Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog

Marlo Brooke

Saving big with a Brita 4-pack

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…
Marlo Brooke

Sputnik goes beep-beep-beep

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…
Marlo Brooke
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Beauty IS the Geek

“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…
Marlo Brooke

David I Nuevo

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…
Marlo Brooke

Humor for Wednesday: Baseball and Data General

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…
Marlo Brooke
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What color is your automobile? Silver, perhaps?

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,…
Marlo Brooke

Opus 300

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…
Marlo Brooke

FutureTest 2008 has a vision of software quality

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…
Marlo Brooke

It’s all about the conversation

BZ Media's Software Test & Performance Conference is our largest and most popular technical conference. In case you didn't know, it's coming up next week, at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, Mass., just across the Charles River from Boston.At…
Marlo Brooke

The Windows Vista backlash, and Apple’s missed opportunity

Apple makes some excellent products, specifically the Macintosh hardware/software and the iPod. But not everything that Apple makes is great, and not everything that Apple does is wise.Specifically, Apple has laid two noteworthy product eggs…
Marlo Brooke

Even Windows developers don’t like OOXML

I was fascinated to receive an e-mail newsletter from Michael Desmond, editor-in-chief of Redmond Developer News, admitting that even Microsoft-centric IT professionals thought that Microsoft did a bad job in its failed attempt to fast-track…
Marlo Brooke

Should we vote developers off the island?

Here’s an idea: What if commercial and enterprise development teams were organized and managed like open-source teams? That is, individual architects, developers and testers could choose which projects to join up with, based on projects anywhere…
Marlo Brooke

Dreadful behavior from Yahoo

In their bid to recapture momentum from Google, the Yahooligans are behaving very, very badly.On Monday morning, I received an automated e-mail from Alexander Falk, founder of Altova, saying that he was changing his e-mail address:I have a brand-spanking-new…
Marlo Brooke

Hand over the stickies

In April 2005, my colleague I.B. Phoolen wrote a humor piece predicting that The SCO Group would sue itself.Two-and-a-half years later, it's still funny... and possible.Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
Marlo Brooke

How not to do a press conference

As a former fan of the New England Patriots (I stopped following them after moving to California in 1990), I was appalled to read last week's story that the Patriots were using a video camera to steal signals from the New York Jets. However,…
Marlo Brooke

The 5 Browns: A delightful piano experience

When my wife — a classical pianist — stumbled across a CD by a group called the 5 Browns, she was impressed by the concept of five siblings playing ten-handed arrangements. The CD contained short arrangements and medleys using pieces like…
Marlo Brooke

The SCO Group files Chapter 11

The SCO Group filed Chapter 11 today. Here's the full official release:The SCO Group Files Chapter 11 to Protect Assets as It Addresses Potential Financial and Legal ChallengesReorganization ensures business as usual and that assets remain for…
Marlo Brooke

The fraudulents have recently increased

Speaking of unwanted spam, sometimes they're at least good for a chuckle. Here's phishing e-mail, received this morning, purporting to be from Citizens Bank:Good day dear clients,We are sorry to inform that the fraudulents with the accounts…
Marlo Brooke

You’re welcome, HP! It was my pleasure!

The marketing folks at Hewlett-Packard are very, very polite.As a matter of practice, I'm fairly aggressive about unsubscribing from unwanted e-mails, when I know that they come from legitimate sources. (By contrast, I delete and block true…
Marlo Brooke

Six years since the towers fell

Is 9/11 just another day? Should it be just another day? Do the terrorists win if we commemorate the day, reliving the horror? Do the terrorists lose if we remember those horrible events on our terms?Those are big questions, and although I sometimes…
Marlo Brooke

Steal this source code

When reading one of the cover stories in the Sept. 1 issue of SD Times, I was struck by a comment from Ashok Reddy, a manager at IBM Rational. In “Negative View of Security Standing in Way of SaaS,” he was discussing how willing people were…
Marlo Brooke

My media-relations talk at CMU West

I've been honored by Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus by an invitation to talk about media relations. The talk is called, "Press relations: Telling the world about your better mousetrap," and it's a part of CMU's exciting new…
Marlo Brooke

Send $2000 to Robin Miller

Robin "roblimo" Miller has done it again. Robin is one of the most thoughtful and gratuitously humorous people I've ever met. Yes, that's a compliment. I've never been bored reading anything that he has written, from blog posts to technical…
Marlo Brooke

The sacrifices we make for quality

Sometimes the old methods are the best methods.The BBC reported today that Royal Nepal Airlines, faced with persistent electrical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, decided to address the root cause... and sacrificed a goat to the…
Marlo Brooke

iPod sounds better through Line Out

Nearly every room in my home and office has a decent stereo system playing in the background. Just about any time of the day or night, you'll hear Classical 102.1 KDFC in our home's dining and living rooms, and the conference room at BZ West.…
Marlo Brooke

More on Eclipse MLP

See Ian Skerrett's follow-up to the previous post. I wonder if there will be a .NET version?Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
Marlo Brooke

The Palm Foleo is dead. R.I.P.

Palm has canceled the Foleo, its Linux-based quasi-laptop device that was designed to be a mobile companion for smart phones (that is, Palm's smart phones).According to a blog post from Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm Inc., the company instead will…
Marlo Brooke

Let’s celebrate Microsoft’s OOXML setback

Despite rosy spin by its PR department, Microsoft has suffered a setback in its attempt to ram OOXML through the standards process. We should all celebrate (even Microsoft people should celebrate) that there’s still some amount of credibility…
Marlo Brooke

Tá an ríomhaire tar éis cliseadh

My Glaswegian wife is a follower of all things Gaelic (at least, of the Scottish dialect of Gaelic, as opposed to the Irish one). Although she’s a Mac user, Carole was delighted to learn from the BBC about a forthcoming version of Windows…
Marlo Brooke

Worse than failure

While on the subject of funny posts, you should add "Worse than Failure" to your RSS subscriptions. This blog, run by Alex Papadimoulis, documents some of the strangest goofs in the world of software development. Often, he runs great stories…