I’ve not used this blog for politics in the past, but I’m going to start making some exceptions where I think there is a technology tie-in. George Will’s piece on the Copenhagen summit was very interesting. I recommend that you read it. I am not a climatologist but I am a skeptic of all science based on computer models, especially models that cannot accurately predict the present observable state of a system.

The recently hacked emails of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain reveal a pattern of behavior that would be more consistent with the corrupt leaders of a cult whose proclaimed tomes of divinely inspired scripture cannot withstand scrutiny should certain facts be revealed. In the minds of the true believing disciples or the corrupt leadership of the cult, the ends justify the means. And truth is not a consideration.  

The software models and data upon which all climate change disciples rely are written by flawed human beings. Whether a software engineer expertly writes the software to implement his best understanding of the requirements of the scientist or the real scientist writes the software with a less than perfect knowledge of software engineering and design, the outcome is the same. (Hey, not even a PhD can know everything.) All software is flawed. It is the nature of our art.

Can computer models be a good thing? Sure. Especially when they work. Can they be a bad thing? Well, consider that a climate model must model the entire earth and its atmosphere. That’s a few million data points (colossal understatement). These models must have historical data. And there’s the rub. It’s not there. Not really. So we extrapolate the data using tree cores and ice cores and, wait for it, more computer models.

Any software engineer knows that such a model will be inherently complex and that complex systems are inherently flawed and that very complex systems are inherently very flawed. No software engineer will declare her (or his) faith in such a model or its output, but more importantly, they would never bet a week’s salary on it’s accuracy without full testing and confirmation against known observable data and repeatable tests. Yet, we are preparing to bet trillions of tax payer dollars on these flawed models. “Hey, Sam, keep your hands out of my pocket!”

The problem we have is that scientists have put their faith in software models and data produced by software models as the magical source of all truth and knowledge. They are either the corrupt leaders of a cult (see the CRU emails) or its blind disciples insisting on the truth of their models even when observable facts contradict and invalidate those assertions.

The climate change models and extrapolated data have become scripture. The scientists who preach daily from the pages of that holy writ are held in prophetic awe and reverence by the ignorant masses of well intentioned politicians and citizens of the earth. Except for software engineers and the “deniers” of course.

So back to the question. Can computer models be a bad thing? Yes, when the ignorant or the corrupt use them as an unquestionable, magical affirmation of their own political agenda or emotional response to the idea that man is killing the planet and that unless we do something about it, we will all die. Well nobody wants that.

Oddly, we ridicule and persecute religious nuts who do the same thing. I guess they just weren’t smart enough to get a PhD and call themselves scientists rather than prophets. Stupid nuts.

Silverlight WCF RIA Services Beta Released was released recently, replacing the preview bits I’ve been playing with. You can pick up the new beta here. I'm still using VS 2008 SP1, but I am using Windows 7, so I download directly from here.

WARNING! If you’re not on Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, you’ll need the hotfix mentioned. If you're still on XP or Vista, let this be the final reason to upgrade and do it. You won't regret it.

I learned first about the beta release from Dan Abrams blog post. Some coolness he mentions:

• DataSources window. Drag and drop "tables" exposed by Domain Service onto the form.
• Simplified error handling on client and server.
• Data model inheritence flows through the Domain Service.
• Presentation model hides DAL model with CRUD support.
• Optimized binary channel by default.
• Integrated into Silverlight 4 installer.
• Handling of compositional hiearchy in data models.
• GAC and bin deployment, with bin taking precedence.
• Globalization support, user state and persisted sign in with updated Business Application Template.
• Go-Live bits for .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3.

Another item of note is the name change with the WCF moniker. RIA Services is now part of the WCF services family along with ADO.NET Data Services. This seems like a convergence of technologies in an enterprise ready set of tools and services that will bring Silverlight into the forefront of enterprise application development and delivery.

I'll be working on pulling these new bits together and getting my "Aventure" blog sample back on track with the new Azure SDK bits and these new WCF RIA Services bits. Given the plethora of changes, I'll likely start over with fresh new project templates and pull what little customized code that might be needed from my previous blog post on the topic.

I am extremely impressed by the sage wisdom of Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare's The Emperor's Old Clothes given at his acceptance of the Turing Award in 1980 and subsequently published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1981. Here are my favorite excerpts. I hope you will read the entire text using the link below.

"You know, you shouldn't trust us intelligent programmers. We can think up such good arguments for convincing ourselves and each other of the utterly absurd."
...
"Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it. Our applications are complex because we are ambitious to use our computers in ever more sophisticated ways. Programming is complex because of the large number of conflicting objectives for each of our programming projects. If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution."
...
"At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way--and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
...
"The mistakes which have made in the last twenty years are being repeated today on an even grander scale."
...
"If only we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past, we would not need to learn from our failures."
...
"To have our best advice ignored is the common fate of all who take on the role of consultant, ever since Cassandra pointed out the dangers of bringing a wooden horse within the walls of Troy."

The Emperor's Old Clothes
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare
Creator of the Quicksort algorithm
1980 Turing Award Winner
© 1981 ACM 0001-0782/81/0200-0075

Full text here in PDF.

Having accidentally browsed into this today, I reiterate the axiom that complexity is the enemy of sound software development and hereby recommit to following the path of simplification, learning more lessons from my successes to avoid more failures and to sometimes keeping my best advice to myself.

In anticipation of repaving my Vista x64 machine with Windows 7 after the MSDN release on August 6, I’ve prepared my wish list of hardware upgrades I’d like to do at the same time I pave the machine with the new OS.

Should the family financial officer (FFO) decline to approve my purchase request, I’ll at least sneak in the SSD purchase.

Update (new list, bigger appetite):

What plans do you have for your Windows 7 upgrade?

Drool….

Here’s the content of the most exciting email I’ve received lately (invite code redacted of course):

Thank you for your interest in Windows® Azure™.

Your invitation code is xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx.

You can now sign up for a Windows Azure account at http://lx.azure.microsoft.com/fs. Please keep this email in a safe place.

This invitation to participate in the Windows Azure Community Technical Preview is subject to the following usage limits:

        Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours
        Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
        Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day

During the CTP, we reserve the right to suspend your account activity (this does not imply we will delete your cloud storage) if you exceed these usage limits.

Sincerely,
Windows Azure Platform Team

You have received this email because you registered as being interested in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Azure. As a participant in the Windows Azure CTP program, you will continue to receive emails related to that program unless you end your participation by emailing azinvite@microsoft.com with “END PARTICIPATION” in the subject line.

To ensure proper delivery of future updates please add azinvite@microsoft.com to your address book or safe-senders list.

Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more about Microsoft's privacy policy, please click here.

Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

I’m very excited to begin learning to develop against Azure in all my spare time. If I learn anything worthy of note here, I’ll share it. Just too many things to dabble in and too little time.

With the release of Silverlight 3 on Friday, I’m wondering whether the enterprise (that mythical stereotype) will adopt Silverlight 3 for line of business (LOB) applications. The official “what’s new” section included the following items that I found very interesting:

Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity. New features include:

• 60+ controls with source code : Silverlight 3 is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The controls come with nine professional designed themes and the source code can be modified/recompiled or utilized as-is. Other additions include multiple selection in listbox controls, file save dialog making it easier to write files, and support for multiple page applications with navigation.
• Deep Linking. Silverlight 3 includes support for deep linking, which enables bookmarking a page within a RIA.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Silverlight 3 enables users to solve the SEO-related challenges posed by RIAs. By utilizing business objects on the server, together with ASP.NET controls and site maps, users can automatically mirror database-driven RIA content into HTML that is easily indexed by the leading search engines.
• Enhanced Data Support Silverlight 3 delivers:
  • Element to Element binding : UI designers use binding between two UI properties to create compelling UI experiences. Silverlight now enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML, for instance binding a slider value to the volume control of a media player.
  • Data Forms. The Data Form control provides support for layout of fields, validation, updating and paging through data.
  • New features for data validation which automatically catch incorrect input and warn the user with built-in validation controls.
  • Support for business objects on both client and server with n-Tier data support. Easily load, sort, filter and page data with added support for working with data. Includes a new built-in CollectionView to perform a set of complex operations against server side data. A new set of .NET RIA services supports these features on the server.
• Improved performance, through:
  • Application library caching, which reduces the size of applications by caching framework on the client in order to improve rendering performance.
  • Enhanced Deep Zoom, allows users to fluidly navigate through larger image collections by zooming.
  • Binary XML allows communication with the server to be compressed, greatly increasing the speed at which data can be exchanged.
  • Local Connection This feature allows communication between two Silverlight applications on the client-side without incurring a server roundtrip: for instance a chart in one control can communicate with a datagrid in another.

I’ve just downloaded the bits and will begin exploring the new controls and just how easy it is or is not to build applications. My only criteria at the moment is whether or not the applications are as easy to build as a Windows Forms application. Obviously there are far more important evaluation criteria, but I’m wondering whether my stated criteria here will be the more common question raised in the enterprise. That is, can we build apps faster, easier, better with this? If not, I’m not sure the enterprise will get too awfully excited about it unless a clear case can be made for replacing the often time consuming, error prone web application development process with a simpler Silverlight 3 development process.

One way or another, I’m excited about Silverlight 3 and eager to dive in and have some fun.

After a long search for the right business process management platform that would allow us to integrate and extend with .NET, my team selected the Ultimus BPM Suite. The primary factors in the decision were the comprehensive nature of the solution which would allow us to deploy process management without requiring the use of some other tool such as InfoPath or SharePoint. Additionally, the solution would allow an incomplete process to be deployed and have assigned "process experts" make final decisions about business rules that may not have been clear or available at the time the process was designed.

I spent all of last week at their North Carolina offices in a "jumpstart" training course and met many of the key players at the company. Good people all around. Their technical expertise and willingness to listen to our team's concerns were impressive. There were a few minor UI glitches that we brought to their attention such as some scrolling issues when designing a process with limited screen real estate. The Ultimus people were genuinely interested in our input.

Having initially found and recommended the product, I was even more impressed with the product as we went through detailed training that brought out a number of features and illustrated an architecture that gave me even greater confidence in the product. This was particularly true in the area of integration points with existing systems and the ability to extend the process using custom developed controls or even process context aware ASP.NET pages hosted outside of the process server.

Our only disappointment was that some of the the training session content could have been improved as at times some of the class members were left a little lost and fell behind. This was in part because the "jumpstart" course was designed to fit a lot of material into a few days, but it was in part due to a lack of maturity in the content and presentation. We were very candid with the Ultimus training director about this and he took our input eagerly and promised improvement. Based on my conversations with key Ultimus employees, I believe that will happen.

If you are looking for a better way to deliver business process management and enterprise human-centric workflow solutions, you should consider Ultimus. There were other systems that were much more expensive that may have fit our requirements, but this was the only one we found that allowed us the freedom to extend and customize using our .NET dev skills without requiring coding skills to design and modify and manage processes.

I'll be writing more about Ultimus as our experience with the product continues.

The following spam message (less the links) skipped through my spam filters somehow. If you are not a native speaker of English, this message may appear to be in order if your skill level with the language is limited. Otherwise, I suspect you will find this text as amusing as I did. I have not modified a single character. Enjoy...

welcome to order,
Our company is one of the largest wholesalers in Asia ,and we sell products to all over the world,we have the authorithed licence issured by Chinese government,all products in our company ranges from varieties of electronic products like mobilephone ,television, laptop,DVD,GPS,MP3/4 to photograph video game ,scanner, motorcycle prohector and so on..
We have earned our reputation in the world through our honesty business practice in the past years,and obtained many compliments from our clients globally.As we are the direct wholesalers for many reputable brands in the world,so all the products purchased in our website are promised to be at a lower price with the high quality,also all the facuty products will be returned within 7 days,exchange within 14 days,repair within 2 years without charge.
We will be right here waiting for your visitation.

I hope that as software architects and engineers we are producing code and other textual artifacts that communicate with greater clarity and understanding of the language and idiom in which we express our ideas. Do we write documentation as badly because we can only communicate clearly in code? Or vice versa? It is something to think about.

One of the latest Apple ads makes fun of Microsoft for spending more on marketing than on fixing Vista. Time for all you fruit computer junkies to face some cold hard facts:

Let's take our most recent SEC filing quarter for both companies and compare spending on sales, marketing and administration versus research and development and then average that spending per employee.

Microsoft spends about $25,000 per employee on R&D and $43,000 on sales, marketing and administration.
A ratio of 1 to 1.72.

Apple spends about $16,300 per employee on R&D and $51,200 on sales, marketing and administration.
A ratio of 1 to 3.13.

So relatively speaking, Apple spends nearly twice as much on sales, marketing and administration as Microsoft does.

And that's one reason why I'm a PC. You can keep your fruit computer.

I just posted this on a linkedin group to which I belong, but I thought I'd also like to pose the question here.

I'd like to get a discussion started that attempts to define enterprise software architecture. My own definition seems to be evolvoing with every enterprise for whom I've worked. In the abstract, for me, enterprise software architure is the art of putting the pieces of multiple puzzles together into one great work of art.

