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Time for a new toolset?

By on November 10, 2005 in Technology

Listening to the Gilmor Gang podcast yesterday (great discussions on Windows Live, conversation with Robert Scoble, and Doc Searls nails it once again), one of the panelists mentioned Eric Von Hippel’s work on “user-driven innovation” that had been featured in a podcast of Michael Tiemann’s presentation at the last MySQL conference. Michael also mentions Von Hippel’s work and his HBR article (May 2002, if memory serves) in his presentation on “The Open Source Triple Play.”

It’s a vast simplification to summarize Von Hippel’s work as “give the users the tools and they will solve the problem” but much of the work on Von Hippel’s site (including video tutorials, two books under the Creative Commons license, and articles – bravo!) points towards that theme. Well worth a look.

FoxPro developers can recognize similar patterns in our ability to embed tools such as Stonefield Query and FireFox! inside our applications, allowing the users to develop the complex reports that lets them run their business and extend the reach of the application. Gilmor Gang members were speaking more of Web Services and AJAX and extending services such as Google Search, Maps, Yahoo! and Microsoft offerings. The scale changes when you move from offering tools in a proprietary application to exposing these tools to the entire World-Wide Web.

Provide users with easy-to-use tools and they will build the solutions they need. Isn’t that what fired up the PC Revolution in the 80s? Isn’t that what real innovation has always been about?

“Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools;
without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.” — Thomas Carlyle

“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed,
it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

Exciting times.

Dabo does DataSets!

By on November 8, 2005 in OpenSource, Python, Technology

Ten-time Microsoft MVP Ed Leafe and Fox/Wine/Python guru Paul McNett have been working on a Free (price and license) framework in Python to create data-intensive rich client applications that will run on all major platforms (thanks to Python) and support all major databases.

On his ProFox mailing list, Ed Leafe announces Dabo reaches another milestone:

If you had to give one reason why Fox rocks, what would it be? The UI and reporting tools are good, but there are other products out there that do those things as well or better. The language is OO and can be quite elegant, but it is also procedural and can be quite ugly. And DBFs are not exactly the ultimate data store around.

No, if I had to name the killer feature, it would be this: an internal data engine. With this, you can do things that other languages simply cannot. You can pull a data set from SQL Server or Postgres, and then manipulate that data quickly and powerfully, using Fox’s SQL engine as well as its Xbase commands. You can select a subset from that cursor, and then join that subset to another cursor. All in Fox, and all natively.

This was the piece that Dabo lacked, and that I felt would take it from a second-rate data framework to a first-class product. Well, I’m thrilled to announce that Dabo now has such an internal data engine! Data in Dabo is held in objects called DataSets, but which are very much like Fox cursors. These DataSet objects now understand SQL, allowing you to send it any valid SQL statement and get back the results in another DataSet object.

http://dabodev.com/wiki/DataSet

Congratulations, Ed! This is a really exciting step! Fox Rocks because it has a rich development environment, a powerful means of iterative development using the command window, and a very capable local data engine for cursor manipulation. With the integration of SQLite (via pySQLite) into the data layer, Dabo developers can still use the backend data of their choice and have a powerful local engine for manipulation, the best of both worlds.

Tod Nielsen, CEO of Borland

By on November 8, 2005 in Home Page

Tod Nielsen and Chris Caposella yuck it up in the 'Challenge Me!' skit at Microsoft's Visual FoxPro Devcon, Orlando, 1993Borland Appoints Tod Nielsen as New President and CEO. Tod Nielsen and Chris Caposella yucked it up in the ‘Challenge Me!’ skit at Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro Devcon, Orlando, 1993. They were the marketing team for Microsoft’s new at the time acquisition, Visual FoxPro. He rose through the company’s marketing arm, but spilt a few years ago after a term as vice president of the platform and developer group in 2000. He joined CrossGain as CEO but was temporarily benched as part of a Microsoft non-compete violation controversy. Next, he was the the chief marketing officer at BEA, a job he left Aug 24, 2004 to “pursue other interests”. I last noticed Tod at Oracle.

Tod’s a sharp guy, and Borland a company with a lot of history and potential. Hope it works out well for both!

Apple switchers growing

By on November 8, 2005 in Apple Macintosh OS X

OSNews links to an Apple Insider article that can’t have been well thought through: Over 1 Million Windows to Mac Converts So Far in 2005?. “The momentum generated by Apple’s iPod digital music players and related products continues to translate into new Macintosh sales according to one Wall Street analyst who estimates that over one million Windows users have purchased a Mac in the first three quarters of 2005.”

