Nick Sieger: tech

Microsoft, Competition and the Right Fork

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:43:21 GMT

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.

Goodbye OSCON

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 20:27:27 GMT

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!

OSCON OPML tutorial notes

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 04:18:28 GMT

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

Me too OSCON

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 03:08:52 GMT

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...

Del.icio.us as podcast publishing and remixing platform

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:25:22 GMT

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.)

podcasting del.icio.us

Bloglines per-feed article limits should function like a queue

Thu, 26 May 2005 15:00:13 GMT

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.

Ruby on rails trials on OS X

Wed, 25 May 2005 03:35:58 GMT

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 :).

The end of point-and-shoot cameras?

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:49:12 GMT

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.

Delicious not so tasty today

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 15:05:16 GMT

A single attempt to post to del.icio.us resulted in me seeing:

Sorry, you have been banned for 30 minutes.

Note to self: Time to start backing up my del.icio.us posts regularly. Maybe del.irio.us isn't looking so bad anymore...Update: Yes it is, eww! It's completely down!

Update 4/26: Found out the reason I was banned. In the posting bookmarklet for del.icio.us there is a white "." hyperlink. I'm guessing it's there for testing purposes, and I must have tabbed to it unintentionally.

Blogging as parenting

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 03:38:25 GMT

One thing I've found in the couple of months that I've decided to put words onto page in this blog is that it's a committment. I've already been through a couple of droughts and spurts. If my blog was a child it would be the youngest one sitting in the corner sulking. Not acting out (there is no RSS feed representing the absence of content on the blog), but just sitting there in a knowing fashion that I'm not giving it any attention. Or maybe blogging is like gardening. Hmm, I suck at that too :)

Couple of the things I've checked out lately that are eyebrow-raising:

Greasemonkey, a user script manager for Firefox. All those sites and webapps with terrible usability can now be tweaked to your heart's content. Too bad it doesn't work in my copy of Firefox. Might be time to uninstall and install clean; I've been upgrading 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 on top of an existing installation.
Amazon's A9. As a search interface, I like the columns and the customizability. Maybe over time I'll find myself migrating back to the bare-bones Google, but for now I'm forcing myself to try it to see if I like what it does. Oh, and by the way Opensearch is a simple, elegant extension of RSS 2.0 that is a snap to implement. Users can only benefit from a proliferation of search columns/buttons.

Freemind and WSDL

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 03:31:13 GMT

I'm experimenting more and more with Freemind as a visualization tool. This time with WSDL. I've taken the Amazon Web Services WSDL and applied this XSL transform to produce the following Freemind map:

(Browseable applet coming soon I hope, but for now here's a screenshot)

Freemind and OPML take 2

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 02:46:17 GMT

A follow-up on FreeMind and OPML -- so the impending 0.8 release is chock full of new goodies including a MM-to-OPML XSL file and an export option that allows you to apply an arbitrary XSLT. Nice work guys, but I still think that the UI should somehow auto-detect all transform files available (both in the distro plus the user's freemind directory) and create menu options for each in the Export submenu instead of forcing the user to select the transform...maybe the next iteration?

FreeMind and OPML

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 04:25:34 GMT

I just discovered FreeMind, and am all jittery with excitement about a new tool to try out and see if it fits the way my brain works. All early signs point to yes...

It seems that since FreeMind is at its core a fancy graphical outliner that it should support OPML natively. The only answer given is :

It should be easy to create conversion XSLT between FreeMind and OPML.

These guys have created a great program with a solid UI and decent usability, yet they don't understand how big a benefit interop with growing standards like OPML would give them? At least give me built-in "Import from OPML" and "Export to OPML" commands so that non-techie users don't have to a) write an XSL transform; b) write scripts to run it on their .mm files just to get to OPML. At best FreeMind is a nice toy program right now; if it groked OPML it suddenly jumps into a whole new class of eminently useful applications. Imagine being able to import the Podcast directory (OPML) into FreeMind!

Tagging, metadata and folksonomies

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 03:14:56 GMT

I feel like I should weigh in on this briefly. The web is all abuzz about "folksonomies", tagging (both del.icio.us and Technorati) and loose classifications. As Dan Bricklin, Dave Winer, Dare Obasanjo and others are pointing out, there are lots of reasons why these tags don't scale, and I agree with all of them:

Semantically incorrect (multiple meanings)
Content authors too lazy to properly tag content
Author-driven tagging error-prone and incoherent as a whole
Not how the majority of us probably think (my own conclusion).

Now some will point out that there are socially interesting overlaps and serendipitous events that occur when similarly tagged information is displayed together. Point granted. But the web as a whole is not going to grow up around this kind of system. Looking for patterns in the ways that individuals categorize and tag their own information is like assuming that all people respond to a Rorschach test in the same way.

