Mac and Me

In a classic example of 'too stupid for my own good' I tried something very dangerous during my upgrade to Mandrake 10, the Linux distribution I run, and managed to fry my partition table. Even though the damage was my fault I was sick of driving a car with no seatbelt. I had enough of figuring out how to run Java, or print pictures or deal with install quirks or never figuring out how to get flash running or living in fear of installing non-RPM software lest it toast my system. I really just had enough. So I decided to buy a Macintosh G5.

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WebDAV, DASL, XQUERY and XPATH 2.0

The Web's slow but inexorable movement from a read only to a collaborative environment is increasing WebDAV's success. But WebDAV still has a serious functional outage – search. The DASL community has been keeping hope alive by continuing to work on a search grammar for WebDAV. But much as WebDAV adopted XML both to solve real problems and to ride on the coat tails of XML's success, so DASL could solve a number of serious technical issues and increase its own visibility and leverage the excitement and investment in the XPATH/XQUERY community if it adopted a profile of XPATH 2.0 as its basic search grammar. In the article below I discuss some of the details of how DASL could use XPATH.
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Why LinkedIn is a better fit for me than Orkut

This article compares LinkedIn and Orkut. These are websites that allow you to enter in people you know and then those people can enter in people they know which then lets you perform searches over your entire social 'network'. Orkut focuses primarily on personal relationships while LinkedIn focuses on business relationship. I prefer LinkedIn because it provides tools and features that are extremely useful to me both in hiring people and in putting myself in a better position to be hired if I should need a new job.
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Orkut

My Experiences Installing Mandrake 9.2

It took one day and a few hassles but upgrading from Mandrake 9.1 to Mandrake 9.2 was worth all the effort. Better yet, the amount of effort required was much less then with either Windows (3.1, 95, 98, 2000) or other versions of Linux I have installed. Not only was I able to get access to the latest versions of Open Office, Mozilla & GnuCash but the new Mandrake 9.2 fonts are just outstanding. The increased clarity makes reading the screen pleasurable and by letting me keep my windows smaller it gives me extra screen real estate. It's like getting a new monitor.

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It's Official, I'm not a C Level Player

I got mentioned (alas my name was misspelled it's Yaron Goland not Yaron Golan) in Cringely's column this week. I read Cringely's column every week so getting mentioned is pretty nifty. What is even nicer is that while Cringely uses my old project, UPnP, as an example of why MS screws things up (not that I can disagree with him, UPnP was a lot of the reason I ended up quiting MS, see my article on the subject) he was kind enough to mention that I don't suck. That was very cool of him.

The Book I Want To Read on Web Services

I just finished reviewing a chapter in an upcoming computer science textbook on Web Services. The authors made a heroic effort to give the reader a solid grounding in Web Services including HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, WS-TX, WS-CO, UDDI, etc. all in 60 or so pages. In terms of information density, the result was the book equivalent of depleted uranium. To make matters worse many of the specifications they were describing had already changed since the time they wrote the chapter and will surely change even more before they publish. Which got me to thinking about the book I would want to read about Web Services Protocols.
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Microsoft and Office Innovation

As a thought for today, Microsoft really hasn't managed to add too many compelling features to their Office monopoly. On top of that their recent licensing games have certainly given customers an incentive to look elsewhere. At the high end Office is still the best there is. But the majority of customers are no where near the high end. There are now a large number of competing products, many available for free, that more than meet the needs of most users.

The irony is that Microsoft has traditionally killed off the majority players in any market they enter by offering a product that is 'good enough', lower priced and leverages their existing monopolies. The Office alternatives has reached the point where they have certainly nailed two out of three. Given Office's institutionalized refusal to base any of its code on Windows it doesn't even get to take advantage of the Window's monopoly beyond getting first access to new versions and getting its bugs fixed NOW. But given how mature the office market is and given the generally low rate of new features it isn't clear how much of an advantage that really is.

In the short term none of this matters, no body gets fired for buying Microsoft. But in the medium and long term the change of events spells interesting times. How long until some CIO becomes a hero by slashing the company's Office budget to near zero and the pattern is set? I realize training and support is a bigger issue but anyone who knows Office will be comfortable with the alternatives and I suspect the support for the free/low cost choices are generally better then anything Microsoft can offer.

Microsoft's lack of innovation and pricing games is exactly the sort of help its competitors need.