Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Oracle Corp. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun and Oracle for over 15 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

 

September 2010
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OpenOffice loses this round

I use spreadsheets every now and then for pretty trivial things.  Recently I’ve been using google docs spreadsheets because they were online and editable from different locations easily.  A few days ago I tried to use OpenOffice for a fairly simple sheet.  I’ve used OpenOffice on and off for years and years without ever becoming a [...]

Mac OS X — Dock review

I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for a week or two as my main desktop environment, and I’m really liking the Dock for icons and such.  For the last 20 years, I’ve wanted a window manager that combined the quick-launch buttons with the running program icons.  I’ve finally gotten my wish.  But after using [...]

Twitter needs to be commoditized.

Twitter needs to be commoditized. What do I mean by that? I mean that the Twitter message streams need to interoperate with all my other message streams. Twitter is just a bunch of logical message streams from different people. I don’t really care if my messages are coming via twitter or RSS or IM.  Why?  I’ll [...]

OpenID starting to take off (finally)

I found this on del.icio.us/popular: A video showing how to use OpenID to get a portable login that you can use with many different web sites.  One password, controlled from one spot. And you can get your free login identity from multiple different web sites offering the OpenID service.  Check it out.  Back to your holiday [...]

Markets without Marketing

Engineers can help management (though not necessarily marketing) by saying “Don’t ask how we can make money with this technology. Ask how we can make money because of it.’

I just read an article by Doc Searls at Linux Journal called Markets without Marketing. It is a really good, short, perspective on the changes that Open Source [...]

Anti-help

This is great. I’ve complained about vacuous GUI help before, but I was just faced with the worst example I’ve ever seen.  I almost laughed out loud when I saw it.  A file chooser comes up in this tool, and glued onto the left hand side of the file chooser is this fine specimen of useful [...]

I don’t get all the keysigning hubub.

I’ve been reading about keysigning parties today, and trying to study about OpenPGP (which uses a so-called “web of trust” and S/MIME (which uses “certificate authorities“). S/MIME is simpler to use and it’s top-down. You get an official company to vouch that your cryptographic key (your certificate actually) really belongs to someone with your name and [...]

Credentials and Identity (part 2)

First I will apologize to Bob, for being vague about which postings I was responding to. I’ll take more specific pot-shots next time. Next, I will thank him for taking the time to give me such a thorough response to my last blog posting. I appreciate the prodding to put more thought into [...]

Credential Theft

I’ve always been interested in on-line social mechanisms, and identity mechanisms are crucial to developing a ubiquitous on-line community. I’ve been reading blogs by some Identity Pundits, and a thought occurred to me just now. (The guys I’m talking about are: Bob Blakely and Kim Cameron) These guys take an approach that a lot of [...]

Some thoughts on Licensing vs Copyright

IANAL. This stands for: I Am Not A Lawyer. It doesn’t stand for “I (am) Anal”, although if you took a cross-section posts starting with that acronym you might be hard pressed to prove it either way. A lot of the people who like to argue about legal issues are very “detail oriented”.

Also, please note that [...]