Don’t you just love that illustration? I think it says so much. It’s from an article in The Economist about Microsoft and the new threat from emerging Web 2.0 products.I mean, who wants to use the calendar in Outlook, when Google Calendar was just released. In fact, who wants to use Outlook at all, with an online alternative such as GMail? And as for writing documents I, for one, prefer Writely over Word.

Using an object perstistence layer can be greatly benefitial for any medium to large size project. Or, any project at all some would say. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a quick example. Usually, in PHP we would do something ugly-bugly like this to retrieve info about a certain item in the database: $res = mysql_query(“SELECT * FROM article WHERE ID=5”); if($row == mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) { echo $row[“title”]; // do something here } Compare it to this:

This post is not about design-design, but the internal design of a software system. Such a design has several general characteristics, and Code Complete 2 has a list of these. First, a related quote by R. Buckminster Fuller: “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Ok, I see this post is getting some traffic from Google on keywords such as ‘relocating to norway’, ‘moving to norway buying a house’, etc. etc. so before you start reading you should know that this article is a joke I published back in 2006. Ok, maybe it’s a little bit of truth in it. But it’s more of a rant than a serious guide. If you’re looking for something more serious you should probably try norway.

This week’s issue of The Economist has an interesting article on open source called Open, but not as usual (subscription required). It’s not all positive, here are some paragraphs: As “open-source” models move beyond software into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent.EVERY time internet users search on Google, shop at Amazon or trade on eBay, they rely on open-source software—products that are often built by volunteers and cost nothing to use.