[block user nina.skies]

He was most excited about the “home brew” applications he had installed, which required him to get to the Linux command line on the Pre.  And how he had installed a hack of the GPS and the networking on the Pre that allowed him to remote login to his Pre, and fetch the GPS location of the phone if he had lost it.

He let me look at his for a few minutes, because–surprise–I have been so deep in the world of defense tech lately, I haven’t even had a chance to look at a Pre on a store shelf, let alone evaluate one.  And yes, after a cursory examination of the Pre, even with its microscopic keys, the Pre has moved up on my list of potential replacements for my Blackberry 8700c. (I absolutely loathe screen-typing on the iPhone–I need physical feedback, being a touch typist.)

That is, if I ever get free of AT&T, what with every other member of my family on an AT&T phone, and two of them on iPhones.

But I’ve been going out of my fucking mind.

My current company is at least geographically relatively close, compared to previous employers — a 75-mile drive, an hour-and-a-half commute off peak. I spend most Mondays in the office just so people know I exist. It’s certainly less of a grind than my last corporate gig, where I spent nearly every other week flying to New England, and the folks at the office park Sheraton knew me by name. That job drove me to the edge, to dark places I never want to go again, with the lost hours in airports, on Southwest, on the 128 to Needham, in a bad hotel restaurant, in cubeland trying to figure out why things were so fucked and what it was exactly I was supposed to be doing since nobody knew I existed even when I was there.

But I digress.

There is a great deal of what I do that is best done in isolation, with no interruptions. I find that I write best in the dark hours, when the house is quiet, and there are no interruptions– or at least that’s when I am *able* to write. But the inspiration for writing has to come from a more social world, and my brain needs other people to engage it sometimes.

That became clear to me when I stood up and guided a session at the recent SocialDevCampEast here in Baltimore, and then participated in several more. Part of it is ego, and part of it is just plain human need — I like the feedback that comes with gettting up and talking and thinking on my feet, and I like talking about things I’m passionate about. As solitary as I am most of the time, I am a social animal, and given my usual isolation, I find that I need approval and acceptance all the more so when I get the opportunity.

In other words, I’m a needy, egotistical serial loner. Quite the personality profile.

But, as it turns out, a lot of other very smart people are also needy, egotistical serial loners looking to be more social. One of the conversations at SocialDevCampEast was about co-working.

Dave Troy, who I used to occasionally co-guest with on the Marc Steiner Show (on what was then WJHU, along with Eric Monti) , is leading ab effort to bring co-working in the style of Philadelphia’s Indy Hall to Baltimore. Co-working, for the uninitiated, is a social approach to independent info-working, providing the professional and creative benefits of networking and idea bouncing for those who might itherwise spend the day talking to their cat.

So far, the Beehive group has been meeting at Blue House, a Fells Point coffee shop, and doing Tuesday and Thursday “jellies”-sessions where people loosely show up and work in each other’s company and leech off the establishment’s wifi. But plans are in the works for an actual shared space in Canton.

I, unfortunately, have yet to get to a jelly. But I think I’ll be trying to frequent the shared space when it opens, being as it beats driving to Falls Church for a day in the office.

Government, especially local and state, loves the word free. And Google’s geospatial and other data standards have made them even more dear to them, since local government data has been locked up in GIS and other databases that would cost millions to integrate independently.

Also, it’ll make the transition to googlement that much easier when the googleplex takes over the world.

And as I type this on my Blackberry, folks from the Navy, State Department and GSA are talking about blogging. You wouldn’t think there would be so much regulation standing in the way of government talking to itself–let alone the public–via Web 2.0 tech. Procurement, congressional oversight, policy and administrative rules are all tooled against direct communication.

*and an edit from a real computer*

After taking in the whole conference, and looking at what 3 cups of coffee and a crackberry wrung out of me, I figured maybe I should expand on the buzziness above.

I had been away from covering government stuff for almost 15 years before this January. And as much as things have changed, the people in government IT largely haven’t. The average age of the Federal IT workforce is 47, according to a factoid I heard yesterday–which I’m going to have to get a cite for, but based on the folks I’ve seen at various events, it seems on target. Unlike the commercial world, there has long been a culture of risk-avoidance, and resistance to change is embedded in both the regulations and culture. One person I spoke to talked about how regulations are to the point that government employees now have to basically break them in order to get anything done.

Another problem is that there’s a dependency on contractors to do much of the deep technical work in government IT, and contracts are generally driven by specifications from within government. Cross pollination of new ideas — and a flow of fresh blood into the Federal IT gene pool– is something that hasn’t been made easy by the way the government does business.

But now, I have a Blackberry.

And those trapped moments are now bloggable.

It’s less a pure blog and more of a mash-up of blog and aggregation portal. I’m using XSL transformations and RSS feeds to create a topical site that combines a regular blogger with all of the “traditional” editorial coverage we do on a topic. And, much to my chagrin, it’s all based on .NET.

One down, nine to go. This month.

Carton has started writing a weekly column for my day job. Considering he’s now Dean of Philadelphia U.’s School of Design and Media, it was kind of strange on the surface that MICA would ask him to come speak–it almost seemed like GM having Lee Iacocca come speak at a Chevy product launch.
But I was also there to network, and to find out about MICA’s graphic/digital design programs. Plus, it gave me a chance to check out the new Brown Center at MICA, the concrete and glass monster on Mount Royal that’s most famous here in Baltimore for catching a bullet shortly after it opened. And besides, I wanted to steal some ideas from Carton.
And here’s the idea I’m stealing today — to succeed with a product, in bits or atoms, you need to delight.

Here’s the context. After a whirlwind tour through the last 20 years of digital convergence and its impact on culture — and on the amount of available attention people have — Carton talked about how important design has become to the success of a product. Products (be they physical or information-based) succeed because of the total experience people have with them, and much of that experience is a result of design.

The Delight factor is what seperates the iPods, BMWs, Mini Coopers, Muvicos, Googles and such from the rest. People overlook the specs if something engages them in a way that goes beyond just the function of the product.

It’s a dangerous word, “delight.” When I hear managers talk about “delighting the customer”, it usually comes two seconds before they spew out the most idiotic drivel I’ve heard in that particular fiscal quarter. The word itself has lost most of its meaning in daily usage; people just don’t say, “Whoa, dude, this thing delights me.” Typically, it’s used in a sycophantic greeting (“Delighted to meet you!”) or ironically (“I’d be delighted to take that back to the kitchen for you, sir”).

I have a hard time working up to delight. Sure, I covet some of the things that hit the “delight” button hard, like the Mini Cooper, the latest PowerBooks, and so on. But creating a lasting sense of wonder about anything is pretty fucking hard to do. The butterfly on this blog’s header landed next to me on a broken asphalt parking lot…that delighted me, in that moment. Doing stuff with my kids delights me. It’s a real stretch to say that any brand of anything can come close to that level of emotional connection.

And really, that’s the challenge people trying to hack our emotional responses for a buck face these days. Everything has become experiential–everybody is trying to find some way to connect in a scripted, contrived way with the product-consuming public that you really have to do a good job of faking originality to get anyone interested anymore. Everything is derivative of derivative things. To “delight”, you basically have to:

• be original
• be “authentic”
• be inclusive
• not suck

Baltimore has plenty of places that pull that off for me. The fine folks at Atomic Books know how to pull off the experience for their market niche (Yo, Benn and Rachel! And congrats on the Emily Flake book making the Must List in Entertainment Weekly, by the by). The Karzai family has experience nailed at B and Tapas Teatro. WTMD has somehow managed to steal my iPod playlist and make it their programming.

The other key piece of what Sean Carton said is that eventually, the technology or medium used to deliver whatever connection you’re trying to make with people is irrelavant. It’s about making people feel like they belong within the world that the product/website/experience reflects. A cool, makes-you-want-to-come-back web site isn’t just about the graphics, the beveling, the font choices, or demonstrating mad CSS skillz–it’s dependent upon creating a connection with the audience. The content needs to speak to people at a whole level beyond just passing along information.

I look at the stuff my company does. Does it “delight”? I don’t think so. How do you “delight” IT people, corporate executives, etc. with a tech website? It’s hard enough to just suck less, let alone not suck.

But for those of us who only fall into the first categories, podcasting may carry a little too much of a footprint. If you haven’t mastered GarageBand or some other multitrack editing tool (or don’t own one), creating polished podcasts may be difficult.

For those who want all of the advantages of podcasting without the audio, I’m taking blogging to the next level in inaccessibility and security: Papercasting. Using a paper-based logging device (a notebook) with a Fischer Space Pen, I record up-to-the minute notes on the day’s events. Then I scan the page for the day and upload it–if you don’t have a scanner, a digital camera may do the trick if set for the appropriate image quality and focal point.

Here’s my papercasting plog (paper weblog).

Next, I have to figure out how to do a fax gateway so I can moblog from Kinko’s.

If you want to see a sample plog entry, click below.

In the run-up to this event, Ed blogs about the shoddy piece of journalism from the New York Times about blogs and Iraq.

What’s funny about the article is that it’s a lot like the blog posts that most journalists who deride blogs point to as evidence of how bad they are–a single original source, relying on third-party comments on another weblog, failure to do simple fact checks. By the end of the story, I was wondering, “OK, so what exactly was the point of this?” The reporter raises lots of doubts, address only a few, and ends it so lamely that she might as well have used the cliche: “Only one thing is certain–life goes on.”

