I’ve been a bit slack in my farewells lately. Towards the end of the year we lost a few people from the Readify family as they go off to face new challenges.
It is sad to see them leave, but you can’t hold on to everyone forever, and as Aaron said the community in Australia is pretty small so we will all see each other pretty regularly anyway.
Maybe we should send them tech@ list care packages so they can get their daily dose of language wars, EntLib bashing threads and other good stuff 
I wonder if this stuff is the beginnings of Grey Goo? Although I believe the doomsday scenario attributed to Grey Goo really has more to do with a general Frankenstein Complex.
I was happy when the new Federal Government was elected in November. But when I see announcements like this from Stephen Conroy I have to wonder whether anyone in politics really knows enough about the technical realities to make sensible policy.
So there are two issues here. The first is child pornography, that is pornography that features children. Obviously this stuff is terrible, and as a father of a five year old I would like to see people who put children in that situation strung up. However, I don’t see how adding filtering to the Internet does anything other than cover it up so the masses aren’t aware of the problem. It is the electronic equivalent of sticking your head in the sand.
The second issue is pornography that a child might be exposed to. This is a much more delicate issue (in my opinion) because the policing of it is subjective.
For example, if my five year old daughter found some pornography on the Internet I think that I would be interested to hear what SHE had to say about it. It would be an opportunity to do some parenting.
You could ask your child:
Basically its the beginning of a discussion, and whilst we like to pretend that we have a lot of control over when that discussion takes place, a child’s natural curiosity is going to find a way to circumvent any control mechanisms you put in place - and if a child can do it, everyone can.
Basically - the government is just proving that they are irrelevant on this issue.
Darren, Greg and Paul (Glavich) have been having an interesting discussion about the merits of technologies such as AJAX, Silverlight and what the future of web vs. windows might look like.
I’ve kinda flip flopped on this whole issue. I look at the web browser and I see a great delivery platform. And while HTML isn’t perfect it can be used to produce some beautiful UI’s, in fact even when compared to WPF.
On the other hand if you aren’t careful you can end up with a fairly unstable application. I actually browse the web with JavaScript debugging turned on just so I can see some of the rubbish code that is executing out there - but to concede Darren’s point, its usually because they aren’t using some kind of DOM abstraction layer like the Microsoft AJAX library (or something else).
Personally I quite like some of the things I can now do (relatively easily) with ASP.NET AJAX, and whilst I don’t think I have abused Silverlight enough I think that I’m going to enjoy that too.
One thing is for sure - the line between the two is blurring, in the end we are building an engaging experience for our customers. Its not worth getting too religious about whether you use System.Windows.* or System.Web.*!
This post on Slashdot got me thinking about what I usually see IT departments do when they adopt a virtualization technology like VMware or Microsoft’s Virtual Server platform.
Most of the time they will buy a few big boxes and then provision virtuals on top of them, then proceed to manage those servers like physical boxes (because that is what they have always done). Ultimately virtualization means distributing the management responsibility for business systems to those who are both capable and most impacted by those systems.
That means that if you have a software development team that needs an entire Virtual Server host so that they can create and delete servers as they see fit - give it to them, they probably know more about what they are doing with the applications anyway.
But I’ve blogged about these kinds of control issues before.
Last night I went out to see a movie with a friend (Atonement, highly recommended). Anyway we got to talking about stuff and one of my pet hobbies is freaking people out by saying (what they think) are completely unbelievable things about what the future might hold.
One of my favourite lines is “your great great grand children will probably be a computer simulation“, although I didn’t get that far last night.
However - when I have these conversations I seem to come up against this unbreakable mental block where people can’t conceive how much things could change as technology advances. For example I tell them that they will likely have chips implanted in their head to produce a more natural interface to the digital world.
The general response is that it would lead to some kind of mind control. However I argue that it would be like getting another sense, just like the human eye, and the human ear ultimately send electronic signals into the brain. I could go on that chips in you brain is about as unnatural as human cells assembling calcium to produce bone.
This whole area is fascinating and, I believe inevitable, but like so much social change people don’t really recognise that they are already in the pot and the gas is on.
When I read posts like this on the Singularity Institute blog, I’m reminded how much I am enjoying living in a time where our technology acquisition rate is tending from horizontal to vertical.
When I was last at the Microsoft Australia headquarters in North Ryde I caught up with Michael Kordahi. You may know him as Delicate Genius. While I was there he gave me a shirt to help promote his blog (he is loosely attached to a marketing organisation, so his overt marketing schemes are forgiven).
Anyway - when I posted up about Pointui I pinged my blog with this (not so) subtle reminder that I had agreed to blog a photo with me wearing the shirt.
At the time I said it would probably be the trigger for my next blog post, but sadly I found something else to blog about and the shirt sat in the bottom of my bag until today when I brought it out (and ironed it).
So - without further ado, here is a photo of me wearing the shirt.
The second shot is a little bit blurry because I needed to apply Vaseline to hide my receding hairline. Unfortunately the shirt is a little bit too small to wear every day (shows up my man boobs too much). However - I do wonder whether that was Michael’s true intention and whether he is collecting all the photos of people wearing his shirt so it can put them into some weird fetish calendar.
If he isn’t careful he will attract the ire of the Department of Internets.
*drum roll*
So last year, at the end of 2006, I posted up my goals for 2007, and towards the end of 2007, I posted up a review of how I went with those goals. This year I’m going to take a similar approach to setting my goals where I evaluate my one, two, five, ten and twenty year vision.
With that in mind here are my goals for this coming year:
Some of that might sound pretty cryptic, but it makes sense to me. Obviously I don’t want to lock myself in too much on HOW I am going to achieve these things, but I’ve got a few ideas.
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