TaoSpace

The strangest thing...

Today saw what might be the end of my long running feud with my cable-internet company.

When I moved to my current house around January 1st this year, I got a letter from them detailing when an engineer would come to install the cable internet again. I wrote back saying I wasn't using it (hadn't for ages since I switched to ADSL. Just forgot to cancel.) and that I would like to cancel.

Thinking it was sorted I didn't give it another thought. That was until I found out (way too late) that they were still deducting my from my account every month. I called again and was told that I would have to write another cancellation letter. And fast too, since they had now switched to a "per year" scheme. If I was too late they would automatically extend the agreement another year!

Dutifully I complied and sent in another letter. That was 5 weeks ago and I still hadn't heard anything. So I called yet again. After waiting in line for ages and getting redirected 3 times I got someone on the phone.

She explained to me that according to her records the account was cancelled early this year and that I was hundreds of euros "in the plus". She went off the check with a colleague and what do you know?
It was true.

They vowed to transfer this "surplus" back to me forthwith and cancel the account "for real".

Amazing...

Now I need a way to spend it!

The rebellion will be weblogged

Oliver's post on The Enterprise Webservice makes sense.

I do however think the trend is broader then just web services. Web Services are just a way to make things happen, and there are many ways. Some examples:

• IT departments using Linux in the enterprise, by bringing it in through the back door. Some companies are already using Linux for most things, without any form of vendor support. They rely on the community instead.


• People setting up corporate weblogs (like I'm doing), publishing their own newsletters, etc.


• Me running a Mac in a Window-client-only shop. Strangely enough more and more people in the company are interested in getting it to work with everything (corp. email, our own software, etc.).


• People running stuff like SETI as screensavers. They are in fact "abusing corporate tools" as their computers weren't bought for doing that.

Why is this going on?

1. Because it is technically possible (standardization, commoditization).
   
2. Because the tools to do it have become usable (weblogs, dedicated web services clients, etc.).
   
3. Because there are more and more people with "just-enough" technical knowledge to see the possibilities.
   
4. Because the IT departments have become too slow to react to what is going on (both a reason for this to start and a reason why it is unstoppable).
   
5. Because people in general want to be able do their job better, as long as it is on their terms (using the tools they want). This is something most managers fail to understand.
   
6. Because people's jobs are (becoming) people's lives and their employers all but demand this continue. This means the office becomes your home (and your home your office). If that is so, people will treat it like that as well, taking what they need (network-bandwidth, desktops, corporate information) and using it to further their own ideas.
   The logic: If you (corporates) invade my world, I (your employee) invade yours. In a word: rebellion.
   

It has been said many times before: the future of computing lies at the edge of the network. This is were this rebellion is going on.

In strategic terms this means the corporation and its IT departments can only practise "containment".

• Technically this means trying to make sure the entire infrastructure is well protected and that nothing crosses the "border" that shouldn't.
• Socially this means trying to make sure your employees goals remain more or less aligned with the corporate ones.

Beyond this all they can do in the long run is sit back and watch it happen.

Can you say Chaordic?

What Apple might really be up to

Apple-X is running an
in-depth analysis of the Chameleon patent. This got me thinking about future Apple products (always fun to guess).

After reading about the Sony Librie it now seems very likely that Apple well produce an eBook reader. Think about it. The business-model is almost exactly the same as the iPod's. The iTunes music-store is easily updated to include books and magazines, and the fact the digital paper is now really here means that Apple will be able to produce a reader that actually works the way it should.

With Sony dropping the ball on with the Librie regarding user-friendliness surrounding DRM, Apple might again be able to steal Sony's thunder.

Other reasons why all this seems likely:

• By adding books Apple can take another big bite of the popular culture market and position itself as an entertainment provider.


• Although video seems nice, the battery-life of any video-device would suck. The Librie manages 10.000 "page-turns" which means 10 post-scifi Neal Stephenson novels (what do you mean there are only 3?). More then enough.


• Apple could integrate the eBook reader (call it iPage) with Address Book, iCal and the printing engine. The latter would mean you can convert anything printable to something the eBook reader can display.


