Nofollow Atribute
January 19, 2005 | Science
I have installed the Moveable Type "nofollow" plug-in to try and help deter comment spam. If you're running a weblog, most vendors are supporting this, and I highly recommend you install this on your system.
Future Of Apple
January 14, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Well, with all the discussion about the Mac mini, the iPod Shuffle, iLife '05, iWork, and other miscellaneous Apple-related announcements, you may be interested in this intelligence from DigiTimes.
|
Taiwan contract manufacturers for Apple |
|||
|
Product |
Contract maker |
Estimated shipment volumes for 2005 |
Delivery date |
|
iPod shuffle |
Asustek |
400k-500k/month |
Available now |
|
iPod/iPod Photo/iPod Mini |
Inventec Appliances |
Combined shipments of the three items totaled over 10 million units in 2004 and are expected to increase substantially in 2005. |
|
|
iBook/iBook G5 |
Asustek |
1.3-1.5 million/year (combined shipments of the two series) |
iBook G5 to start shipping in 2Q 2005 |
|
PowerBook G5 |
Quanta Computer |
30k-50k/month |
2Q 2005 |
|
Mac mini |
Foxconn |
>100k/month |
Available Jan 22 |
Source: compiled by DigiTimes, January 2005.
As usual, the MacWorld keynote address by Steve Jobs is a state-of-the-art marketing event. (Read: Uncanny ability to manufacture techno-lust – are you sure you don't need a Mac mini?) Spend an enjoyable two hours watching the streaming video here.
Perhaps they actually meant to type "G4" up there instead of "G5?"
Avoiding Software Fear
January 6, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
We had a social lunch today, seven people, all involved with web or application development. At one point, someone asked something along the lines of, "What is your obligation to customers to use 'standard' technology that will be around when they need to update their app?" Another person mentioned the ease of getting Java programmers; shouldn't something like that be one criteria?
I casually tossed off: "Well, if it's a small company, that attitude will cause failure, because it's not entrepreneurial." The topic deserves a more thoughtful response. My bias is that effort should be focused on potential, not risk. Risk is something to manage once you've decided to reach for a potential. There are a few intermingled threads that occur to me:
Any custom software will require on-going maintenance. Any customer who doesn't know this should be fully informed. Some very successful business-people will refuse to believe it, because they don't know anything about software. Actually, it's not about the software, it's the fact that they haven't looked closely, over time, at their business. The business requirements change, hello; therefore, business processes encoded in software will have to change too. The cost of software platform maintenance pales in comparison to the cost of determining and implementing the business logic. Non-software business people who are overly concerned about cost are usually the ones who cannot describe exactly what they want. That is what drives costs, not the platform. The business people who come to you with a written specification usually already know the ballpark cost, and you're immediately discussing the project at a much higher level – feature trade-offs, deployment risk factors, strategic opportunities for version two, etc.
"New" technology becomes "mainstream" technology through the momentum of use. If no one uses something, it dies off, orphaning existing software. This isn't quite literally true, because the software will continue to work virtually forever, but eventually the business logic changes (or you have to patch Windows) and then you have to update the code. It could take years for this occurance, but it is a downside risk to consider. So custom software developers rarely use something brand spanking new on a customer project until it is proven somehow.
But what does "proven" really mean? It is important to consider the case where something new takes off fast. At lunch we were specifically discussing Ruby on Rails. Two of us thought it looked pretty good, and one person was thinking about a small test project to check it out. Ruby on Rails has the opportunity to take off quickly because Basecamp was built on it, and everyone who's used it knows that Basecamp is an awesome product. When they find out it was developed in two months by one guy they cannot believe it. Why only two months? Ruby on Rails, supposedly. Sometimes "new" becomes "mainstream" very quickly. It appears that this could happen to Ruby on Rails this year. That brings with it a host of potential problems, but obsolescence isn't one of them. [Update: The Ruby on Rails author has commented on this post.]
We should remember that everything mainstream today was once brand new. How did Java, or MySQL, or Perl, or, for that matter, C and C++, actually take hold? Enough people used them and told their friends.
If there is legacy code, a good software engineer will just deal with it. I've had the opportunity to work with several world-class software engineers in my career. And universally, what top-notch engineers say is, I'll learn what I have to learn to do the project. So if a customer ends up stranded, what they need is to find a good engineer, who will either work within the existing framework, or re-factor it for the future. So they're paying $125 an hour instead of $75. Or $175 instead of $125. Whatever. It's insignificant compared to the cost of the business logic. If the customer is bothering to update the application, then by definition it has value and is worth doing. If you're simply obsessed by cost, then you're probably investigating outsourcing anyway.
