| LoudSpeakers |
| There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 |
I just returned home from a weeklong trip and decided to start the morning off with M.Ward’s Post-War, a record that I can’t stop talking about apparently. I realized this morning that M.Ward is best listened to on the softer, warmer sound that is vinyl rather than through the purity that is digital.
I have been writing about software for enterprises for a long time. Some of that writing focused on the new era of applications and some of it was more focused on the traditional side. In either case, I felt that it needed it’s own life rather than continue to be mixed with things like my personal opinion and my podcast. Introducing Kung Fu Apps. To my knowledge, there’s not another blog with the same type of focus on enterprise startups and applications with a similar approach.
It also plays into BigSwerve, my consumer facing startup. I can’t say exactly why they’re related, but they are. Kung Fu Apps allows me to continue to write about subject matter than I know about extensively and care about deeply.
Kung Fu Apps was named by my friend Jerry. I expressed to him what I wanted to write about and he came up with the name and a catch phrase: Kickin’ Apps in the Enterprise. It is brilliant — a catch phrase with a double entendre. And the name, Kung Fu Apps, is something that the enterprise publications lack: a little levity.
Hat tip to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for the inspiration to do what he did for the consumer space.
Btw, here’s the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kungfuapps
Twice today I have read blog posts by people that I have never met, yet somehow I feel like I can associate with them on a very human level. Their posts today reveal more about the people behind the blog than I would have known otherwise. And they each made me tear up a little. Mark lost his friend Tom recently and Seth lost Beau, his four-legged friend. This is precisely why I despise the term blogger – it sounds so de-humanizing. Both of their posts explain why I have taken so many photographs of friends, family, and dogs over the last 15 years. I want to enjoy the memories when they are gone. Photographs are sometimes all we have.
Sorry for the radio silence, but I’m back just in time for the release of M.Ward’s “Post-War” on August 22nd. I went back and listened to all of his past records and EPs and chose my favorite songs in order to introduce you to his work if you’re not familiar with it. There’s some great stuff in here. Check out his new record —– it’s easily in my top 10 of 2006.
I used the Merge 2006 sampler to connect the songs this time. Here’s a tracklist:
To play with iTunes:
1. Download iTunes version 6 and install it
2. Select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and enter this into the dialog:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/internmentcamp/loudspeakers
Alternately, you can download the mp3 here.
Kiko closed it’s doors. Everyone in the echo chamber knows that now. All 90,000 of us. They have important lessons for startup guys like me: Keep focused, build smart, keep it simple.
But my issue with any online calendar application that’s not Google Calendar or something integrated into Microsoft is that you’re not part of the transaction. Google Calendar and Outlook are integrated into a host of other functions.
It’s like the issue with Rapleaf. Portable reputation is a cool concept, but how do they get into the transaction? They’re not part of the eBay transaction when checking out especially now that they have been banned. They’re not part of the Rent-a-Coder transaction when I finish paying a guy to do some work. They’re not part of any system unless that vendor agrees to eliminate its own process for rating members for some 3rd party application. It’s like outsourcing your logins to OpenID. Great concept. Tough sell.
I heard about the problems faced by the FBI regarding the development of their Virtual Case File (VCF) while I was working for Documentum/EMC. The case is only unique in that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted rather than hundreds of thousands by private firms. We saw this type of failure frequently in all sorts of sectors, not just the government, but we never saw anything that was quite this massive.
There’s a certain baseless reluctance by governments and large firms that sometimes only small businesses seem to understand. “Commerical software can’t possibly do what WE need it to do.” That’s the assumption that plagues some govt organizations (and sometimes big businesses) that think their problem of dealing with data is unique. Sure, the business problem at hand is inherently different, but the technology and methods on the back end are mostly identical. But it doesn’t help when you have a government contractor steering or allowing you to steer in the wrong direction when they should be calling the turns. After all, that’s why consultants exist, right?
The most amusing example of this problem was when a hospital, for instance, would try to write their own custom applications because somehow they care for patients differently than the rest of the world and their applications should reflect it. Or a bank that tries to write it’s own system to manage checks from the ground up. Um, hello! (Pssst: the rest of the world writes checks too.)
