Author: mike

Visual Studio 2005!!

mike 0 Comment Technology

I finally bought myself a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I’ve been very excited to get the updated version (I was running Visual Studio 2003) becuse it’s chock full of great new features. In particular I am excited to try out the auto-update that is built in as well as the refactoring features.

Alas, my install will have to wait, as I just received the error message, “You must install Microsoft Office 2003 in order to proceed.” Huh? The development environment is now dependent on Office being installed? Ack! I guess most folks installing VS2005 have a universal subscription, so this isn’t an issue. And it does tell you this on the box, but I still didn’t expect it and was too dumb to read. You know, I really do like Microsoft software… That is why I was so excited to install. But these interdependencies sometimes just don’t make sense. When it works, it works great. But it sure would be a lot better if it were lean-and-mean too.

I’ve been perfectly happy without Office on my system for the last two years using OpenOffice. I never upgraded to the latest versions of OpenOffice, and from what I hear, it’s improved quite a lot. And, I’m still grumpy about not having a free version of Office available for home users.

Oh well, I’ll get over it. I’ll go buy Office 2003 now because I want my VS2005 that badly. More to come!
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The Truth about NTP

mike 0 Comment Lawyers

NTP is the group which is suing Research In Motion, the makers of Blackberry wireless handhelds. They’ve won a $450 Million judgement and are threatening to “shut down” Blackberry. They did this because they hold a few key patents in the wireless messaging arena.

So who is this NTP? No doubt they are a struggling, small startup just doing their best to bring their own products to market while being bullied by the huge conglomorate RIM, right? Well, not exactly. Actually, NTP is a holding company that has no assets except for a couple of patents. They’ve never built a product and have made no indications that they ever plan to. Instead, their plan is to just sue anyone else who actually does build things.

Also in the news today is that NTP (via Visto) is now suing Good Technology. Good has been a competitor to RIM for a while. Last year, in order to make sure that Good was not hit by NTP’s legal shenanigans, Good and NTP inked a deal for Good to license the patents. Good was proactive in seeking out this arrangement. Although I don’t personally think NTP should have this patent in the first place, our legal system lets it be, and Good did the right thing by legally licensing with NTP. Keep in mind that Good is a small company doesn’t have the deep pockets that RIM does. This was an easy deal for NTP, as it lends credibility to their patent, and yet doesn’t represent nearly the magnitude of dollars that suing RIM would represent.

Nonetheless, NTP’s greed remains unquenched, and they’ve now decided to go after their licensee Good under the Visto name.

Do you remember Visto? Of course not. They are basically dead now. They are a small, Silicon Valley startup that made some semi-interesting, but not-too-revolutionary sync products for wireless devices. Unfortunately, like many startups, they found that their biggest impediment to success was running out of money.

Thanks to our vulturous legal system, however, the corpse of Visto is still sputtering. NTP and Visto just announced last month that Visto has given NTP an equity stake in the company in exchange for use of NTP’s patents. The San Jose Mercury News ran an article titled, NTP ally Visto sues Good over wireless patents. But I thought Good was NTP’s ally that had licensed their patents? I guess that was last year!

This whole case with RIM, Good, and NTP is such a travesty. RIM is building a great product – millions of people use it daily. NTP, by contrast, builds nothing of value. The man who originally filed the patents NTP now holds is already dead, and the lawyers that remain at NTP are suing only to get rich. In the meantime, the poor guys at Good are trying to play by the rules with their meager startup budget. As a payback for helping out NTP, NTP goes and partners with another Good competitor, and then sues Good.

I hope NTP loses big time.

Backup your Backups

mike 0 Comment Technology

Popular blogs today are reporting that your CD-R backups of your photos and precious data may have a lifespan of only 2 to 5 years. Ack!

There is probably some truth to the story. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if CD lifespans are shorter than we think. But what bugs me is that there is absolutely no data provided in the article. How about some tests? Did they use different types of CDs? Different types of CD writers? Did they store the CDs differently? Did they use the CDs frequently for reading? Who knows. They provided no data. Wouldn’t a responsible journalist at least provide a few crumbs of facts?

I know first hand that I have some CDs I’ve burned which I’ve used for more than 2 years. In fact, I regularly play a CD in my car that is dated 2001.

It’s probably all just dramatized yellow journalism. Or maybe we need to make backups of our backups. I haven’t done any studies, so don’t take my word for it!

Structured Blogging, Microformats, and XML

mike 0 Comment Technology

I’ve been paying attention to “building blocks of XML” as a mechanism of standardizing dataformats for a while. XML certainly is the tool which is supposed to be able to solve this. And in a few isolated spots it has worked. But for the most part, applications still don’t share a lot of data types for a lot of reasons.

A group called StructuredBlogging has some interesting ideas around doing this within blog. They have an interesting demo for MovableType or WordPress. They are also supporting the notion of Microformats.

Microformats is brought to us by a group of folks from Technorati and other places.. It’s an interesting concept. They basically claim that XML formats will never get used much due to the fact that you have to build a whole slew of tools to actually make it usable by any large audience. So, instead, they’ve reverted back to using XHTML, which is a form of XML, and then using conventions for how to describe objects. This has the advantage that microformat objects are instantly usable on basically everyone’s desktop – because they work well in the browser and can be manipulated using javascript and stylesheets. More interesting is how well they work with AJAX, because AJAX is already a client->server interaction of HTML.

Its a bit of kludge, though, because it is shoehorning in XML data types into HTML which wasn’t really intended for it. It makes the syntax a bit obscure, and you lose namespaces and need to be a lot more careful about what XHTML class attributes you use. But, if it gets past the adoption problems of XML, those are minor issues.

