Software

Not 4 hours after posting my most recent blog stressing the importance of setting up systems with disaster recovery in mind, fate stepped up and thwacked me. "Oh yeah, think you're so resilient?

If there's one thing that's constant in the web world, it's change.

If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?

If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.

If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.

At Freelock we're in the midst of building dashboards for ourselves and for customers, to really dial in our process and let us know where to focus our improvements.

A couple weeks ago NPR's Planet Money and This American Life had some really great episodes about the broken patent system. These are great stories for people who don't understand why patents are a problem, but they overlooked a couple of crucial points.

Yesterday Drupal.org got hacked, and potentially all the password hashes on the site fell into malicious hands.

Hey, that's not what I was thinking!

That's a very common complaint customers have with developers, when they receive the result of weeks or months of hard work. And it indicates a failure of planning.

I was talking with a new client the other day who spends a lot of money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to try to get people to visit his online store. And yet his blog -- what search engines value most -- was on wordpress.com.

At Monday night's MIT Enterprise Forum event, Mark Anderson headlined a fascinating sideline discussion of the "Coming Tech Wreck."

Will asks:

> I ... have been thinking about alternatives to QuickBooks. I sent these links to my bookkeeper but she has not used any of these. Do you recommend any of them, or is a “custom open source” option viable for me at this point?

Customer Relationship Management. After the term being around for the past 15 years or so, it seems CRM is becoming a really hot thing right now.