• How did IT fall so far behind the tech curve? - It is true, the future of IT needs to be a hybrid on several levels from on-premise vs SaaS and IT being the top-down dictator vs user-defined bottom up approaches.
• Motorola goes all-in for Google Android - While I think my iPhone is a fantastic device, especially when jailbroken, it is closed, proprietary, locked in to AT&T (in the US) and a host of other negatives so I'm definitely interested in how Android matures over the next year which will be about the time my AT&T contract is up.
• SaaS: Shelfware as a service? - SaaS is not a cure all (no duh!).

• Street View: We can trike wherever you like - Trail view?  River view?  Someday, house view?  Send your suggestions in.
• T-Mobile Data Loss Falsely Reflects on Cloud Computing - "We need to stop calling everything that does not exist within our firewalls 'the cloud.'"  Well said.
• EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source - Well written article, but is MySQL an exception or will what the EU is doing become the new rule?

• Google Wave: The moral equivalent of sliced bread - Interesting back and forth between ZDNeters.
• Mono-mania: It's risky business - Good read on how Samba and Mono are different when it comes to patent protection.

As I mentioned last week, we were able to get a number of talks on Java EE 6 at Oracle Open World and the Oracle Develop conference going on as I write this in San Francisco.  In looking for folks thoughts and reactions to what they saw, I came across a blog entry by Cay Horstmann that I thought hit on a bunch of the key points we were hoping to share there so deserved a mention.

A few quotes from his blog:

"I cannot overemphasize how much simpler EE6 is than just about any web programming model I know. All of the bad parts of the old EJB are gone. No XML. No crazy packaging of WARs and JARs inside EARs. Annotate your beans and persistent objects, and let the container worry about the database, transactions, clustering, and so on."

"Similarly, if you haven't given GlassFish v3 a try, you are in for a very pleasant surprise. It is fast. Startup is not just faster than JBoss, but faster than Tomcat! Hot deployment works great, there is a nice admin UI and a scriptable command line interface, and the Eclipse and Netbeans integrations are first-rate. I can't see myself going back to Tomcat—there just would be no point."

If you want to learn more, visit glassfish.org and download GlassFish v3 Preview which will give you early access to these new capabilities Cay mentions.

One of the cool features of the iPhone OS 3.0 was the built-in Voice Memo app.  No longer would I need to deal with a separate app and having to transfer the files around awkwardly as they just sync with iTunes nicely.  WooHoo!

Well, it was a woohoo for only a bit, as I discovered this weekend that the Voice Memo app seems to stop recording around 25-30 minutes now.  A bit annoying as this caused me to miss about 10 minutes of what I was recording as I didn't notice it right away.

"Why might this be the case?" I asked.  A bit of Googling revealed this thread on Apple's discussion forum where the consensus is that OS 3.1 broke this and introduced somewhere around a 74.3 MB file size limit.  Depending on what you are recording this causes it to stop somewhere between 25 and 35 minutes it would appear.  Worse, reports are that when it stops you can't start recording again for a minute or so.

So, what was a cool app that solved a real use case is now useless for anything that might go over 20 minutes.  Back to using 3rd party apps as it doesn't appear Apple has even acknowledged this issue let alone said when it might be fixed.  Has anyone else ran into the problem or found a solution other than a 3rd party app? 

• The T-Mobile-Microsoft Sidekick data disaster: Poor IT management going mainstream - Ooops.  But is this really cloud?  Or just a regular data center not being backed up?  James Governor's 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing may help answer that.
• Apple versus Microsoft: The top 20 stolen ideas of the OS wars - It is interesting to remember where some of the features that we take for granted came from.
• Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on - It was great to see Scott on stage and Larry went after IBM.
• Windows 7 boots 42% slower than Vista, says study - Ouch, are the claims of it being faster just smoke and mirrors?  More concerning, "By the end of a simulated two-year period, Windows 7's startup times increased more than 330 percent."

Oracle Open World comes around every fall and while Sun has been a sponsor in the past, for the first time, at least in my recent memory, we will have sessions for Sun software, specifically around Java, and more specifically for my interests around Java EE.  And not only are we at Open World but we are at the smaller Oracle Develop event being run at the same time.

At Open World, the Java EE specific sessions are:

• S312765 - Java Platform, Enterprise Edition: The Foundation and Future of Your Enterprise - Tom Kincaid - Monday 4pm-5pm Marriott Salon 4
• S312767 - Easy Database Access from Java with Java Persistence API 2.0 - Linda DeMichiel - Wednesday 10:15am-11:15am Marriott Nob Hill AB

• Mickos letter to EU: Approve Oracle-Sun deal - A good read that (IMHO) accurate outlines the situation.
• Dell creating Android phone? - Interesting move, but surprised about this: "Interestingly, Dell is splintering the Android stack and shipping the phone with modified or missing Android libraries, making it a bit harder to program. The tipster reported that some apps won’t work on this version."
• AT&T ends iPhone VoIP restrictions; Skype set free - Great news.

