Content Preview: rss
351 days ago
Will anything ever replace e-mail? A lot of things are trying. Look at Facebook and it's ilk for social networking and ad-hoc communication. Look at SharePoint in the enterprise. There's plenty of good collaboration, social networking, and content management platforms out there. But somehow, I still can't spot how, for work, any of these things are more effective than Outlook. Useful supplements yes, and I do think that the value is Outlook not Exchange (and that MS should create a proper MAPI provider for SharePoint to replace it), but fundamentally the e-mail based approach of all of Outlook's functionality is still the best mix of flexibility and semi-structured information sharing for most office workers (and for a wider set of roles than sometimes targetted under the 'Information Worker' concept MS use). Here's a few reasons why: It's simple. One (fairly small) set of concepts apply to all communication, through one UI. It puts users in control. By and ...
549 days ago
I thought this article was quite interesting: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=673 Essentially the article argues you can't be a programming expert any more because of the pace of change of prorgamming languages and the variety of them out there on the internet. I disagree! I agree the sentiment of the article, but I would differentiate between specific API knowledge and an understanding of how to design and write good software, and of the programming 'memes' over the last 20 years. I would argue that the real pace of innovation is not that fast, if you have sufficient expertise & experience to distinguish between a new concept, and merely a new implementation of one. AJAX was around for 5 years before the term became widely used, and is actually a simple use of DHTML, HTTP and XML, though some of the abstraction frameworks around it are great for productivity. SOA is an attempt to describe ideas 10 years older in a more ...
563 days ago
Well, as you may notice from my photos, I just got married! Well actually it was on the 11th April - but I think I have my priorities right in only just blogging about it. Many thanks to my friends and family who made the day so special - our faces ached from smiling and if we could we'd do it again! All the presents were greatly appreciated and we're sailing through the thank you letters at the moment . People keep asking me "how are you finding married life"... well, much the same as before; we have lived together for 8 years after all . The honeymoon in Morroco didn't quite match the wedding but it was great fun - we feel like we saw everything in Morroco - starting in Casablanca and travelling via Rabat, Meknes, Fez, Todra Gorge, the Sahara, High Atlas, Essaouira and Marrakech. We even bought a rug :)... photos to follow shortly when we get them off the camera (now broken due to sand in the Sahara). See you all soon!
