Blog
December 14, 2005
The Promise of Ajax and DOM: Simple Event-Driven Widget-Based Web Applications
As a Web developer, I have a confession to make: I prefer writting desktop applications.
In an enterprise-level Web application, just to get a usable display tier you need to perform gymnastics in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JSP, Java, and Struts (a similar set of gymnastics…
December 5, 2005
NCI warns users about using IE
According to an email apparently sent to users at the National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services) on Friday, an IE bug could allow evil web…
December 3, 2005
Microsoft and OpenDocument
I’ve been following the firestorm over Massachussetts’ possible adoption of the OASIS OpenDocument XML format as their standard format for office documents with interest. The ability of governments (and indeed, all computer users) to have guaranteed access to their data…
December 1, 2005
foXpose — Tile your tabs!
I just installed Viamatic foXpose and my web browsing will never be the same again. With a single click, all of my open Firefox tabs are represented in thumbnails one one screen, enabling quick review and identification of interesting content. …
Kim Nelson, EPA CIO, going to Microsoft
Nelson to step down as EPA CIO.
Kim’s been a vocal supporter of e‑government and a strong manager. This
is a great move for her…and a great catch for Microsoft.…
Information sharing awards — Excellence.Gov 2006
Every year the eGov Shared Interest Group of the Industry Advisory Council (IAC), which is part of the American Council for Technology (ACT), organizes the Excellence.Gov Awards. Nominate your program now! The deadline has just been pushed back to December…
Backing up in real-time
I just purchased some new software: NTI’s Shadow 2. It’s pretty neat — makes an instant copy (to any mounted drive or directory) of any file that changes on your windows box. It even keeps past revisions of files, so…
NASA ditches IE in favor of Firefox
A little birdie told me today that NASA has given up entirely on Internet Explorer. Now, if you are an employee of NASA, every time you go to a page using IE, you get up to three prompts telling you how…
November 30, 2005
Silly SaaS
In his weekly InfoWorld column this week, Ephraim Schwartz invokes yet another acronym — SaaS, or Software as a Service. He discusses how products modeled after Salesforce.com are moving beyond the salesforce to invade other parts of the enterprise. But this…
November 29, 2005
Johns Hopkins accelerates Grants.gov plans
MIT participated in Grants.gov’s applicant system-to-system interface pilot, developing out their Coeus system, which is used by a great many grantees for their grants management needs. Steve Dowdy, MIT’s lead developer for this effort, is a very well-spoken advocate and critic of…