machine501

I read a blog post by Jeff Clavier about Twitter, Microblogging, and when Twitter might go mainstream.  I thought, yeah: I publish much more often on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and am starting to mess around with Muxtape.  So I looked around for a widget for my blog where I could put up my different streams from different social services.  I found friend feed and thought it’d be good to put on my blog.  That’s when it hit me: why not just make my stream my home page?  Why not replace my whole blog with my social stream, and just make my longer entries part of that stream?  So I whipped up a script in a few minutes and came up with what you see on the front page of my site.

Is this the way we’ll start to see online presence for those of us brave enough to run our own blogs?  Basically, this is a way to publish feeds from your online identities, not to aggregate feeds you’re interested in.  It’s not a personal feed aggregator.  It’s a starting point for people to get to your online identity(ies).

I have a bunch of ideas for this.  The initial, quick and dirty, version of these scripts is setup in a somewhat modular format, so as you sign up to new services, or new services appear you just drop in a new module and it will load those up.  Each item from each service can be customized as you want using CSS.  And you can control how often it should aggregate your content.  The source is coming soon but if you want to play with it I can post it.

Let me know what you think.

I was just catching up on my SFist LAist reading and was reading through the comments on a post linking to an LATimes story comparing LA to SF on a green scale. turns out sf wins. Then I saw this comment I thought “Oh no you di’n't”

i have always promoted the awesomeness that is SoCal. without SoCal (specifically, without LA), SF is just another Portland. and i don’t mean that in a good way.

Completely unrelated … I was catching up on BlazeDS forum reading and saw a very good question about OS project management on the project.  Here are the questions:

1. Who is the project manager(s), senior leads, etc?
2. What is the experience level of the project management staff and contributing developers?
3. What is the release schedule? What was the historical release schedule?
4. What version is BlazeDS in right now?

Tom Jordahl, CF 7 & 8 architect and BDS/LCDS know-it-all, gave a good reply and the about page gives a highlevel answer to the questions, but it’d be great to see this more formalized, either as wiki pages with contact and role information about the higher level participants and accepted contributors. It reminds me of how tricky managing and leading an os project can be, and how much work it’s actually required to get do it right. It’s specially tricky for a project backed by a commercial entity because confusing or missing information can quickly bring suspicion from project users.

If you’re interested in finding out more about BlazeDS I suggest you watch the talk Tom Jordahl gave to the Connecticut CF user group.  Also, what’s up with those adobe forums? The formatting’s bleh and it pukes on multipart messages.

I can’t talk about what I saw at the Microsoft Home of the Future because I signed an NDA.

I’m usually approached by people telling me they want to talk with me about their startup idea but I have to sign an NDA first. This usually doesn’t happen on the street, but at least once it’s happened in a diner. My reply is I have an Anti-NDA policy. And that usually cuts it short and saves me from having to listen to their idea which is absolutely nothing new and everybody and their grandmother has already come up with it so why even bother signing a stupid NDA? Not to mention that they’re unenforceable in california.

Well, I felt the same way about the MS home of the future NDA ; I saw nothing there that was anything new. Go watch minority report, dumb it down, tone it down, remove all sense of privacy, and have some goth girl pretend to be a mom and give you a tour of her home, and you’ve got the MS home of the future. Mostly I was indifferent to it. The current setup was created more than 2 years ago, so it’s missing some things that are most in our minds today, like power consumption, reuse, etc., though it did have some demos of assistive technologies.  Maybe next time we’ll see better ways to conserve energy, turn off unnecessary displays, report power consumption, provide easy ways for recycling materials, and a host of other things to make life better.

Here’s a quick list of blog posts about the Microsoft Technology Summit 2008 from people who were there. If you have a link to one please send it to me.

Paul Jones:
Don’t pitch me, bro!

The Real Adam’s impression of Open Source at MS:
http://therealadam.com/archive/2008/03/27/open-source-and-research-at-microsoft/

Luis Villa, who managed to quickly dismiss me and others who care about open source by saying “almost everyone was in some way a user or developer of open source technologies (the rest were flash/adobe people)“. Nice way to form alliances.

http://tieguy.org/blog/2008/03/29/microsoft-technology-summit-mts08/

The company I run is built on open source technologies, for both commercial and philosophical reasons. I use flash because it’s the best way to deliver the service to my costumers. The rest is python, mysql, php, apache, jabber, java, django, bsd and lots of other things. But, I shouldn’t have to list my open-source creds to be legit.

