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From time to time I get recruited to help someone export mail and contacts from one e-mail program and import the data into another. The fact that a civilian must recruit a geek to accomplish this seemingly mundane task speaks volumes about our industry's sad history of data lock-in.

Like many of you, probably, I tire-kicked Google Spreadsheets when it first arrived on the scene, then forgot all about it. A nice bit of AJAX hackery, I thought, but no serious competition for Excel. I was wrong, though, and here's an anecdote that explains why.

At the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT in September, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave a keynote talk on the slew of new and innovative Web services his company has recently launched. His discussion of MTurk, S3, and EC2 held no surprises for me, or for readers of this column and of my blog. But one of the questions posed by an attendee, in the Q&A period following Bezos' talk, was a stunner.

If you set out to explore XQuery, the XML query language, you'll soon encounter a collection of examples, or use-cases, that show how XQuery can query and transform XML data. These scenarios are elaborated in a W3C document that presents a sample data set -- about books, authors, prices, and reviews -- and enumerates a set of queries against that data. For each query, there's a description ("List names of users who have placed multiple bids of at least $100 each"), a solution written in XQuery code, and an expected XML output.

If you search the Web for "fortune500.xml," you'll find an ordered list of the Fortune 500 companies. It's just what you'd want if you were writing a custom portfolio application. But it didn't exist until last week when Doug Purdy, a Microsoft program manager, created it while writing his own personal portfolio application.

There's one thing I wish screen-sharing systems would do well: screen sharing. I watch a lot of demos projected to my computer. It's always a struggle, both for the presenter and for me. Windows or Mac? IE or Firefox? Who has the latest version of the client? Who's the host? Which application is shared? Can you see my screen?

Two weeks ago I wrote about an invitation to join Sun's Oct. 10 debut in Second Life. On the same day, coincidentally or not, IBM invited me to its alumni virtual block party on the 12th. I'd been itching to try my hand at virtual cinematography, so I donned my avatar, went to the party, and used the in-world movie camera to document the event.

A dozen years ago, I wrote a Byte cover story on the subject of computer-telephony integration. CTI was "right around the corner" back then. Every time I revisit the subject I conclude that, regrettably, it still is.

A well-known company issues a press release inviting reporters to witness its online debut. The year? Not 1994, but 2006. The company? Sun Microsystems. I had to pinch myself when I read the announcement: "Please join John Gage for a special event in Second Life." It's been a while since I got one of those.

Security pros know there's no perfect defence against a determined attacker. So when an identity thief strikes, it's vital to detect the theft. But who's going to be the detective?

The announcements from Amazon Web Services just keep on coming. The latest news flash is FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), which will make Amazon's warehouse, its customer service, and its pick, pack, and ship machinery available to sellers.

Every seven years since 1964, the filmmaker Michael Apted has released another installment of . These films document the lives of a diverse group of Britons from the ages of 7 to, most recently, 49. One of the patterns that emerges is a dramatic illustration of the Jesuit motto that inspired the series: "Give me a child until he is 7 and I will give you the man." You can clearly see how these kids' very different personalities were fully formed at age seven.

At the 2004 Open Source Convention (OSCON), Jim Hugunin, the creator of Jython, made the dramatic announcement that he would be joining Microsoft to pursue his latest project, IronPython, a Python implementation for the .Net CLR (Common Language Runtime). The timing was awkward for OSCON -- nothing chills the room like news that an open source hero is emigrating to Redmond -- but it was opportune for me. I had just written the keynote talk that I would deliver a few days later, at the Vancouver Python Conference; it ended with a plea to consummate the marriage between popular dynamic languages, such as Python and Ruby, and the dominant managed runtimes, namely the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and the CLR.

Back in 2003 I was trying to drum up interest in Peter Wayner's book, Translucent Databases, which shows how to build and operate databases whose contents are opaque to their operators. Three years later, there's still no serious discussion of why translucency should be a key architectural principle, or how it might be applied.