Well I've been away on vacation un Dominican Republique for the last week. It was really nice great weather and very relaxing...

Feds planning higher IT spending for fiscal '04 - Computerworld SAN DIEGO -- The Bush administration plans to increase federal IT spending by 12% in the next fiscal year, a move that will likely pump billions of dollars into the IT sector by what is the world's largest end user. Yeah baby, this could be good!!!

blogrolling.com - the best link manager for your weblog and more! When I write this blog column, I will say a few words about blogrolliing...

vnunet.com Suse Linux Office Desktop Suse's Linux Office Desktop combines Suse Linux 8.1 and extra utilities to ease migration from Windows to Linux. Office Desktop has an even easier install than 8.1 and ....

blah blah blah.... Is this really an OS review? If you ask me this is not one, there is absolutely no meat to it. Reviewers there is more to an OS, in this case Linux, than the setup. I'd like for them to dig more into it, for example in this case, can a corporation think about having its people working day in day out with the same productivity as with windows? What tolerance should they have toward bugs? Use cases scenarios and the like would be useful!

Most interseting... Here you go for shops like ours where we want to get into this but can't really afford having all development staff own a tablet PC...

Tablet PC Buzz.com - Forum But did you know that you don't need to buy a Tablet PC in order to play with one? If you're a MSDN subscriber and have about $100 to spare, I'll show you how to have a near Tablet PC experience." URL: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/01/16/tablet_pc.html

Ben Hammersley.com: Trackback in the saddle again There's been a lot of thinking about TrackBacks lately, with lots of variants coming up, and being coded. It's great stuff, and so very promising, but I've been losing track. To help myself out, I made a list. Does anyone know of any more?

I feel so much the same, I need to understand trackback soon...The information gathered is worth it take for those interested.

Smart people work on both side of the spam fence, read on for a kewl trick to get spam throuh filters, and then realize how hard it must be to write those darn filters...Uh-oh: Spam's getting more sophisticated - Computerworld "The most dastardly thing I've seen so far," Graham-Cumming said, involved words that were printed vertically within the raw HTML text, l i k e s o . The HTML message then used tables to reassemble the words and display them horizontally again. The result: Antispam filters didn't understand that the words in vertical format were spam, and let the message through; but the HTML displayed normally to recipients. "This is ingenious," he said. The lesson for those writing antispam software: Filters need to understand how HTML is displayed to the end user, not merely look at the raw text.

It's a LinuxWorld, after all - Tech News - CNET.com "Microsoft...has always seen itself as replacing Unix. That ain't going to happen. Linux is going to replace Unix," Claybrook said. In coming years, Linux, not Windows, will take over high-end computing tasks currently handled by Unix servers in "data centers" at the core of corporate computing operations, Claybrook predicted.

Linux vs Unix vs Windows. Why does MS think it can win Unix people over with a pitch with maintenance costs being lower than Linux or Unix. They also say Linux is free but then when it's time to maintain it, this is where it hurst cost wise. Aren't they doomed to think they will win over high Unix servers with Windows on maintenance cost when those Unix CO have linux avail for free and the staff to maintain those machines readlily trained because of their Unix background and most likely very Anti-MS to start with. To me this is a slam dunk for Red-hat and all if they can show their advanced servers reliably working on those big irons, because they truly will save money... Desktop is another issue, and existing MS customers on the server side is another ballgame.

This guy has been keeping a tab on how fast the blogosphere is growing, it's about 2.8blogs/day... From what I understand it's only based on weblogs.com but it should be significant enough to show the trend...Jarrett House North : I thought this was a good time to make my source data available. I will continue to post comments as new high water marks are reached, but I think it will be more useful if people can get to the data themselves. It’s now downloadable in Excel format from this site. (The spreadsheet is under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it wherever you like, just give me credit and make any changes and additional research available.)

Microsoft Issues Dividend, Splits Stock Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said it would, for the first time, pay an annual dividend to shareholders. It also announced a two-for-one common stock split. WooHoo!!

