Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.The meme sites were abuzz yesterday about Zooomr - believed by some to be a Flickr killer, and purportedly written by a 17-year old in three months. Two of its killer features, apparently, are the ability to add audio to pictures, and to geocode pictures.
Aside from the shameless rip of Flickr's name and appearance (don't people feel a little ashamed when they do this? While it works for parady and satire, when used for a legitimate company it makes the foundations appear dishonest and shady, especially when the product is targeting at exactly the same market and use), superficially ripping off an existing site is easy. We subcontract some work through several of the code-farming sites, and every day we see low-cost jobs completed for tasks like "make a clone of MySpace" or "make a clone of Ebay". Hysterics about how amazing it is that a superficial Flickr clone + marginal features (such as a mash-up with Google maps, one of the cheapest techniques to liven up a website) was written in three months betrays a basic lack of understanding about where the difficulties of software development lie.
Of course, like the widely hyped Riya, I haven't actually been able to look at Zooomr -- it appears that their servers fell over and died under the onslaught (one of those non-superficial features you have to design in is scalability, and appearances are that it wasn't a primary concern).
As an aside, I read TechCrunch, but take everything Mr. Arrington and crew say with a monster-sized grain of salt: He seems far too incestuously embedded into the Web 2.0 hype community to offer any sort of critical analysis, and occasionally offers up some highly suspect infromation (such as yesterday's recommendation that everyone sign up for TrustedID to take advantage of already existing, usually free services for $8 US per month).
Speaking of geocoding and ideas, years back -- early in Google's ascent -- I emailed them advocating that they pioneer and evangelize geocoding standards for webpages: A standard that would allow web authors to indicate where, if appropriate, a particular webpage applied. For example Burlington, Ontario, Canada, perhaps even a particular street corner for a fish shop (possibly longitude and latitude). This thought came to mind because of the difficulty searching locally, which naturally led to a diminished value for small, localized businesses to take advantage of the web -- while we were gaining the ability to search a world of information, it was becoming, and remains, enormously difficult to zero in on locally relevant data.
At the same time I advocated that they should pioneer web client geocoding -- a proposed feature that with the user's authorization would enable an HTTP header, much like the language header, that would indicate what geographical location or proximity that they are most interested in, automatically incorporated throughout the web. Obviously there are some privacy concerns with this that would need to be evaluated. As it is this sort of feature has somewhat been accommodated via reverse-DNS and geographical records correlating with IP.
Google has added some hit-and-miss, high false-negative code to try to detect and extract addresses on websites, but it only partly achieves the goal. It would have been very advantageous for both users and businesses if geocoding were a principal element of page markup at the outset.
While commenting on a grab-bag of thoughts, here in Canada we've watched our dollar climb about 30% against the American dollar over the past two years. While a part of this can be attributed to the monstrous reserves of the oil sands we harbour, with a world oil price that finally makes it cost-effective to perform the costly oil extraction, the principal reason our dollar has ascended has simply been the decline of the US dollar on world markets (e.g. we're largely spectators along for the ride). Several important Asian currencies are tied to the US dollar, and thus have also dropped against the Canadian dollar.
The impact this has on Canada is that anything sourced in the US, or in Asian countries whose currencies are tied to the US $, is that much cheaper in Canada. While our exports are more expensive to some countries, and thus less competitive, for organizations that rely upon substantial foreign inputs for their products or even operations, this can be a great advantage.
Given that I'm in the IT industry, of course I'm talking about computer hardware.
From LCD displays to laptops to servers, the prices across the board are amazingly low, and if a shop held off upgrading a server, there are some fantastic currency advantages to doing so now. You can get more computer hardware for less, far beyond the power/$ advances of the computer market.
Back on March 13th, I asked how the audience valued ideas in the [software development/product creation] process. This was a question I was spurred to ask after seeing yet another series of "Ideas are worthless!" proclamations on software development discussion boards. As has been the case many times in the past, the statements were quickly propped up by dozens of supporters, certain that it was the shovel in the dirt that makes the project, and not the guy sitting back thinking up grand visions.
Of course, threads on discussion boards have never been an equal representation of commonly held viewpoints: The people who are the most motivated to make their opinion known -- often only those who feel that their views will "fit in" without friction -- are the most likely to reply on such venues, so certain mindsets appear more prevalent than they actually are.
In contrast, over half of the answers to the poll on here (which received a surprizingly high 25 votes. I've found the lurker-to-active participant ratio to be huge on these sorts of things, so I was surprized that 25 people took a moment to express their view. The poll is still active, and will be until the end of the month, so values will of course change) valued ideas as somewhat or equally important as the implementation.
