Definition of Smart

:)

Where Is Dr. Neil?

This question is being asked so much at the moment I decided to recreate the Where Was Dr. Neil web page. As the Virtual Earth team removed support for the older (less than 3 years old!) version of Virtual Earth, the old site was broken and I have not had the energy to repair it.

In the last month I received more than a dozen emails asking where I am, so I decided to rebuild the page using the new Virtual Earth Silverlight control. the Virtual Earth Silverlight control was announced (again for the third year) at Mix09 last month. It took less than a couple of hours yesterday evening to put this page together. 

One of the things that I have always seen as very important is the ability to customize the experience with the map. I feel that, while the Silverlight Virtual Earth control lacks some of the functionality I might like to see in a full GIS system, it does provide a great new opportunity to build rich mapping experiences.

You can now track me again here.

Open for Cloudy reasons

The latest buzz in the Cloud computing blogosphere seems to be on the Open Cloud Manifesto. This is a strange document, which at its core seems to be based on the fact that a bunch of companies do not want to pay for the effort of others in order to gain their own business advantage. 

Suggesting that all the software that supports cloud computing needs to be open source, leaves no room for a business that wants to innovate and capitalize on IP created to enhance the cloud computing effort.

It seems that IBM is one of the key players behind this manifesto. IBM has long been a strong proponent of Open Source as, for a consulting and services company, software is a cost in their business model. Reducing this cost to closer to zero is something they must strive for. As a software developer I like to get rewarded for the software I create and innovate. 

Reading the manifesto it seems to be a very limiting concept; blocking innovation of new programming models, blocking innovation of new protocols and blocking the independent innovation of cloud technologies.

While I can see advantage in defining some standards for protocols I think we already this with W3. It is not clear to me what this manifesto adds to the cloud computing world.