dbrum

the end of an era?

2009-01-23T18:27:00.000-08:00

The recent Microsoft announcement about layoffs, has particular interest to me. I first started flight training in 2000, and did my C172 PPL at my local airport. I don't fly much in the real world these days, but I do "play" simulator flying, using MS Flight Simulator X - a fantastic and very close to the real thing, if you add in things like live ATC through the VATSIM network, scenery addons, aircraft, etc. It's a great world, and you can make it as real as you like.

The recent announcement by Microsoft:

"This is a landmark day in Flight Simulation, as Microsoft announces the layoffs of 5,000 employees, as well of the closure of it's ACES Studio on Friday.

ACES, home of Microsoft's PC games division, was best known as the developer of the popular 'Flight Simulator' series. As of this time, it is unclear if this will result in the end of the series, but early reports claim that it is. We will do our best to stay on top of this situation as it unfolds.

For those of us in the FSX world, this means that Microsoft is basically killing the line, the longest flight simulator family of release in the world of personal computers.

Some in the community are hoping that some other game publisher takes over the line. Others yet, are suggesting that if the line does not get picked up by another game publisher, that they not let the platform die by way of releasing it to the community - open sourcing the codebase basically. I doubt this will happen. The most likely scenario is that one of the big publishers (Activitision, Ubisoft, EA, etc) will end up taking over the codebase and the developers, testers, creative people, etc.

Let's hope MS doesn't let this wonderful product go the way of the dodo bird. It would be a real shame.

Merry Xmas

2008-12-25T11:12:00.000-08:00

Or, to my Spanish speaking family and friends, Feliz Navidad.

It's been a pretty interesting year to say the least. Looks like 2009 will be even more volatile and unstable from a markets and work perspective for many. It's exactly in times like these that you realize just how little importance material and wasteful things are. What matters is family, friends and being healthy to enjoy life to the fullest. These are the things that should matter in life.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Years.

Cheers

born-again iPhoner

2008-12-16T06:27:00.000-08:00

I have been saved, washed in the blood of the iPhone... well, that's a bit of an exaggeration.

But even Richard Dawkins would be hard-pressed to convince me that a higher life-force was not behind the creation of this wonderful device, dubbed the Jesus Phone by my early convert friends. Steve Jobs, the new Messiah?

Anyhow, this is a little story of how after many months of saying the iPhone is not good, not cool, not worth the $, not better then the BlackBerry - how I finally saw the light!

I have been using a BlackBerry since they first came out, my latest was a purchase of the Bold a few weeks ago. The local Rogers (phone carrier in Canada that does GSM) let me buy it on a 'trial' run and compare it to the iPhone. Very nice sales guys. The idea was, take each device for a trial run, then come back and take the one you love most.

I went in with the prejudice that the Bold would win hands down. In fact, I have to say the Bold is by far the BEST BlackBerry ever built. The Storm sucks from all the reviews I've read. RIM just doesn't have the cool design, the cool interface, nor the cool platform (Apple/OSX). RIM should focus solely on the professional business crowd, the lawyers and Gov. people who have all standardized on the BB platform. For this crowd, an iPhone won't cut it.

After my trial with the Bold, it was on to the iPhone. Compared to the Bold, I had an amazing initial experience. In 5 minutes I had all my contacts, email accounts all sync'd up and setup for use on my iPhone through the native sync in iTunes. This is the biggest gripe i've always had with BB's - their Mac support was useless.

Emailing is not as easy as on the BB. GMail sucks for push mail on the iPhone, which is what I use. On the BB, at least the internet mail setup would poll every 5 minutes then push it down to you - a semi-real time push mail solution to GMail. No such luck on the iPhone. That is the only negative part of the iPhone experience. It's all the other stuff it does that made me choose it over the Bold:

- sync of my favorite Podcasts daily
- sync of my favorite iPod format movies and TV shows. I get to watch some great stuff on the train each morning. I hardly notice the 25 minute subway in each morning as I'm usually laughing myself giddy watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm or an episode of Frontline.
- music sync in iTunes
- Apps. This is one area iPhone kills all competitors. There are so many cool, paid and free app's for this device. How can anyone catch them with this head start? Android has a chance I think, but it will be a while yet.

So I ended up keeping, and loving the Jesus Phone - Richard Dawkins, try one, you might just become a believer again!

