SteveStreeting.com

I don’t use my iPod as much as I used to, owing to the fact that I work from home now so I don’t have my daily walk to / from work in which to listen to it. Updating it for the first time in ages I was presented with a lovely "iTunes has detected an iPod in need of recovery" error message, which I thought was odd. Nevertheless I dutifully followed the instructions and performing the recovery, which is a pretty laborious process involving some waiting, disconnecting, rebooting of the iPod and reconnecting, at which point I got the same error. Rinse, and repeat. Scratch head.

Long story short, the eventual cause was a drive mapping - I had forgotten that since I last updated my iPod, I’d mapped the I: drive to a local folder (using subst) to replicate a customer setup on my machine, completely forgetting that I: is the drive the iPod likes to use, and if it’s in use it gets rather confused it seems. The resolution was to either to stop using the I: mapping (which is what I did, since I didn’t need it anymore), or telling the iPod to use a different drive letter in Disk Manager.

This is reported in the Apple knowledge base, although it’s a couple of links down from a typical Google search so easy to miss. You would have thought a more specific error message would have been better, since something like this is pretty easy to do by accident and then forget about, like I did.

Bill Gates, who seems to be following the tradition of Tony Blair in doing the sort of ‘long goodbye’ which makes us wonder why he’s still here, like he’s holding out for a standing ovation and encore or something - has irritated me again by doing another presentation of technology we’ve all seen before but that Microsoft is reinventing, just rather less impressively, and touting it as their innovation. It all links back to Microsoft Surface which has always been a total rip off of the work of people like Jeff Han, just with more lag and a clunkier interface. It just makes my blood boil to watch them crow over a juddery, sluggish version of something I gleefully played with 2 years ago at Siggraph, when it wasn’t even new then. Compare the following:

Personally, I know which one I think is innovative, and which is derivative, and also which one I’d rather use. But, no doubt a ton of people will hold out and buy the Microsoft version just because it’s made by Microsoft. Bah.

So, as we all know the whole MicroHoo! idea has been called off now, unless you believe the conspiracy theorists who believe this is all still part of Count Ballmer’s plan to devalue Yahoo! (as some of its shareholders go through a set of inevitable legal tantrums) and make it easier to pick up later. I’m not so sure about that myself - after all didn’t the rotund billionnaire say he wasn’t going to raise the original offer for Yahoo!, before doing exactly that? Doesn’t really sound like a bluff, unless you factor in that he knew they were going to reject that too, thus increasing the chances of annoying their shareholders. But then we start getting into the ‘he knew that they knew that he knew’ territory and it all gets dreadfully confusing. Whatever the case, the whole deal has always sounded like a recipe for total disaster to me. So much so, I was kinda hoping it would go ahead just so that I take some perverse pleasure in watching the train wreck later.

No-one I’ve spoken to ‘gets’ the Yahoo! bid at all, seemingly a constant across the entire spectrum of opinion about both companies. I can understand that Microsoft would love to get hold of Yahoo!’s ad customers, and to a lesser extent all the freeloading users required to eyeball said ads (and the services required to keep them sweet), but they can’t have seriously thought that it would be a smooth transfer. The philosophies of the companies couldn’t be much further apart, with Yahoo! very much invested in open source technology and service models, and spritually the culture of the company is very much of a younger, consumer-oriented, more agile and open thinking sort, very different from the business-focussed, shrink-wrapped and closely integrated, keep-it-in-the-company sort of vibe that Microsoft tends to exude. I’m sure Microsoft must have earmarked a bunch of money to use in encouraging key people to stay, but honestly in my experience the very best people aren’t swayed that much by that kind of offer. I think had the deal gone ahead, MicroHoo! would have haemorraged much of the best Yahoo! talent to other Valley companies like Google (or to new start-ups) in the first few weeks, whatever reassurances might be given.