In the end, I think as Dave points out most of us are too lazy to take the time to painstakingly categorize our work beyond a certain point. Perhaps that's why search as a means of organizing information seems to be eclipsing hierarchical organization. Rather than spend the time up front organizing our information, it's easier to be lazy, simply save an impression in our heads and recall the full details later with a few keywords. If only there was a Google for all the paper and clutter in the physical world!

Some good ones from IT Conversations

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 02:32:21 GMT

IT Conversations is a fantastic site with a huge archive of audio shows containing thoughtful commentary on contemporary technical and popular culture issues. If you're just hopping on the podcasting trend, or just want to hear a couple of good podcasts without subscribing, here are a few shows worth listening to on your walk, in your car, or even while sitting at your computer:

Adam Curry

And for the more technically inclined, a couple software/IT-related items:

ProxiDate, meet singles over Bluetooth

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:27:46 GMT

You'd have to seriously believe in love against all odds and possibilities to think your future significant other has a cellphone with Bluetooth, knows how to operate said phone and Bluetooth, has ProxiDating installed, and happens to be within range of you at that moment....

While we're at it, maybe it's time to review all our old EUNUCH manuals lest the Bluetooth interaction get too messy...

Google Map Queries in XML

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 15:07:11 GMT

As Jon Udell points out via proxy from elsewhere, Google maps are XML. Check out this query for pizza near Eden Prairie. I wonder how long this feature will remain open to public consumption?

Tech toilet

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 02:34:07 GMT

Oh, man, if I had one of these, would I ever want to sit anywhere else in the house? I wonder if it can stand a 40-pound kid standing cock-eyed on the lid, leaning over the sink!

Verizon hosting sucks

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 21:14:52 GMT

Daily WTF is exactly what a techie needs for a daily dose of humor. I'm sure the network fellas can appreciate this particular one...

Backspacing over unicode characters

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 02:41:14 GMT

Does your browser backspace correctly? Follow the title link and page down a bit and try it out. Interesting how easy it is for folks to not get this right -- even the demigods over at Firefox.

The post itself is a little Microsoft-centric (as it's from an MS employee), but contains a good bit of info.

AOL loses two million punters

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:53:37 GMT

AOL headed down the tubes...

50 year-old prediction of PCs in 2004

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 15:41:19 GMT

Enjoy...my favorite part of the caption is the "with teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use." Indeed!

(click image to open full-size version)

Fedora Dual-boot

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 14:08:05 GMT

Here goes nothing! I'm playing with fire and attempting an install of Fedora Core 3 on my Win XP Dell C840, despite numerous reasons to avoid it.

On the upside, I don't have much data to lose anyway because I just got a hard-disk upgrade and a fresh XP install so I've only got a couple days' worth of work, as opposed to 2 years' worth.

We'll see what happens...

Later...

Success! Installation was painless, and XP still boots! I'm now fiddling with updating software packages since FC3 was released, we'll see how that goes. up2date seems a bit clunky, and I've read that even the Fedora developers nuke it.

iPod-don't-Play

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 18:34:09 GMT

Got a second iPod for the household because my wife and kids wanted to enjoy tuneage portability during the day while I have my iPod at work with me.

Needless to say, the prospect of having a second iPod with the same copy of iTunes, despite using multiple user accounts on Windows XP did not make this a simple matter of plug-n-play.

Simply plugging in the second iPod with an up-to-date 4.7 copy of iTunes did not work; the iPod was not recognized by iTunes.
I had to install the new iPod from the factory CD under my wife's user account. Because her account does not have admin privileges, I had to give them to her temporarily to accomplish this.
I peeked at the registry and noticed that the iPod software keeps per-user registration settings, so the registration info under my wife's account holds the serial number for her iPod, while the registration info under my account holds my iPod's serial number.
iTunes for Windows still does not like to have two copies of itself running at once, even under different user accounts. This sucks because I like to keep iTunes and iPodder running so that newly downloaded podcasts are dropped right into iTunes automatically. That would mean that my wife would be locked out of using iTunes.
On the iPodder note, it would be nice if iPodder had a feature to manage downloads and republish messages over to iTunes. Might be high time to go join up on the iPodder mailing list.

Of course ITW is going to trail behind OSX, but it makes me wonder just how much the iTunes usability folks are exercising ITW.

TV Be Gone

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:42:09 GMT

Ever sat in a bar with friends and you can't stop looking at the TV, despite furious attempts to avoid it? Look no further than TV Be Gone. TV Be Gone is a small, keychain-capable universal remote that has infrared on/off signals of many TV remotes programmed into it. Perfect for those annoying moments where nobody's looking at the TV. Not a bad practical joke gadget, either. Sounds like something Woz would have built back in the day.

The TV Be Gone site is displaying a "coming soon" message, apparently they've been slashdotted or something. Check back later.