A really quick note: one of my colleagues Ed Hartwell-Goose has written a post for the Google App Engine blog on Project WOW - a site for weather enthusiasts to send their readings to and be collated by the Met Office. It's well worth the read to see what we've been up to and some of the hugely high-performance stuff you can write for App Engine.
There's one question that I get asked a lot:
If you've developed for Microsoft's SharePoint before (I'm talking about 2007 here, but this applies to WSS2 and 2010 as well) , then you'll know that you can reach the limits of it's functionality very quickly. This is a big problem if you're making a zero-code solution, i.e. you have no access to Visual Studio and can't create web parts. This is more common than you'd think, especially in large organisations that use SharePoint extensively. For this, the only choice is to use SharePoint Designer 2007 (SPD), but it's not pleasant because, frankly, SPD sucks. I've not found a program that crashes as much as SPD, or that performs so poorly when presented with the most basic tasks. If you make a page that is too complex, has too many web parts, large data sources or lots of conditionals, connections and filters, it can take anywhere up to 20 minutes to perform a single action.
It's the end of an era for me. On Monday night, I got this e-mail from my old university hockey club
Well over a year ago, I wrote an article on the regulated rigidness that is Apple's product release cycle. I mapped out the next two years of Apple's product launches down to the month, and it has been the most viewed post on my blog for the entirety of last year, even eclipsing Smashing Mag calling my bookshelf "rough". nearly 40% of all page views were for that and over 80% of searches led to that page