Links for February 19th through February 22nd

A little something extra…

It’s no secret that I’m down here in Texas. Us Texans are big on telling people that. Apparently, we’re also big on being stupid, with about about 30% of us thinking humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together. They call this Yabba-dabba-do politics down here, and it seems to work well for some of the more opportunistic right wing folks.

At the same time, it’s interesting that The Big City Slickers in Texas – Austin and Houston – are all into renewable (or at least new forms of endless capital) energy. And that doesn’t shake the sense out of your head, Houston now has an openly gay mayor. Yeah, that Houston, the one in The Land that Good Sense Forgot.

Weird – fun – times here in Texas.

And let’s talk about Houston for a second while I’m off-topic: it’s a pretty nice city, you should check it out before you assume it’s a rotten-egg smelling swamp – a sentiment I’ve heard a distressing amount recently.

Being a native Austinite, I was breed by city culture to think that Houston was The Enemy. “Don’t Houston my Austin,” bumper-stickers would say. Having spent much time there now – my wife is from them parts – I actually like Houston a bit. I mean, let’s not go so far as to say I’d want to live there over Austin, but it’s a fine place to hang out.

The Links

• Austin Ventures team starts a new firm | Starting Up
• CollabNet chews up scrum dev house
  CollabNet beefing up their agile offering.
• Big Blue says Power7 will make world smarter
  "Of course, the real issue in the new integrated systems world is having the full stack to tune for optimal performance – something that IBM cannot do because, unlike Oracle, it is not an application software provider. But IBM is aware of this and last year tweaked its sales force to do more solution-based selling with its ISV partners and to compensate its sales reps accordingly. 'You will see us do a lot more partnering and selling with our ISVs,' said Adkins."
• What Is This Devops Thing, Anyway?
• Teacup, Meet Storm, pt. IV: Adobe Blocking HTML5?
  Post-Identity 2.0, it's easy to forget the eye-rolling drama that comes up in the (now) old-school standards world: "So, to get back to Hixie's original complaint, two aspects of it appear to be untrue. First, Adobe's complaint is not a secret at all – it's a procedural thing that was posted to a public mailing list February 5. Second, this complaint is not blocking HTML5."
• Rackspace Cloud Partners
• Paremus and RTI to Deliver Next-Generation Enterprise Cloud Platform
  Enterprise Cloud Platform
  Sub-title: "A distributed OSGi-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution for low-latency, high-throughput enterprise applications "
• Carlyle's Ta Chong Bank Uses `McDonald's Strategy' as Koh Awaits Approach
  This quote is fantastic: “You buy a burger for something like $3, and you can use the toilet, you can rest, you can park your car,” he said. “You give the bank a million dollars and you can’t do that? I’m trying to change that.”
• The credit crunch has shattered America's 'neoliberal dream'
• TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
  "Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll." Yee-haw.
• TEDxAustin streaming online: watch it here
  "Given the number of varied, free social-networking and tech-related bar camps that regularly happen in town, some cried on Twitter that the event, with its tight invite list and $50 admission fee, was elitist and not keeping with the spirit of Austin. (Funny, you don’t hear a lot of that when it comes to what people pay to attend SXSW Interactive.)"
• What’s on at Mix 2010 – some surprises as Microsoft talks standards
• Adobe Photoshop Hits Twenty
  PhotoShop turns 20.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.