When you pay for software/services upfront you know how much it is going to cost right away.

via: Fragility of Free — The Brooks Review

Great post from Ben Brooks on why he likes paying for things. I agree, I much prefer an honest transaction, where I am the customer, and I’m giving them money for goods or services. Of course, this is also a good place to draw a line between free and open source. If it’s free, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold. This applies to web services too. Gmail is free, but it is not open source.

In Ben’s theory, if Gmail were to be shut down, there’s nothing we could do about it. If it were open source, we could open up our own Gmail on our own servers. Furthermore, if Tweetie were open source, we could create a fork without the #dickbar. I think what Ben is really concerned with is the continuance of software that he enjoys, which is where I agree with him, and why I prefer my software to either be paid-for commercial versions or open source. Both models have a greater chance of sustainability than “free”.

There used to be a line between having a Mac, and owning a Mac, and that line was drawn with Quicksilver. Quicksilver changed the way I thought about using my computer in a very fundamental way. It led me to think more about telling it what to do, instead of clicking about asking it to do something. It led me to think about mastering my tools like a craftsman, choosing my tools with great care and thought. Quicksilver was my first step towards owning my Mac.

At first, Quicksilver is a difficult application to get your head wrapped around. At least it was a few years ago. It’s an application launcher, a file browser, a mail client, a basic text editor, a database manager… and more. What truly sums up an explanation of Quicksilver is that it’s a unified interaction paradigm for the Mac. You speak to it in sentences, tell it what you want, and then what you want done with it.

Here’s what I said about it in a paper I wrote in 2006:

Using a Mac can be made much more productive by installing the free application named Quicksilver from Blacktree. Quicksilver runs in the background and waits until the user presses a pre- defined key combination. Once the main Quicksilver window is available, the user types in the first few letters of what he is looking for, followed by a tab, and then the first few letters of what the user wants to do with the item selected. For example, to launch the Safari web browser, the user could type “S tab return” and the application would launch. Quicksilver is a major leap forward in human computer interaction, however it currently has a very steep learning curve and takes some getting used to.

I’m so glad to see Quicksilver back in active development again. I’ve looked at the source code, and it’s a daunting task, but it seems like the group who’s adopted it is a dedicated bunch. They’ve set up a twitter account, and a blog; both of which are worth following.

There are so many things that Quicksilver does that I’ve forgotten how much I’ve missed them. Appending a text file on the fly, adding an event to iCal, shooting off a quick email, searching the web at DuckDuckGo, keyboard access to an apps menu, moving files, printing files, the list goes on, and on.

I suppose this is a testament to open source, that a dead project can be resurrected by a few who want the app to continue. Here’s hoping that it not only continues, but thrives.

The devastation from weather related disasters in the past few years has been overwhelming. Japan was ready, as ready as you can be for a disaster of this scale, Haiti was not, nor was Christchurch.

If you’ve thought about giving to Red Cross before, now is a good time. Text REDCROSS to 90999. Information

It’s not really a science, it’s more of an art. If you are careful, and attentive, you can see when someone starts working this particular art form. In a technical discussion, bit by bit, you start getting lost in the conversation, wondering how we got on to this topic, when it doesn’t have anything to do with what needs to be accomplished. Then you realize that the same guy has been talking for the past few minutes, and he’s been working his art, casting his spell, and the whole room has fallen under it. He’s convinced everyone in the room that he knows so much more, that his knowledge on the topic is so vastly superior to anyone present that no one is on the same level. Which is exactly where he wants your mind to be, because the next step after that is agreeing with whatever he wants to do.

There are several problems with the scenario described above. First, that the culture of the organization would allow a meeting to continue when the topic has been lost, and confusion has taken over. Second, there’s a good chance that the guy throwing out acronyms and buzz-words doesn’t understand the topic, or how the acronyms he’s spewing relate to the topic. He probably has a vague concept, he looked it up on Google, maybe even read about someone else doing it on TechCrunch, but he’s missing the deep understanding of the subject to speak with real authority on the matter. Einstein said:

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

If things are getting deep and confusing, and the guy doing all the talking is talking too fast, and you start to see the same looks around the room, it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to say “wait, stop, I don’t understand how we got on this topic, let’s get back to how we can fix X”. It is at this point you see what the guy is really made of. If he’s good, he’ll respond by saying something along the lines of “ok, no problem, let me walk through it a bit slower so everyone is one the same page”. If not, he’ll try to push back, either with intimidation or more technical jargon, or he’ll change the subject, which might be best for everyone.