Of course, getting into a topic like this requires some clarification of what exactly is being discussed, otherwise both parties end up burning strawmen rather than actually debating the argument on merit.
"Let's make a better search engine than Google!" isn't an idea. It's a lofty goal. "Let's consider links on the web likes votes, and build a search engine that ranks pages based upon the number of votes" is an idea, and it's an idea that has the founders of Google jetting around in their personal 767.
Given the basic foundations of PageRank, backed by a patent (*), the Google founders could have farmed out the implementation to any of countless capable development team (of which there are tens or hundreds of thousands around the globe), though of course the implementation that Google did create is so extraordinary and cost-effective that it took a great basic idea, and gave it a fabulous implementation. I could have been a footnote in history if the wrong team implemented it, requiring another System z mainframe for every 10 simultaneous requests.
The result of the founder's great idea, coupled with a great implementation, was the winning, ultra-high speed search engine that cost-effecitvely scales, providing more computing services to search engine clients around the globe than competitors.
Google is now valued at $68 billion dollars.
Of course the perfect combination is a developer that brings creativity to their projects. One who doesn't need to be literally directed in every activity, but instead acts as a professional and less as a technician. Similarly, it is beneficial when a developer has respect enough for ideas and the creative process that they appreciate the contribution of peers and partners, understanding the value that it really does bring.
Countless vertical market products have succeeded despite terrible implementations because the founder had knowledge about an industry, and brought some original ideas about how to do it better (perhaps a better process flow, or some ideas about how data could be used more effectively). Given the hostile opinion many developers have of ideas, often these founders end up pulling up Visual Basic or some other RAD tool and developing it themselves, succeeding despite having what technically is a terrible product. How much better it would have been if a developer embraced the idea, and created a first rate technical solution to go with an original, valuable idea.
* - While I think software patents are, in common practice, a travesty, it is the implementation by the USPTO that is the problem -- they're granting ridiculous patents for, excuse the pun, patently obvious "ideas".
Nonetheless, there are many patents that have been granted to non-obvious ideas. This is difficult for many to believe, because in retrospect of course they seem obvious now.
There was once a time when mankind believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that our eyes projected light, and that eye-illumination was how we were able to see our surroundings. As ridiculous as those ancient beliefs sound now, it wasn't until someone did some "implementation" (research) based upon an idea (a hypothesis) that we became enlightened. What we know now seems obvious with this additional information.
Before I go about possibly reinventing the wheel, I thought it worthwhile to ask: Could anyone point me to .NET / Windows server modules for SXIP 2.0 and/or OpenID? They're both fairly trivial identity solutions, so if I can't find one I'll implement one or both. Not only for personal needs, but because I can see some uses for them in client projects.
Thank you kindly.
Some recently published statements regarding the Canadian Firearms Centre's online database, made by a former webmaster, have rightly earned a lot of attention: Mr. Hicks, an Orillia-area computer consultant, claims that he has identified several prior -- and possibly still remaining -- security gaps in the firearms registry. Gaps that allow(ed) very sensitive information to be queried by anyone with a home computer and an internet connection.
If this is true, it betrays tremendous negligence in the creation and maintenance of this system, and while a lot of the attention is coming from the politically motivated, using it to further a pre-existing agenda, it doesn't diminish the seriousness of this event occurring in the first place.
No specifics are given, however the likely vulnerability relates to SQL-injection vulnerabilities.
More importantly, do people still call themselves "webmasters"? Is that really still a title?
While Mr.Hicks refers to the system as a "$15 million dollar system" in the linked article, its history is convoluted, and much more expensive (perhaps a digit was lost in editing). After purportedly giving EDS $151 million dollars to make a working system, the government gave up and turned it over to a consortium of CGI, BDP, and Resolve Corp, giving them an estimated $100 million dollars thus far.
This is to create a system to register 1.9 million gun owners with a combined seven million guns.
Accounting for extensive security and auditing -- of course mandatory for a system of this nature -- eforms, correspondence, web services, feeds for police stations, integration with legacy systems, web reporting and secure access, and so on, it still doesn't strike me as an overly complex project. The scope and capacity of data I've heard could be handled on a modern four-way SQL Server box with a half decent SAN. Add in a cluster backup, and you're still talking about less than $200,000 (with all software licenses). The actual custom software itself should be straightforward, given that data entry, data reporting, and data security are some of the most known, proven design elements in this business.
This is largely wizard-type stuff, for which they've purportedly paid $251 million thus far.
If an article in the National Post today ("A one-stop shop for gun thieves") is to be believed, the system crashed 90 times on the first day of testing, requiring their hardware to be completely reset 30 times that day -- an event that is unseen with the reliable platform stack we have nowadays. They called off the test and sent it back to development, sending all of the expensively flown-in testers back home.
