Stories by: Jon Udell

At the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT in September, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave a keynote talk on the slew of new and innovative Web services his company has recently launched. His discussion of MTurk, S3, and EC2 held no surprises for me, or for readers of this column and of my blog. But one of the questions posed by an attendee, in the Q&A period following Bezos' talk, was a stunner.

A well-known company issues a press release inviting reporters to witness its online debut. The year? Not 1994, but 2006. The company? Sun Microsystems. I had to pinch myself when I read the announcement: "Please join John Gage for a special event in Second Life." It's been a while since I got one of those.

Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code.

If you work with open source software, you've been to the place I'll describe in this column more times than you care to count. It always starts innocently enough. In my case, I needed to re-create a Linux-based development environment on my Apple PowerBook. The essential ingredients were Apache, Berkeley DB, mod_python, and libxml2. Pretty standard stuff, but I'd never assembled all the pieces on Mac OS X.

Apple's walled-garden approach places unnecessary limitations on its online educational content.

Tthe proper use of the HTTP verbs POST and GET, their benefits and hazards, can often seem abstract. Recently, though, two compellingly concrete examples emerged. The first involved a collision between Google's new Web Accelerator and an application called Backpack, which is built with Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework for the Ruby programming language. This was an unfortunate but timely demonstration of what can go wrong when HTTP-based software fails to distinguish between requests that alter resources and requests that do not.

The instant Google Maps appeared, a lot of us knew right away that we'd never use MapQuest again. Google's (Profile, Products, Articles) mapping and direction-finding service is a stunning improvement.

When it comes to cell phones, I'm a trailing-edge guy. Fancy, new smartphones are appealing, but my town lacks the network to support them. So when I dunked my phone into a pond recently while reporting a loon sighting from my canoe, my replacement options were limited.

Every fourth summer, IT trade pubs write about the technology that powers the Olympic Games. It's always an interesting topic, but apart from an enhanced focus on security, the Athens 2004 stories were little changed from their Sydney 2000 counterparts. And yet, this Olympics was utterly transformed, for me and for a few million other viewers, by TiVo.

Several weeks ago, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Michael Tiemann -- formerly Red Hat's CTO and now vice president of open source affairs -- spoke about the role of Fedora, Red Hat's free Linux distribution. To refute the claim that Fedora represents a fork of its core product, Tiemann appealed to a notion that is best summed up in a phrase popularized by Tim O'Reilly: "the architecture of participation."

We asked two open source leaders -- Brendan Eich, chief architect of Mozilla, and Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Novell's Ximian services business unit -- for their perspectives on Longhorn's Avalon presentation subsystem.