A long time ago I worked as a management consultant. One of the most fascinating projects from back then was the introduction of Kaizen at several German automotive companies. Kaizen means loosely translated continuous improvement. It is a bundle of techniques applied by Japanese manufacturing companies. The goal of Kaizen is to break out of the notion that there is a fixed cost-time-quality tradeoff. Traditional thinking was that if you wanted higher quality it would imply more cost and long...

A long time ago I worked as a management consultant. One of the most fascinating projects from back then was the introduction of Kaizen at several German automotive companies. Kaizen means loosely translated continuous improvement. It is a bundle of techniques applied by Japanese manufacturing companies. The goal of Kaizen is to break out of the notion that there is a fixed cost-time-quality tradeoff. Traditional thinking was that if you wanted higher quality it would imply more cost and long...

Over the weekend I decided to play around a bit with jQuery. I had done tiny bits of Javascript front end stuff previously and had heard a lot of good things about jQuery. As a disclaimer upfront, I have not looked at any of the other Javascript libraries, so this is not a comparative view (not even a comprehensive view for that matter). I had a concrete project in mind. DailyLit breaks books up into installments of roughly 1,000 words. As a brief historic aside, when Dickens went from monthl...

Over the weekend I decided to play around a bit with jQuery. I had done tiny bits of Javascript front end stuff previously and had heard a lot of good things about jQuery. As a disclaimer upfront, I have not looked at any of the other Javascript libraries, so this is not a comparative view (not even a comprehensive view for that matter). I had a concrete project in mind. DailyLit breaks books up into installments of roughly 1,000 words. As a brief historic aside, when Dickens went from monthl...

When I started this blog, I picked the name continuations. But at the time, continuations.com was not available and so I used a subdomain at wenger.us. I am happy to report that thanks to the capable negotiating help of Eric Friedman, I am now the proud owner of continuations.com. Old links should still work as I am forwarding requests.

When I started this blog, I picked the name continuations. But at the time, continuations.com was not available and so I used a subdomain at wenger.us. I am happy to report that thanks to the capable negotiating help of Eric Friedman, I am now the proud owner of continuations.com. Old links should still work as I am forwarding requests.

At OSCON, I listened to a bunch of talks about distributed file systems (including HDFS) and scalable databases (including hypertable). What is intriguing is that both need to solve a similar problem at their core because they store stuff across machines: they need a way of tracking where stuff is. In HDFS that’s the job of the namenode and in hypertable the hyperspace – which in both systems at the moment are single servers. The approach at the moment is to build the scalable DB on top of th...

At OSCON, I listened to a bunch of talks about distributed file systems (including HDFS) and scalable databases (including hypertable). What is intriguing is that both need to solve a similar problem at their core because they store stuff across machines: they need a way of tracking where stuff is. In HDFS that’s the job of the namenode and in hypertable the hyperspace – which in both systems at the moment are single servers. The approach at the moment is to build the scalable DB on top of th...

This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software). Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google engineers built a free version with very similar functionality which they had called HuddleChat. Google took it down beca...

This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software). Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google engineers built a free version with very similar functionality which they had called HuddleChat. Google took it down beca...

Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental service in the cloud and will subsume both traditional file storage and most of the relational DB mark...

Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental service in the cloud and will subsume both traditional file storage and most of the relational DB mark...

My first word processor experience was on an Apple II - I have forgotten which program I liked best, but they were all fairly capable. This was over 25 years ago. When I look at how I use Microsoft Word today, not much has changed. Sure I will occasionally make use of some nice features like revision tracking, but there is nothing fundamentally different about the experience. In particular there seems to be no leveraging of the enormous compute power of modern machines and the fact that we ar...

My first word processor experience was on an Apple II - I have forgotten which program I liked best, but they were all fairly capable. This was over 25 years ago. When I look at how I use Microsoft Word today, not much has changed. Sure I will occasionally make use of some nice features like revision tracking, but there is nothing fundamentally different about the experience. In particular there seems to be no leveraging of the enormous compute power of modern machines and the fact that we ar...

A while ago I bought an AppleTV, mostly on a whim because I had some store credit. I liked the form factor and the HDMI output and thought it might provide a good solution for getting pictures from my ReadyNAS onto the TV. Sadly, the AppleTV software is geared toward synching content instead of streaming it. Streaming is possible, but it’s not the default mode of operation, is hard to set up and so far has proven flaky. This is a big flaw as far as I am concerned. I have almost 1TB of storage...

A while ago I bought an AppleTV, mostly on a whim because I had some store credit. I liked the form factor and the HDMI output and thought it might provide a good solution for getting pictures from my ReadyNAS onto the TV. Sadly, the AppleTV software is geared toward synching content instead of streaming it. Streaming is possible, but it’s not the default mode of operation, is hard to set up and so far has proven flaky. This is a big flaw as far as I am concerned. I have almost 1TB of storage...

A while ago, I was critical of Apple for including Safari by default in their software update. Given the widespread protest, Apple subsequently changed the update pretty much along the lines I and many others had suggested. Today it’s Microsoft’s turn for a ribbing. I have a 4+ year old Panasonic laptop that works great. Runs Windows XP and is usually snappy and super stable. Yesterday morning it slowed to a complete crawl and I could not easily determine why. Well it turns out that Microsoft...

A while ago, I was critical of Apple for including Safari by default in their software update. Given the widespread protest, Apple subsequently changed the update pretty much along the lines I and many others had suggested. Today it’s Microsoft’s turn for a ribbing. I have a 4+ year old Panasonic laptop that works great. Runs Windows XP and is usually snappy and super stable. Yesterday morning it slowed to a complete crawl and I could not easily determine why. Well it turns out that Microsoft...

I have seen various headlines about Javascript security issues but never paid any close attention (my bad). But today I was talking to a friend about keeping javascript based widgets small by using a two stage process of loading a small script first, which would then pull down the rest of the script and any associated data. I assumed that this could simply be done as follows. A site located at say “acme.com” would add the following to their pageWhere loader.js then does axmlhttp=new XMLHttpRe...

I have seen various headlines about Javascript security issues but never paid any close attention (my bad). But today I was talking to a friend about keeping javascript based widgets small by using a two stage process of loading a small script first, which would then pull down the rest of the script and any associated data. I assumed that this could simply be done as follows. A site located at say “acme.com” would add the following to their pageWhere loader.js then does axmlhttp=new XMLHttpRe...