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 is to look at code, and Wayne Beaton, the Eclipse evangelist, has […]
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 Team System. I’m anticipating that some people will ask, “Why didn’t you mention the […]
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 are priceless. Doesn’t “Falling Tchotchkes” sound like a great name for an alternative rock-jazz fusion-klezmer band? Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan […]
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 products for developers to use, or positioning and marketing those products, this is the ONE conference you can’t […]
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, you might as well pick a date, since we’ll never know for sure.) The U.S. […]
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 Best Buy and CompUSA. I believe that the 750GB drives […]
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 4GB unit costs the same US$199 as Apple’s other 4GB iPod nanos, […]
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 desktop. Let’s hope that the Linux community embraced Portland, and that […]
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 of music — most of my library. (I don’t bother exporting […]
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 digression: At SFO, United promotes the service by boasting, “Only […]
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 interaction with him (the meetings were all at industry-related events), so I […]
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 pioneer Salesforce.com today in S.F. The general riffed on a number of themes: he mocked […]
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 an embedded Java Virtual Machine. (Alex Handy wrote about the kit in the July 15, 2006, issue […]
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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. With Windows XP, the amount of discomfort that an illegal software user (or a legal software user who […]
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 the most widely quoted stock-market index. However, many people, myself […]
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 back cover says: Tim Berners-Lee, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing are the pivotal […]
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 imaginable, but his faith has waned, and waned and waned, and now it has waned […]
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 company is releasing a new line of tools which are more function-based, called LQM. This strategy […]
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. However, it is a fascinating tale, and it’s interesting to watch it unfold. Certainly friends who work […]
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 syndication feeds, and there’s a convenient CSS stylesheet. How hard […]
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 to program. Many hardware and software engineers, including myself, cut […]
Tomorrow I’m heading up to San Francisco for the second day of the Intel Developer Forum. I’ve received many meeting invitations for IDF, but have been struck by the paucity of news or announcements that would apply to software developers. The bulk of the third-party announcements have focused on storage and wireless networking. As Intel […]
My 9/21/06 “Zeichick’s Take” about automotive security brought several letters-to-the-editor, one of which made an excellent point that applies well in the physical security world, but which in my opinion falls down in cybersecurity. Steve Brewin wrote, “Apparently the vast majority of crime is committed by amateurs chancing on an easy opportunity. The simple lock […]
(Cue the trumpet sound effects) The 2007 editorial calendars for SD Times and Software Test & Performance are now avialable. For those of you who don’t follow such things, a magazine or newspaper’s editorial calendar provides insight into some of the feature articles that the publication will cover during the next year. It’s traditional for […]
One of the challenges for any software development project — whether enterprise or for-sale, open source or not — is what to do about all those pesky defects that nobody’s going to fix. Why aren’t they going to be fixed? It might be that they’re not a show-stopper, or that there are other priorities, or […]
The HP spying investigation is getting stranger by the day. When the company reported that its chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, was going to step down as of January, many of us knew that wouldn’t hold — she had to go, and she had to go now. Only a few days later, after more revelations, she resigned […]
Welcome to my blog. It has to start somewhere, and this is where it starts. And the trek had to start sometime; it should have started a long time ago, but it didn’t, so here we are. This blog will be a spot to discuss topics of professional and personal interest to me, mainly focused […]