Linux has a scalability problem. The current vision of Linux device driver Utopia is based around “stick your source code in our tree, and as we change our kernel interface, some one in the open source world will fix up your drivers.” This approach simply wouldn’t scale, as the number of drivers in the tree [...]

(Sorry for blogging in too technical terms, I’ll clean this up when I have time later)
Sean McGrath suggests that the audience for computer programs should be people, not computers.
I was most struck by the reference comparing novel writing to diary writing. I would like to add a third style, screenplay writing. OO programming [...]

It seems like 2007 is going to be year when web hosters move en-masse to virtualizating their shared-server. In the past, virtual hosting is simply the practice of hosting lots of websites on a single box, and a web hoster may run tens of boxes.
With clustered hosting, every website is served by every box, [...]

A Samba Primary Domain Controller is useful if you want to secure access for a small business network.

apt-get install samba
sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf
comment out
invalid users = root
… otherwise you can’t add machine account from a client computer
wins support = yes
security = user (i.e. no anonymous access)
domain logons = yes (otherwise it won’t be a domain [...]

Phil Windley revies Parallels and mentions that “Virtualization will become part of our everyday lives”. I tend to view virtualization on the desktop as a necessary evil rather than being a good thing on its own.
I had to use a colleagues desktop, running Linux with a Windows running in VMWare which then had a [...]

(Read my VMWare Server Review)
I’m not affliated with VMWare in any way. If you haven’t signed up for the VMWare e-mail newsletters, go do it now. It’s not spammy, and has plenty of meaty technical material.
The latest e-mail points to the VMWorld 2005 Conference Sessions. There are free audio downloads for you to listen [...]

Shekhar Jha writes that virtualization process on the x86 platform has really taken off:
Isn’t it time to start the virtualization process for the OS itself? … Is this time to really start thinking about completely moving away from the monolithic kernels like Microsoft Windows and Linux and start adopting the Micro-kernel architecture
Virtualization is not an [...]

CNet reports RIM calls for patent reform in newspaper ad.
This is how the patent office thinks inventors work:

Somebody want to figure out something works.
They’ll trawl through the patent office’s patents looking for solutions
They copy the idea and sell the product denying the original inventor costs of research and development.

This is what happens in real life:

Inventors [...]

Stefan Tilkov and Steve Vinoski wonder why JavaScript hasn’t really taken off. The wikipedia entry on Prototype-based programming suggests that the
community of software developers is not familiar with them, despite the popularity and market permeation of JavaScript. Further, as prototype-based systems are relatively novel, and few and far between, best practices for software development using [...]

Imagine I used to run a business called Chui’s Discount Paint. To keep costs low, I’ve hired a new university graduate to run my computer systems. He advised me to use open-source software to make my costs lower.
We shifted to Linux, but he advised that I don’t buy commercial support from Red Hat or [...]

Steve Loughran comes close to nailing the problem when he attributes interop grief to the “use of XSD as the language for describing messages”.
Interoperability is primarily a human endeavour. It is an exchange of information in formats both side could agree and understand on.
To truly appreciate how inadequate XSD is for interop, here’s [...]

Ian Bicking blogs that orthoganality is overrated, and gives points to PHP for helping users to get things done, in contrast to frameworks which try hard to separate presentation from logic.
I believe Ian’s remarks are very similar to what Dan Bricklin said in an IT Conversations podcast. VisiCalc was powerful because it imposes minimal constraints, [...]

Another evidence of the Attention Economy at play. ComputerWorld reports Oracle buys SleepyCat software.
The moves by software vendors to snap up open-source companies are seen partly as a way to attract additional developers, in the hope that those developers will upgrade to paid-for products for wide application deployments.
Who says I.T. is not a mature market?

VMWare’s web site boasts of a case study where AXA saved $550k in hardware through virtualization. With savings like that, one cannot ignore virtualization, especially given that VMWare Server Beta (download) is now free, as in beer. VMWare Player is still free, and this review aims to cover the differences between the Player and VMWare Server.

Dan Creswell’s suggestion: that businesses use open source because it is free, does not adequately describe the open source ecosystem.
Ultimately, businesses are driven by cost. Open source in itself is not free of costs. In some cases, they can end up being more expensive than their shrinked wrapped counterpart.
I would group open source consumers [...]

Dear colleague, and you intend to develop in a language that has lukewarm company support: don’t do it.
It’s hard enough debugging someone else’s code, and it is even harder debugging unfamiliar code written in someone else’s language, with an unfamiliar tool (like emacs) that I haven’t even installed on my workstation, with unfamiliar semantics (e.g. [...]

Peter Coffee makes a case for LISP in E-Week (via Phil Windley’s Technometria), arguing that Lisp trades memory/CPU usage for expressiveness, so that one can deliver applications quicker.
While I agree that Lisp is more expressive than, say Java, it’s not necessarily the platform to chose to develop web applications with.

Forget about using Common [...]

The Anatomy of a Note ID provides some fundamental ideas how Lotus Notes style replication can be used with little embedded databases like Derby.
The parts of a note ID are:

UNID (Universal Note ID) - Identifies all the copies of a note, regardless of location or time. In other words, every replica of a note has [...]

F-Secure’s weblog explains how WMF’s vulnerability arises from a feature that lets the WMF VM execute x86 code through Escape() function.
When Windows Metafiles were designed in late 1980s, a feature was included that allowed the image files to contain actual code. This code would be executed via a callback in special situations. This was [...]

What’s wrong with CS education today? Perspectives from Joel Spolsky, Robert Scoble and Steve Yegge.