Wednesday August 22, 2007

Kotatsu vs. SunRay

I've been working at home this summer, and it has been hot. We try not to run the air conditioner too much, out of ecological guilt. This afternoon I was really sweating, and had to put the air on in the room where I work. BW was kidding me gently about the room where she was not feeling warm at all, and suggesting that maybe my overeating at lunch was making me sweat. 

Later, I had to call one of my colleagues up in the Bay Area, and while I was complaining to her about the heat, I began to realize that most of the heat in the room was emanating from my laptop. It was actually quite painfully hot in some spots. I told her about it, and she smugly replied that her SunRay draws very little current, and thus is quite cool. This is what happens when you complain to a female engineer.

Anyhow, she got me thinking about my laptop's excessive power consumption, and the heat it throws. I started looking at it closely, and it appears that the heat is vented to the front, directly under my chin, whence it rises to bathe my face in extra warmth on a hot day. Gaahh!

It occurred to me that in the winter this would be quite pleasant, rather like a kotatsu, the Japanese combination of card table, heat lamp and quilt that my sister had told me about. She goes to Japan every year, and is quite fond of the communal kotatsu, where everyone gathers in the winter to play cards, talk and stay warm in poorly heated Japanese houses. So I guess I should switch to a SunRay in the summer, and save my laptop to serve as a kotatsu in the winter. Might save on the heating bill, but it lacks the conviviality that a true kotatsu would provide.

Is OpenLazlo the wave of the future?

My buddy Tony Vigna, uberconsultant and bleeding-edge CIO, has become quite enamored of OpenLazlo as a platform for building rich, interactive Web 2.0 applications. I've been checking out their site, and also Lazlo Systems, the commercial startup that produced OpenLazlo. I like their business model, which is to sell support and commercial applications based on the open-source OpenLazlo that they have released under the Common Public License. I also like their endorsement of OpenLazlo on the front end, Java on the back end.

I also signed up for a free LazloMail account, and I really like the rich browser-based experience. Other web-based mail systems I've tried have the look and feel of a washing machine control panel. LazloMail feels like a thick client, yet it's delivered in a browser. OpenLazlo definitely seems like a technology to watch.