Hayley scores. It's great to see a woman succeed in professional hockey.

This is a lot like our software development profession. I've only worked with a handful of female software developers. Two were Sandra Vrtikapa and Anna Kazak. Sandra was the best programmer on 724's Content team and is till there today. Anna was the best programmer at Casebank. Both were very much appreciated by myself.

David Winer mentionned Juice in his Scripting News Blog. Cool!

Juice is a freeware application that I wrote over X-mas [http://www.kbcafe.com/juice.htm].

This hour is when I finally became a fan of .NET remoting. Looks great. I'm going to try to create a P2P framework over .NET remoting. I previously looked at Intel's P2P.NET framework. Wow, that's pretty awful.

Imagine a file transfer utility that didn't have a centralized service. Who would you shut down? A true P2P file transfer utility (and lookup). Give me some months to work on this.

Happy New Year!!!

Yesterday shortly after the New Year rolled over in Beijing, around noon EST, I made my way to a DimSum Chinese restaurant.

Profiles of the seven lost astronauts.

I tried including this link in the previous post. I think I might have found a bug in Radio.

NASA put there shuttle program on hold. A shame. I think the 14 astronauts that died in the two accidents almost 17 years to the day apart, would have wanted the program to continue forward. It took 18 months before NASA launched a shuttle after the 1986 disaster. I really hope they launch another shuttle before years end.

But today is about the 7 astronauts that we lost. Two Texans, an African American, an Indian, a male from Virginia, a female from Wisconsin and an Israeli.

Anybody interested in chromosome telomere surgery?

Or maybe this is why you should do a lot of stretching :)

We lost seven more World heroes.

NASA's spaceflight website [http://spaceflight.nasa.gov] must be swamped. I was able to navigate it this morning, but in the last hour (11-12 AM EST), it has slowed to a crawl.

I'm quite exciting about J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition). I really think we could bring some interesting applications to the cell phone with a mobile Java virtual machine. Right now, my WAP browser is getting more boring by the minute. I don't think anybody has written an interesting WAP application since the original stock quote applications began appearing (in HDML).

I must be stuck in a time-warp, because I still think Java has a niche in the Web and WAP browsers. I was promoting Java clients 4-5 years ago along side a large community of fellow believers. I think I'm the last person on the Java client bandwagon.

When I think of Java, I remember back to one of the worse server applications that I've ever had the pleasure of working with. 724 Solutions started out as a C++ shop, but a few contractors, led by Roman Kulyk of Screaming Solutions, were adamant about using Java in their stock alerts server. The reason was that Java would provide them much more scalability than equivalent C++. I argued that language has little to do with scalability and that we should limit ourselves to C++. I lost!

It didn't take long before I realized the Java developers didn't know what they were doing. They didn't understand how to use Java synchronization objects. They wrote their own Java classes to do thread synchronization. Their consumer classes polled the container in a tight while loop. When we deployed the application, the Java servers ran the CPU at 100% for obvious reasons. The Java crew added Sleep statements to the tight while looping consumers. This reduced the CPU utilization.

Unfortunately, the Java servers choked on very light loads and in the end we decided to rewrite them in C++. The 10 thousand lines of Java code were replaced by a few hundred lines of C++ code and scaled thru the roof. Thanks to Sandra.

I can understand not giving an 'A', but the reason for the grade is simply Microsoft bashing. When you are on the pedestal, expect people to try and knock you off. But this actually goes beyond trying to knock Microsoft off. You might be able to argue that Microsoft is not the most secure platform in the world, but giving it an 'F' for a virus that Microsoft had already provided a fix for some 6 months earlier, simply shows that TruSecure is not capable of evaluating computing security.

Now add this to the fact that TruSecure is not only a tech company, but a company that provides enterprise security certification. Everybody knows that Microsoft's security is not perfect, but neither is it awful. So, you may argue that it's between a D-minute to a B-plus. Arguing otherwise, shows a lack of ability in evaluating computing security. In other words, TruSecure has a lack of ability in delivering its primary service.

I'm currently reading her January 28th issue of Release 1.0. From that and the other articles I've read, I think Ester is very impressive visionary.

Visionaries are hard to find. I've only known one true visionary, Greg Wolfond. To see him, you'd think he was much less. He didn't exactly impress people with a suit and tie. You were more likely to see him in casual dress and uncombed hair. 

