rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for November, 2005
November 29, 2005 at 9:25 am · Filed under Grid Computing
In Kill all screensavers, Nick Carr writes about a problem facing CIOs wanting to harness idle compute resources: graphic and compute-intensive corporate screensavers. We have all seen these screensavers either in our own companies or while visiting others. Depending on who you ask, these either encroach on the employee environment or they are a valuable conduit for employee education. They are also mistakingly considered a green alternative to employee communications versus paper-based communications as screensavers can cause enormous power consumption in aggregate. Nick Carr has some numbers supporting this view in his article.
Delivering employee messaging through screensavers is incredibly inefficient: aren’t employees either using their computers (i.e., there is no screensaver running), or doing something else (i.e., not looking at their screensavers)? But when the employee is out of the office, it runs 100% of the time. 16+ hours of employee communications directed at an empty chair.
Want a green alternative to employee messaging? Use e-mail.
Save your idle compute resources for applications that deliver real business value. That is one of the reasons we developed the Digipede Network: to deliver real business value on idle resources.
Aside from grid computing, the CIOs should be successful fighting the screensaver with the power savings argument.
Tags: .NET, green, grid, screensavers
November 23, 2005 at 10:55 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Steve Gillmor posts provocatively about attention, standards, timing, and Office, in Time is on our side.
I posted before that the work that the AttentionTrust is doing is very interesting with powerful connotations.
One valuable, pragmatic, insightful (and inciteful) thing they’ve done is to put together a way to track attention without standards bodies. Sure, those can come along, but nothing revolutionary happens through standards bodies. First you show it is interesting by doing real work (e.g., the AttentionTrust Extension, ATX; or ROOT Markets). Then let the interested (and threatened) get involved. Even in this case, the first format for attention data will soon be superceded by OPML.
I do want to point out, though, that I wasn’t slamming Steve for saying office is dead, exactly. It was I who brought up Office at the TechCrunch party. I was trying to poke fun at Steve about Office “already being dead”. This came from our earlier argument at the Berkeley Geek Dinner. He has been arguing this and Robert Scoble refutes it. I think what it comes down to is that Steve is saying that Office is dead (see Office Dead) meaning that the writing is on the wall for Office. I don’t think he isn’t saying people won’t upgrade to Office 12 (though he probably doubts that the numbers are significant); however, I see plenty of sales and opportunities for Office for both Microsoft and ISVs regardless of the Office Live strategy. In the mid+ enterprise.
Anyway, I think that Steve’s post supports that he views time differently then many. For example:
. . .when someone tells you how long something is going to take to make a difference, divide by 10. 10 years, 1 year. 5 years, 6 months. A year, a month and a half.
Most of us think in opposite terms: we tend to under-estimate how long something will take to make an impact. And I think the difference is, again, that Steve is talking about the implication of the “something” versus the practical, mass adoption of that “something” (or irrelevance of the alternative). I’ll leave that to him to refute, agree, or ignore.
And, I wish I hadn’t brought up Office, because we were having a much more interesting discussion about attention . . .
Tags: Attention, office, office12, Web2.0
November 22, 2005 at 7:36 am · Filed under .NET
I wrote a mini review of Framework Design Guidelines
, an excellent book by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams.
You can read it here.
An excerpt of my review:
This is an excellent book. I recommend it to any and all .NET developers interested in improving the style, consistency, and maintainability of their class libraries — public or not. While it is certainly targeted at designers of public frameworks, there is a lot of good content here for everybody.
Tags: .NET
November 20, 2005 at 8:46 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
One thing striking at Web 2.0 events is the absence of people using Microsoft software development tools. Of course, that isn’t news. Many of these startup companies go for the free tools and steer away from Microsoft. When we were starting out, we signed up for the Microsoft Empower program for startups. It is essentially free and provides all the Microsoft development tools. I suspect Microsoft needs to promote this program more. Free Express versions help, but it is too early to tell what the impact will be.
At the TechCrunch / Riya party, I did hear only one thing that made me bridle:
On the way to the ePlatform demo, we walked into the end of a Podcast of John Furrier of Podtech.net interviewing a fellow podcaster. She was pushing her site (I won’t mention it here). She said something like:
We are all buzz-word compliant. (list of terms), anti-Microsoft, (more terms) etc.
