Jeffrey McManus

As a reminder, I've moved this blog to http://blog.jeffreymcmanus.com. New posts will appear there, not here.

If you are reading this post in an RSS reader, you have the old feed. To read new posts, you'll need to subscribe to the new feed, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/JHFw.

A NetNewsWire user told me last week that she was having trouble subscribing to the new feed; upgrading to the newest version of NetNewsWire seemed to fix the problem.

I took my own advice and snagged a domain name where my personal stuff will live henceforth. I also used this as an excuse to move the blog from Typepad to Movable Type. So: the new blog is at blog.jeffreymcmanus.com.

If you're reading this via RSS, it means you are subscribed to the old feed, which doesn't point to the new blog. You will want to resubscribe to the new feed, which is here.

The archives here will continue to exist at this domain until September-ish, but the new stuff will all go up at blog.jeffreymcmanus.com.

Link: Why Your Business Blog Shouldn't Be On BlogSpot.com.

"No problem, we thought, Google is nice enough to provide a programming interface to support this. In fact, they have multiple such APIs (application programming interfaces). As it turns out, neither of the versions of these interfaces that Google provides works completely. One version doesn't let you migrate comments (an important part of many blogs). The other doesn't let you move more than a few dozen articles - period. Basically, Google has seemingly made it intentionally difficult to migrate off of their platform. This is just annoying. We ended up writing a fair amount of custom code and jumping through a few hoops to get all of the data migrated over (which we finally did). But, this was much harder than it should have been, and we're trained professionals (so please, don't try this at home). If you're not a programmer, chances are you won't be able to do this yourself. It shouldn't be that hard."

I know that Wordpress does a good job of letting you liberate your data and move it around; I'm thinking about moving the four or five blogs that I maintain onto a single server -- the fact that all of them are either in Wordpress already or are importable by Wordpress is going to be helpful.

Link: Task of Shooting Down Satellite Begins

"Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who left Washington Wednesday for a week of meetings in Asia, has been empowered by President Bush to issue the order to shoot down the satellite."

You know, people kick around the word "empower" a lot, but you have to admit, when the President of the United States orders you to use your navy to fire a rocket into orbit to destroy a spy satellite, that's what I would call empowerment.

I wish that my two-year-old were more cogent so I could explain this to him -- rockets, boats, and explosions, all wrapped into one. Only if Thomas the Tank Engine played the role of the Secretary of Defense and Sir Topham Hatt were president could it possibly enhance the already pornographic appeal.

Link: In Miami, Cuban Exiles Unmoved

"Senator McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that despite Mr. Castro’s action, 'freedom for Cuba is not yet at hand.' 'We must press the Castro regime to release all political prisoners unconditionally, to legalize all political parties, labor union and free media, and to schedule internationally monitored elections,' Mr. McCain said in a statement."

Dear Republicans,

Would it be possible to make all that stuff happen in the United States first before we sweat it with other countries?

Yours truly,

The Voters

Link: Ex - President Bush Says Attacks on McCain "Unfair"

"Former President George H.W. Bush urged disgruntled conservatives on Monday to rally around John McCain, calling their criticism of the Republican presidential front-runner 'grossly unfair.'

The father of President George W. Bush said he was annoyed by attacks within the conservative wing of the Republican Party against the Arizona senator, the all-but-certain Republican nominee to face Democrats in November election.

Many conservatives distrust McCain because of his moderate views on illegal immigration and campaign finance reform and for having originally voted against President Bush's tax cuts. Persuading them all to vote for McCain in November will be a central challenge. 'His character was forged in the crucible of war. His commitment to America is beyond any doubt,' the 41st U.S. president, flanked by his wife Barbara, told a joint news conference with McCain in a Houston airport hanger. 'You know, if you've been around the track you hear these criticisms and I think they are grossly unfair. He's got a ... sound conservative record but he's not above reaching out to the other side,' he said."