After the removal of the Taliban, we have left a country in ruins. This is where we can make our biggest strides. If we walk away, then another generation of Taliban will rise from the ruins. If we help them rebuild their country, then maybe we can both increase the standard of living for afghans and prevent another World Trade Centre disaster.

I'm looking for a way of diverting money to the rebuilding of Afghan schools. Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell which organizations to work with. If you know anything more than I, then please advise.

A little research and I found out that PlaceWare is another Xerox Palo Alto Research Center company. To think Xerox has created such technology, but are still on the brink.

I've been recently discussing the PARC mentality with a friend. I really think it's an effective business model, if handled correctly. If I can gather enough funds, then I'd like to implement this model myself.

I like the title. I don't think you can stop a Tornado. File trading is definitely a disruptive technology. The problem is that nobody has yet to get the business model correct to avoid the authorities who are trying to protect copyright laws. Kazaa is dead meat and Morpheus is an easier target on the back end.

Actually, I heard recently that Morpheus is trying desperately to get into other P2P applications, other than file trading. In particular, they have expressed interest in P2P sports gambling.

I was going to write about on Sunday, but decided against it. Then I found myself talking about it at work. And I couldn't easily find a link. I couldn't see why a US-based pharma-company wouldn't file this application. It's easy money. Too bad I failed biology, nearly failed chemistry and am not a US citizen eh!

And I have a picture with Gates handing bin Laden a check. I am of course joking. The theme here is "How do you know any charity is legit?"

I'm currently looking for a way of building schools in countries that were destroyed by war. By first aim is Afghanistan. I checked out a hand full of charities that suggested they were helping to build schools in Afghanistan. Not one met this one simple criterion.

• Reply to my email

In fact many emails simply bounced.

This is a great article on the benefits of globalization. Great exert follows.

"This is why I love what is rather barrenly termed globalisation, the process whereby people, communications, trade, investments, democracy and the market economy are tending more and more to cross national boundaries. This internationalisation has made us less constricted by the map-makers boundaries. "

The reason people hate globalization is because business has a near monopoly on it. It is time for the rest of us to participate.

The power of a multimedia Internet. I'm wondering if I can transfer some of the pix to NASA using a P2P file transfer system like Napster. Oh wait, Napster is dead! Maybe Kazaa, better hurry! We'll have to settle with Morpheus, soon!

Good call! Exert follows.

"With the help of H-P's technology and servers," says a voice-over, "the world's space agencies can focus on getting their employees home safely."

This commercial has been running for awhile. Bad timing for HP, but gives HP an opportunity to demonstrate their ethics and they pass with flying colors.

This is a good idea. If Java is going to compete with .NET on the server-side, then they better be THE platform for developing Web services.

I started developing Web services when I was at RPM Technology. There, I developed an OFX gateway with extensions to support RPMs fund trading application. I presented this architecture to Paul Mansz and Patrick Engel when 724 was first starting out. They were looking for ideas on how to develop their new wireless framework. They adopted this architecture as their own.

Originally, my intent in moving to 724 was to move down the ladder. I was a System Development Manager at RPM and was tired of the politics of systems architecture. At RPM, my boss, Allan Grossman, pushed technology into the architecture for marketecture reasons. He just wanted to say that he was using this (IBM MQ Series) and that (MTS) technology. Truth is, the technology was in their, but we didn't yield any benefits from the way it was implemented. I gave up and moved to 724, hoping to return to working 30-40 hours per week and start my technical book writing career.

At first, I worked very light hours at 724, but slowly I began to realize that this was something special. I started working more and more hours, until I was working longer hours than ever. My hours stretched to 70-80 and more per week.

Here's my response to the Microsoft lacks security bashing going on. NASA should upgrade their web servers to use a secure web server like Microsoft's IIS. This is so funny!  It puts the Microsoft bashers, UNIX-thumpers in their place. I'm not saying IIS is any better or worse, I'm just having my fun.

Another UNIX story. When I was working at 724 Solutions, we were to pick one data access component to be used by the entire development team. The developer in charge of the effort was Mike Lepenna. He chose Rogue Wave DBTools. The reason was that it was portable to UNIX. We, of course, were strictly a Windows shop at the time.

