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 • opinion

• Farewell PC, you have been virtualized
  This weekend an era came to an end, at least in my house. The last PC, dedicated to run a Microsoft OS got dismantled and put to rest for good.
  
  The year was 1982 or 1983, when I brought my first computer home, a Triumph-Adler Intel 8085A based Alphatronic with two disk-drives and 48KB RAM. The Alphatronic was not CP/M compatible but used the MOS operating system instead and came with BASIC, Fortran and Pascal compilers. Just like the original IBM PC, I replaced it with about 2 years later, the computer was rented from a local computer store. Still in high-school, I was contracted to write a laboratory billing system for a clinical laboratory and could not afford to buy the machines. It must have been 1984 or 1985 when I finally had the money to buy my first computer, a PC-Clone from Zenith Data Systems, with no harddrive but a 8MHz fast NEC V20 processor. Ever since that time, I had at least one PC in my home that was dedicated to run a Microsoft operating system. There was the 80386 based Gateway PC, several more beige boxes followed, and the last one of its kind was a small tower style PC with an ATX motherboard and a 2GHz Pentium-4 processor, with most components purchased from the local PC-Club store, which also closed its doors just a few months back. Since 2002 I have gradually replaced PCs with Macs and at home the computer landscape now only features Mac minis, Macbooks, and an Apple TV.
  The occasional need to run a Windows application can easily be satisfied by quickly warming-up a VM in VM-Ware Fusion, which I have conveniently stored on an external harddrive, and can therefore be used on any Mac.
  
  A sad farewell? Not really!
  

  
  
• WWDC 2008 - Final Thoughts
  I was in NYC, seeing the long lines going around the block the 5th Ave. Apple store, when the iPhone was launched in June 2007. People couldn't wait, getting their hands on the beautiful mobile phone, the one with the best user interface, and the only one with a useable Web browser. This year I was in San Fran. at Apple's worldwide developers conference, WWDC 2008, when the iPhone 3G was announced.
  In 2007 Apple launched a new product-line. In 2008, a new platform was born, already used by several hundreds of companies, with the help of several thousands of software developers, all creating custom applications running on that new platform.
  

  
  
• Just trying to keep larger numbers in perspective
  Sometimes it's hard to keep perspective and since the Democrats seem to be asking for another Economic Stimulus Package, I was wondering how much the 1st one was. I thought, I'd compare it to the cost of the Iraq War - not the whole thing, just to the new, additional spending request, and just for this year.
  
  The President just made a $178 billion war spending request, $135 billion is dedicated to the Iraq War, with $84 billion allocated for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2008 and $52 billion allocated for the first three months of Fiscal Year 2009.
  
  Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act of 2008:
  The bill totals $146 billion, but the business tax incentives, which encourage investment in FY08, would bring the total cost down to $117 billion over ten years.
  
  

  
  
• We are committed to open source, no really, we are.
  A couple days back, I had the chance to talk to the senior director of software development of one of the fastest growing private companies in the US. Offering Software as a Service, the company uses lots of libraries but mainly MySQL and Java on the back-end and Apache and PHP to generate the presentation, nothing really surprising or out of the ordinary, I guess. The conversation was kind of boring until the senior director suddenly mentioned, "You know, we are heavily invested into open source" and one of his software development manager concurred, "We are really committed to open source, no really, we are."
  
  Hmm, heavily invested and really committed to open source, right! Guess what this fast growing company had contributed, how many lines of code and how many person-hours of engineering time it had donated? Yes, you guessed correctly: nothing, zero lines, and not a single hour.
  No monetary donation to any open source project was ever made, no single bug report to an open source project was ever submitted, not even a single feature request was ever sent.
  
  "Heavily invested and really committed to open source " just sounds so much better than "being a freeloader that grows his business like crazy thanks to those code-monkeys that make all this cool and virtually bug-free software available under the BSD or Apache license ".
  
  By no means am I against open-soure. In fact, I am the founder and principal developer of the Swixml XUL Engine, an open-source, Apache-licened library, available here swixml.org and here java.net. (Graphical User Interfaces are described in XML documents that are parsed and rendered into javax.swing objects at runtime.)
  Neither do I think that everyone benefitting from an open-source project needs to give back to the community, (it certainly would be nice though). However, the meaning of "heavily invested and really committed to open source" should really mean some deeper involvement.
  Wouldn't it be cool if senior directors and software development managers would proudly state to be really committed to open source and also put some money and resources to where their mouth is?

  
  
• Multi-factor Authentication at PayPal
  Back in 1996, when leading the development of a Deutsche Bank retail banking project, a software solution allowing the bank's customers to maintain checking, saving, and investment accounts from their home PCs, I became aware of Multi-factor Authentication. An authentication factor is something that's used to authenticate a person's identity and multi-factor authentication is a system, using different methods for authenticating.
  
  In our case, it was a simple two-factor authentication, using something you know (a password or pin) and something you have (a sheet of paper, issued by the bank, containing several one-time passwords).
  The implementation was rather simple, for read-access, like getting an account's balance, only the account number and pin was required. For write-access, like buying or selling stock, the customer additionally needed to enter one of the one-time passwords. And of course, requesting and activating a new sheet of one-time passwords also required entering one-time passwords from the old sheet.
  