Sort of sad that McCain has to suffer its slings and arrows, since he's a reasonably principled campaigner, but wouldn't it be ironic if the Republican swift boat slander machine were responsible for their party's anointed candidate going down in flames in November?

To hear the New York Times' John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you'd think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.

The writers did take the time to interview someone who did a Unix-to-Microsoft port of a web site after it was purchased by Microsoft, but that port was done eight years ago. And Microsoft's 1998 Hotmail acquisition (which some people consider to be the gold standard for Microsoft cocking up an acquisition of a *nix-based web property).

So the question is, from a technical integration perspective, could things have possibly changed in the past eight to ten years?

Well, of course they have. The one guy with direct knowledge that Markoff and Richtel interviewed (who now works for O'Reilly and should really know better) was probably migrating from Solaris to some version of Windows NT. One could imagine that LAMP as we know it today was not in the picture. And there are a broad spectrum of software engineering best practices that were not in place back then which go unmentioned in the article.

So ultimately, the piece leaves out several key facts that almost completely scuttle their thesis:

1. Microsoft has worked with Zend to make PHP run well on Windows Server. In my February 1 post on the merger, I theorized that Microsoft did the Zend deal specifically to make it easier for them to digest companies (like Yahoo!) that extensively utilize PHP. The Markoff/Richtel piece does not mention the Microsoft/Zend deal at all. It does mention that PHP's inventor works for Yahoo, but it's a fact that Zend contributes far more to the language today and this has been the case for many years. At any rate, a reader of the Markoff piece could come away with the impression that PHP doesn't run on windows at all, which is totally bogus.
2. The hellacious Unix-to-Windows migrations of the late 1990s often hinged on the ability to get Oracle running on Windows, which was a big challenge then and remains a challenge today. But Yahoo uses very little Oracle in its customer-facing properties; the big database in use there is MySQL, which runs quite well on Windows today. I wouldn't guess that Microsoft would migrate MySQL-on-FreeBSD to MySQL-on-Windows, but they could do it as an intermediate step if they wanted to get a merged Yahoo! running on Windows. But there is no mention of databases at all in the Markoff piece.
3. FreeBSD, while prevalent at Yahoo!, is not actually the operating system that most companies in Silicon Valley (or anywhere) use. I've heard more than one Yahoo! engineer state that the company's choice of that operating system is a hindrance for a number of reasons. Migrating to Anything But FreeBSD (whether it's Linux, Windows Server, or Solaris) will have several key benefits -- not the least of which being the fact that very few recent college grads are learning FreeBSD today. Another implication for this is that when Yahoo! acquires a company, they acquire that company's operating system choice as well (all the company's recent acquisitions, including Flickr, run on Linux, not FreeBSD).
4. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have made extensive investments in XML web services, both inside and outside the firewall, which should ease technical integration somewhat. You may recall that XML web services were considered cutting-edge and exotic in 1999. There is no mention of web services in the Markoff piece.
5. The Windows Server that Microsoft sells today is not the piece o' crap that Windows NT circa 1999 was. Period. The fact that Microsoft's server technologies no longer suck is key, but it's not mentioned in the Markoff piece.
   
6. Probably the most ill-informed assertion is that Yahoo! is totally open source or that Microsoft is totally proprietary -- or that either of these things would matter on a technical integration level even if they were completely true. But let's imagine for a moment that someone needed to hack at the kernel of Windows Server to perform some Yahoo!/Microsoft integration task (which seems far-fetched, but let's just imagine). Are we really to think that getting access to that code would be a deal-killing problem?

  knowing me knowing you. by kendrak.

Some people — crazy people, but good crazy — mail their rental DVDs back to Netflix with movie reviews written on post-it notes. The crazier among them take photos of the post-it review and post them to the Notes to Netflix pool on Flickr.

