So, it turned out to be a well-timed Gillmor Gang this week for me, as I started listening to it on the same day as the PDC keynotes were webcast.

It seems that Microsoft is fast approaching a fork-in-the-road. The left fork represents the illusion of continued desktop dominance fueled by Wall Street hunger for sky-high profit margins in the Windows and Office businesses, and is very much grounded in the 20th-century Microsoft. The right fork represents the future of the company, battling for market share in a Web 2.0 world, innovating both in the rich client and web application arenas, playing fair by creating and building open standards, and doing all of this in such a way that the end user comes out the winner.

So which way will they go? Where's the new revenue model in the open world of the web when your sacrifice your existing business to get there? That's the big white elephant in the room at PDC.

Microsoft, stop charging for the tools. If Avalon, Indigo, Atlas, LINQ, Max and all the other goodies being dangled in front of developers this week are to ever gain any widespread adoption, they need to be accessible to the hobbyists out there. Give away IIS. If Apache is already free, what incentive is there to run IIS? Give away SQL Server, to at least level the playing field with MySQL. Give away Visual Studio, allow companies to develop and deploy ASP.NET and Indigo applications to their heart's content. Make it possible for the hacker in the basement (i.e., me) who's taken up Ruby on Rails to try your way of building web apps.

Jon Udell tells a good story in the Gang podcast of the difference between TerraServer and Google Maps. TerraServer has been out for years, has a public API, and yet has not inspired innovation or remixing in the way that Google Maps has. The conclusion was that Microsoft has too long focused on the developer as a professional ISV. In this scenario, the ISV is just a middleman preventing and stifling user innovation because the cycle is too lengthy. By the time developers have gotten around to building and distributing apps and getting some level of user adoption, there's no where left and no reason for the user to innovate -- it's too late. Of course, user customization and innovation is what the new 21st century web is all about.

So, Microsoft, take that leap of faith, get your stuff out there, gain adoption through cool, fun, programmer-friendly, easy-to-use tools and an open platform. Compete based on speed of innovation and the ability to retain a user base through that innovation without locking them in. Choice is what builds trust.

Take the Right Fork.

8:43:21 PM      comment []  trackback []

What a whirlwind week at OSCON! I'm still spinning and trying to catch up on sleep the day after getting back home from my first O'Reilly conference experience.

For me, the main themes this week were Java, Ruby, Ajax/Remote scripting and Subversion. I have some skeleton outline notes from several more talks that I'll put online shortly at my OPML blog. I'm still too overwhelmed to form these into fully coherent thoughts, and each could easily generate multiple blog postings.

Off the top of my head, here are a few random thoughts that were floating through my head this week:

• If you want to meet the best hackers in the world, come to OSCON. Open source programmers are the most passionate of their kind, and where there's passion there's intelligence, community and great ideas.
• If you want to hire the best hackers in the world, come to OSCON. The networking opportunities are absolutely incredible -- I was blown away. Now actually convincing a hacker to come work for you is a different story. It would help if your business had some kind of open source strategy, so that the hacker can continue to participate in the community and give back what he or she works on at your company. Non-open-sourcers will find it unreal, but it is possible to contribute to an open source community and still receive a lot of business ROI from the exchange. Paul Graham is quite possibly the most articulate speaker you could find on this subject. I was at his What Business Can Learn From Open Source keynote and it immediately struck me as great fodder for discussion at the cube farms back at work.
• Damian Conway is an evil genius. And his arch nemesis may be Danny O'Brien.
• As I mentioned it was my first time at OSCON, and I was really surprised to find the whole OSCON community extremely friendly and receptive. I never sensed any elitist attitudes (not that there probably aren't any here or there) and never felt like an outsider. To me, it's important that the community retain this sense of welcoming and open-ness so that we can further the cause and be better positioned to promote change for good in the world.
• Ruby is a super cool language, but it's not a panacea. There is still lots of room for growth in the language. During Matz's talk he mentioned that he wants to implement a sealing feature of some kind so that some Ruby code could be locked down or scoped to a single file only (unlike the current implementation where you can change any class, anywhere, on the fly). Ruby still seems a year or two away from fuller adoption in the enterprise, although that's not going to stop me from trying to use it.
• Likewise, Java's not dead either. The same players in the Java open source community are around and are still committed to the language. However, the politics can tend to get a bit more ugly.
• Subversion is ready for primetime and I can't wait to roll it out at work.

Like I said, my head is still reeling and my blood still pumping after a high-octane week. I'm looking forward to stepping up my involvment in the open source community and I hope to maintain contact with all the folks I had the pleasure of meeting during the conference. Cheers!

3:27:27 PM      comment []  trackback []

My raw outline notes from today's ruby sessions are here.

