The idea of a configurable keyboard, that displays key assignments based on the application isn’t really new. The optimus keyboard is another example. However, the helpdesk version of the keyboard is pretty unique. (Thanks, Manuel.) I can think of a few more key assignments, for example, “Ugh”, “I’m in a tunnel…”, or “Any” for people [...]

I need to congratulate Edmund Stoiber and Jürgen Rüttgers, Ministerpräsidenten (Governors, sort of) of states Bavaria and Nordrhein-Westfalen for delaying the infamous spelling reform of the German language. Demonstrates guts and is the right thing to do. The spelling reform is a huge waste of time, energy, money and every other resource and pretty much [...]

There are a few interesting discussion threads at the Armageddon blog and at GartnerWatch. Being a Gartner analyst, I thought why not disecting some of the comments and claims there. Here we go…
First, I’m delighted that at least one Gartner Analyst is working well with Gartner ConsultingGood observation. I’m the only analyst that does that. [...]

Looking back a year or two, many small (and not so small) vendors in the data quality space and data integration space were gobbled up by larger entities: Acta, Sagent, Trillium, Group1, Avellino, Dataflux, Vality, Enosys, Nimble, Venetica, Avaki, Evoke, Mercator, Striva, Ascential, Data Junction… add to that the M&A; activities in the larger business [...]

In my job, I spend a considerable amount of time watching the data quality and data integration markets, including user adoption, best (and worst) practices, and major blunders by large organizations. Right now, I’m struggling with my bank, because they keep sending me marketing stuff although I’m already a customer. Now, the problem is, they [...]

A friend has just sent me this image. Can you figure it out? If it doesn’t work for you, move away from the screen and try again. OK now?

I hate flying KLM. There is simply no other way to put it. I’ve flown them 5 or 6 times in the past few weeks, their airplanes suck, business class is a joke, and every single flight was at least 45 minutes late. I’m writing this post from Schiphol airport (yes, it sounds like something [...]

I noticed some obscure Firefox behavior recently. When using multiple tabs and switching between them, eventually Firefox becomes less responsive, the disk starts spinning like crazy, Firefox keeps eating memory and the page file grows at about 5-10MB per second. I have once had Firefox block over 1GB of swap space. At the same time, [...]