11/11 - Stopping to Remember

2008-11-11T11:17:00.001-08:00

Today is Remembrance Day - a day when we're supposed to stop and remember those who served and continue to serve in the armed forces. I have always wanted to go and watch a Remembrance Day ceremony, and today was the day I finally stopped everything else I was doing to actually go. Toronto hosts several ceremonies, the largest one would be at Queens Park, the Provincial Legislature. Canada has lost a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan, and being able to attend a Remembrance Day while Canada is involved in active armed conflict has more meaning then ever.

It was a moving event, especially seeing 2 of the few remaining WW1 veterans still alive - bused in for the event from Sunnybrook Hospital where there is a dedicated Veterans retirement and care facility.

The canon salute, was incredibly loud, and shook you to the core. I can't imagine what it must have felt like in the middle of battle to hear and feel those shock waves over your body. Just standing 20 meters from one was incredibly loud and awe inspiring. The smell of gun powder, it's overwhelming.

I took some photos of the day. I'm glad I finally got to see one of these ceremonies. My father was an officer in the Army. Although he didn't see any 'action', he certainly saw his share of evil during the days of military rule in Uruguay in the 70's.

Next year I will attend the largest of these events in Canada - at the Ottawa War Memorial.

WSO2 ESB upcoming webinar

2008-10-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in hearing how you can use the WSO2 ESB to put together a real-world integration scenario that brings in things like an ESB and BPM - come check out the webinar.

I'm presenting on Tuesday @ 2:00 PM. More info here.

Mashup - "bad boy!" says Southwest Airlines

2008-10-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

I wrote about Jonathan Marsh and a Mashup he put together to help get premier seating allocation on Southwest flights. Well, it didn't take long for the 'Brand Protection' Police from Southwest to issue a 'Cease and Desist' letter to WSO2. Seems this mashup violates the terms of use for their website. Can someone tell a third-party how their website is to be used, really? I can browse to any site I feel like, and use it any way I feel like. Who can tell me otherwise? If they expose things on the web, then it's fair game for anyone to make use of it, any way they want. Anyhow, that's another issue.

Check out the letter and Jonathan's reply here. Don't despair, if you're a frequent Southwest traveller, just download WSO2 Mashup, and deploy the mashup on your own local server! Hint - cache:https://mooshup.com/mashup.jsp?author=jonathan&mashup=southwestAutoCheckin into Google should get what you want.

fly Southwest? WSO2 Mashup can help you!

2008-10-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Marsh recently published a Mashup on our Mooshup.com site, which will help you a lot if you're a frequent Southwest Airlines traveller. Check out the details of how this mashup works on his blog. You can really beat the queues by using this service!

the iPhone goes political?

2008-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine, Raven Zachary just announced the 'Obama 08 for iPhone' application which he has been working on in stealth mode since August.

Raven and I first met when we were the first members of the JBoss Customer Advisory Board back in 2004 @ the Four Seasons in Atlanta. I was with Aviva, and Raven was working for La Quinta. Since then, he went off into consulting, then as an analyst @ The 451 Group, and since a few months ago he has been following his obsession with the iPhone into a full-time role. It's always very satisfying to see someone get to work at their passion, and Raven has definetely found his sweet spot.

Congratulations Raven and the team on a major release and contribution to the political campaign. Now, if you can somehow make that app. talk to the voting machines in the US and allow Canadians with iPhones vote, you will guarantee Obama wins as most Canadians want him to win!

Apple waives white flag

2008-10-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

From Apple iPhone Dev. Program:

"We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter."

About time is all I can say. I've never heard of such a restrictive NDA for a publicly available and promoted API. They were only hurting themselves. I suspect the release of the recent Android based G1 gave the final push required.

SOA 2001?

2008-10-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

Google, the omni-present "don't be evil" company, just put up a circa 2001 index, in which you can search the web as it were 2001. Try it out. The lack of some of the results we take for granted today are interesting.

One example, search for "SOA".

open source moves

2008-09-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

Rob Bearden of ex-JBoss fame and Benchmark Capital VC, takes over as President and COO of SpringSource. I greatly admire Rob, he did amazing things with the sales organization @ JBoss. I used to work for Rob for a time @ JBoss. Get all the details of this move @ The Register.

