Friday, July 25, 2008 - Posts

Apache Software Foundation

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Sam Ramji gave a Keynote at OSCON today and announced:
PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team.

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

I listened to Ray Ozzie yesterday at the Microsoft Financial conference and he indicated movies like this were in the making, but our community needs support too.
posted Friday, July 25, 2008 3:05 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Randy Pausch October 23, 1960 to July 25, 2008

Randy Pausch loses battle with pancreatic cancer at 47

Whitney Hess was a student of Randy's at CMU - He taught the most difficult course I took to receive my degree in Human-Computer Interaction. It was called Programming Usable Interfaces and was essentially about how to express your ideas through functional prototypes. The course materials introduced me to the most prominent thought-leaders in the field (Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Jesse James Garrett, Steve Krug), and the assignments were unbelievably rigorous.

Randy insisted that any GUI developer or user experience designer (the course contained both types) worth his salt has to have the ability to prototype his ideas and the balls to test them with real people. And ultimately, the inner strength to admit he was wrong and make the design better.

In May Randy spoke at the Carnegie Mellon University commencement ...we don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well.
The Last Lecture
posted Friday, July 25, 2008 10:19 AM by paul with 0 Comments