And now Belgium...

Belgian government chooses OpenDocument.

It is all about bits on the wire...

...when it comes to true distributed systems interoperability.

We need truly openn way to temporally decouple services on SOAs and doing that requires a substrate to provide reliable asynchronous messaging exchange. Hopefully AMQP will get traction and get done pdq. The world needs this yesterday. It amazes me that such a critical piece of plumbing has taken this long to bubble up on the Web on but there you go.

Truly open, interoperable protocols must come before the cutesy don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it-and-just-drag-and-drop APIs, if lock-in is to be avoided and open innovation fostered. Think SMTP. Think HTTP 1.1. Think XMPP.

Note to API-centric developers who read a lot of stuff vendor-driven about interoperability via their "open, standards based APIs": "No". JMS, WS-Relia*, Biztalk etc. do not do what AMQP sets out to do.

The next best thing to knowing something...

"In a short space of time search engines have literally changed the way we think about knowledge." -- The next best thing to knowing something.

Hard disk Pachinko

Some time between Friday and Sunday my hard disk decided to go South and I don't mean to Kerry.

Sunday morning I hit the on/off switch on my beloved IBM T42P and I hear what sounds like my hard disk doing a bad impersonation of a Pachinko machine. I visualize ball bearings whizzing all over the magnetic media scrambling everything as I listen in horror.

Luckily my backup strategy is in reasonable shape.

I've lost a few notes I made to myself last week and some e-mails from Friday but nothing else that I can think of.

Fact: Hard disks fail.

Fact: Hard disks are getting smaller as well as bigger and cheaper.

Thought: Maybe the time has come to double up on hard disks in the laptop and run RAID 5 or something.