After a few weeks of use, I started encountering weird problems. For instance, if you tried to insert a duplicate key, DBTools would respond SUCCESS, even though SQL Server told it otherwise. Actually, I was not able to submit a statement, no matter how ridiculous and have DBTools respond other than SUCCESS. Then we had threading issues. The problems with DBTools continued to compound. I was emailing the problems to Rogue Wave, but they were not responding, even though we were paying big money in licensing fees.

Eventually, Rogue Wave announced they were no longer supporting SQL Server 6.5. I had to modify the DBTools library myself. I did and fixed many of the issues, but we decided against using DBTools in the future. Good choice.

They forgot KBCafe.com. Give me a few months and a million dollars. I'll show you web services.

I'm nothing but disappointed in the current available of web services. Especially with tools like dotNET, we should already be there. This is a real market opportunity. The tornado is about to take off. Join or stand on the sideline.

This is really cool. It's a link thru to a friend's blog. It contains a very detailed explanation of the worm slash virus and the source code.

I'm always amazed at the lack of effort most businesses put into the security of their network. While at 1X Inc, I aggressively locked down the network. When I left 1X Inc, the network security fell off and viruses became rampant. They had to rebuild their entire network only weeks after I left. Twas quite funny.

I'm not certain if Sun is trying to win or play a draw or lose. The lip service they are playing SOAP could mean the death of Java as a server-side language. It doesn't matter that Microsoft invented SOAP, with nearly everybody on board, SOAP will be the way of Web services.

But then, I have the same uncertainty about everybody. I'm never certain if my employer is trying to create a successful company or trying to suck all the cash out of a company. Sure everybody at work gives it the lip service, but rarely is anyone ever willing to put in an honest effort.

Reminds me of when the President of 1X, Anthony Novac, told the employees that they were not allowed to take a vacation till development of the initial release was complete. Then he went on vacation. Lip service is cheap, actions are priceless.

When the Microsoft bashers present themselves, I can ask how Opera's patch strategy is any different than Microsoft's. It isn't. The only difference is that Microsoft is on the pedestal and Opera is on the floor.

Very interesting article. Of course, the truth will never be known. Assuming that the report is truth, then someone or some people at NASA have to live with knowing their failure the rest of their lives. Horrible!

That's the thing about not telling the truth. Whether you tell the truth or not doesn't really matter. The fact will remain that you have to live with your decisions the rest of your life.

I had a friend who turned unfriendly quite quickly. Then one day, I uncovered evidence that this character had screwed another friend. He screwed the individual by sending an anonymous email to the friend's boss. I approached him about the email, but he didn't deny or confirm, so I'll never really know the truth. Doesn't matter if we ever find out the truth. If the individual is innocent, then fine. If the individual is guilty, then he has to live with himself, knowing he screwed a friend.

It's amazing how even well paid employees will resort to fraud in order to make a few extra bucks. How common is this?

I won't mention any names, but previously I uncovered an instance where the President and CEO were writing off large amount of fictitious expenses in order to defraud the investors. In particular, they expensed high-speed Internet connections in their homes for periods during and even before the company ever existed. And by the way, they didn't have high-speed Internet connections. In one month, they expensed $5,000 each without any receipts. 

Pay-for-placement and pay-per-click are effective business models?

BANNERS coming to a Blog near you!

I think I'll stay out of this space and see how it pans out.

Tonight the Bloogle crew met for the second time. We also met two weeks ago this same weekday. Scheduled to meet again next Thursday. I'll keep my blog diary updated on the progress.

About a 1,000 foot view of dotNET. Let me add. You can now do it in one quarter of the development effort.

I developed Juice [http://www.kbcafe.com/juice.htm] in dotNET. It took me 15 minutes to hook into Google searching. Another 15 minutes to hook into Amazon searching. It took me a whole hour to do RSS files. I've spent a total of 10-20 hours on the app. A lot of that time was spent working on the UI (I'm a techie, not an artsie) and the installer.

Oops! These guys have it on the ball. Unchallenged, this looks like a money demon.

Issues. Too much like Google and lacks artistic appeal.

Can blogs avoid the 80-20 rule? Interesting article. Eventually, the cream rises to the top and that cream which makes up 20% percent of the coffee, receives 80% of the attention. Yahoo was part of the 20% on the Web.

