Peter Coffee

Im intrigued by the news that eBay is eliminating access fees for developers whod like to explore eBay Web Services (www.developer.ebay.com). This turns the online auction site into an enormous playground for those with innovative ideas on how to improve the worldwide match between supply and demand. I expect to see a corresponding flood of […]

If I said that integrated programming environments are mixed blessings, any developer who started work in the past 15 years might look at me oddly and say, “Compared to what?” Most developers probably feel that their choice is between one integrated environment or another. The idea of using entirely separate tools—an editor from one vendor, […]

Take rising gas prices, add ubiquitous broadband connections, garnish lightly with fear of crowded malls that might harbor avian flu or terrorist bombers–and you have the makings of a vigorous online shopping season that begins, oh, right about now. This is therefore an excellent time to make sure that your instrumentation of site performance and […]

In Fritz Leibers 1958 short story, “Try and Change the Past,” a man gains unauthorized access to a time machine. He tries to rearrange events to prevent his own death from a bullet between the eyes. He gives up when he sees himself die of a micrometeorite impact in precisely the same place. He decides […]

Were looking back this week at 20 years of Microsoft Windows, and along that timeline theres much to admire. Id fall short of my duty to eWEEK readers, though, if I didnt make it clear that you didnt get all that you had coming to you. PC users have demonstrably been robbed, not to mince […]

How hard would it be to record every action youve ever taken on your PC? How much would that be worth? It would probably cost a lot less than youd willingly pay. This came to mind after a talk by Neil Puthuff, director of hardware engineering at Green Hills Software. He was on the agenda […]

Prepare to be overwhelmed by this weeks long-awaited launch of Microsofts Visual Studio 2005, whose final bits were frozen late last month — perhaps before they should have been. Every tool maker that I regularly cover has been in touch with me over the last few weeks — in some cases, during the last few […]

What could be more outdated than the analog local loop that connects us to the circuit-switched telephone network? What could be more welcome than digital, untethered Wi-Fi access to low-cost and location-independent VOIP service? Thoughtful answers to those questions must address issues of infrastructure reliability, public policy and international cooperation. Anything as pervasive as telephone […]

Space-based systems are the last bastion of handcrafted, custom-built technology. The unit volumes are small. The intervals between one procurement cycle and another are long. The rigors of launch and the hostile on-orbit environment are severe. These factors make it hard to take advantage of mass-market economies or gain leverage from previous engineering efforts. Challenging […]

Users rarely behave as planned unless thats the easiest thing for them to do. Alfresco Softwares enterprise content management platform, released today, applies this basic lesson in an open-source, service-oriented architecture approach that makes content management a path of least resistance — instead of creating a parallel process that asks users to do extra work. […]

Next month will see the next chapter of a saga that began with Microsofts Visual Basic (through Version 6.0), took a dramatic turn with the early 00s Visual Basic .Net and will reach a climax with the forthcoming Visual Basic 2005. If youre not a developer, you probably dont know that these names refer to […]

Microsoft Corp.s wooing of developers to build custom applications by extending its Office “12” platform is as crucial as any such campaign in the companys history. Microsoft can reasonably hope to engage application developers with core technologies such as its WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation), with obviously useful ideas such as shareable repositories of PowerPoint charts […]