My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

Google made its first public move today to put its brand on the mobile sector, announcing an Open Handset Alliance of 33 partner companies committed to advancing an open source platform called Android. Google's partners, gathered apparently over the last year, include T-Mobile, Motorola, Sprint Nextel, China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, eBay and Telefonica as well as HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI and Wind River. Obviously Apple, Microsoft and Nokia aren't members.

Do I care just because I am a Google fanboy? Not exactly, although that does amp up my excitement. With an open platform for development for mobiles, plus Google's conquest of Jaiku for its mobile/presence capabilities - I am a big fan of Jyri Engestrom, the founder of Jaiku, a smart and innovative person devoted to the Net's common good - this could be the disruption that turns mobile phones from annoying bricks of bad reception into a platform for apps that can assume constant presence and that know where we are and who our friends are. It could make FaceBook look like CompuServ.

Have you played with Google's Desktop tool? This is basically a strip on the side of your screen that lets you house small applications, called Gadgets. The tool is available for Windows, Linux and Mac so no matter your vice there is a flavour for you. There is a wide variety of Gadgets available, ranging from the usual news tickers and clocks right through to games and even being able to vote if a girl is hot or not!

Imho, Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It's like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod's contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series. Only in tech, a persistently immature industry, could such an idea be aired seriously (assuming Mike is actually serious). I hope that the Facebook people, many of whom have never been in the middle of a tech PR war, don't overreact. Me, I've been around this block so many times and it's boring. Let's see some software then I'll let you know if this means anything. But Google is keeping people like me far away, which suggests that there may actually be no 'there' there.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

As Microsoft's recent $240M investment in Facebook gives FB all the capital it needs to further its grand ambitions, some are concerned that one corporation should control so much information about the detailed personal activities and connections among individuals. Even before OpenSocial launched today, one individual had decided to outline an open source software architecture to address these concerns. He has published a technical overview of his ideas for an open source infrastructure for social networking, calling it 'Breaking Open Facebook with Open Source Software.'

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Gee whillikers. After hours on Monday Apple, the PC company people love to love, started behaving like Google. While its Q4 conference call was in progress its stock price went up almost $13 to over $187, a personal best, a position it then failed to hold. Even if it pulled in its December gross margin and had doubts Mac could outdo itself, September was a scorcher and December promises to be better still, it said, projecting earnings of a whopping $1.42 a share on revenues of $9.2 billion, better than the $1.30 on $8.7 billion that the Street has been imagining.

There's a really interesting (free) article by Amol Sharma in the Wall Street Journal about Google's expected cellphone software, and whether Google will be able to do the necessary deals with the mobile carriers. In addition to providing core Google apps (search, maps, YouTube, etc.), the rumor is that the Google mobile operating system will be open to developers who want to use the phone's services, such as GPS data.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

The European Commission said Monday that it's going to take another two weeks and change to weigh the widely criticized Google-DoubleClick deal and either rubberstamp it or plow into a deeper, months-long investigation. It was supposed to say something by Friday October 26; now it's given itself until November 13 to study the concessions Google is prepared to make to address competition issues and see if they'll pacify rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo who claim the $3.1 billion acquisition will give Google an uncontestable chokehold on Internet advertising.

Google is perhaps today's best example of a company built on calculative thinking. Like a grand master in chess, Google uses strategic feints to obtain its objective - winning the game. Google Version 2.0 shares the search and ad capabilities of Google Version 1.0, but it is much, much more. With a little more effort, Google could become the largest information publishing, distributing, archiving, and retailing operation in the world.

That anti-Microsoft pair, IBM and Google, are kicking in $20 million-$25 million apiece for hardware, software and services to spread the gospel of 'cloud computing' in the academe. They want budding computer scientists to learn how to write Internet-scale programs that process trillions of secure transactions a day and master massively parallel computing skills.

Joshua Cyr at Macromedia blogs writes: 'I got some spam from sys-con again today. I have tried for months now to get off their damn lists. At any rate the subject caught my eye. 'ColdFusion 8 is Here'. Thats odd... so I decide to read the email. Turns out their mail server probably just sent a big batch of old email since the mail date is October 9th, but the date in the actual email content is August 8th. Gave me a chuckle for so many reasons. :-) As for the acutal content... Most of the 'newsletter' is just ads and interviews that are actually advertisments.'

'The biggest problem here is that it looks bad for ColdFusion. The first print magazine dedicated to it has left the building,' says Michael Dinowitz in his blog about the Adobe decision to kill CFDJ. 'The very fact that they're moving the magazine from ColdFusion, an Adobe product, to Silverlight, a Microsoft product, can and will be used against ColdFusion.' Other bloggers directed their disappointment toward SYS-CON, the publisher of the magazine, rather than Adobe, which made the decision to kill the title.

The data protection commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein Thilo Weichert has written to EC antitrust chief Neelie Kroes saying the proposed Google-DoubleClick merger would mean the violation of fundamental provisions of the European Data Protection Directive and 'lead to massive violation of data privacy rights' of European consumers. Herr Weichert is particularly concerned about Google analyzing people's search behavior.

Google said Wednesday that it's added Postini's e-mail security and compliance service to its Google Apps Premier Edition just as it was expected to when it said in July that it was buying the company for $625 million cash. The Postini widgetry is supposed to be a come-on for the enterprise to use Google's hosted applications.

Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya Adobe was gonna buy that free Buzzword online word processing widgetry so it can finally get into the Office business. Adobe, which invented desktop publishing and saved one of Apple's nine lives, denies it's going up against Microsoft - and, if we're decoding the mutter from inside Adobe right, they're not just being cute - they think they're competing against Google's online software Docs - which is risky enough considering Google and its Toolbar are supposed to bring Adobe about $60 million-$80 million in Adobe Reader revenues every quarter.