Today was my last day at Opencola. Opencola has a great story. Not a money story. Rather a pit hole story. But nonetheless, I've considered extending the book I'm working on to include 1X and Opencola, the two companies I've work for since I left the original target of the book, 724 Solutions.

Opencola's story begins with three guys; John Henson (a friend), Grad Conn (a recent acquaintance) and Cory Doctrow. Cory is an author of the boingboing.net blog. One of the more popular blogs. The three ran the company for awhile, until the VCs stepped in and brought David Lawee on board to move the company from its Open Source roots to a more realistic and profitable business model. David passed the torch to Ken Nickerson and eventually the VC's pulled the plug. The company still continues to exist, but only after firing more than 100 employees.

It's a great story. Cola and Nola and all the buzz.

my newsletter

Let the OS wars begin. Linux is clearly moving in as a threat to Windows. Microsoft is afraid and everybody else is against them. This is going to be fun. Also Star Wars seems to be up for worst picture of year. Arggg! I'm not much of pop culture person. Here's a list of the movies that I've watched and liked in the last 10 years.

• Star Wars, Epsiode I & II
• Batman I, II, III, etc.
• Spiderman was ok
• Edward Scissorhands
• Romeo & Juliet
• X-men
• Blade
• Face-Off and Con-Air
• The Fifth Element
• Matrix
• Stigmata
• Gladiator
• The Grinch
• Braveheart
• The Postman
• Lord of the Rings was ok
• AI would have been good if they stopped it with the robo starring at the statue
• not much else
• I'll add more later

read the title again

A great discussion on the Linux threat. I think Microsoft has to stop worrying about Java and Linux. The .NET programming environment is clearly superior. Instead of addressing #2, they should focus the discussion on Win32 vs .NET. Coke did very well positioning Classic Coke against new Coke and Coke against Diet Coke. When the argument is Pepsi against Coke, then Pepsi wins. As such, if Microsoft continues to focus on beating number two, then number two will continue gaining momentum. If Microsoft focuses on being number one and number two, then they win. Game over!

I often wonder about the marketing efforts of most organizations. For instance, Opencola, my most recent employer, has released one press release in the last six plus months. Unbelievably, the link to purchase a copy of their product was not functional the day of the release and for several weeks thereafter.

Great article on the pay-for-performance industry, the players and some rates. 17 cents per click times 2% click-thru (I made up this click-thru rate) is 0.3 cents per view or $3 CPM (cost per thousand views). I think I got those numbers correct.

Now add 30-40% of queries may contain targeted ads, then you get less than $2 per thousand searches, let's assume $1. In order to make $50K per month, my magic number, then you need 50 million searches per month or about two million per day.

I can't see a Linux kernel on a Motorola cell phone. You see, Linux has its origin as a UNIX-variant on Intel x86 hardware. Motorola has always been an Intel competitor. Maybe Motorola is trying to move Linux away from Intel x86 hardware. Linux already runs on a lot of hardware other than Intel x86, but is primarily run on Intel x86 hardware.

What is really interesting is that Motorola is clearly positioning Java as their platform of choice for mobile applications. In the article, Motorola states that this is really about Java, not Linux. I wonder what the architecture looks like. Is this just a JVM running in a Linux kernel? Or is there something more? Also, how much of the Linux kernel is running as hardware and how much as software?

On the search for something new.

The Bloogle search team met again last night. I think we have some great ideas. Ideas that'll knock off Yahoo and Google, but we'll just have to wait and see.

The dot-BOMB revolution has killed many good companies. But even beyond the existing companies that have died with good products in the channel, there are many good companies that are not even starting as venture capital waits out the devastation.  Opencola is one of the former. For 4-5 years, they have been trying to develop P2P collaboration software. Unfortunately, the VCs are yanking the chains left and right. None of the founders remain and over 100 individuals have been fired or laid off.

I joined Opencola over six months ago. I quit last Friday. I had to lay off nearly everybody that worked for me the workday after Christmas. But in the month before Christmas (don't remember the exact date). One of our board members told the employees at a formal company meeting "Not to worry about the money". Weeks later, the employees were all let go.

This guy, John Abraham, was on our board to represent, Battery Ventures. The layoff occurred because Battery pulled the plug on Opencola's financing. Not only did he mislead the employees, but it was the company he represented that was responsible for destroying the company. Funny thing is that this was the second time Battery pulled this stunt on Opencola.

