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Esther Schindler wrote a thought-provoking column on CIO.com last week, Business Social Networking Geography: Does It Matter Where My Contacts Are?

One of my projects in the past few weeks has been to put together a SOAP server for a client. So suddenly I've had to learn a lot of the nitty gritty details about what works and what doesn't...

While they're fresh, let me jot them down here. WARNING: Extremely technical content ahead.

I generally try to stay out of politics on this blog, but couldn't help it today when I ran across two stories today.

This week I'm at the Open Source Convention in Portland, aka OSCON. First impression, before showing up: it seems all focused on big business. Big ticket price. Lots of enterprise-related topics, and sponsors.

The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) has a great segment dissecting the criticisms/wild flames put forth on a series of shows on the TWIT network. Wanted to add a couple comments missing from their discussion.

I started writing a response to a discussion in the latest "Linux Link Tech Show" episode, but ended up with something far too long, so I've split it up into 4 posts.

In my early Linux system administration days, when I was first trying to set up a mail server with spam filtering, I ran across a really puzzling bug in Dspam, the software I was trying to get working.

What's extraordinary about the open source community is that this level of support happens all the time, every day, without charge, in hundreds, thousands of projects out there.

At Freelock, we're always trying to figure out ways to do things better.

Unbelievable. Microsoft was one of the first places to support WebDAV, and after a little investigation, looks like they've completely changed how they support it--with security implications, and an amazing amount of brokenness...

Once upon a time, for a period of about 8 years, picking a document format was safe and easy: save it as a Word document, a .doc file. The vast majority of businesses could open, edit, and print it with no difficulty whatsoever.

This mythical golden age of Word arose after Microsoft conquered the world of Word Perfect and Lotus 123 by bundling a “good-enough” version of each into a single package, Microsoft Office. After a few generations of painful Office upgrades where every new version had a slightly different file format, Microsoft finally matured into a format that it kept stable for three versions in a row—Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. And the overall interface has stayed stable much longer than that—there weren't any dramatic changes to the way you use Word between version 3 (when I started using it, back somewhere around 1987 on a Mac) and Office XP, in 2003.

With Office 2007, Microsoft completely changed the interface to its new “Ribbon” style. It also introduced a whole new file format. And now, only a year later, the new format is obsolete. Yet businesses are unknowingly starting to use this new docx format, not understanding that there are only a couple of minor advantages it has, while having several enormous drawbacks.

Packtpub is running a sample from a developer's guide for customizing SugarCRM. The author describes how to set up hooks for particular modules to build a custom workflow.