Some recent Springsource stories:

SpringSource changes software maintenance policy.
reports that Springsource's revenue has been going up like a rocket.

Looks like SpringSource is positioning itself nicely for an acquisition.

Ringside winds down?

2008-09-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

Read some sad news today about Ringside Networks, a startup founded by some ex-JBossers Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman. The news from Bob is that they are apparently winding down... read Bob's post here.

There was incredible interest and excitement surrounding Ringside's social application server - a bridge to the islands of social communities out there like FB, MySpace and countless other regional ones.

Sad to hear they were not able to get the funding.

open source SOA

2008-09-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

An interesting new book is due out shortly, from Jeff Davis through Manning.

I have been reviewing it, and I am very impressed by the quality of the writing, and for once, a book written to walk you through in small, managed stages through the process of putting together an end-to-end solution (a B2B sales order request) and includes very interesting and real-world technology concerns. The book uses Apache Synapse/WSO2 ESB as the basis for putting together the use-case, which includes:

validation - is the request received valid?
transformation - take the request and shape it to an internal data format
protocol mediation - go from SOAP/XML to JMS and others
legacy transports - legacy stuff like file polling
custom mediators - take a CSV and transform it to the internal model
error handling
Esper - Complex Event Processing
BPM - send sales requests into a wider, enterprise business process using jBPM as the engine
data enriching - lookup a customers file when the requests comes in, and enrich the data with his information before it gets sent onto the business process.
message splitting - use the iterator mediator
QoS - use WSO2 ESB's Throttling capabilities for real-world throughput issues

The many concepts in examples in this book easily make it a must for anyone working on SOA open source projects which use any of the technologies covered - ESB, BPM, WS-*, etc. All the fun stuff is covered.

Be sure to order your copy!

the Android comes alive

2008-09-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Google's Android platform just had it's first phone coming out party for T-Mobile. See the promo video for what is being called the "G1" here.

Some interesting details:
- will retail for $179 on October 22 (with 2 year contract)
- limited quantities will be available to T-Mobile customers (I ordered mine already) from this site

I'm happy Google is getting into this game, we need a platform to counter the Apple iPhone reign and RIM. RIM has enjoyed their top spot for to long, and hasn't done much with improving their design and handsets. Yes, I use a BB 8800 for daily use, and they are great for email, but suck for everything else. Now with 3 major platforms (BB, Apple, Google) we will have serious competition, and that's ultimately good for end-users. Options are good and mean lower prices.

Check out the video from the Google Mobile Team:

the land of Celine and Open Source?

2008-09-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

In Matt Asay's blog recently, he writes about how he is surprised that the Green Party of Canada actually lists Open Source as a key party principle in their Looking Forward mission statement.

What I find quite funny from Matt, is this statement -
Personally, I find it a bit ironic to see open source on a liberal party's platform. Conservative politics tends to be about smaller, local government solutions, even Libertarian in nature. Open source is the same, favoring tight customization/systems integrator or customer-tailored solutions. Liberal politics? Big government solutions strike me as akin to proprietary software.

Really? How does that statement jibe with what has happened the last 2 terms of US President Bush? He has easily created the largest government, in terms of programs and budget spending since any administration in the history of the USandA. Libertarian? That is a word that could never be used with Bush and his government. Why are American conservative voters under the illusion that they are living under a smaller government? Is the ideology of voting conservative, and calling oneself a conservative so blind to the facts in front of them? What's wrong with voting for a candidate or party (the better system i should point out ;-) that best represents what you really want in government, and not blindly voting like a lemming for what you "should" be voting for based on a label?

I don't consider Canada as being extremely liberal at all - we are a tolerant society, which is a big difference. In many ways, Canadians are very conservative with the one difference being we don't have the religious extremism that seems to permeate life, and politics in the USandA. Religious fervour and politics do not mix well here.

Are we perfect? Far from it. One of my biggest gripes with the land of snow and maple syrup:

Monopolistic culture. We have a small set of large companies that have enjoyed protectionist policies from every government - liberal or conservative. Examples are no DirecTV - the cable and phone companies control all media. Little to no competition in the cell phone market is also a large problem(that is changing).