John and Battery Ventures. You are the CORPORATE SCUM OF THE YEAR.

I guess it's legal to drop bombs on them (killing many) and it's illegal to do a DOS attack on their website. Hmmm! There seems to be a miss in the moral connector. But then, what's new. Eventually, everywhere I work, I end up finding out that the management team and/or owners are much less ethical than I thought.

For instance, at 724, at least two of the executives were shorting the company's stock. This information was from multiple reliable but imperfect sources. One executive supposedly had a put option written into his employment contract. Another shorted the company shortly after the IPO. Again, imperfect sources.

Even funnier, when the stock crossed below the original option price of the founders, shares were traded of a multiple of the amount of shares owned by each of the founders. Why would one of the founders sell their options below option price? He wasn't, he was buying to cover his short. This is of course speculation.

By the way, where is the Ontario Securities Commission? Are they blind?

I found out that the Iraqis have figured out how to remotely explode your computer if you have certain ports open. I got this information from the sometimes reliable Science Depot at Opencola. I might have added the Iraqi thing on my own. This fear mongering by the American leaders is becoming laughable. Not that I blame them, they are simply trying to build a case for ousting Sadam Hussein. That, in itself, is a noble cause.

At fault here are two organizations, we just don't know which two. Either the Iraqis are hiding their weapons of mass destruction as the Americans suggest, or they are not. If they are hiding weapons, then down with Sadam and the United Nations is at fault for taking so long to expose them. If they are not hiding weapons, then down with the Americans and the United Nations is at fault for taking so long to clear them.

If you recall, in Star Wars Episode One, it was the bureaucrats that would not move fast enough that led to the war. Sound familiar? The United Nations inability to move with any speed is the real problem.

This is the Recase engine in action. The site will only be available 50% of the time, because it runs on my personal laptop. My laptop is not always connected to the Internet. It's currently hosting a goldfish medical casebase.

Bought a new goldfish (Fantail) yesterday. My daughter named her Butterfully. A combination of butterfly and beautiful.

Let me introduce the Blog to my goldfish. I have one comet named Jumpy and a few fantails; Butterfly, Fina (the 3rd), Afina, Alina (the 2nd), Tiger Windy (the 2nd). Two loaches, Rebecca and Wawessa. Three minnows, Oneka, Twoka and Threeka. A snail, Jackie. An algae-eater, Battery.

Battery is usually in his cell, cause he spends a lot of time nibbling at the other fish. My daughter calls him Battery sucks. I tend to agree with her, but I'm not referring to the fish.

Another one of my babies. What I can't understand is why Opencola has been unable to generate any publicity of late. Another case of a product company that can't sell their product. Hopefully things turn around for them.

Let me re-iterate my recipe for success. First you get the idea (dime a dozen). Then you get the money. Then you get the product. Then you get the marketing. Miss an ingredient and you are out-of-luck.

Opencola is the classic proof of this theory. For years, they had the idea, the money and the marketing. No success. Then they traded the marketing for a product. Again, with only three of the four ingredients. No success.

Back to my blogging with Alec about Opencola. Thru four generations of management, Opencola has debated various business models. Only one has been tried and that's the massive P2P market. Unfortunately, it failed due to a lack of marketing.

In the olden days of the Opencola grandiose marketing, that likely would not have been a problem. But the VCs stepped in long ago and reorganized the Opencola marketing machine into a product development machine. When the product was finally delivered, there was no marketing team to push the product.

The fault lies in Vernon Lobo, his friends at Mosaic VC and Battery Ventures. The board has done nothing but yank the chains and threaten to cut off funding. They finally did cut off funding in December, resulting in the latest rounds of layoffs and my resignation.

The current marketing effort (or rather sales effort) is led by Joel Silver, the current CEO. Joel isn't the mass marketing type, but rather the tedious enterprise sales type (see Sales Driver for his previous adventure). Opencola is now addressing a second revenue model, that is, enterprise P2P collaboration software. I think his approach is good, but lacking the money to pull it off.

An extremely cool set of maps from all around the globe.