There are many puzzles to choose from and every enterprise has a unique mix. There are multiple teams with various skillsets and experience. There are multiple business processes sometimes with unique and strange business rules. Technology platforms that differ, communications protocols that won't communicate with one another, languages, frameworks, compilers, IDEs, components, and hardware that vary from team to team and department to department. Ours is the task of taking these disparate and often incongruous pieces and molding them into one coherent masterpiece of technology and human resources to get more done, get it done better, quicker, cheaper and easier. And if we do our jobs well, it may be that no one will notice that we did it at all.

What do you think?

I just posted the following note on a LinkedIn group I follow in answer to a post about so called "software factories," which is a nice euphemism for overseas developers working for much less than they deserve struggling to meet the unreasonable demands of their bosses. This represents my opinion on the subject:

Never forget that you get what you pay for. Hiring an overseas or even local "software factory" or consultancy to build your software can be problematic at best and a complete waste of time and money at worst.

First, if you cannot communicate, forget about it. Building software is 99% communication and 1% technology. Okay, perhaps I overstate the case. A little. But you cannot overestimate the importance of clear, effective communication.

Second, unless you have the internal people required to manage such a relationship, your project will fail. This means you need project management and technical people in your own organization that you know well and trust. They need to be supremely competent. This is especially true if you plan to hire a firm outside of your own geographical area.

Third, plan for time and budget overages. It is the nature of consulting to promise a low price and quick turnaround and then when you are committed to the project and it is "nearly done," you will be informed that there is much more to do, generally due to legitimate changes in requirements because you did not fully understand what you wanted when the project first began. This is the boon and bane of software development whether internal or external.

Finally, you can have success outsourcing your software development project, but do not make the mistake of thinking that it will save you an enormous amount of time and money, especially for a single application project. It takes time to develop a working relationship with an outside consultantcy, especially one that is half way around the world. If you have multiple projects, long term goals, and a huge budget of time and money, it may in fact be cost effective to have a relationship with a so called "software factory." But if you are a small organization and have one or two projects, you will nearly always be better off hiring a professional locally, usually through one of the many technical recruiting companies, to come into your organization as a contractor to work on-site building exactly what you want as you discover over time what it is you want exactly.

I upgraded to the latest version of dasBlog a few days ago and inadvertently allowed comments without requiring approval. A spambot comment got through and while I quickly turned on the "require approval" feature, it was too late. Since then I've been bombarded with stupid link spam comments. I even deleted the one post that seemed to be the bot target and created a new post with the same content.

No luck. After many similar spam comments today being posted to the most recent post on my blog, I'm giving up. I'm taking a comment holiday. It won't bother anyone really because I don't get many real comments. I'll enable the comment functionality some day in the future.

Meantime, if you have a comment, feel free to email me and I'll post it as an addendum to the relevant post.

Being rather new to Vista this week, I was sorely disappointed to see the severely dumbed down defrag utility in Vista. A pathetic effort. Really! So after a few highly scientific Google searches, I settled on O&O Defrag and could not be happier.

Here's the lame, incredibly useless UI in Vista's Disk Defragmenter. Note, if you are going to use some other defragmenter on a schedule, which I would recommend, be sure to disable the regularly scheduled Vista defragmenter by unchecking the box. One way of getting there is to go to the Control Panel and then Performance Information and Tools and then Advanced Tools.

And here is only part of the incredibly useful O&O Defrag UI, a shot taken as it defrags my drives:

Of course there are other suitable defrag tools such as DiskKeeper and others. Perhaps Microsoft wanted the Vista tool to cater only to the basic, uninformed user. If so, they certainly left the market wide open to the more sophisticated tools vendors such as O&O.

I finally took the plunge. Now I get to use 4GB out of 4GB except that the bare minimum I seem to be able to get Vista x64 down to is a 1.2GB footprint. And that's after hours and hours of experimentation and disabling some visual enhancements, though I feel no loss there and am experiencing a significantly reduced sense of loss.

Now I'm happy to be able to test on x64 virtual images using VMWare's Workstation, I'm afraid I may need to buy four 2GB sticks of RAM now. Despite the fact that the additional memory is available now, the larger footprint nearly wipes out the gain.

And that's without running any significant applications, except IE, which is quite a memory hog. I guess the old 640K upper limit days are over.

Yes, RAM is cheap. A quick check on Newegg.com and I found 8GB (4 x 2GB DDR2 800) for $174. I can't even buy three tanks of gas for my SUV for that.

I'm getting ready to do some serious MOSS 2007 architecture and development work. In the past, I've used Virtual PC 2007 to host a virtual development environment running a Windows server operating system, SQL Server, MOSS and Visual Studio all running in the same virtual machine. And I've never been very happy with the performance of that virtual machine.

So today I decided to give VMWare a try and downloaded VMWare Workstation 6.5. I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard x86 (full install) on a new virtual machine with the same disk space and memory as I had allocated for the same operating system install using Virtual PC 2007. I gave both virtual machines 30GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM. I'm running on a Core 2 Duo 6600 on an ASUS P5B at factory default speed with 4GB of RAM with virtualization support enabled. Both virtual machines virtual drives live on the same drive.

The major advantage of VMWare is its ability to utilize both cores where Virtual PC is stuck with using just one. I'm sure there are additional reasons for the differences in performance. I used PerformanceTest 6.1 from PassMark. I'm sure there are other ways to test virtual machine performance, but this seemed to be a reasonable though unscientific approach. I made sure my machine was running the same processes and completely idle except for the virtual machine host application.

I only ran the tests that mattered to me: CPU, 2D, memory, and disk. I don't care about 3D and CD performance for the virtual machine. Here's the results:

vmware		test 1	test 2	avg	ratio
	cpu:	326.6	344.4	335.5	2.2x
	2D:	28.7	32.2	30.45	3.3x
	Memory:	96.7	96.2	96.45	1.2x
	Disk:	469.1	454.5	461.8	6.4x
	Total:	921.1	927.3	924.2	2.9x
vpc 2007
	cpu:	150.7	154.1	152.4
	2D:	9.2	9.3	9.25
	Memory:	83.3	83.2	83.25
	Disk:	69.6	73.8	71.7
	Total:	312.8	320.4	316.6

 

I was amazed to see that overall, the VMWare virtual machine ran 2.9 times faster than the Virtual PC machine. Even more amazing was the performance improvement of the 2D and disk tests, 3.3 and 6.4 times faster respectively.

I am now completely sold on the value of the VMWare Workstation license. The best price I found after a quick search was $161. For all the saved frustration in working with a slow virtual machine development image for MOSS, the product is well worth the price. But don't take my word for it, run your own tests if you don't believe me. Of course, if you aren't running a multicore machine, and what self respecting developer isn't, you probably won't see any improvement. On the other hand, if you have at least two cores, choosing save a few bucks seems to penny wise but pound foolish!

