August 20, 2007

Why comments are disabled

What if you fired up your business with a little Internet-style participation? [NSFW - language]

Yeah, I thought so.

(Edited to point to original source)

Posted by jim at 10:21 AM

June 10, 2006

There's no Bullet List like Stalin's Bullet List

This may only appeal to a rather narrow slice of my own small readership.

Edward Tufte - author of books such as Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and the essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint - is embarking on something of a tour. He'll be teaching a one-day course entitled Presenting Data and Information in, among other places, Seattle and Portland.

I got the mailer today. I've already asked my company to pay for the $360 registration. If they won't, I'll probably do it out-of-pocket.

I was surprised by my enthusiasm at the prospect of attending this course. Obviously, this says something about what really interests me...

Posted by jim at 10:54 AM

March 22, 2006

Windows Vista Delayed

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Windows Vista has been, you guessed it, delayed.

Vista will be available to volume-license business customers in November (even my own workplace, a Microsoft-centric shop with 1000 employees in the US, obtains Windows as OEM licenses with new computers). Consumer availability will occur in January 2007.

Right now, all the press is focusing on the impact to hardware vendors in the “all important” Christmas shopping season, as consumers hold off on new hardware purchases until they can get Vista with it.

But as I skimmed the Channel 9 boards and saw the comment, “Who releases product in January?!?”, I thought of something…

Apple does. MacWorld - usually in the first week of January - is an Apple showcase event. Based on earlier comments from Steve Jobs, we’re very likely to see the next version of MacOS X released in early 2007. By releasing Vista in early 2007, Microsoft can use their marketing juggernaut to try to defuse Apple’s now-regular domination of the tech press.

Now, I’m not saying that Microsoft would change their release schedule of Vista just to try to steal/minimize Apple’s thunder. But tell me - just try to tell me - that the people involved in marketing Vista aren’t relishing the chance…

Posted by jim at 10:32 AM

September 28, 2005

Fighting a War

Since Monday afternoon, I have been fighting a war. The smoke has cleared, and the front is now quiet, and I have a chance to look over the battlefield.

Starting sometime in the wee hours of Monday morning, a virus author controlling a large army of zombie machines started a massive propagation campaign, sending hundreds of thousands of messages to myriad targets on the Internet. Besides their binary payload, the messages had one crucial thing in common:

Their headers were forged to appear as though they’d originated from the company of my employ - from a randomly generated username (usually invalid) at my company’s domain.

As these messages reached their targets, immense numbers were rejected or bounced. They “returned” to their apparent port of origin. Us. Even though our inbound mail server is a buffed dual-Xeon 2GB spam-processing machine, it quickly developed a backlog of over 90,000 messages. All “legitimate” - because they were bounces, not actual spam or viruses. From myriad IP addresses, because the originating spam campaign had myriad targets.

In the end, we built a script snippet that would delete any bounce messages - related to the given storm surge or not. First pass took 20 minutes and deleted over 43,000 messages from the backlog. A tweak, another run, and 15,000 more were gone. Two hours, several passes, and no more surges later, we’d caught up.

More than anything, this simply reminds me that there’s a shadow war on the Internet - one that most users rarely see the depths of. spambots, virus campaigns, zombie armies, cancelbots, incessant probes, firewalls, VPNs, virus filters, spam filters… there will come a time when this overhead becomes too burdensome to do business online. Not sure what will happen, then. The Internet shares part of the UNIX philosophy, in that it “doesn’t prevent you from stupid things, so as not to prevent you from doing clever things”. But the stupid is growing, and doing its best to eat the clever.

Posted by jim at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2005

Buzz ball in Microsoft's court

In the “Apple vs Microsoft” camp of computing, it’s pretty hard to deny that the power of buzz has been on Apple’s side for at least a year and a half. As Microsoft stumbled - shutting down their engineering to focus on security (and still having some serious issues right after), “rebooting” their Longhorn (now Vista) development plans - Apple was getting all the good media buzz. Halo effect from the rampant success of iPod/iTunes, the Mac mini, Mac OS X 10.4, and several highly-visible “Web 2.0” personalities making the Mac their personal computing choice.

Well, the pendulum is swinging again.

Yes, the iPod nano is sweet. But the iTunes Phone was a non-starter. The record companies are, in their greed, ready to hamstring ITMS. There’s no new Mac OS X version coming down the pipeline for a bit, and it’ll be hard for Apple to excite people with new hardware until they truly get their Intel transition underway (the rumored dual-core Power Macs will still be G5s). The news isn’t bad - there just isn’t much at the moment.

