regarding Oracle’s hostile takeover bid for BEA Systems is, “What took them so long?” It’s always been inevitable that BEA would be snapped up by a bigger company. It’s always seemed that BEA’s data-centric technology is the most synergistic with Oracle’s. It’s always been a question of when, not if. Oracle’s move, […]
Last week, a friend of mine told me that one of his Web servers was brought low when Apache Cocoon, an open source document-publishing framework, filled up a disk volume with a log file. At that point, Cocoon — and the Apache Web server that it fed — quietly shut down. Solving the problem by […]
According to the Technobabble 2.0 Web log maintained by Jonny Brentwood, my own blog, Z Trek, is ranked as #53 out of approximately 225 tech analyst blogs. The ranking, dated Oct. 1, cites research that scores each blog based on a weighted composite of its Google PageRank, the number of Bloglines subscribers, Technorati ranking, Digg […]
It pays to comparison shop! I tend to buy a lot from Amazon.com. No shipping charges, no sales tax, and generally prices that are either the lowest or just about… it’s hard to get better than that, particularly if you’re lazy. So, it happened that we ran out of cartridges for the office’s Brita water […]
Today’s vibrant, exciting advances in technology — and in particular, the computer-related careers of many developers in our 40s and 50s — can be directly tied back to an event 50 years ago: the launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. It’s long forgotten now, but 1957-1958 was the International Geophysical Year. American […]
“Beauty IS the Geek” is Marlo Brooke’s term, not mine. Ms. Brooke is the CEO of a company called Avatar Partners, which does supply chain consulting – RFID, that sort of thing. Today, Avatar’s PR agency, RMS Public Relations, sent out a pitch – including the photograph on this posting. The subject line, “Story idea: […]
A few months ago, I wrote a couple of posts about my long-time friend David Intersimone, the developer evangelist at CodeGear (a Borland division). The June postings showed off a couple of different photos of David, one looking shaggy (“David I Classic“) and the other looking somewhat corporate (“New David I“). Now we have a […]
Three items. The first came in my e-mail, and stood out because the “from” address was “email hidden; JavaScript is required.” That’s right, zom. Do these phishers know how unbearably funny they are? Dear Amazon Member: Due to recent account takeovers and unauthorized listings, Amazon is introducing a new account verification method. From time to […]
According to this article by the Evening Times, silver is the most popular color for cars. It shows a desire to be seen as having wealth and prestige. What does your car color say about you? My wife and I have only purchased one silver car, a Ford Tempo. At the time, we weren’t seeking […]
Three hundred blog entries! Not bad, considering I started the blog almost exactly a year ago: Sept. 22, 2006. The 100th entry was on Jan. 10, 2007. I’ve learned a lot since then. Here are some lessons that have come to mind: • Writing about SCO gets lots of traffic• Writing about Apple gets lots […]
I’m delighted to announce FutureTest 2008, an exciting new conference from BZ Media. We’re big on software testing and quality assurance. We launched Software Test & Performance (ST&P) in 2004, and it’s now the leading monthly magazine for software test/QA professionals. Our Software Test & Performance Conference (STPCon) has also been a huge success, and […]