Blog updates
I made a few minor changes to my blog:
- Added a menu to the top.
- Moved my picture.
- Got rid of the funny chevrons in favor of normal bullets.
- Fixed a few links here and there.
I think it is a bit cleaner now.
rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. AndersonAuthor Archive
SF Tech Sessions
After being up half the night coughing, I rallied and came into the city for Niall Kennedy’s SF Tech Sessions event.
I showed up late for two reasons: I’m often late. That makes the second reason superfluous.
I missed this presentation and came in during the questions. There were several questions (all from the same person) about their choice to model the user interface of Microsoft Outlook. The speaker said that at the end of the day the administrators in the enterprise don’t want to retrain their users from Outlook. True, true, but unfortunate. This is the second company I know that has modeled an entire application after Outlook. I use it every day, but its UX (in Microsoft terminology) is cumbersome to say the least.
Messaging and collaboration. Client and server components to their solution. Slight jab at the previous speakers — “copying Microsoft is not the only approach.” Zimbra’s approach allows the users to stick with Outlook if that is the best choice for the enterprise.
Very cool Ajax integration between email content and popus windows with further information. For example, bugzilla integration (hover over bug #x and see the summary for that info). He showed many others as well: addresses, web sites, phone numbers (call with skype), conversion of relative days to actual dates (e.g., if ‘tomorrow’ meant Friday when the email was written, it can show you ‘Friday’ when you hover over it.
In terms of Outlook (and other clients) they support pretty much everything: Outlook (MAPI), IMAP, POP, iCAL, RSS, . . . ; of course, their client is the coolest. They also use Postfix MTA instead of trying to build their own MTA.
I think I would closely at this product if I ran IT for an established enterprise.
Jason Hoffman, 23-people, customer-funded and profitable. Cool.
They have a hosted collaboration solution.
- Defaults to everything being open — everyone in your group can read your mail. Of course, you can close this down, but it is in and of itself an interesting approach to an open organization.
- Everything is shared (e.g., contacts).
- Everything can get commented on (e.g., email items can have comments which is much better than the reply “comments below” standard that most of us follow).
- Everything is exposed in RSS (e.g., your inbox).
- Everything can be tagged.
- You can bring things to others attention without forwarding.
Very cool product. When we started Digipede, we used Groove for collaboration. I think I would look closely at Joyent + some kind of file synch technology (like FolderShare) if I was starting a new company.
Thanks to Niall for organizing this. I look forward to see how this progresses.
Evolutionary Approach to Grids
A paper, entitled, Evolutionary Approach to Realizing the Grid Vision has been published by Marvin Theimer, Savas Parastatidis, and Tony Hey of Microsoft, Marty Humphrey of University of Virginia, and Geoffrey Fox of Indiana University. Presentation from the authors and a link to the document itself can be found here.
This paper suggests several areas of focus to bring the grand vision of the greater Grid down to a practical level that can be accomplished in smaller steps. Not surprisingly, the authors suggest starting first with computational grids. The paper focuses on the basics of this area where the problem set is fairly well understood and puts off those areas that are strictly outside the requirements of a computational grid.
It is partially the “overarching intellectual context” with which the OGSA Working Group is charged that keeps the greater Grid outside the interest of much of industry. This kind of focus articulated in the paper, properly executed, really helps progress towards the greater Grid.
BTW: I still think we don’t know what Savas is actually working on at Microsoft 😉
Found: digipede.net
Like many startups, Digipede started before we had office space, employees, a Web presence, and of course, any real hosting service. At the time, I ran several FreeBSD servers for my friends and family distributed all over the place. These all supported primaries and secondaries for DNS and mail, Web sites, and other services. This is where we originally hosted all of the Digipede services. Well over a year ago, we moved email and our Web site to a hosting company. One thing that we left in place was DNS.
The FreeBSD servers were a bit of a hobby for me which I recently quit.
Those of you who tried to access the digipede.net domain over the weekend know where this is going.
It slipped right past me that I was still hosting Digipede’s DNS. As a result, Digipede appeared to go dark over the weekend.
Ouch.
