Nice, Skype 2.5beta users can now send SMS messages to anywhere in the world for 9c a pop.
By default the Skype userid is sent as the sender’s ‘phone number’ but options allow you to set it up to send your mobile number instead (there is a verification check to make sure you’re not spoofing someone elses).
Now if only the recipient could reply to back to the senders Skype client…
Lots of discussion in the past few weeks about the gap between REST/POX/Web2.0 and SOA/WS-*:
Thats a lot of clever folks trying to figure out how WOA will fit into the enterprise. It does seem likely to happen given past trend of internet technologies migrating into enterprises but at this early stage nobody seems to have a clear idea of exactly how, where and when.
I’m not suggesting that it will lead to the death of WS-*, too many large organizations have invested too much in WS-* for it to go away any time soon.
It is also interesting that nobody has yet mentioned how early WOA adapters will end up with a JBOWS architecture instead of a WOA, as has happened to some early SOA adapters. WOA doesn’t seem to offer anything to help alleviate this tendancy – if anything it may well suffer from it even more.
They also need to figure out how WOA will fit into developers and IT departments hands – they won’t get far without better development and management tooling.
Don Box wrote a while back asking for suggestions on how to split a hypothetical $100 budget to best improve the Microsoft HTTP/XML/REST platform. That Don hasn’t yet provided his own solution to the problem suggest that a) it isn’t as easy as he thought or b) MS don’t want to give too much advice away to their competitors 
Either way, there’s an opportunity for some clever Eclipse folks to get their thinking caps on and produce a WOA tools platform, maybe targetting the huge LAMP server platform.
My guess is, in the time honoured tradition of software engineering, someone will produce a new “architecture” layer that sits on top of both SOA and WOA, and over a long period or time one of the architectures will capture the magical point-of-no-return mindshare. Maybe the SaaS (Software as a Service) banner will evolve into that role?
All this talk of Oracle acquiring JBoss (or even Red Hat) and IBM acquiring Novell/SuSe. Why isn’t anybody talking about the possibility of IBM acquiring Red Hat? Ignoring RHAT’s market cap of >$5.4Bn (affordable to IBM) it would instantly solve IBM’s problems and set them up for years to come – for the first time in 20 years, they would own their preferred OS distribution (It is worth remembering that IBM are probably the biggest contributers to the Linux/Apache/Eclipse-type OSS communities that exist out there – they do get OSS.)
IBM would also be buying control of the JBoss product lines and I’d imagine their Websphere group would relish that.
Either way, NOVL stock looks a tasty bet. Someone is going to end up buying them up, one way or another…
Joel Spolsky has produced yet another excellent essay, this time on Development Abstraction. The analogy between software developers cutting code and artists recording songs is a compelling one and I think it clearly illustrates what is missing in most software development organizations:
Nobody expects Dolly Parton to know how to plug in a microphone. There’s an incredible infrastructure of managers, musicians, recording technicians, record companies, roadies, hairdressers, and publicists behind her who exist to create the abstraction that when she sings, that’s all it takes for millions of people to hear her song. All the support staff and management that make Dolly Parton possible can do their jobs best by providing the most perfect abstraction: the most perfect illusion that Dolly sings for us. It is her song.
When you’re listening to her on your iPod, there’s a huge infrastructure that makes that possible, but the very best thing that infrastructure can do is disappear completely. Provide a leakproof abstraction that Dolly Parton is singing, privately, to us.
Without the invisible infrastructure the artist won’t succeed and I fully agree that the same applies in a development group. There is no point in having an orchestra and a conductor if they have instruments that don’t work and recitals are performed on the side of the road.
From a team process point of view these views dovetail nicely with the emerging development processes like Scrum. We recently adapted Scrum in Cape Clear (with a little help from exoftware) and the new process, with a little role changing, already seems to be having a major impact on development organization productivity.
(Spolsky is definately on a run with his use of prominent female figures in his analogies – his keynote presentation at EclipseCon 2006 a few weeks back was attention grabbing, hilarious and food for thought…)
The Web 2.0 bubble continues to expand and with the hype comes the inevitable need for thought leadership. The daily arrival of “new, exciting and and revolutionary mashups/services” against the background noise of the perpetual “but what the hell IS Web 2.0?” questions from newbies is prompting the thought leaders in the arena to throw in their tuppence.