And what about the technology? Yahoo! is again the antithesis of Microsoft here, running their core business on open source stacks. Quite whether the acquisition would have eventually led to that being replaced with equivalent Microsoft technology I don’t know, but a switch would seem like a pointless effort - regardless of your technology preference, the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ rule is universal. But at the same time an entire growth arm of the business running ‘competitors’ products would be somewhat jarring I would have thought, so perhaps their principles would have had them invest in that transition anyway - none of which sounds like a particularly efficient investment.

So actually, I think Microsoft has had a lucky escape here - I think they would have been hugely distracted (not to mention considerably poorer) trying to make a Yahoo! acquisition work. Sure it might have advanced them to some degree, but it surely would have been a messy, inefficient fight which would have given their main competitors - ok competitor - much amusement. The big question is whether they can achieve more on their own. The word is that Steve Ballmer is obsessed with beating Google (you would have thought he’d be content with all the billions he already has, but I guess there’s no pleasing some people), so it will be interesting to see what Plan B is. I hope they’ve screwed the chairs down in his office.

I’ve been a little busy for the usual diatribe these last couple of days (a fact for which no doubt the Intertubes will be grateful) so for the moment my spleen will have to simply tolerate the increased pressure in anticipation of future venting .

In the meantime, here’s an interesting site I found recently: TED. It’s made up of a ton of videos of presentations from quite interesting people on a variety of subjects including creativity, technology and politics. All round great bloke Johnny Lee even makes a short appearance with his Wii hacks in one of them - the head-tracking I’d already seen of course, the digital whiteboard & touchscreen I hadn’t. But you can pretty much grab any video from the site and get a 20 minute talk about something that’s usually mentally stimulating and perhaps a bit tangental to what you might normally watch.

I’ve been a fan of cross-platform development for a while now, I like competition and have a dislike for single-supplier dependence - my general rule is that if you put your eggs in one basket, and then give that basket to a monolithic corporation-being with the power to crush planets with a single cybernetically enhanced pectoral clench, odds are that you’re not your own boss any more. However, as a developer who must inherently exchange the scribing of cryptic text for food & shelter, I haven’t always been able to follow that preference.

I’m a recent convert to the Mac platform - while I’d never have described myself as a cheerleader for Windows, it has always been my desktop of choice simply because I hadn’t used anything better (desktop Linux was often too much hard work), and I would always express that to anyone who asked (with a side-note that if you’re running file/mail/webservers, you’d be nuts to do it on anything other than an open-source *nix, given how easily and cost-effectively it slipped into that role). However, two things happened in recent history - Vista being increasingly forced on me as the incumbent upgrade path despite being a damp squib, and I got a my first, real-life Mac.

At first, all my PC predjudices emerged. One mouse button! All my games don’t work! I have to find replacement applications for X, Y and Z! This interface is weird! Etc. But you know, going on for a year on now, I’ve overcome all that and I’d buy a Mac again without thinking twice about it. My dual-boot to Vista on this machine lies so unused it’s in danger of getting purged if I could actually be bothered.

And I’m not the only one. There was a time when the needs of business also strongly drove the needs of consumers when it came to PCs - you had a Windows PC at work, so you tended to buy that at home too. But then, devices started getting more diverse - Blackberrys, smart phones, iPods, iPhones, games consoles with media playing / web browsing features - most of these didn’t look or feel very much like Windows, even the ones that included a pocket version of Windows, but yet people got used to them, and perhaps realised that they can use this crazy alien technology after all, and that maybe all the concepts underlying it were actually pretty common. The Internet is the platform of choice now after all, it’s the glue that holds most things together now.

The key takeaway from this is that I think the consumer PC/device market is now far more autonomous from the ‘turns like a supertanker’ business market than it’s been in a long time, and is looking to be the engine of real change in the industry. People increasingly expect to be able to hop between devices and still get to all the things that are important to them, and thus make choices about their own devices more independently from the staid business world than they have in the recent past. Apple is a powerful brand in the consumer space, something they’ve genuinely earned in my view, so in an increasingly business-consideration-free consumer space, that’s bound to influence things. Some reports claim that Apple already has 21% of the consumer PC market in the US (note, excludes business PCs - it’s more like 3% worldwide), and look at the results from a recent Morgan Stanley survey of US students:

Certainly if you’re Dell, this must be a little concerning, although I’m sure they’ll continue to sell a ton to the besuited world.