It’s been at least a couple of years since anyone thought the New York Times was infallible. But you’d think that the experience of a public witch hunt would have chastened the editors at the Times and made them pay more attention to process.

Of course, if you thought that, you would be wrong. The NY Times, and the newspaper business in general, is an archaic institution that wraps itself in the glory of the First Amendment while continually selling off the good china of its reputation to pay the bills. In other words, general audience print journalism is the Wizard of Oz of modern media–pay no attention to the declining talent and energy behind the curtain.

Despite the advanced technology available to journalists of all walks today, many newsrooms have until recently totally escewed having actual Internet access in their newsrooms. Until recently, for example, only a select few reporters at the Baltimore Sun (based on my conversations with Sun reporters on the topic) actually had access to the Internet (or even their e-mail) at their desktop–reporters filed copy from terminals plugged into an archaic editing and layout system. At least they aren’t printing thermal “slicks” and doing manual paste-up of mechanicals any more.

And even now that they have the resourcves available, your average newspaper reporter doesn’t have a solid grasp of how to use them–or the time to use them properly.

But that’s hardly an excuse for not properly attributing sources. Even we in the technology news business know how important proper attribution is to the credibility of a journalist. People who cobble quotes together and manufacture what they can’t get firsthand quickly get a reputation for being hacks, and nobody will talk to them.

And reporters just seem to get twice as stupid when they write about bloggers, or practically anything about the Internet. They seem openly hostile to bloggers, and treat the Internet like something to be alternatingly feared and mocked.

There are several big lies that general audience journalists pull out whenever they want to go after blogs:

1) Objectivity. Because blogs are run by opinionated individuals and not by big, safe editorial operatons that screen stories carefully, they are inherently less objective than professional news media.

Bullshit. Print objectivity is a lie. All stories are written from a point of view–the hook for the story presents a particular point of view, and it’s usually that of the journalist (or the editor who rewrites the story), filtered through the experiences of the writer or editor. And an editorial process never helped Fox News, or stopped NYT and USA Today reporters from making up entire stories without getting caught.

2) Resources. Professional journalists lay claim to a wealth of informed sources that somehow make the quality of their information better than what individual bloggers can pull together.

Again, bullshit. Bloggers often have deep experience in the areas they write about, an Internet full of assignment editors and ready sources to help them build stories, and the ability to revise on the fly as new information becomes available. General assignment reporters often start with a press release; bloggers start more often with first-hand experience and established connections in their niche.

3) Credibility. This lie is built on the other two–because they are objective and have well-established resources, the traditional news media claims that they are more credible than independent sources like bloggers. Plus, they’ve been around longer. They’re institutions. You can trust them.

Total bullshit. The news media have been around a long time, and they’ve been screwing up for just as long. There was no “golden age” of print journalism any more than there was a “golden age” of strip-mining; since their formation, media organizations have been playing sleight-of-hand with the truth when it benefits them, just by the nature of their organizational culture. The people who have exposed greater truths were always iconoclasts within or outside of those organizations, and their bext work was often in the individual form. Take Upton Sinclair, for example.

If Upton Sinclair were alive today, he’d probably be a blogger, not a NY Times reporter.

They're going to make Solaris for X86 Solaris for X86 free. I guess that's the news.

Apparently, that was all it took to push a 10-year old pocket hub that had been holding together my second-floor segment of the household LAN to decide its time had come, and it crapped out completely. It seems it was for the best anyway–my network speed has improved radically, so I suspect the hub was causing some latency or collision problems that I had never noticed. Hasta la vista, hublet.

Meanwhile, for a week, my sons had no Internet access while I tried to find the time to isolate the wiring problem and fix it. Tonight, I found the offending wiring block and re-did the punchdowns; within minutes, they were watching the new Harry Potter trailer.

Yet another reason to go totally wireless in our house, I suppose. But if we did that, all my 10Base-T skills would go to waste…

E-vandalism? E-warfare by Disney? Who knows?

Well, I'll keep trying.

Here's a great application for DARPA to look into for this: an RSS feed for every RFID tag issued, that updates every time the tag passes through another checkpoint. Want to know in near-realtime where a particular pair of sneakers has been? Subscribe to its RSS feed, and you could have its global coordinates posted to a dynamic weblog. Where's that kid off to? Enter the UPC code on his new pair of Air Jordans, and you'll not only know when he arrived at the mall, but potentially who with. Yowza!

[buzzword compliant/ dotCommunist]

Monsanto has created a defacto monoculture through genetic engineering that gives customer a product that not only is derived from a narrow gene line, but is also sterile (so they can't cross-breed it with something else and correct any of its problems on their own) and guarantees post-sales support will come only from their licensed agents, spraying with their chemicals. Sure, it's easy to use, but as resistant strains of pests and weeds start to go after the vulnerabilities in the genetic/chemical firewall Monsanto has built, you're stuck waiting for their engineers and scientists to get a “patch” out in the next version of the product, which won't come out until next growing season at the earliest.

So is Windows the potato of the Internet age or the sorghum? Well, considering that Microsoft “eats its own dog food,” maybe it is more feed-quality than for human consumption.

[buzzword-compliant]

So, for example, if you had a set of network drives you connected to, those shares would be established over the best file service protocol available for the client you were on (NFS, SMB, Windows filesharing, AFS). Bookmarks and cookies were configured for the browser available. Desktop icons would be linked to networked or local applications that provided equivalent functionality, with your preferences translated to them.

Most desktop strategies are monocultures. What if you could, through the application of secure web-based technology like SSL and IPSec, create a heterogeneous desktop strategy that gave you 80% of the power of the homogeneous ones? Using RSS as a vehicle, and a cross-platform agent in, say, Java, to do the client configuration?

I encourage someone to implement this model. All I want is “friends and family” status for the IPO.

Monocultures have spelled trouble throughout history. My ancestors who brought the Gallagher name to the US came here in the wake of the failure of a monoculture–potatoes, which supplied an inordinate percentage of the food supply, were susceptible to a fungus “blight”. The failure of potato crops had a disasterous effect that Ireland, it could be argued, only really recovered from at the end of the 20th century.

The EPA has a history of the Potato Famine on its website, which includes this passage:

Besides the horror, what unites the famines today with one over a century ago are the reasons behind them. Ireland's famine and those of the 20th century have similar, complex causes: economic and political factors, environmental conditions, and questionable agricultural practices.

Substitute “vulnerable code” for “environmental conditions”, and “business” for “agricultural”. and you've got a description of the current state of the Internet.

Windows is the potato of the Internet age. That's basically what the researchers, including analyst Daniel Geer of @Stake, were saying when they wrote, in the executive summary:

“Most of the world's computers run Microsoft's operating systems, thus most of the
world's computers are vulnerable to the same viruses and worms at the same time. The
only way to stop this is to avoid monoculture in computer operating systems, and for
reasons just as reasonable and obvious as avoiding monoculture in farming. Microsoft
exacerbates this problem via a wide range of practices that lock users to its platform.
The impact on security of this lock-in is real and endangers society.

“Because Microsoft's near-monopoly status itself magnifies security risk, it is essential
that society become less dependent on a single operating system from a single vendor if
our critical infrastructure is not to be disrupted in a single blow.”

After this report was published, Geer was fired by @Stake, which is a Microsoft contractor. The fact that Geer was apparently fired for mentioning the elephant in the room with him is telling. Considering the world-wide press Microsoft is making to prevent alternative operating systems like Linux from taking root, it's obvious that some folks think maintaining the dependence of the masses on the next release of Potatoes Server and Potatoes XP is essential to continuing their standard of living.

As someone who once earned his bread by installing and administering Windows NT networks, I can't help but agree with the CCIA assessment. While I use multiple computers, I now do all of my daily work (including e-mail) on one of my two Apple computers–mostly because I haven't had to worry about an e-mail worm or script attack since I started doing so. My 12-year old son uses a Windows XP computer, which I'm constantly applying patches to. And as I mentioned in Server Not Found, constant reboots from applying patches actually killed my last Windows 2000 server in my inventory. It sits in the corner of my office, awaiting resurrection with a new mother board or cannibalization of its parts.

The best defense against any assault is defense in depth–relying on one thing for defense is what led to the Maginot Line, and, well, we know how that turned out. Having loosely coupled, heterogeneous systems means that you can more easily ride out an assault (or a fatal bug) in any part of your infrastructure.

The main problem is increased cost of ownership–you need to have people with multiple skill sets to maintain multiple operating systems, Well, maybe. Some alternative OSs may actually reduce cost of ownership for some classes of users. If you build your applications on top of a cross-platform architecture, switching from a MS SQL server backend over to a MySQL backend won't be that big a deal. If you stick to common file formats, the cost of maintaining different office productivity apps isn't that significant (I use Office, AppleWorks, and OpenOffice within my office, on the same files, interchangeably, every day–sometimes even at the same time).

A point made by the study is that any technology monoculture is a potentially bad thing. If we had a Linux monoculture (perish the thought), we'd all be dealing with the latest Linux virus…right?