It’s like the government saying that they needed to buy dump trucks to clean up after 9/11, but the commercially available ones were not sufficient somehow. So they contract with a firm to build dump trucks completely from scratch. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
The FBI’s failed system is a classic case of trying to reinvent the wheel rather than just acquiring off-the-shelf applications and customizing it to spec. There’s not a developer of software that doesn’t have an API that allows for customization or integration with other apps. It’s common practice.
SAIC can’t take all of the blame, but they certainly knew that using commercial software and customizing it would have meant a smaller deal size with the government. Why save the government hundreds of millions of dollars and enormous risk, not just risk associated with project failure but risk related to national security, with time tested commercial software when they can get paid to reinvent the wheel? They put their own greed over national security. Responsible parties at the executive level should have stepped in and put the kibosh on the deal. What transpired was intellectually immoral.
My love for Dell is dwindling. I had two Latitude D600 laptops in my previous life. I never had any substantial issues with either of them. My first D600 was stolen from the trunk of a parked car while I was on a business trip to London. My replacement D600 was equally as great as the first.
Since embarking on my startup quest , I thought of no other vendor than Dell for my mobile needs. I’m regretting that decision now entirely.
My Dell D610 gets so hot that it creates red marks on my (already brown) lap. They’ll tell you that they “no longer refer to them as laptops” and recommend using their mobiles on a flat surface. Where am I supposed to find a flat surface (except for the floor) at the gate waiting for a flight? Typically, flat surfaces involve desks. Most desks that I use have ethernet connections nearby. What’s the purpose in having integrated wireless if I’m supposed to be near an ethernet port to use this thing?
When I first reported this to Dell through a form on their site, I got an automated response back that essentially was of no help at all. I was hoping that someone would have taken the time to call considering the widely reported news of exploding laptops nor did I actually expect an automated email response at all.
I had an internet chat with Dell a few weeks back. Someone was dispatched to my house to replace the heat sink and the fan. No luck —– this laptop is still hotter than Hades. I have to use something more substantial as a buffer to prevent the device from completely burning my lap. It’s not comfortable in the least. I was able to sit in bed, sit on the couch, and sit at the gate at an airport with my D600 and work on things with no thought of it getting too hot. I can forget about sitting in my pajamas working late at night or early in the morning while in bed unless I have something to protect my lap with my new laptop.
Any usage, other than when the laptop is idle, causes it to become very, very hot. My batteries are not subject to the recent recall though I wouldn’t eliminate this machine from possibly flaming up like the recent news of spontaneously exploding Dell laptops.
I filled out another form online today for people who are still have unresolved problems. We’ll see where it goes.
Update: There appears to be some doubt as to the validity of the statement that the site is targeting Israelis or contains any malware at all.
Mahmood Ahmadinejad, Iranian President, has taken to blogging. I think it’s great that he’s addressing people in this medium. Be sure to click the US flag, second from the left to get the English version.
But don’t visit his site if you’re in Israel. His blog is specifically geared to exploit an IE vulerability, but ONLY for Israeli IP addresses. Amazing.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad now has his very own blog. That’s fine. The content is entirely what you might expect with one notable exception. Several Israeli bloggers, including Yael K.’s Step By Step, which I read regularly, report that if you access the Ahmadenijad blog from an Israeli IP address the site sends you a little gift, a cyberattack in the form of a virus or trojan (reports vary) designed to exploit an Internet Explorer vulnerability.
Link: Ahmadenijad Blog Contains A Little Surprise For Israeli Readers Using Windows and Internet Explorer
It was 59 years ago today that Nehru raised the Indian flag at Red Fort Delhi, marking their independence from Britain. Happy Independence Day.
Jill Carroll, the freelance journalist for The Christian Science Monitor (a great newspaper by the way), tells her story on The CSM starting here. It’s a multi-part series starting today. Absolutely riveting.
Link: The Jill Carroll Story - Introduction
There’s a great read in the July 27th edition of the Economist that reminds me of the perils associated with the imperialistic endeavors involving the US, Britain, and France in relationship to the Suez Crisis of the 50’s.
Britain and France wanted control of the Suez Canal, but had no basis for invading Egypt, so they colluded with Israel who was willing to put up a smoke screen that would then allow for an invading force to keep the peace and then control the canal.
