Belgian government chooses OpenDocument.

posted by Sean 1:25 AM

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...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.

posted by Sean 1:36 AM

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

posted by Sean 9:03 AM

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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.

posted by Sean 4:19 AM

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