One of my favorite Mac programs is OmniDazzle. When it’s on, I always know where my mouse pointer is.

Earlier this week I upgraded VMWare Fusion to version 3. Unfortunately, now I can’t have OmniDazzle on while I’m using Fusion. For some reason, when you first start a VM in Fusion you have to click in the window (or press command-G) before input is sent to the VM guest, and with OmniDazzle on this doesn’t work. Well, if you click four or five times one of them will eventual get through, but then Fusion switches back immediately to “you must click in the window” mode.

So now I’m getting in the habit of turning off OmniDazzle whenever I launch Fusion. Bummer.

(I wrote this last week, but apparently clicked “save” instead of “publish”.)

Sputnik, spaghetti and the IBM SPACE machine: The 50th anniversary of the 1401

I’m glad we have the Computer History Museum to keep stuff like this from being forgotten. According to the article, they have two restored and working 1401’s.

Because of some comments I made, a correspondent on the SAG-L mailing list asked my opinion about zIIPs and zAAPs and software licensing. I thought I’d post part of my answer here.

My take on this is that the industry hasn’t figured out a rational way to price software, so all sorts of silliness or even evil keeps happening when businesses try to charge for it. I’d recommend this blog post: The Economics of Software.

So, software is expensive to produce but cheap to distribute. On the other hand, it’s not easy to switch from one “brand” to another. From the point of view of economic incentives, software vendors are a lot like drug dealers. If you’re not already a customer, they’re willing to provide it for you cheap in order to get you hooked. Once you’re hooked, though, they can make a lot of money by raising their prices.

For IBM, where they are the only supplier of the hardware needed to run the software, you have hardware lock-in as well.

If you look at everything IBM has done with zSeries pricing in the past decade or so, a clear theme emerges: they are trying to lure new customers to the platform while continuing to extract monopoly-level revenues from their existing customers. Whether we’re talking about IFLs and zIIPs and zAAPs or z/OS.e and zNALC, it all comes down to that.

The W3C  has advanced CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3 to Last Call status.

Of course, this won’t do much for people still using IE.

Or at least their web site now looks like it belongs here.

Although I’m not sure if the redesign is really an improvement, other than appearance. By shrinking the navigation bar at the left of the home page they’ve added clicks to getting to a lot of content, and many of the new pages are quite incomplete.

Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites

This anecdote illustrates the most serious manifestations of the data-jail problem. Third-generation version-control (hg, git, bzr, etc.) systems pretty much solve it for code repositories; every checkout is a mirror. But most projects have two other critical data collections: their mailing-list state and their bug-tracker state. And, on all sites I know of in late 2009, those are seriously jailed.

I’ve been wondering lately if UTForge shouldn’t switch to git from subversion, and this is one of the reasons.

The winners were announced last night. Someone affiliated with the University was a cowinner of the Physics prize:

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.

I’m not sure if my favorite was the study showing cows that have names give more milk than cows that don’t, or the guys in Mexico who made diamonds out of tequila, or the brassiere that can be converted into two gas masks.

(via The Register.)

via Mainframe Watch Belgium: IBM Archives FAQ (pdf).

IBM has a really good archive site; you can find information about nearly every product they’ve ever sold. A good contrast to most corporate web sites, where the only information available is for stuff they’re currently selling.

Why Apple is betting on HTML5: a web history

The article contains a disturbing number of typos, but is pretty good overall. I particularly liked this description of the late 1990’s browser wars:

With Netscape and Microsoft racing to outdo each other in unique features, the glacial pace of the sausage-making deliberation on how to best implement HTML as an interoperable standard began to run aground. The bottom of the barrel was reached with Netscape’s BLINK tag, which Microsoft matched in silliness with its own MARQUEE tag; both unplugged HTML from the goal of delivering serious documentation presentation and instead targeted the web at replicating the garish desperation of gaudy neon signs in a red light district.

That pretty much nails it.

Mainframe emulator goes commercial

Roger Bowler – the creator of the open source Hercules mainframe emulator – has put together a company called TurboHercules to try to commercialize the decade-old program that he created as a “programmer’s plaything.”

Rather than go straight at the IBM mainframe base, which many a company has tried to do and ended up in court, TurboHercules is taking an oblique angle of attack on the mainframe base, positioning a commercialized version of the Hercules mainframe emulator as a platform for disaster recovery machine for working mainframes and their software stacks. So, if you are reading this, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, IBM’s New York lawyers, this is not about replacing existing mainframes, but about giving their software a place to run when the mainframe crashes. (I didn’t think that happened…)

…

But all the modern mainframe platforms – z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM – have license restrictions that do not allow for customers who have versions of the code running on real mainframes to load that software atop Hercules – except for one provision in the IBM software license agreement, according to Miller, that allows for mainframe shops to load their software onto another machine in the event that the box on which it is licensed fails.

This is why TurboHercules is positioning itself as a provider of x64 and Itanium platforms suitable as emergency backup boxes for modern mainframes. Not as a box for supporting legacy (but not ancient) mainframe operating systems or new ones, but rather as a poor man’s disaster recovery for a state or local government, for instance, that these days does not have the budget to buy two System z10 BC mainframes, much less one, but is sitting on older System/390 or zSeries mainframe iron and nonetheless needs some kind of disaster recovery iron if this old kit kicks the bit bucket.

That usage scenario is eerily similar to a mainframe shop I’m somewhat familiar with.