Luckily, the Digipede DNS secondary was still up and running (though its slave zone data had expired). Once Nathan realized what was going on, I was able to update the existing DNS secondary while starting the propagation through the registrar of the new DNS servers.
I’d like to say this is all “business as usual” in a startup, but it was completely my own fault. My apologies to anyone affected.
Tags: Digipede
Judging Naked Conversations by its Cover
I was sitting with my two-year old daughter while she ate macroni and cheese. I had just sat down with my copy of Naked Conversations and had flipped it open to the first page. She said,
Daddy, is that a book about macaroni and cheese?
I said, no, and then realized that she had judged the book by its cover.
If the cover is the same color as macaroni and cheese then the book is probably about it too, right?
Maybe she is right; after all, I haven’t read it yet 😉
TechCrunch 5
Had a great time at Mike Arrington’s party last night, TechCrunch 5.
These parties are on an upward trajectory (I wrote about the previous one here). Last time there were boxes of pizza strewn about; this time there was catering — some of the food was quite good. Last time it was very cold in the backyard; this time there was a tent. Last time it was pretty full; this time it was absolutely packed. Next time, I think Mike is going to have to get an even bigger tent.
Anyway, thanks to Mike and Robert Scoble for the great time. I see in the pictures that Robert and Shel Israel took off their shirts for a photo (I missed that). Here are the Flickr photos. Even better, Robert’s Dad was there. And of course Patrick Scoble was also there. Robert’s dad must be very proud of his son / grandson.
Some people I talked to:
- I ran into Nima Dilmaghani, a developer evangelist at Microsoft. I did a double-take when I saw him, because I don’t usually see Microsoft people at these events. He has the right approach to .NET evangelism: he doesn’t claim it is the right answer to every problem, but can knowledgably explain the relative benefits of the platform in an honest way. Note that link is to his empty WordPress blog — I’m hoping that will shame him into getting his blogging going 😉
- I also talked with Ramana Kovi of ePlatform; look for their launch soon.
Keep your eye on Kevin Burton’s Feed Blog. Word has it he was chasing a scoop last night; I don’t know what it was. - I talked a bit to Andrew Bunner, Director of Engineering of Rojo. He demonstrated some of the new features for me. I asked him about the AttentionTrust and its principles; particularly about principal #2, Mobility (we’re looking into that). In talking to him, though, I think that there is still a general misunderstanding about the AttentionTrust. It is about the 4 principles and the mission. That’s it. The ATX (attention recorder) allows you to store locally and / or provide data to services (one right now, ROOT). Using it isn’t in any way a requirement of the AttentionTrust’s principles.
- I saw Zach Coelius again, his company Triggit is coming along. I realized he reminds me of my best man, David Shaw.
And many others, too. A splendid time for all, methinks.
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, Scoble, techcrunch, techcrunch5, Web2.0
Why Web2.0 is a natural for the Mac crowd
I generally use Microsoft Windows and I mostly use desktop apps.
I have to admit: I often get annoyed with Web-based UI. Even that with the slickest use of AJAX. Even with WordPress, the application I am using right now.
And what is my problem?
- Losing my form data if I hit the backspace at the wrong time?
- Managing application-related pop-up windows?
- Discerning what some little non-standard icon means?
- Actually getting my mouse over that tiny icon?
Nope.
It is that the right mouse button has nothing to do with the specific page I’m on. Occasionally I find myself right-clicking and going “doh, this isn’t a Windows desktop application.” I miss having context-related options available with a right-click of the mouse (and no, I don’t just mean “copy this link”, etc.).
Of course, until recently, the Macintosh had no right mouse button. Or left button for that matter. Just one.
So all these Macintosh users look at the Web applications (Web 2.0 or not) and they are much like Macintosh desktop applications. See a button: click on it. See a menu. Click on it.
This limitation we Windows users perceive in browser-based apps just isn’t there for Mac users.
So Microsoft, and Robert Scoble in particular, I think you guys might be missing this point regarding Web 2.0. If you want to get more involved in Web 2.0, forget Live and Office Live; instead, start shipping single button mice. I know it might seem like a me-too mid-1980’s strategy, but you never know.
