Yet another reason to raise my rates

Apparently, people drinking wines actually enjoy them more- based solely on the price.

The researchers discovered that people given two identical red wines to drink said they got much more pleasure from the one they were told had cost more. Brain scans confirmed that their pleasure centres were activated far more by the higher-priced wine.

I am not sure I want to activate customers' "pleasure centers", but if higher rates can lead to satisfaction- it's a win-win!! I can sorta see the logic too- the customer is thinking, "Wow, this guy seems slow, but he's the most expensive one we could afford, so I guess it must be how much consultants costs these days."

Then again, Seth Godin says we should be giving away stuff for free. Oh, maybe that's what this blog is! Even then, it's not worth the price.

The Backbone of SOA is Standardization?!?

Hurry out and buy this report on SOA from Input. I read the insightful reformatting of it on Washington Technology. It is frankly amazing how this publication can continue to peddle such inane drivel. Apparently, SOA is about standardization now:

SOA calls for agencies to standardize their technologies, which could create a significant shift in the market, said Deniece Peterson, senior analyst with Reston, Va.-based Input’s Executive Program.

“Standardization is the backbone of SOA,” she said. “For providers who usually supply proprietary solutions, this will force them to find other ways to be best-of-breed. If they don’t, they’ll just become very easily replaced.” On the other hand, providers who understand SOA and can market their offerings accordingly stand to gain.

Well, at least it's not about alignment anymore. I am glad this genius is spreading her BS straight to the executives. Do they notice when everyone says SOA is about something different?

At least I understand how it works now. Years ago, some developer decided that applications should have APIs (and the running instances of those APIs are services) so the data+application could be used in a loosely joined confederation of multiple systems. And lots of other software architect types noticed and gave it a name and said it was good, while slipping in their own favorite protocol or application in there. So, before anyone really agreed on what it meant, the word was out that SOA was good. Since basically all it means is good, any fool can say whatever jibberish they want is SOA as a shorthand for saying it's good in some technical way you don't understand.

Googling "backbone of soa" is instructive. I found these:
"Backbone of SOA is Service"
"Web services are the backbone of SOA"
"ESBs have become universally accepted at the backbone of SOA"
"ESB is the backbone of SOA"
"we suggest that you seriously consider an en-masse deployment of AMQP as the backbone of SOA"
"Messaging is the backbone of SOA"
"XML is the backbone of SOA"
"With processes serving as the backbone of SOA-based composite applications"
"distributed computing, which is the backbone of SOA"
"It's very appealing to mainframe customers, and the System z, which is the latest mainframe, is fully enabled to be the backbone of SOA"

With all of these backbones, maybe we should switch the software design metaphor from architect to anatomist. I am personally in favor of REST+JSON as the middle finger of SOA.

Frequent readers of my blog may recall that the appeal of the content-free term is simple: people in the business appreciate being served by IT, as opposed to the unfortunate situations that always seem to occur when IT departments are giving the job of enforcer of business rules via the replacement of efficient ad hoc systems with official electronic processes from which thou shall not deviate.

Are you being served?

Why so slow?

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.

Ron Jeffries Can't Get Rails Running

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.

Digital Notes in general (and in ArcGIS)

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?

Amish Oriented Databases

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

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.

iPhone SDK trumped

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.

...tear down that wall.

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:

• With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
• With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

In keeping with my thoughts on 3D virtual worlds, the walled garden approach is not the end state, the "internet of virtual worlds" is. I think we're going to see this with Facebook, MySpace and others eventually becoming part of an "internet social spaces" connections between bits and pieces of ourselves, photos on flickr, blog on blogger, twits on twitter, profile on myspace, maps on geocommons, restaurant reviews on yelp, plus whatever we think of next week. Tying all of this together is going to be remarkably cool.

Technology like OpenID is really useful, and that's why you see Enterprise players like Oracle on the agreement. Now Facebook has a great UI and momentum, so there is still a really huge chance that this effort will fail if it turns out that no one uses it effectively, but I think there will be at least one innovation out there that will cause Facebook to pull down the wall towards interop of their data...

Official Gmail Blog: Code changes to prepare Gmail for the future

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.