I find the Green's parties stance on Open Source - the mere fact that this is mentioned in a political policy paper, very encouraging. Open Source has gone mainstream, it's here to stay. Is it the right model for all software? Of course not. There is a lot of closed, expensive software that is excellent. There is even more closed and pricey junk though. In general, for most home computing, and a lot of office or work computing, open source has a product, or various products which do the job as good, or better then the commercial alternatives. In many mission critical deployments found at the largest of companies in the world, you will find open source doing a nice job, quietly in the corner with no big hoopla.

Am I voting Green? Doubtful. They have many other policy positions which I don't agree with.

Lastly, the truly offensive comment from Matt would be to mention Celine Dion as some sort of Canadian hallmark. Now that's a low blow!

SOA and PHP

2008-09-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

At this week's ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara (This is the big PHP lovefest) - WSO2 announced the release of WSF/PHP 2.0. If you're a PHP developer and need to do web services or work with web services, WSO2, the open source SOA company (needles to say I work for WSO2) has just the platform for you: WSF/PHP.

At ZendCon, our marketing director interviews the lead and product manager for WSF/PHP. Check out the interview here.

WSF/PHP is the industry’s only PHP scripting language library that enables developers to create and consume both SOAP and REST Web services — with the security and reliability required for an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA).

welcome to the US-SR

2008-09-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

I hear that DHS is going to be printing new signs welcoming travellers to the USA with the new official name: US-SR. The United States Socialist Republic. Credit for this name goes to Marc Fleury on his latest blog posting about the take over and nationalization of AIG, and others in the still raging economic meltdown.
Other blogs are calling it the USSRA (United States Socialist Republic of America) but i like the US-SR much better, has a certain panache and likeable quality to it. I can't wait for the T-shirt's to start printing. Do you think we could incorporate Che's picture into it somehow? A star-spangled sickle?

Other blogs are lighting up the netwaves - here are some good one's:

It's amazing that this is happening. What would the titans of capitalism say if the middle class and the sub-middle class all screamed for Uncle Sam to give them all a handout to help pay their credit cards, or their car payments, cause they were to stupid to realize that they could not manage their own debt? Every capitalist would cry foul and scream bloody murder at the thought of handing out a lifeline to the average person. Yet here we are, the largest and wealthiest executives on the planet along with the companies they control come hat in hand begging Uncle Sam to rescue them from their own lunacy.

Less government the republicans say? Well guess what... good luck with that! You just grew the government payroll by 116,000 last night and the H.R department at the White House is surely to be a busy one in the next couple of months as more and more 'critical' enterprises come for their due soon enough.

update - check out this video from Jim Cramer, which is a great commentary on the last day's events:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=858359962&play=1

where is future of the valley funding headed?

2008-09-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

This interesting interview with Bill Hambrecht of WR Hambrecht & Co. - a legendary VC investor. His take on the current financial crisis - called the "Worst Financial Crisis Since the Depression", and the impact to new startups and companies who will need more rounds of financing. I suspect a lot of funding options will dry-up for new startups, but even that might be wrong as there have been a good many announcements lately about new offerings being done. Can the Valley go against the crisis somehow? Will the 2.0 bubble burst be the nail in the coffin for the financial crisis?

As with many things right now, who knows what will happen, and just how much turmoil this crisis will cause. The people predicting another depression, but worldwide this time, is downright scary.

meltdown continues melting...

2008-09-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

Everyone now is aware of the economic malaise hitting the markets. There are tons of blogs and stories out there, the news is covering it like crazy. But some of you, like me, who don't have an economics background, nor work in the industry, are wondering just how the hell did all of this happen? I have finally found a story, in which a commenter actually walks through how all of this essentially started and how it's rippling through global economies like a virus - check out the story on the Economist.com's web site. The comment, from a reader I will paste below:

R.T.G wrote: September 15, 2008 15:18

It would probably behoove everyone engaging in this debate to attempt to understand the roots of Lehman’s collapse, and of the liquidity mess itself. While many comments describe the troubled investment banks as “greedy” and “stupid;” such comments are both counterproductive and widely uniformed. The beginnings of this meltdown originated years ago in the conception of sub-prime adjustable-rate-mortgages (ARMS), originally handed out by quasi-governmental corporations to low-income prospective homeowners.