Corporate GMail
In GMail attacks Outlook, Nicholas Carr reports on Google’s new service clearly geared towards companies: GMail on your own domain with administrative management tools. Google blogs about it here.
This is, of course, not dissimilar from what Microsoft is going to do with Office Live. They are already doing it for personal accounts with Windows Live Custom Domains, but that seems geared toward vanity domains.
These kinds of products will be very compelling to small to mid-size businesses, and eventually, even large enterprises; though I would like to know more about how they protect company data.
- How will GMail isolate company data and ensure that it never gets shared with other customers?
- How secure is the GMail database? Leaving aside the issues raised by the EFF yesterday, what are the security procedures in place at Google to ensure that customer data are secure? I’m not just talking about secure from external hackers but also from Google employees.
I’m sure they have this all covered, but I’d like to know how. Issues surronding security will be the #1 barrier to adoption of these types of servers — these guys ought to lead with answers to these questions.
But, if they can solve these issues, Google (and Microsoft, too) will hammer Outlook and Exchange.
Add built-in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and you have a killer-app.
Getting Better: Berkeley Bloggers Dinner #2
Last night, Dave Winer held the Berkeley Bloggers Dinner #2.
I had a good time and as usual met several new people. At one point, Dave got up and talked a little about his past, his current plans, and asked the group what they wanted to do with these dinners. Meet and eat? Maybe work on a project? I heard later that he hadn’t wanted to get up and talk, but I know that several of us appreciated hearing him give some perspective on why he is arranging these dinners and what he is up to.
In terms of logistics, I think it worked a little better than the last dinner. People were able to move around which is a good thing. The downtown location is good (barring the Cal / Stanford basketball game which affect traffic). The large round tables were a little strange and the karaoke music was a bit loud at times. I dropped enough hints about singing at the karaoke bar, the clearly no one was up for that. 😉
Unfortunately, the attendance was low. Dave had planned in advance with the hotel for a certain number of people to cover a buffet. When people don’t show, someone gets stiffed. We all pitched in more money (at least I hope we all did), but I suspect that Dave got stuck with the balance.
Thanks to Dave for arranging the dinner — I know this is a real value to many people. I hope that the experience with the hotel doesn’t put him off to do more of these. I do think that this dinner was better than last.
Thanks to Tom Conrad for the beer. It is a little known fact that we members of the CTOs of Oakland Startups Club have this understanding about buying the round — I’ll get the next one.
I enjoyed chatting with Enric. Let me know if you want to try out the Digipede Network.
I met Shannon Whitley again. Since meeting him several months ago, he has started blogging. He took exception to some arguments that were made last night regarding technology and change. He may have misunderstood where I was coming from — enterprises cannot throw their investments in the lake; many businesses are five+ years behind the technology curve and that is actually OK.
I enjoyed some banter with Steve Gillmor over Windows, IE, and the Beatles of all things. He is a challenging adversary on the latter topic — he trumps my trivia knowledge considering he actually saw them perform.
And now I’m 3 for 3 in meeting someone who uses FreeBSD at one of these events.
Tags: Blogger_dinner, FreeBSD, Web2.0
coComment
Much has already been written on coComment — clearly there is a great pent-up demand for this kind of service.
I decided to try it out. My past approach has been to rely on TalkDigger to go back and look for comments I have posted, though URL search is not as good as an exact list of my conversations.
The way you track your comments with coComment is through a bookmarklet. They have specific ones for the four main browsers. The bookmarklet is supposed to allow you to both track your newly added comments and also add your old comments.
I tried it out in both Firefox and IE7 (and Maxthon, too, which runs on whatever version of IE is installed).
A couple things I noticed so far:
- The bookmarklet doesn’t appear to work properly in IE7 due to a script error. The same may be true of IE6, but I will have to restore my VMs before I can try that out.
- It works fine in Firefox when adding new comments (in both blogger and WordPress); however, I am unable to add my old comments. The FAQ suggests that a dialog box will appear, but it does not. Nothing happens.
It is a cool idea and I will keep evaluating it. I agree with Mike Arrington that including trackbacks would pretty much solve the entire problem of tracking one’s comments (and the responses to those comments); however, this is a great start.
About me
Main feed
Email subscriptions