Hmm. Probably not. Because, you see, there's a big difference in that scenario–anyone can look at Linux's source code. And because of all of the different potential configurations, distributions, and revs to Linux (hell, some application binaries don't work from one version of Linux to another on the same processor platform), a “Linux monoculture” would be an oxymoron.

But here's another example–what if, say, there was another flaw like the floating point “flaw” that Intel had with the Pentium processor, or the, ahem, cache problems that Sun had with the UltraSPARC, and a vast preponderance of systems running the Internet depended on that CPU? What if everybody used the same Ethernet chip for their network interface, and it was found to have a bug that caused it to go into permissive mode? What if someone could, say, exploit a hole in Passport, and use it to launch a DOS on every system running MSN Messenger?

What. indeed. Potatoes may be cheap and easy to cook, but if they're what you live on, their cost of ownership can get extremely high very fast. Just ask any Gallagher you run into.

I am, as a non-professional who writes code when God sees fit to allow time for it, a programming pragmatist. While I like Java for some tasks, I do most of my web programming in PHP, thank you–at least partially because I don't host my own site, and very few hosting companies are comfortable with running a Java ServerPages-enabled site. But even when I do home portal stuff, servlets and JSPs are doable–but why would I waste my time when I can do it with a little server side script?

Java 2 Enterprise Edition is not a hobbyist's toolset. I don't sit down and say, “Hey, I should write that [insert trivial application here] in Java.” Hell, it's not even appropriate for enterprise software projects with a lifecycle of less than six months. And, no matter what Sun tells you, Java is not exactly knocking anybody dead on the desktop; moving the focus of Java to the app and web server was the smartest thing the Java community ever did, because it widened the potential client system audience exponentially.

But that's not to say that Java couldn't move down into the world of trivial applications. You have to start off a little higher up the dev tool food chain than notepad.exe to make that happen, and you have to make the “include” process more transparent to developers. In fact, that should be determined at build time, not by the poor sap writing the code.

There are already some very good Java IDEs out there. But it's not just a cooler, flashier IDE that Java needs–it needs a tool that's got better property-driven components that can be rapidly assembled into applications. The key to the success of VB was the ease with which you could wire it to an external data source. ODBC and data-aware controls together, not just ODBC, made Visual Basic what it is today. Any moron with VB could create a client application that accesses a relational database.

Unfortunately, the Java IDE ecosystem has withered quite a bit over the last two years; now Borland is pretty much the only show in town outside Sun and IBM (and a personal bitch here: Borland's JBuilder for Mac is still back in version 6, while the rest of its tools have gone through 3 more generations).

The bottom line, it seems, is that Java's corporate custodians want it to be hard to use. They want it to be an enterprise tool that acts as a vehicle for consulting services; and with the increasing amount of open source Java tools available out there, they're depending on services to be what makes them money on Java. Look at IBM's WebSphere suite–it's a suite only in name, with no really clean integration of components. Some assembly required, your consultants put it together.

Greenspun's got it wrong. Java could be a sports car, or a skateboard. But the way Java is delivered to most developers right now, it's a 747, not an SUV. Companies end up with full blown J2EE servers when all they ever really run are JSPs and servlets. One corporate development manager told me that “what I need is a ball-peen hammer, but IBM insists on selling me jackhammers.”

Samba now integrates with Microsoft's version of Kerberos and with Microsoft Active Directory, through LDAP. Apparently, Microsoft hasn't totally locked down the intellectual property for the protocols required to connect to and from Windows.

Elba was originally intended (by the CDN crew) to be an effort to incorporate The Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo Project with the JBoss code; now, it's a placeholder (and source of revenue) for CDN while it contributes to Geronimo itself, independent of JBoss code. Geronimo is to be Apache's Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) server, which it hopes to certify with Sun as J2EE-compliant. The Apache Software Foundation is in no way connected to Elba–and wants nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, The JBoss Group is trying, now, to get certified itself. Bob Bickle, once of Bluestone and then of HP Middleware (killed by Carly Fiorina post-merger), is now the VP of biz dev for JBoss, and he, as he put it to me today, “drew the short straw” to negotiate certification licensing with Sun. He says the the move was driven by a change in JBoss's user base (more actual deployments by businesses); others outside the company suggest that the real reason is to get certified before Geronimo.

Clearly, no love was lost in the breakup. Marc Fleury said to me today in a phone interview: “The two guys working over there (Geronimo) were mediocre guys at JBoss.” He suggested they were purged because they weren't up to the transition of the project to “professional open source.”

Uh-huh. Well, I guess Scott's kid won't be building those fixtures.

But, seriously, I understand the “vision thing” that McNealy is trying to spin here; it's the software component-driven world we all thought we would be living in by now, that Sun tried to execute (poorly) with Java Workshop 1.0 in 1997 (or whenever that was). Unfortunately for Scott, that's still the world inhabited by George Jetson–and not us.

While the vision McNealy promotes is of information systems consumers not needing to know how to program,the reality is that somebody still has to play around under the hood to put the building blocks and interfaces all together–or even set them up properly. Packaged software, bundled hardware and software, and so forth are certainly available, but they often end up causing as many or more organizational problems for the companies implementing them than they solve. The return on the investment in these pre-formed slabs of software and hardware isn't exactly great, either. (Seen a happy Siebel or SAP customer lately?)

Grid computing is a wonderful thing, to be sure. Application dial-tone, fire-and-forget business apps, buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. There's just one problem–once you've got all this stuff, and you've installed it with default settings, how the hell do you get any differentiation out of your use of it from your competitor who set up the same system? How do you extract additional value from your leased compute cycles, virtualized storage, and packaged business logic? And how do you make your company dynamic once you've tied your strategy to any-color-as-long-as-it's-black product cycles?

I don't want my fourth grader to have to learn how to program a nuclear power plant, Scott. But I want him to learn logic, and programming technique at some point in his school career, so he can navigate the stupid menus to program a VCR. And I want him to be able to find a better way to do things than the losers fine people who build the interfaces and embedded software and operating systems that we're currently enslaved by. Software matters; programming matters, just as you argue IT matters. Making electrons jump on command is an essential part of making things work better, faster and cheaper, and you know it.

Let's look at the automobile analogy. You once said something like, “Nobody goes out and buys software for their right turn signal.” True. But there are two kinds of car owners out there–users and enthusiasts. Enthusiasts do everything they can to tweak the performance of their car, buying aftermarket kits and tinkering under the hood. Look at what happened to GM's J-car series when it got into the hands of these people, and you'll see what I mean–they made cars from the base car provided by GM that were better than anything GM's design team could come up with.

That's why “open interfaces” and “standard building blocks” may become the accepted baseline of IT–but who still buys the base model? There will always be a need, and a desire, for software jockeys to go under the hood to get that little bit more efficiency out of the system to get that much more of a profitability edge out of the IT investment. There will always be businesses that the standard building blocks don't fit. And there will always be another set of holes in those standard building blocks that need patching.

This is just the latest problem with Sendmail, which has had other similar vulnerabilities (this is the third this year).

But you never hear about sendmail attacks in the press, now do you? And the patch for the problem was ready for deployment within 5 days of the bug being reported on the Full-Disclosure list.

This convergence of wireless networking and audio-video realtime conferencing is waaaay cool. It is portentous, in the same classs of developments as camera/phones and moblogging. It's like peer-to-peer TV news.

I had been in doubt about how well my iSight camera was working with my old reliable G4 Cube; despite being able to conference within my LAN, my attempts to conferene with an old colleague had been discouraging. I was convinced the problem was the speed of the G4's bus, or processing speed, or (worse yet) its cable modem connection being too slow.

It turns out, however, that it's his problem.

So what are those “other interests”?

It seems ironic that the University of California was on the other end of the stick some time back when it was sued by AT&T for patent infringement for its development of BSD Unix–a case which it won, and which put a substantial amount of Unix technology into the public domain. Now, it's putting the same open source community on the spot again–unless, of course, Eolas and UC act to allow open source development based on their patents to continue, or a higher court overturns the decision against Microsoft.

The patents that Eolas claims are disturbingly broad in scope, and would seem to be undermined by significant “prior art” elsewhere in the software world/.

Of course, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is incapable of screening effectively for patents that infringe on unpatented (but copyrighted) work, because there's no link between the patent and copyright systems–patents are governed by the Department of Commerce, and copyrights by the Library of Congress (which isn't even in the executive branch, to my knowledge). And the PTO is woefully understaffed, underfunded (it operates solely on the funds it takes in in patent fees) and, based on the evidence, just plain full of idiots to begin with.

Copyrights are relatively easy to enforce than patents (especially when it comes to software), and not as damaging to innovation. It's easier for the poor downtrodden masses to file for a copyright (you don't need a lawyer to do it), and copyright is protected by common law in most cases. Patents, on the other hand, are generally available to anybody who can pay the lawyers to fill out the forms cryptically enough, and they not only prevent copying but can be used to prevent innovation by others.

The threat posed by software patents extends to Europe as well, where the EU has been considering a new law governing them. If passed there, it could be a spanner in the works for everybody. As Simon Phipps says: “Without a legal protection for standards against retrospective attack by software patents we will suffer death by a thousand gold-diggers as we try to navigate into the massively-connected future. ”

There are two ways to fix the disconnect between patents and coyrights. The first way is to unify the patent and copyright systems, either by some sort of shared knowledge base (or by patent inspectors using a search engine to look for prior art as part of the patent approval process, which they rarely do). But as Otter said in Animal house, “that could take years, and cost millions of lives.”

