Project 31-A

This month I attended two conference in Vancouver, B.C. One I left looking forward to the next one,  the other I am unsure if I will attend again. I give a table of the characteristics of the two conferences Attribute Product Camp SQL Saturday Attendance Limited to 140 (with waiting list) 280+ (no limit) Breaks Rooms with round tables and sofas In hallways, no seating Lunch Seating Sitting around round tables Sitting on one side of tables facing stage Lunch food Buffet ($10) Individual plates brought by staff ($15) Lunch time activity Talking with each other, making new friends Listening to sponsor presentations (captive audience) Speakers Local folks Imported from everywhere ...

Last night and this morning there was an ongoing discussion about taxes and teleworking on one of my groups– especially for small firms (LLC often). All of the folks are based in WA-state and thus subject to B&O and sales tax. The discussion also caused me to look at the future of taxation – why, governments are slow to adapt to technological change.   First item was simple: in WA state an individual or business that buys stuff on the internet is suppose to self-report and pay tax to Olympia.  It is unlikely that individuals will be audited on this (cost benefit is negative unless they can get massive cooperation from credit card companies); businesses are a different issue – if you are registered in Olympia and file B&O, then they know the size of revenue target that you present. My own solution is to buy items from Amazon if it is for business use because they charge me tax (thus saving the cost of tracking and self-reporting).   Second item is B&O, ...

Finally I am at the last part, and the one that most interested me – Mobile Platforms. The idea of learning multiple smart-phone languages does not appeal to me, and if you are involved with a startup – could add a major outsourcing expense. I look at a well established site like the economist.com and see that they have an iPhone application and have a pending Android application announced. With their deep pockets, it is clear that time to market for each mobile application can be problematic. Windows Mobile First item is that it deals with 6.1 and 6.5 only – the classic problem with books on the cutting edge of technology.  Good solid advice about a gotcha that some developers may not think about because they will not think beyond their own phone… “For gadget developers, the two editions of interest are Windows Mobile Standard and Professional. The important distinction is that Professional is meant for touchscreen devices, while Standard is not.” We also discovere...

Today I will cover Part 3 of this excellent (so far) book, Desktop Platforms. The first chapter talks about Windows Vista, Windows 7.  Alas the author failed to cite that it can also be used for Windows Server 2008 if you do a ‘ little adjustment ’  see this how to . The rest of the chapter is nicely done – covering debugging, publication on Microsoft’s Gallery as well as how to add it directly to your own website (often a better way of promoting an web gadget to your readership). The non-web extensions (i.e. showing CPU usages, critical event log entries, etc) is described but since this is off-topic, he provides the appropriate link and did not get distracted.   The second chapter dealt with Windows nemesis – Mac OS X. He points out key features that could frustrate Windows types, like case-sensitivity of files. For testing the appearance, he points out Mac widgets are always rendered with the Safari browser. Issues like widget bundle is required to include a backgr...

I caught a breaking story on CBC National this evening and it pretty much resolved a question that I was struggling with. The story was that two Canadian Federal Government Department had been severely breached. Treasury and Finance. It happened a month ago and they are still in recovery mode (a.k.a. finding all of the virtual moles hiding in all of their systems). What they did was the right way of handling an virtual mole a.k.a. ghost in the machine – they disconnected both departments entirely from the internet. The moles could not report back to their masters – even if they had internal relay points. If an employee needed to check something on the internet (or even send email outside of the isolated departments) they had to head home or to a coffee shop. The hack managed to send emails out to have people change passwords via a bogus site from senior officials because there was a security breach of passwords! Talk about self-fulfilling email messages! Foreign hackers attack C...

Finally got some time to get back to this review… Chapter 3: Developing for Multiple Platforms The opening paragraph perked my interest: “if your gadget uses a feature from a specific API, how can you avoid being locked into that API?”  This is actually a problem across the industry with most developers struggling to get a feature working and paying no attention to lock-in issues. In general, I see a lot of developers focused solely on getting some functionality working with neither lock-in, performance or robustness ever being considered.   The treatment of issues from HTTPProxy to caching was among the best balanced that I have ever read. A path is given, alternatives paths are cited and instead of defending his choice, he gives the pros and cons and then why he opted to use a specific solution (often it’s clarity of presentation). For example: Finally, there are also two web gadget platforms, Netvibes and iGoogle, that will supply the configuration user interf...

On the way home from ProductCamp Vancouver, we got discussing the increasing division of product development into smaller and smaller cubicles – each with a hyper specialized individual in it. Back in 1979, I had my first professional employee - then consulting gig. Technically I reported to the head of IT. My customer was a department head managing a 30+ employee group. I meet directly with the department head, his reports and the clerks that would use the application (an interactive system using CICS running on a big IBM 4331 –2 megabytes of memory!!). I did UX mockups and reviewed them. Shadowed the clerks. Refine the requirements. Then I proceed to write the specifications. After that I proceed to design the database and implement (create a relational database using ISAM – not a trivial feat). Then coded up the application in COBOL and tested it (did QA too!). Then it was passed over to user acceptance. Finally, writing up documentation for users as well as design documentation...