Google has thrived by proving that computer users value speed above nearly all else. So why does each Microsoft Windows device I use take longer and longer to boot up? via NY Times
Booting from Flash RAM is the future- how fast is Windows? I will not buy another computer without it. Everything in memory is the default optimization to take now...cache everything.
This is kind of a strange story, but why the hell can't he get it running? This is when to call in VMWare and have a nice set of clean machines available. Apparently he was running SlimServer, which sounds slightly immoral so I am sure he deserved the non-functioning environment. Anyway, nice thing about XP is early cancellation, but, he could have just asked for help...
That said- development environment set up is not that easy. I had one J2EE project where we had a two day process. For my last Rails project, it was a about two pages on the wiki, most of it related to SQL Server driver (don't ask) and Ferret. It did remind me to not depend on the availability of external resources for the install procedures though- what's out there on the Rails Gem servers can change.
What's killing everyone on one of my internal corporate projects is svn+ssh. That said, our most recent hire nailed it pretty well, even though it was his first time using a Mac and NetBeans, and I am using RadRails on Windows.
Anyway- it's worth writing up the procedures for the development environment set up, and then having the new person update those when they come on board as their first task. Of course, if no one has started for a while, chances are the instructions just won't work.
I was reading Tim Ferris' post on how "awesome" he is at taking notes. I have tried his approach and it didn't really work for me having all my notes in a little moleskine notebook, even if there is a little index page. I much prefer the approach of having a tear off pad of heavy Levenger paper, then I can put the note page in the appropriate folder and file it.
I was experimenting a little today with the middle ground- a digital/analog pen. You use a special notebook and special pen to take notes, then you connect the pen to a USB dock and the notes get transferred to OneNote 2007- and OCR-ed. It's a really cool idea- and their ArcGIS product is coming out soon. It's a cool idea to go out into the field with a paper map and then have your annotations show up on the map without scanning it back in, but as vectors recorded by the pen.
Anyway, I don't really want the big pen, but maybe the good idea to steal from all of this is to scan and OCR all of my note pages. Then I can full text search them...brilliant, eh?
Was Ray Ozzie right? I've been seeing a fair amount of information circulating about RDDB. RDDB is a document-oriented, RESTful database. Lotus Notes is a document-oriented, old database (and email program, calendar, workflow form generator). The cool thing is that all of my Lotus Notes knowledge, which was rapidly becoming worthless now has a chance to be valuable again if this sort of thing takes off again.
I was in a Rails training class with this guy who made his career on the back old Notes and their ugly little autogenerated web apps. He kept asking, "how do we keep this from becoming another Lotus Notes?" At the time, I was thinking, "how do I keep myself from being one of those guys who looks at every new technology in terms of some old technology that he actually had time to understand?" Now, looking at the potential resurgence in document oriented datbases, maybe he was right...nah. Rails is nothing like Notes, because, uh...it's dynamically typed? No, Notes had that. Works with Java now, thanks to JRuby? No, IBM took care of that with Domino+WebSphere. Hmmm. At least 37 Signals hasn't been sold to IBM while David H. grabbed the lead role at Microsoft.
Oh, wait, there is a difference. REST! I had posted a long while back about how my cousin made fun of me in front of a huge room of people because he asked what the two types of web services were (hoping for document oriented and remote procedure call as answers) and I said "REST". He said the REST people were like the Amish, got some laughs and proceeded to promote WS-*. At lunch after his talk, Bob Martin took my side, so I knew I had made at least an interestingly wrong decision. Tim Bray has a nice round-up of other smart people that were wrong about that. So sweet to be right about that, even though he could kick my shins in programming any day of the week. Except Sunday, when we Amish polish our wooden laptops. Anyway, maybe RDDB is more Amish Oriented Database than Rails Oriented.
So Rails has REST, and even though I swore off creating RESTful apps when the initial URL implementation was polluted with semi-colons, it's the real deal now. Not so much for the application, but for the API. It's great to have APIs that are platform independent. Most things like a Lotus Notes wouldn't bother with this- doesn't help with platform lock-in. I spent more time working with the Lotus Notes ODBC driver to suck data out of the system than was reasonable. Of course, they did support COM, which was the REST of the day (if CORBA was the WS-*).
Now, REST still needs a solution for the old federated identity problem (so many websites, so many passwords, so many usernames)...but there are plenty of options. Maybe my cousin is right about CAS? Seems Amish enough for me.