I get a lot of forward email from friends and relatives. I've never felt compelled to do anything with any of them until, bored this evening, I read this one from my father-in-law. I don't know if any of these stories are true or not, but whether they are or aren't, they are. In a time when America seems to be taking much criticism from within and without, it's good to have reminders like these.

When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush. He answered by saying, 'Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.'

There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying 'Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb them?' A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly. 'Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships, how many does FRANCE HAVE?'

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers that included personnel from most of those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, 'Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?' Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied "maybe it's because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to speak German.'

An elderly American gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on. 'You have been to France before, monsieur?' the customs officer asked sarcastically. The man admitted that he had been to France previously. 'Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.' The American said, 'The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it. 'Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France !' The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained, 'Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn't find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to.'

A week after being laid off finds me wondering why I've neglected this blog. I'm currently experiencing the self recriminatory state one goes into at the end of the dead end street having recently passed the Dead End sign. Brake, execute the multi-point 180 and head back to find the turn you missed. And then realizing that the turn you missed should have been as obvious as the nose on your face.

My conscience tells me not to be too hard on myself. In one week I've had an interview or two. Have another scheduled for tomorrow. And one or two inquiries from other potential employers. Met with more than one recruiter and talked with several more. Polished the resume a bit more and started working the neglected network of friends and former coworkers--neglect as a result of me working from my home office with little real world interaction. Note to self: get out more and talk with humans face to face.

I've even taken more than one meeting from possible business partners with ideas that may or may not pan out, but I'm not taking anything off the table until I replace my mainstream income.

So if anyone needs a C# dev guy with some architecture leanings, grab my resume and give me a shout.

Sometimes the odd helper class is useful. This one might even be a decent candidate for some .NET 3.5 extension methods. These URL utilities are quite self explanatory and by no means are a complete set of URL helper methods that would be useful, but who knows, they might have something you're looking for.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace HelperCode
{
    internal static class UrlUtils
    {
        internal static string GetTldFromUrl(string url)
        {
            string tld = UrlUtils.GetHostFromUrl(url);
            if (tld != null && tld.Contains('.'))
            {
                string[] parts = tld.Split('.');
                if (parts.Length > 0)
                {
                    tld = parts[parts.Length - 1];
                }
            }
            return tld;
        }

        internal static string GetHostFromUrl(string url)
        {
            string retval = null;
            try
            {
                Uri uri = new Uri(url);
                retval = uri.Host.ToLower();
            }
            catch
            {
                retval = null;
            }
            return retval;
        }

        internal static string GetSchemeFromUrl(string url)
        {
            string retval = null;
            try
            {
                Uri uri = new Uri(url);
                retval = uri.Scheme.ToLower();
            }
            catch
            {
                retval = null;
            }
            return retval;
        }
    }
}

If you have a better way to do it, please, by all means, let us know. There are no doubt better ways. :)

Whether it be in code or business deals, complexity kills. If you're an architect and you love the elegance of endless inheritance where everything is a descendant of MyCoolRootObject or an venture capitalist trying to tie off every risk with carefully structured language that leaves a founder in the lurch and you in the driver's seat of the getaway car, you are the enemy of success. If you flout the team's style guild and name your class members with freaky names and patterns only you can recognize, you are an enemy of success. If you're a framework developer and you believe you have to add every possible toy feature in the universe to your framework, you are an enemy of success.

And enemies of success lose! Lovers of complexity may win a battle here or there, but the ash heap of history is full of them. Consider any number of technologies that have become so overbloated and difficult to work with that developers and architects look for simpler solutions. Examine the many thousands of failed startups killed by pencil pushing pinheads with no other agenda than to make the deal difficult in hopes of making it perfect, only to kill the deal with a stulted obsession with detail and gaining the advantage in every paragraph.

Simplicity is the key to success.

I recently picked up Booch, Jacobsen and Rumbaugh's new book Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications. It's like the textbook I never had in the OO classes I never took. (Yeah, I'm just another self taught bozo who knows the difference between a five minute class exercise and a multiple month enterprise development project.)

Among others, I have especially enjoyed Chapter 6 called simply Process. Let me quote the opening paragraph and you'll know why.

"The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic, some sensational method or tool whose application promises to render software development trivial. It is the mark of the professional software engineer to know that no such panacea exists. Amateurs often want to follow cook-book steps; professionals know that such approches to development usually lead to inept design products, born of a progression of lies, and behind which developers can shield themselves from accepting responsibility for earlier misguided decisions." pg.247

There's more and the book is a treasure trove of wisdom, but when I read this paragraph, it was nice to feel as if I had met the estimeed Booch, Jacobsen and Rumbaugh definition of professional software engineer.

I do remember looking for magic bullets when I first started teaching myself how to do software development. Fortunately through long trial and error and even greater opportunities to learn from true professionals, I gave up on looking for magic solutions long ago. Since then my life has been easier and busier and much more rewarding with regard to software development.

To their credit, the authors in Chapter 6 review the strengths and weaknesses of both agile and more traditional plan driven (sometimes called waterfall) process approaches. They begin their thesis in this chapter in addressing the traits of a successful project. Now having this is true magic. Here they are:

• "Existence of a strong architectural vision."
• "Application of a well managed iterative and incremental development lifecycle."

The killer qualifiers in those two statements are: "strong" and "well managed." Yikes! These are qualifications that are difficult to come by. When you do, grab them up and hold on to them for dear life. I think most of us can agree that "weak" and "poorly managed" will result in disaster every time.

In an ever more agile development world, we gradually learn to accept that requirements change constantly. Of course, it has always been thus, but I do remember a time when we pretended that requirements were locked and could not be changed. But then I remember delivering a product some months later which did not then meet the client's requirements despite what they had agreed to only months before. Their requirements changed, you see.

Now I work in an environment where this norm is the norm. Requirements change and they change often. Or better put, requirements are discovered daily and old requirements change into new requirements nearly as often. This is the unavoidable nature of the business I'm in. I accept it.

What I hate and cannot accept in this ever changing world are requirements documents written in a proprietary binary format. Sure they're stored in source control, so when I do a little update on my Subversion client in the morning and see that several requirements documents have changed, I'd like to just do a nice simple DIFF on them and see what's changed. But no. Oh, sure there are probably some diff tools out there I could get, but why should I when we could have just written the requirements in text or even a simple transformable XML rather than the binary gobbledygook in a Word or Excel file.

And can anyone tell me how to "blame" a change in a particular line in a Word doc on a certain author? Oh sure, I could use the gooey sticky messy change tracking--no thanks. Just give me a good text file and an editor that can handle it well.