The other way is simpler: ban software patents. Period. And that's a move I can get behind.

As a result, Microsoft is going to have to rewrite parts of Internet Explorer. The changes will impact any company that depends on client-side code in web applications–like Java, ECMAScript, JavaScript, Quicktime, Flash, RealAudio…the list is a long one. It could affect Netscape and Mozilla, too, as they have plugin implementations of their own. And W3C standards could be thrown into a crisis as well, as the “OBJECT” and “SCRIPT” tags in HTML (as Noel Bergman pointed out in an Apache mailing list) may be seen as in violation of the patent.

When software depends on standards to advance, how does it go anywhere when software patents can be used to essentially hold standards hostage?

For those of you who haven't been fully indoctrinated yet, RSS (which, depending on which faction of the XML wars you belong to, stands for Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) is an XML format most commonly used to “syndicate” content (usually web content, as in news “feeds” or weblog entries)–as part of a paid or free subscription to a specific content source. RSS “feeds” are pulled in by a piece of software and rendered for a user to read directly (as with RSS newsreaders like AmphetaDesk and Ranchero's NetNewsWire, and blogging software like Radio), or processed to be posted to a web page.

At least, that's what they're used for now. Because of the way they work, RSS feeds could concievably be the delivery vehicle for any number of things. Radio already uses them to deliver media downloads–subscribe to, for instance, Adam Curry's weblog feed, and you'll get an occasional video “enclosure” download to your hard drive.

In fact, RSS is potentially a great way to deliver web services to user's desktops as well. What if they were used as the subscription vehicle for web services–to, say, syndicate an interface to a movie schedule database, or a context-sensitive connection to an online bookseller?

There's already a similar implementation of a “channel” based content delivery system that's widely distributed: Sherlock in Mac OS X 10.2 uses “channels” to deliver web services to the desktop. Sherlock uses an Apple-specific API for its web services that governs how they're presented on the client–but what if that information were just provided in the description tag for an RSS feed item, and the link was to the backend web service instead of Jow Blow's latest weblog entry?

There are already some web services being delivered as RSS. An early example of this is Google Alert (which uses the Google Web APIs to generate an RSS feed of a specific Google search, updating it daily); Radio allows users to do something similar with its “Googlebox” code.

Amazon already has an “associate” program that uses links from other people's websites–but what if it delivered a web service-based front end, through an RSS feed?

Or, what if Microsoft issued all of its security patches via an RSS feed that was consumed by the OS itself at start-up?

Don't get me wrong–I like Firebird.  Or at least, I like Firebird
when it works.   But Firebird on Mac OS X is a little flaky
sometimes, and doesn't behave like Safari in some important ways.

One of them is the last page cache–particularly in the case of the
WYSIWYG editor.  In Safari, if I accidentally click on a link or
launch a new page in the window I'm typing in, I can back-button to it
and the content is still there where I left off.  Not so in
Firebird. (Or at least in the WYSIWYG editor in Firebird.)

For instance–yesterday, while typing a fairly long post, I clicked on
an entry in my browser history to check for the URL.  Whoops, it
went to the page.  I arrowed back, and 20 minutes worth of typing
was gone.

Now I know why Dave always fixes his posts after he publishes them.

For this, and dial-up access from the road, I've been paying $50 a month.

So, the time has come to completely pull the plug. I just redirected my domains to a new domain name server at my bargain-basement hosting service, where my disk quota is larger by more than a factor of 10 and my hosting bill is $8 a month. I will no longer suffer in the name of supporting locals. As soon as the DNS refreshes, my move of all my weblogs (except for the one hosted by Userland) will be complete.

McBride, who a just a year ago was pimping for UnitedLinux and hoping to use SCO's installed base to push Linux into the small and medium business markets in earnest, is now claiming that all his former friends in the Linux community of being orchestrated by IBM in their attacks on his “poison pill” strategy for profits from Linux.

As the “evidence” presented by SCO of infringement on its intellectual property starts to fall apart slowly in the light of day, McBride has resorted to dumping piles of press clippings on stage at SCOForum to prove how relevant the lawsuit has made SCO. And rumor has it that some customers are considering filing racketeering charges against SCO for extortion of licensing fees prior to proof of their case.

So the question is, just who is going to have to use that lard that Darl's throwing around to grease up and bend over?

In any case, the return address the culprit used was the e-mail for The Randi Rhodes Show,a “liberal” talk-radio show on ClearChannel's WJNO in West Palm Beach, Florida. I somehow doubt Ms. Rhodes herself sent me the message…it smells more like someone who'd want to embarrass her. Or maybe she's that stupid? I don't know, really, or care.

What's more interesting, or disturbing, to me is the potential for abuse of sites like NewsMax for spam attacks. While this one was pretty much a blunt-force approach, as far as I could tell, it wouldn't take an amazing piece of coding to create a robot that could be pointed at a site like NewsMax's article forwarding feature to churn out e-mails using harvested e-mail addresses for both the sender and target address. Some script kiddie could wack out something like that in Visual Basic in fifteen minutes, I suspect.

Stopping attacks like that would require webmasters to be able to link the source IP addresses of the spam, and not the sending e-mail address. Some straightforward code could limit the damage–say, limiting article forward requests from a specific IP address within a single day. (Also, having user authentication as a gateway to using article forwarding would reduce the likelihood of a spam engine assault).

Since everything else in my house (well, at least since the security patch reboots killed my Compaq server) runs on Mac OS X, the security patches on the single XP machine have become a disproportional administrative burden. So has the general upkeep of the machine–deleting off all the crap software my son inadvertently downloads, ferreting out spyware, and getting rid of the pre-loaded garbage that HP shipped on the hard drive have been an ongoing distraction.

And I'm a guy who's administered Windows and Unix networks. Imagine what it's like for Grandma when she gets a Windows XP PC and a cable modem for Christmas. The security patch feature has to be made more simple–and more automated–for home users, or every new vulnerability in Windows will turn Grandma's PC into a member of the legion of undead PCs trashing your network.

The great part about RASH will be that you can get a RASH feed without even subscribing to it. All you have to do is visit a RASH-inducing weblog, and you'll instantly “catch” its RASH content. In fact, anyone visiting the weblog of anyone who's visited a RASH-enabled weblog–or is just in their FOAF file– will probably catch it too.

That's right–rather than being opt-in subscription-based syndication, RASH is opt-out syndication–you have to do something to get rid of it.

The result will be a boon to bloggers' log files–the hits to weblog.rash files will make any site's logfile look like Instapundit's. Inverviews with Chris Lydon, instant Internet fame, and power over the fate of nations will immediately follow launching syndication in the RASH format.

To opt out of a RASH feed, users will have to use a file similar to robots.txt, called “ointment.rash”, with explicit refusals for each feed they do not want to receive–much as they must currently do with unsolicited e-mails. While this may seem to put an inordinate burden on those on the receiving end of a RASH, it guarantees the RASH source a rapid growth in readership–even if readers are only trying to figure out how the hell they caught the RASH in the first place.

Soon, the whole Web will break out in RASH.

Details to follow…

It's just a little bit creepy.

Some of the results, however, are quite amusing.

Now, I figured, what with my bio out there on publication sites, there might be an entry for me. And there is–a little incomplete, with a few rough edges on the parsing of the data, but it's there. So is my boss. There are some glaring holes in their content based on the sites they've apparently scanned, so their AI is still a work in progress…but like I said, it's creepy.

As a journalist, I can see this being an interesting tool. But it also raises questions of privacy, and of copyrights (especially if they plan to sell this to people). How much of your life is public record? Punch in one of your former employers, and find out.

Except for the fact that I can't converse with anyone in the outside world by video, that is. At first, I thought this was a matter of horsepower; my two day-to-day Macs are powered by 450 MHz G4 processors. I managed to get up a link to my old partner in crime–a rabid iSight fan–from my wife's new 800 MHz G3 iBook without a problem.

But then, with the help of a second iSight camera, I established that I could get the two G4s to conference with each other over the household LAN (albeit with some latency). So now I'm wondering if it's a matter of bus speed, or if my problems are related to my Internet provider–I have a Comcast cable modem.

Sure enough, a quick check with a couple of bandwidth tests reveals that my available bandwidth is down to 400k — less than half of what it was three months ago. Apparently, others in my neighborhood have signed up for Comcast's cable-modem service, and my share of the pipe is dwindling.

The hearbreak of shared broadband.

Still, there's the matter of the iSight working with the iBook. I don't get it. I'll have to do some more testing.

Maybe I should be nicer to Ronald McDonald next time…..naaaah.

The whole thing started when Noel Bergman noted that Microsoft has turned the loss into a winby turning interoperability with Windows into a poison pill. Microsoft can't claim all of CIFS or SMB as proprietary protocols, but it can add proprietary extensions to them–and charge a licensing fee for using those extensions, based on the final ruling.

Want to use Linux as a file server for Windows clients? Whoops–Microsoft ships a patch to its client-server protocols, and all of a sudden your file server dissapears. And only a commercial software package will fix the problem, since Microsoft has made the protocol proprietary in the process–and everybody has to cough up money to get access to it.