“The Israelis provided a way out. On September 30th a delegation secretly presented the French with a fabricated casus belli: Israel would invade Egypt and race to the canal. The French and British could then invade, posing as peacekeepers to separate the two sides, and occupy the canal, ostensibly to guarantee the free passage of shipping. When this plan was presented to Eden, he jumped at it. Thus was collusion born. The details were agreed on at a secret meeting in Sèvres, outside Paris. Not for nothing is the Suez crisis known in Egypt as the “tripartite aggression”.
The British and French forces now had a pretext to invade. For the Israelis, it would punish Egypt for its escalating incursions into Israel from Gaza. It would also hitch the major European powers to the cause of Israel: up to that point, the French had tried to be even-handed between Israel and its neighbours; the British had leaned towards the Arab states.”
It blew up in their faces when Eisenhower balked at the thought of such events and put the kibosh on their little masquerade.
“Eisenhower, kept completely in the dark, felt utterly betrayed by his erstwhile allies. “I’ve just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things,” he told his aides. He determined to put a stop to the whole enterprise.
America struck at Britain’s fragile economy. It refused to allow the IMF to give emergency loans to Britain unless it called off the invasion. Faced by imminent financial collapse, as the British Treasury saw it, on November 7th Eden surrendered to American demands and stopped the operation, with his troops stranded half way down the canal. The French were furious, but obliged to agree; their troops were under British command.”
They royal schlacking that the Brits in particular gave Egypt through the years in part fuelled the rise of “radicals” associated with Islam while all they really wanted was to be left alone. The Muslim Brotherhood formed during the height of Egyptian fury over the peddling nature of the British government. Ayman al-Zawahiri, 1st Lieutentant of Al-Qaeda, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at 14 years of age. It was the Egyptian intellectual, Sayyid Qutb, that really furthered the movement though. It’s no coincidence that we’re faced with radical forms of Islam wherever colonial powers once roamed in the Middle-East and South Asia in particular.
Condi Rice should have used her recent trip to the Middle-East to persuade Israel and Hezbollah to an unconditional cease fire. It would have been the first time since the Suez that “America was to take strong action against Israel.” I’m not trying to argue right or wrong in the current conflict that will finally reach a UN negotiated cease fire on Monday, August 14th. What I do know is that Lebanese civilians have been amongst the largest casualties and Israel will be no safer in the end.
Link: The Suez crisis: An affair to remember (subscription required)
I wrote about WinFS late last year and provided some of my thoughts on the subject. In the days and weeks after writing the post, I noticed a massive number of referrers in my logs from microsoft.com directly to that post. For a period of weeks, it was my most viewed post — mostly from employees at Microsoft. Apparently, it touched a nerve and people must have received it in widely sent internal emails.
Microsoft announced recently that they’re essentially slowing the growth of the project by including it as a component of SQL Server. I have never fully liked the idea of an object-relational file system —- especially if it comes from Microsoft. That’s not because I enjoy Microsoft bashing, but I have real-world experience with storing massive numbers of files in Windows file systems. NTFS just doesn’t cut it when you exceed 25 million files per partition. If a machine sets the dirty bit on that partition, a reboot can take days potentially to complete due to checkdsk. Adding layers to the file system to add nifty functionality is great in theory, but in practice it’s almost impossible to make it scale for enterprises when it’s based on a Windows file system.
WinFS sounded better for the consumer in some regards. They’ll never need the same sort of scalability that enterprise data centers demand, but the adoption of such functionality is still dependent on application developers seeing value in the offering. Bundling WinFS with SQL Server is one assured way of keeping it out of the consumer space unless perhaps an application uses the developer edition of SQL Server. But this is still a big barrier if Microsoft wanted to see adoption in the consumer space.
I spent the better part of the last decade dealing with issues surrounding adding metadata to NTFS using something called the extended attribute block. It’s sort of a free form area of the file system for low-level developers to store stuff. It was a bad idea to use the EA block to store meta information and I doubt that WinFS was much better.
We were in Toronto this past weekend for a wedding. Now we are in Boston visiting my sister and attempting to get some much needed scheduling issues settled. We’ll be back in Hartford tomorrow. Sorry for the radio silence as of late. Travel has been killer.