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.

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.

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.

• 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).

What I really want is one thing which is personal and non-technical and conversational, and then something else where I can indulge in uninhibited geekery, and be as free-form and self-indulgent as I like.

So I think it's time for me to split things up.

I'm not sure how yet. The Corner Office will either be a tech blog with another personal diary-style blog somewhere else, or else this'll be the diary and a new tech blog started up elsewhere. Perhaps I'll tweak my link blog, which has occasionally threated to become a tech blog anyway.

Watch this space.

Update: here it is. ]]> http://www.thecorneroffice.org/blog/plink/2009/06/090624-1819.html Eclipse Galileo has been released. I commented on Ben Poole's site but thought I'd save most of my moaning for here.

Since about 2007, each release has seen me fall further out of love with Eclipse. Sure, each release adds useful new functionality, but the core Java IDE lacks focus and often as not adds 'features' which can only have been implemented in response to corporate sponsor diktat.

Ironically, I've very recently started using Intellij IDEA at work. I've tried it in the past, but always gave up after a few hours and went back to the comfort of Eclipse. After months of Visual Studio development, a new machine that didn't have a Java IDE, and me getting that little bit hazier with all the Eclipse Java shortcuts and tricks, I thought I may as well give it a real go. The jury's still out but it's slowly winning me over. Not as pretty as Eclipse (all praise SWT), but refreshing to use an IDE that has what you need, when you need it, and which just works, consistently and cleanly.

Anyway, I still use Eclipse at home, so I'll be trying out Galileo and I'll see whether there's anything new and exciting about it. In the meantime, I noticed, if my memory serves me correctly, that this is the first new Eclipse release where they didn't get around to updating the splash screen. Assuming I'm not wrong about my observation, I wonder if that's somehow significant.

]]> http://www.thecorneroffice.org/blog/plink/2009/06/090602-1925.html 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.

If it were voluntary then I'd understand that MS are providing a service that UNISA needs, no doubt with all sorts of cushy terms and incentives, but hey, that's the way things go and good luck to those who want to use it. But forcing students to use this address is a different story. I can't think of any way in which this is in students' best interests. I can jump through hoops to redirect or forward the email, but I shouldn't have to. I should be able to have my UNISA correspondence mailed to me at an address of my choosing.

Shame on you, UNISA.

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