Peter Coffee

A reader of these letters asked me last week if I had noticed the formal naming of Microsofts next-generation development environment, now designated on a company Web site as “Visual Studio 2005 (formerly referred to as Visual Studio codename Whidbey).” He asked what I thought about the disappearance of “.Net” from the current “Visual Studio […]

In this 25th anniversary year of the PC spreadsheet, we can be proud of the progress weve made in decision technology. We can also be appalled by the stagnation of our decision-making practices. The things we learned to do badly in 1979, upon the debut of VisiCalc, we mostly continue to do wrong today. IT […]

This letter coincides with the 2004 Software Development Conference in Santa Clara, where Ill be taking part in a Monday evening panel discussion on “The Marriage of SQL, XML, Web Services and Grids.” Moderated by the estimable Ken North, the session will offer viewpoints from Sun, BEA, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle in addition to whatever […]

Command-line skills confer the power to speak to the machine. Despite a decade of effort to replace the DOS or Unix command prompt with a point-and-click user interface, fluency at the command line still streamlines many operations. Its welcome news, then, that Microsofts “Longhorn” initiative includes major improvements in commanding system actions. In the 1980s, […]

Open-Source software “has proved to be amazingly good at commoditizing IT infrastructure,” said Red Hat fellow Jeff Law in remarks last month at Utah State Universitys annual Partners in Business IT seminar. Addressing some 200 regional business leaders at the universitys Logan, Utah, campus, Law reviewed the fundamentals of open-source licensing and collaborative practice, offering […]

Its conventional wisdom to say, “whats measured is what matters,” and its clearly useful to define IT goals in measurable terms. Thats not the same thing, though, as saying that something matters just because its measurable. An IT bulls-eye is a dubious achievement if it hits an irrelevant target. I heard a tale of poor […]

On this past Friday morning, one headline at the Cryptonomicon.net site read, “Text of Bill Gates RSA Keynote Available.” Running down the left margin of that page were Google-generated sponsored links, including “Automatic gates”; “Iron gates and fence, no welding”; even “Custom aluminum gates.” If I were paying for one of those supposedly context-driven links […]

With open-source eclipse gaining ground as a foundation for nonpartisan software development, SlickEdit Studio 2.0 from SlickEdit Inc. demonstrates the opportunities and challenges that Eclipse presents to toolmakers and their customers. The versatility and power of SlickEdits proven source code editor find a comfortable new home in the Eclipse integrated environment, and the included GNU […]

Adobes FrameMaker 7.1 offers corporate librarians an expanded arsenal of tools for two-way migration between XML repositories and publication-quality layouts. The January update addresses a weakness in the promise of two-way XML capability that I noted following the May 2002 release of FrameMaker 7.0. Unfortunately, Version 7.1s interoperability with Microsofts Word continues to disappoint, and […]

I just turned on my electric shaver by dialing my cell phone. This was not a Stupid Bluetooth Trick. I just happened to notice my Norelcos battery lights blinking when I put the phone down on my desk at the end of a call. I found that if I made the phone ring, I could […]

Even free-trade advocates are starting to tiptoe around the subject of tech-job outsourcing. In a presidential election year, its dangerous to suggest that the overseas export of any voters job is a long-term gain for the U.S. economy. But for IT pros, the important trend is not the loss of jobs in slinging code or […]

An e-mail application is the hub of many users lives, especially in the workplace, with action items coming in and work going out through that universal connector to the world. Because it has to handle anything, an e-mail client indiscriminately accepts just about anything, hence our problems with mail-borne malware. Since its not an integral […]