I've been doing a lot of work lately on behalf of clients who are looking to deploy applications to virtual data centers. When I first started working as a technology consultant in the '90s, it was a given that if you wanted to have a web application, you had to buy a bunch of servers and rent out a cabinet in a data center somewhere. Now the notion of spending all that money on hardware that will go obsolete in a few years seems like insanity most of the time (particularly when the size of the audience for your application is completely unknown). When I first started a hosted web service in 1999 people judged us by how many servers my company owned. Now when I tell them "we don't own any servers at all" they nod knowingly.

It's great that we have more cost-efficient virtualization options today than we had ten years ago. Unfortunately, though, virtualization is a disruptive technology, which means that there are incumbents (including hardware and software vendors) who are digging in rather than adapting their technology and business models to the new realities of the marketplace. If the economy of 2008 dictates that IT managers put more emphasis on cost-containment as they did in the recession of the early 1990s, the pressure to do more with virtualization will only increase.

Microsoft in particular is far behind the curve on virtualization -- maybe not with respect to its own virtualization products, but with respect to its one-CPU/one-license business model for its software products and operating systems. Rather than seeing virtualization as an opportunity to charge a lucrative toll for dialtone computing, Microsoft's first response was to make their license terms more restrictive (by preventing users from deploying Windows Vista to desktop virtual machines unless they pay for the bloated, expensive version). I know that they've relaxed this restriction for Vista in the last year, but that doesn't matter to me since Vista will not likely touch any computer I own for at least a year or two, if ever. (When I do my own development work today or do .NET demos at VSLive, I run Windows Server 2003 in a virtual machine under Parallels on my Mac.)

But the desktop is neither here nor there. I'm more concerned about the way that Microsoft is missing the boat with respect to server licensing. They are getting their butts kicked by LAMP, particularly here in Silicon Valley, but also internationally, and their poor virtualization story is a big reason for this.

We're currently working on an out-of-band innovation project for one of the world's largest companies. The company went with us specifically they wanted an outsider's perspective on what they wanted to do -- but also because they didn't want to deal with a bunch of bureaucracy and institutional hurdles to shipping the application.

We could have written the application in .NET (which I am a world-renowned expert with) or in PHP (which I am just now coming up to speed on). Paying for Windows Server licenses would not have been an issue for this client. So given that, you'd think that that free operating system would be at a huge disadvantage (particularly since the developer who's going to write this application is operating outside of his area of expertise).

But we came to the conclusion that it would be more efficacious to write and deploy the application using Ubuntu and LAMP mainly because the story with Windows virtualization is so totally ridiculous. After looking around, it does not appear that there is a product out there that supports Windows Server on a virtualized basis in a manner similar to Amazon EC2 (giving us the ability to spin up many instances of a cloned server configuration quickly) or Slicehost (which also provides virtual hosting based on several different Linux operating system configurations at low cost -- less than EC2, actually -- and can spin up a new server instance within a minute or two).

None of these hosting options really work with Windows because of Windows' licensing model.

What would Windows support for an EC2-style virtualization product look like? Microsoft would provide a preconfigured machine image of Windows Server for use on EC2. Users would be able to spin up one or more instances of the server in less than a minute (no waiting for 40 minutes for the operating system to copy its files onto the virtual machine and no running Windows Update five times with a reboot each time). Just providing something like that would be a huge benefit in and of itself.

But -- and this is the important part -- you'd be able to pay for your operating system license by the minute instead of by the CPU. If you do the math on this (a $400 license for the web server edition of the Windows Server OS, divided by 8,760 hours in a year, factoring in the expected period of amortization for an operating system product which is three to five years), it should be possible for Microsoft to offer a bare-bones utility computing edition of Windows Server through Amazon EC2 for no more than one or two cents an hour. If users wanted other stuff (like a version of SQL Server that doesn't artificially throttle the amount of memory you can utilize), you could pay another few cents per hour. (Or you could just run MySQL which works quite well on Windows.)