Is my rant a cry for a product or what? Is there an existing product you can recommend? If so, please tell me. And then maybe we can ban the use of Word and Excel for the production and maintenance of requirements. We can say goodbye to the lack of transparency and traceability. We can say hello to simplicity and accountability. Ah, how would it be.

I'm currently working on a rather complex ETL system in the medical industry. There are new business rules uncovered daily as development and analysis proceeds in parallel due to overwhelming business urgencies. The use cases in the system are limited pretty much to "Process File." Everything else is buried in a system of business rules more complex than I care to think about very often and a series of events and event handlers which process the file and implement the business rules.

My own approach to this challenge could have been much more organized had I purchased Karl E. Weigers's book More About Software Requirements earlier on in this project. He says, "Use cases are less valuable for projects involving data warehouses, batch processes, hardware projects with embedded control software, and computationally intensive applications. In these softs of systems, the deep complexity doesn't lie in the user-system interactions. It might be might be worthwhile to identify use cases for such a product, but use case analysis will fall short as a technique for defining all the system's behavior."

I could not agree more. Weigers goes on to recommend the use of event-response tables to provide a way of documenting the requirements of such complex systems which have little if any interaction with users. Granted, you could write a use case using the machine or file system or OS or scheduler or some other non-human entity as the actor, but the analogies break down when trying to document the requirements of the complex rules within the case.

The event-response table is a simple approach to organizing these details that in fact works much better than an ad hoc method of writing it all down in sequential paragraphs and then asking developers, in this case that developer being me, to interpret those requirements and design and code a solution that really works.

You simply need a three column table with the following headers: Event, System State, and Response.

Breaking up functional requirements in a complex rules-driven system with minimal human interaction can be a daunting task. You can make it a bit easier by using some simple organizing structures such as the event-response table.

Thanks to Miguel and his team for making it easier than ever for us Windows-bound .NET geeks to give Mono a try. It's a fairly big download but well worth it. You can now download a VMWare virtual machine image of Mono 1.2.2.1 on openSUSE 10.2 and the free VMWare Player. Install the player and open the unzipped VM file. Easy peasy. I had to play with network settings a bit but that was easy.

There is no easier way to check out Mono on Linux. No partitions to worry about. No setup to worry about. No drivers to mess with such as the constant failure I would get with my dual monitor card when I tried earlier to get SUSE running on a separate partition on my box which led to me giving up.

I recommend you give it a try. Amazing what the Mono team has done. Kudos again to Miguel and his team and all those who have contributed to the Mono project. 

There is much ado about the coming Semantic Web and the dream of objectifying all the data in the world allowing machines to exchange mindshare, yada, yada, yada. But what happens to old web pages when they die? Do they go to HTTP heaven? And when this glorious web for machines supplants the Legacy Web (that messy old WWW), what will we all do with our fancy browsers? Where will we find the fuel to power our AJAX rocket engines? And how will humans survive the rising tide of <tag><mytag>
<yourtag>hey</yourtag>
</mytag></tag> drive by taggings?

The truth is that while the semantic web will find some heavy hitters to knock it out of the park in a variety of industrial and scientific arenas, I'm not sure the messy old WWW is ready for retirement just yet. I doubt the content switch will occur very rapidly in most corners of the world given that most users of the web currently are human and they use the mundane web browser occasionally flicking the AJAX booster switch and dreaming of the connected client days of yore.

We humans like messes. Just look around your office if you don't believe me. Four out of five dentists recommend a messy desk for a healthy work life. And if you don't believe me, Google it.

Still, the semantic web bears some level of intrigue beyond its obvious usefulness in some areas of business and science. In fact, I'd love to have a browser that would help me make more sense of the mess on the WWW or even the mess on my desk.

My New Year's resolution is to explore that idea and determine whether or not it can be done in the messy old WWW world without holding a gun to the head of all those gumbah's with an HTML six shooter in their belt.

I've been busy. Yeah. Sad excuse, but true.
 
On November 7, 2006, about two months after I was hired, my employer "invited" me to resign my position because I refused to sign a mandatory arbitration agreement which among other things included the following language: "I understand that by agreeing to this binding arbitration provision, both I and [company name] give up our respective rights to a trial by jury."

I told my employer that I didn't think I should have to waive my constitutional right to petition the government for redress just because so many others abuse that right. I had researched the issue on the Internet and found that these agreements are enforced by the courts and that in about 99% of all cases, the employee loses, regardless of the issues and facts.

I was annoyed. More at the law than at my employer. I know the law stands behind employers on this issue. And I even support the idea of arbitration as a first option, but I cannot abide the idea of just waiving my right to go to court just to keep a job. I don't think the law should allow an employer to require such a concession upon employees, but it does. Specifically, as long as both parties give up the same rights, the contract is enforceable.

This would be just fine except for the fact that in arbitration, the little guy is viewed by most arbiters (usually retired judges) as the money grubbing whiner and the employer as the victim of the evil, greedy employee. So you give up the same rights but you put yourself, as an employee, at a significant disadvantage if you run into some dispute with an employer.

All that said, I've never been sued by an employer and I've never sued an employer. Still, if I had to, I'd like to preserve the option of having a real court and a real jury hear my case rather than an arbiter who answers to no one regardless of his or her conduct and decisions in the face of the evidence. Take those odds? No thanks.

I was lucky. I found another job the same day I was "asked" to leave which happily pays even better. And I've been super busy with the new gig ever since. Not everyone has the same opportunity and flexibility that I enjoy, so I recognize this development as a true blessing.

Since that day, I've spent an hour or so contacting legislators about the issue. They are generally either indifferent or completely ignorant or in some cases both. Senator Hatch sent me a nice, completely off-base form letter reply referring me to legal counsel despite the fact that I had just asked for his opinion on whether employers should be allowed to continue this practice and whether he would support legislation to prohibit it. Many others just never responded. It's pretty sad when elected officials care so little about the way that employers are now forcing their employees to give up their constitutionally protected rights just because they are afraid of employees who abuse those rights.

It's typical fare for our culture. Punish those who have done nothing wrong in the false hope of protecting yourself from the real bad guys. Similar examples are not difficult to find. Such draconian practices are not needed. If you're going to get sued by employees, you're going to get sued. And if it happens a lot, you might want to consider changing your behavior and/or changing who and how you hire.

If you're reading this and you've signed employment documents without really reading them, you may have signed a similar document. I recommend reading every document your employer "invites" you to sign. Despite your excitement to have a new job and your high opinion of the people you'll be working for, you may be surprised at what they've asked you to agree to. There's only one way out of such an agreement. Don't sign it in the first place. I really liked the people at the former job, but regardless of my regard for them, I was not about to give up my rights in order to work for them.