Something is happening! Can you say Tornado? When so much news surrounds a new field, its the start of a tornado. Now Microsoft has made its first step into the water with a demo app. The last time this happened to me was back in 1998-9 in the matter of months when wireless computing went from wireless what and why? to wireless euphoria. It was fun working at 724 Solutions during that rise.

My Top 10 Potential Tornados (not in any order)

• Blogging
• Collaborative computing
• Online communities
• Internet-based multimedia content delivery
• Web services (SOAP & XML)
• dotNET
• Wireless computing (WiFi & WAP)
• Broadband Internet access
• Distributed computing (grids)
• Server farms (maintenance tools)

Cool associative search blogging tool! w/ source code.

Very interesting article that brings to light the importance of Intellectual Property. The oft forget asset class of companies. Many companies fail to define and protect their intellectual property (IP). IP can often be the sole source of revenues for many of the startup technology entities gone broke.

I've seen many developers who thought the most important part of the company they ran was the product. I've seen executives who thought it was the management. I've seen salesmen who thought it was the salesmanship. I've seen marketing folk who thought it was the buzz they were generating. I've seen IP lawyers who thought it was the IP. Truth is it's all of these things. The best companies do all these things and many more very well.

There may also be a lot of undiscovered value in the dot-Bombs. Not only the IP, but also the tax benefits of their losses carried forward :)

Another interesting article on Opencola at DEMO 2003.

Quote from the article

"The issue working against OpenCola is simply how to explain the security model. If a user makes some documents available but shouldn't have, does OpenCola know enough to pull back on the document before it's too late?"

Dumb statement on the author's part. Anybody can create a scenario with a stupid user? What if I inadvertently email a confidential document to somebody? Can I pull it back? No. What if I share my hard-drive and somebody pops a confidential document off my hard-drive? Can I pull it back? No. etc. etc. The stupid user scenario doesn't hold water.

A lot of interesting quotes from the article. "How do you make money selling a product that's free?" "...small and midsize businesses, which didn't embrace the low-cost software because it isn't easy to manage."

It is good to hear that they are not losing money anymore. They definitely have good management to survive in this time and selling a product that otherwise is available for next to nothing.

Great article on disruptive technologies. It's amazing how he's working thru the same concepts as myself. In fact, the best part of the article was the links off to other sites to help me understand the various concepts. Some of the concepts that I'm currently working thru are bookmarklets, bought to my attention by the bloogle crew this last week, blogs and memes. Let me also try to answer some of his questions.

"Whose job is it to be on the lookout for and experiment with new examples?"

All those interested in forwarding the human existence. Eventually, someday, the planet will no longer contain us, either thru extinction or waves of disruptive technologies.

"What institutional arrangements can facilitate the development of potentials in disruptive technologies?"

Programs like Canada's R&D Tax Credit are already in place to do this. Educational institutions have served this purpose for decades.

I'll be reading this article another dozen times to absorb it all.

The problem with most censorship laws is that they often over censor. Again this is the case. Because some sites share the same IP address as the bad sites, they too are blocked from Pennsylvania surfers.

So, what's wrong with this? Nothing. First, if you don't want to be blocked, then don't share an IP address with a porn site. Second, ISPs could proxy connections to the blocked sites and scan the HTTP request to determine which connections are with the bad sites and which are with the good sites.

Conclusion, all three parties are at fault.  The good but blocked websites shouldn't be hosting along side porn sites. The legislation didn't account for virtual hosting. The ISPs are playing stupid in the middle.

The long and short of this interesting article is the author believes that Google bought Blogger to have access to RSS links and improve its associative search. I would tend to agree that the RSS links have value, but Google could have used the RSS feeds, which are public, without having to buy Blogger.

An interesting article from 1997 when Ray Ozzie left IBM and Notes in the dust. Quote from the article. "Ozzie's departure likely won't kill Lotus" I guess something else killed Lotus and the timing of Notes' death and Ozzie's departure are simply coincidence.

I'm always confused when corporations let key employees leave without a fight. This happened at 724 Solutions. One day, I found out that Steve Gamble was leaving for a CIBC startup. I thought, "How stupid? We can't beat CIBC?"

I talked to Martin Cottreau, Steve and my manager at the time, about the situation. He reassured me that 724 did everything they could to keep him, but that he wanted to leave and nothing would change his mind.