The Register Its latest figures show that 77.4m people in the US used a dial-up connection from home in December - down 10 per cent on the previous year. By comparison, 33.6m - an annual increase of almost 60 per cent - used a broadband connection from home to access the Net.

Well, welcome broadband...Now that we all have routers, wireless routers, and homeplug stuff...let's get some devices to use this bandwidth. What's next radios playing web radio? Or devices to let you subscribe to music databases on the internet? Movies on demand, as in finally? Since we will be at critical mass shortly it would make sense.

Business Software and Applications / Open source Java route yields big savings - ZDNet Tech Update Today, IT shops are able to develop complete enterprise solutions without paying expensive license fees. The days of paying thousands of dollars for enterprise development suites and tens of thousands for application servers are numbered.

I don't say I like to read this kind of stuff, but we've used the tools he is talking about here at Macadamian, and we also think they rule... Jakarta is a wonderful opensource project with short term quantifiable ROI for all IT departments dealing with web development. A layer of the web development stack is being commoditized with Jakarta, JBoss and Eclipse, but there are many layers in this stack The commercial software industry is adapting, that's why Borland bought TogetheSoft, Starbase ... IBM buying Rationale... They're moving up the value chain.

Symantec reports revenue growth Increasing demand among enterprises for the full range of Symantec's security products and services was responsible for the strong performance, according to Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif. Overall, the company's enterprise security business grew by 26 percent in the third quarter over the year-ago quarter, accounting for 42 percent of Symantec's total revenue. An indication that security is bigger now in the corporate world? I can't say. What I conclude though is it's not because IT in general spending are decreasing, that all segments of IT are decreasing There are few hot spots, security is one, anything else?

Looking forward the day the whole city(Ottawa) is wi-fi enabled...Some shopping centers and downtown buildings for now...if we want to stay ahead in the smart community program race, we will have some work to cause UBC is making a big jump ahead...ITBusiness.ca It was one of the first fruits of a project under way at the school to create a massive wireless local area network. Based on 802.11 or "WiFi" technology and running at data rates of 54 Mbps, the UBC wireless LAN may eventually include between 1,200 and 1,500 access points, serving 300 buildings and covering more than one million square metres

From the doom-and-gloom-dep, yes again we can expect the IT budgets to shrink, this articles says 1%, this is better than the 3% I read a few weeks back...The Register Leaving aside the fact that the lower IT spend will reflect flat or lower revenues for some of the major technology companies for 4th qtr 2002 / 1st qtr 2003, the IT market is now forecast to decline by 1% rather than grow by a modest 2.3%.

CES Darling, 802.11g, Set to Explode 802.11b wireless networking products, which work in the 2.4 GHz frequency band, have been resounding successes over the past couple of years, but the standard has a maximum data transfer rate of only 11 Mbps. Meanwhile, companies like Intel are rallying around the 802.11a standard, which can transfer data at 54 Mbps operating at 5 GHz. The problem is, the a products and the b products don't work with each other. By contrast, 802.11g promises to work with both standards, delivering 54-Mbps speeds in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. That fact is catching the eyes of product manufacturers. I kept wondering why g and not a, as I thought was happening in the industry. Already I've see routers handling the two protocols, but it looks like this is only a stop gap and that momentum is behind g.

Internet tax ban efforts resume - Computerworld Online merchants would suffer as much as the buyers if Internet access taxes were allowed, Congress members note. Come on! Can somebody explain why in the heck we can justify internet merchants do not have to pay taxes...

Nokia extends mobile apps development to Linux NOKIA ON TUESDAY began offering a free, Java-based toolkit for developing mobile applications on the Linux platform, for deployment on Nokia mobile phones. Follow the hackers... this makes perfect sense, if you want to have developers for your platform, offer the tools on the platforms where the ratio of people developing apps versus using them is actually higher than 1, isn't that odd!

Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research In this document, I analyze an emerging form of knowledge sharing that I call personal knowledge publishing. Personal knowledge publishing has its roots in a practice known as "weblogging" that has been rapidly spreading on the World Wide Web over the last three years. It is a new form of communication that many expect will change the way people work and collaborate, especially in areas where knowledge and innovation play an important role. This is a good read for those who wants to know a little more about the blogging world.... I would have liked a better ananlysis of the implications of Blogging when everyone has a blog, and every media journalist also does (or should i say publish outside of the big media umbrella)... What will happen when the edge runs the show, and we get info from each and every one. What will the big medias do? What changes in our society will this provoque?

The Register Alcatel's cheery prognosis is a welcome sign for the beleaguered telecoms equipment market as a whole, which has been in the doldrums for the best part of two years. We need more of those, especially here in cold Ottawa...

Greg Reinacker's Weblog - NewsGator v0.5 This is a really kewl utlity for people like me who feeds on rss feeds... Congrats to everyone involved, cause it rocks!

Slashdot | Top 10 Vulnerabilities in Web Applications The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has released a well-written document that is a must read for every web programmer out there. This security document is not about firewalls, encryption and patching. It's about common, highly exploitable errors made by the application programmers. Pick up your copy of "The Ten Most Critical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities" from the OWASP web site." Because it's our responsability as programmers to know what the hell we're doing, and security should always be top priority, let's all read it!

johnhagel.com: blog: When will Tech Spending Revive? What do technology customers need? They are looking for technology that can be bought in small increments with modest investment and that can deliver tangible business benefits (especially operating cost and asset savings) with short lead-times (six months preferable, twelve months at the limit). In short, they want a compelling, short-term business case focused on helping to take cost out of operations. What are technology providers offering? They continue to offer grand visions in the quest for mega-sales. They promise fundamental new architectures, massive business change and untold wealth for those brave enough to march down the long path ahead. After all, you can't change the world overnight. Here's the disconnect. Grand visions sound expensive. Implementation tends to be very complicated with lots of risk of failure. If that weren't enough, they also require long lead-times with difficult to quantify pay-offs. This is exactly what executives don't want right now. That says it all!!

Greg Reinacker's Weblog - New Outlook News Aggregator Build Ok Now outlook as a news aggregator...wow wasn't this one obvious...Anyhow giving it a shot we'll see...

When will tech spending start again [Release 1.0] Since this is a question I'm thinking about one too many times a day. I was just talking about this yesterday, and what make the enterprise buy...

InfoWorld: D-word Dissection [Linux Today] A great analogy in this article by Doc Searls, Destructive techno versu disruptive techno...

D-word dissection But then imagine that someone discovers a nearby land with bountiful forests ready to supply vast quantities of inexpensive lumber. Suddenly, the once-lucrative lumber trade is no longer the virtual gold mine it once was. Instead, the home builder becomes the chief money maker in the new resource-plentiful housing market. Thanks to Doc Searl for this great analogy OpenSource disruptive vs destructive techno!

The Movie That Just Won't Die. Brian Fleming's independent flick, "Nothing So Strange" ? which includes as part of its plot an assassination of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates ? is due to open in San Francisco next month at IndieFest. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley] Oh Man, you know you're famous when...somebody makes a film to assassinate ya!

The Movie That Just Won't Die. Brian Fleming's independent flick, "Nothing So Strange" ? which includes as part of its plot an assassination of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates ? is due to open in San Francisco next month at IndieFest. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley] Oh Man, you know you're famous when...somebody makes a film to assassinate ya!

Register: Start-up marries blogs and camera phones. [Scripting News] I've always thought pictures were the missing link in the blogging infrastructure out there. This is why I have had to setup my own server and all for my son's weblog... I like this consept of blogging with your phone. Now people around me are really going to think I'm a freak...where can I get this cel phone stuff...

Mike Gunderloy, in a TechRepublic article published today (free subscription required):
The most annoying bugs to track down are always the intermittent ones. What do you do when a Web service is failing to send the expected data, but only some of the time? The best solution is to monitor the SOAP traffic, so that you can analyze it over a period of time. For this purpose, the newly released SOAPscope Personal 1.0, from Mindreef, is ideal. You can get a trial version, or purchase a $99 license for continued use.

[Mindreef.blog] voilà those bounce checkers dudes are at it again!