This is why I said in 1998 that the Justice Department was barking up the wrong tree–and that the server was where Microsoft had the greatest opportunity for anti-competitive behavior. The only way around this gambit, short of a new antitrust case, is to either take the war to the client( develop a freeware/shareware SMB driver that replaces/”enhances” the Microsoft client protocols on the client) or migrate to another network file sharing and directory stack.

For the most part, this is not a crisis. I had transferred most of what I work with on a daily basis over to the 120 gigabyte external Firewire drive plugged into my Apple G4 Cube a long time ago. The Compaq's usefulness as a software testing machine, given its horsepower, was limited.

But the Compaq was my last remaining wholly owned Windows server; I hardly ever shut it down other than to reboot after a bug patch (which, in recent months, has become almost a daily event). For a time, it was my household's primary digital asset store, with much of its RAID's 10 gigabyte storage capacity dedicated to digital photos and the shared family music library. And it hosted the household intranet.

So now I face a painful decision: do I take it down to the Little Shop of Hardware and attempt to have it resurrected? Or have its innards transferred to another machine? Or do I pay to have it put down? Or do I put it in the closet and wait for it to decompose?

Considering how decentralized my household IT architecture has become over the past two years, I'm not sure I want to do anything more than recover what little data I care about on the Compaq and consign its case to use as an artificial oyster reef or something (and, of course, the rest of its parts to some dignified and ecologically-correct rendering process). Once upon a time, I needed an in-house web, file, and print server; now it's all peer to peer file and print sharing, and everybody's got an e-mail address to send stuff to. It's less efficient storage-wise, sure–but all the client machines in the house have at least twice the storage capacity that the server had.

It makes me wonder if there's such a thing anymore as a workgroup server–outside, say, the media business. When software like Groove has “virtualized” shared storage, and even laptops now come with more than 80 Gb of storage, it takes some pretty serious file-sharing requirements to justify any sort of centralized storage. In fact, the only reason I can think of most people wanting a file server is for centralized data backups–a job served better by a network-attached DVD-R than a multi-processor server.

Over the operating life of my now-deceased Compaq server, I've outsourced my e-mail and web servers to my ISP, eliminated the need for any sort of local web caching by getting better and cheaper bandwidth. and shifted most of my storage burdens to the five other computers in the house.

I've ditched FrontPage and ASP for Dreamweaver and PHP; I've ditched Visual Basic for JavaScript and PHP, since what little software development I do now can be done for the most part for the web browser. I've (mostly) ditched Office in favor of OpenOffice and AppleWorks; in general, I interact with Windows only when I have to run a new security patch on my son's XP machine (Unfortunately, you still need Intel and Windows for most of the really cool games out there). My NT Admin muscles are atrophying.

And I think I'm happy they are.

So why exactly am I mourning the passing of my server? Maybe it's a co-dependency thing.

Thanks to Simon for the heads-up.

I wonder if Bob is still carrying a picture of Carly in his wallet. Probably not.

Could it be in response to Lotus' introduction of a Linux client for Domino? Ximian's Evolution mail client, essentially an Outlook for Linux, is part of the “MadHatter” desktop strategy at Sun. Or (more likely), is this about Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's C# and .Net web services architecture?

Novell has already been pushing hard on the app server side with its acquisition of Silverstream last year. It got a Java application server and a web services integration platform out of the deal. It bought a commercial license for MySQL last year as well, adding a simple but powerful departmental database server to its NetWare application stack. With the addition of Mono, Novell could start to position NetWare as the Swiss Army Knife of network service platforms–it prints, it files, it connects your 3270 applications to your BizTalk workflows by way of Java…

What this means to the rest of the open source and Linux platform communities is, well, TBD. But Novell is certainly putting its money where its newfound open source religion is.

That's an intriguing approach–one I had been aware of before, but I hadn't really considered the the implications of it. The commercial license includes access to the MySQL JDBC, ODBC and C-based database access drivers from MySQL AB, which are not open source. Developers building pure open source applications can use MySQL freely under the GPL license; anybody who wants to tweak the code of MySQL itself has to buy a commercial license.

Again–the core is GPL; the tools to exploit the core for commercial purposes are not. Open source development is encouraged, while a revenue stream–the real revenue stream, in my mind–is maintained.

I've had a bit of debate with some others over this issue myself. How, one friend asked, can Sun take Java (for example) open source when Jonathan Schwartz is shifting its whole business model toward software?

As Simon says (no pun intended), that question is based on confusion between a development methodology and a business model. Sun owns more than just Java–it owns a stack of software and services built upon Java. The Java language development process is a money-losing effort for Sun–it makes all its money off of the technology that is built on top of that language. So, if Sun were to pull, say, a C# with Java and make the language itself an open standard, while keeping its pieces of the runtime technology proprietary, it would still be able to derive a profit from its products built on Java and improve the cost structure (and the quality) of the maintenance of the underlying programming language.

There are already major chunks of Java technology in the open source domain–Tomcat and JBoss come to mind. But what Sun really needs to do is open up the language itself to the community, while continuing to build a profitable business further up the stack, so to speak.

Lessig suggested that the laws of intellectual property would force “*a*a” to one of two extremes–either open source, where its reach could be greatly expanded but the risk of it being “hijacked” or “embraced and extended” [Gabriel's links, not mine ]; or being kept under the control of Sun (whoops, *u*), and thus maximizing its integrity but limiting its potential reach. The third route, or the “just right” that Lessig (and Gabriel, by proxy) endorsed was one where the language was handed over to a “conservancy”, a la The Creative Commons licensing approach–much like what Dave Winer just did with RSS 2.0.

I suspect that Sun will have to take Lessig's advice, or be forced to take Java open-source via some other licensing scheme soon. And I've spoken with enough people who've got some insight to the workings of Sun to be confident that they're certainly already pointed in that direction. Certainly, they've been embracing open source for a while.

The main question is whether they go with a “traditional” open source license or the Creative Commons approach–turning, say, the Java Community Process into , say, an independent, jointly-held (with the other Java contributors) intellectual property holding corporation , something I said they should do nearly 4 years ago when I was at Java Pro. (Unfortunately, that opinion is hidden behind a pay-to-read firewall at DevX.)

Unless they do, Java's not going anywhere. Many of the major contributors to the Java code base are reluctant to cough up more of their hard work to add to Sun's bottom line; for Java to explode into the mobile market and other spaces where Sun has no current clout, it really needs happy (and unfettered) partners to make it happen. Microsoft is already moving in a crushing fashion into the wireless market, making some sort of Java “glasnost” an even more urgent requirement.

But then there's that damn lawsuit…and there's the beating Sun is taking with its sales numbers. So the question is, will Sun jump out of the Java frying pan and into the revenue fire? Or does McNealy understand that he gains more strategically by coughing up Java to a separate licensing company and sharing the wealth?

The concept is pretty straightforward: by building a set of access points across the globe connected by a high-speed network not hobbled by the performance issues of Internet Protocol, they've created “virtual data centers” for their customers that bypass the latency of Internet routes and boost the performance of web applications for distant customers–not just web pages, like content staging services do.

To do this, they've created a high-performance data protocol of their own that web traffic is tunnelled over, and access points that turn the data back into standard Internet traffic at the local ends. Using DNS redirection based on geography, users in, say, Japan get pointed at Netli's point of access in Japan instead of following the Internet's routes across the Pacific. Instead of it taking up to 10 seconds to load a page, it takes less than one.

What's cool about this is that, unlike content staging services like Inktomi, Netli can deliver web pages reliant on real-time data–like ASP applications, corporate portals, and web services. The alternative for most companies would be to have regional datacenters serving up those applications–but the challenges of keeping them all synchronized, even with a private backend WAN, are daunting.

Netli just inked a deal with IIJ to cobrand the service in Japan, and is already delivering the service to North America and Europe. HP is using Netli for its Asian developer portals.

NetLightning addresses one of the problems of the “World-Wide” part of the WWW. Because of its DNS sleight-of-hand, it's transparent to people using it. And Netli is looking at other Internet applications–like, say, virtual private networks–as future services.

For those applications, it remains to be seen how Netli's proprietary pipe compares to RouteScience's optimized routing in terms of performance and bang/buck. I'll be digging some more on this.

Microsoft cuts the entry fee for looking at its server protocol hooks from $100,000 to $50,000. Well, at least we all know which IP ports those protocols use, based on the security problems reported last week. Maybe Microsoft should just issue the protocols as a vulnerability report and get it over with.

Two groups that will hate this–video rental stores and environmentalists. Another form of throwaway culture is all we need–the DVDs should come with a return deposit for recycling, at least.

Ya gotta wonder what's going on at SCO Group. The company formerly known as Caldera, erstwhile Linux OS distributor, is clearly attempting to precipitate a crisis in open source land that, sadly, many could have predicted when Linux started to attract money a few years ago–a crisis that Caldera played an active part in until its sudden personality change as holder of the crown jewels of Unix System V.

BSD is looking better every minute–though I suppose SCO is looking for ways to sue anyone using the Mach kernel, too.

Did IBM and others dump intellectual property that didn't completely belong to them into the open source code of Linux? Did they, in fact, give Linus Torvalds a poison pill of multiprocessor code?