The most important problem that should be addressed directly is that the guy doing the talking is behaving just like a schoolyard bully. Like any bully, the one and only way to deal with him is to call him out. Make your stand, demand an answer. Of course, making a stand means that you are going to have to prepare first. You can’t stand up to him if you don’t have a solid grasp on the situation. But, if you do, if you know your tech inside and out, by all means call him out the first time he starts throwing around terms that you know don’t belong. After a few times, he will start to acknowledge your presence a little differently. He’ll start to think a little harder, and choose his words a little more carefully. An end result that will benefit everyone involved.

Starting next year, every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Apotheker said.

via: Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth - Businessweek

Well, this will be interesting. Porting WebOS, which is Linux based, to run on x86 hardware should not be too difficult. What will be difficult is managing the user interface. How are they going to integrate the touch based UI of WebOS with the standard PC?

Apple is solving some of these problems with new gestures and interaction changes with OS X 10.7, but they are not porting iOS to the Mac.

Also, dual-booting is a pain. I used to dual-boot Windows and Linux, before I started using my Mac at work, and the problem I’d run into was that I never knew where my data was. Did I save that file in the Linux partition? Did I accept that meeting invite on the Windows side?

I’m going to assume that HP plans on including WebOS as an option for fast, almost instantaneous boot to use a limited subset of the computers capabilities, and not as a full-blown Linux install. In that case, no one will ever know its there, and will continue to boot straight into Windows.

If HP is really serious about this, I’d suggest that they not install Windows on their machines at all, and ship them with an enhanced, more desktop ready, version of WebOS as the one and only operating system.

We charged money for a good or service

I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project sips daiquiri. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn’t involve repackaging them as a product.

via: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog)

Exactly. I’ve said before that I prefer an honest transaction with a company, where I am clearly the customer, and am not volunteering to be part of the product being sold.

This post by the owner of Pinboard is full of interesting information. For example, the service is hosted on three (now four) large, dedicated HP servers, which, according to Netcraft, are running Ubuntu and Apache. His database servers are MySQL, with a simple Master-Slave replication setup. I especially like this part:

It has become accepted practice in web app development to design in layers of application caching from the outset. This is especially true in the world of Rails and other frameworks, where there is a tendency to treat one’s app like a high-level character in a role-playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras, capistranos, and other mithril armor into a mighty “application stack”.

I had just come out of Rails consulting when I started Pinboard and really wanted to avoid this kind of overengineering, capitalizing instead on the fact that it was 2010 and a sufficiently simple website could run ridiculously fast with no caching if you just threw hardware at it. …

If you offer MySQL this kind of room, your data is just going to climb in there and laugh at you no matter what kind of traffic it gets.

Over-engineering is something we deal with at my workplace, and something I’ve been guilty of myself. Which is part of the reason I’ve been looking at moving away from virtualization, clouds, and other buzzwords and returning to the simplest, most reliable setup possible. A concept that Pinboard has nailed.

There is no profit margin on mediocre. While every company including ours has its hiccups as it grows we set the bar on day one to offer a premium service and priced it as such. We are unapologetic about it.

via: [Our Lean Startup

WordPress Hosting Blog

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I’m always wary of free services. I like knowing who I’m dealing with and what our business relationship is, preferably with me being the customer, and them providing me with goods or services in exchange for money. Very simple. Services based on advertising revenue will eventually start preferring the advertiser over the user of the service.

For example, take the recent Twitter app update. Twitter is a great service, fun to use and interesting in how it allows you to connect to people. But, it’s free, and since its free we have never been Twitter’s customers. As such, the recent update introduces a new “quickbar” which annoyingly obscures the tweets we want to read with a trending topic we couldn’t care less about. This happened because Twitter needs to please the people who are giving them money. I would much prefer the ability to pay for the service. Paying for Twitter would reduce spam and refocus the company on what really matters; people.

37 Signals comments on a trend I’ve been noticing for a few years. Data centers and IT departments are not the core competency of most businesses, they are a requirement of operating the business. Or, at least, they have been for the past thirty years or so. Businesses are now seeing the benefits of moving what they are not good at, controlling IT, to what they are good at, which is whatever makes them money.

You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

via: The end of the IT department - (37signals)

John Gruber from Daring Fireball has a comment that matches what my thoughts have been when I try to explain the consolidation I see in the sysadmin field:

Certain of the comments on Hansson’s post remind me of this quote from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I’ve even heard that virtualization technologies and cloud services will provide more opportunity for sysadmins. That makes little sense to me. People are assuming that the work in the future will be just like the work of the past. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of work, especially work that revolves around technology. It grows, it changes, it merges into new things. Consider the iPhone.

Disruptive technology changes things, and the iPhone was, and continues to be, disruptive. It is powerful, both in means of hardware capacity, and the operating system and software that it runs. How long will it be before the iPhone, or one of it’s many competitors, completely supplants laptops as the computing device of choice for people? I imagine a future where you dock your phone to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your one and only computer. I don’t think its too far away. When that happens, how much need will there be for a traditional IT department?

