This year’s 2009 Software Industry Conference was no disappointment. With some great speakers and great company it was an excellent chance to put some faces to names that we knew only by email and newsgroup postings.
This year we spent a lot of time talking in the hospitality suites, here’s who was on hand:
Stand on the Shoulders of the Giants
I have been developing a script that shows bar graphs. While similar
systems already exist, this one particularly is geared towards
accessibility. I was inspired on CSS For Bar Graphs. However, a major improvement is the added flexibility that comes from implementing it in ECMAScript. Even with these changes, the prevailing
first intention remains: that the graph is readable in plain HTML,
which is why it is appropriate for an accessible design. It works by
firstly creating the appropiate DOM tree of the graph, and then
applying the corresponding styles.
There’s been a lot of talk about the latest e-commerce platform to emerge on the scene. We took the time to talk to Michael Dadoun, UpClick‘s COO. Here’s what he had to say.
1. UpClick is the new kid on the block’ in a world of many e-commerce services. Why does the web need another payment processor?
This was the day many people had been waiting and hoping years for… Google takes up the Open Source / Linux code base and enters into full competition with Microsoft in the operating system market. Now it is official, as Google announced on their blog yesterday. The “Chrome OS” will be, like Android, based on the Linux kernel and essentially a Google-sponsored re-write of the user interface over that to build a next-generation, cloud OS geared to run web apps. The most important point here is “browser” based vs. “desktop” based, because with that comes all of the potentialities of cloud applications, remote hosted drives, distributed computing, SaaS, etc. Since the Chrome OS is being specifically targeted at netbooks, many are also pointing to Adobe Air applications vs. traditional desktop apps as future standards. The last point though highlights the main asterisk to the announcement: the Chrome OS will be optimized for netbooks first, rather than desktop PCs, which most users and virtually all professionals & business users rely on.
According to a SEC filing by the publicly traded company RackSpace, the power outage that caused its servers to go offline for an extended period last month will cost the company up to $3.5 million USD in refunds. According to the report: “We have experienced power interruptions which have affected a portion of our Grapevine, Texas data center. We have posted updates on our recent power interruption on our website blog and our customer portal for the benefit of our customers. We are continuing to assess the financial impact of service credits due to these events. Currently, our preliminary range for the resulting one time service credits is estimated to be between $2.5 million and $3.5 million. Our website blog is located at http://www.rackspace.com/blog/ .”
Acquia, the start-up company founded by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer & founder of Drupal, has announced that they are now providing paid search indexing for Drupal sites on a subscription basis aimed at enterprise sites. Similar to Mollom, Acquia’s anti-spam software for CMS platforms, Acquia Search will also work for those running other open source software like WordPress, Joomla, TYPO3, etc as well as sites with proprietary code. Acquia Search is based on the Lucene and Solr distributions of Apache, and essentially works by having Acquia index your site’s content on their computers and then send it with encryption on demand to supply user queries using an integrated Acquia Search module. According to the announcement, Acquia is using Solr server farms on Amazon EC2 to power this on cloud architecture.
