Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I'm still writing regularly for The Guardian's Inside IT section.

Here's a piece from a couple of weeks ago on the new release of Microsoft Exchange. Also another from a bit further back on Customer Relationship Management tools for small and medium businesses.

I've been getting good feedback from folks about the piece on Longhorn (and various other Microsoft PDC announcements) that I had in today's Guardian, aiming to explain all the new codenames to a general IT-literate audience.

There's a lot to write about for developers and non-developers in Avalon and Indigo - and in Whideby (which I'll be covering by-and-by) - and it's important to get people who weren't at the PDC to think about the tools and technologies, and just what they'll mean for their next few rounds of IT planning. While Longhorn is purely a desktop OS, I believe Indigo will have a big effect on server deployments and the shift to service-oriented architectures that's happening across the industry. There's also a lot in Whideby's generics support and the pattern-based thinking (especially in the Whitehorse modelling tools) to help architects develop the solutions they need.

Now to see Whitehorse folded into DSI. I'm meeting folk from the management tools team next week at IT Forum, so I think that's going to be a big part of any conversation I have with them - understanding how they intend to go about linking SOA development tools to service operational management.

...and here's yet another (but this time funny) switcher ad spoof...

"crash different"

Finally getting to grips with the IBM implementation of J2ME for Tungsten series Palms. It's much better than Sun's version, and the midlet conversion utility available from Palm's developer programme works really well. I'm actually posting this from a PRC I made from the JAR and the JAD for the latest build of the J2ME Live Journal client.

Google Deskbar or Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar?

Decisions, decisions...