Great news! I’m a switcher, though in 2004. But, digging into the article,

“If we assume that all of the growth in Mac shipments during the past three quarters resulted from Windows users purchasing a Mac, then purchases by Windows users exceeded one million,” the analyst said.

Well, that’s silly. No current Mac user bought a new Mac in the past three quarters? If so, Apple is doomed. Apple users often keep their machines running for years, as they don’t have the rapid decline-to-obsolesence of WinTel boxes, but I’d guesstimate a 4-year-lifecycle on average and so a rough estimate of 20% of sales to current Apple users still yields a respectable 800,000 switchers this year and projects around a million by the end of the calendar year. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Let’s leave the exaggeration to the other guys.

DLSLUG/GNHLUG Quarterly Meeting, 3 Nov 2005

By on November 7, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

What a great meeting last week! Forty-three attendees made this the most attended Greater New Hampshire Linux User Groupquarterly meeting of the year.

Thanks to Doug McIlroy for a fascinating presentation on his memories of growing up with the computer industry. Doug ran the department at Bell Labs where Kernighan and Ritchie came up with C, studied at MIT with WhirlWind, and had many fascinating adventures along the way. Doug put on a great show featuring significant and memorable milestones and wonderful anecdotes. Several people took notes, audio and video recordings. We hope to see something on the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee LUG site soon!

Thanks also to Bill McGonigle for arranging and emceeing the meeting. Bill started with the usual announcements about the group, thanking PTR/Addison Wesley for providing some books to raffle as well as paying for the delicious refreshments. Bill had been contacted by a survey firm claiming to be looking for cases of Linux cost of ownership situations other than those that have been popularly reported. Bill expressed some scepticism on the legitimacy of this information and asked to contact him if you want to look into it. A raffle after Doug’s presentation gave away a couple of Addison-Wesley books and some RedHat promotional DVDs.

Bill Stearns announced the results of the project to bring some networking gear to Pass Christian schools following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of their schools, and pointed to a link with pictures. Great job, Bill!

At the end, I spoke for a few minutes on the on-going effort to gather feedback for the development of by-laws and the registration of GNHLUG as a non-profit organization. Reception was generally positive. Several attendees offered to send along by-laws for their organizations, so we can examine what others have done.

Finally, we announced the next quarterly meeting. We’ll be joining with the New Hampshire Chapters of the ACM and IEEE for a presentation by Rik van Riel showing off spamikaze, an automated spam block system. The meeting will take place at Robert Frost Hall in the Walker Auditorium at Southern New Hampshire University. Note the unusual time: the main presentation is 5 Pm to 6 Pm, to allow evening graduate school students to attend. Hope to see you there! Thanks to all who attended!

Working for Dilbert’s Boss

By on November 3, 2005 in Technology

It would be funnier if it were not so painfully true: Working for Dilbert’s boss.

The problem springs up all of the time, when a well-meaning good-faith estimate of the level of work is taken as the opening gambit of a one-sided negotiation.

Look out for bootable media!

By on November 3, 2005 in Microsoft, Security

Last night, I booted my Windows XP notebook after it spent the day traveling in its padded bag – never touched, dropped, struck by lightening, etc. I had left a CD in the tray and it may have tried to boot from that — oops. Removing the disk and rebooting resulted in “NTFS.SYS is missing or corrupted.” Since the machine didn’t come with a rescue CD, I used Knoppix to boot the machine to examine the partition. Looking through the partition, the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers directory is empty. That’s pretty unlikely a failure on Windows part – WinXP usually keeps several of these files open, and “Windows File Protection” prevents their deletion. Ran fine until I shut it down yesterday morning. Running S.M.A.R.T. utilities shows no errors on the drive. Running SpinRite right now to confirm there’s not a drive problem, then I’ll be restoring from a Ghost backup.

Reminder: don’t leave your computer configured to boot from devices you don’t want to boot from! UPDATE: Scanned the disk on a trustworthy computer with an up-to-date NAV, and it indicates no malware. Curiouser and curioser…

Microsoft: It’s Alive!!!!

By on November 2, 2005 in Microsoft

It seems Microsoft was a day late with their Halloween horror story called Microsoft Live! and Microsoft Office Live! Whether these are truly “a Microsoft bet” (boy, is that line getting tired) or just a tired rebranding of next-gen Hotmail, MSN and bCentral services to respond to all the good press Google, Yahoo! and other rich AJAX apps are getting remains to be seen.

Dave Winer attended and called it “the worst demo ever.” Mini-Microsoft links to dozens of links. Mary Jo Foley has thorough coverage. Dan Farber questions what’s live – that it’s on the web? Niall Kennedy has some intriguing photographs.

Maybe Microsoft Live 3.0 will be better…

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