So “anti-Microsoft” is now a buzz word? It isn’t enough to be Java or Ruby on Rails or PHP or pro-Google or Sun, etc? Not liking Microsoft is one thing, but encapsulating that dislike into a buzz word is too simplistic for me. It is just another way people put blinders on isolating themselves and narrowing their view.
It isn’t about the hardware, software, OS, development tools . . . it is about what you create with them.
IMHO.
Update: I think I’m still not being clear on this: I would also bridle at “anti-Google” or “anti-Java” as attaining buzz-word status. It is just to cliqueish for me — am I alone on this?
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, Web2.0
November 19, 2005 at 9:52 pm · Filed under Web 2.0
I attended the TechCrunch / Riya launch party last night. Pictures on Flickr are here. It was a good time — thanks to Michael Arrington for hosting the party.
Some people I met or reconnected with:
- Steve Gillmor. We talked about the AttentionTrust a bit; I’ll blog more on that soon. Unfortunately I jokingly raised the “Office Dead” topic with him and Robert Scoble again and found myself in a minor repeat of the Geek Dinner / Parking Lot discussion (described here in a previous post).
- Of course, Robert Scoble — he brought his son. Seems like a nice kid.
- Zach Coelius of Triggit. Zach, it looks like you jumped on FeedBurner after our discussion!
- Ramana Kovi of ePlatform. Robert Scoble first blogged about ePlatform here. I sat in on a demonstration that Ramana gave to Steve. Kind of a Web portal allowing parents to manage the whole family’s Internet experience. All on .NET, too.
- Many of the Meetro guys. They all moved out here from Chicago a few weeks back to setup shop in the Valley.
Tags: Attention, riya, techcrunch, Web2.0
November 17, 2005 at 9:45 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Web 2.0
John Powers, the President of Digipede (my company) was recently interviewed by WindowsHPC about the Digipede Network, how it fits into the distributed computing market, and how it is a good fit with SaaS providers. We designed it with SaaS in mind. After all, we came from a company where we had a SaaS product (and enterprise products) that needed scale-out (I mention the product briefly in my previous post).
You can read the full text of the interview, here: An Inteview with John Powers, President of Digipede Technologies.
Tags: Digipede, grid, HPC, SaaS, Web2.0
November 17, 2005 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Web 2.0
In his post Contrary Evidence at the SLC, Sam Ramji of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team is surprised by big CIO resistance to SaaS pricing models. No surprise, really, that CIOs want the best of all possible worlds (a ceiling on price with lowering price as appropriate and lowest overall cost).
He makes some good points about confusion surrounding standard (or lack of standard) pricing models and conflation between value-based and usage-based pricing. I certainly agree that pricing models are getting more complex. There is a real need for simplified / standardized pricing as well as licensing agreements. This would be a real help to all types of software vendors.
Back in the Web 1.0 days, my former company Energy Interactive sold SaaS to large energy providers (both vertically-integrated electric utilities and deregulated energy suppliers). Of course, we called ourselves an Application Service Provider (though SaaS is a better term).
At the time we sold the hosted product as a one-time setup fee plus annual bundle of license, maintenance and support. We also sold the product as installed software with a perpetual license + maintenance and support. There was a direct correlation between the size of the customer and their level of comfort with the SaaS model: the bigger they were the more they wanted to just buy it and install it themselves. Truthfully, we didn’t want to sell it as an installed product for the typical reasons (i.e., it was much easier for us to maintain and support it if we had direct access to it, etc.).
Again and again we had to convince the large prospective customers that it made sense for them to go with the SaaS model then for them to host it themselves.
Of course, times have changed: SaaS is more accepted. Small customers (both individual users and small to midsize companies) certainly benefit from it; however, Mr. Ramji has detected that this is still the case for large enterprises. Certainly there are the financial and licensing issues to be resolved, but this will continue to be a hard sell for the large enterprise that is used to having absolute control over their brand, operations, IT environment, security, etc.
I don’t have the answer to question, “will SaaS fail to penetrate large enterprises”, but I do think it will continue to be a hard road.