Now, this isn’t supposed to be a born-again Mac fanboy post, I’m simply illustrating an increasing desire for diversity, innovation, and just good design in the consumer space, which I personally am very happy to see. I expect (& hope) that if Ubuntu smooths out its remaining kinks that require the kind of forum-trawling that non-enthusiasts have no patience for, it could challenge for the consumer spot too - although at the moment I’d still personally rate a sexy looking MacBook with OS X on it considerably higher as a device for the wider market, at least in wealthier countries, that doesn’t mean it will stay that way forever. The world just needs good software, good designs that fit the purpose and preferably look great at the same time. That’s what people want, and heck, Apple just has a habit of delivering here, so all power to them.

The final thought then? If you develop commercial software for ‘real’ people, you really ought to be including a Mac port in your plans. And perhaps an Ubuntu version, just on the remote chance that anyone running it on the desktop decides to actually spend some money on software one day And of course there are all those cool little devices. It ain’t just about Windows PCs anymore, and chances are in the consumer space it may well get less so as time goes on.

For the last several decades, the computing industry has depended on what was perceived to be an insatiable desire for more raw computing power. The WinTel alliance has worked well, with the world’s most popular operating system demanding ever increasing resources (sometimes for debateable practical benefit), driving the demand for new chips. One of the latest drivers making people buy new systems is virtualisation, a nice little earner for those wanting to sell nice big mainframe-like boxes to replace the multitudes of servers - the ones they previously sold people to replace their original mainframes in many cases of course.

However, the fact is that demand for ever faster boxes is waning. Personally, even as a developer who makes pretty heavy use of my machines, I’m increasingly finding my upgrade cycles slowing, and it’s been a long time since I’ve genuinely felt that my hard drive space was under serious pressure - usually it’s just me being lazy and not deleting all my old crap. Since I work with GPUs I probably update my graphics card more often than your average consumer (excluding hardcore PC gamers), but as regards everything else, it pretty much works ok most of the time. Server consolidation will drive sales for a while yet, but on the desktop side I see things going in a completely different direction - rather than chasing processing muscle, I think we’re increasingly going to be chasing form factor, power consumption, and aesthetics.

In every previous iteration of Windows, people have generally upraded their machines for it, and it’s pretty much worked every time. Vista tried to do the same thing, but it hasn’t really worked. Firstly, there was the whole confusion about what ‘Vista Ready’ meant - in many cases, it meant Vista would boot, but be pretty unusable compared to the same machine running XP. Along with that, people using it often responded with a gigantic ‘meh’ as regards the enhancements they were getting in return for this additional overhead - and many just decided that their machines ran a lot better on XP, and tossed Vista out the window. I don’t blame them - having used Vista I really can’t say it’s my OS of choice, and certainly can’t recommend it to others - I just can’t justify the extra RAM it needs to do the exact same tasks as I can do on XP. I also can’t explain why OS X and Ubuntu can do everything Vista can do, just more elegantly (especially OS X) and on a lower hardware spec.

So, mindless upgrading because of bloated Windows code doesn’t seem to be par for the course any more. People are staying on XP and some are even trying out OS X and Ubuntu, and liking what they’re seeing. More importantly, people are getting more discerning about what their devices look like, how much power they draw, and how easy they are to use - this is I’m sure related to the iPod effect, but also environmental concerns. Small, elegant, portable, intuitive, power-efficient - these factors are all more important now than ever before in our industry, pushing out the big, high-powered, inelegant but muscle-bound approaches. Sure, computing power will still be important, if we want voice controls some time and ever flashier displays, but really I think we’re very much exiting the period where raw brute force was an acceptable technical focus, and entering a period where design is more important. It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it, as they say. This is definitely a good thing, and I think we can expect to see more success from the likes of Apple in this sort of market.