I should reiterate that this is not a matter of "your operating system costs money" versus "their operating system costs nothing". Businesses are always willing to pay more when the value is there. This is really a matter of who is more of a pain in the ass to do business with. Or not do business with, as the case may be.

It's Super Tuesday; voters here in California and 23 other states will go to the polls to select candidates in their parties' primaries.

I'm convinced that the damage that the Republican administration has done to this country will take a generation to repair. I lost my taste some time ago for the tenor of political debate in this country, and I have very little patience for the kind of candidate that will make equivocation and political gamesmanship the order of the day.

Although conventional wisdom states that the two remaining Democratic candidates are pretty much aligned on all the big issues, my vote is being informed by two things: 1) She voted for the war and 2) My discomfort with the notion of the White House bouncing back and forth between two families for decades on end.

This is not how government of/by/for the people was intended to work. At all.

So I'm voting for Barack Obama today.

In a related note, NPR began a story this morning by describing Bush as "the current occupant of the White House" which must have been a nod to the term that author Sarah Vowell uses to describe him. She can't bring herself to use his name, ever: she calls him "the current president".

Link: Gluttonous Rite Survives Without Silverware

"You've got the tender beef, butter, salt, French fries, beer -- all your major food groups. But it's very unique to North Jersey. I go to other places and nobody's heard of it."

1. Zend and Microsoft have done a lot of work in the last year to make PHP run well on Windows. I never understood why Microsoft devoted resources to that, but now it is clear: it's going to make technical integration between the two organizations go much more smoothly.
2. This will hopefully be the death knell of the awful "Windows Live" branding for consumer web stuff.
3. Maybe now somebody will release a .NET OpenID 2.0 library that actually works.
4. Big losers here from a tech supplier perspective: FreeBSD and MySQL.
5. Another potential big loser is Adobe; having a gigantic global audience will help with adoption of Microsoft's various Adobe-killing initiatives like Silverlight, which would never otherwise have penetrated the consumer web without a large built-in audience like Yahoo's.

My wife (who, like me, used to work for Yahoo!) rolled her eyes this morning when I told her about the Microsoft offer. We used to excitedly hear rumors of this kind of thing every three to six months but they were only rumors. Now it's the real deal, and I have to say, I'm excited (and not just because of the 48% bump in YHOO this morning on the news).

I think this is a good thing for both companies. It will be a good thing for most of the people within Yahoo! who are left after the two businesses combine, although one would be naive to think that a lot of people aren't going to lose their jobs because of this. But we knew that there was going to be a big restructuring anyway; my sense is that the Microsoft-led post-acquisition restructuring may cut deeper but may wind up with a better, more focused organization in the long term. My guess is that the Jerry Yang restructuring was going to nip and tuck at underperforming sales and marketing people; I assume that the Steve Ballmer reorganization will take aim at underperforming managers, too.

I think there are things in each companies' DNA that the other company lacks. Microsoft was always skittish about having a meaningful physical presence in Silicon Valley and they are utterly clueless about how to do consumer Internet; that could end here with the stroke of a pen. For its part, Yahoo always paid lip service to transforming itself into a platform but could never devote the resources to making it happen.

Anytime the Microsoft rumor started up around Yahoo!, you'd hear embittered griping by people (mostly engineers who had been with the company for more than a few years) who'd say they'd never in a million years go to work for the evil Microsoft. They now have the chance to put their money where their mouth is, but I suspect that the people who haven't left already will stick around for a while. It's really not worth quitting your job because someone is trying to separate you from your beloved FreeBSD.

Update: Over breakfast we were wondering whether another prospective suitor might step in to bid against Microsoft. Google probably wouldn't for a couple reasons, not the least of which being that they may have just sunk $4.6 billion into wireless spectrum. On his blog, Fred Wilson theorizes maybe News Corp. but probably not, and since there's a credit crunch on, he doesn't see anyone else stepping up.

For business owners in the United States, the last day of January means it's time for you (or your accountant) to issue 1099s and W-2s to your contractors and employees. For me, this means I get to do my annual trip to IRS.gov to download the forms.