With the creation of these organizations, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the United States opened a derivative market that has since evolved into a situation in which mortgages and like loans were back-sold to banks (Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, etc…) who would then repackage them with various other debts into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), subsequently sold to investors world-wide via stock markets, most prominently the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Theoretically speaking, such practices yield a positive effect on the economy if one assumes the primary lenders like Countrywide are acting responsibly. Unfortunately, they were not. Once primary lenders discovered there was minimal risk on their end they began to lend irresponsibly, issuing loans to buyers with bad or no credit. Once these buyers defaulted, due to the recent crash of the U.S housing bubble, the larger banks who purchased via the derivative market got hurt, not the primary lenders.

It’s not hard to visualize how the initial collapse quickly ensued. While all this liquidity is being traded, re-traded, and multiplied everyone begins to lose sight of the fact that all this money does not yet physically exist. So, what happens when the borrower goes into foreclosure, and the money never will exist? Everyone gets hurt. Compound this to thousands of companies like Countrywide issuing hundreds of thousands of irresponsible loans to homeowners who then default on their mortgages when the interest rates rise and they can no longer pay. The end result is that the big banks lose billions, investors run away from hedge funds and the like, and the real estate market collapses into a downward spiral that, as of 2008, is still two or so years away from hitting rock-bottom. Sound familiar? Now let’s work on fixing the problem – in America and abroad.

Like most economic disasters, the sub-prime crisis needs to be dealt with at its roots. Brokerage firms across America must be regulated. To these ends, Congress must enact laws that would force these firms to issue loans only to buyers who are likely to fulfill their agreements, as well as mandate that the original lenders hold a certain percentage of their loan portfolios. Such measures would restore responsibility to lending, and while immediate profit for these firms, as well as the larger banks and their investors, would be cut in the short-run, this lower-risk environment would ensure that integral corporations like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers cease to collapse.

Though foreign economies are not significantly affected directly by the millions of American foreclosures, they are, in fact, ravaged by the products of the sub-prime meltdown Global corporations publicly traded in the international market place, such as CitiGroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and others, were so heavily invested in the American sub-prime mortgage market that the crisis was able to use these banks as a means to traverse borders and spread, like a virus, to nations thousands of miles away; the London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo Stock Exchanges in particular were damaged. Regardless of these incredible losses, cleanup should be secondary to immediate prevention of further re-enactment of the situation in the United States.

As problematic as it is, the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a part (granted: a large part) of the greater dilemma that has become to be known as the “credit crunch,” an issue which has grown so complex it far exceeds the bounds of any comment. Consumers must also learn to spend responsibly, especially in an environment where a piece of plastic, easily swiped, can ruin credit in a blink of an eye.

With the global political and economic environments becoming increasingly non-polar to a point where more than just a few major players decide the financial fate of society, it is key that each power, whether governmental or private, learn from one another and vow to never repeat previous mistakes. As Goldman Sachs’s Gerald Corrigan states, “It is indisputable that the global glut of liquidity played a role in the 'reach for yield' phenomenon…” (“Paradise Lost”) power-brokers everywhere must come to this realization as well as the epiphany that a more responsible loan market will yield even greater profits and simultaneously provide for healthier economies everywhere. Until then, humanity itself remains in default.
-Richard Gerbino

incredible reader for documents

2008-09-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Finally, someone has come along and developed something to truly replace printed documents, but reads and feels like holding a piece of paper. The Guardian notes a story about an annual event, the famous "Demo". The highlight for me was the product from LogicPaper which has a device which ups the Kindle from Amazon by leaps and bounds. I was thinking of getting a Kindle, but I'd rather wait for this thing to hit the stores.

Of interest also, the "Demo" conference apparently does not allow PowerPoint or other A/V aids, the speaker has just a few minutes to show their product using the product itself or other simple aids, like small cue cards. Very interesting to check out some of the presentations themselves, to see how top presenters handle this type of situation.

Twitter for the Enterprise?

2008-09-11T06:03:00.000-07:00

TechChrunch just named Yammer their #1 of their Top 50 - it's basically twitter, but for a group, company/enterprise. Check it out... we're all using it now, and it's pretty cool just to be able to twitter updates to your colleagues. It has a desktop Adobe Air based app, along with a BlackBerry package. Very nice.

Yammer links for software clients:
BlackBerry client
Desktop client

what is Money Supply?

