Copacetic

Big Bill didn’t have much good to say about MIT’s 100 dollar laptop at the Microsoft Government Leaders forum today. One might ask why  Bill gives a a damn about this project given that he makes his money from software. It doesn’t take too much thinking to realise that its pretty hard to spend $300+ on a office suite that is going to run on a $100 PC.

The final ignominy for Bill is that these upstarts at Google and MIT insist on putting a Linux O/S on the thing so he can’t flog Microsoft Office even if he wanted too….

BlueJ is a an IDE for Java specifically designed for teaching programming using the Java programming language. It eschews the (Eclipse, NetBeans) Boeing 747 cockpit user interface approach. Instead, it adopts a clean and simple interface that focuses on writing and understanding code.

Its simple, but it works.

Don’t take my word for it though, James Gosling is also heavy booster.

Guy Kawasaki has a great quiz for budding entrepreneurs.

Some good questions in here….

Infoworld reports on Steve McConnell’s talk at the SD West 2006 Software Development Conference. His major points,

McConnell’s best ideas included the following:

* Recognize that software development is performed by human beings and that personnel capabilities are critical in software projects.

* Iteration and incrementalism in software development are essential.

* The cost of fixing defects increases over time.

* Software projects tend to follow a predictable intellectual flow.

* The ability to create accurate software estimates can be improved over time.

* The most powerful form of reuse is full reuse.

* Risk management provides critical insight into many software development issues. McConnell cited extrinsic risk management activities, which are bolted onto a project, and intrinsic activities, such as project tracking and UI prototyping.

* Different kinds of software call for different kinds of software development.

* A software engineering body of knowledge (SWEBOK) exists, featuring disciplines such as configuration management, maintenance and testing.

“I’m not convinced [SWEBOK is the ultimate answer],” McConnell said. “I think it’s a very good start, though.”

The other worst ideas in software development cited by McConnell included:

* There are only two development options: iterate everything and iterate nothing (the waterfall model).

* Agile projects are immune to DCI (defect cost increase) dynamics. “The software engineering research really does not bear out this idea,” McConnell said.

* We have to accept “wickedness” in software projects since software projects are for wicked problems.

* Requirements are always changing.”[The] single most common source of changing requirements [is] requirements that were not significantly investigated in the first place,” said McConnell.

* Requirements can be gathered or they just drop out of the sky like manna from Heaven.

* Entrepreneurial companies cannot be afraid of risk.

* One single development approach will work best for all projects.

Steve is the author of the seminal work on Software Development Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules.

From del.icio.us/popular, 11 ways to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks.

From digg a great article on picking the correct image format. The article summary captures it all,

• JPEG:
  • Good:
    • Photographs
    • Game screenshots
    • Movie stills
    • Desktop backgrounds
  • Bad:
    • Windows application screenshots
    • Line art and text
    • Anywhere where fine lines or sharp color contrast is needed
• PNG:
  • Good:
    • Text, line art, comic-style drawings, general web graphics
    • Windows application screenshots
    • When absolutely 100% quality is required (24 bit)
    • When alpha channel support is required
    • As a general replacement for anything that is a non-animated GIF
  • Bad:
    • Photos, in-game screenshots (only when quality is not important and you’re looking for small files)
    • Disappointing browser support from Microsoft and others
• GIF:
  • Good:
    • Where animations are absolutely required
    • Widespread browser support
  • Bad:
    • Patented, legal techicalities
    • Large file sizes compared to PNG for the same quality
    • Obsolete

TechCrunch reports on a new offering from Amazon called S3. S3 is a web-service that will allow developers to leverage Amazon’s backend infrastructure to provide low cost storage services to their customers. The pricing is,

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred

This compares very favourably with the competition. However there is an issue here for most users. Most of the competition use a flat fee model for a given amount of storage (e.g. IBackup charges you $9.95 a month for 5GB of space). This is the price you pay whether you use it or not. Amazon uses a variable pricing model that charges like a utility for the time period the storage was used and the amount of storage used for that period. This will not sit well with end-users who are uncomfortable using services where they cannot easily predict the costs.

This might fly for storage costs alone, but when you include bandwidth costs it becomes impossible to predict the final price. Ask any user how much bandwidth they consumed reading and writing files in the last day, month, year and you’ll find most people are pretty clueless (myself included).

The competition offers no bandwidth pricing or caps at the moment so you can expect their prices to drop in line with Amazon’s in order to compete. At that point Amazon will have to address their bandwidth pricing policy to stay in the game.

JVC Everio GZ-MC200

This is the camera I shot the Irish Blog Awards video on and it captured the sound as well, its a JVC Everio GZ-MC200. It fits in the palm of your hand and writes straight to a hard disk. You then upload via USB.

Infoworld reports on Oracle’s TOAD Killer application, Oracle SQL Developer. This product has been produced by an Engineering Team in the Oracle European Development Centre here in Dublin, so show a bit of Irish solidarity and give it a spin.

I saw some early versions of this software when I was working there and was very impressed.

Congratulations to Donal and his team for producing another great piece of software!

So jumped in a cab on Saturday night to head of to the Alexander Hotel. As soon as I mentioned the destination the taxi driver shoots back at me “Are you going to that Awards Ceremony?”. Turns out his brother in law was heading out to it and apparently bringing a bunch of mates.

When the taxi driver knows about it you have definitely hit a tipping point!