If it's a big company, then they deal with re-factoring and changing platforms all the time. They have engineers on staff, and it's a constant part of their job to deal with some piece of crap code that's 20 years old but is core to the operations. It's brittle, and dangerous to work on because if it breaks some huge part of the org shuts down, and only the most senior people go near it. Hospitals are famous for this. Hospitals are also pretty famous for technology decisions made by administrators who are not well-informed about technical details, therefore choosing the wrong products and platforms for the wrong reasons, but I digress. (No links provided so as to protect the guilty.)
If a small company is choosing their developer based purely on a pre-conceived language specification, they are operating from fear, and will not succeed. Entrepreneurs look for opportunities, not optimizations. (N.B.: These comments apply specifically to companies whose core product is not software. Software companies deal with these issues using more advanced methods.) Basically, the buyer is placing themselves in the hands of the developer, and they need to have a solid relationship – the relationship trumps everything else. If the developer is going to walk the customer down a dead-end, it won't be because of technology – though that may be the vector – it will be because the developer is not accurately or honestly solving the customer problem.
Conventional wisdom says that customers need to know that the developer isn't going to invent something new to build their app – use mainstream technologies like PHP or Perl, Apache, and MySQL, and no one gets fired. But that's not what happened at Basecamp. The developer of Basecamp invented Ruby on Rails in order to do a good job building the customer product. No doubt the customer paying for Basecamp was fully informed, but then again, we're back at the relationship. Innovation is not as clean as a technical specification might make it look. They took a risk, together, apparently leading to mutually-assured success.
Focus on the upside potential, and manage the downside risk, in that order. That's where the innovation is.
Your Brain Wants To Participate
January 6, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
It's all about the conversation!
Fantastic post on writing style and reader engagement by the authors of the "Head First" series of books. Great stuff!
Four Hot Applications
January 5, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
It's too late to say anything cogent about folksonomies, but this paper does pretty well.
Check out the following four web applications and look at how they're allowing users to tag and browse content. It's a wonderful new wave of innovation.
del.icio.us – Social bookmarks.
flickr – Social photo sharing.
Books We Like (Howard Rheingold example) – Social book recommendations.
43 Things – Social goal setting.
And, if you're looking for an interesting framework to build your next-generation web application, you're going to hear a lot more about Ruby On Rails this year. Basecamp is a damn fine product built on it.
Synchronicity Abounds
January 5, 2005 | Life
Very synchronous day. Examples:
Thought about this idea "folksonomy" that's all the rage, and thought I should write it up for Pat. (And will post here when I get around to it.)
Decided to leave home early and stop at the Lebanon Coop for a Nibby Bar chocolate treat before my 4.5 hours of meetings (including working lunch). Saw Lynne's car in the parking lot, found her at the checkout, and she had – for no reason – bought two Nibby Bars. "You want one?" Yeah.
Just then ran into Pat; introduced her to Lynne.
Meg and I had three one-hour project kick-off meetings with stakeholders plus a working lunch. Luckily we much enjoy working together. I think we were both somewhat overwhelmed with info intake (typical project startup) and needed assimilation time afterwards. Not that either one of us got any – after almost five uninterrupted hours on a project, there's a lot of email and response-mode catch-up.
Seems like another synchronous event happened during the day, but I don't seem to remember it right now.
On the way home, stopped at Hanover Coop. Ran into Meg, with whom I had worked virtually all day, and who's office is next door to the Lebanon Coop. Very unusual that either one of us would be in the Hanover store just after work. She had finished her class (new tonight) and I happened to know that the Lebanon store was out of Green & Black's 70% Dark (review). So there we were, and there you go.
Randomly checked my spam folder and found important Coop business there - Don's new email wasn't in the whitelist.
Decided I hadn't heard enough music this week and rooted around the CD collection for something I hadn't heard in a while. Pulled out Jane Sibery's "The Walking," but just then saw Paul Simon's "You're The One," which is now playing instead. Wow – I forgot how beautiful this album is. Simple love songs, disappointment, stories, jokes. It's been a few years since I've heard this, and it's just wonderful. Full of love and life. Very highly recommended.
