Friday, April 04, 2003

1st Law of Noels

This morning, the application of the "1st Law of Noels" came a little closer. (no doubt other Laws will follow, btw) Looks like I may be evolving into a new professional direction - one that I am VERY enthusiastic about. More details will follow in the next couple of days...
Posted on Friday, April 04, 2003, , Permalink #

Thursday, April 03, 2003

Long time since Dilbert was here ...

It was about time ...
Posted on Thursday, April 03, 2003, , Permalink #

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

Flowers for Fleury

After all of the JBoss hype last week, CNET.com just published a little dated interview with Marc Fleury of the JBoss Group. Some interesting quotes:

We're highly structured and commercially focused. We just use open source as R&D and recruitment if you will.

So it's a question of creating better tools?

No, no, no, that's the point. BEA, (note to self: and Novell, and IBM, and ...) for example, is trying to solve the usability with the tools. Like Microsoft, we realized that it's a fundamental framework construct...Instead of learning additional APIs and interfaces that make you reprogram applications, you want to take existing applications and just configure the server to work with existing objects. It's a simple technical point.

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

Microsoft Acquires TheServerSide.com

Very funny April fool. Keep 'm coming!
Posted on Tuesday, April 01, 2003, , Permalink #

Monday, March 31, 2003

Cluetrain reality

After reading this, there is one certainty more in this world. Marc will write books one day - he is so eloquent in explaining his points of view. Much better than I am...

But let's get back to reality. Believe me, I read and reread the Cluetrain, and I liked it a lot. But I am much more of a realist by nature - I do NOT believe that the rosey picture painted by the cluetrain will ever be realised for the full 100%. It is impossible. It is impossible to have an infinite number of conversations to take place simultaneously, and NOT suffer the (sometimes EXTREMELY negative) consequences. Openness and conversations is a good thing, just like OSS is a GOOD thing - I completely subscribe to this. I also think that access to the source code is something that should be much more discussable than it is today (with escrow and everything). But that does not mean that the downsides of the conversations (and OSS) don't exist. People never seem to take them into account. That was they ONLY purpose of my original post: to show that there are multiple sides to a story, and that it would be foolish to abandon one story for another without thinking of the consequences.

In any case I think that "paying for not knowing the details' is a VERY useful and wise thing to do, both personally and professionally. If I would need to know every single detail of every single thing that every single colleague is doing here, I would go mad - I would simply not have the time to realise my objectives. People pay other people (CSS vendors among others) to help them realise their objectives. They pay to get that worry of their mind. They will only look into the detail by exception, and still outsource that part of the problem to other people. They don't want to be bothered. So as long as the number of barriers to OSS is greater than the number of barriers to CSS, they will choose to "outsource" these worries to a vendor. And in many cases, that makes a lot of sense, just like in other cases OSS makes as much sense ;-) ...
Posted on Monday, March 31, 2003, , Permalink #

Search for a time-craft

Very funny story about a filthy rich time traveler ...
Posted on Monday, March 31, 2003, , Permalink #

Sunday, March 30, 2003

Next sunday: silent admiration

Next sunday, I will be humbly and quietly watching The Tour of Flanders on TV. No, it's nothing like the The Tour of France - it is MUCH better, spectacular, exhausting, ... an ultimate sports event. It will take the professional cyclists through 255km of the best scenery that Flanders has to offer. A total of 19 (mostly cobble-stoned) hills separate the start from the finish. It is quite an unbelievable event.
So today, me and some buddies cycled through 71km of the race, doing 9 or 10 (I forgot already) of these hills. It was amazingly hard, I am completely bushed right now. But it was memorable - I'm sure my future offspring will be proud ;-) ...
Posted on Sunday, March 30, 2003, , Permalink #