harris reynolds

RailsConf or Bust

Heading out to Chicago tonight to attend the first ever RailsConf. It should be a good time of hacking and listening to a bunch of people pontificate about Rails. Gotta love it.

$200 comp

A friend pointed me to "How To: A Complete Terabyte File Server For About $500" a couple weeks ago. You got to love how cheap the standard parts of a computer are getting. This article actually inspired me to build a low cost PC to use as a file server for backing up media here at the house. What I decided on is a $200 box that contains a Celeron CPU + 512 MB RAM + a 160 GB hard drive. In a year or two I'll buy another hard drive. Here is how the costs break down:

1) Barebones Kit with CPU - $110

2) 512 MB RAM - $35

3) Seagate 160 GB Hard Drive - $30 (plus you get some security software)

Add shipping costs and you are right around $200... for a fairly decent piece of hardware! Note in the specs above that disk space can now be purchased for ~19 cents/GB. That is CHEAP! The fun part of course will be putting it all together! :-) The not so fun part? The 35 rebates (actually about 7 our 8) I need to complete to actually get these prices!

Note: not sure how long these links will last at TD.

Men In Black go to the GYM

Two or three years ago Microsoft, IBM, and BEA (MIB) were all the rage in the software world when the frenzy of web services and "SOAs" seemed to reach its peak. During those days the MIB were pumping out specs at an unprecendented rate and created a lot of buzz among developers. It is interesting how there has been a tectonic shift since then so that the GYM players (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) seem to be getting most of the [large company] attention.

There are a few interesting observations about this:

1) IBM and BEA are not in danger of going out of business, but they aren't interesting anymore. Web services, yawn, fulfill a useful purpose in the enterprise, but don't really capture many (any? :-) people's imagination these days.

2) Microsoft always finds a way to stay in the game; and despite losing some talent to Google, they have retained and recruited engineering talent

3) It is ironic that in each acronym that the players are listed in descending order in terms of strength in the market. Microsoft was clearly the leader during the brief web services era, with IBM and BEA playing respective supporting roles. In the new "Web 2.0" world, Google seems to be leading with Yahoo running a close second and MS also staying close to the pack.

4) GOOG

Geeks in Business

I studied both Business and Computer Science in school and have a good appreciation for both. Why Business Needs More Geeks, highlights why geeks (like those who studied CS) can also be successful in business, assuming, of course, that they also have the skill of dealing with people. I have seen many of the items described in the article at work in some of the large corporations I have worked in. Instead of using the term geeks though, I might insert "Hardcore Employees"! People who are really interested in succeeding and objectivity and not just surviving and defending turf.

Spock out.

Apple + Windows, Microsoft + Linux

You know times are changing the two headlines below appear on the same page! (from Google News a couple days ago)

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.

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!

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!!

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.

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.

A Blue Moon

You don't see this too often... unfortunately it is the 2nd time today Gmail has been unreachable for me.

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.

Autistic BBall Star

If you enjoy basketball and you didn't see the video clip, "High School Basketball Pandemonium", be sure to check it out. Talk about draining some 3's... Sweet!

JDJ RIP

I receive several trade rags about technolgy. Most of them get stacked up in a pile by my desk that I eventually go through after they start cluttering the office. When going through the latest round of magazines recently I noticed Java Developer's Journal lead story, What Is POJO Programming? LOL... I am wondering if any other Java programmers find this amusing!? What is POJO programming?? It is what we have been doing all along!! It is vanilla Java... public class Blah ...

That JDJ published this as the lead story tells something about the Java platform... it is no longer interesting to talk about!! This is not to say Java is not an important technolgy. On a timeline, I actually view Java as in its Golden Years. It is very mature, it has a rich ecosystem of tools and libraries, and will remain a central technology in enterprise software for many years to come. But...

It is not interesting. I tried to read a couple other articles in this JDJ issue... one on the Seam project from JBoss and another about Spring; I was so bored though after the first couple pages that I coudn't even finish the articles.

The JDJ will probably continue to exist for several more years, but for me it'll likely go straight from my mailbox to the trade rag graveyard in the sky. It used to be fun to read about new things in the platform. However, now that we are back to reading about java.lang.Object, I hope JDJ will rest in peace.

RailsConf 2006

I decided to be part of history and go to the first ever Ruby On Rails Conference this coming June. Apparently only a day or two after opening registration it is 25% booked. If you are up for a summer trip to Che-kaago it should be fun.