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Old Technologies Still Sticking Around

Chia — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:33:00 +0000

Even as new technologies continue to flood the marketplace signaling death for older technologies, some older technologies simply refuse to die. I was reminded of this recently as I read a release touting IBM Lotus would be available on mobile phones. Wow. And here I was thinking Lotus was going to die a slow death…continuing to exist where it was already installed but eventually being replaced as systems got upgraded. Guess I was wrong on that one. Mobile compatibility may be one of the things that keep Lotus around just a bit longer as IBM shows Lotus’ relevance in the marketplace, mainly with enterprise customers.

Another technology that perplexes me, one that I thought was on its way out a decade ago, is Cold Fusion. New coding standards, richer XHTML capabilities, and new languages would surely make this closed system obsolete, right? Wrong. A decade after thinking its days were limited (I had no timeframe in mind, I just saw the writing on the wall. Well, at least I THOUGHT I did…) I still see .cfm on many pages that I hit as I’m surfing around.

It’s tough to predict the future when it comes to the Internet and other computer-related technologies. Things that seem like a sure hit can fail for a variety of reasons (marketing, bad implementation, politics, etc) while other technologies that seem as if they are becoming obsolete continue to exist, and sometimes thrive. For now I guess the safe bet would be to use the technologies that have the most compatibility and sadly, the most backing. I say sadly because backing can come from deep wallets wanting to push a particular standard for reasons of profit rather than promoting the most useful and promising technology. Goodbye Betamax, sorry Minidisk, you had a chance Ogg Vorbis but not good enough, you were fun while you lasted HD-DVD. There goes that semester of programming I took in Pascal…

PageFlakes To Be Bought By Live Universe

Chia — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:21:41 +0000

TechCrunch is reporting that PageFlakes, a custom homepage-building site, is being bought by Live Universe. This is exciting news for startups abound as we see a company with a good product but not loads of money succeeding in the ever busy tech world of Silicon Valley. I’ve been using PageFlakes for well over a year now and couldn’t be happier to see it succeed. Using PageFlakes, one is able to build a custom portal so very quickly and easily. For example, I’ve got four pages on my PageFlakes site…News, Sports (mostly cycling, soccer, Steelers), Atlanta-centric, and fun (games, comics, etc). Why hit page after page surfing all over the net when you can do this?

Anyway…I digress. PageFlakes fell on my radar over a year ago amongst other similar sites (Netvibes is the only one that comes to mind right now) and PageFlakes is the one that won out in my picky “I only have so much time to futz around” life. I still haven’t seen any advertising for it so to see it succeed with its grassroots movement makes me happy.

It also inspires me. I’ve still got a few ideas that I’ve been sitting on and need to get out to the masses. Knowing that a great idea can still become popular, not only amongst users but also investors, is the fire I need to get my ideas out of my brain and into the internet cloud.

MS Sharepoint and Apple Safari 3 Frustrations

Chia — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:59:31 +0000

Apple just resently released Safari v3 to the world and I’d been holding off. At home where I primarily run on a Mac (G4 PowerBook…old school baby. My XP-based HTPC crapped out on me recently and haven’t had the time to tinker with it yet) I generally use Safari and Firefox. When I heard about the newest release of Safari for Windows I couldn’t wait to get to work and fire it up.

Downloading was easy (the company I’m contracting at right now blocks iTunes, YouTube, and a myriad of other sites for “inappropriate attire” and the like so getting to download Safari was a small victory for me), installation was a breeze, and it really did seem faster than Firefox (my default browser at work…unless I have to get to some site/part of Sharepoint that some goomer coded only for IE). I was pleased and as I ran through a few test sites to determine whether I would make it my default browser or not I continued to pay attention to how pages rendered, the speed, functionality, etc. I was especially excited because Safari is supposedly one of the most advanced browsers out there now, supporting HTML 5 and to be a great rich internet application browser. But alas…it will not be my default browser at work. Why?

First, I already have to have two browsers open. I begrudgingly use IE because Siebel does not play nicely with Firefox. I then have Firefox open so I can have the four or so tabs I need to do work and (shhhhh…don’t tell anyone about my personal emails that I check) play and also do research. Much more convenient than having another five windows open. When I fired up Safari…it get no Sharepoint support.

I’m finding this horribly frustrating. I just want to have one browser that supports all my needs. Really now, is it THAT hard to do? Tabbed browsing, not a memory hog, stable, secure (we all know IE is a security nightmare), and one that works well with everything I need to do. The fact I would need to run three browsers to get what I want and need is ridiculous. So until Apple and Microsoft can figure out how to get Sharepoint to run smoothly (ok, to run at all would be a good start), I’ll have to settle with working with two browsers that do what I need (yet I still have my wants). Blasted…I’ve been foiled once again by incompatibility issues.

Addendum – After posting this I finally got Sharepoint to work on Safari. Finally! However, there are still parts of Sharepoint that still do not work at all (let alone correctly). Also, Siebel still blows chunks (my Siebel rant would take days to complete. I can’t think of one person here that is a Siebel fan. Slow, clunky, unintuitive, confusing, not compatible with other browsers…) and doesn’t work on Safari either. I’ll keep testing Safari as my main browser for a while and see if it’s good enough to beat out Firefox as my default browser on XP or if I’ll switch on back.