May 2006

This month at FSL Technologies Ltd we've been doing a lot of thinking about how to promote FOST.3™. We've concluded that the most effective way is going to be to open source it.

There's still some way that we need to go before we can make the source available for download, but as a start I'm going to write a long series of articles that should make the design philosophy of FOST.3™ clear. I'm planning on calling this series Enterprise systems for geniuses¹ [1Business critical is probably a better phrase to describe the sorts of system that FOST.3™ targets, but enterprise is the current buzz (even if it's probably past its prime).] and the first parts should be complete within the next week or so.

If you want an early look at the software that runs this site you should get in touch with me.

New this month

The serious articles included one about why programmers need to discuss faults in systems and be open about mistakes they make. There are also suggestions as to how to deal with forms on web sites. Interview by under-constrained programming sparked a lot of visitors after I put a link to it on Reddit² [2I'm not 100% sure about the ethics of this sort of self promotion, but… everybody else seems to do it so why not me?]. I've also put up some stuff that I wrote a long time ago about the Thai alphabet and numbers as a start of a series on how to read the language.

Due to all of these new visitors and in the continuing spirit of openness I'm now allowing anybody to see my Sitemeter statistics. Don't laugh too loudly.

On the much less serious side I discovered an interesting punctuation mark and put up another wallpaper, Canna.