As government web sites go, IRS.gov isn't terrible -- certainly not as bad as it used to be. But it doesn't support certain common use cases (like downloading a whole bunch of PDF forms at once) as easily as it could.

You can go to this page on IRS.gov to select forms to download from a list. The list is pretty difficult to navigate, and the filenames for the PDFs you download don't have the names of the forms in them (just their numbers, ugh).

I found that downloading a bunch of forms at once from this page was much easier with the Firefox extension DownThemAll!. You can go to the IRS.gov search results page, then tell DownThemAll! to download all the .pdf files on that page with just a few clicks. Handy.

Link: Steer Escapes From Ohio Slaughterhouse

"Searchers on the ground and in a sheriff's department helicopter Monday were looking for an Angus steer that postponed its date with a slaughterhouse by bolting out a gate that had been inadvertently left open.

The more than 1,000-pound animal escaped from a slaughterhouse holding pen Monday morning and ran into the woods of suburban Cincinnati, according to Colerain Township police and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office.

The steer was last seen heading into woods several blocks north of Stehlin's Meat Market and Interstate 275, said Dick Stehlin, co-owner of the meatpacking business. He said the bovine should be approached with caution. 'It's not, say, a mean animal or anything like that, it's just sort of in a panic stage,' Stehlin said. 'It's just out running, not even knowing where it's heading.'"

Oh, it knows exactly where it's heading. Away.

While browsing one of the Yahoo! developer groups for information on something else, I noticed that somebody accidentally published a spec for an upcoming Calendar API.

I tried to move this forward way back in 2005, so it's exciting to finally see this coming, although since I left Yahoo! I've started using 30Boxes (which has its own API) and I'm pretty happy with it.

Seeing this post from Miguel about a major cock-up pertaining to the developer download experience in Mono made me think about the platform companies we've been advising.

Companies often trick themselves into thinking that every developer who discovers their stuff will automatically do whatever it takes to use their stuff. But developers actually make very calculated cost-benefit choices about what technologies they want to adopt -- in a world in which time is at a premium, doing nothing is always an option. If developers feel jerked around or not fully supported, they'll turn their attention elsewhere. Certainly there are some developers who will slog through anything to get to what they want. But ultimately developer adoption is a numbers game; in our experience a sizable percentage of developers who encounter a platform will abandon it without adopting if the developer discovery experience isn't fairly solid.

We advise our clients to own their platform discovery process from the first pageview to the time a developer performs a download, and to test this flow frequently. We generally recommend against permitting any part of the developer discovery process to be owned by a third party. A good example of this is Sourceforge -- what they provide in terms of hosting and presence does not make up for their horrible user experience and very unfortunate practice of showing advertisements for competing products at the very moment the developer is about to hit the download button for your product.

One of the consulting products we provide for clients with existing platform products is a developer discovery analysis. The idea here is to go through the process of getting up to speed with a technology platform, and then provide recommendations to the platform provider (our client) as to what they can do to optimize the process of developer discovery. Often the recommendations we make are things that the client knows should be fixed, but often our recommendations are enough to motivate them to actually fix the problems.

This is a fairly quick way to get very detailed feedback (with screen shots, written recommendations for remediation, etc.). For start-ups that aren't quite to the point where they can afford a product manager, it's a cheap way to get a quick dose of help in the area of platform product management and developer user experience optimization.

Link: Yahoo Reported to Plan Hundreds of Layoffs

"Over the weekend, some blogs reported that Yahoo was considering layoffs of 10 to 20 percent of its work force. But the people close to the company, who discussed Yahoo’s layoff plans on condition that they not be identified, said the cuts would likely be in the 'hundreds.'"

I don't even think it's necessary to comment about how perfect this photo is of Hillary in Las Vegas. Study it for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about it that is not hilarious.

From the NY Times' election blog.

