I’ve been following the firestorm over Massachussetts’ possible adoption of the OASIS OpenDocument XML format as their standard format for office documents with interest. The ability of governments (and indeed, all computer users) to have guaranteed access to their data…

I just installed Viamatic foXpose and my web browsing will never be the same again. With a single click, all of my open Firefox tabs are represented in thumbnails one one screen, enabling quick review and identification of interesting content. …

I just purchased some new software: NTI’s Shadow 2. It’s pretty neat — makes an instant copy (to any mounted drive or directory) of any file that changes on your windows box. It even keeps past revisions of files, so…

In his weekly InfoWorld column this week, Ephraim Schwartz invokes yet another acronym — SaaS, or Software as a Service. He discusses how products modeled after Salesforce.com are moving beyond the salesforce to invade other parts of the enterprise. But this…

I saw yesterday (yes, I’m behind the curve on this one!) that Google is beta-testing a version of Google Maps for mobile devices. I have a Treo 650 and, while it’s not one of the officially-supported devices, you can install it if you…

According to an article in SYS-CON, Linus Torvald posted a message on the ‘net saying that specs don’t help in software development, that they are a needless level of abstraction. Torvald may be right when the developer is the client, creating a program…

Last week I attended the a reunion of the NSFnet crowd — lots of people whose names you probably don’t know (and a few whose names you’d recognize immediately, like Dave Farber), who 20 years ago developed the standards and the systems that…

One great feature of Linux and other Unix variants is that you can quickly make a “bare metal” restoration or duplicate of a system provided you have a full backup of the original.  (With Windows, the registry requires special tools in order…

At TCG, many of our servers are running Fedora Core 2.  As an emergency restore technique, I wanted to be able to quickly recreate a server on a VMWare virtual machine running FC2.  In addition, virtual machines are a great way of quickly creating…

An article in the June 2005 issue of MIT’s alumni magazine Technology Review by Howard Anderson called “Good-Bye to Venture Capital” got me thinking. The article says technology spending has crashed because there’s a limit to the number of things that…