Mark Roseman's Blog

SMBs and SaaS.

(That would be "small/medium businesses" and "software as a service"). Interesting article on connectitnews.com talking about how smaller companies react to software as a service at this time, and the general consensus is "not very well". In particular it raises the issue that most such organizations would, with a few exceptions, rather own the technology and manage it themselves.

Though all the investment money is busy chasing the next great pure web SaaS play, it's clear this "niche" (ha!) of companies running much of their own IT isn't going away anytime soon.

Saving my desk.

Trying to get a handle on all the technology is continually a struggle, but I've been mostly successful at retiring the older stuff I've had kicking around, but still keeping access to all the stuff I need to use. The Dell laptop with XP has replaced the old Win2k box which is now sitting on a shelf elsewhere, and the Mac Mini has almost but not entirely replaced the circa-1998 Linux box.

Today I tried out Parallels for Windows on the Dell, and found it works quite nicely. and much cheaper than VMware too. This will give me a way to run those various Linux and BSD distros that I once in a while need, which has been a complete pain in the ass recently. My main machine is still a PowerPC not an Intel Mac, so running Parallels there is not an option.. besides, the Dell is hardly used, so this will be a way to give it a bit more usage.

So I think that's where its at for now; left to right: MFP, Powerbook (with a VNC into the Mini), big screen, keyboard and mouse for the Mac, and then the Dell with XP and then whatever under Parallels. The Mini (with two external hard drives) is hiding on the very right, and the old Linux server is in purgatory under the desk. So that still leaves the other half of my desk clear and technology free. For now.

Komodo.

Have been using ActiveState's Komodo IDE a lot the last few days, now that its available for OS X. Been a nice development environment to work in, in the sense of things just seem to work right, and the tool integration is excellent. It could stand to be a bit snappier in a lot of places, which I'd expect to improve over time, but otherwise no complaints.