Link: Politics Wrapped in a Clothing Ad - New York Times.

"In a new series of ads, American Apparel is moving in a political direction. The cause is immigration reform, and the ads say in part that the status quo 'amounts to an apartheid system' and should be overhauled to create a legal path for undocumented workers to gain citizenship in the United States."

The piece goes on to quote a dessicated professor who is an expert on immgration, who states that the "apartheid" term can't possibly be accurate because these people are breaking the law. Well, tiger, I gotta tell ya -- apartheid was the law of the land in South Africa, too. If what we're doing were not apartheid then we'd be building a big anti-immigrant wall on the Canadian border, too, wouldn't we?

Woke up this morning to the Sun/MySQL news; my initial thought was "uh oh". My big concern is whether Sun will continue to support languages-that-are-not-Java as well as MySQL has been doing.

But my concerns were at least partially laid to rest when MySQL's CEO Marten Mickos explicitly called out their support for lots of different languages (including C#) and said they'll continue to do so in the future. That's good to hear, although as soon as the ink dries on the acquisition, it won't be solely up to Marten to determine how much support Sun provides for a competing technology stack that Scott McNealy once referred to as "a joke". In fairness, that 2003 quote did more to reveal McNealy's own ignorance regarding his competitors' products than anything else, and of course he's no longer calling the shots at Sun on a day-to-day basis. But still.

This is a concern for everyone because MySQL comprises the foundations of the technology stacks of so many companies, including Approver.com (which uses .NET and MySQL). It's also a key component in the stacks of many of Platform Associates clients including Alfresco and others. On his blog, Alfresco's CTO John Newton is raving about the opportunities the deal will provide. If he's happy, then I'm happy.

This is not to be missed: Fake Steve Jobs attended today's MacWorld keynote and live-Twittered it. It's vulgar and hilarious.

I think that Dave was one of the twelve people who bought an Apple TV before they made it work right and lowered the price; it'll be interesting to see what his upgrade experience is like.

Not excited about the MacBook Air, even if it is impossibly thin, etc. I don't need a smaller screen and a smaller hard drive, I need a bigger hard drive, 3G wireless everywhere for a fixed rate of $20 a month, and more battery life. And more memory. And a pony.

Paying $20 apiece to equip our two iPod Touch devices with software that should have been there in the first place will make me feel like a choad, but I'll probably do it at some point, maybe.

A movie rental that expires after 24 hours is still a stupid idea, particularly for people whose kids constantly screw up their plans. Extending the intentional bit-rot factor, even slightly (like to 27 hours) would be a big help. But even then, this feels like the flip side of the Blockbuster coin that consumers have been rejecting in droves in favor of the Netflix model. Instead of dinging you with endless late fees they simply disappear the movie you paid for. Dumb model.

A wireless terabyte network attached storage device for $500 is kind of interesting.

Still, nothing to make me leap out of my chair and run to the Apple store this year. (A 3G iPhone, maybe with more storage, might have done that this time around, and I will probably want to replace my mid-2006 MacBook Pro before the end of 2008, but there's no rush on that.)

I'll be speaking at VSLive San Francisco the first week of April. This time around I'll be giving three talks:

• Creating Facebook Applications Using .NET
• Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax (an updated version of the talk I gave in New York last year)
• Creating iPhone Applications with ASP.NET

If you're going to be in town for the conference and want to set aside some time to get together and chat (particularly if you're interested in getting some consulting help) please leave a comment.

Link: Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store

"Sony BMG, the music company, announced Thursday that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month."

Buh-bye DRM. Buh-bye now.

Link: Tata launches Nano, the 1-lakh car

I don't care about the car necessarily but I wanted to take a moment and celebrate the awesomeness that is the word "lakh". It means "100,000" and it's what Indians use to express a big number (the way we use "million"). So in this case, we're talking about a car that will cost 100,000 rupees, less than $2,500. Not bad unless you had your heart set on going faster than 35 mph.