Worth reading about if you are interested in this kind of stuff…. I do wonder if the real issue is that too many businesses think they don’t want to share data types at all… (Look what happened with Oodle/Craigslist when they shared data via RSS) I hope that is not really the case.

Finally, if you are interested in this, definitely read what Tim Bray has to say about inventing XML languages.

Hasta-la-vista Adobe Acrobat!

mike 0 Comment Technology

foxit.jpg

I so like using my new PDF reader that I have to post this article. Thanks to Marc Orchant for first posting about it.

If you’ve been surprised by Adobe’s staggering 50MB of size, or annoyed by its slow load time, or annoyed by its nagging “upgrade me” notices, then Foxit’s PDF reader is for you. From what I can tell, it loads up every PDF you can throw at it. And, it is faster than blazes. I’ve often used Google’s “translate from PDF to Text” feature to avoid using Adobe’s slow Acrobat reader, but with Foxit, you don’t need to do it anymore because it loads so quickly.

Foxit’s reader loads instantly. It’s only a 1MB download, and it is free! Get it while it’s hot!

Further, if you create PDF documents, Foxit has their own editor for sale too. I haven’t tried it, but the price tag is $99 compared to Adobe’s $449…

Consumer Power via Blogs

mike 0 Comment Technology

If you haven’t already seen Thomas Hawk’s PriceRitePhoto Story, it is an interesting read.

In summary, he got baited by one of the Digital Camera scam sites (having just purchased a camera online myself, I had seen such horror stories and was lucky enough to avoid them!)

What is amazing about Thomas’ story is it’s demonstration of how powerful a blog can be!

Within 1 week of his posting, the following happened:
* Searching for “priceritephoto” on Google, Yahoo! and MSN surfaces Thomas’ review of his negative experience as the #1 result.
* PriceRitePhoto was dropped from several major price comparison engines
* PriceRitePhoto turned around and tried to fix the service issue; and claims to have fired at least one individual with their firm

All in all, that is pretty cool. I hope the reporting on the story is all accurate. But, if you’ve ever been scammed by an online site, it may be time to invest in a blog, and be ready to share your experiences on digg!

Productivity Harassment

mike 0 Comment Lawyers

Last week I went to an “Anti-Harassment Training Class”. I’ve been a development manager for about 8 years now, and in the software business for longer than that, but this was the first course like it I had ever taken.

Why did I have to take it now? I’ve never been accused of harassing, and it is all basic common sense.

The reason I had to take it is because I work for a company that has deep pockets. When I worked for startups, the chances of being sued were low. Lawyers just don’t take cases where their chance of collect their paycheck is low. Further, public sentiment in trial is less likely to blame a company rather than an individual at a small company.

At the big companies, however, there is going to be a harassment case eventually. And when it happens, the company will get fined with some set of punitive damages. In order to minimize those damages during the punitive phase of the trial, the company needs to prove that it did everything it could to prevent this up front, and that it wasn’t the company’s fault (which is true). So, the company trains its employees.

Optimists may think that this training is about prevention of harassment rather than minimizing damages. But I don’t believe that for a few reasons. First, there is no correlation between training and avoidance of harassment charges. Unfortunately, even smart people that should know better sometimes go over the line and harass. But secondly, the fact that it’s only large companies that implement training shows that this is really about damage control than it is about prevention. If you’ve got assets and something to protect, implement anti-harassment training. If you don’t, you don’t. Third, if it were about prevention and not damages, why do lawyers end up collecting the majority of the punitive damages? Shouldn’t the money be spent either to compensate the victim or to prevent future incidents? In reality, it does not work out that way.

In my mind, this is just one more example of the many hidden costs created by our legal system. Anti-harassment training is not necessary for creating a positive work environment, and it a complete waste of time. But companies throughout the US are forced to spend billions of dollars annually on these programs, when instead they could be building real products and real customer value. Unfortuantely, in our times, a successful company needs to constantly be watching his back just in case the lawyer comes knocking. And you know he will. It’s so well known that these will come up that the cost of lawyers is now baked into our product prices and reflects all the way back to the customer. So, companies aren’t punished when these events occur. Instead, consumers just pay more in retail prices for lower quality products.

Lawyers are “Productivity Harassers”.

Why don’t we switch to a democracy?

mike 0 Comment Politics

We all know that our government is a Republic and not a Democracy. We call it a democracy, but it really is not, and never has been.

Did the framers of our government really intend that it be a republic and not a democracy? I think they did. In general, the common citizen will not, and cannot be expected to always know how to vote on a particular complex issue. So, a republic, in theory, solves this. The people elect the representatives, and the representatives carefully study, analyze and vote for us.

But, is this not dated? Certainly the framers of our Constitution also had a practical problem. The populous simply could not vote on every issue. There would be no physical means to collect daily votes on every minor issue that came up before the house.

Today, however, this is not true. Using technology, there is no reason that we could not change to a government which is completely a democracy, and where every citizen can vote from their living room on any issues, on a daily basis. Issues would come up, debates would be broadcast live across the nation, individuals could go to Washington and be heard, and then, everyone who wanted to could vote. Instead of having polling stations, individuals would make a trip to the library.

Here in California, the Governor just punted several issues to the people for voting. For whatever reason, these political hot potatoes were just too hot for the elected folk to make decisions on. What if this sort of election didn’t cost the taxpayers $80M, but instead was effectively free, riding on technology that was already in place for our regular voting?

Even if we didn’t have a real democracy, what if we had a real-time system the people could vote. Any elected official could go to the system and see the results from his constituency the exact results on any issue for those watching live? I guess it’s neat-o but not necessarily an improvement for any of us.

Practically, this is pretty costly. Security issues abound. But, it’s solveable if we want to. And it could radically change the way elections are handled. If nothing else, it’s fun to think about.