I was looking forward to this mornings breakfast … it’s always a good
set of conversations. I got to share my success in getting
OpenDarwin working in Virtual PC 2004 … I also started a new OpenDarwin Experiences blog where I’ll write about my experiences.

We started off talking about Yahoo! and Google for a bit … comparing
their financials and discussing Google AdWords and search technologies
in general. It was surprising to see that Yahoo! still exceeds
Google in revenues. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

Someone brought up the subject of Google Maps,
and the various hacks that are out there. It’s amazing to see
just how far people are taking this amazing new medium. I brought
up the USAPhotoMaps product that my friend Joe Skehan showed me.

The topic of Microsoft’s new XML file formats came up, and that took us
off into a conversation about whether the open/proprietary formats
really matter. I don’t feel that they make much difference
anymore, and I used C# and Visual Studio as an example … even though
the C# language is now supported cross-platform by the Mono project,
the Mono development environment does not come close to the level of
functionality provided to a developer in Visual Studio.

Phil brought up ActiveGrid
which is a “LAMP stack based system for building web
applications. It looks like a pretty impressive solution for
developing SOA applications. This (for whatever reason) caused me
to think about my recent experiments with Greasemonkey and what I
think is the next generation of real innovation in browsers. I
really believe that client side post-processing of web pages is going
to grow and become more and more commercialized.

The subject of identity theft came up, with one of the folks telling us
about how someone had recreated a physical copy of his credit/debit
card and was using it … in Indiana! They indicated that the
“card was present” at the transactions … even though his wife and him
were here in Utah. We talked about whether RFID would solve any
of this, but I talked about how you could probably create an RFID
skimmer, just as easily as a ATM Skimmer.

We wrapped up talking a little about hacking – and getting hacked – and
the potential for Open Source Web Service intermediaries.