Current Editorial I always get distressed when I read about the latest example of someone cracking a commercial system, stealing credit card numbers, etc. There's absolutely no excuse for this! We in the industry should have the knowledge and skills to preclude the possibility of anyone hacking into back-end systems. Those of us who've been at it for a number of years have learned the architectures and techniques for protecting information. I can only surmise that the people responsible for some of these systems have not had the benefit of experience. I don't personally know anyone who would make the kind of obvious mistakes we read about on a frighteningly frequent basis.

Previous Editorials There were a few events in the last week which got me to thinking about the world we live in. Okay, I'll admit that the Apple iPhone is incredibly sexy. But I don't believe in being on the "bleeding edge", a sentiment regular readers will recognize. There are pitfalls galore on the road to adopting the "latest and greatest" insofar as technology is concerned. A more prudent approach can save you money and aggravation.

Iwas looking at my latest combined electrical and water bill the other day and, upon more careful examination and consideration, arrived at some startling conclusions. I don't know when it happened, but the change to cost plus billing (explained below) has significantly altered the economics of what we pay.

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I hate pseudo-open source! Now that might seem like an odd position for me to take, given my embrace of open source tools and technologies. In order to appreciate it, you need to understand what I mean by "pseudo-open" as opposed to truly open source. The prime examples are JBoss^® and MySQL^®. Your first clue should have been the requirement for me to add the registered trade-mark symbol after their names. Another example is that when you surf to http://www.jboss.org you'll be redirected to jboss.com, a domain with a commercial designation. A final indication is that there is no newsgroup dedicated to discussion of JBoss: the trade-mark holder can legally prevent the creation of a Usenet newsgroup containing their name.

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You know, it's always nice to see confirmation that my opinions on the application of technology are shared by others. A lot of what I've been advocating and implementing is based on conclusions drawn from experimenting with tools and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. Well, it turns out that Sun Microsystems has come to some of the same conclusions. I invite you to read an interesting article here.

Click here to see how IBM is embracing Linux. I told you that it was a new world! You'll need QuickTime to view the video, but you can get the plug-in here. If you're a fan of Linux (as I am) then you can download a free personal edition of IBM's stalwart DB/2 RDBMS by starting here and drilling down.

The United States Department of Labor (sp) has put together some documentation on Teleworking. If my previous editorials didn't convince you about the benefits, check it out here.

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This page last updated: 22-May-06