Feral Programmer: A programmer who has no notion whatsoever of common, socially acceptable programming practices or knowledge of available tools and technologies. The feral programmer is not necessarily a bad coder, and sometimes could be labeled a savant, but is generally impossible to work with due to the complete lack of any common framework of understanding. Somewhat of a corollary to Not Invented Here syndrome, the feral programmer is either just completely unaware or uncomprehending of most inventions in the field. Behaviors include: creating flat file databases, version control systems or their own web service architecture built of packet sniffers, frequently using only Perl.
A third note in the open platforms series...Facebook vs. OpenSocial, Second Life vs. Multiverse, iPhone vs. Android. Now strictly speaking, the iPhone is the least walled garden of the three, but the lack of Java support means that it's a little like Facebook. Even with the vague SDK announcement, all applications will have to be custom built for it. Fortunately you can still use the iPhone to get to your Google docs...
Where's my GPhone?
Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.
We recognize that many among the multitude of mobile users around the world do not and may never have an Android-based phone. Our goals must be independent of device or even platform.
You have to love the timing of the Open Social API announcement. Facebook is not worth $15B or $3 for every person on earth...
As pmarca puts it:
This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:
Official Gmail Blog: Code changes to prepare Gmail for the future
How sad is it that I get excited about a mostly invisible update to a web based email program? Nonetheless, I am "stoked" for the gmail updates, and only slightly concerned about potentially losing some GreaseMonkey awesomeness.
Read this SOA definition from Pete Lacey this morning and it almost makes sense...too bad it's not what most people mean.
So, then, what is SOA? For one thing, SOA is misnamed. It’s not an architecture in any sense of the word. It is, to use a Burton Group phrase, a mind set. It is the generally held belief that when implementing systems one should expose system functionality for general consumption directly from the network, as well as or instead of burying it behind a user interface. It is, as well, the belief that there is a great deal of value to be generated by retrofitting network accessibility into most existing systems. And it is the belief that this can only work if the means of doing so aren’t locked to a particular language, framework, operating system, vendor, or network architecture.
It's a bit hard to disagree with that as a good policy. However, having a bit of a linguistic bent, it makes me wonder if there isn't something fundamentally wrong with an acronym that is "misnamed". Mr. Lacey does suggest an alternative term for what he is describing: Network Oriented Computing. However doesn't that make it a worse definition of SOA (since the definition better fits another term)? It does. His final definition of SOA is "a technical approach to NOC that has a non-uniform service interface as its principle abstraction. Today, SOAP/WS-* is the chief implementation approach.". This is a better definition because it actually is an architecture. It also sits well next to ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture).
The killer final definition he offers is: "Business Service Architecture (BSA): An unnecessary term (also not an architecture) that tries to make the obvious something special. Aka, business analysis. Aka, requirements gathering." Reading this crystallized something important about why phrases like IT-Business alignment always bothered me- you align the IT systems with the business via requirements gathering. Now, maybe you are doing it at high level and want to give it a special name, but the dangers of abstract terms are that people can look like they are agreeing about how to do something, but really have completely different ideas about what they are concretely going to do.
Hmm, that might be a topic for another post.
I've been an extreme skeptic when it comes to virtual worlds for a while now. I really can't understand how people can get excited about things like Second Life. None of the arguments for it as a great business seem to make much sense. The false scarcity markets for real estate seem quite misguided. I really enjoyed working with Forterra the other day- it's definitely richer than chat rooms and teleconferences in terms of communication- but is it richer than video telecon? In one way it is, because you can walk around and such, but that also imposes the limitations of the real world upon communication: you can't hear someone if you walk too far away.
I left a highly skeptical comment on James Au's post on 7 reasons why business execs should care about second life. There needs to be an Internet of sorts, so that the virtual worlds can, well, internetwork. You can't say Second Life is that important, because investing so much in something owned by another company is putting all of your eggs in one basket. It's like starting a company that builds Facebook applications- when (not if) Facebook gets acquired, your whole business model is in jeopardy. Better make a quick buck.
The world isn't just about open platforms. It's about interoperable platforms. One thing that makes adoption of new GIS systems possible is that the data can be transitioned from one to another because all of the stuff is connected to real world coordinates, and it is possible to translate from one coordinate system to another because the both refer to a place on the real earth. I am not sure what the virtual coordinate system is. With the Internet, it's the unified addressing and naming schemes. There can only be one 220.231.23.123 on the public internet.
In this light, the iPhone looks really dumb. You can't install apps on it. Okay, WiFi works and the phone bit actually connects with the real phone network, but it's not an open platform. Few cell phones are unlocked to connect to multiple networks, but Apple seems to be actively discouraging this. To me, that's a sign of a bad business model- easily defeated. Just make the money on the device- not the lock-in.
It seems like the right business model is have an open and interoperable platform. It cuts off competitors, but allows you to benefit from the network effects of others innovations.