2008-09-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Marc Fleury's blog about how he's investing his JBoss millions, and well, trying to learn as he goes along...not that I have my own millions to invest or anything, but I have started to wonder what the hell is really going on with the current global economic picture a.k.a the credit crisis.

Well, first of, I've had to learn a thing or two about a lot of the terms Marc throws around, like M4, M1, etc. What is this M# thing? It's simply a reporting mechanism to measure just how much "money" (and the term is really used loosely by governments) is available in the "system" at any given point in time. To read and learn more on this, head on over to Wikipedia for a great article as usual.

Next, head on over to this article which describe what the US Federal Reserve did in 2006 when it stopped reporting on the M3 numbers. Why did they do it? The author has his theories of course, and they sound pretty bang on to my uneducated ears. A followup article picks up the story once more and the implications are not good. Depression, really?

Up till now i've only been skimming the financial news, as what most affects my daily life are things like the price of oil, and the US exchange rate. But as you start to dig a little deeper into things, it would seem to me that the economic outlook is pretty dire. I even began asking a friend of mine who was a former head economist at a major bank what he thought about what was going on. His reply was scary: "expect to see a lot of dead by the side of the road before this is all said and done". He means banks, investment houses, and even economic systems... the worst is yet to come basically is what i'm reading from the tea leaves.

In Canada things don't seem to be quite as dire as in the US right now. We have several things going for us:

much tighter credit lending policies. Canada has never been a big fan of giving out consumer credit unless you could *really* prove you were worthy of it. We don't have many people with huge mortgages (there are some surely) but not as many as in the US.
Oil. We're floating in it. The reserves in the Alberta tar sand fields are massive, and with the high price of oil these days Canada is reaping the rewards in jobs, direct money to provincial and federal coffers, etc. We also have large off-shore oil projects in NFLD. Check out the oil reserves table here.
No housing collapse. We just have not seen the house price drops seen in other places, not yet anyways.

There are signs that events occurring in the USA and elsewhere are starting to impact things here in Canada. Isolated economies don't exist anymore, so what happens in China, USA, or elsewhere, ultimately ends up causing an effect where you live. I'm sure there are hard times ahead even for Canada regardless of how good things "seem" to be now.

Outsourcing to the USA?

2008-09-08T08:25:00.001-07:00

Now here's something you don't see a lot written about - manufacturing jobs being outsourced to the USA, from of all places, the EU! In this article by the Financial Times, it's pointed out that many states are now offering such lucrative terms to open up shop in the US locations, that as one exec. put it "you would be stupid to turn them down at the moment. It is one of the low-cost locations to be in at the moment.”

Now, if only these states would offer incentives for US based firms to STAY in the US instead of moving operations to Mexico or Asia. In fact, why not remove all tax incentives for any firm which chooses to relocate outside of the USA?

Anyhow, it was very interesting to read that the USA is now being considered a cheap place to manufacture, along with traditional third-world locations in Asia and LATAM.

FireFox keeps moving - someone mentioned Chrome?

2008-09-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

Many people (myself included) and news organizations have been writing about Google's new Chrome browser - I for one can't even test it since I run OSX. Luckily for us, the guys over @ Mozilla haven't stopped their hectic pace of release for FireFox. The latest Alpha for the 3.1 release promises some pretty exciting and interesting features. Check it out here.

For all the 'promise' and hype surrounding Chrome, i doubt they could release anything to compell me to move from FireFox fulltime. The AdBlock Plus addon (I haven't seen ad's in 18 months now i think) makes my web surfing painless without the silly banner ads distracting web pages. I use maybe 5 or 6 other addons which I find very useful. FireFox 2 was painfully slow compared to the new 3 platform. Performance might be the only reason I look at another browser in the near future.

If FireFox and the large community behind it keep plugging away and improving it like they seem to consistently do, I see no reason why FireFox can't reach even higher usage then IE.

blogging constellations

2008-09-02T10:26:00.001-07:00

Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 just posted a mashup that as he describes it

provides a visualization of a set of feeds
providing an intuitive sense of activity in a set of blogs
frequency and size of posts,
cross-links between the feeds
highlighting links to "domains of interest"

WSO2 Mashup server is the latest product in our SOA stack allowing you to create, compose, and connect your SOA artifacts.

Check out the Mashup here, and try adding your set of blogs to see how they all relate and reference one another.