It’s official - Vista’s UAC was designed to annoy users. The idea was to piss them off enough that they’d beat on the ISV’s to make them change their software so it didn’t trigger UAC prompts anymore. So that’s at least one feature in Vista that’s a rip-roaring success then.

To be fair, it’s a bitter pill that had to be swallowed. Microsoft built OSs for decades that were concentrated on flaunting all their wares to developers with little or no protection; because you know, security just gets in the way and all those rookie developers get upset when things are difficult. It was only a matter of time before such a weak design bit them on the arse, and as anyone knows fixing a fundamental design / architecture issue is by far the most painful thing to have to do. They can blame the ISVs, but they set the tone and the philosophy in the first place and the sheep just followed, they can’t really complain about that. Mainframe developers I knew 15 years ago would shake their head in desperation when they saw the kind of architectures Microsoft were building and advocating, and here we are now with all the ‘old’ techniques finally coming back in - hypervisors, VMs, secure rings, non-privileged users. It’s really not that these things are new, it’s just that for 20 years some people thought they didn’t need them. They were wrong, and all the mainframe / Unix guys can sit back and be smug about it now.

The ‘implement now, design later’ approach is popular with Finance departments hacking together Excel/VBScript-based ‘applications’ that the IT department has to try to rescue 3 years later when the gaffer tape and string finally can’t hold it together anymore (and if you’ve had to do this too, we can cry into our beer about it together sometime), but developers should be smarter than this. Yes, agile development is important, and turnaround is important, but there’s a minimum level of design  and good engineering you need to do to make sure you’re not building on sand. Microsoft has always been pretty weak in this area IMO, whether it’s the OS, code samples, the .Net ‘framework’ (too many low-level code tricks, not enough framework - which they now finally seem to be realising with MVC, Linq for Entities). This particular sand has held up for far longer than it really should have, but ultimately it’s just made the eventual transition more painful. I only hope they’ve learned from it.

A few weeks ago I posted a rant about how companies keep way more code to themselves than makes any rational sense, under the pretense of protecting their competitive advantage. I asserted that in a large number of cases, what they’re keeping to themselves is actually exactly what everyone else is also developing internally, and also keeping to themselves in the hope that it’s worth something. Result - a ton of duplicated effort that is worth very little. Open source of course frees people from developing the same thing over and over again via open collaboration, and allows them to concentrate on the 10-20% that really makes their application unique from their peers (assuming here that you have to sell a commercial product rather than being able to live off services, which despite the hype isn’t feasible in every sector).

I was therefore glad to see a Register article today quoting others that were saying basically exactly the same thing:

"The irony is that organizations increase their maintenance costs when they take open source code from projects like Mule in-house and add their own code. In all but a few areas companies are duplicating efforts made elsewhere, and wasting time and effort in repeating boring infrastructure programming, under the illusion they are adding competitive advantage. "There’s so much duplicate effort," Zorro said, echoing Red Hat’s Whitehurst, who claimed last month that "billions" of dollars are wasted each year in internal, non-commercial software development that re-invents the wheel."

Amen. I still think that the primary reason that so many businesses don’t ‘get’ this is that the decision making is too far removed from the people at the coalface who can see (and lament about) this wasted effort, and that the accepted wisdom that has been built up over the past couple of decades (fueled by the success of huge proprietary corporates like Microsoft) is that keeping everything to yourself is the only way to make money. Lawyers, vice presidents etc don’t generally have a clue how to differentiate between IP that’s genuinely valuable enough to invent yourself and protect like rabid wolf, and that which is a totally derivative reinvention of something that’s already out there and just a big waste of time and effort, both from the point of view of original creation and ongoing maintenance. Thus, if you have no way to measure one set of IP against another, just clutch all of it to your chest, knuckles white and teeth bared at anyone who would dare to want to look at it.

