The little one's in bed, trying, in her excitement, to get to sleep. Except she's not so little anymore. At 10, she's very wise to the ways of Santa, so that little piece of magic seems forever lost.

But is it always so?

I finally wrote something for the Hyperic blog:

The term innovation opportunity has been discussed by Matthew Aslett, who described it as "the potential to lower development costs for business users, while at the same time raising their potential to focus on innovative development..."

When I was growing up in Indiana, a bazaar was akin to a fancified garage sale--right in there with white elephant sales. Now, of course, having been a part of this community for almost a decade, whenever I hear "bazaar," the counter-image of a huge gothic cathedral immediately pops into my head.

Gee, thanks, Eric Raymond. :)

Of course, after today, another meaning will be attached to this beguiling word, thanks to the auspices of Mark Shuttleworth and his band of coders over at Canonical.

SWsoft announced that in 2008 it will adopt "Parallels" as its new corporate name. They also announced a new unified computing vision. SWsoft is probably best none for their Plesk hosting control panel. SWsoft also has seen great success with their Parallels virtualization solution especially with the recent popularity of Mac OS. Parallels has been a useful way to run Windows virtual machines well before the days of VMware Fusion.

I don't often do a "me, too" column or blog entry, but the latest screed from John Dvorak really set me off. Overnight, I outlined what I wanted to say, and then discovered that Bill Thompson over at the BBC had already written most of the salient points I wanted to make.

So, in fairness, he gets top billing on LT front page today, and this entry will be a "related link." A "me, too," if you will.

Update: Following the initial post of this blog entry, Janrain representatives contacted me with some factual corrections. I have updated the article with these corrections, and extend my apologies to Janrain for the errors.

The OpenID community released OpenID 2.0 last week, and Monday JanRain, one of the primary commercial sponsors for the protocol, announced their support for new spec, and I had a chance to speak to company founder Larry Drebes about the news.

I know, it doesn't seem like earth-shattering stuff. Online identity management specs get updated, news at 11? But as I was talking with Drebes, a couple of things stuck me: is JanRain too ambitious, and will that ambition get them into trouble down the line?

I am fascinated by the ability how communities drive companies. Or how they can propel companies. Today I am speaking at a conference for SugarCRM (an open source CRM vendor) and the keynote was given by a chap that really gets it.

(Yeah, my wife says I'm so easy to get along with...)

One of the things I really like about the Linux community is that many members of the community are not shy in expressing how they feel. Many of my fellow journalists, having been on the receiving end of said expressions, might be wondering at this point if I am in need of some kind of intervention.

But I was not referring to flame-fests; the aspect of communication I really enjoy are those writers and bloggers that like to look at a product--play with it, mangle it, or what have you--then put together a review for the rest of us to read.