the corner office

Oops, I updated everything last week but was too lazy to post about it then ended up forgetting.

I've set up a tech blog at www.thecorneroffice.org/tech. It's actually just my old link blog tweaked and renamed, but that's where all the tech talk will be happening from now on.

My hope is that it makes this blog more accessible to non-technical friends and family, while I can indulge in unfettered geekery on the other side. Win-win for everyone, as they say.

The RSS feed for the tech blog is http://thecorneroffice.org/tech/rss/all.rss - if you're following my blog for the technical stuff then my apologies for the inconvenience, I hope the (hopefully) increased technical content on the tech blog will make up for it.

If you're a Lotus Notes developer or ever were a Lotus Notes developer, then you probably follow Damien Katz's blog, and you smile knowingly when you see the rest of the world trying to get to grips with CouchDB.

I remember reading Damien's first Couch-in-current-form post back in 2005 and thinking 'sounds cool, interesting project he'll be blogging about until he gets another job'. As Volker Weber pointed out, CouchDB has come a long way since then, and it's going places now.

So now, reading Damien's latest post:

Right now I'm exploring some ideas of integrating CouchDB with some Lotus technologies, and perhaps creating some new browser-based applications called CouchApps.

...

So I want to know what the Lotus community thinks about CouchDB, do you see a future for Lotus and Apache CouchDB? What do you see it looking like? What sorts of tools, support, applications ,etc would you need to make it something viable?

My first reaction is thinking it's a great idea but too much work to turn into something as all-encompassingly powerful an app platform as Notes can be. I think this because the data store is important and has huge potential, but it's what you build on top of the data store that's really going to count. CouchApps may be nifty, but if you know Notes you know that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Then I remember what I thought back in 2005, and how wrong I was. And now that Damien's eyeing application territory... much like I said yesterday, it'll be quite interesting to come back this post in a few years' time and see what's happened since.

Going back to his post though - I see some interesting words: "integrating", "applications", "support", "viable".

My own suspicion is that the cat is amongst the pigeons a bit in IBM right now. CouchDB has the potential to become the foundation of a 21st century Notes, and people in IBM must know it. Unless there's some faint plan to marry the two (which I can't see), you have to regard CouchDB as a competitor to Notes. IBM is a many-headed beast, and I'm not sure IBM itself quite knows what to do with it, but in many respects, CouchDB is a very disruptive technology.

From my little corner, Microsoft's online version of MS Office is just fluff. I don't see the success of (say) Gmail translating to Google Docs, which looks nice enough but (in my own experience) can't help but be sluggish and unweildy in comparison to a desktop app.

So this is just defensive marketing, an 'us-too' to appease CTOs who don't really know what they or their users want but would like to sound hip by getting onto the 'cloud' bandwagon.

Is there a use case? I'm sure there is. But Microsoft has no hope of dislodging Google to the extent that the world moves online, and Google Docs won't kill MS Office to the extent that big and bulky spreadsheets and word applications will work best as local apps.

It will be interesting to revisit this post in 5 years' time and see how far off the mark I was.

I don't get Twitter. Or should I say, I think I get it, but I haven't wanted to get it, if that makes any sense. That might be a sign that I'm getting old. So I signed up. Dunno who I want to follow or what I want to say, or why I'd want to say it when I do. Off to Mordor we go.

Google announced today that it intends to release a new operating system, called Chrome OS. I think it's interesting, I think competition is good, but that's about all I think of it right now.

• Google's official announcement
• The BBC: Charge of Google's light brigade, somewhere between analysis and blah blah blah blah.
• Fake Steve Jobs: Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective (via).

I saw an interesting headline on an Evening Standard billboard this evening, so when I got home I thought I'd hop onto the newspaper's website and read it. Except that after opening the article's web page, my CPU monitor started showing that one of the CPU cores was maxed out, and the CPU fan started going into overdrive. I've got Flashblock installed so it wasn't even the usual Flash sludge causing the problem. Some JavaScript madness, presumably?

Whatever it was, it's crazy that I can't open a web page without it killing my PC. My laptop is getting old, but not that old. I won't go to the Evening Standard's site again, but the problem is, many other news sites aren't much different. Stop the madness, web developers.

My domain registrar had the wrong card details on file so the thecorneroffice.org domain quasi-expired and showed a Go Daddy splash site for a day.

I don't like domain registrars much. That is all I have to say on the matter, really.

GeoCities is being shut down (because Yahoo! is! circling! the! drain!), but some people are trying to archive it (via):

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I've archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It's not for me to judge. It's for me to collect

This resonates with me, which is I have so many boxes of crap. Recently I was digging through some old files, and came across some old Telkom phone bills.

'I have a lot of old phone bills,' I said to Ronwen, 'It's silly but I can't quite bring myself to throw them away, what do you think I should do with them?'. 'Why don't you hang on to them for a little longer,' she replied. 'I have all my phone bills going back to the mid-90s,' I said. 'OK,' she said, 'then maybe only keep some of them.'

Which is not so easy for me, because if there's one thing that compels me more than the urge to hang on to old things, it's the urge to preserve collections.

Looks like Oracle want to buy Sun, after the IBM-Sun talks fell apart.

I think that Java would do better not being entirely subsumed by IBM, who would, let's be honest, totally cock it up. Having said that, I'm not sure that Oracle and Sun cultures would mesh and I don't understand what on-going business value Oracle would get from Sun. Hardware? Not going to sell more just because there's a new logo on the front. No new ways to make money out of the JVM or Java technologies (and Oracle have been Java-centric for ages, anyway), ditto for Solaris and any creamy proprietary uber-Unix goodness. I'm sure Oracle will be glad to get their paws on MySQL, but that's about it.

The easiest way to make sense of it, is to see it as a way for Larry Ellison to pick up a few baubles and piss off IBM and Microsoft.

I have no doubt that there are some interesting architectural and technical things going on, but for the most part, people waffling on about cloud computing are just indulging in base bullshittery.

As Oracle's Larry Ellison put it:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?