Mark Brownsword

November 7, 2010

Open standards

I’m quite impressed with the current drive for and adoption of open technology standards in business. Open standards include (but are not limited to) UML, WSDL, HTML etc. Open standards demonstrate forward thinking in systems architectural design that is attempting to prevent long term vendor lock in e.g. ‘WSDL first’ Web Services development decouples the […]

July 22, 2010

My Epiphany

Recently I’ve groked standards based web technology in a way that can only be described as an epiphany. This doesn’t mean I’ve turned my back on what I’ve known before, rather it means I’ve seen through my indifference to building software for the browser in a way that makes me a better developer. Specific technologies […]

April 17, 2009

Critical Thinking

It’s interesting how different points of view can lead people to have different opinions given the same basic information. I’ve been a long time fan of building desktop software for Windows and have resisted the move to the web based technologies that are strongly favoured by the enterprise. My argument has been to choose the […]

April 13, 2009

Live Mesh

Live Mesh is Microsoft’s offering (currently in beta) on the future of Cloud Computing for consumers. Live Mesh integrates with Windows Explorer and lets you specify folders & files that you want to synchronise between your devices. Currently I only have one device in my mesh (my laptop), but this still gives me a backup […]

April 12, 2009

Getting Things Done in the Cloud

There’s been a quiet buzz lately about ‘The Cloud‘ and the expectation that we should all be committing our data files for safe keeping at Microsoft or Google or where ever. Aside from the obvious privacy concerns being expressed there are practical advantages of being able to access your digital life from where ever you […]