Scoble is investigating collaborative tools – primarily chat and wiki tools. Seaside and Squeak are powering some really cool new capabilities. Like LogoWiki, a wiki that allows people to embed executable Logo programs. Useful for making educational sites about geometry and introductory programming. LogoWiki is built upon Pier, a wiki so rich in features that it approaches the level of a content management system. Given that the wiki was invented by a Smalltalker, this seems like a return to wiki’s roots.
Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
Wikis – The new generation.
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006Vonage is a Rip-Off
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006And I sincerely hope they go out of business soon.
I decided to give them a shot when I canceled my Qwest DSL for unreliability and switched to Comcast (which has been SOLID). They promised that it would be easy to transfer my phone number, they sent me some paperwork and a catalog of interface boxes/routers. I selected one made by linksys, it arrived and I set it up and got a dialtone.
Two days later we had a wind storm and power outage and the linksys completely died. Bad experience, I conclude that having my phone service dependent on electricity is a bad idea and set out to cancel the phone number transfer.
This is where I learn that Vonage is the roach motel of phone companies. They have sales people working around the clock, but intentionally don’t put their customer service extension in the menu on their phone system. This is dishonest and I decide not to do further business with them.
Unfortunately, they won’t or can’t cancel the number transfer. I contact Qwest to see if they can stop it and at first they think so, but eventually they say no, but let it go through and in a week they can request it back. So we do. This leaves me without the ability to receive calls for over 3 weeks. I tell the reps at Vonage that I want my number transfer cancelled and plan to cancel service – they warn me not to cancel until the number safely returns to Qwest. Qwest gives me the same advice.
It takes 20 days for a number to transfer – so this entire fiasco is over 40 days long. Cleverly, Vonage provides a 30 day money back guarantee. Criminal.
I learn this last fact when phoning to cancel my Vonage “service” (which never worked) and am told that 1) I’m over the 30 days to I have to pay $30 in cancellation fees and 2) I am charged an additional $50 for hardware that I bought up front for $89 in the first place and that failed within days of power up and 3) am told that they won’t even replace the dead hardware (although the rather smug-bitchy rep in cancellations is pleased to tell me that “if you had stayed we’d replace it but since you’re cancelling you’re out of luck”).
There’s no option to simply not pay the bill – Vonage gets your credit card number up front. However, I have disputed all charges from them with my bank and returned the defective equipment so I’m hopeful to escape with my cash intact (while sticking them with chargeback costs as well).
So much for customer service. Avoid Vonage at all costs!
Employers think workers are stupid
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006About once a week some recruiter emails me with a “great opportunity”. Only the opportunities are usually worse than I have now.
In a keyword search your resume came up as being possibly qualified for the following position I have open
with a very successful IP Network Security software development company I am currently working with in the
Sunnyvale area:Please review the following requirements and reply with a copy of your resume if you would be interested:
Sunnyvale. I quickly do a web search for median home price of Sunnyvale and find its about double my current home value. So I email the guy and tell him my salary requirements to consider a move. His reponse?
Sorry, that’s a CEO salary.
Ignoring for a second that I have yet to meet a CEO worth anywhere near what he gets paid, I tell him to go ahead and outsource the job somewhere with sane real estate prices. I mean, since when are knowlege workers supposed to be stupid enough to take a real pay cut?
No wonder they can’t find qualified workers, they are totally oblivious to the market forces talent has to deal with. My salary expectation is (median home price)/4. No matter where you are. If you can’t pay that, move or plan on outsourcing to some location where people can afford to live on what you are willing to pay. That doesn’t necessarily mean India or China or Russia or some other country. Lots of folks in the US live in sanely priced areas as well who can do the job just as well or better for the money you’re willing to pay as long as you don’t expect them to relocate.
Workers have costs too. Respect that.
Software in Europe
Thursday, July 6th, 2006Scoble talks about tech in Europe. Since I worked in Paris for a year immediately after working three years in Silly-con Valley, I’ll weigh in here.
First, I think the valley is actually an obstacle to doing business. The number one cause is the cost of housing. I work in Seattle. When I price houses in the bay area, they cost just about twice what my house costs. Since I measure salaries in median home price multiples, I’d have to take a 50% pay cut to move there. All bay area companies freak when I simply double my salary when asked about my expectations.
Second, the local talent is overrated. Its young (people with low overhead who don’t mind paying $1500 for 400 square feet of living space), but inexperienced. So you need more boy wonders to get the same job done as you might if you hired seasoned professionals. Given a million$ budget, I’d prefer to hire 5 senior guys at $200k rather than 20 at $50k. I’ll get more done.
Furthermore, its a myth that the valley has the biggest talent pool. Denver Colorado has more programmers per capita than any other city in the USA. This is largely due to the concentration of telcos in Denver. The cost of housing is still sane (even a little depressed because of the telco industry’s woes), and these people know how to build for scale.
Getting back to Europe, I met some phenomenally sharp people in Paris. There’s a vibrant core there and they also have their geek functions. Furthermore, they seem less influenced by the fashion crazes that brought us garbage like Java and J2EE. There are at least 4 Smalltalk oriented conferences in Europe each year – compared to only one in the USA, and a lot of interesting research in how to build systems better happens in Europe.
As to the smoking angle, hooey. American geeks don’t smoke much? Extrapolate to Americans don’t smoke much. Euro geeks smoke about as much as Europeans. I did find the smoking annoying for the first couple months, then I got used to it. (People smoked at their desks in our office). Smoking is gradually falling out of favor in Europe, and if geeks don’t like smoking, they can have a non-smoking office. Not a factor.