This reminds me about another thing I noticed at the summit: some people who are extremely passionate about their respective domain are, as my best friend often labels me, “ANTI”. You’re in the belly of the beast, in the borg! And you have the borg’s ear. Rather than showing how indignant you feel about M$ and what a shitty, enslaving, conniving, greedy, dense, stupid company you think it is, how about finding some common ground and seeing how you can work for the common good? If I missed some adjectives regarding M$ please send those to me, they will be promptly appended to the previous list.

And also, like I mentioned in my previous post: from what I saw, Microsoft Research is Research with a big “R”. That’s academic type research. The reason there is no iterative process or user engagement is because such research is not typically amenable to iterative process and user engagement; in other words, it’s not Product Testing. Some areas of study, like social computing, HCI, user interface design, cultural effects on user experience, and stuff having to do with people will have limited user engagement, typically called debriefing, after testing theories with experiments. Because you are trying to find out one thing, you control for many factors, much as in academic research. So, you can’t have the same free-form, back-and-forth user-feedback-loop that you should when developing and product testing. The way Research works is you first come up with a theory. For example, that green buttons are easier to click on. Then you create an experiment where you control for all sorts of stuff so that the only variable that changes is the green button. Then you have people click on the green button, and then you report your findings about how that one variable proved or disproved your theory. Then you provide some potential reasons why your hypothesis is true or false, sometimes pointing to previous Research. Some time, later in the future, maybe years into the future, the results of that research are used inside a product. At that point, you might, if you want your product to be good, engage in iterative development and user feedback.

Often I heard the question: “Why should I care?” Why should I care that, say, ASP.NET MVC, exists when I already use Rails? Why should I care that Silverlight exists when I use Flex? I have the same visceral reaction when listening to the Silverlight talk, but that’s just my initial reaction because I’m invested in what I’m already using. After thinking about it for a minute, I can come up with a few reasons why I should care a little more, and why I shouldn’t feel indignant about the fact that M$ is building a clone. As The Real Adam pointed out in his post “Important Ideas in ASP.NET MVC“:

The most promising thing about this tool, to me, is that MS is guiding people down the unit testing path by default

What about Silverlight? It might be a better tool for a client or product, but not yet. Hey, choice is great sometimes. These are purely pragmatic reasons. And if a programmer learns to do testing in one language then she’ll be at an advantage if sometime in the future she has to develop something in Rails and she’s already familiar with unit testing thanks to her having learned it first in ASP.NET MVC. Note to microsoft, drop the .net thing =s Skills transfer is an important thing that M$ cannot control. I learned to program on the C64, then on Borland’s Turbo Pascal, then on Borland’s C/C++, then on Microsoft’s C++ compiler. Then, I magically transfered all my programming skills that I learned in close-source commercial implementations to GCC, python, ruby, PHP, using vim or emacs. Lock-in is not so all-consuming on the developer skills end as it is on the product usage end.

Some thoughts on “presentation fu”: I had ample notice from M$ about this summit. So I was disappointed when some of the presenters seemed to have recycled product pitches and tech talks created specifically for audiences already receptive to and interested in the M$ pitch. This could have been a chance for those presenters to really think about their work in relation to OS, Rails fanboys, Apple Fanboys, Flash Fanboys, etc, basically, to the audience. They could really have thought about how their work fits with the current trends in the online sphere. Maybe I was mistaken about the purpose of the summit? Anyway, there was plenty of time to at least drop a couple of slides addressing these issues. I’d get the summit managers to see how the talks fit in with the summit next time. I heard John Lam praised in the few discussions I had with other attendees about this particular topic. You’ll see his name in some of the posts on the above blogs. He certainly had the presentation zen, or whatever, while talking about IronRuby and the Dynamic Language Runtime. He put it nicely when he showed a slide with MS/APPLE/The Penguin at the bottom, IE/SAFARI/FF (where’s opera? nudge, wink), above that, and the stuff that really makes the web tick, the services and things people build for it, above all that. He said, and I agree, that the browser and the os are uninteresting; they’re just fancy rendering engines. He also said that people are interested in the source for frameworks, not for browsers. How true. I’ve often heard the question asked during Flex conferences why the Flash players is not open source? First, you probably will not download it and recompile it yourself. If you will, you will have exactly one user. Second, there are so many licenses to sub-components of the player that it would be plenty difficult to get lawyer$ to let you open source it. The same applies to the browser and maybe the os. I care more about why DRM is in the player, clear and consistent policies on spyware, adware, and user privacy while using that player. Anyway, John Lam even managed to keep me wondering if the presentation was done in Apple’s slidemaking thingy until he alt-tabbed out of it into vista. Still, he was running Vista on an Apple (i heard my nascent apple fanboy side say). What? No open office?