Such attitudes are woefully outdated and as open source continues to penetrate into corporate environments, such prehistoric attitudes are going to have to change. Ironically what these companies consider to be competitive advantage is in many cases precisely the opposite - all these largely worthless internal reimplementations of common functionality are in fact unnecessary baggage that’s slowing them down, and making them less competitive. Knowing how to separate the wheat from the chaff - the IP that is truly unique and differentiating you from others versus that which is common and functionary - is something that most experienced developers who know their field can do instinctively in very little time - if they are allowed to. More companies should allow their development leads to make this kind of call, in their own best interests.

They’re not announcing the results officially until tomorrow, but it appears that enough countries have changed their votes since September 2007 for OOXML to become an ISO standard. Some of the key ’switchers’ responsible include the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Japan (all from No to Yes) and France (from No to Abstain).

We need document standards to preserve business data over long periods and thus as a core principle it’s a good thing to have an ISO standard used by Microsoft Office, the dominant business office suite  - and for good reason, it’s been a great product over many years. Personally I find the features added to it since around 1997/2000 to be entirely optional in all practical real-world use, so I jumped off the upgrade treadmill some time ago and am quite content with Open Office now for both personal and business use, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that Office has always been good. Milked until it’s drier than the Goby desert maybe, but still good

The problem that most (sane & rational) detractors have with OOXML is not that it’s from Microsoft (although that justifiably promotes extra scrutiny from the off, given their track record) - it’s that, as a standard, it’s borderline unimplementable. The whale-crushing 6,000 page spec has proved somewhat inpenetrable to most people outside Microsoft, even with the changes since September. Ambiguity, references to existing Office behaviour, patent concerns (remember, Microsoft’s open specification promise excludes all commercial implementations) all make OOXML something of an encumbered standard at present, and encumbered standards are potentially worse than no standard at all - because they can give an impression of openness without actually delivering on the benefits that it’s supposed to bring; i.e. a lack of vendor lock-in for your critical business data. There is exactly one implementation of OOXML right now - Office - and without a clear, unambiguous, no-nonsense spec there won’t be any others that you can trust either. Which the cynical among us would say is exactly the way Microsoft wants it.

I don’t have anything against OOXML in principle if it’s truly open and genuinely implementable by someone outside Microsoft. Sure the world doesn’t need 2 document standards, but if MS insists on having their own (what’s new, I think ‘Not Invented Here’ must be in their training manual), let them if that standard is truly open. A 6,000 page spec with 1,100 comments still largely unaddressed at the last reading doesn’t seem to fit the bill to me - maybe if more time had been spent hammering those things out I might have felt like it’s respecting the spirit of openness, but this just feels like a wave-through by vested interests to me. Let’s see what happens over the next year or so, but I’m not confident about OOXML doing anything but sowing confusion and doubt in the document interchange arena, all the while being spun by the PR machine as an interchangeable standard. Business as usual then.

This is a good write up of the process so far and why it’s been seriously lacking.

It may be going on for 4 years old now, but GPU Gems is still a fantastic resource - in fact now that you can rely on being able to use the techniques it contains on a much larger array of hardware, it’s perhaps even more practically useful than it was on release. Graphical products outside the hardcore gaming space (and this is where Ogre gets used most) are increasingly catching up and using more advanced shader effects now, and so a resource like this is actually maturing rather well.

You can imagine how pleased I was, therefore, to hear that NVIDIA and Addison Wesley have now made the whole book available for free online! That’s a fantastic offer and if you don’t have the book already you need to follow that link immediately and see what you’ve been missing. There are another 2 books in the series too of course once you’re done with that one, although for now you’ll have to reach into your pocket for those

Thanks as always go to Kevin Bjorke at NVIDIA for bringing this to our attention in the OGRE Forums, and who of course had no small part in creating the book in the first place.