Bill Roth's Blog

Stacy and I, for a belated ho neymoon-ty pe thing, are planning on visiting Ireland and Scotland from June 8-23. We fly in and out of Dublin, and would like to see Dublin and its environs, and then hop over to Scotland for some E dinburghia n and possibly Glaswegian splendor. Of course, we really don’ t know what we 217;re [...]

Pic of the Day Dept. -- Motorcycle Limo

Here's 9 minutes of Chris Matthews trying to get a hollerin' right-wing radio host to acknowl edge that he (the host) doesn't know what "appeaseme nt" means. Clearly, neither does President Bush.The notion that it's weak to talk with your enemies is even more dangerous than the Bush preemption policy. If you ...

Even as Carl Icahn rallies angry shar eholders to try to force Yahoo back to the bargaining table with Microsoft, one of the “str ategic alt ernatives& #8221; Yahoo may still be trying to work out in the background is a search adv ertising deal with Google. There is a 60 to 70 percent gap between what Google collects [...]

While this is crazy: … this makes it bearable:

Fortran IF (A-B) 20,20,1010 A = B20 CONTINUE Fortran IV IF (A .LE. B) GO TO 30 A = B30 CONTINUE Algol 60 if a > b then begin a := b;end PL/I IF A > B THEN DO; A = B;END; BCPL IF a > b DO $( a := b$) C if (a > b) { a = b;} Algol 68 if a > b then a := bfi Python if a > b: a = b There are lots of ways to write an if statement. One of the worst was Fortran's arithmetic if statement, which jumped to one of three line numbers depen

The quiet market town of Banbury, O xfordshire in England is not a place you would expect to see in the news very often. But, according to the Banbury Guardian, a bingo cashier in the town&# 8217;s Gala bingo hall was jailed this week for stealing a pproximate ly $32,000 from her employer. Apparently , the bingo hall uses a [...]

I recently completed work on an internal S ilverlight app. The project was a blast ? it really reminded me of how coding could be fun again . One of the surprising gaps I found in S liverlight was the inability to get the current user context (e.g. dete rmine...(r ead more)

In this next entry in my peer networking discussion series, I talk about some of the reasons why just having a pure peer network isn't good enough for today's modern apps - we need more.

I bought my camera from Amazon (a Canon SD900) years ago and when they launched the Eye-Fi based on my past buying pre ferences they sent me a special offer for the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card. Otherwise I would never have found this very cool little device. The Eye-Fi is a SD Card and Wi-Fi combo [... ]SHARETHIS .addEntry( { title: "Review: Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card", url: "http ://sociali zedsoftwar e.com/2008 /05/16/rev iew-eye-fi -wireless- sd-card/" });

More on the topic of Java Object Per sistence ...I have this time interviewe d the following ODBMS.ORG experts Jose Blakeley ( Microsoft) , Rick Cattell (Sun Micro systems), William Cook (Univ ersity of Texas at Austin), Robert Green (Versant) , and Alan Santos (Pr ogress).Th e panel addressed the ever open issue of the impedance mismatch, a problem which has existed ever since computers were used to persist ently store data - in file systems or database management systems -, and where no fully sati

Novalys is once again holding their annual survey of PowerBuild er users. Once you complete the survey, yo u’ll be allowed to access the results of the survey for the last several ye ars.Origin al Entry

What are you doing now? There's no words there!!! Fill in the approp riate four letter word.

OK, some women are  concerned about sexism in IT.  Here&rsquo ;s what I think. First, I do not like when people curse in public .  Not just because that there are women in the audience, but it’s just plain wrong.Seco nd, there is v

Sun has launched the "Student Reviews Contest": it is reserved to students that are regularly enrolled in an educ ational institute and would like to write a review about Open Solaris or NetBeans 6.1. The prizes are small ($250 grand prize and...

and much to my surprise, the public beta of the flash player 10 is out.  I knew this would be coming before too long, but didnt realize that it would be out so qui ckly.  ; This new version is filled with lots of new features aimed at allowing

Congratula tions ... Sybase 4; IQ analytics server has set a new Guinness World Reco rd™ by ...

Guiness World Record - Sybase and Sun - a PetaByte sized data warehouse. Yes - size DOES matter.

Lots of new toys to play with. You can find all of the informatio n on labs.

I’m giving a p resentatio n on “The Politics of Metrics ” in Rochester on May 15th, for a seminar being organized by the IT Metrics and Produc tivity Institute; it’s an updated version of the presen tation I gave in Orlando a month or two ago. You should attend in person, if possible, so you can not only hear my [...]

Join us Aug. 4 ? 8 at the Mandalay Bay Resort &Casino in Las Vegas, NV... for the 10th Annual Sybase User Training and Solutions Conference .

This years JavaOne was a not to be missed event. Here are my views on how the conference has changed.

New APIs, new algorithms and new pr ogramming language. Want more can a geek ask for?

As I write the last of my event summary reports and follow up action items, I am now officially putting a bow on the TIBCO user conference (TUCON 2008) What a madhouse. I was acco untable for the TIBCO Analyst Summit (TIBCO?s first ever), two days of the Business O ptimizatio n track of presentati ons (combining [...]

At the end of this week, I will no longer be employed by BEA Systems. It has been a great 4 years working at BEA, and u ndoubtedly the highlight of my career thus far. I have enjoyed the opport unity to write for the BEA developer community, and to lead Tooling at BEA these last 3 years.