Believe me, it is not often you get a chance to do this in Ireland:

Tandoori chicken primarily, but with some Cajun-enhanced beef and some token carbohydrates in the form of mushrooms and onions. The other half of the meal is a Greek Salad with too much Feta cheese and not enough olives. Oh, and a spud. Of course.

Hand me that Cisco, I need to make a phone call

An 80211-only phone. The Mesh-men cometh. 3G religion is questioned. Thus spake Zarathustra.

UNIX As Literature

"Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon..."

-- The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
Amen to that.

Extracting IT value from XML and Web Services today

That's the title of the upcoming event at which Jon Bosak, Mark O'Neill and I will be speaking on May 12 in Dublin. If you are around, why not come along? Admission is free with advance booking. Hosted by Enterprise Ireland.

The Zen of non-graphical user interfaces

Master Foo discourses on the Graphical User Interface. An amusing illustration of the problem with GUI-only development environments.
I see more and more evidence that young programmers see their systems - and build conceptual models about designs - purely through the medium of graphical user interfaces. I fear for the future.

The mesh-men cometh

Wireless or more specifically, WIFI, or more specifically still, 80211.* will change the way we think about networks. In particular, the word mesh is poised to become an important part of the networking lexicon. The mesh men cometh.

This looks all wrong to me

Okay. I've only had a chance to take a quick look at MessageCentral but I'm not feeling comfortable with it. This is a solution to a problem that you just wouldn't have it you had based your integration strategy on document exchange rather that object interfaces/rpc. Sure you would still have the scenario where a transformation may be required but the tools for that are obvious - XML to XML conversion tools.

We need to get this code finished today. Quick! Get into your pod. This will be a long one...

lets roll.