Of course we don't know all of the obscure details of this project, and it is a certainty that trying to build a system for a rapidly changing government, with enormous changes in the root requirements, is more difficult than an average project, but I find it hard to fathom that it's $251 million dollars different. I do appreciate that software developers often underestimate the tasks of other software developers and systems designers -- often with a foolish cowboy "I could do that on a weekend!" bravado -- but in this case I've designed and worked on systems of a similar scale, and I feel fairly confident in my assessment.
Given the very limited details that I've heard, I would have armchair estimated this as a less-than-$1 million dollar project, hardware in. I would never imagine that it would pass a quarter-of-a-billion dollars.
I've long been a Microsoft enthusiast, heartily embracing the platform and the development tools.
My first real professional development job was with Visual C++ Professional v1.0 (after years doing less professional work with tools like DJGPP) -- a product that came in a giant 50lb box full of huge reference manuals, along with a giant stack of floppies -- and my work and home life have predominately relied upon various incarnations of Windows throughout the years, from 3.11 to Windows Server 2003R2. I've personally pursued various certifications from Microsoft, and will be completing another hopefully in a few days. I've been developing in C, and then C++, and then .NET since the first beta, on the Microsoft platform, along with some deviant Win32-targeting object Pascal Delphi work, relying upon great products like SQL Server, or subsystems like MSMQ, ActiveDirectory, and DCOM, to build amazing solutions.
I've been branded a Microsoft astroturfer/paid-shill countless times on sites like Slashdot for speaking out against some rampant anti-Microsoft mistruths, and for defending some of Microsoft's actions (though I still haven't received a cheque from Microsoft for my volunteer advocacy...).
I've even written for Microsoft's premiere development magazine.
Yet I have zero personal interest in Windows Internet Explorer 7*, beyond professional observation. Perhaps it'll have some yet unannounced amazing new innovation when it's eventually released, but as it is it's nothing more than an also-ran, finally bringing functionality that competitors such as Firefox and Opera have had for years. Other functionality, such as the sandbox model IE will have on Vista -- which they've built for the inevitable exploits that will follow -- rely upon operating system shims that only Microsoft has the privilege of adding. Presumably this same functionality will exist for alternate software products as well, so there's no reason -- beyond the type that the Justice Department would take interest in -- that Firefox and Opera won't gain the ability to utilize the functionality.
If users are waiting with baited breath, living with their half-a-decade old Internet Explorer 6 in anxious anticipation of Microsoft finally putting some care into their browser, they need to seriously ask themselves why they haven't considered or evaluated the superior alternatives that are freely available. IT departments that simply coast along with whatever their Microsoft rep has decreed as acceptable need to ask themselves the same thing, and blanket decrees such as a banning of Firefox on corporate machines need credible justifications, and not just some baseless fear-mongering by a group that doesn't want the bother.
Internet Explorer wasn't always such a boring product. The period of greatest innovation with Internet Explorer happened in the IE 4 and IE 5 timeframe, when we gained functionality such as XML, XML data islands, the foundation of AJAX (if you had the luxury of only targeting IE 5+, you could build web apps in 1999 that rival the most "innovative" Web 2.0 sites today), implementing advanced CSS and DOM functionality simultaneous with, or ahead of, competitors. This was when the team seemed to have free reign, and whose primary motivation appear to be creating a great browser, rather than the oft claimed conspiracy of building Microsoft tie-in -- in fact the product was cross-platform, bringing a great browser to the Mac, for instance.
Of course, then they were trying to win the browser wars, and the result was the quick decimation of Netscape's marketshare. Microsoft's best minds rapidly created a killer web browser to kill a competitor in the web browser market, and there is no doubt that they technically succeeded, evolving their browser much more rapidly than the quagmired Netscape browser.
Even with the first-rate team working on what was the premiere browser, the market still was still very slow to adapt: Microsoft had so thoroughly intertwined the browser in the operating system that it became a potentially dangerous operation upgrading. It's for this reason that old version of Internet Explorer lived on long past their presumed expiration date, with IT departments hesitant to upgrade. This system interweave yielded some advantages, such as embedded browsers in divergent applications such as Quickbooks, yet it came at the cost of greatly reduced agility of the foundation. Compare this to a product like Firefox that exists largely as a software island, where uptake of new, feature-enhanced versions happens at an extremely rapid pace. Taking advantage of the new functionality in Opera 9 or Firefox 2(*2) would be no more risky, for most users, than upgrading their copy of WinTetris.