  
  More than ten years later and triggered by the growing number of phishing attacks,

  
  
• Digging Hypocrisy
  When you hear people talking about a Hypocrite, maybe a Washington based, gray-haired politician comes to mind, promising to be a fiscally conservative Republican but infect leaving mountainous of new debts to his successors. Anyway, one certainly doesn't think about the diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.
  Their weekly video podcast, which promotes Kevin's digg.com Web site and business, is available for download at http://revision3.com/diggnation/
  However, only paying subscribers can get the video version, while everyone else may download the audio version or can wait until a week since recording has passed, at which time it's made available for free.
  Now, Kevin and especially Alex often brag about pirating content like software, games, videos, and TV-shows; and Alex is known for his opinion that nobody gets hurt since all the content that he's pirating he would never pay for anyways.
  
  Surprisingly to some, digg.com's parent company (Revision3) went after a small web site (diggdown.com) that was redistributing the diggnation video podcast for free.
  
  "Your reproduction, distribution, and public performance of our client's federally protected copyrighted works constitutes multiple counts of copyright infringement. Additionally, your use of the DIGG marks in your <diggdown.net> domain name and on your website constitutes trademark infringement. It is likely that your use of the Digg Marks is likely to confuse Internet users as to the sponsorship or affiliation of your services with our client despite your many disclaimers. In order to protect our client's intellectual property, we must demand that you immediately cease and desist the reproduction, and public performance and display of all audiovisual works owned by Revision3 Corporation and immediately cease and desist use of all DIGG Marks, including as part of your domain name and website name.
  If you do not comply with the demands of this letter, we will be forced to seek damages and attorney's fees "
  [Complete Letter: http://b6.jerrcs.net/uploads/pdf.pdf]
  
  Since then, Kevin Rose suggested on Cranky Geeks that the video content would be made available for free to everyone at the same time ... which of course did not happen.
  
  I guess, digg.com's relevance (and value) has decreased over the last couple of months, which saw lots of other well done and designed site coming up, all using an equivalent concept. I don't know if that's enough to explain digg's hipocratic behavior. However, it's probably a good thing for Kevin that he was able to start his next gig: http://pownce.com/ ...
  
  Here today .. Gone tomorrow
  
  

  
  
• Did Google just lose its innocence?
  Google now gets access to all the information AOL has collected over all these years, e.g. demographic information about the AOL user base. Looks like Google wants to become the enemy to destroy the enemy. Here are some portfolio related thoughts I had after reading about the Google-AOL deal:

  
  
• Why in the world would you think your cell phone would work in your house?
  This obviously rhetorical question was asked by Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon's CEO.
  
  During a short trip to San Francisco last week, I stayed at the stunning Hyatt Regency San Francisco (thanks to a great deal I got on HotWire). The biz section of the morning newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle had an interview with Verizon's CEO that I found rather interesting.
  
  Seidenberg seriously complained about his customers' unrealistic expectations about having the wireless service working everywhere. "Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?" he said. It would not be Verizon's responsibility to correct the misconception by giving out statistics on how often Verizon's service works inside homes or by distributing more detailed coverage maps, showing all the possible dead zones.
  
  Can you hear me now? :-)
  

  
  
• Clone for fame or famous for cloning?
  Now this is really ticking me off. For the 3rd or 4th time now some SOB comes along, clones a project's CVS hosted on java.net, changes a couple lines of codes and imports it into a "new" project on SourceForge.
  One of those clones even bothered publishing a list of incompatibilities, which is certainly longer than the lines of code changed. Best of all, I received an e-mail with an "invitation to a healthy competition, which certainly would serve the users."
  
  Maybe this is why I don't like SourceForge all that much, not only does the UI really suck, most of the projects hosted there are either deserted or a POS - admittedly, there are exceptions but the approval process one has to go through to get a project on java.net certainly works a lot better then what sf.net does.
  Worst of all, all the cloneys mentioned above are follow German countrymen, desperately seeking fame but taking considerable shortcuts and haven't understood how open source project are suppose to work. It's certainly a lot harder to explain your feature requests and solution approaches to other developers on the team, than cloning and hacking away.
  
  I don't know why I even bother reading the emails from those clones.
  
  
  

  
  
• My current favourite is SwixML
  Rick Jelliffe, CTO of Topologi, and a standards activist with ISO and W3C involved in XML, and schema languages, in his blog on oreillynet.com endorses Swixml:

  "Objectively, Java is now looking pretty good for use in desktop applications: the speed for tasks that don't involve much object creation is excellent, Swing is stable though in need of scintillation with some fresh JComponents, SWT is available for people who want something else, Linux's new threads may improve responsiveness there, JRE 1.4.2 is available pretty much everywhere, and we have a zillion open source libraries--my current favourite is SwiXML."

  
  
• XAML
  I know, instead of creating just another blog entry about Microsoft's infamous XAML, I should rather be working on the Swixml 2 specification or even better continue working on Franklin, the elusive Swixml Editor. However, all the comments on XAML that I have read so far (Jeremy Allaire, Asterisk, Erik, Jon Udell, Gerald Bauer, etc.) seem to miss an important point: while XUL is for programmers, XAML is for generators.
  
  Let me try top get my point across. I don't know exactly when this started but I think it must have been somewhere around 1997, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio 5, which included Visual-InterDev. Ever since Microsoft's mantra seems to be, let us do the coding and you programmers out there (you don't know what you are doing anyways) just do composition of components.
  
  Design-time controls (DTC) introduced with InterDev and the ill-famed MFC wizardry are just two examples for MS's belief to be the only force in the universe able to write code.
  
  If you take a more serious look at XAML it becomes very clear that this isn't anything a straight thinking human being could or would ever write. Putting lots of C# code, like event handlers for instance, into the XML descriptors makes them really hard to compile or at least type-check. All this is a clear indication that XAML is something that tools will create and developers never really have to look at. The tools will be created and sold by - yes, you've guessed correctly. The old Microsoft objective: "Extend, Embrace and Extinguish" still exists and is probably more real than ever.