For most people, the question, as the linked article in The Register suggests, is moot. If you're only using single or dual processor systems in cluster to run Linux, the alleged infringed code may not be of any consequence. That means that the only people really impacted by SCO's claims may be those trying to run Linux on a mainframe or on IBM or HP mega-servers.

And there ain't a whole lot of those people out there.

I was already impressed with many of the non-Apple channels added to Sherlock, like “Flights” (the FlyteComm-provided channel that plugs Sherlock into airlines' flight status databases) and “Yellow Pages” (the business directory that gives driving directions, from Switchboard).

But the lightbulb really went off for me when I added Feedster as a Sherlock channel. Now, I have this itch to build channels of my own. And I'd love to see somebody extend the ideas that are there already–like adding a feature for future flight lookup and pricing, or a price-comparing e-commerce channel…

Better yet, I'd like to see Apple offer an easy way to start consuming RSS feeds directly in Sherlock. It's great that you can search feeds on Feedster, but how about building a straight subscription engine right into Sherlock? I'm sure that with a little scripting, I could wire Radio or NetNewsWire to Sherlock… or Userland or Ranchero could do a web service version of the news aggregator, and charge me an annual service fee instead of me downloading their software.

Now, the conspiracy theorists may wonder, was this just to undermine Pie?

There's a lot that isn't in the article that I wished could be…but as it is, as a friend said to me upon looking at it online, “Jeez, this thing is a novel.”

One of those moments that couldn't be fully captured in the article (it's touched on in one of the sidebars) was what happened when I tried to use McDonald's wireless internet access at the restaurant across from Grand Central.

The way McDonald's WiFi works would be pretty straightforward (that is, if it actually worked). You get a card with a scratch-off box covering your password, upon request, when you buy an Extra Value Meal. Then you fight a vagrant for a table in the 200-seat dining area, wipe the cold fries and spilt ketchup and soda from the table, and put your $2000 laptop on it next to your Extra Value Meal. (A note here–it's not necessarily a good idea to eat fries while using your computer, unless you like the feel of vegetable oil on your keyboard.)

Next, you scratch off the box on the card, exposing your password. Following the directions on your card, you start up your computer and attempt to access the wireless network; theoretically, a web site prompting you for a user name and password will come up, and you'll be given access to the Internet.

That isn't what happened in my case. I made extensive use of another feature of the scratch off card–the tech support number. Now, there's something truly Dadaist about sitting in a lunchtime-rush McDonald's dining room, under a “No Loitering” sign, with your laptop open and cell phone to your ear as you attempt to troubleshoot a free network connection for at least 45 minutes with some far-off tech support operator. There's something even more surreal about giving a call-back number to that operator when he escalates your trouble call to an engineer, as your fries cool, your paper cup full of Diet Coke and ice starts to sweat, and and the grease on your Quarter Pounder starts to congeal.

The WiFi access point on that day was not answering DHCP requests; I could see the network, and even the access point's physical Ethernet address, but my laptop wasn't being issued an IP address to connect with. The helpline operator at Cometa confirmed that there was something wrong with the access point.

Now, McDonald's is expanding the trial to over 70 restaurants in the San Francisco area. They wouldn't tell me how many people had even tried to connect in New York in the first three months of the trial; McDonald's PR said that not enough promotion had been done for the program yet to give out numbers.

I'm a reformed Gnutella user (who sought the digital versions of all the albums I owned still tucked away somewhere in my parents' basement) and a reborn music addict (I own and play (poorly) two guitars and a couple of other musical instrument). And Apple figured out how to hook me– a 99-cent price point for single song downloads, and $10 for most albums. And the 30-second listening room feature made my trips to the local chain store (or even time browsing music on Amazon) seem a waste of time–and opened some doors that I might have otherwise left closed musically because of issues like , er, cover art.

Case in point: I just downloaded Sum 41's album, “Does This Look Infected?”. While the visuals associated with the album probably would have kept me from listening to it in the record store (and it certainly isn't in circulation on the radio stations I listen to during my 15 minutes in the car every day), I decided to risk a listen. And I found, to my surprise, the punk-metal hooks were oddly compelling, at $10 and without the lurid cover.

And it was just too damned easy to do it, since Apple already had all my particulars because of my .Mac account. Instant gratification is a dangerous thing.

(Just to show you how bad it is, 10 minutes later I downloaded The Allman Brothers' “Eat A Peach”. Talk about dissonance/consonance).

BEA upgrades Java server software. The company delivers the first components of an important release of its Java server software and drops the price of its entry-level Java server product. [CNET News.com]

“If European GSM technology is deployed in Iraq,” Issa wrote in a letter to the DoD and to the US Agency for International Development, “much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe. Furthermore, royalties paid on the technology would flow to French and European sources, not U.S. patent holders.”

Well, at least the money wouldn't flow back to his district, as it would if CDMA was chosen.

Congressman Issa is from the San Diego area, home of Qualcomm–the patent-holder for CDMA. He founded a company called Directed Electronics, which until last year was working with Qualcomm joint-venture Wingcast to develop hardware for “automotive telematics” based on CDMA technology. According to OpenSecrets.org, he recieved over $160,000 in compensation in 2001 from Directed (deferred from his wages in 2000, while he was still serving on the company's board). Qualcomm was his sixth largest campaign contributor.

GSM is an open international standard. CDMA isn't used by any of Iraq's neighbors. But, dammit, if anybody is going to profit from this war, it should be Darrell Issa, right?

However, I have my doubts about Orion, the Sun equivalent (apparently) to Microsoft BackOffice or something. This smells like yesterday's fish rewrapped in today's newspaper; not that it isn't technically superior in many ways to Microsoft's offerings.

So, now I have a handy brass paperweight.

We're minutes out of the box here, so I don't have a whole lot to say about the 450 yet except to give my first impressions.  The display, roughly 14 inches, is sharp and bright, and readable in the glare from my window.  The system's performance seems to be very good for a laptop, as advertised for the Pentium M –1.5 MHz is the advertised clockspeed of the CPU, though how much of that I'm seeing is open to debate.  The basic user aesthetics of the system are good; the keyboard is solid and has good key travel, and the trackpad pointing device works smoothly (though I suspect my carpal thumbs will soon protest over the two buttons and the center scrolling button).

Downsides: no DVD-R drive (the drive is a CD-R/DVD combo); the comparable Apple system has gigabit Ethernet now as an option compared to the Gateway's 10/100.

I've been looking to consolidate my domains on a single host in any case; this helps me down my decision path. Anybody got any reccomendations for a decent, low-cost hosting company that respects free speech and can distinguish between news and porn?

One of my most vivid memories of the last JavaOne conference I attended was all the Sun Ray workstations synchronously crashing and rebooting because of a misconfigured server–a server configured by a Sun engineer. If they couldn't take light usage in the press room at Java One–arguably an ideal setting for this sort of computing–how would they do on corporate desktops?

Imagine a corporate exec swiping his smart card, and trying to pull up data from a spreadsheet, only to have his (and everyone else on the floor's) system reboot like a stuck elevator door for fifteen minutes. Now, that's real enterprise computing.

The difference in radiation exposures between Mars Odyssey and the International Space Station indicates one thing to me: it's good to have a liquid iron planetary core that creates a magnetic field. Elsewise, we'd all be as fried as microwaved popcorn by now.

Over lunch, we discussed the various laws of physics that we were going to need to take into account as we built this strange bird. It?s great that his sixth grade science class is so focused on physics right now–we can talk about Bernoulli and Newton and apply what he?s learning now directly to this project.

Now, to get it to fly will take more than physics. But he does go to Catholic school…..

While (GeorgeBushIsPresident = true,
++ungood){
document.writeln(“God, we're screwed.”);
// figure out how to insert break here
};

Um, guys, time to either (a) reconsider your code base, or (b) buy more Windows seat licenses.

UPDATE: Okay, now I can print. An interesting little preferences setting in the “StartOpenOffice” application (Support Direct to Postscript Printing) was set on by default, which meant a bunch of Postscript was getting streamed to…lord only knows. A little un-check of the box, and a restart of OpenOffice, and voila…

The file compatibility with my MS Office X documents looks good so far, and the response of the app is snappy on my 450 MHz PowerPC Cube despite the multiple I/O layers now running on it. I'm using Apple's latest X11; I'm not sure if that's what's accounting for the over-scroll response to the scroll wheel on my Logitech USB mouse or if that's an OpenOffice thing (if I don't turn it click-by-click, OpenOffice flies from one end of the doc to the other).

Font display is, well, a little jaggedy despite installation of GhostScript and the other add-ons. Quartz doesn't appear to be applied to the X11 interface.

Other than that…well, I'll be doing an AppleWorks / OpenOffice shootout over the next two weeks, and I'll let you know. But there's already one thing that OO has to its advantage–AutoSave. And for the number of times in recent history that I've had a power-disconnecting event here in my office, that's a feature I can use.

A personal aside: I don't necessarily think that David Black's idea would make any difference, even if it is technically feasible. It could create as many problems as it solves; it's sort of like trundling out nuclear artillery to deal with a shoplifting problem. Sure, nobody will be shoplifting anymore, but then again, nobody would be able to make money legitimately in the market anymore either once the fallout settles.

Why? Well, it reads and writes to Word and Excel file formats. It's not intrusive. And it doesn't crash with the dramatic regularity that Word does on OS X.