• It would use Tiger's new Sync-engine as well obviously. This new engine might have been built for lots of reasons, but somehow I think this is one of them.

The iPage can be a relatively simple device, that just does one thing well: display documents.
In true Apple fashion it won't play music (use an iPod!) and won't have any input-methods beyond what the iPod has (basically scroll and select). No touch-screen.

Think of it as a portable stack of paper. Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course eBooks will be the main focus marketing-wise, but actually "documents" are far more interesting. For most office-workers reading is a big part of the work. Reading for a screen, even a flatpanel, is still more tiring then reading from paper. Paper documents however take up a huge amount of space, especially if they are printed single-sidedly.

Also, when you're traveling a lot, as I do, lugging a laptop around sucks. Sure it is nice to be able to work from anywhere, but not all places lend themselves for working in that way. Something small and portable, like iPage, would work far better.

Remember the Apple PDA that was never released? I think they have a point. I find myself using my smartphone primarly for retrieving information, not inputting it. When I still had a Palm it was mainly the same. The input methods used are just not good enough.
Therefore device that just displays information makes sense (at least to me). It wouldn't be a PDA, but a new class of device altogether, which I'm sure must appeal to Apple.

(To still get some form of input Apple could put in a voice-recorder, which remembers the page you were on when you spoke. When you get back to that page later a little icon could show there is a voice-note, which can then be played back. Simple but effective.)

Why I hate "Enterprise Software"

For decades now "Enterprise Software" has been the holy grail for software companies. Big installations, big customers, loads of money to be made. Yet, with very exceptions, they have made a huge mess of it.

Case in point: Oracle. After you've downloaded the 3 CDs required to install it, the fun begins. The installer asks you every imaginable question, including the names of your pets and whether you'd ever pose naked for Playgirl. Well maybe not quite that, but amount of (mostly useless) options is staggering. Do I want to install an XML thingamajig? A Media support library? A Content search engine? A Webportal server? A Cluster management toolkit? etc. etc. etc.

Even if you manage to get rid of this stuff, you end up with an installation of around 2Gb (or more!) in size. There are wizards, managers, configurators, monitors, administrators etc. A ton of Windows Services are registered. All that, just to get a database running. Even if you not using all of this (and most likely you won't be) it is still there. On your disk, running in the background, screwing things up etc. It tooks me ages to work out that the reason my Java Webserver refused to run was because of Oracle's XML DB, which had installed itself semi-secretly for instance. XML DB doesn't even register as a separate process. It actually runs inside the Oracle process, making it impossible to locate unless you know what you are looking for.

Sun's stuff isn't any better. Sun ONE iPlanet Netscape Directory Server Enterprise Edition (or something) can just fail on installation, throwing an error to the tune of "couldn't start blablabla, the process did not return an error. For more information type yadayada". Typing "yadayada" results in the message "The process did not return an error". Great.

My colleagues are having loads of problems porting our J2EE application to IBM WebSphere. It runs on partically any other J2EE server with no or very little changes. Yet WebSphere isn't even remotely compatible, eventhough it should be. The IBM consultant, that was hired to help out, turned out not to know anything about WebSphere worth knowing and could just Google for answers.

Why can't this stuff just work? This isn't rocket-science! Not anymore anyway. Why is that 99% of us need to suffer, just because the other 1% has some special requirements, or is running some ancient legacy environment that still has to be supported?

One can only imagine the cost that is incurred throughout the chain because of this! Countless hours lost due to installation issues, administration problems, API bugs, process interfering with one another, etc. And this on top of the often hugely inflated license pricing and consultancy fees.

These isn't just the regular "the IT industry is still in its infancy"-type stuff. In my view most of this is a direct result of rushed releases, buzzword-driven development ("We need to support SDFRT2.3b by tomorrow or our competitors might...") and sales/marketing-induced featuritis.

It has to stop. Now.

Blojsom update

The migration continues. Parallel to migrating this blog I'm also set up a project weblog using Blojsom, for a project I'm currently doing in Copenhagen. The idea is that all developer use this to post design ideas and ask questions, with commenting being used to facilitate discussion.

