Photo by Badly Drawn DadI don’t know if it’s just instinct, but we humans have this sincere need to limit the amount of variation in anything we do. Ever sincy we started to live in stationary communities and worked our way up to professional farmers, we have been trying to eliminate variation as much as possible. Selecting the finest crop and weeding out the bad ones.

When after many centuries a certain Mr. Darwin explained to us that evolution actually depends on variation, nobody wanted to believe him. And we still don’t. Yet nature does what nature does best, defy human efforts towards standardization. And somehow we do the same. We come up with new stuff regularly and we call it progress.

But every time something new comes up, certain people start crying out that ‘this will replace that’, ‘this will win over that’ or ‘this must be phased out because of that’ etc.. It is a habit we’re born with, comparing things and classifying them as either good or bad. Recently I saw another example on LinkedIN Answers. Someone asked the community there whether PHP will win over .NET. I can’t help but feel a bit annoyed. Why can’t different species coexist and share an ecosystem where both can prosper? Why should the whole IT landscape be a monoculture?

And of course, it shouldn’t. Monocultures have significant disadvantages. We have seen that in agriculture a lot of times. One disease figures out a way to attack a certain crop and because of the monoculture kills every single plant or animal. This sort of thing has caused famine, disease and mass migration in humans and still does from time to time. Monocultures are vulnerable because the variation in disease resistance that occurs naturally has been selected away. This gives viruses and other pests a good chance to have an impact. Did you wonder why computerviruses are called just that? And why do they thrive in ‘monoculture’-IT-Landscapes?

In fact, there are more links to biology in the IT terminology field. How about bugs?

what about farms. What about LifeCycles, In fact we are also using biology-derived scientific fields like Taxonomy for IT related things as well.

We have these ‘climate-change’ like discussions on Google Chrome versus Microsoft Internet Explorer, and about Linux versus Windows. We have the Evolutionists versus the Religion-buffs when it comes to different development platforms. I guess there’s nothing new in IT when it comes to these subjects. So maybe, just maybe, we should learn a thing or to from biology, agriculture, and most of all history. Maybe variation isn’t a bad thing after all, maybe it brings stability while actually supporting us best. Maybe standardization aimed at minimizing variety is at least in part a bad choice that should be made carefully. Maybe we should ‘relearn’ choosing in the first place. (And I’ll come back to that in another post, promise!).

What about you? Don’t hesitate to comment below!

Photo by Neil CrosbyYup, another predictions post. Like you, I can’t wait to see what this year is going to bring. Let’s try a few predictions on 2010.

HTML5 is going to be something really big one day. Will it happen in 2010? I think so. But it depends on one big monopolistic Goliath mainly. Will Microsoft add HTML5 support to it’s browser platform? I don’t have the answer on that one. HTML5 is what will make most of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight rather obsolete. (and good riddens). Very promising technology!
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Recently a colleague of mine wanted my opinion on a situation he discovered with one of his clients. This client had an Oracle Database server with one database configured which was beeing used by multiple applications. He thought it wasn’t a good idea but wanted to hear my opinion on this. This is what I told him.

1. performance

Which application is causing bad performance? Monitoring separate databases is much simpler to setup than monitoring use on separate tables or weeding through all logging to see which parts of the database get pounded.
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In my previous post I talked about barcodes and QR-codes. One of my dear commentors, Aldon Hynes, asked me about the Microsoft Tag in relation to my post. I didn’t hear about that before so I went right at it. What’s that all about?

versus

Microsoft Tag is another system for tagging offline objects with a code or tag and allowing mobile users to connect to online resources that are linked to the tag. You see the MS tag pointing to my domain here. It’s, ahemmm, ugly. I guess taste is personal…
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Some of you have allready noticed two distinct barcodes on my weblog. One conventional barcode and a strange looking 2d barcode (picture on the left!). What’s that all about? Let me tell you a little more.

Barcodes are ways to create computer-readable information. The well known barcodes you find on your products in the supermarket and on books simply represent a series of numbers. In the supermarket product you can tell the country of origin and the manufacturer and product code from the barcodes. This is all governed by international standards. This means that (in theory at least) all different products have different barcodes and are therefor identifiable.
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Many will know the experience with computers that run Windows. The slowness of things. If you try to download Windows 7 today you’ll have a similar experience with that download. Here’s what it looks like:

Yes, it’s that time of the year… Let’s tell you what I think 2009 will bring. 

Windows 7. That’s one. The replacement of Vista should become available. Should we expect a lot from it? I guess so. Vista hasn’t seen the great support Microsoft surely hoped it would get. Many organisations will be skipping Vista in the hope Windows 7 will be better. But will it be better? I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but the reviews I’ve read are promising. The end of Q2, or maybe the beginning of Q3 will see the release. Consumers will adopt it pretty quickly (since they can’t avoid it when buying new computers). Businesses will probably start adopting Windows 7 after the first servicepack comes out. I expect to see that before the end of 2009 which means that the real start of the race towards market domination starts at the beginning of 2010. Is this a good time to move to an alternative platform?

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Standardization for interoperability is a good thing. Standards make interoperability possible, make governance easier and cost lower. But how should you go about choosing your favorite standards? In this post I want to tell you the way the Dutch Goverenment chooses and I’ll tell you why I don’t agree. (and note that this is my personal opinion!)

Standards in this sense are choices. Choices to use certain methods and technologies, and also the choice not to use certain others. It’s a way to limit the variation therefor making it easier to exchange date or interact between organisations and between applications. There is however a problem with limiting the possibilities. What happens when certain organisations or applications can’t support your standards of choice? Do you force them to change or do you make an exception? How do you accomodate the diversity that you are confronted with?
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It happened. Maybe I should say, it finally happened. The Microsoft Office Open XML format has been accepted by ISO as a true Open Standard. You can even get it for free here. This means that this file format has now the same open status as the allready open format ODF, used in Openoffice.org and Sun Staroffice. Let’s see if this is a good thing…

First of all let’s look at the perspective of Microsoft. It’s good to no longer loose against ODF because OpenXML wasn’t open. This means that Microsoft – or rather it’s file formats for it’s Office platform – can now better compete against ODF and the accompanying office-products. It also means that a lot of other developers might start developing tools around this format. Interesting things would be converters between different formats and generators for MSOffice-compatible files. This would help the Microsoft Office user as compatibility issues would be less a problem.
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