Microsoft has announced the private alpha of PopFly (love the .ms domain BTW!), their Yahoo Pipes! competitor. Looks like there's a bit of social networking involved as well with the ability to vote on user's projects and track their progress. One of the big things going in Microsoft's favor is the Visual Studio integration. See some details here. I asked for an invite so we'll see....
The latest issue of Redmond Developer News has a column by William F. Zachmann (got to have the middle initial), BTW he doesn't appear to have a blog...I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. Somehow blogless commentators feel less "authorative" to me...or something. Anyway, he talks about a phenomenon that he terms GWHHMs or Gwhyms, otherwise known as "Geeks WHo Hate Microsoft". His main point is a good one: "Remain open to alternatives that make sense when they do in fact make sense." However, I think he comes down a bit to harshly on the "alternatives" in my opinion.
He does a good job of condemning some of the zealotry that's out there, but unfortunately he really only talks about half the problem. There is another side. GWOLMs (pronounced Qualms) or Geeks Who Only Like Microsoft. Much like Gwhyms, Gwolms are found in every IT department across the Industry. They will turn a blind eye to any and all solutions that are not stamped with the Redmond Seal of Approval. They can cost your company thousands of dollars in licensing fees for potentially inferior products. They are the ones who dismiss AJAX until Microsoft releases their AJAX Library or dismiss Ruby until Microsoft releases IronRuby and then fawn over how wonderful it all is.
Don't get me wrong, I love Microsoft in a number of ways, I make a living coding in C# using the .NET framework. However I also run Firefox as my main browser and use a GTK based IM Client (Pidgin). I use these not because they are open source or because they are not Microsoft. I use them because they are (in my opinion) the best solutions out there. I recently utilized PDFBox in a solution for the same reasons.
Also, I can not agree with his recommendation to make Microsoft solutions your "default choice", my advice is to look at all possibilities in a problem area and choose the best one that fits in with your style, budget, and resources. One shouldn't have a "default choice" in my opinion.
Personally, that's why I can't wait for the next CodeMash, a conference like that epitomizes how software development should work (incidentally Microsoft was a sponsor of CodeMash, so even they realize the importance of learning from one another).
Ah the first real blog post in a while, and even this is late, hoping to get back in the groove here with this one!
After leaving Cleveland at 6am I ended up arriving at Day Of DotNet a little late. Not too bad for a three hundred mile drive, I ended up walking into Josh Holmes' talk on "Architecting the User Experience" (part of the ArcReady series, this was like a sneak-peek) about 10 minutes late. What I saw was awesome though , definitely some things to think about. Jason Follas, who I met at CodeMash and an organizer for DoDN, was kind enough to grab my name tag for me in exchange for me doing a head count of the session (76 people if you're curious).
After having a few minutes to mull over what I had heard, it was time for the next session. "Hardcore Reflection" by Dustin Campbell. This was by far the most valuable session of the the day, for me. Dustin was a great speaker and really knew his stuff. I learned alot there that I'm looking forward to using in my day to day work.
I then had a chance to attend red-gate Software's vendor session, mostly a bore-fest infomercial. Then Lunch, Domino's pizza (if you could get it), I had a couple pizza's and called the wife.
Off to "Next Generation UI" session by Mark Miller. Poor guy, his speaking skills are awesome, but the technology did not want to cooperate! I heard his second session went well, but I had opted to go to "Multithreading in Windows Forms Applications". Patrick Steele gave a good talk on the basics of multi-threading a form application, I was hoping for something more in depth, but all in all a good refresher.
Then we had the Microsoft Vendor Session, which was also hosted by Josh Holmes, he didn't have anything prepared so I threw out the DLR and IronRuby. Well, he didn't have IronRuby, but we got to see some of the DLR in Silverlight 1.1 with IronPython, cool stuff! Someone asked about Silverlight on Linux (which Mono is working on). Josh said that if it made business sense Microsoft would do it (being that they're a business and all), but he didn't think that the Linux made much business sense right now. He's probably right (though I did rib him a bit about Dell putting Ubuntu on consumer systems now), but sometimes developer and community good will pays more then a strict bean counter could see. Could you imagine if Microsoft announced Linux support for Silverlight? I think it would be a brilliant PR move myself. You keep saying your open and look at these cool standards and we're cross platform, and blah blah blah. Just do it already! :)
Anyway, wrapped up the day with Brian Prince's talk on "Agile Processes", I didn't get a chance to hear Brian speak at CodeMash, and I must say I came away impressed. He's quite an awesome presenter! I hope to incorporate some of his company's ideas into my own practices, and at least I'll be more prepared if I ever get a job at an agile shop.