BTW, I saw zero GNU/Linux laptops at this summit; I left mine at the office.  I stand corrected on this point; thanks to Paul Jones for pointing out that Luis Villa was using one.

Personally, I’m glad for the opportunity to come and engage with so many smart people, both attendees and presenters. Special thanks to The Real Adam who was thoughtful and engaging when discussing our reactions to the summit while there.

Oh yeah. Just to be fully transparent here: M$ paid for my travel, stay, and food.

The summit’s ended and we had a closing session with Sam Ramji. Some issues about the format were brought up and there were lots of other great comments and questions. Here was my question:

What did Microsoft learn from this?

I want Microsoft to somehow publish, with consent from participants, what they got out this summit. What was useful to them, what was confirmed, what did they already know about, what did they not know, and maybe how they will proceed with this information.

An MS employee who was one of the event managers quickly suggested that if we, the attendees, posted back what Microsoft told us, then our audience would learn from us instead of MS publishing this themselves, and that this would make it “seem more believable and legitimate if it came from the community than if it came from Microsoft”. Ok, put aside how creepy that sounds. I doubt, also, that there was a sinister motive behind that.

Anyway, putting those things aside, here’s what my response to this suggestion is: If Microsoft wants to be involved in the community, then Microsoft *should* be part of the community. That includes dialog. I want for others who see my blog to be able to go to a response or blog post I linked to and compare and decide themselves if what MS believes matches up with what I believe or if there’s a huge difference.
So, I suggest MS put up a site that aggregates the blogs, twitters, and other digital artifacts from attendees, presenters, and maybe others, that reflect the thoughts, discussions, and conclusions of these summits. MS has held these summits in previous years, but when I googled to find out what they were about, why I was invited, I saw a list of results that didn’t synthesize what happened. The trail ended abruptly. So, I have little idea what happened before and what happened in response.

Before this summit I couldn’t care less about Microsoft. Now I’m aware of them.

Update:
Something else I learned about! The vimperator! The vimperator is an awesome Firefox plugin that gives you VIM like keys and UI for using firefox. It’s awesome.

This is the third day of the Microsoft Technology Summit. I’m thankful it is only a half-day because I’m all .NETted out. That’s just the nature of these types of events; I work with Flex all day, but when I go to Max or 360|Flex, I’m all Flexed out by the end of these conferences.

There were two main things I got from this summit:

1. Microsoft is playing catchup: They know they’ve missed the boat on this generation of web developers, that is, the folks who are working with rails, django, social networks, and open technologies. To address parts of this they’re providing ASP.NET MVC (rails), Silverlight (address Flash in silverlight 1; Flex, in silverlight 2), Hibernate (parts of LINQ), and the Dynamic Language Runtime (dynamic languages). I’m not saying I’m not impressed with what they have come up with.

2. Open web: OpenID was the prominent example of an open web technology during the two days. MS is playing a significant role in defining it, but the main questions during the two days were “why is MS not doing more to push it by providing implementations and integration points in its current products?” and “why are they not leaders in this?” I think the trust issue is big, too, with many people commenting that although they appear to embrace it, are they actually doing it for the “right reason?” or is it just for the bottom line.

Thanks to all the folks that I got to talk to during the event.

A friend said I shouldn’t have bothered coming all the way to Seattle to spend 2.5 days listening to Microsoft.  Instead I should have just checked this out:

The summit’s not a sales pitch.   At the moment, I’m on day two of the summit and listening to Anandeep Pannu discuss his role and the projects inside the Microsoft Open Source Lab.  Some of the other, more technically focused speakers give sales-pitch like talks because I’m sure they’re recycled from previous presentations, given to audiences who want to know about Microsoft projects, and not to people who are skeptical or indifferent about MS.

I thought I’d jot down a couple of things about day 1. I wrote out the details live on the chat over at http://www.chatopica.com/topics/flex/

Microsoft Psychological Distress Mechanism

First, the attendees are a variety of people including enterprise architects at large corporations, popular mainstream bloggers (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog, http://www.davidrecordon.com/) and developers, people working in academia, java and Flex user group manager, and others. The purpose of the meeting, according to Microsoft, is to engage in conversation about their technologies, their roadmaps for their products. In this process they get to find out what people who don’t use Microsoft technologies think about and perceive Microsoft and its strategies.

