rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Friday, 24 May 2002

Tully's borrows Starbuck's Wi-Fi: I've always worried about people doing this at my house, but never at the office. 6:18:10 PM  comment []      Amazon's Secret Sauce: I've always said that Amazon has one of the best built websites in the world, it looks like they are finally working out how to leverage that to make money from avenues other than traditional B2C commerce. Mature e-tailers like Amazon and eBay are more than just online storefronts -- they're also software platforms. Microsoft Windows is one kind of platform, as are Sun's "Java" and Oracle's 9i Database. Platform vendors thrive by putting themselves at the center of an ecosystem, offering core functions and integration hooks for other products to exploit. In much the same way, the best e-commerce companies are licensing their platforms to other retailers.  [via Doc Searls Weblog] 6:16:17 PM  comment []      In searching around for Java Blogger API clients (I haven't found any) I found Antville - which is a JavaScript (!= Java) based weblog hosting platform. Looks interesting none the less. 4:47:13 PM  comment []      Niki just pointed me to this article The Revolution Will Be Webified. Good stuff.  4:12:42 PM  comment []      Sim City 4 preview is being released this week at E3. I can remember wasting years of my early life playing Sim City 2000 at a friend's place (my computer wouldn't run it very well). The screenshots of SC4 look amazing in their detail and realism. [Slashdot] 3:22:14 PM  comment []      Text Parking. "Customers in Sydney and Melbourne can pay for parking via mobile phone and receive SMS alerts as a reminder their time is about to expire as part of a new trial." That's pretty cool. It's a pity that only Telstra mobilenet customers can use it, that you have to pay the 1900 call cost in addition to the parking cost (so it is more expensive overall) and that you can't park twice in the same spot! [australia.internet.com] 1:09:57 PM  comment []      I got on my first blogroll at davidwatson.org. Wow. Does this mean I can lose my newbie blogger status? 12:38:18 PM  comment []      In my ongoing search for other J2EE blogs, I found Jason Hunter has a blog (rss) for Servlets.com. While I may not agree with everything he says (JSP has some uses), he is an influential J2EE pundit and it's good to find another J2EE blog. It's a pity the blog is powered by Movable Type (but mine is powered by Radio so I can't really talk!) - if only there was fully featured J2EE blogging software. In the future eh? 12:25:01 PM  comment []      Business Week: For Venture Capitalists, Paradise Lost. The biggest problem of adjustment hasn't happened with first-time entrepreneurs. The biggest problem has occurred with companies that were sitting on large amounts of cash they had raised in the bubble period. In those instances, there were a number of CEOs struggling to adjust to the fact that maybe they should spend less and economize more. VCs are putting extreme pressure on CEOs to reduce burn rates.  A good honest look at the state of the VC industry today. [Scripting News] 12:03:58 PM  comment []      I know a large number of people looking for work at the moment. To say it's a tough market is an understatement. Here's David Watson's rather amusing solution to the current job market: BSCS - Bachelor of Science in Common Sense. If you're like me, you may have an undergraduate degree, but not in computer science (CS). Alternatively, you may not have an undergraduate degree but that doesn't change the fact that you are a gifted individual contributor on programming projects. People like this get a bad rap in the current psychotic interviewing climate. I'm not saying that companies shouldn't hire the brightest people possible, I'm just saying that sometimes a lot of really phenomenal people don't even get to the interview because they don't have 4 letters on their resumes - BSCS (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science). If you count yourself in this group of people, try this: The next time someone asks you whether you have a BSCS, lie. Say, "why yes, I do have a BSCS, that's a Bachelor of Science in Common Sense." If half the people in this business had a little more of that, they'd need a lot less of this. 11:56:18 AM  comment []      Qwaste: Eric Norlin sez Quest is going down. By the way, I spoke a few days ago to a guy I respect, who knows his stuff about the Net, telcos and the rest of it. He says that Joe Nacchio, CEO of Qwest, is actually not all that bad a guy. "His first problem is that he's smarter than nearly everybody else. His second problem is that he's not as smart as he thinks he is." [Doc Searls] 11:46:49 AM  comment []      DVD Site Has Early IPO Success. I would dearly love them to come to Australia but I fear that the huge size of the country and the small size of the market will probably stop it from ever happening. If they did this with console games it would be fantastic too. People get tired of playing games after a while, trading them in for other games sounds like an excellent idea. I'm sure they do already, right? [Wired News] 11:39:18 AM  comment []      Dan Knight posted The Future of Low End Mac yesterday, letting readers know that the revenue streams for his useful site are just not allowing him to make ends meet. Something has gone terribly wrong with the world of online advertising when a site with a loyal following that serves up to a million pages per month can't earn $1,000 in income from all the ads displayed on our site. Yet that's precisely the state of things at Low End Mac. Dan goes on to present a good summary of his site's experience trying to make ends meet over the last 18 months - and they've tried it all (banners, affiliate programs, donations, memberships, newsletter ads). I think it is sad, but then again it is economic reality I suppose. Online banner advertising certainly just doesn't give the results people are looking for. [Mac Net Journal] 11:33:45 AM  comment []      Teacher displays porn during exam - hahaha only in Britain. [davidwatson.org] 12:29:12 AM  comment []