I was glad I went, I learned alot and had a great amount of fun and will be attending the next one! We need more events like this in the Northeast Ohio area!
Sorry for the lack of postings, work has been kicking my butt. We have an important client coming up so my energies have been pretty focused on that. But there have been a few things I've noticed going on around the net.
Carlos Men'steal'ia vs Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan is my new favourite person just for the utter way he destroys Carlos. At a deeper level though it's an interesting allegory for intellectual property rights. There's ideas and then there's implementation. It's one thing to take an idea and expound upon it, it's another to steal an implementation outright. (as an aside Microsoft's spell checker recommends "Menstrual" to replace "Men'steal'ia").
Rex Dixon & Scot Duke's new site. It's kind of like digg but with a satirical twist. Have you ever seen something that made you go "Give me a friggin' break!"? Well here's your chance to share it with the world. It's a fairly well done site that's gone through some cosmetic changes since it's been launched, I'd wager it'll go through a few more, but the idea is a good one I think.
Is something missing from your life? Feel like all your material possessions you've acquired isn't enough? Do you want more then more? Perhaps Havidol is right for you. Take the self assessment and find out!
So much for that "Do No Evil" slogan. I still think this may be the year that Google looses it's luster. With all the bad press the time may be ripe for a new geek friendly search engine to take the throne. Remember, it was word of mouth that made Google, it can break them just as easy.
Poor Mark Martin. He's literally within seconds of winning the Daytona 500, and up comes Happy to steal it from him. He's the eternal runner up. Nice guys don't finish last, but they do finish second alot. I wonder if there'll be a backlash against Harvick, regardless his late run was amazing. I'm more upset at NASCAR for not throwing the caution.
Looks like someone was trying to make a buck off of Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft is heaping praise on the Sheriff department for making the arrest. I especially like the name of the task force: "Computer And Technology Crime High-Tech Response". "High-Tech Response" sounds like they should have friggen laser beams on their heads.
Apparently the guy made three quarters of a million dollars selling SQL Server and Creative Suite 2 on eBay (excuse me "online auction sites"). Of course Microsoft makes $750, 000 every 37 minutes. So that's a major criminal off the streets.
They're calling this a "mid-level" piracy operation. It was one guy selling two products online....I think they may be overstating it just a bit. I'd expect a "mid-level" operation to having three or more people and be making a couple million a year. But then I'm not in copyright enforcement.
The thing that really surprised me is the guy was 64 years old. I could see if it was some punk kid, but the guy should have known better. One thing I do know is that he's praying he doesn't end up in Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison.
Jim Holmes and James Avery's book "Windows Developer Power Tools" now has a companion website. WinDevPowerTools is a simple, yet interesting website. Once you register you can create your own toolbox letting you share with others those utilities you find useful. You can then browse via the tag cloud and "love" those tools you think worthy.
Right now it appears that only Jim and James can add tools (they're working on getting the ones from their book up). I think a tool submission page would really be useful. Letting users submit tools would add to the overhead of the site of course, and I'm not sure if the authors are willing or able to take the responsibility. Even though currently the only method of getting a tool added is to email James. So maybe it would actually free him up more. However, I think a user based submission method could really add to the usefulness of the site. There's a definite feeling of community trying to be built (after all one of the authors helped organize CodeMash), freeing up the tool submission process would really increase that. Maybe that's coming down the road.
The site opens up the possibility for some interesting statistical profiling. Adding the ability to add some user specific profile information (i.e. industry, location, etc) could lead to some interesting information beyond the current "Most Loved Tools". I'd be interested to see what tools were in how many toolboxes broken down by industry, location, or even age group. Right now you just submit desired nick, email, and desired password. Which may be a big plus to some people, but limits any of the interesting reporting that would be possible. Of course any demographic information should be totally optional.
One of the hallmarks of the developer community is the sharing of information, a site like this could definitely help with disseminating information on tools. I could see sites created for Mac and Linux very easily (maybe with companion books?), with a unified toolbox between the sites. Especially with the number of open source cross platform tools.