Europeans are better at integrating tech into their lives than Americans. (Just compare a Euro cell phone with the garbage being pushed by Verizon, Cingular, etc). They also balance their lives and walk away from their computers to think now and then. They take holidays. Much was dicussed at gnomedex about the echo chamber. Europeans are better at leaving the echo chamber and experiencing life. The wide range of cultures in a smalll geographic region give them better perspective. They get 6-8 weeks of vacation, free health care, and job security/unemploymnent benefits lasting upto a year. Tech workers want to give this up? Don’t think so. This is a key advantage.
If I had my choice, I’d live in Europe over California in a minute.
Gnomedex is imminent
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006And I am psyched. Should be lots of fun. I’ll be staying at Bell Harbor Marina aboard my sailing yacht Aurora on B-Dock. It’ll be the one with the hammock on the foredeck.
I’m still looking for the killer startup idea and ideal partner(s). Perhaps I’ll stumble onto something there. If you are going to Gnomedex and want to talk about doing something cool, find me. Look for the loudest Hawaiian shirt you can find.
Switchers
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006Mark Pilgrim is going off about how he’s moving away from the Mac OSX and onto Ubuntu because he’s unhappy with the amount of work involved in data preservation. Tim Bray is also discussing this.
That’s all well and good, but this isn’t remotely related to the Mac itself. It is a universal problem.
I did a lot of song writing in the ’80s and have a lot of original music as sequences that were built using an Ensoniq ESQ-1 keyboard/sequencer and dumped as MIDI sysex data to a Mirage sampler and saved on floppy disk.
I still have the Mirage (although its getting more and more “quirky”) and the ESQ-1 and I’m “converting” the data by actually loading it into my old synth stack and “playing” it while having Digital Performer “record” the data stream in slaved sync mode.
This is the original source material. I used to have versions of this material in Studio Vision format. However, while I was off exploring the world and had my stuff mothballed, Gibson bought Studio Vision and promptly killed it. Macs moved to Mac OS X from MacOS, and Studio Vision is copy protected (like all music production software apart from Garage Band). So the Studio Vision versions were lost.
The Digital Performer file formats are proprietary too. If you want to maintain total data fidelity, you have to archive the program, the OS, and the original machine. Otherwise, its all lossy conversions again. Switching to Ubuntu won’t mitigate this.
Java Swing returns
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006Sun presented all day yesterday at work. I attended the session on desktop Java. So far as I can tell, the key changes are better windows integration (don’t care), an effort to get vendors to preload the JRE on both windows and linux, and a wizzy new demo app that makes heavy use of J2D to look a bit like a Mac OS X widget with lots of translucency, fades, throbs, and visual effects lifted right off of OS X.
I will say that the demo app was pretty, but having written swing and J2D in the past, I know how much work went into that app and I shudder at the level of effort it would take the average developer to replicate it. Most of the UI elements are not in the standard Swing package and are custom widgets making use of Java 2D graphics. Those that are swing widgets have been subclassed and had their rendering code replaced with some fancy hollywood quality graphics.
The NetBeans GUI builder (Matisse I think) was also shown. It looks so-so and it uses code generation which naturally makes it nearly useless.
The Q&A was also rather brutal with one attendee asking “why does it take 10 pages of code to replicate what I can do in six lines of HTML?” Their answer – they are working on a new app framework to hide the complexity of the Swing framework. Hello? Why isn’t the first framework simpler? Abstracting a framework behind a framework is excessive. No wonder the thing crawls at times.
My question/comment was to suggest that they bail on code generation and focus on the real pain point. Intelligent default sizes for widgets. For example, I constructed a standard outlook-style browser with a vertical split pane that has a scrolling list on the left and content area on the right. If there are no items in the list, it initially displays at something like 4 pixels wide. If I populate it with items first, it displays at a reasonable initial size.
So, under what circumstances does Sun imagine I might want a 4-pixel wide list? If I did want one that narrow, what are the odds that I’d want it to expand to 100 pixels when I added data? I’d say that Swing remains a nightmare framework of poorly chosen defaults, code generation gui builders, and ugly rendering. It can be improved with Java 2D rendering, but at that point, you might as well write all your own widgets as its not that hard to do raw mouse/keyboard event tracking.
Once again, Sun spends vast amounts of time, energy, and cash gazing at their navels instead of simply adopting proven solutions.
BadPage.info has a new purpose?
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Scoble claims that the MS Word team finally generates clean html. I’ll believe it when it passes checks at http://badpage.info with no warnings or errors.
It will be nice for people to actually care about web standards. The web 2.0 people have to because bad dom’s leads to broken javascript. But so many large websites are still awful.
So I’ve met the queen of the VC’s
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006of Seattle and she was very helpful and a lot of fun to talk with. Wish we had more time.
Now I’ve got a huge list of names to follow up with.
How to pick a startup idea
Thursday, May 4th, 2006Something that was clear from Startup School was what kinds of ideas seem to take off. A few things I’m looking for:
- It should change basic user behavior – like Flickr has become the way to share photos on the web.
- It must be “head slapping easy” to use.
- It must encourage formation of a community.
- It must provide embeddable content and thus be viral- like Flickr photos on a blog.
- It should be hackable/employ web services, like google maps.
Thinking, thinking, thinking. I’ll be talking to lots of people in the next couple weeks. Keeping those things in mind.