We started off with Karri Dunn, Senior OSS Dev Lead of Platform Strategy & Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Strategy. Sam said Microsoft’s Open Source website (http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/default.mspx) was created to provide a unified statement about MS vision of open source in their roadmap. I had a good quote here about the reason behind it which went something like “to stop people from coming up with their own MS open source stories”, which included microsoft and non microsoft people but, being an inexperienced journalist i didn’t write any of it down and thought i’d be able to commit it to memory. so there you go, shoddy reporting. There were comments from invitees about how microsoft was trying to frame the discussion.

Kevin Schofield, General Manager of Microsoft Research talked about how research works at MS. Researchers, he said, are free to pick the area and problem they want to research. They have thought about and looked at how other companies do research and how much should be driven from a central place, or from business divisions. Some of the downsides are that taking direction from business divisions could cause researchers to focus on short term projects. One of the things that impressed me was the long view that MS took to research. Kevin talked about how they know that once a research project is complete it might take years, sometimes 10 years, sometimes 25 years, for it to become useful in a business application. That it also takes a long long time to refine it; meaning you might have the solution down but to actually get it to the point where it can be used in a product might take many iterations and lots of other work by developers before it can make it into a business product. This is a process they call Tech Transfer, and one of the important lessons he says he learned was that tech transfer is a social process. It requires relationships, communication, and trust. Unfortunately we didn’t get to go much in depth into this. One of the signs of commitment that MS has towards research is that they have yet to cut it during economic downturns, said Kevin. And that this usually happens when research is influenced by short term outlooks.

I thought there were a few pre-conceived notions about research project’s source code from the audience when the question was asked about why source was not provided. Kevin pointed out that many of the projects on the MS research site make the source available. Then others asked why it was not more open source driven. We couldn’t get into it because of time constraints but I think that managing an open source project is a serious undertaking that a researcher focusing on a problem does not have the time to manage. In fact, the lead researcher may not even have the skills necessary to run an os project.

There were a few other questions that made me realize that maybe the way research projects works wasn’t made clear. For example, some people asked why the customer was never involved in the research. I think some projects are amenable to research. Those are projects where user interaction actually takes place, but it’s probably not going to be the regular ms customer, and the setting and presentation have to be free enough from MS baggage that it doesn’t influence the results. Imagine you are testing a novel way of presenting structured data to the user. It’s one thing to test the effectiveness of how an MS product will perform with the user, but if you want to get at the base question, that is, does presenting data in, for example, an isometric view makes it easier for people to remember where they put data, then you have to do it free from stuff that might influence your result.

Someone asked about the percentage of research that become products and Kevin’s wild guess (it was a wild guess, he said he didn’t actually have an idea) was 25% or more. Some thought this meant that MS Research was extraordinarily successful and Kevin agreed.

Scott Guthrie presented on ASP.NET MVC. This was more of a tech presentation where we went over code and he showed how to do basically what Rails, Django, and other MVC frameworks are already doing. Someone asked him outright if Rails influenced the creation of ASP.NET MVC and he said not really. I’m not sure. In my opinion, I think it was more so than he’s letting on to be. Someone said, it’s cool but why would they use it when they have other options. I think the only compelling argument I heard was that it provides really great integration with their development tools; you get intellisense (auto-suggest), data modeler, debugging, and such. I spoke to some attendees who were on the fence about picking an MS technology on the server and this aspect, tool integration, was what impressed them most. My personal opinion, not that anyone asked, is that I’m not familiar with IIS, or .NET, and I’m happy enough with the tools I use (vim, eclipse, php, django, mysql, etc). But I think developers who are used to MS technologies will greatly benefit from this framework, AND, if they were never going to jump on Rails or some other framework, then this gives them a way not to miss out on the great productivity improvements you get with a good MVC framework.

I asked an MS employee (sorry, forgot his name but he’s a real nice guy) if there was a community project that was trying to implement an MVC framework on ASP.NET, and if so, why did MS not work with them instead of creating the thing themselves. His answer was that there sort-of was but that once MS came out with the framework they were happy to build on top of that rather than write it themselves. I guess that’s one difference between camps ;) I mentioned to him that the majority of the Flex community is adamant about not having Adobe sanction one particular framework, but that it is valuable for a strong entity to back some of them because it makes adoption at some companies easier.