A pre-release of the new book, SEO Notebook by SEOpartner.com, promises to give business Website owners and Webmasters leverage in real-world SEO techniques and strategies. According to the authors, SEO Notebook is a journal full of the tips and techniques used to make SEOpartner.com number one on Google - and keep it at #1 two years running.

Telefonica and Yahoo have announced a global agreement providing a framework for making oneSearch, Yahoo!'s mobile search product, the main search service on Telefonica's mobile portals in 15 countries in Europe and Latin America, potentially reaching more than 100 million consumers worldwide.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in 1997, and Google was officially launched one year later, making Google 9 this year. Google's birthday has alweays been celebrated on September 27th with a doodle displayed on the homepage, and today is no exception.

Well, now we'll get to see just how powerful Microsoft really is. The test is whether it can stop Google from taking over DoubleClick and becoming, in Microsoft's words, the 'dominant pipeline for all forms of online advertising' as well as 'the largest database of online user data in the world.' The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights held a webcast two-hour hearing Thursday afternoon on Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, the advertising company Google outbid Microsoft for.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

While trying out the Yahoo Mail Beta (in combination with the new Yahoo Mash Beta), I imported my address book from GMail into Yahoo Mail today - and was HORRIFIED when Yahoo proclaimed that it was now going to spam all my contacts and tell them about my 'new' Yahoo e-mail address. What on earth do they think they are doing? The system never asked me for permission to notify my contacts!!! And why would it do such a thing in the first place, when all I wanted to do was import my address book?! If you got a message from Yahoo today that asks you to update your address book because I switched e-mail addresses from gmail.com to yahoo.com - please accept my sincerest apologies and ignore that message!

What I need is a rich desktop application that can save files to my hard drive and if I need to make a shared copy, I can save to a shared location. If Google gave me a good 'Save As...' location from inside my MS Word or Pages '08 application, I might use it. Until then, I see these new apps from Google as just more crap to ignore while I go about my business. I haven't been impressed with anything I've seen Google put out since I started using their search engine. And to be honest, there's a couple search engines that lately have gotten so good that the only reason I use Google now is force of habit, not quality of results.

In the first, possibly serious, quasi-defection to the online software-as-a-service Google Apps Premier Edition, Capgemini SA, the $10 billion French consultant, said Monday that it will recommend the stuff to its clients which include major outfits like Eli Lilly and PricewaterhouseCoopers while continuing to support Microsoft Office. Perhaps installing Google next to Microsoft. Citing Gartner research Capgemini said that the SaaS market could grow 25% by 2010. Peddling $50-a-seat-a-year software in lieu of Microsoft isn't going to do much for Capgemini's bottom line.

He is the second executive in the past month to say he would leave Google's 44-strong executive team -- three years after the company's initial public offering. Chief Financial Officer George Reyes said he would retire by the end of 2007. Bosworth, who joined Google three years ago, had been thought by Google watchers to be at work on a major new health service. Since last year, speculation has centered on ideas ranging from a health information search service to a way for allowing Google users to create a personal medical record.

CFDynamics, a ColdFusion Web hosting company, has announced their hosting of Jumpstart?s Read for the Record Event Finder/Builder that will allow participants to find reading events being held in their communities on the record-breaking day, September 20.

September 13 being Roald Dahl's birthday (he was born September 13, 1916), Google is celebrating today with a special celebration logo on the Google search page featuring items and characters from Dahl's world famous children's books.

The Google Calendar API - one of many powerful APIs Google provides to AJAX Web developers - offers the little-known capability to embed a custom Web page directly into Google's Calendar. This hands-on tutorial instructs on the use of AJAX to build feature-rich applets within Google Calendar.

Many companies, including IBM, are beginning to find enterprise uses for Web-based Google Gadgets, including intranets, extranets and Internet applications. This talk gives an update on this fast-moving world, and the surprising ways people are taking advantage of this technology. Adam Sah is the architect of Google Gadgets and the Gadget Content Directory. Prior to Google, he was a founding engineer at several startups, among them Inktomi and Sensage, where he is a member of the board. He holds several patents in databases and Web systems.

With the recent rise in popularity of web technologies such as Ajax and Flash, it has become possible to create richer user experiences on the web. Even though these technologies are not actually new, we are now seeing their widespread adoption. One of the hallmarks of this experience is the move away from the neccessity of always having to refresh the page for interaction. Instead of a standard page-to-page experience, we now have the opportunity to more closely model the real flow of the user.

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. My intention here is to expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki

The inaugural iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (November 12-13, 2007) is building out its program and the Conference Advisory Board is busy sorting through the hundreds of proposals for technical and strategic sessions that have been coming in. Final deadline for proposals is September 10, 2007.

Google has started looking for a new CFO. The post's current occupant 53-year-old George Reyes said Tuesday that he wants to retire. Google said he'll stick around to help with the search and ensure an orderly transition, a process it expects to occur by the end of the year. Reyes has been there for five-and-a-half profitable years including its Dutch auction IPO in 2004. No reason was given for leaving. One would imagine it's to count his money.

'Google has caught the attention of enterprises with the low price [of $50 per user per year] of its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) solution. However, there's a catch: limited functionality and new information technology (IT) risks.' Burton Group senior analyst Guy Creese claims Google Apps could be a 'career-limiting move for enterprise architects' if they expect too much from the rudimentary widgetry. Even Google itself hasn't replaced its Office desks.