Also, it came bundled on my Macs.

I had considered using OpenOffice…and I still may. But somehow, the idea of installing XWindows on Mac OS X to run a word processor seemed a bit…much.

But he said the relationship hadn't changed, and that things were great with Sun. However, in an answer to a seperate question, he revealed that 20% of BEA's license sales were for the Linux platform now. And it wasn't a Sun exec doing a keynote on the first day; it was Carly Fiorina.

Okay, so with Adam Bosworth at BEA, there's been something of a shift in the developer tools side of BEA's strategy: they're trying to create a component economy–they even call them “controls” like the VB components–around their Workshop development tool.

Workshop was originally created to build web services (and was taken directly, it seems, from the work that Bosworth had done with his attempted start-up company just before Microsoft shut him down with a non-compete clause); now, it has been applied to J2EE development for Weblogic in general. It's designed in a way that allows business analysts, or whoever, to wire together business logic components…er, controls, that can be configured by filling in a few fields and clicking a few checkboxes. Sound familiar, VB programmers?

There have been numerous efforts to create a component market around Java. There's a decent trade in Java Beans, but no Java dev tool has ever really approached the Visual Basic level of simplicity enough to create a huge demand for the components. It can be argued persuasively that VB is only where it is today because of the third-party controls market that took off around it.

It will come as no big surprise that Bosworth has brought over a few developers from Microsoft to help pull this off.

Workshop is at the center of BEA's efforts to merge application development and integration into a single environment. If it can manage to evangelize Workshop controls well enough to the developer and ISV communities, it could finally create some momentum around Java development beyond the object-oriented development faithful, making it more accessible to procedural developers and more high-level software pros. The question is whether BEA can execute.

The last time BEA attempted a major Java tool initiative, it gave us WebGain, a Java IDE spinoff that took over Symantec's Visual Café software, and proceeded (mostly through gross corporate mismanagement) to run it into the ground (The IDE tools were acquired by Togethersoft last summer, which, as you may know, was acquired by Borland in October).

Then again, you might say that WebGain was the Viking funeral ship of software companies, apparently set adrift on fire purposely by BEA to put Joe Menard out of their misery.

So hopefully, Workshop will amount to something. One has to wonder about the name, though; remembering Sun's products by that name brings back all sorts of bad memories for me (apologies to Joe Keller).

And another thing…

Wasn't giving attendees bobbleheads of BEA execs just a little narcissistic?

In any case, the battle to take back some desk space led me to pick up Griffin Technology's iCurve a lucite laptop stand designed specifically for iBooks and PowerBooks. It lifts the laptop up off the desk to about the same height as the top of my 17″ LCD, and there's room to shove the full-size keyboard underneath when it's not in use.

There were a set of adhesive-backed pieces of clear rubber in the box with the iCurve. I'm guessing they're feet and a set of stops for the iCurve's laptop support arms. But the friction pads on the arms do well enough without the stops, and I'm not sure the feet would do anything for the stability of the iCurve.

For $39 bucks, it's a pretty low-impact way to make life with a PowerBook on your desk easier. Plus, it looks so…intentional. I mean, I had used a number of other jury-rigged approaches to propping up my PowerBook before; the iCurve makes my desk look almost professional.

Now, if I could only get rid of the rest of the clutter…

Umm….I didn't know what to say to the little sycophant. So I asked him for some replacement rubber feet for my TiBook, grabbed a copy of TaxCut and the iCurve I had been coveting, paid my bill and bid him adieu.

This was almost as disconcerting as when Mike Himowitz told my wife I was one of the smartest guys he knew. I don't even know how to process those kinds of messages. My self-image just isn't compatible with them.

Herring once boasted issues with 682 pages(that's a lot of lutefisk). I don't know how many pages it is now; I let my print subscription lapse long ago, around the same time Rafe Needleman got the heave-ho (though there's no particular connection between those two events).

RH survived the demise of Upside and The Industry Standard, but is apparently destined for the recycling heap. Fast Company and Wired seem to have transitioned from the New Economy zeitgeist with some pain, but in better shape than the spawning redfish, which now appears to be completing its lifecycle. Maybe they should have called the magazine “Red Salmon”–it seems to be getting devoured by the Bears like one.

The problems Sun faces are nothing new–they're just magnified by the current market climate. Somehow, the company managed to generate enough forward momentum during the dot-com boom to grow its business dramatically. But the company has never done an effective job of selling software. Now, with so much of its future riding on software,that's become a real big problem.

I drank the Java Kool-Aid a few years back when I took over a Java developers' magazine. J2EE did it for me; it was my belief in 1999 that the desktop was becoming more and more irrelavent from a business software point of view, and that Java offered the best path to the Web for business developers. But I never really completely bought Java as a desktop technology outside of a limited cross-platform development domain, and I didn't hold out much hope for Java on mobile devices and cell phones either.

Scott MacNealy firmed up my thinking for me when he dissed software as a business. “You don't buy software to control your right turn signal,” he said at a Gartner conference. Sun software execs winced.

MacNealy has never “gotten” software. He's a hardware guy. Java wasn't a product–it was, in the automobile industry's language (which MacNealy is so familiar with) “content”–another feature that would help Sun sell servers.

For all its work on Java, Sun never successfully produced a good set of developer tools for Java on its own–because, quite frankly, its development tools have always sucked (as anyone who has used Sun Workshop dev tools can testify to). This is why most Java development in the first few years of Java's history was done in vi (or, for the wannabes doing Java on Windows in the early days, Notepad). Sun acquired developer tools from Netscape, Forte (and Forte's tool is pretty good), but then it didn't know how to market them well.

To put it bluntly, as one Sun employee once said to me, “This company couldn't market its way out of a wet paper bag.” While it captured developer mindshare with Java, it failed to turn that mindshare into a lasting commercial relationship; instead, it has to rely on Java licensees to generate most of its Java bucks.

Then came XML, which, despite Sun's claims of intellectual authorship of XML, it failed to capitalize on XML or web services quickly. Theopen source community (and IBM) did much of the grunt work of making XML and web services connect to Java successfully. Software politics, intellectual property concerns, and plain old intrangisence managed to keep Sun away early and lock Sun out of the WS-I later.

Now, as Sun tries to deal with the threat of commodity hardware and software (in the form of Linux and Intel), it's selling itself as a systems integration and services company. To succeed, Sun needs to change its nature. Like a star that's spent all its hydrogen, Sun has to find something else to keep it burning. If it fails to do so, it may have to look outside for its continued survival, or go out with a big bang.

He sent an e-mail to Shigeru Miyamoto (he googled his e-mail address) outlining his ideas. He plans to storyboard the entire game concept; he has assigned friends to design different elements of the game, including bosses and mini-bosses, weapons and landscapes. He has mapped out an island, and has written a central narrative. And he is hopeful that Shigeru-san will respond to his e-mail, and eventually adapt his ideas into 3-D rendered virtual reality.

My son dreams big.

I've tried to lower his expectations somewhat, without dashing his obvious enthusiasm. My wife was more blunt. “Everybody's so negative,” he said to me in tearful frustration last night. “I'm not getting any support.” So I tell him that it's good to dream, that he should keep it up, and have fun with it. But he says, “What's the point if it's not going to happen?”

My son has yet to experience the collapse of a dream as big as this. He's had some smaller dreams fulfilled, and others turn out to be less than what he expected when he actually got to execute them. He complains that his two weeks away with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation this past summer were too hot, and the bugs too bloodthirsty.

There are few things that I can get him to muster any enthusiasm about. But this one, he's latched onto it. He's in charge, directing others toward his vision. And he can't stand to think that it won't work out.

So what do I tell him?

I can only offer him my support, and advice. Anything else, he sees as tearing down his dream.

There's something so 1997 about all this.

Here's how it works:

Once upon a time, a distributor or supplier would deliver goods to a retailer, and invoice them for them. The retailer would take ownership of the goods, and sell them; the two parties would negotiate compensation for unsold or damaged inventory, but the inventory was carried on the retailer's books.

With SBT, a retailer doesn't take ownership of the goods until they're sold; the distributor doesn't get paid until a product gets sold and is scanned at the the register. An invoice gets generated when the scan info is sent to the supplier/distributor by an electronic message at the end of the day.

This is great for retailers–they lose the financial risks of carrying inventory, and pass those costs back to the supplier. They don't pay for anything that doesn't get scanned (so anything that gets shoplifted, mis-scanned or otherwise leaves in an undocumented fashion gets deducted from the supplier's take). And the retailer can see daily what's selling, using that information to drive supplier restock and cut off products that aren't making their numbers.

Often, the retailers also place display responsibility on the suppliers too–they have to come in and set up displays, handle restocking and otherwise maintain their products in-store.

So WalMart and Target are effectively in the real estate business–they take a cut of the sales on products for letting them sit on their shelves.

You could see where this could be unpopular with suppliers. It gets even more unpopular when the retailer's software doesn't correctly credit them with sales.

More to come on this….

The CSS I put together for several sites renders perfectly in Safari, Mozilla and Opera. But it gets hosed in IE–and it gets hosed in different ways, depending on whether I'm using IE for Windows 2000, XP or Mac. It's like someone at MS said, “Which way should we break stylesheets for this platform?”

