07.01.08
The problem with money trees
The problem with money trees is that you have to have two in order for them to bear fruit and chances are, you aren’t going to find another one when you are looking.
06.26.08
Book Review: Simplexity by Jeffrey Kluger
Simplexity Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)
This is a fun book to read purely because it is largely a collection of little of illustrative stories plucked from science and history. I also think it relates strongly to the theme of this blog which I was trying to center around subtle and not-so-subtle contradictions in everyday life.
I don’t think Mr. Kluger really reaches any over-arching conclusions about complexity and simplicity except that they are found everywhere and sometimes one may reveal the other at another level.
Simplexity is an an enjoyable book to read, and because it lacks any strong postulate it probably will not change your world-view.
Upgrade
Upgrade is the name for trading a set of problems you are familiar with or have already mostly solved or come to terms with (the devil you know), with a new set of unfamiliar problems and enhancements.
06.10.08
Apple and Google, change paradigms, leap past Microsoft
I’ve often said that you cannot beat Microsoft by going head to head with them. You have to come at them from an angle. Microsoft has crushed all the companies that have tried to oppose them directly. Apple with the iPhone and Google with Android are evolving new paradigms in computing and leap-frogging over Microsoft.
Google understands that content is king, but they realize that their content is your content so their value-add is locating and displaying the content and manipulating it. The key to this strategy is giving access to this content anytime, anywhere. Enter Android. Android should continue the precedent of manipulating content and add inexpensive, anytime, anywhere access to Google. Android won’t run Windows and it won’t have MS Office so down the road we should expect a continuous evolution of tools to use the file formats we are familiar with. At the same time a realization will occur where we learn those files aren’t the best way to use the content anymore and the new tools will be developed using things like Ajax and cloud computing. Exit Microsoft.
What does Apple bring to the party? For one, lots of style and ease-of-use, but where Android will probably look like a portal to Google, the iPhone will combine a high end client end-point with a portal, and local storage. So along with access to a world of Google-mediated information you have music, movies and games.
It will be interesting to see how Apple and Google remove the perceived restrictiveness of these small platforms (particularly small screens) and expand our access to our standard world of information.
05.14.08
The Berryheads are coming
The “Berryheads” are those people (cause we would never do this) who are trying to walk while typing on their blackberrys. They run into people, walls, and get off on the wrong floor on the elevator. They make OGBs (Original Gansta Berry-users) shake their heads in disgust.
Watch out berryheads, you put yourself and others at risk until you realize whatever you have to say really isn’t that important. Or you never figure it out and go down as proof that natural selection is at work all around us.
05.11.08
Squeezecenter (formerly Slimserver) on Ubuntu Hardy Heron
I had some trouble installing Squeezecenter (formerly Slimserver) on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). Everything goes according to the instructions from the Slim Devices (Logitech) web sites but once you try to access the web server problems pop up.
It seems the issues stem from Apparmor. A program used to protect certain settings on Ubuntu. you can see the issued in /var/log/messages.
After a lot of digging the answer was available here: http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7580#c1
There is probably a more elegant solution but this will work for now, and I just wanted to point anyone else in this direction in case others have problems.
04.27.08
Ballmer out of touch?
I realize the media gets a lot of things out of context, but whoa! This was a quote from Steve Balmer on CNN. “Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are IT departments who are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.”
He’s right, we are having trouble justifying upgrades to an obese operating system that does not really have any justifiable ROI.
Steve must be living on the moon. He should go visit some people in the trenches really doing IT and living with a budget.
04.18.08
Where is the browser from Adobe?
Arguably, anyone who uses the Internet touches Adobe technology at some point. Most likely in the form of Flash and Shockwave or Acrobat. Some of the most annoying problems creep in when your browser and operating system don’t cooperate with these technologies. Adobe could fix this. If Adobe had an Adobe-browser they could seamlessly combine the browser with all their extra technologies to work together. Historically Adobe has had good support for multiple operating systems including Linux so we know there is expertise within the company to support a broad range of platforms, perhaps even including mobile phones.
You can say there are already too many browsers and several very good ones now, but I think the Adobe browser is missing.
What would be the attributes of an Adobe-browser? I think it would have several useful things. First, it would be small and tight, carefully written for fast execution. It would need to be rigorously standards-compliant, perhaps based on an existing rendering engine, but not necessarily. Finally it should be a component. The browser itself should be able to plug into IE or FireFox, or run by itself. It should also be highly manageable and secure. It should also break some paradigms about what a browser should look like. That’s a tall order.
An Adobe browser should be highly manageable and secure because in a lot of places people would want to use it as the sole interface on a Kiosk. Imagine all the Flash and Acrobat technologies right there, for a pleasant user-interface and form-filling capabilities. In companies it would be nice to be able to lock down different aspects, like proxy settings, history settings.
Maybe Adobe doesn’t want to touch the browser market for several reasons - there is no profit in it, nobody “buys” a browser anymore, several good browsers already exist, or they don’t want to dominate the Internet and have to contend with antitrust issues. Certainly there might not be much profit in it, except perhaps in an IDE, developer materials and deployment and developer education for those wishing to extend or better support the browser, the “ecosystem” around it. Several good browsers do exist. OK, extend one. Use the rendering engine from an existing browser (maybe not IE) or partner with Apple, Mozilla, Opera or KDE. Do not worry about dominance and antitrust. It would be hard to get market share away from the big two, worry about that once you are successful.
I’m not asking Adobe to merge all their technologies into the browser. They should be modular, as they are with other browsers. That way you could trim the browser down for a cell phone, or have different levels of Acrobat support according to what the browser needs to do. The Adobe developers of all those other good technologies can continue to concentrate on making them work and improving them, they would have just have an additional browser to worry about integration with.
Finally, an Adobe browser could be a great development tool for all the people who work in development with Adobe technologies today. The first and best place to make sure your AIR, Flash, ColdFusion, or even Acrobat applications are working. Hopefully within an IDE like Eclipse.
C’mon Adobe, how about it?
04.10.08
ColdFusion 8.0 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
We have a little application that collects the contents of a database and then sends them to a few mail recipients for review. It was working fine in CF 8 prior to moving to Exchange 2007. We have other applications that relay mail through Exchange 2007 fine but for some reason this one was not. It turned out that the cfmail from field only had the name and not the domain of the sender. Once we added the sender domain mail would relay and work again.
This is probably a good thing - Exchange having tighter adherence to a standard, though I’m not sure which one. But it could definitely be a “gotcha” if your mail server was working fine prior to a switch to Exchange 2007, or possibly even an earlier version of Exchange such as 2003 or 2000. We happened to be moving away from Exchange 5.5.