In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. "Excel Macros," we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without locals, without subroutine calls: in short it was almost completely unmaintainable. It had advanced features like "Goto" but the labels were actually physically invisible.

Kimbro Staken has a good blog on 10 things to change in your thinking when building REST XML.

Thirty years of defining the nature of information technology, and latterly the future of gaming, and television, is tiring. Yes, I've decided enough is enough. I won't listen to Bill Gates any longer

Parallels released the production version of their virtualization software for Intel-based Macs. I downloaded it this evening and took it for a test drive using a Windows XP SP2 Guest OS I installed under the earlier Release Candidate 2 version. It worked fine as expected. For those of you who have not seen Parallels Desktop for Mac shift between a window on top of Mac OS X to full-screen mode, I created a short video to show you what it looks like.

Late last year I served as rapporteur at an EU workshop where Europe's top search experts were looking ahead to the future audio-visual search engine.Of course Fast company were there and they made th

I'm in my second day as a flock user and I'm getting closer to saying it's a steal, the first quantum step improvement in browserland in a decade.technorati tags:flock, browser

Ned Batchelder announced about a month ago (announcement here) the release of Tabblo, his company’s new web app. Interestingly, Django was used to create Tabblo.

Spammers don’t need to use clever (or unclever) web-scraping techniques when they can just harvest e-mail addresses by brute force. There’s just no other way to explain the correlation between the fury of suspicious, blank messages I’ve gotten lately along with the dramatic increase in offers for great sex-pills, “insider” stock info, and deals on vacations that are just too good to be true.

A recent reader comment in response to my "Are certifications a necessary evil?" post raised some good points I’d like to expand upon. Certification is just one element of the learning lifecycle, one which can provide a valuable service to professionals, employers and customers. I see certification as a measurement of what a person knows, not as the actual creation of the skill or capability. Training and on-the-job experience is the only way to develop the necessary skills.

It serves me right for writing a blog post such as ‘How to avoid losing 150M Euro‘. Just to show you I get things wrong on projects, here’s three mistakes that I made (and should have known better). They all come from a Sales application that we’re doing for a client.

Hacking Yojimbo bookmarklets so that new items are added with flags. A nice tip from Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings.

Surreal story about a person coming into the U.S. from Iraq who is held up at the border because he used to sell copyrighted images on T-shirts:

This Monday we released ONTAP GX, which is a super-high performance clustered version of our software. GX combines Data ONTAP with the technology from our Spinnaker acquisition in 2003. Since you can read about how great GX is from our press release, web site, and in trade press (more press, and more), I'll talk about the big picture.

I got a chuckle this morning from the SciFi Channel Battlestar webpage.

Horrific blog by an ex Microsoftie on possible reasons for Vista’s slippages. Comments such as An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies) are enough to set any software developer’s hair on fire.

I'd like to offer my heartiest congratulations to the Mark Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu community - what's Ubuntu? The fastest growing GNU/Linux distro out there (and as you know, volume matters).

I wrote in one of my previous posts regarding blogging frequency that blog traffic was far less important than traffic “quality”. In other words, who reads your posts should be the key success metric. This is especially true for corporate bloggers who want to reach customers, suppliers, analysts, journalists and employees. Unfortunately current tracking systems do not allow you to track readers. Where they are and what kind of companies they work for will remain a mystery until Nielsen and Buzzmetrics come up with an answer. One of my most frustrating experiences as a new blogger has been to rely solely on page views and other traffic metrics vs. knowing who I was connecting with.

Google today announced the (re)launch of Google U.S. Government Search, an updated version of their vertical search of federal government websites. The Google Government search has actually been around for at least five years, though it was not heavily promoted....

I finally got around to digging through the most recent load of mail sitting on the corner of the desk in my home office. While typically comprised of impressive pounds of magazines I’m constantly barraged with (all because selling magazine subscriptions every couple weeks seems to be the school/athletics fund rasier of choice for [...]

The Development of the Squid.