Of course, everything I've said here is my own opinion. I'm sure my former employer sees it completely differently. I bear them no ill will and certainly have no plans to waste time and energy on the lawsuit that so many of my friends have recommended that I bring against them. I would just hope that they would see their actions for the paranoia I believe it to be and revise their agreements with their existing employees. I think it would be the right and moral thing to do. But that's up to them.

With that all said, I'll get back to coding and promise some real .NET coding posts here in the future.

Thanks to Google CoOp, www.netbrick.net is now my personal .NET developer search engine. With the help of a few friends, the list of domains searched remains relevant to .NET development. This helps eliminate all the clutter I get when hitting Google directly.

Thanks to Paul Allen for alerting me to this very cool feature. And if you use it, don't be afraid to click on the ads. :)

Today I attended my first UCNUG meeting. It was great. Easy location. Perfect size crowd. Great presentation by Aaron Zupancic on refactoring.

Previous meetings have been held at UVSC, but fortunately they got kicked out of there. I'm lazy by nature and didn't want to bother with finding the room on a campus I don't know. This one was hosted gratiously by NuSkin at the East Bay location and that was easy to find.

Aaron gave a well thought out, cogent presentation on the ins and outs of refactoring. I actually learned some things. And for me, that makes any presentation valuable. But it was a good presentation as much for what Aaron did not do as what he did do. He did not just read from the book. Martin Fowler is great but the presentation was really valuable because Aaron pulled examples and ideas into slides with even better code examples.

I've attended the Utah .NET Users Group, where Aaron is the president, a few times. The presentations are generally good, including Aaron's, but this one was much better. I'm trying to convice a buddy of mine to present on CruiseControl.Net, NUnit and automated build and testing in general. I'll post it here if I can get him to commit.

Installed IE7 (7.0.5730.11) over the top of the beta. Everything working well so far. Ah, but now, because of the increasing clutter on my drive, I'm running out of space and will soon be rebuilding my machine. Just another chance to install, install, install.

Point, click, wait. Repeat.

It's been less than a week and my www.photohistorydoc.com site has caught up by many RegNow affiliates, hacked by some warez hackers in the UK, Israel, and Australia, and indexed by Google. The question I have is why does Google continue to index warez sites whose primary purpose is to sabotage the shareware and commercial software industry.

So, Google, why? Why do you help promote these low lifes whose only goal seems to be to troll for software thieves susceptible to the enticements of porn in order to make money from the click flips to the real porn sites. Why? These sites don't use AdSense, so there does not seem to be a monetary motive. What else can it be?

Does anyone have a clue?

After two months of working nights and weekends, I've finally finished Photo History Doc, my little contribution to the shareware world. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Visit http://www.photohistorydoc.com and download it and let me know what you think.

I'll post more about it and how it gets received out in the world later.

I'm disabling trackback on my blog because one particular post gets spammed with about 30 porn trackback spams a week. All of them in one batch. They point to seemingly empty places. So if you want to trackback here, sorry, too bad. It's too much of a pain to delete all the spam trackbacks and there is no easy way to track the offender or block him/her/it.

I want a T-shirt with these words on it:

Bad Code is Platform Independent

All the political and religious debates about platform superiority all come to an end when running bad code. It amazes me how much bad code is out there (some of mine included). And yet we so often jump to blame the platform, runtime, operating system, tools, or some other outside element.

Where have all the good coders gone? More to the point. Were there ever any?

Bad coders never die, they just pick a new platform.

Nothing like a great laugh to perk up your day. Stumbled onto this Captain Zilog on computerhistory.org today. Take a moment and read it. What happened to those good old days? Did the dolldrums of reality take over?

"Systems designer Nick Stacey works late into the night, unknown to him, a small eerie comet passes overhead..."

"I am known to men as...opportunity! I give you the key to man's destiny in a brave new world!"

"It is the beginning of a new freedom for man's imagination! It is a microprocessor! I bestow upon you all of the knowledge that goes with it, but use it wisely! Now, go!"

Corny? Yes. Prescient? Definitely. It was 1979. I was in junior high school. It was the battle of the little, inventive, hungry geek vs. the titans of business with deeper pockets than I could imagine. It was an epoc battle that went to the best and the brightest, not to the most powerful. Or so it seemed. But as a kid, I was only barely aware of the war that raged in the world of technology in those days. To me, it was just an exciting time of change.

Now, change is more terrifying because I have responsibilities. I have four kids, a mortgage and car payments. Just like everybody else I know. And a lot has changed in the last couple of months. And it's been terrifying. And exciting. Two days ago, I blogged about the ethics of meta-searching. It came as a shock to others involved in the project because I had not discussed it with them. I blindsided them. That was fundamentally unfair. And yet, even had I wrung my hands over the issue and discussed it with them, it would probably not have changed the end result. Things changed. And it scared the heck out me. Some of them are probably still angry with me. I don't blame them. I would be too.

Looking back to the days of Captain Zilog made me laugh. It also made me think. Zilog is not a player in the huge PC market. But it's still alive and from all appearances, it's doing well. They innovated. They struggled. They stayed alive and ultimately found a niche market that has served them well. Are they comparable to giants like Intel and Microsoft? No way. But did they survive? Did they make money. I'm guessing that they must have given the fact that they're still around and still selling the Z8 line.

So what is our challenge? We must find a way to survive. Find a way to innovate something truly useful. Believe in that thing. Work hard to make that thing succeed, even if it's in a market you had not originally foreseen. In other words, we must adapt without losing a sense of who we are or what we've created. Time will tell if we, as technologists and entrepreneurs will do just that.

(Modified slightly on Monday, August 21, 2006, after considering issues of fairness and further introspection.)

For the first seven months of this year I worked on a project which, in part, was a meta-search tool designed to bypass the router pacing algorithms used by sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. I have come to believe that even if this were not a violation of their terms of use, it would be fundamentally unethical. I cannot claim the high road in having come to this conclusion. I did not arrive at this conclusion until some time after becoming unemployed and then re-employed.

Yesterday I began to question myself more seriously about the ethics of meta-searching than I had done before. Without doing any online research, a rarity for me, I just wrote down in long hand some basic questions and let one lead to another. My conclusion was that I could not ethically or morally justify the acquisition of data and resale of it in some form or another using meta-search techniques in violation of the source's terms of use.

On July 21, 2006, I was suddenly unemployed along with the rest of the development team at Provo Labs LLC, a Paul Allen (the lesser) venture. I didn't abandon the project even then. I looked for ways to keep the project alive. After all, I had spent months, including nearly every Saturday and Sunday, working on the code for this project. It was my baby. I was the only developer on it. A week or so after that fateful day in July, reality set in. I had no income and four children to feed. I had to find a job. And I did. A great job! The timing could not have been better.

