iT Design NZ

At last it appears there may be some competition in the broadband market. Pipe Communications and the Kordia Group are teaming up to lay a submarine cable to link NZ with Australia, Japan, and the USA. Cheaper broadband, more capacity, more competition.

It is interesting watching organisations make the transition to the Agile Development Methodology. Inevitably seems to lead to a bit of a cleanout of staff. Some people just don’t get Agile, and probably don’t want to. Fair enough.

Part of the problem in my opinion is that often the change will be made to ALL an organisations projects. To me, that’s overkill. Just like choosing the right programming language for a job, you also need to pick the right methodology. Agile works for some projects and not for others. 

When I first heard that PHP were setting a date to drop support for PHP4 I thought it was a great idea. Surely this would prompt web hosting companies to upgarade their systems to PHP 5, and we could start using some of the features of PHP 5 in mainstream deployed apps.

Well, the deadline has passed (Feb 2008) and still it seems many hosts are still offering PHP 4. Worse still, they dont seem to know how or when to upgrade existing clients without breaking PHP applications. Can’t say I blame them. Upgrading apps from PHP 4 to PHP 5 needs to be done on a case by case basis.

PHP 5 is 3 years old now. It’s taking a long time to shake off PHP 4 and all the problems associated with it.

Who is using OpenID? I know Yahoo! have implemented version 2, so there are plenty of potential users. Seems to me its far from mainstream yet. Clients don’t seem to be interested in it. I haven’t needed to get an OpenID… and yet I like the idea of it.

We use Google Apps at work. With this system you can choose whether to receive updates to the software as they are released, or wait until the general public have thoroughly tested them (through gmail, etc). Google Apps are then updated at a later date.

So, do we trust Google to get it right first time, or wait until new features are thoroughly tested?