Software is becoming simpler and easier to use. Hardware is becoming more reliable, and longer lasting. And, most importantly, harder to break. This comment from the 37 Signals post stood out to me as a common misconception in the IT industry:

I’ve “done” IT for multinationals and startups, and the thing that is most obvious, is that if you leave the kids alone with their toys, you end up with a network which hardly ever works, more viruses than you can count, the mail server acting as a spam relay, the company being raided by FAST , the fans overheating in the PCs, the aircon never having been considered in the server cupboard, the backup plan being a mystery… need I go on?

No, you need not go on. Because every single argument stated is a symptom of the Microsoftian workplace. A computer on every desk, and every computer running Windows. Since Windows is easy to break, people break it. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Over the years people have been trained to “click here, and here, and once a week here, but no where else or you’ll break it”. People don’t need to become smarter about computers, computers need to be easier for normal people to use. When they are, when the computer is as simple (or, is) an iPhone, the need for things like anti-virus and defragmenting schedules, and wallpaper policies go out the window.

Desktop support departments are a symptom of misguided use of technology in the workplace. What is the purpose of that Dell on your desk? To assist you in performing whatever task your job really is. Perhaps if you break your tools, you are not really fit to be doing the job in the first place. If you don’t understand your tools, how can you be really good at what you do? Would you hire a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use a jigsaw?

Change is coming. I can feel it, see it on the horizon. Between web services, increased business specialization, and incredibly small and powerful computers, there is a shift in the culture of work brewing.

Alex Payne from Bank Simple sees it

Finally on the technology front, we’re deploying into Amazon’s cloud. Our information security architecture allowed for this even before Amazon announced PCI compliance; their support for these more stringent security standards is a happy bonus for us. Using AWS today is a no-brainer, particularly for an operation of our modest scale and performance requirements.

They are a bank, and they are gong to be using Amazon’s AWS. Independently responsible employees, outsourced data center, and no IT department. How long will your business hold on to the ’90s mentality of what IT needs to be.

I love these videos from Field Notes.

Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

If you take a moment to look around the room you are in now, what do you see? Are you surrounded by things that matter, and were built by people who care? Or, more likely, are you surrounded by mass produced, assembly line, imported goods that you honestly don’t believe will last all that long? I’ve been thinking about quality again, and how it applies to me, to what I do, and how I spend my time.

It started with our washing machine. After seven years, our washing machine looks like it’s on its last legs. Seven years sounds like a long time to have an appliance, but its really not. When our grandparents bought appliances they were built to last for thirty years, now they are built to last five. We called up a repair man who stopped by the house to take a look. He was an older guy, and didn’t bring the right tools for the job, so he just looked at the machine and told us his view of the model we own. He said that he had just told a customer that day that his washing machine, same model as ours, was not worth the cost to fix it, and that it would be cheaper and more economical to buy a new one. As older people do, he lamented the quality of todays machines, so I asked him what was being built today that was as good as the machines of the past.

He looked me in the eye and said “There are none.”

The repairman’s view of the world has become so pessimistic that he truly believes that there is nothing built for the common man worth buying. This is sad, but I believe he’s wrong. I believe it in part because I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro, in my opinion the best computer ever built. The perfect blend of power and portability, but more than that, an example of manufacturing excellence. Apple is a company that cares about details, and they are not alone. I believe we may be at the beginning of a renaissance of sorts, a return to traditionally crafted goods created by artisans and engineers.

These people have inspired me to do better, to be more, to remember the attention to detail that the Navy demanded of me. Take a minute to read these stories, watch their videos, and see where they are coming from.

Saddleback Leather, Coudal Partners, DODOcase, Blackbox Case, and finally, Staber Industries.

Staber may very well replace our Maytag washing machine. Its all they do.

We don’t have to live in a world where all of our things are replaceable, where everything around us falls apart after a couple of years of use. We don’t have to live in a world where everything has a computer chip and can’t be fixed if it breaks. We don’t have to live surrounded by junk. But that’s what the past thirty years of steadily declining quality of goods has taught us, it’s become a core belief that affects everything we do. We go to work, and sigh, and think, “here it is, another Monday…”, and do what we have to do until we can go home. Punch the clock, earn a paycheck, who cares if our work is any good? That’s wrong, and it doesn’t have to be like that.

Living in a world of quality goods and services starts with each one of us caring more about what we do with our lives, what we spend our money on, and most importantly, where and how we spend our time. No matter what you do, if it is writing software or changing oil, I want to encourage you to do your absolute best. Because no matter what you are doing, you make an impact on the world around you, you matter because you are here, and when you start to believe that what you do makes a difference, you start to care a little more, and when you care about your work, you make the world around you a little better every day.

So, today, as you go to work, or prepare for the next day, or think about what might come next…

be great.