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Are you really “Buying” an eBook?

posted in: Interesting, Technology - No Comments

5:15 pm 5:15 pm

I saw a link today to buy a textbook online and decided to checkout the latest shenanigan the textbook publishers were peddling these days. I found myself at CourseSmart.com looking at what appeared to be the best eTexbook experience I could imagine. They had everything figured out and addressed pretty well. They had full text search, allowed reasonable copy and paste, allowed printing, enabled online and offline reading, even page numbers were made to match the printed version. I was hard pressed to think of an eBook sore-thumb they haven’t tended to.

For just a few moments I wondered if somewhere out there in some distant forest a lion laid peacefully besides a lamb.

Alas, my poor eyes were swiftly and ruthlessly assaulted with this sharpest of insults:
Buying a Subscription

This publisher and I differed to no insignificant measure on the simple concept of “Buying”. One would innocently assume that by pressing the green button captioned “Buy Online Version” that one would respectively “Own” something at the end of this “Buying” exercise. Not so with this dimwitted excuse of a technologically progressive publisher.

It turns out, what you are really “Buying” is a mere 180 days ownership of self-evaporating book. That’s right, 180 days after you “Buy” this book, you will automatically be relieved of your ownership burden.

If you don’t realize how insulting that is, consider that at the very least the emperor owned and got to keep his imaginary new clothes.

How pathetic…

I Have Found Beauty & Elegance

posted in: Interesting, Technology - No Comments

4:08 pm 4:08 pm

Fundamental Theorem of Calculus

…in the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. The answers this nugget provides are amazing. I’m blown away. Learn more about it at Wikipedia.

Etelos Goes Public !!!

posted in: Interesting, Technology - No Comments

5:28 pm 5:28 pm

Etelos Public

:) :) :)

What’s Blogging?

posted in: Interesting, Technology - 1 Comment

8:54 am 8:54 am

What made blogging popular? What changed from the days when blogging was not known? The internet has been around much longer than blogging has, yet blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon.

The trigger is differentiation. It is the same thing that made us drop $5 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks as we abandoned Dunkin Donuts and their fried carbohydrates. They both served coffee, but if Dunkin Donuts started charging that much for their coffee we would not have bought it. We knew what coffee was and have come to expect it in a certain style and environment. Starbucks weren’t really selling coffee, they were selling something else. They were different. In our minds, it’s was not coffee as we expected it.

But there was one more trick; the moniker. Starbucks didn’t call it coffee, joe, or -even the exotic favorite- java. They called it something else. Indeed, I didn’t know what a Latte was until I had tried it.

Blogging, is the moniker that stipulated the experience we expected when we “blog”. Along with the environment that blogging software provided, these two innovations made blogging what it is today. Before, a person would “publish” content on a “website” that was run by a “webmaster”. You had to be cool, proper, or otherwise straight-up interesting for your thoughts to be “published”.

But now, those layers of complexity have been peeled off. You just be yourself, relax, say what you may. Your posts needn’t conform to any editorial style or a webmaster’s timeline. And that is a different experience that has a different name; a different moniker. That is the differentiator.

How could this post be useful to you? Think about what you are producing, is it different? should it be? should it go by a different name?

Adobe Unleashes Flex as Open Source

posted in: Technology, UNIX - No Comments

9:31 am 9:31 am

I talked about the potential of Adobe Flex before, now the doors are open.

Flex Logo With the Flex SDK released as Open Source get ready to see the Flex OS. The underlaying OS will not matter, Flex will be it. It will take a long time, but people will eventually wake up to it.

Why am I so certain? the market will correct itself. Now Flex is the most appropriate thing to build a cross platform UI. It is as close as possible to the sexiness of OS X (close enough), and fully internet aware.

There is one person that I can think of who should be thanked for this, there maybe more folks but the most visible sane person at Adobe is Duane Nickull.

Eric S. Raymond gets bashed too…

posted in: Community, Interesting, Technology, UNIX - 3 Comments

5:23 pm 5:23 pm

Back in 2003, I wrote an article for Linux.com (or NewsForge.com, I forgot which, but they are the same outfit anyway). The article was titled, “Is RHN the right choice for your business?”. I basically questioned the sanity of paying 10 times more for a product that essentially was broken.
The article made it to the front page of Google News and many other sites. So at first I was pleased, and on virtually all sites, the comments were supportive and it seemed I hit a nerve.

Then I turned to Linux.com and NewsForge.com’s comments. And I was shocked, the comments were awful. My competence was questioned and I was virtually crucified. No rebuttals to what I was pointing out, just a “well if you don’t like it you are an idiot”-type of comments. That was a turn off.

It was to my delight (sorry ESR) that yesterday I came upon this gem titled “ESR gives up on Fedora”. I thought it was interesting that 4 years later, ESR comes to the same conclusion. But what’s more interesting, are the comments that followed. And some of these bozos didn’t even know who ESR was!

I should mark this post as Humor even though its real, but its just way too funny.

Thank you ESR for speaking up!

Over-Engineering

posted in: Humor, Interesting, Technology, UNIX - 1 Comment

12:08 pm 12:08 pm

I believe this is one of the most destructive and under estimated bugs that inhibit devs (not code, but developers).