WDPT is a site just starting out, but with the possibility of being very useful to the Windows developer community, sort of a FreshMeat for the rest of us with a bit of social networking for spice. Be sure to check it out!
Microsoft's Dan Fernandez has issued a statement apologizing for the company submitting a patent that appeared to copy BlueJ. They have promised to pull the patent submission and investigate what caused it to be filed in the first place. Microsoft has always had a bad image with patent applications, and this is just the latest in a series of bad PR moves. The most recent of which was the RSS Patent Controversy. Nail Kennedy at the time commented that there were some patent worthy inventions in that case, but that the patent as a whole was probably invalid. Nail's summary is also relevant to this latest episode, specifically where he mentions the importance of patents in the Microsoft culture:
"Microsoft employees receive an inscribed granite cube and a financial reward for each patent granted. The trophies are often displayed with pride for any visitor to quickly count. If you possibly invented something you're encouraged to submit a patent to reward yourself and the company."
It's obvious that Microsoft employees are being a little over-zealous on filing for patents.
I wonder if it's a managerial problem personally. How far fetched would it be to believe that employees in some groups have a "patent application goal" that they are to meet? Perhaps they're throwing stuff at the wall for their manager's sake, not really believing any of it will stick (i.e. get past legal).
Regardless, Microsoft has to re-examine it's patent application structure or the bad blood will continue. The developer community is wary of software patents to begin with. For every point Microsoft gains with the developer community for an open standard or some cool technology, it loses two points for every sinister looking patent application.
Kudos for Microsoft for doing the right thing in this case though! Remember, they're like "Blaster" from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, not evil, just big and dumb.
I went ahead and bit at one of the101 FeedFlare ideas on the FeedBurner site. I went ahead an wrote #25: Display categories/tags. See how to set up the flare here. Oh and if you don't use FeedBurner, I highly recommend it. Let me know what you all think!
If I didn't have a wife, I'd probably have all the toys I want...I'd have an XBox 360, a Nintendo Wii, and a PS3. I'd also be living at my parent's house and very very lonely. Me and my wife have a good back and forth relationship. I'm the spender, she's the saver. I'm the little kid who never grew up, she's the little kid who had to grow up fast. In alot of ways we really do complete each other. Sometimes she has to work very hard to reign me in.
I've been itching to get a next generation game system since I purchased my HDTV earlier this year. The PS2 in 480p just does not cut it. Being a new father one as to be responsible. As my loving and caring wife is quick to remind me. This quickly eliminates the PS3 from contention as a possibility. Even I can't rationalize a purchase like that. So that leaves the XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii as finalists. While the Wii is fun to play (my brother's own one), the XBox has something that no other console has: XBox Live.
XBox Live is simply the killer app for the XBox. My brother's (who live at home, are sometimes lonely, and have every video game system imaginable (they're also quite a bit younger)) have shown me this. All my other gamer friends who have XBoxen have shown me this. No other gaming system has an infrastructure that can come close to what Microsoft has put together.
The only debate has been if I should wait until the new revision comes out or if I should get it now. Well, as my wife was quick to point out, with a 3 month old "now" isn't going to happen. I've been told that I have to save the money up first and pay with cash for the system and accessories. With the date of the new revision ranging from "soon" to "June" to "Christmas", I've decided not wait on Microsoft and will purchase the XBox as soon as I have the money saved up.
I've already got a start. With the $100 gift certificate I won at CodeMash and a $20 rebate from SanDisk, I figure I only have about another $700 to go in order to get everything I want (including the HDDVD drive). Here's the breakdown:
Xbox System 399.99
Wireless Network Adapter 99.99
Xbox Live Gold 12 month 59.99
Gears of War Game 59.99
HDDVD Player 199.99
---------------------------------------
Total: 819.95
Less: 120.00
Remaining: 699.95
So I got a while to go, and the new XBox will probably be out by the time I get the money together (not to mention no one will be playing Gears of War by then). In order to help expedite this process I'm opening the floor for donations. If you feel like helping a guy out, feel free to click on the donation button on my blog and send me some cash (even if it's only a buck). This isn't any charitable cause, you won't be able to deduct this from your taxes, you won't get monthly letters from the child who you're providing an education to , you won't get any stickers to put on your car to help you get out of a ticket. In fact, if all you have is a buck to donate, go to them first please. But if you can help me out, you'll get the satisfaction of knowing you helped a fellow gamer out. If I get enough donations that it significantly helps me towards my purchase (more than $300) I'll let my readers choose my gamertag.
