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Paul Downey's short presentation is well worth 5 minutes of your time if you are interested in web application architecture/design.

The age of uber-tooling in software development

The age of uber-tooling in software development - some thoughts on the emergence of a select group of big honkin' IDEs, exherting considerable gravitational force, at the center of the programming universe.

A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam

My house is hard to see from this distance but it is in there.

Creeping featurism : OpenOffice?

The wikipedia entry for Creeping featurism uses OpenOffice Writer as an example.

Hmmm. I can think of more worthy contenders to exemplify the phenomenon.

Asset stripping meets the web dividend

"Most of the time, the web dividend accrues as an accident. A sort of happy, innocent, unavoidable result of a technical limitation of the web. To put the limitation in its simplest possible terms, the web works best with small documents." --
Asset stripping meets the web dividend.

The BIOS for a new century...

When I still had hair we talked about PC's having a BIOS. A basic i/o substem on which you would layer an OS. I remember layering a Microsoft product onto a PC once.

No. Not that one.
No. Not that one either.
This one: Microsoft Xenix.

Anyway, given that this week some of my noodlings on virtualization have been blogged to an unsuspecting and indifferent planet :-) I had virtualization on my mind when scanning the newscape this morning. User friendly virtualization for Linux caught my eye. This could be a real sweet spot for Linux I think. Take the kernel and you have yourself an uber-BIOS to base your work on - even if it is another operating system. Take the BIOS + the Apps and you have a fully-blown OS environment.

I suspect soon I will be booting into a layer of Linux and then booting into further laters of Linux and other OS's in virtualised containers.

There, I knew we as an industry would find a way to use up all those pesky CPU cycles and megabytes of storage.

Resolving the online/offline service conundrum using virtualization

"Oh dear. What to do? Well, we could wait until software becomes simple. (Cue the laughter)." --Resolving the online/offline service conundrum using virtualization