June 21, 2006, 11:00 pm
Novell today terminated CEO Jack Messman and CFO Joseph Tibbetts. Messman is replaced immediately by Ronald Hovsepian, Dana Russell is interim CFO.
Novell has long been the hardest-to-parse of the major OS vendors. To say they “owned” the network market in the early 90s is to understate things. Their fumbles have been extraordinary. Lately, I’ve liked their plan to become a major Linux vendor, but execution is everything, especially in the tricky world of making money by being a corporate supporter of OSS.
June 21, 2006, 10:00 pm
Yesterday, Tina and I went for a dive off Honokohau Harbor just north of Kailua Kona on the Big Island of Hawai’i, a 10-minute drive from our house. Tina and I mostly freedive; this was the first time we had tanks on our backs in five months. Two eagle rays cruised the margin at 70′, where the coral slope changed to sand. We went out onto the sand flats to watch a flashing school of scads and stalk a plain of garden eels. Coming back, we saw our friends the eagle rays again, this time at a cleaning station, where we could watch them easily.
Then, in unusually shallow water I saw a school of Heller’s barracuda coming towards me. The usually shy species swirled around me. Wow! I thought, not realizing that I was missing the main show. Suddenly, further away, I saw a giant trevally thrashing a barracuda like a terrier with a rat. It was big: probably a 50# fish. I hooted in my regulator and pointed so Tina would see it.
When we surfaced, Tina told me that the reason the barracuda had swirled around me was because the trevally was herding them, cutting back and forth at lightning speed, only a few feet away from me. She had seen the whole thing.
Freediving’s nice, but we’ve decided to go back for another dive at that spot this weekend!
June 21, 2006, 3:00 am
Michi Henning’s article on the history of CORBA in the latest Queue is very good indeed. Henning has biases (he’s got his own middleware solution) but the article never strays too far. It’s opinionated, but accurate. Some of the timeline discussion is a little overblown but not too much (CORBA’s popularity didn’t have quite the triumphant ballooning and deflating that he describes; there were critics and hesitation all along). Very worthwhile read for those interested in Web Services.
June 21, 2006, 1:00 am
The Jolt Awards are the major industry award for software development tools (compilers, libraries, etc.). One problem we face every year is proper classification of tools. Traditionally, we try to refine / fine tune the previous year’s categories (Development Environments; Libraries, Frameworks, and Components; etc.). Problems arise frequently balancing the number of products in a category (20 entries in one category, 3 in another), when clearly competitive products end up in different categories (happens all the time with categories “Web Development Tools” versus “Development Environments”), and when a product cuts across categories.
Brainstorming yesterday, we wondered if it would not be better to generate the categories dynamically. One idea was to use checkboxes for predefined activities (”defect tracking,” “code generation,” “GIS mapping”) and use some form of entropy measure to divvy them up into our 12-or-so categories. Easy enough mathematically. Another, more dramatic idea, was to create a tagging system for software tools and see if we could come up with a more dynamic view. The main challenge we see is that it seems like a small world: there are only a few hundred tool releases every year and it’s difficult to imagine many people becoming engaged in the task of tagging them.
Do the Web 2.0 dynamics of distributed collaboration apply to small numbers? A del.icio.us for software development tools?