In my first three days on the new job, I was impressed by the effort and expense the company is willing to expend to be sure that copyrighted material used in their product is properly licensed. This reminded me of a conversation I had had with management at Provo Labs earlier in the year. I had raised the question of the ethics of meta-searching and collecting data using automation from public search engines and other resources whose terms of use statements clearly prohibit such behavior. The discussion was brief and the subject was quickly swept aside. It boiled down to "everybody does it, including the search engines, so that makes it okay". I filed that rationalization away and kept going.

The intellectual property transfer from Provo Labs LLC to the new company Phil Burns is starting had not yet happened. I had even contemplated using my company, NetBrick Inc, an S corp of which I am the sole shareholder, as a holding company for this new venture. But I had become impatient and as Phil put it, "emotional and panicky".

I had my doubts about the whole deal and so today I pulled myself out of the deal entirely in part because I had lost faith that we would successfully negotiate the intellectual property rights to this product, in part because I did not believe I would have time to continue working on the project, but mostly because I had come to believe that it would simply be the wrong thing to do.

This process of introspection has been painful. I had to admit to myself that for the last seven months of my life, I have been building, enthusiastically, a product that was in large measure designed to violate the terms of use and possibly violate the law in the acquisition of meta-data from search engines and other sites for the express purpose of reselling that data in the form of market research and other such reports. I had rationalized this by thinking that we would not sell the data but only the conclusions we reached from the data. Splitting hairs like this was just another way to sweep the ethical inconsistency under the rug.

Today I informed Phil and Paul that I will no longer be involved with the project as it stands and that I will deliver the code in its existing form. I did not share with them my reasoning behind my decision because I really did not want to engage them in a debate on the merits of my decision. We had already been down that road.

After I informed Phil and Paul by email, I did some online research--something I really should have done, and unbelievably did not ever do, prior to starting the project. From any of the big three engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), you can click one or two links to get to the following terms of service information.

Google
http://www.google.com/intl/en/terms_of_service.html
"The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons... You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them... You may not "meta-search" Google... You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things: using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries;
"meta-searching" Google; and performing "offline" searches on Google.

MSN
http://tou.live.com/en-us/
"In using the service, you may not:...use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or “meta-searching”);"

Yahoo & Overture
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
"Except as expressly authorized by Yahoo! or advertisers, you agree not to modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Service or the Software, in whole or in part."

Clearly, these search engines do not want you to use automated search software to mine their meta-data presented in search results and the results of other search related queries. It is clear that their intent is to only allow individual users through a normal web browser to access and use this information. Yahoo is more vague than the other two but the intent is still there.

So is the search engine behavior of crawling the content and indexing the content of other web sites unethical or immoral? Does that violate the terms of use posted by many other sites? Will the search engines remove your content from their site if you request it? I do not believe that it is unethical or immoral to drive traffic to a web site because its content contains what a search engine user probably wants to find. The search engine is not repackaging and reselling the data they find on the crawled sites. Yet they do profit in some measure from mining that content, for without the content, they would have no users. It seems to be a trade that most web site owners are willing to make.

I want to make it clear here and now that I believe that if I had made my concerns known to Provo Labs management more forcefully in the early days of this project, they would not have required me to work on it. They would have, I think, found something else for me to do. I hope this illustrates the flaw in my own character, which I hope to remedy in this, and does not leave the reader of this post to believe that Provo Labs LLC acted in an unethical manner.

The code is powerful and capable of being extended and used in a variety of ways. A friend of mine pointed out to me that not everything it does is a violation of terms of use document. In fact there is a lot of things that it is designed to do which goes no further than a typical web crawler in terms of gathering data. Perhaps a means can be found to make use of what it can do without violating terms of use policies. Perhaps the power of the code can be leveraged within the framework of licensed APIs. This is something that will have be determined.

Until that time, I'll continue my work at my new job and focus my personal coding efforts on my Forseti Project to keep my coding skills as sharp as I can. And I will take away an important lesson from this whole roller coaster ride: always examine and question the ethics of a project and then listen to your instincts.

If you'd like to comment and berate me here, go right ahead. I deserve it. If you're particularly vicious, I reserve the right to edit or remove the comment. If you've had similar experiences and stood up more valiantly, I'd like to hear about it and how it all turned out for you.

Just found this referenced on an FTPOnline story: http://www.turboexplorer.com/

For an old Delphi aficionado (version 5 was my last), I can't wait to download the Explorer versions to see what they've done with the place.

I've always felt that starting with a Borland tool was a better place for a beginner to start. And then you take a corporate job and everyone is drinking the blue coolaid. Don't get me wrong. I like the coolaid too. Visual Studio 2005 is hands down the best IDE I've worked with. And no, for you Eclipse fans, I've not tried that highly vaunted IDE. I do know people that have used both and they invariably have good things to say about both.

Borland is spinning off the tools, so they say. So where will they be spun and how do these new dolled up Turbo versions fit into the equation. And so I don't have to wait so long, is there anyone at Borland that can get me a sneak peek copy.

I promise to run it through it's paces and report back here. I'm especially eager to try the C++ flavor. Could the good old days of Turbo be back? Let's see....

SOAP vs REST
In my work I've had occassion to use both SOAP and REST in the client and the server. SOAP is easy if you have good tools. Hard wiring a WSDL is not my thing. At the risk of committing a pun foul, I'd rather eat a bar of soap than hard code good WSDL. Fortunately, .NET makes WSDL for simple web services easy, both on the server and client end of things. And WSCF makes more complex web services easy in the .NET world.

At the same time, REST is more comfortable, especially for those without nice support tools for consuming SOAP on a plate of WSDL. A nice simple HTTP POST. A simple agreement between friends to pass X, Y, and Z data along in a simple name value pair model.

Trust or Verify
I guess in some ways it comes down to trust. Do you trust the client to submit clean data? Can you trust your server application to parse through and make safe any data that is not clean? Or would you rather automate some of that authentication via schema and the rigidity of SOAP? For me, it all depends on the circumstances.

The Illusion of SOAP and Schema
How tight are your contracts? A good lawyer will take a two page agreement and expand it to ninety pages. Not only because she wants to bill you more but because she needs to cover all the bases. Are your web service contract bases covered? Is the schema and secondary validation sufficient.

Can REST Be Secure?
This line of thought takes me to the question. Can we trust REST? Well, the short answer is no. But the longer answer is, yes, just as much as we trust SOAP. The brilliance of SOAP is the contract is carried with the data, or at least that data is transported in a container with which the contract may be validated. So is that really better? Well, the underlying truth is that someone else wrote a bunch of helper code to help us perform the first level of validation in the message--form. But what about content. Yes, schema validation can do some content validation as well, especially of the type type of validation. Beyond that, it's up to you pretty much.

