Lync

Somehow or other I missed the rollout of yet another Microsoft base/platform technology, called Lync. As stated in the marketing material, Lync "provides a single interface that unites voice communications, IM, and audio, video, and Web conferencing into a richer, more contextual offering." Of course, one needs a Lync server (enterprise or "other") and has to purchase CALs for each seat. Running alongside your Sharepoint server, Active Directory server, Remote Access server,  Terminal servers,  Exchange Server, and regular old Windows 2XXX file servers, Lync will help seamlessly integrate all your data and communications. It seems to me that this is sort of an add-on to the Sharepoint concept, allowing for voice and teleconferencing to be added. I'm not sure why this wasn't integrated into Sharepoint.

Tor Project

Discovered the Tor project today. Amazing that I have never heard of it until all the publicity about Wiki Leaks. The ultimate paranoiac would of course think that Tor is a government or industry plot to follow your every move and does just the opposite of what it claims. It's like some of  the "anti-virus" protection software that is in itself a virus. Always scary installing anything on one's machine. But since it is open source one can only assume that if it was in fact malware, someone would have exposed it. This is one of the special things about the open source community, the black hats and the white hats. It is a largely self-governing society.

HTML 5

Great history of HTML 5 by Mark Pilgrim in this link: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html Amongst other things this details is the great fail of XHTML and how often people went to great lengths to try to convert their sites to pure XHTML, only to specify the mime type as text/html so it wouldn't break. Also, how the W3C decided it didn't want to take on extending HTML 4 with new declarative mark-up, so a sub-group of enthusiasts broke off and took the task on themselves, with step one being to figure out just exactly how all the different browsers were coded to be forgiving of broken markup. Every browser did it differently with the same intent, but once this Rosetta stone was parsed it was possible to move on to new features that wouldn't break backward compatibility.


Reading this took me on a little side trip into Xforms and the history of that largely unimplemented technology. Clearly, the browser as OS is the future, but how competing browser developers can agree upon accepted and universal standards so that mark-up doesn't have to be tweaked for every user agent and conceivable device, and still maintain a market edge is the challenge. As long as the ubiquitous web remains a jungle of sniffing and changing code to make mark-up work behind the scenes, there will be chaos.

First post

This blog's sole purpose is to give me a means of tracking new technologies via notes and links. If you have stumbled across this blog you may wonder what the point is. Everyday, as a technologist, I am inundated with feeds, news and pings from friends about what is happening in the technology landscape. Typically, something that looks interesting will involve some cursory linking around and then be stored in my head as something worth investigating more, or at least something worth being informed about. It makes sense to want to keep track of these discoveries, and what better way than online, where I can access and update this anywhere that I have a connection. Doesn't matter if someone scrapes this - there is nothing here that can get me in trouble, short of another wise-ass technorati wondering how I could have just discovered "X" in 20XX.