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March 23, 2006
Welcome to 1995
Yet another... [Yawn] ...web-based word processor was annouced today. While that isnt' very interesting... what is interesting is the large quantities of unintended comedy found in Michael Robertson's announcement, "Bye Bye Microsoft Word, Hello ajaxWrite". There are a couple of very funny things in this piece.
First, he is talking about software being delivered via the web like it is the new big thing. LOL... Paul Graham was doing this back in 1995 man! Welcome to last century. Even with the Ajax slant, the technolgy has been around since the late 90's.
Second he mentions that this new product is "cross platform".
"These programs look and operate much like their traditional software cousins, but are cross-platform, loaded dynamically, and are available to users at no charge."
Riiiiiiiight! It currently works only with Firefox. Good stuff.
I won't mention how stupid the name ajaxWrite is (Opps! :-). A common user will think of Ajax as a cleaning supply, and couldn't care less how a word processor is implemented!
Well.... as I said... only read this piece if you are interested in the humor... it is about 12 years too late to qualify as visionary or strategic. If you are really bored more information on this here and here.
Posted by harris at 05:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 10, 2006
Image Etiquette
I had to slap the guy hosting the "Alternate Energy Blog" on the wrist this morning. He was freeloading my bandwidth by linking to an image on my server. The solution? Simple... rename a different file with the same name!! The result is pretty sweet! Now he has a picture of my daughter on his site with a caption: "This guy is stealing my bandwidth. Please visit http://harrisreynolds.net/blog/" SWEET!!! I am not sure how long it will be until he notices it and changes the link, but in the meantime you can enjoy the result via the image below.
James... you have been a naughty boy! Don't just randomly link to other people's images; copy the image, assuming it is in the public domain, to your own server. Oh... and James... thanks for the free advertising!! :-)
Click here to see the picture!
Posted by harris at 10:43 AM | Comments (1)
March 09, 2006
Writeup on Writely
I had a conversation with a friend exactly six months ago to the day that went something like this:
[me] Take a look at Writely... this could be BIG... zero client install... collaboration Sharepoint style, etc etc.
[him] What is the big deal? MS Word dominates the market and hosting a word processor on the web is not interesting
...
The conversation ended with "Time will tell". I honestly thought at the time... "yep time will tell, and I predicate that within 2 years that Writely will be acquired for at least 10 million". Well... it turned out to be six months! Writely announced today after a round of rumors that they will be aquired by Google (see Google announcement here). I haven't heard the price tag, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was north of 10M.
A couple things about this acquisition. First although this may put some pressure on Microsoft, it is interesting that Writely is implemented using .Net so presumably the server is a Windows box. As Google continues to acquire interesting companies the technology choices for their army of developers will expand. Today their primary languages are C++, Python, and Java [1]; tomorrow though it will likely be a mix of everything including C# and Ruby (note they bought a Ruby on Rails company just a few weeks ago).
This acquisition also supports their policy of hiring through acquisition. I am not sure about the rest of the team, but Steve Newman definitely appears to be a hardcore hacker. Check his profile here at TopCoder. While there is more to software development that simply cranking out Algorithms etc. this is certainly an objective metric for programming prowess; and cranking up a rating of 2985 there is hard-core. If you don't think so enter a few of the TC competitions and see where you end up.
Congrats to the Writely team... you built a quality product that can only get better with the support of Google. Plus, your IQ will probably go up a couple points just from all the good food!! :-)
[1] see Python at Google
Update: Russell Beattie had a GREAT post about the acquisition!!
Posted by harris at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2006
MCSD/MCAD Certification Books For Sale
.Net Books for Sale: The complete set of books required for either the Micrsoft Certifed Solution Developer or the Microsoft Certified Application Developer certifications. Specifically the books on building:
1) XML Web Services
2) ASP.Net Web Applications
3) Windows Applications
Price: $15.00 USD
Will ship any where in the US.
Update: Here is what the Microsoft Live Expo Listing looks like.
Posted by harris at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
Edgeio Experiment
I have been thinking for a while now that Michael Arrington has the perfect marketing platform for his own startup with the explosive popularity of his relatively young blog, TechCrunch. Well... that time has come with the launch of EdgeIO a few weeks ago. The point of this site is to aggregate sales listings that people post on their own blog. It will be interesting to see if this concept takes off.
My next post will be a test case where I'll post a listing on this blog to sell some books. I got the C#/.Net MCAD certification about three years ago because it was a requirement for some C# classes that I was teaching at the time. I am going to sell the set of books that I used to study with. The are a bit dated but someone may want to pony up $15 for the set.
Since this is all just an experiement I'll probably post a listing on Microsoft's new classified site as well. It is interesting to see all the traction in this space. I remember years ago when Yahoo and Amazon tried to dethrone eBay with their auction sites and were easily rebuffed. It will be interesting if some of these new approaches will make any inroads on to eBay's turf.
Posted by harris at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)
A Blue Moon
You don't see this too often... unfortunately it is the 2nd time today Gmail has been unreachable for me.
Posted by harris at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2006
ETrade Bug
Note the nice bug in eTrade's tranfer money "feature". Apparently the system skipped straight from February 28th to March 29th... the calendar popup shown below does not allow a user to select a date before 03/29/06. The image below also shows the current date as March 1st in the upper right-hand corner, but clicking the Transfer button with that date in the Date text box doesn't work. You can't get past the errant "Please enter a valid date" dialog box to actually make a transfer. Talk about user hostile... all I wanted to do was fund an IRA account. This nasty bug needs to be fixed pronto! The lesson here? When dealing with dates MAKE SURE TO DEAL WITH FEBRUARY properly! :-)
BTW... if you are viewing this entry from the main page in a browser you'll need to click this link to see the full image.
Posted by harris at 01:40 AM | Comments (1)