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The Apple iPad is still some months away from shipping, but I am already sick of it. Those who love all things Apple – Mac users especially, Mac loving press certainly – have talked this device to death. I hate the talk, and even I can’t avoid talking about it! (more…)

Michael Widenius certainly has his concerns about the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Michael is the original developer of MySQL and worked on the project for more than 27 years. It is worth reading his posts about the importance of the GPL in MySQL licensing and even goes on to tie the fate of MySQL to the free nature of the Internet. What I find facinating is that his argument is that the open source project requires a strong corporate master invested in making it competitive with closed source databases. (more…)

The state of Oregon still has over 11% unemployment; not the highest rate any more. But that doesn’t really mean the state economy is looking up. (more…)

ACTA aka Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is getting a lot of press recently, especially from the likes of TechDirt and Broadband News. ACTA is the most recent lightning rod for those who are critical of the music and entertainment industry intellectual property concerns.  ACTA is a good thing for the very reasons that the anti-RIAA and anti-MPAA crowd completely overlook – that artists who are not distributed through these publishing venues are being ripped off every day and the DMCA falls short in providing any sort of protection. (more…)

So what is REALbasic support going to be like for Valentina in 2010? (more…)

When is no news a feature? When its Valentina DB and Windows 7. Our ongoing tests so far with Valentina DB and Windows 7 have revealed no incompatibilities so far. But that’s just us though – no matter what we do, Paradigma Software’s compliance can’t fix it if your development environment itself has a problem with Windows 7.

Well – there is one fix, and that is to change your development environment. The more you rely either on very portable, non-development specific SQL or utilize the cross-platform, cross-environment native Valentina API, the easier it is to move your front end to another development environment.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, I had a free Saturday and decided to spend it at the H P Lovecraft Film Festival 2009 held in Portland, Oregon October 2-4, 2009. I wrote a review of the film festival for Lovecraft 3D, a new site in a state of betaness.

The Shade 10 E release team has been hard at work with preparing Shade 10 E  for market and its looking good.  There are a huge number of workflow based improvements, feature enhancements and strictly speaking – brand new features.

Much of the work related to Shade 10 E is focused squarely on localization, re-writing much of the support material, but there’s been a few technical updates that will likely get rolled back into the Japanese version.

If you are a Mac user, you probably know that Apple has shipped Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I am not going to try to review it – there’s an excellent and detailed review over on Macintouch. Many Mac users were surprised that Apple isn’t charging the full price for the upgrade that has become the norm for them; but after installing they understand why. Snow Leopard is more about omission than adding value – and in the case of Quicktime, a crippled product that should be the shame of the company. (more…)

Now that Wired and Digital Trends are joining in with Mac centric sites like MacWorld to pan Apple products, Ill weigh in as well. I have been a Mac owner since the early 90’s when I paid over $8,000 to get a Mac CI set up in Japan (with Mac OS 6.7-J), though in a past life as an educator and a student I spent much time warming the keys of Apple IIs. (more…)