11:18:28 PM      comment []  trackback []

I'm here in Portland this week too for OSCON 2005. The first day was great but rather exhausting as the lack of sleep is catching up with me -- flight got in super late Sunday night/Monday morning.

The first day for me consisted of the Ruby track of tutorials. Dave Thomas was up first. He's got the conference speaking act down pat. Highlight: during a quick rant on static vs. dynamic typing, he said something along the lines of "anyone using java generics as an argument for static typing should be shot" which was tongue-in-cheek if not dead on right :).

Next up was DHH. David needs a little more work on his pacing -- he ended up at the finish line with a lot of material uncovered. It was basically a big coding session with David upping the standard for the "hello world" app of the new web development millenium by coding up a fully-featured blogging application in the course of a few hours. I had no problems following David; I've been toying with Ruby for a few weeks now, but there were several quiet moments where no one in the audience of over 100 caught the fact that he was adding a new action method to the wrong controller. You had to squint a little bit to see and appreciate the wizard at work; apparently not everyone appreciated David's style. If the Rails video didn't captivate you, then this talk wouldn't have as it was basically the extended remix :)

Looking forward to the Learning AJAX and Creating Passionate Users tutorials tomorrow...

10:08:52 PM      comment []  trackback []

Don't look now, but del.icio.us has become a podcast publishing platform. Could this supercede other podcast registry sites such as audio.weblogs.com, PodcastAlley and others? Ok, maybe not on the grand scale of things. But if you're already familiar with del.icio.us's social sharing and tagging capabilities, you can see that this could be a powerful combination with endless possibilities.

Del.icio.us will generate an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures when using any of the new special system:media or system:filetype tags. Adding in other tags with the "+" sign allows you to remix your own podcast of serendipity based upon the files that others are posting. Examples (some from Joshua's post, some mine):

• mp3s tagged as "mashups": http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3+mashups
• Free music: http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:audio+music+free
• "Podsafe" audio: http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:audio+podsafe (No items there as of this post, I guess the del.icio.us community hasn't beed "Curried" yet.)

(And of course, the RSS feeds of the above for your podcatcher are available on the page via the little orange icon.)

11:25:22 AM      comment []  trackback []

I absolutely love Bloglines and couldn't live without it. Having a centralized newsreader that stores my feeds and tracks what I've read minute-by-minute, no matter what machine I'm reading them from is a huge deal. Even now with my new Blackberry I can stay on top of matters with Berry Bloglines and feed status is still shared.

However, recently I had a string of days where I was too busy to even take a peek at my news. More than a few of the feeds are high-volume feeds such as the BBC, NYT, and Engadget. After a couple of days of being left unread, these feeds quickly would swell up to several hundred entries.

Now I completely understand that Bloglines would limit the number of posts per feed that it saves for me for practical reasons (I now know that this number is currently 200), but what struck me an unintuitive is that the data structure that imposes this limit operates more like a stack, when it should be a queue. Once a feed has reached the 200 post limit, no more posts are saved for that feed. It's like a stack or a "grocery bag" that is filled and can no longer accept any more product. Instead, what I'd like to see is that the saved posts operate like a queue or a sliding window, so that every new post that appears above the 200 limit simply bumps the oldest out of the queue. In this way at least when I go get caught up I'm not missing the most recent posts which are more likely to be relevant.

10:00:13 AM      comment []  trackback []

Finally sitting down play with rails on OS X. I had previously built Ruby 1.8.2 from source and installed into /usr/bin on top of OS X's default ruby -- seemed to work fine. Now, just upgraded to Tiger last weekend, got as far as creating a new rails model, when I got a nifty little error:

Access denied for user: 'root@localhost' (Using password: YES)

Seems that Tiger broke ruby for more folks than just me.

Whiz-bang-crash, several packages later...

• fix-ruby-tiger.sh from above
• download, build and install fastcgi
• download and install MySQL 4.1.12 from an OSX binary package
• download, build and install mod_fastcgi (apxs works!)
• install mysql gem (gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include --with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib)

So far, so good, but haven't reached the kicker yet...what amazes me though through this whole process is how transparent it all is. It's happening on a Mac, but it's all good ol' FOSS that configure && make && make install's as good as on any other box (except XP :).

10:35:58 PM      comment []  trackback []

Stumbled across an interesting post that points to the potential end of an entire consumer market: Point-and-shoot cameras.

Cameras are yesterday. Mobile phones are THE camera now, and as quality improves will become our ONLY camera.

Whether analog or digital, standalone cameras will just become another bulky add-on next to cameraphones. If my cellphone camera provided good enough fidelity for candid shots, why would I have a separate digital camera? As soon as cameraphones have multiple megapixel quality, cameras will be a niche market.

10:49:12 AM      comment []  trackback []