Tags: SaaS, Web2.0
November 15, 2005 at 9:36 pm · Filed under Web 2.0
I just signed up as an AttentionTrust member (check out my spiffy new graphic in the sidebar). I have been meaning to do this for some time since it became public. I started following it after meeting (or at least disagreeing with) Steve Gillmor back at the Dave Winer’s Geek Dinner for Scoble. I may disagree with him over the pending demise of Office, but he is doing truly interesting work on attention.
It will be very interesting to see how the big players (i.e., Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc.) deal with user-controlled attention. My guess is they will completely ignore it unless enough users demand it. Of course, if just one of them buys into it then maybe it will be adopted by everybody.
I am looking forward to (and willing to help, if necessary) the Internet Explorer version of the AttentionTrust Extension. I work in Internet Explorer pretty exclusively (it just doesn’t make sense to use Firefox when developing with Microsoft Visual Studio). Actually, for what it is worth, I use the tabbed Maxthon browser which makes use of the Internet Explorer engine.
Tags: Attention
November 13, 2005 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
My blog has a new look.
Now I know that this is not news, but I felt it worth noting just the same. The (major) changes are:
- Added a Linkblog using Recent Links by Markku Seguerra. My linkblog has a separate feed:
.
- A new heading graphic with a shorter heading region.
- Tweaked the <pre> sections to be more readable.
- Began to implement post categories, though I have not gone back and categorized my old posts (yet). I used categorization in GeeksWithBlogs, but that didn’t port cleanly. My new categories are: .NET, Grid Computing, Miscellaneous, and Web 2.0.
- And various other minor tweaks.
I hope these changes make my blog easier to read and use.
Cheers!
Tags: blog
November 11, 2005 at 11:00 pm · Filed under .NET
I just added an article on using UpdateVersion to update resource scripts for unmanaged code. You can read it here.
An excerpt:
At release build time, we update our version numbers using the UpdateVersion utility by Mike Gunderloy, Scott Hanselman, and Matt Griffith. This works fine for managed assemblies, but it doesn’t work for versioning unmanaged Win32 DLLs using the resource script.
I solved this problem while dealing with a completely different versioning issue (related to VS2005′s inadequacy regarding Win32 resources in managed assemblies).
Interestingly enough, just as I thought about posting this, I found on the MSBuild blog that a new MSBuild task similar to the UpdateVersion utility has just been posted to GotDotNet. If and when we migrate to MSBuild, this might just do the trick, but I suspect there will still be some extra work to get this to help with resource scripts.
Tags: .NET, vs2005, win32
November 10, 2005 at 8:35 pm · Filed under .NET
In Renaming ASP.NET 2.0 Assemblies Redux, I detail a way to handle renaming ASP.NET 2.0 assemblies without aspnet_merge. The release of Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects (Beta Preview) pretty much obviates the need for my solution (unless you need exact control over your per-folder assembly names). If you haven’t heard about the new add-in (and aspnet_merge), read this Scott Guthrie post for an overview: VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects.
All in all, it seems to work well — thanks to the ASP.NET 2.0 team for getting this together so quickly. I did come across the following (very minor) issues:
- If I happen to click on the VS IDE while building the deployment project, I get a “Microsoft Visual Studio is Busy” warning in a notification icon ballon.
- It is cool that you can open the build deployment project without unloading the project (as you do for other project types); however, it doesn’t warn you if you edit the project file and (without saving) then change the properties. It does detect the problem when you try to save the project file, but this is a bit late.
Also, I was looking forward to the ability to replace sections of the Web.config, but found that I basically wanted to replace something in nearly every section. I ended up going back to what I used to do: have two config files stored in my development project: Web.config and Web.release.config. The former is used during development and I copy the latter for use in deployment. An easy way to do this with Web Deployment Projects is by editing the project file and using the MSBuild Copy task:
<Target Name="AfterBuild">
<Copy
SourceFiles="$(SourceWebPhysicalPath)\\Web.release.config"
DestinationFiles="$(OutputPath)\\Web.config"
/>
</Target>
The functionality provided in this addin resolves the issues I had with the new ASP.NET 2.0 deployment model. We get many more choices including the old-style single assembly. Yes, this is more complex than ASP.NET 1.1, but the greater flexibility and benefits of the new model make it worth it to me.
Tags: asp.net, aspnet_merge, vs2005
November 7, 2005 at 10:36 pm · Filed under .NET
I’m here at the Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 Launch.