A few weeks later, I ran into Steve at a Toronto pub, the Granite brewery. I use to run a hockey pool out of this pub. Steve told me that 724 made no attempt whatsoever to keep him, that they made no counter-offers.

Martin and Steve worked together before 724 at another company. I don't understand the confusion. They were good friends, yet not on the same page. Likely something else was up. But it just shows you how companies will allow their top individuals to depart without a fuss.

Cool new P2P stuff from Microsoft. My evaluation follows. To start with, the document is quite preliminary, that is, incomplete. The SDK comes with two trivial sample Chat applications. The graphing functionality is quite nice. Basically, these graphs are like synchronization objects. As users add to the graph, the changes are reflected locally to each peer belonging to the graph.

There seems to be a PKI-based encryption mechanism for secure communication, although it's hard to see how it works as the documentation is quite lacking.

At first glance, this kit is functionally superior to what we had at Opencola. But it's in Beta and the documentation suggests that it will only work on Windows XP. Haven't validated the XP thing.

Let's start by saying that Rondi generally only write off-the-wall articles. As usual she'll express any viewpoint to get attention to her floundering writing career. That said, we have three parties here. We have the pro-US, the pro-Iraqi and the pro-peace. No confusion should be made between the pro-peace and the pro-Iraqi parties. They are not the same. Nor does any pro-peace thought support the pro-Iraqi position.

The pro-US party is in the wrong. It refuses to give peace a change. Actually, they have been more patient than I thought. But the push for war is obvious. The pro-Iraqi party is just a bunch of war-mongrels looking for trouble. Sadam thinks he's cool, kidnapping peace from our world.

Then you have the pro-peace people. Peace is always a noble cause. Regardless of whether peace keeps Sadam in power or in the spotlight. "Peace is always a noble cause," Worf son of Mogh.

All three interests come together in the United Nations and fight out for some sort of legislative control. Unfortunately, it is obvious that the nations are much too concerned with dancing around appearances. The United Nations is dead and serves no purpose. Just as the League of Nations died in the bottleneck of political quagmire, so too shall the UN.

Take that Microsoft! I truly wonder if Microsoft, Bill Gates and the gang regret having made such unethical business decisions over time. Especially the blunder where they returned bad content from their webpages to the Opera browser. Now Microsoft gets to sleep in their bed.

Truth is, I still use almost exclusively Microsoft product. I participate in their DevStudio 2003 Beta and enjoy it tremendously. And I thank them for allowing me to enjoy that program. All said and done, Microsoft is still producing better quality product than everybody else combined. If they'd only stopped pissing everybody off, they would have endless roads of profits in the future.

I dare Bill Gates to hire an ethics officer to get Microsoft back on track. Maybe they already have one. If they do, then they should fire the person or give them some real power.

This article rightfully questions Web service interop. Although SOAP and WSDL were to bring interop to Web services, they have pretty much stumbled to date.

Here's one of the problems. The number one Web services development tool for consuming Web services is Microsoft's DevStudio and .NET. The number one public non-beta Web service is Amazon.  If you try to add a Web Reference to Amazon in DevStudio 2003, you get nothing. DevStudio doesn't recognize any services in Amazon's WSDL. Not recognizing any services, it tries to open the WSDL file in its editor.

I think Box was correct in that trying to hide the underlying XML, as DevStudio does, causes interop problems.

In order to get Amazon's Web service to work with .NET, I opened up an existing sample project and copied the reference to my local project. Yes, a kludge, but it did save the day. I doubt many programmers would have jumped thru hoops like myself. Most would have given up, with the thought that this Web services stuff was not ready yet.

Conclusion: We are still waiting for interop.

WOW! This is really disturbing. The article doesn't paint a bad picture, but after reading the email, this is a major WOW! Link to the emails. Another related site: Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

From Jeffrey Kling's email 24 hours before the accident.

Ultimately, our recommendation in that case is going to be to setup for a bailout (assuming the wing doesn't burn off before we can get the crew out).

Arggg! I hoped I was a little less evil.

How evil are you?

Top benefit on the webite? Offline reading. That's extremely valuable in this always connected world :(

Doesn't indicate any support for Internet Explorer, the #1 browser.

One of the less impressive RSS/RDF ideas.

The classic Cobalt Highway Bookshop. A must stop, if you can afford the trip. From Toronto, take Yonge Street North for 490.3 kilometers.