Yesterday I went shopping and every store had reminders that daylight saving time begins today. Every year before "springing forward" or "falling back" I always double check the current time at time.gov and the US Naval Observatory Master Clock Time . However neither clock has sprung forward. Now I'm not sure if who I can trust to tell me the right time. :(

Update: Looks like I spoke too soon. It seems most of the clocks in the house actually figured out that today was the day to "spring forward" and I had the wrong time. :)

 

Every once in a while someone asks me about software companies to work for in the Seattle area that aren't Microsoft, Amazon or Google. This is the third in a series of weekly posts about startups in the Seattle area that I often mention to people when they ask me this question.

AgileDelta builds XML platforms for mobile devices that are optimized for low power, low bandwidth devices. They have two main products; Efficient XML and Mobile Information Client. I'm more familiar with the Efficient XML since it has been selected as the basis for the W3C's binary XML format and has been a lynch pin for a lot of the debate around binary XML.  The Efficient XML product is basically a codec which allows you to create and consume XML in their [soon to be formerly] proprietary binary format that makes it more efficient for use in mobile device scenarios. A quick look at their current customer lists indicates that their customer base is mostly military and/or defence contractors. I hadn't realized how popular XML was in military circles.  

AgileDelta was founded by John Schneider and Rich Rollman who are formerly of Crossgain, a company founded by Adam Bosworth which was acquired by BEA. Before that Rich Rollman was at Microsoft and he was one of the key folks behind MSXML and SQLXML. Another familiar XML geek who works there is Derek Denny-Brown who spent over half a decade working as a key developer on the XML parsers at Microsoft.

Press: AgileDelta in PR Newswire

Location: Bellevue, WA

Jobs: careers@agiledelta.com, current open positions are for a Software Engineer, Sales Professional, Technical Writer and Quality Assurance Engineer.

 

Today I was taking a look at my referer logs and stumbled upon a post entitled TechCrunch Resolution on Wikipedia by Jonathan Stokes which contains the following anecdote

A Brief History

The edit war was prompted by the now famous scandal in which Microsoft paid a Wikipedian to favorably edit Microsoft articles on Wikipedia. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch covered the Microsoft story in a post that was largely sympathetic.

Perceiving unfairness in the issue, Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo, aka Carnage4Life, retaliated against TechCrunch by adding an extensive criticism section to Wikipedia’s TechCrunch article. He then wrote about his “experiment” on his blog, 25HoursaDay.com.

Ensuing Uproar

Michael Arrington was not happy to be slandered by a Microsoft employee, in response to Microsoft coverage. Obasanjo expressed surprise at Arrington’s response, but did not apologize. I blogged this chapter of the Microsoft controversy.

Judging from his blog comments, Dare does not seem to have a high respect for Wikipedia. He has previously violated Wikipedia rules by anonymously writing his own Dare Obasanjo article on Wikipedia. Humorously, it appears to include inside jokes with other Microsoft employees, such as:

Dare has lunch once a month with Don Box to rinse the SOAP off of Don while Don simultaneously attempts to lather up Dare.

Edit War

With traffic pouring into Wikipeda through TechCrunch and Digg, an all-out edit war ensued between long-time Wikipedians and anonymous vandals. The vandals began attacking the userpages of Wikipedians trying to protect the TechCrunch article. It finally escalated to a point where this anti-TechCrunch user was banned for repeatedly blocking out user pages with disturbing death threats.

Resolution

Wikidemo came to the rescue by establishing a Wikipedia Mediation. She invited all editors involved to the discussion, even going so far as to invite me on this blog, and Dare Obasanjo on his blog.

Anthony cfc handled the mediation. Notably, none of the controversial IP’s showed up to state their case. With help from Anthony cfcComputerjoe, we have now restored the Wikipedia TechCrunch article, and hopefully made a few minor improvements as well. and

In the process, I earned my first Wikipedia Barnstar for Civility from Anthony cfc. Kind of neat to see Wikipedia in action.

