I _Really_ Don't Know

One of the things that interests me is approaches to architecting SaaS, Software as a Service. Recently I've been thinking about approaches to multi-tenancy; at a very high, "I wonder what... would do", kind of level - nothing deep, nothing tested (yet).

My thoughts started with the fact that everything is nested in different levels of containers. Each line of our own code runs within some context that we create within our application code, that in turn runs inside a container, this might be the OS or it may Microsoft .Net, the PHP runtime or a J2EE or Servlet container, which in turn runs inside the OS, which in turn runs inside a machine, which in turn runs inside a data center...

Yesterday, Steve Jobs posted an excellent short piece on apple.com talking about the future of music stores, players and DRM. He doesn't address many of the detailed points about DRM, but talks about how it's not working. Only 3% of music on the average iPod is DRM protected. Personally I have over 6,000 songs on my machine none of which have any kind of DRM as they were all ripped from CDs that I own; I have no DRM protected music and no "stolen" music.

Steve's posting focusses right on the nub of the issue - why cripple consumers with the restrictions of DRM (and cripple the industry with the costs of DRM) when it simply doesn't work.

So, the Apple iPhone makes a big deal of its multi-touch gesture interface. I can see why, it's pretty slick, but there have been larger, desktop scale, demos of this kind of thing around for a while.

A lot of them look like they're getting close to saleable. TactaDraw, from Tactiva looks amazing, and is a showcase of their TactaPad hardware - they seem to have some industrial design work left to do on the device.

Good companies to work for are coming out of their shells more and more in the style of writing used in adverts. The search for the best people is hotting up again. We've been on the trail of talented people for a few years now at Talis and we have one or two...

Anyways, it was great to read JJG's post looking for a visual designer. They've thought a lot about what the language says about them and feels a lot like briefs I've written looking for "people who get bored easily".

Sun seems to raise this question in my mind more than any other. On this occassion it was "why didn't Sun win the battle for the desktop?"

This film, from 1992, might explain why...

I'm on an interesting communications skills course for a few days, and already, by just 10.30 on day one, I have an interesting reference. Apparently, Da Vinci had 7 ways of thinking and exploring ideas, puzzles and so on.

1. Curiosità
2. Dimonstrazione
3. Sensazione
4. Sfumato
5. Arte/Scienza
6. Corporalità
7. Connessione

<< 12:30:11: mackerel
>> 12:30:20: huh?
<< 12:30:28: well, it's a fish init?
>> 12:30:28: at least provide some context:p
>> 12:30:36: last time i looked yeah!
<< 12:30:47: how often do you check?
>> 12:30:58: not as often as id like!
>> 12:31:02: is that what u had for lunch
<< 12:31:13: yep, but that's not my point.
>> 12:31:17: oh ok
<< 12:31:21: have you ever seen a mackerel that wasn't a fish?
>> 12:31:32: no cant say that i have
<< 12:31:51: exactly.
<< 12:31:55: thanks.
>> 12:32:03: your welcome

Over on Alan's blog he mentions that banks are training us to be insecure.

This is a hard problem to solve. The population at large can well understand that somebody could phone them and say "hi, I'm from blah-blah bank", but the assumption is that they won't.

Had to share this.

Nadeem's been talking about How technical writing sucks and worrying about his own abilities in this area. He even goes so far as to suggest several other people who are better at it, me included (aw Thanks Nad); although he does accuse us all of being old :-(

Then, this week, he blogs "learning a new programming language is just about learning a new syntax"