… except on my friend Sven Claar’s Mac

Next on, Brad Abrams, Principal Group Program Manager for the .NET Developer Platform (phew!) presenting on Silverlight. It still catching up to Flex. I think I’m prejudiced in thinking about Silverlight in relation to Flex, so when he showed a video of flashy video players and moving buttons and said that those were demonstrations of things whose features were primarily addressable by Silverlight, my thought was: bullshit, I thought, you can do that in Flex. But, of course, no one was talking about flex, and indeed those features, i.e. video and fancy buttons, are addressable by Silverlight, if Silverlight is the only player in town. Look at the puppet!! Another reason was the clients had a lot of video in some windows codec and did not want to pay Adobe for the license for the video encoder … The demos left a lot to be desired. For example, one of the apps built for the San Diego Zoo was the simplest of apps, one that could have been whipped up in Flash in no time and with no performance problems, but somehow Silverlight crapped out on it. The app had a basic vector based drawing of the San Diego Zoo with some semitransparent widget window thingy on top. You could click on a spot on the map and it would calculate your route through the park. But the app just stopped responding and we didn’t get to see other demos. Sucks when your demo blows up during your presentation.

He, Zack Stepeck, and I spoke about Flex, Silverlight, and the RIA ecosystem. He asked me if there were some things that Flex failed at. I’m not sure there are any enormous problems that would make flex fail, but I do think it could use work in a few areas. Two important ones are: more control of class loader management for the developer, and a good plugin framework, something like in OSGI, with manifests, provisioning, and dependency loading. I know, Flex has the modules framework, but from the few examples I’ve seen where it is used in a crude way, where the modules are loaded in the background instead of being loaded partially on demand with features exposed as extension points filled in by proxy objects and then instantiated or loaded when actually accessed. It sounds like Abram’s team and Silverlight might have something like this, including declaring extension points. I think that is a pretty compelling selling point for RIA enterprise architects who cannot afford to build giant, monolithic apps.

Attention to this sort of thing tells me that there are people in MS thinking about the classic developer.

One of the sessions that got people really worked up was the Windows Live Platform. I heard over dinner that if they had come out and said: “look, here are a bunch of tools that you can use on your web platform if you want to take advantage of them feel free to use them”. So, what was the demo? Well, a not very compelling way of sharing videos on http://premium.quiksilverlive.com/. You can see your MSN buddies on the page, click on the ones you want to share the video with, and then go into a group chat session where you can all chat and manipulate the video inside the chat window. uh, ok. So you get your chat buddies in the web page. Can’t I just paste the link into MSN, or AIM, or GTalk, and have them all go to the same page? Yes, but the video won’t show up in the group chat window. Uh, ok.

Now, the compelling thing here should be that you have a way for a site to let you share it so that the site can spread. But when it suddenly got trapped in the msn chat window that seemed to lessen its value. It was a weird presentation. And it really got people worked up. They talked about Facebook and how they leverage feeds. Someone wanted to be able to have hotmail provide APIs so you could put your app in there.

Andres Hejlsberg talked about LINQ, which looks like SQL in your code, only it gets translated into C# that looks like Hibernate criteria objects. The cool thing that I got out of this talk was the stuff that lets LINQ exist. Basically, there’s something in the language that lets you create these expressions that can be analyzed because they have an AST attached to them and then compile that at runtime and execute it.

I’ll write down the discussion we had with Roger Slobe, the guy who’s managing the whole Olympics infrastructure and why they are using Silverlight, and a David Recordon on OpenID.

Kool-Aid? That’s for suckers

Come join me at http://www.chatopica.com/topics/flex

Quick announcement early on: microsoft collaborating to provide apache poi support for office open xml.

I was recently invited to the Microsoft Technology Summit, a two days worth of sessions on MS technologies. My guess for why I was invited is because I run the Los Angeles Flex Users Group. I looked around for criteria for invitees and found a blog post here:

“The event is specifically for people other than Microsoft fanboys… they want to have a dialogue with influential members of the developer community outside of their comfort zone to see what we can learn from each other..”

The sessions cover specific technologies like ASP.NET MVC, to Silverlight, to IIS, to robotics and the projects under Microsoft Research.  There also will be a few presentations by attendees. The summit begins on Wednesday, March 26, and I’ll be blogging about it here and chatting it live at the Flex chat room at chatopica: http://www.chatopica.com/topics/flex/