Last week I was listening to Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path sharing her successes and failures as an entrepreneur with Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership program. In the pod cast she highly recommend a book called: The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. She recommended the book so much that I decided to purchase it. The book arrived last night. I am only through the first chapter and it is already inspiring me!
Thank you Janice for the recommendation.

The European Union has proposed plans for a new European Institute of Technology. It is going to be based across multiple sites in Europe and the hope is to create more commercial projects from R&D work. It is hoped that this new Institute will provide a European rival to MIT.

Ever since I studied a module in Concurrent programming in my Masters I have been fascinated by thread programming. Growing up many moons ago as a junior programmer I was always lead to believe that threads are a bad thing and can lead to some very serious problems.
This can be true if you are not aware of some of the principles of thread programming but in the right hands they can be a very useful tool in a programmers tool kit.

One argument that keeps raising it’s head is that Synchronization is a big hit on performance. Brian Goetz has discussed this in an article of his entitled Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends. The first urban legend that he discuses, is this very topic. It is interesting to see that some programmers may compromise their programs thread safety for what they perceive to be faster code.

I have been looking on Blogger for a way to categories my blog entries, if anyone knows how to do this with Blogger can you let me know, via the comments.

Thanks
Stephen

I went along to the IIA -Irishdev.com – DJMG web 2.0 event in the Morgan hotel last night.

It was very interesting to see this Irish Developer movement. There was a real sense of new beginnings. I got talking to Fergal Breen, of Irishdev after the talk. We both agreed that Web 1.0 was full of people that got involved without knowing what they were doing. The post 2001 downturn in the IT sector has shaken all of these people out of the picture. Employers want people that really know what they are doing and that is an important aspect of web 2.0.

Is this the next generation of web design?

I hope it is.

Will it change all of our lives?

Lets participate and find out.

As Paul Browne reiterated in his lecture, web 2.0 is all about choice and communication. People need to feel that they are in control. The freedom to personalize web page (Google Personalized Homepage) or simple the freedom of information. To know what a company knows about you and that you can remove the information if you wish.
We have to move away from an era of “big brother is watching us” and start trusting big brother.

How are we going to gain this trust?

Choice, freedom, honesty.

There are going to be many challenges to face along the way. We have new Architectures and User interfaces to learn. We also have the ever present issue of security to overcome. It’s not going to be easy but it is going to be fun.

One short term goal that I learned from last night is this:

If I want my web site to join the web 2.0 paradigm, I need to increase my font size, round the edges on all my boxes and blog, blog, blog…..

I read an interesting article on developer works. In recent times there has been a major shift towards code quality.

In the article James Conallen discusses how test coverage tools are an important part of a developers armory but high coverage percentages do not always guarantee the quality of the unit test.