When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · January
· · · · 04 (6 entries)
IDE Bet · I’m happy to announce that sometime in early 2007, David Berlind will be buying me a nice dinner. Today, David wrote a piece noting that Lattix (interesting outfit, by the way, check out the demo) is joining Eclipse, and concluding “Is it time for NetBeans to finally throw in the towel?” Misguided of him, I thought. So I’ve proposed a bet: we’ll have a nice dinner together first time in ’07 that we’re in the same city. If, at that time, David still thinks that throwing in the NetBeans towel is a good idea, I’ll buy dinner. Otherwise he buys. Fortunately for David, my tastes in food and wine are fairly plebian.
Upcoming Gig: ETech · Sometime in the March 7-9 window I’ll be talking about “Atom as a Case Study” at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which is billed as being about “The Attention Economy”. I’m looking forward to this just because I’ve heard good things about ETech, but never been to one before.
Upcoming Gig: NYS CTG, Albany · Those acronyms stand for “New York State Center for Technology in Government”, which is under the umbrella of the University at Albany (part of SUNY). On January 25th in Albany they’re having a conclave entitled Thinking Beyond Your Web Site: Lessons from the XML Testbed Project, and I’m really looking forward to being a part of it. Obviously, the intersection of XML and State Government is very, very interesting territory at this moment in history. I’ll try to evangelize of course, but it’s more important that I do some listening; I think most of us in the industry don’t have a good enough understanding of the issues the end-users down in the trenches are facing.
Upcoming Gig: Northern Voice · Now, this is going to be fun. On Saturday February 11th, at Northern Voice 2006, I’m going to be doing a sit-down interview with Dave Sifry and try to entertain the audience for 45 minutes. I think we should engage the whole room in a big argument. Last year was a fun and moving, too.
Upcoming Gig: OSBC · In San Francisco on February 15, I’ll be at the Open Source Business Conference, on a panel called Open Source Software and Standards Revisited, convened by Andy Updegrove, along with Bob Sutor, Stephen Walli, and Jason Matusow. Yow.
Upcoming Gig: XBRL San Jose · On Wednesday Jan. 18th I’ll be at Adobe in San Jose talking at the XBRL Meeting. XBRL is about something that I’ve long felt is important: standardizing financial reporting. I’ve struggled a whole lot over the years with accounting principles and financial reporting, which are generally speaking a snake-pit. Those of us who’ve dealt with this stuff were less surprised by Enron and friends, because “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” have historically included lots of latitude for egregious lies. The best answer is transparency, give intelligent investors enough information and they’ll sniff out the bad guys. Getting from the mess we’re now in to complete transparency has two essential steps: first of all, the regulators have to make Generally Accepted Accounting Lies punishable with lots of jail time. Secondly, we need technical infrastructure so we can build some standardized tools to do financial analysis; these exist today, but require a whole lot of hand-tweaking to weed through the GAAP-approved hand-waving and make one company’s numbers comparable to another’s. XBRL isn’t the solution, but’s an important piece of the puzzle, and if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m there.