Some days the Daily Show just writes itself. I'm crapping myself in amusement at how seriously these people take this nonsense. I am especially amused by all the bits in red font since they are either borderline libel or just straight up hilarious. And I thought Mike Arrington emailing folks at Microsoft trying to get me in trouble after I apologized on his blog was the most absurd turn this story would take.

It's like Nick Carr wrote in his post Essjay's world, Wikipedia seems to be full of the kind of people who used to play Dungeons & Dragons back in the day and now have difficulty separating the real world from the fantasy world they've created in their heads.

 

My website is going to be down for a few days as I make some changes. While I'm gone you can check out some of these blogs instead

• Jeff Atwood - Programmer Geek
• Omar Shahine - Microsoft Geek
• Danah Boyd - Social Software Geek
• Scott Adams - Funny Geek
• Chris Kelly - Liberal Geek

I'll see y'all this weekend.

 

It seems just like yesterday when the tech blogosphere was abuzz with news that analyst Michael Gartenberg was leaving Jupiter Research for Microsoft. So you can imagine my surprise to fire up his blog today to find the post And Back to Analyst… where he writes

This is a difficult post to write. But after  much of thought, I have decided not to remain with Microsoft and I am returning to JupiterResearch as of Monday 3/12.

At my core, I am an analyst. It’s what I do and I do it well and after much thought, I realize I’m just not ready to stop doing that job just yet. I believe Jupiter itself is poised for some amazing things in the future and I’ve invested too much in the company to feel good about walking away at this point. Therefore I have decided to return and I am pleased that I have been welcomed back. My thanks to everyone I have worked with at Microsoft.

Wow, that was quick.

 

Marvel comics has been ticking me off for a few months now with their mediocre Avengers Disassembled, House of M and Civil War trilogy but it looks like they finally found a way to push me over the edge. According to MSNBC in Death to ‘America’: Comic-book hero killed off

Captain America has undertaken his last mission — at least for now. The venerable superhero is killed in the issue of his namesake comic that hit stands Wednesday, the Daily News reported.

On the new edition's pages, a sniper shoots down the shield-wielding hero as he leaves a courthouse, according to the newspaper.
...
In the comic-book universe, death is not always final. But even if Captain America turns out to have met his end in print, he may not disappear entirely: Marvel has said it is developing a Captain America movie.

This reminds me of a headline from the 1990s, Superman killed by falling comic book sales, when DC Comics tried a similar stunt back in the day. The overuse of cross over stories and super hero shockers (like radical changes to a character's history or killing them off) seem to be symptoms of the death of comic books as an entertainment genre. I buy comics from a local comic book store on a monthly basis and I don't think I've ever seen anyone under the age of 25 in the five and a half years that I've been using that store. Well, there was the one time that one of the guys who worked there brought his grandson into work. 

Even though super hero movies featuring A-list and B-list superheroes from Spider-Man to Ghost Rider are making hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, they are pretty much milking a fan base that grew up with these heroes instead of introducing these characters to a new audience. This is similar to the way that George Lucas milked a fan base that grew up on Star Wars with his series of horrific prequels although in his case I suspect that there probably is a market for Star Wars pre-prequels in another 20 years.

Without a continuous influx of fans who are interested in the source material (i.e. comic books), there won't be a next generation of fans to buy all the overpriced merchandising and special effects laden movies. However I doubt that stunts like this are a good way to get people reading the comic books again, even though it did work when they killed Superman...I was one of the suckers who bought all the books. :)

Although Cap is dead, his memory will live on...on YouTube.

 

The hottest story on Planet Intertwingly today is Rob Yates' blog post entitled Safe JSON which goes over a number of security issues one can face when exposing services using JSON. He goes ahead to describe the following approaches

Approach 1 - Plain JSON: Simply return JSON

Approach 2 - var assignment: Assign the JSON object to some variable that can then be accessed by the embedding application (not an approach used by Yahoo).

Approach 3 - function callback: When calling the JSON Web Service pass as a parameter a callback function.  The resulting JSON response passes the JSON object as a parameter to this callback function.

