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July 21, 2005
Wil Shipley on... everything.
Wil Shipley founded Delicious Monster, which makes the damn awesome Delicious Library (a media cataloguing program that has to be played with - preferably with an iSight - to be believed). He’s interviewed on DrunkenBlog, and you should really really read the whole thing. Management, Coding, Depression, Macs, and Extreme Gardening.
A lot of good nuggets in there…
[…] core hours aren’t as important as, say, having a clear vision and motivating your people.
You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.
They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”
Depression isn’t like that, though. You don’t “snap out of it.” There’s a chemical missing in your brain, and your whole life is like those dreams where every action you try to take is hindered by a huge pile of invisible wet blankets.
Mac users love their machines; Windows users put up with their machines because they don’t believe there’s anything really better.
It’s depressing, really, because it’s like dealing with victims of abuse: “Seriously, there’s a better world out there, and you deserve it! You don’t have to put up with this! You can leave! Mac will treat you right!” And their response is right out of the textbooks: “Why would I trust Mac? I don’t think anything can be good after this.”
Microsoft has nothing to gain by making life better for small programmers. They have millions of lines of code written to the old, crappy Windows APIs, and they make all their money selling Windows and Office. If they actually enabled small programmers to do cool things, they’d be creating the very furry mammals which would be their eventual downfall.
If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it’s that there is no stable state in life. There is no getting somewhere and going, “Ah, NOW I’m going to park myself down and just rake in the fat loot.” Change is scary, but it’s also the foundation of life and happiness. We need it. We get bored and lazy without it. Once more, into the breach.
Like I said - go read the whole damn thing.
Posted by jim at 09:50 AM
July 18, 2005
.NET on Rails
Laughter. Of course, I make a smack about MS jumping on the Google/37signals AJAX bandwagon, and my humor is slower than the Internet. Back on June 28th, Microsoft announced that they’ll be adding AJAX support to ASP.NET.
Of course, it won’t ship with the Visual Studio 2005 product, and developers won’t even see a preview version until September, but the announcement should be enough to prevent the larger, slower moving shops from jumping to, say, Ruby on Rails.
I gotta step up the funny.
Posted by jim at 10:27 AM
What's in a name?
Scoble wants people to “…call Longhorn all the bad names you can. Let’s get it out of our systems.”
Oh, yeah, and link back to his post so he can follow the link-tracking on Technorati, Bloglines, and the supah-seekrit blog-tracking thing he’s privvy too. Always nice to kill two birds with one stone.
Longtime was the name used in Wired’s fictitious article about Linus Torvalds being hired by Microsoft, and it’s still the name I use when speaking of it. And that includes when I’m speaking to my “featured in a MS Windows Server 2003 advertisement” CIO.
We could call it Copland. Or Rhapsody. Because I think that’s the more apt comparison. Microsoft is obviously struggling both to get Longhorn out the door (witness the long delays and last year’s Longhorn Reset) and to make it relevant (witness the Gnomedex ballyhoo about RSS in Longhorn and IE7) Even with the betas looming, there seems to be confusion about what Longhorn is going to be.
God help us when we find out what changes the server product will force upon us.
What’s hurting Longhorn is the same thing that has hurt every spoken-of-in-advance Microsoft strategic technology in the last decade - Microsoft. Too many back-door promises have already been made (“Just wait until Longhorn!”), too many products were delayed for Longhorn technologies (there wasn’t going to be an IE7, remember?), and too many projects (MS and non) are trying to get some Longhorn Importance rubbed off onto them.
It’s still a year away. Long enough for them to demonstrate support for security updates via podcasting, and announce “.Net on Rails”…
Posted by jim at 09:05 AM
July 17, 2005
And thinwire doesn't even NEED a crossover! That's COOL!
Scobleizer notes:
Networking at 30,000 feet: Eric Mack shows how he builds a network in an airplane using Tablet PCs and a crossover cable. That’s cool! Tablet PCs are the only way to fly.
Gosh. A crossover cable. Golly. That’s cool. Ahem.
No. You want cool? How about iChat AV - voice and video - at 35,000 feet? And not with someone else in the plane, but with a co-worker back in the office? Scoble’s a good guy, but sometimes I think he reaches a bit to try to make using Microsoft products look “cool”…
Edit: Windows side - how about Skype at 30,000 feet? See how hard I had to look to find the cool?
Posted by jim at 11:06 AM
July 06, 2005
An old theme
I’m an IT professional - I’ve spent well over half my life making computers work for people. While my platform of choice is Mac OS X, I still know much more than the average bear about making Windows XP go where I want it to go. The Dell laptop that my workplace supplies is kept well-patched, lives behind the corporate firewall, has several company-supported GPOs, and runs up-to-date anti-virus software (Trend Micro).
So when I lose a workday and a half clearing my computer of a worm, I become intensely frustrated. The worm, TOMBAI, came courtesy of autoplay. It was undetected by Trend (and failed, in later tests, to identify files recognized by other scanners). It reduced the security settings for IE (which I have to use for several corporate IT services such as SharePoint), such that I found out about my infection via the secondary infections that Trend did detect.
Today, finally, I’m certain it’s clean.
The frustrating part is that, with the knowledge, resources, and support structure I have at my disposal, I lost almost 2 days.
How can the “average” user - running Windows, behind on patches, relying on the spare time of the neighbor’s kid, and likely unwilling to shell out for good security software - even hope to survive?
Why does the consumer tolerate this? In my heart, I know - it’s a combination of low Cost of Entry and undervaluation of personal time. People look more at what it costs to get into a system rather than the total cost (TCO), and they usually undervalue their own time. So they buy systems that are cheap, not factoring in what it’s going to cost to make it run - and keep it running - or the lost value in not really being able to do what you set out to do.
But knowing that intellectually doesn’t really help when you’re so frustrated you want to drop-kick the bloody thing and walk down the street to Microsoft with a fistful of invective. I just don’t understand.
Posted by jim at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)