Regardless, I'm happy that I married the woman I did. She makes me a more responsible person, I'm actually waiting and saving up to buy something. I never would have done this before I met her, I'd have just thrown it on a credit card and let my balance go up some more. Honey, I love you. Even if it does drive the child in me crazy.
Please Help Support My Gaming Habit: Friends don't let friends play Sony.
Robert Scoble did an interesting tour of Intel's new fab plant yesterday, he thought so much of this video that he is beside himself on the number of sites that didn't post it. Robert thought that this video was so important to be linked that he admits to comment spamming in an attempt to have major sites link to it!
I really don't understand what's going on here, increasing traffic to his site doesn't increase any revenue for him (his blog has no text ads on it), he's already a well known and influential blogger. Who cares of Engadget and Gizmodo isn't linking your stuff? Maybe it's because PodTech.net is a /direct/ competitor? Furthermore, I wouldn't consider Engadget nor Gizmodo to be a "blog" really. They're both too large and commercial oriented to have the feel of a personal blog.
Scoble does air a concern that the era of linking to each other is over. However, he does not provide any hard evidence for this assertion. I think it would be an interesting experiment to examine some of the bigger blogs in Technorati say, and see who they link to and how often.
I don't think the problem is a lack of linkage, I think the real problem is bloggers producing unique content. Most blogger's are more concerned with getting listed on digg, they regurgitate some other site's story with a little flair added in, and hope they can get on the front page. If you want the link, break the story or produce the content! And if you're so big that you're competing with other sites, don't be surprised if they don't link to you out of habit!
I'll just chalk up Robert's rant to us hitting the most depressing time of year. I still love you man! *blogger man-huggers*
Palm OS is dead, Long Live Garnet OS. Not. 
As Paul Thurrott noted, they'll be gone so quick we won't have time to care. We should have known that the end was near when the first Palm phone running Windows Mobile was released...though now I guess it's a Garnet Phone...or is it an Access Phone? How the mighty have fallen, I still miss my Palm IIIxe.
I found out that the Sysinternals Suite has been published by Mark Russinovich via MSDN Blogs, ironically there's no mention on his blog about this release. Anyway, Sysinternals stuff has always been good, but the Suite page doesn't list the contents of the download. It only contains this vague description:
This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.
So in the interest of community involvement, for your reading pleasure, here are the contents of the Suite:
These are all great utilities, now that you know what's in it, grab the Suite from Microsoft!
I saw this post on Rex Dixon's site "Technically Speaking" on Infield Parking, the new social website for NASCAR fans. I've been a NASCAR fan for a few years now, so this intrigued me. One of the pluses that IP has going for it is that the President and Co-Founder is Little E himself Dale Earnhardt Jr. This fact will instantly give the site credibility to a large segment of the racing fan population (though admittedly there may be some who will forgo it just for this reason).
So I decided to sign up. When you first hit the site, the one thing that stands out is the slick design. It looks clean and professional. Registration was a breeze, but why do some sites insist on emailing you the password you set in clear text? I would recommend they use https for authentication and please don't email me the password I just set up 2 minutes ago in plain text. If you're going to show me what I typed twice in the email, why block it with asterisk when I type it in at the web site? The other thing you have to do is pick a favourite driver, some people have more then one or would rather not specify, so I don't know how that'll work. Then you can set up your "Infield Parking Space", the cool thing about that is the profile pages aren't random numbers, it's a nice intuitive URL naming structure. For instance my profile is here: http://www.infieldparking.com/Michael_NET. Easy to remember and type.
The other strength of the site appears to be its forums. Forums are the way to build community and IP has a nice selection of them with a fairly active community. I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out up to the February launch.
The NASCAR fan base (and drivers for that matter) are no longer restricted to the original south base that started the tradition. There's plenty of tech and gadgets in NASCAR for any geek to enjoy. If you haven't checked it out before, I suggest at least giving it a glance, it's much more then people just turning left.
It looks like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has gotten a little up upset over Dare Obasanjo's experiment on Wikipedia editing. It seems Mike knows how to stir things up, the digg article on the situation is up over 300 diggs at this moment. Mike Arrington is saying that this Wikipedia page is "vandalized". Hardly, Dare simply posted a fact about some people's opinions of the site. Granted it was biased, but that was exactly what Dare was trying to point out.