In Redmond, however, Microsoft looks to be ready to blow out its constipated pipeline. Xbox 360, IE7, Vista, Office, Sharepoint v3, SQL Server, Longhorn Server - all this and more should be shipping over the next 24 months. Microsoft, for better or worse, looks to be embracing (and expanding) some of the technologies and practices they’ve been lambasted for ignoring (RSS, anyone? Blogs? Hi, Scoble!)

What does this mean? Lots of press about a resurgent Microsoft in the near future, with concomitant articles about an Apple being “under attack” (by MS on one side, and the labels on the other). People who switched from Windows to Mac OS X during the Tiger buzz will start to blog about having second thoughts or even switching back as they see news about the bright-and-shiny from MS (this is already starting). Microsoft diehards will let loose their I Told You So posts. Apple diehards will fall back into almost predictable zealot stance (shaolin monkey school).

That is, unless Microsoft fails to follow through on the proto-buzz they managed to generate in the past month (hitting a current high after PDC and the company meeting), or if Apple pulls something Big out of the bag at MacWorld in January (or at WWDC in July). Those are possibilities, sure.

But for now… I’m putting my money on a “resurgent Microsoft” theme starting in the tech media, and staying with us for a while.

Postscript: All I’m talking about it buzz here, kids. IE7? Summer 2006. Vista? Late 2006. First Apple Intel machines? June 2006. Office 12? Early 2007. We can judge the products when they ship.

Posted by jim at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

Google's Gmail Notifier

Google has finally come out with a Gmail Notifier for MacOS X, written by software engineer Greg Miller in his 20%. (All Googlefolk are expected to spend 20% of their work time on a project of personal interest).

Not that this niche hasn’t been addressed by the Mac community - most notably GmailStatus - but Gmail Notifier includes some spiff features, such as showing header excerpts of unread messages, allowing you to directly view only your unread messages, and the ability to make Gmail your default mail program. I’ll miss GmailStatus’ support for Growl, but Gmail Notifier has already taken over.

Also, a little side note. The new Google Desktop for Windows has a nice feature - not only does it index your desktop (and Outlook while it’s open), but it also indexes your Gmail account and makes that available. No Gmail importer for Spotlight on MacOS X 10.4 - so I went ahead and added a Gmail account to Mail.app, with a ruleset that marks any new Gmail messages as read it into a Gmail Archive folder. Voila - my Gmail messages are being archived by Spotlight.

Posted by jim at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2005

Princeton doesn't get it.

Engadget noted on Saturday that Princeton will be offering digital textbooks starting this fall - with a focus on the intensely onerous and user-hostile nature of the DRM involved. Princeton’s response this morning? A letter from Thomas Bartus of their Office of Communications telling them to take down the “protected image” of the Princeton school logo they posted with the story.

They don’t get it.

Not to say that it comes as any surprise, having worked 15 years in large universities (Such as UW, where they’re force-feeding Napster and Dell to the students). But still… Princeton - or the people making these decisions at Princeton - doesn’t get it.

Posted by jim at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

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

June 20, 2005

Lowest Common Denominator

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogs (I really dislike blogosphere) that “small is the new big”. 37signals loves it, of course. Scoble talks about it in Microsoft land.

Brought it up with my CIO this morning, and he even brought up the “old” concept of Extreme Programming. However, we came to a very quick agreement on why - if they’re so great - you don’t see these models implemented more: the prerequisite.

You have to start with a group of functional, motivated, communicating people who have very little ego in regards to a shared project. This includes the management, and the money - not just the core project team. The moment you throw in someone who is entrenched in his work flow, who is dogmatic about a given implementation or technology, who is in “coasting” mode, or who clams up every time something might possibly be construed as criticism (even constructive), then these hi-efficiency models grind themselves to pieces.

It’s like a hi-performance engine. To get those levels of performance, everything has to be tuned just so.

If you don’t meet those prerequisites, then it’s back to the more structured models - because the structure can help route around the damage of the low-performance parts.

Either that, or you swap out parts. But that’s another issue entirely.

Posted by jim at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2004

Tom's TIB

Okay kids, go read this. You're going to have to have a PDF reader of some flavor to actually get into the goodness but, trust me, it's worth it. While it has a lot of your typical "what color is my parachute" and "who moved my cheese" stuff in it, there is also an overwhelming amount of the very-uncommon "common sense" that is missing in too many minds these days. Such as:

Management Rule/Role No. 1: GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. (“Manager” = Hurdle Removal Professional.)

“Thank you” trumps all!

Fun...is not a...Four-Letter Word (so, too, Joy).

Just go grab it. There's at least one thing in there you need.

Posted by jim at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2004

How Do You Use The Tool?

