Rage on Omnipotent

Great series on life in Oracle too true. I have found IBM to be like this too. 3:41:36 PM

Good resource for software testing and QA 2:49:09 PM

Some really useful stuff here. Site Testing: Preventing the Breakdown. 12:52:20 PM

Bill Gates’ problems aren’t over. Looks like Microsoft lost the latest ruling. Good news. 12:50:56 PM

Everything you wanted to know about “Memento”. Spoilers galore. However, it is a truly great film. 12:43:31 PM

Baseball is a good game. The nicknames, however, absolutely kill me.

Ridiculous, almost pornographic nicknames like Cannonball Titcomb, Dick Tettleback, Cy Slapnicka, Rusty Kuntz, Pete LaCock and Dizzy Nutter.

Cracking. 10:03:43 AM

“At some point Yahoo! will shift emphasis towards a billing relationship, that is as good as fact. What they need to decide, however, is whether to lead with a subscription or ISP model.”. Makes a lot of sense. It’ll be widely heralded as the end of the free web. Again. 10:02:30 AM

Good article on why Microsoft is attacking the GPL. 9:56:50 AM

OJR: Content Management for the Masses. Good focus on simplicity, and that cutting your own CMS isn’t such a bad idea. 9:47:19 AM

NY Times: “Microsoft has a 93 to 94 percent monopoly over the operating system market, a 96 percent share of the office applications suite business and an 88 percent share of the browser market,” said Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and an opponent of Microsoft. “Hailstorm and Passport blueprint a huge strategy, which uses the same monopoly practices which have now be found to be illegal.” Not quite back to square one, then. 9:41:23 AM

Outsider Art. “Woman with Downs Syndrome creates works of art by wrapping random objects in masses of colored fibers. She cannot speak, hear, or communicate whatsoever, and she has been deemed too retarded to possibly understand the meaning of art, but still, she goes on creating with an ‘intensity’ that belies her condition. Does insanity work to produce works of art or other genius?” Interesting overlap between creativity and disability. However, it looks like she has been prompted along the way, if you read the article carefully. Someone must put the stuff there for her to play with, therefore she’s nearer a machine than an artist. 1:04:55 PM

The Economist: “Unlike television broadcasting, streaming video over the Internet gets more uneconomic the bigger the audience.” So that’s why I should never have bought broadband. 12:54:47 PM

eWeek: “But Scoble was not buying this for a moment, saying that while Microsoft may well have meant to remove the list from the beta, ‘it indicates to me that they are seriously considering shipping the .Net runtimes on Linux.’” Some cracking good stuff here: while MS says that the Open Source movement is the devil, it is quietly supporting the major driver of it! 12:54:14 PM

What’s the mob up to this week? Shame it’s a bit repetitive. It could almost be done by taking a set of italian-looking photos and writing revised versions of the Sopranos around it. 12:45:11 PM

Download stock photos without paying, don’t go to jail.. Istockphotos.com offers free stock photos (of reasonable quality) for download. Give it a go. 5:15:56 PM

Flash done right: Flashforward2001 finalists. Some really quite good Flash work. 5:15:28 PM

Popluation Reference Bureau. Who lives where. I doubt I’ll ever need this, but who knows… 5:15:09 PM

Friday mask action for Caroline: LOL!. 5:14:41 PM

The case for legalising heroin (and others). Interesting reading. How to avoid the addiction bit? 5:14:12 PM

Worth a read at some stage: The Elements of Experience Design. What does it take to design great experiences? 4:57:43 PM

The Guardian: New media gets the message. According to Clay Shirky, “venture capital damaged online media.” He says that publishing media is “not a wealth creation business”. I’d like to see him tell Mike D that! 4:56:48 PM

Much Ado About Smart Tags. Microsoft told Walter Mossberg “the feature will spare users from ‘under-linked’ sites.” Hmmm. Does this feature have too few links? 4:43:15 PM

Eikon image similarity search. I like this idea: choose one picture and find related pictures without metadata. 4:41:12 PM

If Joel Spolsky, rates Adam Bosworth: “As usual Adam is incredibly right, and he’s high-bandwidth, and if you can’t follow what he’s saying, don’t apply for a job at Fog Creek!”, I guess I should. PS I do - there’s a lot of interesting material here on how the new generation of services will actually work from an architectural point of view. 2:25:40 PM

Pirelli-PG13. Marvellous. 12:45:15 PM

For all of you who missed the Cold War. (NyTimes/Free Reg Req.) “If America builds a shield, Putin says he’ll arm his missles with multiple warheads.” Fuck. 12:24:16 PM

I don’t watch The West Wing, but I think you get the picture… 12:21:33 PM

Whew. I think he’s trying to simplify the internet topography, but this is not for the faint of heart: A Taxonomy of Computer Systems and Different Topologies. “We all know that P2P relates to some sort of topographical difference in using computers and networks compared to what was common in the near past.” True, but I’m not sure that there is an expectation that one type of topology will win… 11:49:45 AM