The outcome of over-engineering is heartbreaking on so many levels. Not only is the product destroyed, but resources are wasted, careers are ruined, and egos get crushed, in this case needlessly. But worst of all, this disease goes on undiagnosed decimating project after project.

I know I will get lambasted for saying this, but I honestly see this most (not all, most) with devs coming from a specific discipline. One that mainly uses a technology that starts with J and ends with AVA, referred to as J*** from here on.

Consider the following diagram to better understand what I’m noticing.

Over Engineering in action

As I said, this behavior appears to manifest itself mainly within the J*** community. It is already an established fact (if it isn’t, I’m establishing it now) that computer languages and the characters of the devs using them are tightly woven and intertwined. To know a dev is to know his languages.

Case and point, I indirectly got involved in a project that had been in the works for about 8 months already. The requirement was the classical multi-data-sources that needed a single merged view. The solution that was proposed and worked on by your friendly neighborhood J*** dev was a central data warehouse that collects data from many sources into a single Mega-DB. Then that DB would provide that data by merging it chronologically.

In 8 months, work on plug-ins that connect to many different kinds of sources and protocols was about 50% done (to my knowledge). The client was very unhappy, after all that time there wan nothing to show yet.

I cannot take credit for this one, so I must give credit where credit is due. Danny (our CEO) was asked to look at the problem and suggest a solution. Three (3) days later, the site was up and the client was pleased to see data flowing.

So how did he do it? the answer was RSS!

It was very easy for any data source to provide the data in XML. Not just any XML, but RSS XML. Then using any plain RSS aggregator, data would be merged chronologically. No Mega-DB to build and maintain, no periodical data dumps, no plug-ins, and almost no code involved at all.

We did spend some time fixing up a PHP RSS aggregator and adding a search facility, but the solution was dripping of simplicity and elegance, it was art.

I have no idea why all those protocols were used before, I don’t know why they didn’t ask for a standard form of data from all sources, or if a Mega-DB was actually part of the requirement. Maybe there was more to it than what I was told, but it remains an example in my mind of how devastating over-engineering is.

I would advise that you at least be aware of the possibility that you may be committing over-engineering at any time. And be brave enough to re-evaluate your decision (another Agile Software Development principle).

Agility In Practice

posted in: Technology - 2 Comments

12:07 am 12:07 am

Update: Upon request, I have changed the post to protect the innocent. It’s hard trying to discuss issues like these without stepping on people’s toes and pointing fingers. So forgive me if I leave out some major details in the spirit of conveying knowledge without hurting feelings.

Back in the year 2000, we had a field trip to one of our customer’s agent offices to see how they were using our flagship product. We had recently updated their site so we were excited to see how they react to the cool new chrome.

I sat down with an agent that proceeded to show me her work day on our tool. Midway through the process we hit a page that stopped her in her tracks. We tried over and over and we hit the same bug and it kept taking more and more parts of the site down. Obviously the site was broken, and productivity level was at 0.

My first reaction was to call the office and have that update rolled back. But you see at that time I wasn’t CTO, I was Lead Dev and thus considered to be the pure embodiment of evil as far as the Network Admin’s were concerned. The servers were under the Network Admin’s jurisdiction, so no roll back was ever going to happen that day no matter what.
Read more…

Adobe, fix’n to take over the internet

posted in: Interesting, Technology - 2 Comments

2:19 am 2:19 am

For a very long time, I’ve been an advocate of Python and wxPython. I could not understand why wxPython wasn’t at least as popular as Java. But honestly, I did know why, but that’s another post.

Adobe just released Flex2 and I’m way impressed. It seems they took a very good look at wxPython and really did it right.
Check out the component browser and the style browser to see what I mean.
Things that wxPython had that Flex2 does even better include:

  • Cross-Platform, its really a flash file, how much more cross platform can you get? I don’t even think Java is that good.
  • Consistent + elegant, usually you can have one or the other, but Flex2 is right on target.
  • XML-based UI Layout. This is what XUL of the Mozilla project was/is trying to do.
  • Built-in goodness, FLV + MP3 streaming, ActionScript (javascript done right), transition effects, etc…
  • Tiny foot print.
  • No installation required. Well, not so fast, you would need the flash plugin if its running in a browser. But as a Flex2 application, it gives you a single EXE file on Winder’s and an App in Mac. Not sure what it does on Linux.
  • Access to machine hardware like the Mic, the Camera, etc…

But you’re going to bug me about Flex2 being a commercial application. True, the Flex2 Builder is > $500. I wouldn’t buy it even if it were free. The SDK is totally free, that’s all you need anyway. You can build a full Flex2 application using the normal C, C++, and Obj-C tools like make with the Flex2 compiler. It’s way simpler than GCC folks :)

If Adobe keeps this up they will hit a home run guaranteed.

QuickTime frame exporter blue tint fix!

posted in: Technology, UNIX - Comments Off

2:01 am 2:01 am

I finally found the fix for the blue tint you get when using QCRenderer and QuickTime to export frames to a file.
On Intel Macs, you have to use
GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8
instead of
GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8_REV
In all of your OpenGL functions.

It makes sense since the the processor was switched from PPC to Intel. I would have thought Apple already took care of all these minor endian annoyances. Oh well, as long as I know what’s going on.