Microsoft won the browser war, and seeing how this new platform could actually undermine their own business, and reduce dependency on the Windows platform, the team was dispersed far and wide. All work on Internet Explorer, outside of emergency security fixes, was stopped. The internet world that had now come to rely largely upon the rapidly evolving Internet Explorer now saw absolutely no progress, while inside Microsoft they strategized how best to build Windows-specific technologies to pull developers and users back (such as XAML and one-touch deployment), tying them once against specifically to the Microsoft platform.
Five years+ on, the tide is slowly shifting, and Firefox is rapidly gaining marketshare, and the capable Opera browser continues to idle at a low level. Among sites catering to the IT/software development market, Firefox use is dominant. Public websites that demand Internet Explorer are quickly going extinct, and cast considerable doubt on the prowess of their creators.
Even if Internet Explorer 7 were a much more exciting product than it has proven thus far, I would still advocate against it.
We saw previously how Microsoft used the browser market only while it was in her interest, and then promptly abandoned its users when it wasn't, and there is no reason to think the same won't continue. Having users rush to Internet Explorer 7, killing interest (and thus the speed of development for) competitors won't do the web any good when Microsoft promptly stops development again, enticing you to dump this crazy web thing and embrace the next evolution of fat apps. Given that the browser is largely contrary to Microsoft's business interests, it seems an outcome that is inevitable.
Indeed, Internet Explorer 7 was originally only slated to come out for Longhorn (now Vista), as a sort of carrot to interest users in the otherwise boring upgrade, however the endless slips of Vista, coupled with rumors of Google entering the browser fray (which they have indirectly through some healthy financial support of the Mozilla Foundation), led them to revise their plans. Yet it still remains that some of the most valuable improvements of IE 7 will only be available if you upgrade to Vista (so if you're running IE7 on XP, you're running a sort of IE7-lite). Compare this to Firefox, where the exact same browser, and largely the same set of superlative extensions, runs on a huge range of operating systems, from obsolete to cutting edge: Firefox has no agenda to get you to upgrade your operating system, so such a differentiation doesn't exist, and you can take advantage of advanced cavas elements and svg right now.
Why You Shouldn't Care About Internet Explorer 7
*- Based upon the great success they had with the .NET marketing wave, Microsoft is now widely branding their products and technologies with the prefix "Windows", so instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), it's Windows Internet Explorer (WIE? WinIE?), or perhaps Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer. This is to try to get the unrecognized name "Windows" out in the marketplace.
*2 - Apart from Firefox extensions, which are becoming a bit of a problem with each new version of Firefox. The break rate of extensions is so high that it's creating the sort of resistance to change that used to happen with Internet Explorer. The Firefox team really needs to solidify their API, allowing new extensions to take advantage of newer interfaces without breaking the existing extensions.
When time affords, I've been looking over two widely hyped web betas - Riya and Ether.
Riya is a "next generation" Flickr online photo web app, enabled with facial and text recognition. Expectations about the facial and text recognition have hugely scaled back from the hysterical claims being made months ago (now they're giving long lists of caveats, warning that it's just getting started and that you should focus more on the photo album capabilities). Given that this is supposed to be the site's killer feature, it will be interesting to see where they go with that. I'm going to try it out with a load of test photos and see how it compares.
Ether is a rather interesting service that arranges calls through phone service providers and clients, charging a, ahem, "pimp fee" for the service. It's quite a clever idea, and can greatly simplify the infrastructure and billing requirements for small phone service providers. On the downside it requires callers to register with Ether, which is a requirement that will definitely reduce acceptance (if it was "976" style billing, where the billing automatically goes on the phone bill, I would imagine it would do better, though of course that isn't really possible globally).
I can't really see a huge market for this service, but they've built quite a nice web app for the system, and the phone infrastructure seems to work well.
Potentially it could be used for easily billing out phone support for those who follow the software development model of "release the software for free and then charge for support".
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Dennis Forbes
1-888-MY-ETHER ext.
01384785
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(Note: I don't actually expect anyone to call that, as telephone style services aren't really my forte. Perhaps if I got in the astrology industry it would have more utility).
On the topic of neat web services, and while thinking of Ether, there's another clever one I was pointed to recently - http://www.jajah.com/.
For, I believe, the 7th or 8th time, something from here has sat on the front page of Reddit for over 12 hours.
I find this amazing: I don't cheaply pander to the Reddit crowd (though some would say this front page hitting entry did, that was not my intention to), and I don't write entries specifically targeting what I think would do well there.
I am honoured.
Of course if I wrote entries targeting what I thought would do well on Reddit, they'd probably do terribly, quickly getting moderated into the sub-zero range. Such is the nature of presumptions like that.
