Alan Williamson

Approximat ely 250,000 cell phone subscriber s lost service for most of Tuesday this week in Vermont and neighb oring states. According to the Bra ttleboro Reformer, a “s oftware is sue” caused the problem, which caused the loss of Un icel’ ;s cell phone service from about 4:00 am until 2:30 in the afternoon. Public Relations Manager Miriam Svobodny said [...]

Facebook will announce later today Facebook Connect, which has similar fu nctionalit y to MySpace Data Avail ability, announced just yesterday. It is esse ntially a new version of their API for third party websites, which was first launched in August 2006. It will allow users to ?connect? their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. Third party websites [...]

All this i ntrospecti on.

Of late, t here’ ;s been some discussion about whether the role of design will have a seat at the table — you know the table, the large mahogany one where all the important decisions are made. Adaptive P ath’ s search for a CEO (or, as one candidate put it to me yesterday, “It& #8217;s like your adopting a parent, 221;) [...]

I recently ran across this 15 minute clip of Clay Shirky talking about what he brillia ntly refers to as the cognitive surplus and how that applies to things like Wikipedia and Web 2.0. It's an absolute must-watch

Today I am attending Blog Carolinas a social media conference being held in North C arolina 217;s Research Triangle Park (that ’s halfway between Raleigh and Durham). I am particu larly inte resting on hearing Andy Beal& #8217;s session on Online Reputation Management . Andy recently launched Trackur, an online reputation monitoring service (which I am interested in using for Zenoss). H ere’ s what [.. .]SHARETHI S.addEntry ({ title: "Blog Caro linas", url: "http ://sociali zedsoftwar e.com/2008 /

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

Footnote has posted the 1860 Census with its usual array of tools and goodies, some of which require a free membe rship. But the basic browsing and viewing is open to all. Footnote does a nice job with this stuff, including annotation tools and other social amenities. For those who are keeping ...

Now I can say, at last, that I'm a JavaOne speaker, really, not only a successful submitter. This year no headache, sore throat, cold, flu, pain in the ass prevented me from performing my talk. Not even the stinking MacBook...

We're working to build a scalable, beautiful new Twitte rGram, an applicatio n built on the super- powerful SwitchAbit platform.

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 [...]

Apparently Lucas is up to his old tricks again . How sad . I was hoping that Spielberg might diminish Lucas? influence on the film . *sigh* I?ll probably go see it anyway. On the upside Iron Man was surpri singly good and Prince Caspian looks to be good... (read more)

PocketBuil der 2.5.1 is getting some new samples from our evangelist Ian Thain.

Dave Fish has a number of entries on his blog site demon strating the soon to be released features, including DataWindow ToolTips and New Graph Styl es.Origina l Entry

Stockholm, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Munich and Milan are the cities I will be stopping in as part of the second leg of the European on AIR Tour. I will be MCing the event, and giving a session on building your first AIR applic ation with Flex. The first leg was completely sold out, and the second [...]

I relied on two models when I wrote Java Script: The Good Parts. The first was Kernighan and Richie's The C P rogramming Language. It is a brilliant little book. I thought there should be a K&R for JavaSc ript. When it seems that most tech books are sold by the pound, it is nice to read a little book that cleanly lays out what you need to know. The other was William Goldman's The Princess Bride. Goldman remembers his grandf ather reading him a wonderful book by S. Morgenste

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.

According to Forrester research wider handset av ailability , improved network coverage and new pricing models are going to foster rapid adoption of mobile internet services in Europe.By 2013 they predict that the number of people using the Internet via mobile phone will be 125 million - three times toda y's figure.  Some countries, such as the UK, will adopt even faste r. Im proved handset devices, such as the Iphone 2.0, improved networks, such as 3.5G, better network coverage, and fl

Meet you at the JavaOne Modularity session and BOF on Wednesday (May 7th) to share more about the Java Module System and OSGi support. We will show some simple demos of the Java Module System and how a Java module imports an OSGi bundle.

The ColdFusion 8.01 System Req uirements as shown in the detailed platform support matrix [PDF] indicates that support for 64-bit Linux dist ributions is limited to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10.1. This fine print appears to often go o verlooked, so I just want to broadcast it a little louder here. I was contacted today by someone reporting installati on problems and mentioned glibc and floating point errors. A bit of Googling turned up this Google Group thread

There have been lots of exciting d evelopment and changes going on in the modularity areas recently.

Open BlueDragon is now available for working with.Leave CommentRel ated Entri es:Open BlueDragon : 1 day left to goOpen BlueDragon Steering Committee Interview Series - Andy WuOpen BlueDragon Steering Committee Interview Series - Matt Woodw ardOpen BlueDragon Steering Committee Interview Series - Alan Willi amsonOpen BlueDragon Steering Committee Interview Series - Jordan Mic haelsOpen BlueDragon Steering Committee Interview Series - Adam Haske llOpen BlueDragon Steering Committee Interview Series - M

If youR 17;re a Twitter user, you must visit Tweetwheel to have it create a visual rep resentatio n of your Twitter network — just type “www .tweetwhee l.com/your TwitterID& #8221; into your browser, and then sit back and watch it. Here&# 8217;s mine (which may be impossible to read on the blog display, but is awesome on my 24-inch Apple display:

My age allows me start grumping. These young prog rammers do n’t read books anymore.&# 160; They google. They argue, &ld quo;When I need to find a solution it’s just a click away. Why bother purchasing books that are outdated by the time of p

To take the wrong road is to arrive at the snow, and to arrive at the snow is to get down on all fours for centuries and eat the cemetery grass. To take the wrong road is to arrive at woman woman who isn't afraid of light, woman who murders two roosters in one second, light which isn't afraid of roosters, and roosters who don't know how to sing on top of the snow. But if the snow chooses the wrong heart then it might meet the wind from the south, and since the air cares nothing for groans, we