• IBM Challenges Google's Webmail Dominance - The price is right, but it admittedly has fewer features than Google.  But both are a lot cheaper than the offering from Microsoft according to the article.  This is a clear indication though that IBM doesn't consider cloud e-mail only for consumers and doesn't want to cede that market to its competitors.  For those interested in such things it does support IMAP IDLE and they do have a free trial, but you have to call to sign up.  Now isn't that old school.
• Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype - I have not tried it (I'm open to an invitation anyone!) but this makes it sound like it is far too busy an interface to deal with for any type of quantity of groups/friends/messages.  But it is early and I'm sure Google will improve it.

I follow the Amazon Web Services Blog and recently saw several announcements about new Public Data Sets being available.  What is a public data set you ask?  From the web-site:

Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.

What is cool about this is that it greatly simplifies getting access to large sets of data that while public in the past, were difficult to work with as you had to download, install, load, and otherwise provide the infrastructure for and manage all the data yourself.

The one that caught my eye was the Daily Global Weather data set.  Now, I haven't used this yet and there are other great resources for local weather station data like the Weather Underground (where I upload my station data by the way), but this is a great way to gain access to a bunch of historical weather data.  Other data sets include census data, Wikipedia data, geographic data, and more.

One drawback for data sets that are continuing to be updated each day, like historical weather data, is that you aren't accessing a continually updated data store, rather you are creating your own EBS volume from a snapshot.  This means (if I understand all this correctly) that if you need the most recent data, the snapshot must be updated regularly and you would have to update your EBS volume from it manually.  Or perhaps there are tools to assist with that.

All in all, a useful service, and a great move by Amazon to drive more users to EC2. 

• Prepare to freak out! iPhone developers are using apps to pass your phone number to telemarketers - See this too.  It appears it is easy enough to do through the API or sending an SMS that this would have been exposed earlier.  Did Apple's review process just miss this one?  Even if there is a purpose for such and API, you'd expect a pop-up like there is for sharing your location with an app so the user could approve the use.
• GM, eBay pull plug on online car sales experiment - I hadn't taken a look, but if I was car shopping I would have.
• Microsoft vs. Google: An e-mail showdown at L.A. City Hall - The future for commodity apps like e-mail is the cloud, but is it ready for the City of Los Angeles?
• Life With Snow Leopard: One Month Later - Nice but not compelling according to this review

AT&T released today the long awaiting carrier settings that enables MMS on the iPhone.  This is great, and woefully late given that every other phone has supported MMS for a long time, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Getting MMS enabled involved checking for updates in iTunes and then syncing my phone.  Once done, you have to reboot.  Upon rebooting running the MMS app provides for attaching a picture or when using the Photo app you can now compose an MMS from there.  Great!  So how well does it work?

Alas, I tried sending an MMS to my boss and he received nothing.  I sent again, and still nothing.  So I sent an SMS and that got through fine.  So something isn't working with MMS.  Now, he has not applied the update on his iPhone yet so perhaps that is the issue.  But in the past when an iPhone was sent an MMS at least an SMS was delivered with a convoluted link to a web-site where you could enter a password and view the media, so I'd think it would have still done that, but no.

What are others experiencing?

I'll be able to update another iPhone and try between updated phones shortly and will report back then.

Update: Original try was to a 3G running 3.0.1.  Subsequently tried to one running 3.1 but without the carrier settings and it too failed.  Updated that one with the carrier settings and now it works.  So it appears the MMS hack of the past does not work now if the MMS is sent from another iPhone. 

• Starbucks App Uses Your iPhone to Pay for Lattes - Limited to Seattle and Silicon Valley for now, but still a creative idea.  Soon you'll be able to leave your wallet home and just take your iPhone!
• Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program - This is a great idea to jumpstart use and adoption, but the restrictions are pretty strict (build web-sites, less than 10 employees, can deploy to only 1 quad CPU box).  And do you really want to get locked in to a technology that you know you will be paying for in a few years when there are open-source alternatives?
• Layer 7 introduces Securespan Gateway AMI for Amazon EC2 apps - A great offering for those that need this type of security for their cloud based applications.
• Google suffers 2nd email disruption in a month - I'm a Gmail user and did notice the disruption, but its free and isn't causing me to look elsewhere, ..., yet.
• AT&T iPhone's to get MMS - Not that big an issue for me, I just e-mail photos.  But I will give it a shot and do my part to contribute to overloading AT&T's network.

• USB group none too happy with Palm's iTunes hack, either - I wonder if Palm even tried arriving at an agreement with Apple?  Would Apple even consider it?
• As Eclipse Kits for Cloud Arrive, Amazon Deployment Wins - Forrester's John Rymer takes a look at some different kits mostly for Amazon.
• How the Spaceship Got Its Shape - Great historical read for those space or aeronautical buffs out there.

• Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this - Good read, although the comments seem to challenge how big a part XMPP plays.
• Space Station Fly-Around - An impressive and educational animation.