Validation Bottom Line
Ultimately the value and robustness of a web service, whether you use REST for it's simplicity or SOAP for the niceties of automated tools, will be determined by the code you write to validate and execute and respond with an appropriately formed response.

Consider Your Audience
Back in my poor old days as a technical writer, I had to always keep in mind and understand my audience. It really does matter. For example, my mother would not understand a single word of this post. If you are publishing web services, you must consider who will consume them. Will they be a hodge podge of PHP, JSP, ASP, and many other forms of "server pages" technology? Or will they be hard driving Visual Studio SOAP users who would rather have the tool do the heavy lifting and eliminate the need to parse?

Give your users what they want. And to do that, you may have to give them both SOAP and REST. I guess that won't hurt us too much. After all, a hot shower is always a good combination with a good night's rest.

A friend shared this Joel on Software post with me today. An absolute hilarious read.

Excerpt:

"So you don't have any hammers? None at all?"

"No. If you really want a high-quality, industrially engineered spice rack, you desperately need something more advanced than a simple hammer from a rinky-dink hardware store."

"And this is the way everyone is doing it now? Everyone is using a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory now, whenever they need a hammer?"

"Yes."

Frameworks have their place but time seems to be unkind to them. I'm not a Java guy but even the Java zealots I knew "back in the day" are now less bullish on the frameworks mess that exists on the Java stack. And no, for you remaining zealots, I don't want to fight about the point.

The fact is, the .NET Framework is only a few years behind. Will it bloat too? Has it already started with 2.0 and all the changes in ASP.NET and so forth and so on? Will 3.0 see bloat or a cohesive, more conservative growth pattern.

If we're all doomed to framework elephantitus, what is the solution? My hope is that Microsoft will learn from the failures of its biggest competitor and work as hard to keep the framework tight as they work to sell their operating systems. The same aggressive and successful behavior will be the only thing, perhaps, that can save us all from the same doom suffered by our Java brethren who are now escaping in droves to PHP.

Okay, I made that last part up. But it could be true.

I"m not a marketing guru. Never have been. Never will be. You too? So how do we maximize traffic to our blog, our side project, or our main gig? Well, we tell our clients to hire us, the expert, when they need some coding done.

So hire an expert.

I know just the expert. I've watched these guys in action. They know what they're doing. Check them out at http://www.webevident.com/ppc-management.php.

They can handle all your pay per click campaigns. And you would be surprised how much traffic they can drive to your site on a very tight budget. They do a free analysis for you, so you have nothing to lose by at least checking them out.  

My wife won the lottery. Two hundred thousand dollars. Uncle Sam took half. She said, "I want a new car. Go buy me a new car."

So I took the checkbook and bought a brand new Honda Accord for $30,000. When I arrived home my wife said, "I didn't want an Accord. I want an SUV."

On the way back to the dealership, an accident occurred. I escaped with my life but the car was a total loss.

I still had the checkbook so I wrote a check for $40,000 and took home a nice, new Dodge Durango. I was so pleased with myself.

But my wife was not. She said, "The Durango is too small and I don't like the color red."

So I turned around and took it back to the dealer. I asked for my money back but he whipped out the magnifying glass and pointed out the small print: "absolutely, under no circumstances can you get a refund."

"Besides," said the salesmanager, "we've already spent the money and we can't take a new car in trade. It's just policy."

So I drove the Durango to the Ford dealership and on the way was rearended by a large truck. The Ford dealership gave me $10,000 in trade and I wrote a check for $40,000 more for the last of the new Ford Excursions.

I drove the Excursion home. Finally my wife was happy. "Now let's go buy the boat," she said.

"Sorry, honey," I said. "We're out of money."

So we have this giant SUV and we can't afford to put gas in it, and we have nothing to pull behind it.

But, we do have an SUV that cost $100,000 and in three years will be worth less than $20,000. And as a compensating note, I can haul a ton of groceries with it which helps save the cost of gasoline to get to the grocery store in the first place.

Now if only we could find another lottery to win.

Well, after struggling to get Fedora 5 to run on my machine and get the GUI up and running on an nVidia card, I've given up on this distribution after finding this bit of nasty news.

I think I'll try SUSE next. I've tried using the "YUM" updater and following a variety of instructions from a variety of posts to get my dual monitor eVGA GForce 7800 GT to work. All to no avail.

Once downloaded and installed, I'll post the results of my attempts with SUSE 10.

I've begun the journey into Mono. Fedora 5 is nearly completely downloaded. I've freed up a partition on which to install it. I've downloaded the mono-1.1.1.13.6_0-installer.bin from the official site.

Why?

Because I'm building a system that must scale to many machines and we're considering using a virtual machine hosting system. And they only host virtual Linux boxes.

Will we definitely host the application on virtual system? No, not definitely. But if the port to Mono goes well, it's certainly an option.

My concerns about going to Mono is first, I know very little about Linux. Second, I'm using System.ServiceProcess.ServiceBase for my server, and that namespace, as far as I can tell, is not supported in Mono. So these two items may pose a bit of a learning curve.

After downloading some but not all of the Mono source files, I began wandering about and looking at how the Mono team has implemented various class libraries that we .NET developers take for granted every day. Talk about a wealth of code samples that will be extremely valuable in my daily work, regardless of whether I'm in Mono or MS .NET coding.

I'll post more on my progress into the world of Mono and Linux in the future. In the meantime, if you have any words of wisdom for me, please feel free...

I very much enjoyed Dion's Thinking in Web 2.0 post. The ways to think in Web 2.0 seem to be growing with significant and useful comments. I would like to propose a side discussion that attempts to reduce Web 2.0 to seven specific principles.

The Highly Effective Web 2.0 is:

1. Specific - Purpose, content and interface is quickly understood.
2. Standard - Data is offered via open standards and protocols (i.e. HTML, XHTML, SOAP, RSS, SSL).
3. Transparent - Privacy and other policies are enforced and simple (see #1).
4. Accessible - Data should be easily found for those with and without disabilities.
5. Interactive - Participation is be encouraged and facilitated (see #1).
6. Inclusive - One thing leads to more like things rather than fewer.
7. Evolutionary - Everything is both familiar and new.

I tend to be overly verbose while clinging to the principle and value of brevity. If we are to understand the Web 2.0 wave, perhaps we can reduce it to seven (no more) principles that are stated simply and without the need for great expansion despite the fact that books may be written on the subject.

Please comment. Let me know which one(s) you would replace, with what, and why.