Six Web Services Predictions: Going Out on a Limb

I’m making six predictions about the web services space. Highlights: tighter margins for Accenture and OEMs, no room yet for pure-play billing providers, and ongoing developer interest in projects like XML-RPC but little measurable market share. Your comments are welcome–I’m just putting a finger in the wind and making some guesses that are as yet not backed up by ironclad research.

Now playing

Currently playing song: “Ain’t That A Groove” by James Brown on Star Time (Disc 2) The Hardest Working Man In Show Business. Ow! I just gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta know!!! Boy, it makes working on finance cases much harder. 🙂

No Respect

Just got an atta-boy and a pat on the shoulder by the Vice President for my work during this crunch period. He said that I’ve been doing better than my manager, in front of my manager. That’s fine, but next time give me my props in cash money, dog. Where’s the love?

Recommendations?

Me again. 🙂 I have a good friend who will be stuck in London over Thanksgiving for a job interview. It’s been a while since I’ve been, and the only places I can remember for him to eat well on a budget are Belgo and RK Stanley. Anyone out there with more clue than me want to provide suggestions? I’ll forward them to him–the suggestions must be in by tonight for me to be able to email them to him before his flight leaves tomorrow.

“Mixing/Memory and desire”

The New York Times finally ran the profile on Doug Ketcham, my friend from Monroe Hill at Virginia who was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. As should surprise no one, Tin Man wrote a much more evocative eulogy for him two months ago…. It still doesn’t seem real. I had lost touch with him after graduating and didn’t even know he was working in New York. Seeing it in the Times just adds to the unreality.

A more appropriate time to be re-reading The Waste Land than I had realized. From “The Burial of the Dead” (which is ironic since Doug is still officially “missing”):

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

more…

Oops

Interesting issue. When I paste text from an email, it comes in with line breaks — which are ignored in the HTML and end up running words together. Got to do something about that–maybe a new scripting challenge. After I finish my exam today, of course.

The morning civil liberties roundup

Good morning! I have to get some work done this week, so I’m making a pact with you, my reader. I will only write about hideous abuses of power and civil liberties once a day, so I can do it once and then ignore it, and I’ll start tagging those hideous abuses with a special icon, so you can ignore them if you want to. How’s that?

Speaking of civil liberties, my lawyer friend Greg is somewhat fixated on that side of the problem right now. He’s a born blogger, but has never set up one of these sites for himself–that could have something to do with the fact that he’s actually employed ;). He writes,

At The Nation , you can read about a detainee — since that’s what we’re calling them — who died while being held. Well, so much for our first plaintiff …

There’s a great description of the synergies between the new detention, eavesdropping and tribunal rules at Slate, courtesy of Slate magazine’s very own lawyer babe [and wickedly funny writer] Dahlia Lithwick.

Finally, at Findlaw, a link to the most inspiring legal opinion I read during law school — and it just happens to be about a man detained on Ellis Island until he could return home, oh, and don’t mind that he had no country to return to. Read the dissent by Justices Jackson and Frankfurter; search for the clause “Frankfurter joins, dissenting” to find the starting point. The parallels with current times should roll out with the very first sentence.

Even though the detainee lost, it’s cases like that one that remind me of the worth of studying law.

The new culture

I’ve mentioned before that my writing style has changed since switching over to News Items. Part of that, I think, is due to the fact that I was usually creating news items in the browser, which makes me want to write less. Part is that my reading style has changed too.

I used to read TidBITS pretty frequently. After all, I got it via email. A few email addresses ago I stopped receiving it, and I forgot about it. But then I found this article about the recent unpleasantness with the iTunes installer. It’s well written, insightful, and strikes to the heart about what’s interesting and new about Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is a tremendous hybrid, with all the vigor and personality quirks that that implies. It has traditional Mac applications and all the power of Unix. And it has people from both operating systems coming to the platform. Now there’s lots of opportunities for conflict (Unix guy: “What kind of idiot names their directories with leading spaces and funny characters?” Mac guy: “What kind of moron digs an appplication that you have to type at the command line to use?”), but also opportunities for tremendous benefits when you combine both approaches to computing. Programming and using Mac OS X is like taking part in the creation of a new culture. Pretty darn cool, actually.

Spending => more spending

Home electronics upgrade month continues. We replaced our TV a few weeks back with a new model from Costco, and today we splashed for an Onkyo surround receiver. The audio sources are hooked up, and hooking up the video will wait for another day. However, there was a bit of disappointment about the remote control. It controls a wide variety of video devices, but not the CD player we have. And both the CD and the receiver have remote connectors on the back panels so that you can control one device with another–but the CD player is Sony and the two remote interconnectors are not compatible.

So I’m in the market for a universal remote control…