I would have blogged this “live” but there is no WiFi.
The keynote started out with a big bang: Cheap Trick played a song introducing the theme: “are you ready to rock“. Then Steve Ballmer came out and gave the keynote. This launch is certainly a big deal for Microsoft. Steve Ballmer et al are really pushing the scalability of this new platform and suitability for mission critical apps. Intel CEO / President Paul Otellini came on stage to talk about how the Intel compilers are now a part of the VS product launch (critical for the success of the Itanium, I think). After that, it got kind of flat.
I had to fight the feeling that this launch is all old news. I am excited about Vista (and the related Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communications Foundation, and Windows Presentation Foundation technologies), Web 2.0, and more. And of course this is a launch event, not an announcement event (like the Windows Live announcement last week).
Don’t get me wrong — I am very happy to be using the new tools announced today and do think this is something big worth celebrating. And of course, I’ve adopted the new Microsoft tools, but Microsoft has to convert / convince a lot of other people.
I suppose this feeling of “old news” is a necessary result of Microsoft’s increased transparency. Product launch used to be the first time a large number of people really started using the new tools — but the first VS beta some time ago now. Of course, this transparency is a good thing.
So I enjoyed this for what it was: a chance to celebrate the latest release of the most productive development platform in the (known) universe. And better: a chance to meet prospective customers and partners.
Plus Cheap Trick really rocks. No kidding, they sounded great. Here are a couple pictures:
Congratulations to Microsoft and thanks for a great launch party!
November 6, 2005 at 11:27 pm · Filed under .NET
John Powers (the Digipede CEO) and I went to the Microsoft Partner Appreciation Party at Frisson in San Francisco as prep for the VSLaunch event at Moscone center tomorrow. John and I had a great talk about how the Digipede Network is a great fit for SaaS in general.
The party was fun. They had a custom drink menu for the event:
The “Visual Studio 05″ wasn’t bad.
As we were heading out of the city, we found ourselves driving into a dead-end loading zone.
John said: “What we are doing here is slightly illegal.”
It became clear that If we continued we would have had to drive over a sidewalk.
I said: “No, what you are about to do is illegal. That is what makes you a visionary.”
And, no, we didn’t have too many drinks at the party!
Tags: .NET, vs2005
November 4, 2005 at 8:28 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
This is the third and, I hope, final destination for my blog. It started out as Mind From R. Wandering at Blogspot. Then over to GeeksWithBlogs as “Expert Texture”. Then here. I moved from Blogger in search of a community (after all, blogger is a bit too broad as communities go: everyone on the planet who blog. I moved here out of a desire for more control over my blog.
This is just a quick post to make sure Feedburner is picking up my new blog correctly.
No time to blog right now — we have a lot to do today to get ready for the Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 launch in San Francisco on November 7th. Come by and see us at kiosk NC-12.
Cheers!
Tags: blog
November 2, 2005 at 7:25 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I stopped posting over the last few days due to the service changes at GeeksWithBlogs. They have decided to include advertisements on all of their hosted blogs and feeds. I can understand their need: the community is growing rapidly and it’s costing more money to support.
I would have preferred it if we (as a part of this community) had been given a chance to comment on this change and even been given the option of ponying up some money. My guess is that many members here would pay in advance for the service or even just donate money to keep it running free of ads. (Jeff Julian implies that there may be options for an ad-free premium service in the future once they get their new blogging system in place.)
Instead, we received an e-mail on Sunday morning. By Monday morning, my blog had an advertisement on it. BTW: I don’t object to advertisements, I just object to having no control over the advertisements.
This is kind of ironic for me as I have been trying to figure out how to get more control over my blog’s CSS template only to find that I now have less.
In Jakob Nielsen’s article Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, he says that you don’t want to let someone else control your blog. He even sites this very issue as a reason (see issue #10).
Yup.
Now what? Well, I am evaluating other options. And maybe I will move again. If you are a subscriber, please make sure you have subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/MindFromRWandering — this will ensure that if I do make a move, you will come along.
Update: One thing I forgot to say in this post: I do appreciate the community that GeeksWithBlogs is building here. I don’t actually expect service for free (and of course, that is what I have gotten and continue to get from GeeksWithBlogs). And I do fully appreciate Jeff’s need to make this change.
Tags: blog
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