The question of how to handle obviously biased articles on Wikipedia is a touchy one. You'll hear alot of talk about democracy and freedom of speech in this situation. The problem with democracy is that it's nothing but the rule of the mob. Even if everyone agrees on something, that doesn't automatically make it right. Had no one edited the TechCrunch article back to it's original state, or added in the opposing view point (as what was done) then no one could argue that democracy wasn't followed and freedom of speech wasn't respected.
Mike seems to feel that one sentence on Wikipedia espousing an opinion about someone's credibility with a couple of links to blogs that assert this, is "The Man Holding You Down". The problem with this thought is that you can then argue that anyone that doesn't agree with you or that questions you is simply trying to "silence your view point". This is a common tactic of people who have no argument. Such a knee jerk reaction does nothing more than strengthen your opponent's argument.
The ironic thing is that 1) Mike's original article on TechCrunch was hardly anti-Microsoft, and 2) Dare's purpose wasn't to attack Mike Arrington. Dare was simply trying to point out a flaw in the Wikipedia system, namely that it's a pure democracy where mob rules and not true neutrality.
The whole situation could be resolved by allowing people to edit Wikipedia articles that reference themselves or their companies as long as they do it in a transparent manner.
Microsoft is embroiled in another "scandal", between this and the Ferrari Fiasco it's been a bad couple of months for ol' MS. It's really undeserved in my opinion.
Especially this latest Wikipedia thing, if you go back to the source that started all this hoopla (and was in fact linked on the Slashdot article), you can see that Rick Jelliffe was not paid to promote Microsoft's worldview. In fact, reading the opening paragraph to his article sounds like a nice bunch of reasons why it would have not been in Microsoft's interests to even contact him:
My first computer was a Mac Plus. Loved it. My second computer was an AT&T Unix PC running System V. Loved it long time. My third computer was a Sparc running Solaris or SunOS. Loved it. At work I run Linux, Open Office, Firefox, Eclipse, etc. No drama. For the last six years I have been running a little company making Java programs. Love Java. I do a little open source development, in particular with the Schematron program (quite like it!), but I have also contributed some code to the Flamingo/Substance project over at JavaDesktop, which provides novel looks and feels and more modern GUI components.
Doug Mahugh actually posted to the Slashdot thread with the contents of his email to Jelliffe where he states that all Microsoft was interested in was to get more informed and less-one sided discussion going on. If Microsoft is going to ask a professional to take some of their time to review something and elicit their unbiased input, isn't it only fair that the professional is compensated? If Microsoft was serious about not preapproving any of the changes and honestly wanted to simply open up a discussion they felt was being stymied, they should be applauded not condemned. Replying to the Slashdot thread took incredible courage and guts from Doug, and I applaud him for doing it. I don't see Microsoft as evil, I think the mob is more evil then Microsoft ever could be, and in this case the mob is blowing it out of proportion. Ironically they've done exactly what Microsoft and Doug had hoped:
Good to see the tone of the Open XML debate getting some broad attention and analysis. I'll leave it up to others to reach conclusions, but as always I have confidence that most people are reasonable, and will reach reasonable conclusions from the facts.
Let's turn the debate in a more general manner. What if other corporations sponsored editors to take an unbiased look at articles they felt were skewed? Would this be a problem? I don't think so, and here's why. If the sponsor thought the editor was unfair (or just didn't like what they posted) they could stop paying the editor. But if the editor was no longer being paid, then they have no incentive to edit, and the sponsor looses in that the biased slant can easily come back (in fact all it takes is a revert!). Honestly, if Microsoft paid me to review something or add my view (not theirs) to a discussion, because they thought the current dialogue was onesided, I would have no stronger desire to lean in their favor. Why would I? I'm not their employee, I'm doing them a favor by taking my time to check something out, and they're paying me for that time. Here's the kicker, it's not my full time job. And it wasn't Rick Jelliffe's either, he wasn't offered a position, he was offered compensation for a favor. Nothing more. Haven't you ever given someone a beer because they helped cut your grass?
Thanks to Christopher Grant for pointing out that CodeMash moved from #2 on Technorati's search to #1:
Amazing! That kind of exposure can only be a good thing for this unique and wonderful conference.
And has been all day:
Only "Colbert Oreilly" is higher. A Midwestern developer conference beating out iPhone says something, I think.
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