An interesting article saying that Unix is a good example of a component architecture. There’s some useful stuff in there. I still don’t buy the “but you can use the Un*x command line without being a programmer” argument, but the rest is reasonable. 11:40:26 AM

From an initial attitude of scepticism, I decided that I quite liked this Forrester article. Now it’s obviously a puff piece to say “keep doing eBusiness” because Forrester has been hit harder than most by the recession (is there one?). However, the points about keeping someone with marketing, customer skills in charge of eBusiness and not letting everything drop are valid. Cringe phrase of the article: “high-IQ companies”! 9:00:08 AM

Great source for tutorials, quizzes. I got 17 out of 20 on XHTML having not even read the spec! 4:06:58 PM

Register: “MSNBC has been caught doctoring copy originating from the Wall Street Journal to make it more favourable to the news channel’s co-owner Microsoft. The changes introduced by MSNBC also had the effect of removing references to Microsoft competitors.” Hmmm. Shooting oneself in the foot, no? 3:15:45 PM

WMOB Wire-tap radio. Marvellous stuff. 2:06:42 PM

Multithreading. Dull but necessary. I guess. 2:06:12 PM

CIO: SimManager. In real life, Chen is a manager in the office of leadership at Motorola’s headquarters in Schaumburg, Ill. His hectic “first day on the job” was a four-hour multimedia management simulation that Motorola uses to assess and develop its middle managers across the globe. Interesting idea. 2:00:22 PM

Smart Tags may not be legal outside the US. Moral rights include integrity of the work, hence no Smart Tags. 1:59:50 PM

The Man Who Bought the Internet.. Interesting - pretty good unnoticed landgrab… 1:44:57 PM

Become a Netmogul (Isn’t it time you RTFM?). Hurrah! 6:14:13 PM

Now is this guy (from Ovum) saying thatcontent management doesn’t work because a) he wants to be contrarian and thus gain publicity, b) he really believes it or c) because he’s never seen a working implementation. Hmmm. 6:08:30 PM

Useful guidelines on how to create an effective and informative FAQ resource. 5:35:32 PM

Too right: Three Myths of XML. People have been using SGML for many years. XML doesn’t magically make things easier, only a little easier to understand. While stuff is based on DTDs XML is too inflexible, on XMLSchema, too complicated. No way out, really. 12:47:29 PM

Another landgrab: MS Poised for Music Domination. A shrewd analysis of what MS is trying to do in the music world. It’ll win, I feel it in my bones. I don’t like the feeling. 12:44:48 PM

Digging Those Digicash Blues. eMoney hasn’t found its home yet. I think the big credit card companies will do the heavy lifting when they feel the time is right. Until then, we’ll have some very small bit players trying (and failing) to take over the world. 12:31:03 PM

The Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. Cool. Must go back. 5:10:32 PM

Clay Shirky on Hailstorm: Open Web Services Controlled by Microsoft. Show how the whole strategy is a departure for MS. 5:06:55 PM

Class: The Billion Dollar Losers Club. 5:03:10 PM

More stuff about the record / radio industry you didn’t know…The “Bootylicious” gambit. Can a hot new single from Destiny’s Child help Columbia Records crack the indie promoters’ control of pop radio? [Salon.com] 4:42:39 PM

Probably worth a read from News.com: Death of the free Web. Lots about charging more for content, for access, etc. 4:39:03 PM

NYPress: Elegant analogy between Clinton-Monica and W-Jenna hypocrisies. Nice article. 4:35:08 PM

Strange article on ‘Free’ Content Management. The argument is essentially that the cheaper CMSs are risky (standard FUD stuff), but has a useful, but almost out-of-place ROI calculator for CMSs. 4:30:15 PM

Lighthouse: McKinsey on the Internet: this time they’re rational. The new McKinsey formula occupies 13 pages of the Quarter 1 2001 “McKinsey Quarterly” magazine, under the heading “E-performance: The path to rational exuberance”. But it essentially consists of three simple principles and three specific sets of rules. Good reading. 4:21:36 PM

Astonishingly indecisive article on KM : First rule of knowledge management? Better know who needs what. Talks a lot about Raven, Lotus’ new product, but in no real depth. 4:18:47 PM

The net doesn’t grow at internet rates. The Myth of “Internet Time”. This means it’ll take 10 years for the web to reach real integration, just as mobile phones and TV did. 3:48:47 PM

I haven’t seen anyone look at the way that the different cost structures in the US and European mobile markets affect things like SMS Messaging. Surely there are some lessons from this and DoCoMo? 2:44:41 PM

How to interview Microsoft style. 12:10:22 PM

We should stand up to the sofware companies and talk about defects rather than bugs. They’ll just pull the pharma industry’s R&D argument, won’t they? 11:56:04 AM

Good article on search engine optimisation. Get hit by the biggest traffic generators, make sure your tags are good, and have a spiderable structure (no ?d=23&f=3). 6:17:21 PM

Good piece from Clay Shirky on the (re)growth of Java as the place to be for development. 3:58:47 PM

Just think of all the horrors that database-driven Flash could cause! 10:45:47 AM