There are a number of good responses in the comments. The only thing I wanted to point out is that only Approach 1 can really be called using JSON. The other two are "accepting arbitrary code from a third party and executing it" which is such a ridiculously bad idea that we really need to stop talking about it in civilized company. It seems silly to point out specific security or privacy issues with using that approach when the entire concept of building Web services in that manner is fundamentally insecure and downright dangerous.

PS: It looks like Rob Sayre beat me to saying this. :)

 

I've been thinking about AJAX a lot recently. Between reviewing a book on the subject, reading some of the comments coming out of the Adobe Engage event and chatting with some coworkers at dinner about WPF/E I've had a lot of food for thought.

I'll start with an excerpt from Ted Leung's post entitled Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web

The problem as I see it
I think that a lot (but not all) apps will become RIA’s, and the base platform technology for RIA’s is very important. Too important to be controlled, or designed by any single party. The current vogue toolchain, AJAX, has this property. It also has the property of being a cross platform development nightmare. On the desktop, you commit yourself to a single cross platform library/technology, and then you spend the rest of your time wrestling with it. In AJAX, you have multiple browsers on each platform that you want to support. Not only that, you have multiple versions of each browser.
...
Flash/Flex
Enter Flash/Flex. Flash has a great cross platform story. One runtime, any platform. Penetration of the Flash Player is basically the same as penetration of browsers capable of supporting big AJAX apps. There are nice development tools. This is highly appealing.

What is not appealing is going back to a technology which is single sourced and controlled by a single vendor. If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web?

Most people who've done significant AJAX development will admit that the development story is a mess. I personally don't mind the the Javascript language but I'm appalled that the most state of the art development process I've found is to use Emacs to edit my code, Firebug to debug in Firefox and attaching Visual Studio to the Internet Explorer processes to debug in IE. This seems like a joke when compared to developing Java apps in Eclipse or .NET applications in Visual Studio. Given how hypercompetitive the "Web 2.0" world is, I doubt that this state of affairs will last much longer. There is too much pressure on Web companies to improve their productivity and stand out in a world full of derivative YouTube/MySpace/Flickr knock offs. If one company finds a way to be more productive and/or build richer Web applications the rest of the industry will follow. This is pretty much what happened with Google and AJAX as well as with YouTube and Flash Video. Once those companies showed how much value they were getting from technologies which were once passe, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. This means that it is inevitable that Rich Internet Applications will eventually be built on a platform that provides a better development experience than AJAX does today. The only questions are how quickly will this happen and which technology will replace AJAX?

Ted Leung mentions two contenders for the throne; Flash/Flex and OpenLaszlo. I'll add a third entry to that list, Windows Presention Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E). Before discussing what it will take for one of these contenders to displace AJAX, I should point out that being "open" has nothing to do with it. Openness is not a recipe for success when it comes to development platforms. According to TIOBE Java is the most popular programming language today and it was a proprietary language tightly controlled by Sun Microsystems. Before that, it was commonly stated that Visual Basic was the most popular programming language and it was a proprietary language controlled by Microsoft. I believe these count as existence proofs that a popular development platform can rise to the top while being controlled by a single vendor. 

So what will it take for an RIA platform to displace the popularity of AJAX besides being able to build richer user interfaces?

1. Ubiquity: Over 95% of the Web users are using an AJAX capable browser. Any replacement for AJAX must have similar penetration or it's dead in the water. No one wants to turn away customers especialy when it's competitors aren't doing anything that stupid. 
   

2. Debug Once, Run Anywhere: The biggest problem with AJAX is that it isn't a single development platform. Being able to write an application and debug it once instead of having a different debugging and runtime experience for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari is the killer productivity enhancer. Of course, there will always be differences between environments but if we can move to a world where RIA development is more like cross-platform Java development as opposed to cross-platform C++ development (yes, I know that's an oxymoron) then we all win.

