OK, I'm at Day 1 of the Worldwide Compuware Uniface User Conference (CU2008) and it's pretty good. I've always liked Uniface - its a productive way of building rich applications at an abstraction level somewhat above that of C++ (although that's a...

A chance to talk with Danny Sabbah (General Manager, Rational Software) at the London Rational Software Developers Conference (RSDC) is not to be missed—but more of that anon. First, I was impressed at the conference by the sense of...

Well, Sybase is telling a good story at TechWave - but the devil will be in the implementation detail, so it's good to talk to customers. But aren't the customers at such events carefully selected? Of course—but there's a difference between...

At Sybase TechWave 2008 in Las Vegas, John Chen (who has served as chairman, chief executive officer and president of Sybase, Inc and probably made it what it is today) questioned why, given its good revenue results and technology successes,...

On my way to the latest TMF (Test Management Forum) meeting, I was running late for my train. So, I attempted to use the automatic ticket machine at my station—only to give up when it decided to time out rather than process my Visa card, and...

Ah, before I forget, some news for the Informix fans out there. It hasn't escaped my attention that some ex-Informix people aren't entirely enthused by the IBM takeover and doubt IBM's real level of commitment to the product. My...

Regularly, we seem to get scare stores about the skills shortage in IT (for example, in Computer Weekly for 10 June 2008 we read that the number of computing student numbers in universities and colleges has dropped nearly 50% since 2001 to below...

So, RSDC has this team of hero programmers fighting the Dark Side of programming—using the Sword of Jazz and the Shield—or hiding behind something looking like a Second Life avatar..... It's all so cool—but the...

So, I've got up at 6 for the analyst breakfast, after having heard Bob Dylan's son play at the RSDC Telelogic Welcome Party last night (he's not a patch on his Dad IMHO)—but what did I see at RSDC that I didn't expect to? That's always the...

So, it's now Day 2 at at IBM RSDC (Rational Software Development Conference) 2008, and what are my impressions so far? Well, first, if you are one of the small (?) group of people who have written Rational off as impossibly clunky and so not...

Well, I was feeling the lack of a Blog—my last one was with Reg Developer. This is going to be a lot of random jottings, based on some 30 years experience with, mostly dysfunctional, IT. My usual POV is of someone who has heard most...