This seems to be going quite well. The upshot of course is that all project discussion in one place and can be easily exported elsewhere or archived (everything is just a text-file).

I've having some trouble setting up a secondary documentation blog on the same server though. I guess I must be missing some configuration somewhere. When I get it to work it will be really neat though.

The main sections of the project's documentation will be blog categories and the chapters will each be postings. That way it will be possible to:

• Easy add and edit content while the documentation is being written.


• Have discussion about the content while in progess
  
• Publish the whole thing as a "comment only" blog to some server in the final solution, and use it as an online manual (including search functionality!)


• The customer can then add their own procedures, questions, etc. to the documentation using commenting.

This will be sweet!

Impressed

I'm currently somewhere near 60.45 N, 22.28 E, a place known to the finnish natives as Turku and to a lot of other people as "Slightly south-west of the middle of nowhere".

Basically I'm here to attend a wedding of one of my colleagues. The wedding actually takes place somewhere outside of Turku, which probably means closer to "the middle of nowhere"-proper.

The reason I'm impressed has to do with how I got here. Not to keep you in suspense for any longer, I used an airlines called Blue1, which is somehow linked to SAS.

What's to be impressed about? Blue1 is one of the growing number of low-cost airlines. Flying from Copenhagen to Turku, which takes about an hour and 15 minutes, costs me 100 euros round-trip. Not bad.
However, I expected an Easyjet-like operation and was proven wrong. Very wrong. Some examples:

• The cabin-crew was attentive and professional.
• The flight left perfectly on time.
• They actually served proper meal! No age-old sandwiches or something but a three course affair: Smoked Salmon, Chicken with potato-salad and a chocolate muffin.
• Proper drinks as well. Coffee or tea as well as water with your meal, plus your choice of drink on top, including beer (didn't ask about wine). Not just that, they even asked if I wanted anything else besides what I had already ordered.
• The flight astoundingly arrived 15 minutes ahead of schedule.

Of course the last point is moot as it was likely due to the weather, but nice all the same.

I think most frequent travellers have all but forgotten what flying used to be like after the economic crises and 9/11. The above is what flying a regular airline used to be like. Now it is very rare indeed, especially on short-haul flights.

Yet this is supposed to be a LOW COST AIRLINE!

Too bad these guys (and gals) don't fly to very many destinations...

Blojsom migration

Recently I took a long hard look at Blojsom and I must say I liked what I saw. Simple, clean, fast and Java based. Apple will apparently ship it with Tiger.

This has started me thinking about migrating to my own blogging environment again. Typepad is slow again after the recent speedboost, and the amount of new features and improvements to it is negligible. All the while it is costing me money and I just don't feel I'm getting proper "ROI" from it.

Parallel to this me and Hans are investigating build a simple Java gallery tool that could tie in to Blojsom. Who knows how that might end up...

Flickr API

Oliver just posted about the Flickr API, which I must say looks promising. I've looked at Flickr a bit and it seems like an interesting idea.

There are a few caveats though:

• I really dislike the fact that they do not support IPTC tags (or EXIF for that matter). All decent photo management software uses them and having to retag, classify and annotate each images I upload is just plain annoying
  
• The point of the Organizr is beyond me. You can flick through a timeline and view images, but that it is. What is there to "organise"? You can drag images but there is no place to drop them, or rather dropping them anywhere doesn't seem to have any effect. Because it doesn't support EXIF it can't even place the photos on the timeline based on their capture date.
  
• With Google's purchase of Picasa it is only a matter of time before they will come with a free version complete with 1Gb of storage. Although Flickr hasn't yet revealed any pricing, the limits on the "free" version are not that good. 10Mb upload per month, and it only keeps the last 100. OK, 100 is fine when you are just showing off your work and you can pay for the "pro" version take will store most of your images. 10Mb per month however is paltry. That would amount to 4 decent sized photos per month.
  
• Lastly, I really don't like the fact that the full resolution version doesn't get stored. The largest size is nowhere big enough for printing for instance.
  

They should also come up with a way to integrate with printing services like Shutterfly and Fotokasten is they want to make it compelling to use I think.

We'll see how this turns out in the months to come.