Mena of Six Apart, trying to get more information on the MT3 announcement reaction, is asking people how they use the tool in ways that the license doesn't cover. I'll refer to this, which discusses the three blogs I've set up at work - one of which is single author and presents as a webzine, and the other two being news/events aggregators for the College of which will potentially have over a dozen authors each (especially the events item).

The capability of MT3 to make nigh-infinite authors made a lot of novel uses possible beyond the personal journal. Project blogs, collaborative fiction, family journals. The sudden change from a "donate $20 and use it to the limit" model to a model that makes heavy use of blog/author metrics will severely restrict the tool flexibility that had made MT such a popular tool.

I'm afraid I don't have an answer for the SA folks as to how to create a reasonable tiered pricing scheme that can doesn't create these arbitary limits. But it's a massive sea-change in how people approached the tool...

Posted by jim at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2004

MT3 - you just stepped in it.

Six Apart screwed the proverbial pooch earlier this week when announcing the release of the “Developer Edition” of Movable Type 3.0 and the new pricing and licensing conditions thereof.

Less than 48 hours later they were apologizing to beta testers and struggling to reposition and clarify their announcement. Many users (some rather prominent) of MT have already started the exodus to new software, what with the MT3 announcement being foolishly close to a new release of WordPress and the Google-powered Blogger relaunch.

The announcement - timing, content, and tone - shows a stunning lack of business and customer relationship acumen, especially when understood in the context of what was aparently a very rough beta period and many public statements on what MT3 would be. Scary, really.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has what is likely the most intelligent and concise commentary on the matter.

Mark Pilgrim and Brad Choate also have intellgent things to say and good point to make, even if they’re ultimately on different sides of the fence.

Me? I don’t know. I’ve already been considering some site overhaul ideas of my own, preparing for work on littlejenni.com, and starting to examine publishing systems for work implementations. This just throws more questions, rather than answers, into my plans…

Posted by jim at 10:46 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2004

The Internet giveth, and the Internet mocketh...

Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean's raucous speech after his disappointing 3rd place finish in the Iowa Caucuses had just that right combination of fervor, mania, and strained vocal chords that makes samplers and music mixers rub their hands in glee.

With the recent (last week!) release of Apple's new music program, Garage Band, making music from loops and samples is more accessible to beginners than it ever was.

Like they say in the sitcom promos - "hilarity ensues!"

Posted by jim at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2004

Random Networking

Anil Dash (via BoingBoing), makes an interesting observation that almost all the "enabling technologies" that have come about recently are "tied to individuals. From email to mobile phones to IM to social networking applications, a single person is the most frequent point of contact."

There are a couple of secondary items that come from Anil's observations. How many times have you found yourself lost in phone-tree hell, where an automated phone system that might be useful if you knew exactly who you wanted to talk to gives you the run-around as you try to find the equivalent of a general receptionist to help you find out who can actually help you? Same thing. Ever find yourself wanting to get "into" an social group, only to discover that you can't without an e-invite of some sort? How to get it? Know an individual "inside". How do you do that? Get inside. Huh?

A book I read in 1990 (4 years before the explosion of the Web, back when we were using Macs and Windows 3.0), posited a near-future World Data Net where the challenge wasn't finding information, it was the two-fold challenge of finding the information you wanted and filtering through the barrage of information you didn't need. Design of custom retrieval (for "pull" data) and filtration (for "push" data) software was an industry in itself. One of the main characters, in an effort to prevent what she described as the all-too-common self-selection of the world (filter out everything but agreeable news and opinions), hired a wily convicted hacker to write her filters such that there was always an element of randomness - something that, while possibly of interest to the reader, was outside the purvey of defined filters and search criteria.

It was only a couple pages in the book, but it made an impression on me then, and continues to be relevant today. The one-to-one technology that we're surrounding ourself with is slowly weeding out the random, unplanned encounters of our lives. That may include the spammers, and the annoying guy down the hall - but it also includes the person who might have that out-of-print book we were looking for, or the really interesting person that lives just down the street.

Noted Columnist William Raspberry wrote an opinion piece recently about the importance of community, quoting one researcher who concludes that "it is the [lack of] quality of [...] interpersonal relationships and [...] transactions with the wider social and material environment that lead to behavioral, emotional and physical health problems."

This is going on a bit longer than I intended, but the point seems to be the following: most of the new tools and technologies that we are introducing are, as Anil says, targeted towards individual interactions. Additionally, they enable heavy filtering so as to only show us what we want to see. On the other side, social structures - and individuals within them - are being damaged by the increasing lack of meaningful broad social interactions.

Are we doing this to ourselves? Is the new "enabling" technology not only limiting the breadth of our interactions with others, but actually starting to damage our social insitutions? Can't say for sure, but something doesn't feel quite right these days...

Posted by jim at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)