Esther Schindler

According to researchers from Queen's University Belfast, using wearable sensors, ordinary people could create powerful new mobile Internet networks. Doing so, they say, could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations.

Graphic from Queen’s University BelfastThe idea isn't precisely new. At a Comdex keynote address in the mid-1990s, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner predicted that using a mere handshake, it would be possible to relay GIFs, messages, and business cards -- using a computer built into the heel of your shoe.

Some early programmer names are familiar to even the most novice of software developers. You may never have seen a line of code written by Bill Gates, or written any application in BASIC (much less for the Altair). But you know Gates' name, and the names of a few others.

That's a darned shame, because the early microcomputer era (we didn't uniformly call them "personal computers" yet) had many brilliant software developers. Some of them went on to greater fame and fortune; others disappeared into the mists of history.

Telecommuting is great. I've been doing it full time for most of 20 years. But it isn't perfect. Working at home has its own set of irritations, some of which aren't well understood-particularly by those who don't telecommute.

Some telecommuting frustrations are minor things that seem too petty to complain about, especially to those who are stuck in rush hour traffic. Others are major problems that can affect your career. This article lists some from each category, provided by real telecommuters who have entirely too much personal experience.

Several weeks ago, Lynn Greiner's article on the state of the scripting universe was slashdotted. Several people raised their eyebrows at the (to them) obvious omissions, since the article only covered PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. As I wrote at the time, Lynn chose those languages because hers was a follow-up to an article from three years back. Plus, most IT managers are familiar with at least one of those well-known scripting languages, even if they haven't personally written a line of code in one of them.

However, while we've covered several in depth, those five dynamic languages are not the only ones developers use. Since every programming language is a tool suited to solve a particular problem, it behooves each IT shop to use the best tool for the job. So in this article, I share a few up-and-coming scripting languages that really ought to be on your company's radar, with a few passionate arguments from developers who have adopted them.

What does it take to achieve a successful, award-winning SOA implementation? Try asking Synovus Financial Corp., a provider of investment services, commercial and retail banking to 35 banks in the southeastern U.S. In late September, Synovus won a service-oriented architecture (SOA) case study competition sponsored by the SOA Consortium and CIO magazine. The competition highlighted business success stories and lessons learned for organizations pursuing SOA adoption.

Synovus' Emerging Business Opportunities partnered with NACHA, the Electronic Payments Association, and eWise, a financial software provider, to create a consumer secure vault payment (SVP) platform for a new Automated Clearing House payment program. The project reduces consumer identity fraud risks; it also gives merchants guaranteed payment from a consumer's financial institution at lower cost than credit card processing fees. By May 2008, Synovus had rolled out the SVP to 37 financial institutions. The project will continue until 2012.

Telecommuting used to be an obscure option in enterprise career benefits, trotted out only when an existing employee was so precious or skilled that the company would do anything to keep him -- including let her work from home.

The situation is very different today, in part because so many teams have team members in wide-ranging geographies. If you're not sitting next to someone in the same office, does it really matter whether the coworker is across the street, across town or across the country? So telecommuting (at least part-time) is fast becoming part of the usual way of doing business. As a result, it affects IT decisions, from VPNs to teleconferencing hardware choices.

Developers who adopt the Google App Engine for their cloud computing platform today may fear data lock-in, since the only way to import or export data is using a Python-based API. Google is working on a tool to improve data exchange to improve data portability.

The Google App Engine is intended to help developers build and scale applications to run on Google's infrastructure, says Peter Koomen, Google's product manager for App Engine. "It's still difficult to build Web apps," he notes.

It's a typical business scenario. Several people on a project have to create a set of documents: a report in Microsoft Word, a budget spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, the final presentation to the board using Microsoft PowerPoint. One person writes the draft, and wants input or changes from other project participants. So far, so good. But that's when productivity-not to mention disk space-heads down a rat hole.

All too often, people share documents by sending the files around in e-mail. Everyone involved adds his own changes (using revision marking, if the leader is lucky), and then e-mails back that unique file. The project leader has the unenviable job of incorporating all those changes, or there's a flurry of confusion when everybody waits for Jane to finish with the file so Joe can add his own text. And never mind that the security of your document is practically nonexistent as well; what would you do if your competition happened to latch on to your latest and greatest project description? Or your sales presentation for a key client? As a byproduct, the team creates huge attachments (often with no consideration given to file size-and PowerPoint files can reach 40MB in a hurry).

We can't live without e-mail. Even though the Internet standards warn us not to depend on any given e-mail message ever arriving at its destination, every business executive knows how important it is for the mail to get there. But if your mail server's IP address is stuck in a blacklist -- a list of addresses or domains identifying known spammers -- your e-mail newsletters and individual e-mail messages will be blocked long before they get to their recipients.

Blacklists are distributed in a format which can be easily queried by Internet applications, particularly e-mail servers. Many (if not most) e-mail administrators use blacklists (sometimes called RBLs, for Real-time Blackhole Lists) as one step in their process of removing spam before it ever reaches an end user. If you discover that your site or e-mail server is included -- even if it was all a terrible, terrible mistake -- you will discover just how painful and time-consuming it is to get yourself off the list. And in the meantime, your e-mail traffic is cut off.

Open source is changing the rules about how software is designed, created and distributed. But leadership isn't always nearly as innovative. Esther Schindler spoke with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth and two of the dudes who run SourceForge, and discussed some of the lessons the open source community could bear to learn.

Some projects -- in IT, open source, or the world at large -- become major successes. Others fail or (more painfully) they almost succeed; the projects or products survive, but never reach their potential. Sometimes the difference is luck, sometimes it's technology... but we all know instinctively that successful endeavors generally are the result of people working together to make the right decisions.