3. Continuoum of Development Tools: I don't need expensive development tools to become an AJAX developer, however if I feel that I need heavy duty tooling I can buy Visual Studio 2005 then download ASP.NET AJAX to get a fancy integrated development environment. Any platform that expects to replace AJAX  needs to have a continuoum with high quality, free & Open Source tools on one end and expensive, proprietary and "rich" tools at the other. The Java world with it's culture of Open Source tools like Eclipse, JBoss and Hibernate coexisting with overpriced tools from big vendors like IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic is the best example of this to date. That way the hackers are happy and the suits are happy as well. 

So far Adobe seems closer than anyone in getting the trifecta. In a year or two, things might look different.

 

For the current release of RSS Bandit we decided to forego our homegrown solution for providing search over a user's subscribed feeds and go with Lucene.NET. The search capabilities are pretty cool but the provided APIs leave a lot to be desired. The  only major problem we encountered with Lucene.NET is that concurrency issues are commonplace. We decided to protect against this by having only one thread that modified the Lucene index since a lot of problems seemed to occur when multiple threads were trying to modify the search index.

This is where programming with Lucene.NET turns into a journey into the land of Daily WTF style proportions.

WTF #1: There are two classes used for modifying the Lucene index. This means you can't just create a singleton and protect access to it from multiple threads. Instead one must keep instances of two different types around and make sure if one instance is open the other is closed.

WTF #2: Although the classes are called IndexReader and IndexWriter, they are both used for editing the search index. There's a fricking Delete() method on a class named IndexReader.

Code Taken from Lucene Examples

public void  DeleteDocument(int docNum)
{
	lock (directory)
	{
		AssureOpen();
		CreateIndexReader();
		indexReader.DeleteDocument(docNum);
	}
}

void  CreateIndexReader()
{
	if (indexReader == null)
	{
		if (indexWriter != null)
		{
			indexWriter.Close();
			indexWriter = null;
		}
		indexReader = IndexReader.Open(directory);
	}
}

void  AddDocument(Document doc)
{
	lock (directory)
	{
		AssureOpen();
		CreateIndexWriter();
		indexWriter.AddDocument(doc);
	}
}

void  CreateIndexWriter()
{
	if (indexWriter == null)
	{
		if (indexReader != null)
		{
			indexReader.Close();
			indexReader = null;
		}
		
	}
}

As lame as this is, Lucene.NET is probably the best way to add desktop search capabilities to your .NET Framework application. I've heard they've created an IndexModifier class in newer versions of the API so some of this ugliness is hidden from application developers. How anyone thought it was OK to ship with this kind of API ugliness in the first place is beyond me.

 

Every once in a while someone asks me about software companies to work for in the Seattle area that aren't Microsoft, Amazon or Google. This is the first in a series of weekly posts about startups in the Seattle area that I often mention to people when they ask me this question.

The iLike service from GarageBand.com is one of a new breed of "social" music services which is a category popularized by Last.fm. The service consists of two primary aspects

1. A website where one can create a profile, add friends, view stats about the music you listen to and see what music is popular among iLike users.
2. An iTunes plugin which recommends songs from signed and unsigned artists based on what you are listening to and also allows you to see what your friends are currently listening to.
   

I tried the service and definitely like the concept of getting music recommendations from directly within iTunes. The only downside is that you get samples of the recommended songs (probably the same snippets from the iTunes music store) instead of having the entire recommended song streamed to you. I guess that makes sense since it is a free service and likely makes money via an affiliate program. The company recently got a bunch of funding from Ticketmaster so I expect that they will soon start integrating concert ticket recommendations into their user experience which would explain why they require a zip code when signing up for the service.

The president of iLike is Hadi Partovi who recently left Microsoft for the second time after a stint as a General Manager at MSN where he greenlighted start.com which eventually morphed into the live.com personalized page. One of the key developers of iLike is Steve Rider who was the original developer of start.com.

Press: Seattle Times on iLike

Number of Employees: 25

Location: Seattle, WA (Capitol Hill)

Jobs: jobs@iLike-inc.com, current open positions are for a Web / Server (Ruby) engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test, Web/DHTML engineer, Database engineer, and desktop client engineer