We are announcing a new technology platform called [product name].
This will provide customers with unprecedented flexibility in adapting
[company name] solutions to both their initial requirements and to adapt to
changes that are occurring at an ever-faster pace in the marketplace. This
enables faster implementations, easier adaptation to changing business
requirements and a lower total cost of ownership. The new platform combines
existing leading edge technology with new capabilities.

Jeremy Allaireannounced on his blog that he is leaving Macromedia to take a job with a venture capital firm. The Allaire founder became CTO of Macromedia after it merged with the company two years ago. The question is, is he leaving just because he's got a job in VC, or is he leaving to avoid becoming a Microsoft employee?

From: “Sabrina Guttman”
Date: Mon Feb 3, 2003 2:33:25 PM US/Eastern
To: sean@dendro.com
Subject: Comments on “Partial Eclipse of the Sun…”

Hi Sean –

I am writing to you in response to your recent article in the January issue of Baseline entitled “Partial Eclipse of the Sun; Intel and Linux Have Driven Sun to Switch Strategies. Should You Buy it?” In your article, you claim Sun is being forced to switch strategies away from “proprietary” hardware platforms in the face of increased pressure from Intel and Linux. I would like to point out that Sun is a *systems* company which means we sell the best hardware and software solutions to meet our customers' needs at every level of their IT infrastructure.

To your point that Sun's hardware is “proprietary,” the UltraSPARC family of processors are one of the industry's ONLY open systems processors as they are designed on the open architecture and standards set by SPARC International, Inc.[tm] — an independent, non-profit organization. Unlike Intel, Sun builds compatibility into its entire line of server products. This means ISVs can port their applications onto different generations of UltraSPARC without having to recompile them and customers can mix and match processor speeds for the best investment protection in the industry.

Furthermore, might I remind you that UNIX, like Linux, is based on the X/Open 1170 Standard and our Solaris Operating Environment is the best implementation of that standard in the INDUSTRY. The reason our competitors are flocking to Linux is that they failed in creating the robust operating environment we have been offering our customers for years.

Sun is all about open choice and open standards and that's why over 12,000 business applications are currently readily available on our SPARC/Solaris platform. Can Lintel manufacturers say as much? Sun is also about innovation and providing value to our customers and that's why we are now offering Solaris and Linux on x86 architectures at the edge of the network where it makes the most sense.

Please let me know if you would like to speak with us further about any of these points or just generally about Sun's strategy.

Regards,
Sabrina Guttman

*************************************
Sabrina Guttman
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Public Relations | PNP | N1|

I prefer the rubber darts with “stupid” flags approach myself.

Still, I'm really impressed thus far with the CSS editing capabilities of Dreamweaver. It makes me all that more nervous about the rumors that Microsoft is planning to acquire Macromedia.

A more fully fleshed-out review is pending; watch for a link here.

I inserted a simple redirector based on the $HTTP_HOST and $REQUEST_URI server variables in PHP, which capture the URL that the user has requested. The rest is just sending standard HTTP redirect headers, so that the user will be forwarded to the page they've come looking for.

I reused a code-snip from an earlier project that creates a string variable that stores the fully-expressed URL of the site, just in case I decide to add some other options later.

The switch uses the stringsearch function “strstr” to find the text for which domain the incoming request is pointed at, then sends back a header to redirect users to the corresponding directory for the homepage of that site. Extending this, I can now on a single host maintain as many domains as the provider will let me point at the site, and as storage will allow.

To build a home page that redirects based on the incoming URL, (if your site supports PHP), use this code and substitute your own domain names. If you've got more than three, just repeat the “if” statements as many times as you need to. (It's not pretty, but it works.)

<html>
<head>
<?php
$url = sprintf("%s%s%s"," http://",$HTTP_HOST,,br>
$REQUEST_URI );
if (strstr($url, "INSERT DOMAIN NAME #1 HERE")) {
?>
<title>Forwarding to INSERT DOMAIN NAME #1 HERE</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://DOMAINNAME#1.com/DIRECTORYOFHOMEPAGE/">
<?
}
if (strstr($url, "INSERT 2ND DOMAIN NAME HERE"))
{
?> <title>Forwarding to 2ND DOMAIN NAME Home</title> <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.2NDDOMAINNAME.com/DIRECTORYOF2NDHOMEPAGE/">
<?
}
else { ?>
<title>Forwarding to 3RD DOMAIN homepage</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.3RDDOMAIN.com/index2.html">
<?}
</head>

Come to think of it, there are a lot of unemployed tech journalists I know who'd auction themselves off en masse to the highest bidder for any kind of work right now.

A little tweaking of XML, and presto. Okay, we've determined that generating CSS from a print design tool, InDesign, is somewhat restrictive, because it's for PAPER, DAMNIT, and paper (unlike a lot of websites) has FIXED WIDTH AND LENGTH. So, CSS layers that come out of InDesign have a hardcoded set of positions. This is fine if you're spitting out static pages, but if you're planning on modifying them…

Well, duh. Anyway, my copy of Dreamweaver should be here any day now. I'm hoping to do a comparison between Dreamweaver and GoLive at some point ( but considering I just got GoLive 5.0 to install properly for the first time, and 6 has been out for several months…)

If you haven't heard of it yet, iBlog is designed primarily to provide a blogging tool for Apple .Mac users, posting weblogs to a .Mac homepage through WebDAV and a connection to the user's iDisk. It also has a feature that allows you to read RSS feeds, and you can alternatively post to an FTP site (a Blogger interface is coming soon).

Thus far, it's an interesting tool. It did take me a while to figure out that I needed to click the “lightswitch” button to switch to RSS reader mode (I had to break down and look at the online docs). But there are a few lingering things that are bugging me.

Because of some bugs in the .Mac posting feature in the current beta, I'm using the FTP option right now, and I'd like to be a little more explicit about where to put things, but it still appends an iBlog directory onto the end of whatever FTP location I give it to publish to.

Theoretically. I still have to dig a little deeper.

My boss, the mad genius, still is taking entries from the staff for the Sun-goes-out-of-business and the Sun-gets-bought-by-IBM pools (closest guess to date of transaction wins). I'm not ante-ing up yet, though–I don't think Sun is history yet, no matter how stupid they've been about the software side of their business. And I don't think IBM has enough spare cash left to buy them outright.

I have a Handspring Visor (the Prism, their color model), which they now only sell reconditioned. My wife bought it for my for Christmas 2001, along with an eyeModule2–a spiffy little digital camera attachment for Handspring's proprietary but cool Springboard interface. Then, I found out after upgrading to Mac OS X, that Handspring had bought the eyeModule operation and ceased all development work–so there would be no upgrade of the software to work with OS X.

This adds an extra piece of complexity into my life. Now, when I want to download the pictures I've snapped with my digital pinhole camera (that's basically what it is–entirely dependent on available light, fixed focal length, and occasionally surprising results), I have to reboot in OS 9 and reconfigure HotSync, suck off the photos and then reboot to OS X.

Now, Handspring is refocused on its phone/handheld Treo devices (and it's downsized considerably over the last year as it's bled money), so it's doubtful that there will ever be further support for the eyeModule. It's become yet another piece of legacy technology for me to fiddle with.

Now, mind you, the results require a bit of a merge-purge, since I've had seperate versions of all this data in my e-mail, on the Handspring, and so on. But by pushing the button on the Handspring's cradle, I now sync the desktop and the handheld with the data from my laptop.

The Handspring's synchronization was somewhat temperamental (it crapped out on address book synchronizaton the first time through), but that's been my experience with the Handspring in general with OS X).

My oldest son (just turned 12) also wanted to be able to instant message classmates about homework (yeah, right). So I set him up with an AIM account. Soon, we discovered an interesting side benefit to this arrangement:AIM has become our own little intercom system. Now, I don't have to strain my vocal cords shouting through two floors to get him to take the trash out anymore.

Most people have an inner editor–that part of our concious mind that formats our public thoughts before release, and tries to make them acceptable to the audience. The editor isn't there from the start–we learn slowly what's acceptable to say in public, or what to say to certain people, mostly from trial and error as we grow up.

Sometimes, the editor is off getting coffee, and we don't think about what we're saying before it comes out…the results are often embarrassing, or hurtful, or come back to haunt us later, or all of the above in some combination.

I've met some people who don't have an internal editor (or who've bound and gagged their internal editors and thrown them in closets within their minds, at least); they have a non-stop express from thought to mouth, and not even their foot can stop them from bursting something out. These people are alternatingly entertaining, frustrating, and frightening to watch, depending on what topic they happen to drift off to.

(Once upon a time, I thought Scoble had no inner editor, but now I know that he was only on an extended sabbatical. Right, Robert? )

Turning on the inner editor when you're blogging is a different process. When you're writing, it's just you and a keyboard; unless you conciously think, “This is going up in a public place, and there will be consequences,” you may not stop yourself from making comments about work, or family, or other things that might, once cast in electrons, have unintended consequences.

Of course, the advantage of blogging is that you can always go back and change the words. The disadvantage, of course, is that your original words are probably cached for all eternity someplace else already.

Anyway, if you're in earshot, and want to hear me listen to how great I sound on radio (heh), tune in. It should be streamed live by WYPR and by the Baltimore Sun website as well.