Category: Software

Some smiles

Thank God the Onion is back. I’ve missed them the last two weeks. Highly recommended: U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With: “‘The United States is preparing to strike, directly and decisively, against you, whoever you are, just as soon as we have a rough idea of your identity and a reasonably decent estimate as to where your base is located.’ Added Bush: ‘That is, assuming you have a base.'”

Funky Mouse Jive


Another thing making me smile: my browser. For the last five months, my browser of choice has been Mozilla, the open source descendant of Netscape. There are lots of good reasons to use it: better standards support than Internet Explorer, never any threat of smart tags, open bug reporting, daily improvements. On my Mac OS X laptop it’s much faster than Internet Explorer too. But today it’s giving me two pretty revolutionary user interface functions: a tabbed browser window, allowing me to switch back and forth between multiple browser sessions in the same window, and mouse gesture navigation. Gesture navigation uses easily remembered mouse gestures to perform browser navigation, like drag left to go back in the history, drag up then down to reload the page, mouse up and then right to maximize the window… Less overall mouse movement than going to the toolbar. Pretty darn cool.

Where Everyone (Wants to) Know Your Name

A few months ago, I wrote about single sign-in and why AOL and Microsoft are both trying to be the Internet’s major providers of it. Yesterday, Sun announced they were jumping on the bandwagon with digital identity services. It’s surprising that it took Sun as long as it did to come to the party, given their ambitions as an Internet platform company. Why did they wait so long? What’s so important about single sign-on?

When I was a programmer, I used to hate one thing about debugging my application: Every time I wanted to run it to test my code fixes, I had to type in my user name and password. We couldn’t do anything nifty at that point like tying it to some automated central login — the military still didn’t fully trust NT security, and half our user base was running on Windows 95 or 98, which weren’t designed to be bulletproof when it came to authenticating users.

So I did what any self respecting developer would do when he got a loud complaint from his user (me): I hacked my local code base so that it automatically supplied my username and password when I ran. Single sign-in, for sure–I was the only one who could sign-in.

There’s definitely a user benefit to only having to log on once to access information, even when you’re talking about logging into your computer and only one other system. But what about the web? Every merchant, chat room, vendor site, newspaper, whatever site in existence wants you to sign in somewhere. I calculated the other day that it takes visits to four web sites to pay our monthly bills on line. One of those sites, our bank, consolidates information from at least ten other billing agents behind its “single sign-in.” By doing that consolidation, our bank has reduced the number of user name and passwords that I have to remember from fourteen to four. Do they have my business for a long time? You bet.

Microsoft has announced part of its business strategy behind the .NET initiative. While it will be working with service providers across the Internet to deliver tons of value to the end customer, it will be the customer, as value recipient, who will pay for the service. This is probably good, since it avoids all the known bad business models (advertising supported services, VC funded free software, etc.) that have caused so many dot-coms to implode. But how does Microsoft convince customers that paying for these services is worth it? I think single sign-in is one of the benefits they’re betting that customers will pay for. And I think Sun just woke up and realized that a business shift is occurring, and they are about to miss it.

Virii and Ecosystem Health

I rambled a little yesterday. It’s like that sometimes before 8 am. One of the points I forgot to make in my comparison of IM wars and single sign-on wars is that sometimes keeping a diverse ecosystem is critical to the ecosystem’s health. In English? Two or more strong players in the market are better than one. Common sense, really, except in the computer field, which has for the last ten years had a strong whiff of winner take all about it.

Economists talk about network externalities driving the explosive growth of Windows and of Microsoft Office. A “network externality” is an effect that makes a particular good or service valuable the more other people are using it–at least that’s the common definition.

But I think most people forget that occasionally network externalities can be negative as well as positive. And that’s how we get things like SirCam and other Outlook virii. The Outlook virii bother me because of what they say about email clients. What network externalities can be gained on a large scale from everyone being on just one email client? Within an organization’s firewall, sure, you get value by adding extra components like calendaring (and don’t get me wrong–for corporate email, this is a killer app). But I’m aware of very few companies who extend access to those apps to people outside the firewall. So why does everyone run the same email client?

The real externality in Internet mail is the mail format itself, good old RFC 822. It’s a transfer protocol, just like SOAP. Any client that can speak it can participate in the discussion. If you believe in the logic of network externality, in the email realm there’s no reason that Outlook or any mail client should have the overwhelming market share that it does.

I used to feel fairly secure about email virii. I was the only Mac user in the MBA program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and we used Eudora as the school’s email application. There were always a few people who persisted in using Outlook in spite of the fact that there wasn’t a calendar server anywhere in the school. They spread their fair share of virii, but I was never infected. My diversity protected me. Unfortunately we’re changing over in the fall, largely because of a lack of a unified calendar feature for Outlook. I’m grimly looking forward to discussions with my IT-savvy but Outlook-bigot classmates after the fourth or fifth email virus comes around.

More or Less Back to Normal

UPDATES
Eudora Welty has died at age 92…

ORIGINAL STORY
Things are just about back to normal here. Starting early this Friday, I got a bunch of hits (2000 pageviews and counting, up from a normal baseline of 30-40 for a really good article) to the site from MacInTouch and Scripting News readers, looking at my article on SOAP and XML-RPC in Mac OS X 10.1. I think that I scared most of them off from returning with Friday’s piece, though.

For the record, this site isn’t about the Mac, or travelling, or Seattle. It’s more about me and what I’m going through. So you can expect to see me ramble on about a number of topics at any given time. I do recognize, however, that people reading the site may want a little more structure than that. So I’ve added some links in the Navigation area that pull together stories on topics about which I tend to write more frequently. If you’re interested in this site just for one of those topics, you can now bookmark the topic page of your choice. If you don’t mind reading all my chaos, by all means come back to the home page.

Seattle Update

This Saturday I got really sore. I probably should have learned my lesson after last weekend’s exercise in pain management. I was back in Lake Union again on Saturday, this time kayaking with the other MBA interns at my company. We went a little further in the kayaks than I did before in the rowboat. If you look at this map (provided by the Moss Bay Rowing and Kayaking Center, who rented us the canoes), we started at the point marked with the cross and paddled around to a point near the Museum of History and Industry, then back. It was an overcast day, so I was spared the utter blistering sunburn I should have had after three hours on the open water without sunscreen. But I did really pull something in my right arm, so that even today I’m finding it hard to lift anything heavy, move my fingers, or apply a lot of pressure with my hand.

Sunday was a little more painless: I attended Bite of Seattle with a few friends. I was a little apprehensive, but it turned out to be a much better event than similar ones I’ve attended in Washington, DC and other places. The food was much better (although I still got a little sick on something I ate) and the crowds were less crazy. I did get sunburned on Sunday, but not too badly.