doink   (it's one of those things about nothing) homus || backlog || elsewhere || huh?   Friday, March 30, 2001 zelerate (formerly opensales), the company with the leading open source ecommerce software, has all but shut down. this is a bummer. their product was pretty solid, but they overspent and weren't able to develop a large enough development community to make a real business of it. at least since the product is open source, it will live on beyond the company. (9:32:18 AM) Thursday, March 29, 2001 more eservices bad news today: Organic laying off 35% of its staffers, and marchfirst has started a 50% reduction. it's officially really ugly out there... (4:15:47 PM) Tuesday, March 27, 2001 Best practices for open source (10:47:04 AM) one-time eservices industry darling viant is in a world of hurt. (10:42:29 AM) i'm back from ol' mexico. and boy is my body confused. after vegas, phoenix, and puerto vallarta on consecutive weekends, i caught a full-fledged cold while in pv, and the flight back was just miserable. i was dog-tired when i got home last night at 10, but then i was wide awake and craving pasta at 3am. i need a few days to recover. once i get my photos back from these trips, i'm planning on doing a little travelogue type of thing, so stay tuned for that. (10:41:00 AM) Friday, March 23, 2001 puerto vallarta is great. more when i get back. note to self: start travellog. (3:52:36 PM) Thursday, March 22, 2001 apologies for the sporadic updates lately. trips to vegas, phoenix, and puerto vallarta (in a few minutes) in the midst of some contract work, have limited my time for doink. regular updates should resume next week. until then, hasta la vista! (8:32:14 AM) Wednesday, March 14, 2001 today i felt something that i hadn't felt in a while: the rush from solving a vexing technical problem. i'm doing some coding for a freelance gig i'm doing, and i'm building what should be a fairly straightforward app. but because of some of the integration requirements, it's turned out to be a toughie. and tonight, i had a breakthrough. it's probably unique to a small subset of hardcore geeks (or maybe it's even just me), but there's a big adrenaline rush that comes along with breaking through a big technical blockade. breakthroughs get me excited about building stuff, almost as much as seeing people using the things that i've built does. and excitement is good! (10:08:47 PM) interesting write-up on eric greenberg, founder of floundering e-services companies scient and viant. he sounds like a swell guy. not. (10:02:25 PM) Tuesday, March 13, 2001 razorfish has started a voluntary termination program in several of its offices. apparently, they're still high off of some bubble buzz, because they spin this as being part of their "performance improvement plan" (PIP). they've already improved their performance with PIP by laying off 20% of their workers last month. i can't wait to see what improvements they make next! (12:14:58 PM) Monday, March 12, 2001 Linux is like pizza. (11:33:41 PM) marchfirst lost its CEO, COO and a VP one week after its CFO resigned, and it's now being run by a committee of outside investors. they'll be shutting it down by the summer, i'd wager. (11:29:59 PM) Thursday, March 08, 2001 vegas, baby! vegas!!!! (1:37:04 AM) Friday, March 02, 2001 there's been a big debate raised around some comments jim allchin, a high-ranking microsoft official, made a few weeks ago. he basically said "open source is unamerican". microsoft later clarified this, to specify that it's just the gpl that is evil. the folks at newsforge have weighed in, as have open source heavyweights richard stallman (original author of the general public license) and tim o'reilly. an interesting discussion all the way around. my take: microsoft is running scared from linux, and they're trying their typical fud tactics to try to quash it as much as possible. (4:31:10 PM) ibm is now bribing its partners to learn linux. brilliant! they're also about to roll out a multi-million dollar advertising campaign called "Peace, Love & Linux", featuring tux, the linux icon. things are heating up! (1:22:18 PM)   powered by blogger        copyright © 1973-2001, mike manning