However, I got a bit worried when I read Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen Ways by Dion Hinchcliffe. Aside from having a real problem with #3 on Dion’s list (which is a fantasy) I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this list seemed valueless until I read Russell Beattie’s wtf 2.0? followup (great post title!). Dion’s list not only never touches on the business side of things, it never even mentions the whole reason why someone would want to provide a service – to make money. Update: There is some too-ing and fro-ing between the two in updates to their original posts but wtf 2.0 is still the more important post to read.
Besides, I’m not sure you can teach people how to formulate a good idea from a list of 16 rules for a technology domain that at worst defies definition and at best can only be defined using diagrams that contain 30-40 components.
Last year, podcasting was all the rage, destined to destroy big media. I don’t know about you but back in the real world, I still get most of my content from big media.
Carson Worshops have put up free podcasts of the main talks given by Joshua Schachter (Delicious), Cal Henderson (Flickr), Shaun Inman (Mint), Tom Coates (Yahoo!) et al. at the The Future Of Web Apps Summit in London a few weeks ago. Joshua Schachter in particular gave a fantastic talk on “things he learned while building del.icio.us”. Lots of practical infrastructure advice and some great interface design advice too. I’ve always considered del.icio.us to have a “nice-but-dim” interface – this talk verifies that this simple interface is the very reason why it suceeded when many others failed.
Anyone who is looking to produce software services (yes, even SOAs) could do worse than soak some of this stuff in. (hint: associated summit notes, wiki, roundup)
One of the more popular spoof software development websites doing the rounds these days is Waterfall 2006 and it is quite funny in that viral kind of way.
What makes the site even funnier is actually watching real sofware engineers and managers nervously laugh about it’s content. It reminds me of The Office for some reason…
Johnny K recommended using Mint for site stats ages ago so I’ve been playing with it for a while – it’s an excellent package, simple, extensible, readable. I don’t normally pay much attention to the metrics but I do keep an eye on the trend in Firefox usage showing in my User Agent Pie. Today, that balance reached what I hope is the point of no return:
I should point out that the data set only spans back to last Nov when I upgraded to Mint v121, accidently clobbering my stats db in the process – maybe that’s why it became more noticeable to me. Anyway, this is well ahead of the trend (probably because of the geek-ish audience) but it is good to see. Keep spreading the word…
Continuing my little I-Hate-Windows rant from the other day, isn’t this little button on Microsoft’s website cute?
The target page has a reassuring picture of a girl in medieval armour looking mean.
I found that gem via a MS security update page – one of the 2003 servers here in work decided it needed to be updated but didn’t know how to do it itself. Dumb-ass OS.
That lead me to some interesting instructions from MS on how to determine if you have any anti-spyware products installed:
Do I already have anti-spyware?
To see if you already have anti-spyware software:
- Click Start, and then point to All Programs.
- Look for the words “spy,” “spyware,” or “anti-spyware,” for example, Microsoft AntiSpyware or Spybot Search & Destroy. You may also see the name Lavasoft Ad-Aware.
So if the user saw something like “The In-Your-Face Spyware Rootkit Virus” then they would probably think they were all sorted already thanks very much. Very clever.
So I’ve got to use Windows XP in work and it’s driving me particularly nuts today. 5 minutes ago, I right-clicked on a shortcut on my desktop and deleted it. Or rather I asked XP to delete it. 5 minutes later, XP is still thinking about doing it:
I was deleting that shortcut because I spent the morning installing anti-spyware/anti-adware software – my laptop has recently started behaving like a i386 running Windows NT.
But it does all beg the obvious question – what the hell is XP doing in there? Just delete the damn shortcut and get on with it. You’re supposed to be a modern all-singing-all-dancing operating system and you can’t even delete a bloddy sub-1kb file in under 5 minutes! What a pile of $hit.
When I got the laptop it had XP pre-installed. I had too many critical tasks on hand at the time to go installing a Linux distro but as soon as this product release is out the door….
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