Category: Blogs

Inside the Developers Studio

~ rbonini

From Sony comes the Official Playstation Blog. Its rather new and they started off in style with an Inside the developers Studio series in time for E3.

I’ve always wanted to take a peek behind the scenes of game development so I really enjoyed the series .

Its finished now, but here are the episodes:

Hermen Hulst, Guerrilla Games – Killzone 2
Julian Eggebrecht, Factor 5 – Lair
Evan Wells & Richard Lemarchand, Naughty Dog – Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
Dylan Jobe, SCEA – Warhawk
Sarah Stocker, SCEA – SingStar
Seth Luisi, SCEA – SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation
Brian Allgeier, Insomniac – Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Nina Kristensen, Ninja Theory – Heavenly Sword
Felice Standifer, SCEA – The Eye of Judgement
Erich Waas, SCEA – NBA ‘08
Travis Williams, SCEA – PAIN
Cory Barlog, Ready at Dawn – God of War: Chains of Olympus

Don’t forget to subscribe.

Lets Face It

~ rbonini

Om Malik takes a look at Facebook histeria:

Take Bay Partners as an example. A sedate venture fund that typically invests in semiconductor companies and infrastructure start-ups has started a new effort that invests exclusively in Facebook applications. The right applicants can get anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 as an investment for their applications.

The collateral of this project, imaginatively dubbed App Factory, is interesting, cringe-worthy reading filled with clichés like “application entrepreneurs” and “affect adoption, virality, and usage.” Here is just a nugget of wisdom from the press release announcing this new funding strategy. 

 A fully baked business model is also not a requirement, as long as there are reasonable theories and approaches that can be explored together.

Putting my newly acquired Hebrew Yiddish skills to use, I say, Oy-vey!

Are we looking at another dot com bubble?

Shel Isreal asks the same question, in connection to Ning:

But Michael Arrington says that it’s first external financing round was $44 million and that the company’s post-money value is $214  million. This scares me.  It scares me because I cannot conceive of any possible argument that this company is worth nearly a quarter billion dollars. Even considering the value of Marc’s personal brand, the upside expectation seems to me to defy reality.

I am a survivor of the Great Dotcom Bubble. I remember hearing company valuations that seemed silly or worse to me, and I recall being shouted at because “I just didn’t get it.” What I did get was bubble splatter all over my nice PR guy suit, and then a nice long rest from work.

The Ning valuation scares me. I just don’t get it. I hope someone else does

Well? Are We?

Update:  AppFactory Q&A here

Declaration of Blogging Independence

~ rbonini

Just read this hilarious post by Kent Newsome:

We hold these truths to be self-evidently pie in the sky, that all bloggers are created equal, that they are endowed by their Computers and iPhones with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are lots and lots of Links, Thoughtful Comments and the pursuit of AdSense Dollars. – That to secure these rights, lots of Wailing and Moaning is inserted into Blogs, deriving their literary powers from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical video-blogged nerdathon, – That whenever any Ze Frank or Ze Frank equivalent becomes destructive of these ends by monopolizing all the viewers who would otherwise be watching videos of Star Trek impersonations, it is the Right of the Bloggers to use their webcams, lightsabers and YouTube to alter or to abolish it, and to achieve new levels of self humiliation, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their rapidly diminishing Technorati Ranking and Google Juice.

Read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.

Update: Here is the real thing

Scoble’s Phantom Links

~ rbonini

You may or may not have read Scoble rant here about Techmeme not putting most linked stories on its front page.

TechMeme (which started out as a blog news engine) has totally switched its focus away from blogs. I’m tracking the Plaxo news. I was among the first two sites out with news about Plaxo’s new 3.0 platform. I have the only videos. Posted two of them. I have one of the first real reviews. Google’s blog search shows I have the most inbound links. Om Malik, who posted a story about Plaxo two hours after I did, even linked to me.

Yet the top article right now? One by the Register which doesn’t even have comments and doesn’t link out and doesn’t have screen captures (like other articles do) and doesn’t have video and doesn’t even have any real news.

You can read Doc Searls respond to Scoble about this:

And some don’t bother to play at all. Yours truly, for example. I don’t follow Techmeme, Digg, Memeorandum or TechCrunch any more than I once didn’t follow Daypop or Slashdot. Somewhere way back there I began following topics more than bloggers. Last couple of weeks or so, for example, I followed Supernova and VRM, together, because VRM was a subject of special interest to me that was discussed at Supernova. If in the course of looking into topics I run into one of the popularity-following (or -making) sites, I’ll go there. But I don’t start there.

…

Every one of these valuation engines has its own weighting system, of course. But many links from many bloggers does not true authority make, especially when the system is gamed in the manner that Kent nails rather well. We’ve gone from SEO (search engine optimization) to BVE (buzz volume elevation). The results are often useful, but they can also turn the blogosphere into high school.

In his post he links to Kent Newsome’s hilarious post about this:

Scoble says he has all the inbound links and ought to be the top story about whatever the top story is at the moment.  He’s said basically the same thing before.  Here’s the problem with that: Scoble could write a post about arm farting and 30 or 40 people would immediately link to it, hoping he might link back.  Scoble has more yes men than Michael Corleone and Michael Arrington combined.

In other words, all those people linking wildly to Scoble aren’t doing so because they think he is the world’s greatest authority on arm farting.  They are simply holding out their hands eagerly and hoping Scoble will shake it (via a link) as he walks by.  Getting a link from Scoble is almost as good as getting arrested with Paris Hilton.  It’s not Scoble’s fault he’s the king of the blogosphere any more than it’s Paris Hilton’s fault she’s in jail.

 

But none of this is a sound basis for deciding what is top news and what isn’t.  There needs to be more to it.  There needs to be a balance between popularity, authority, freshness and inclusion.  Most of the target audience for Techmeme already subscribe to Scoble’s blog.  They are at Techmeme looking to see what others are saying about various topics.  And let’s not kid ourselves, a ton of Techmeme readers are bloggers who want to be included in the conversation.  To remove the opportunity for inclusion would change Techmeme in a fundamental and adverse way

Unfortunately no one has yet come up with a magic silver bullet or ( if I may mix my metaphors) the PageRank for blogs. Its a though problem to solve. Do you crawl the linking websites to see if they actually talking about Scoble’s expertise Arm Farting, or is it simply a link farm blog? Come to think of it, how do translate a blogs authority? Page views? Subscriber stats (Google will have no doubt added this in to their blog search)?

Authority is more perception than anything else.  You can’t get an algorithm to perceive the difference between Bush’s authority and Scoble’s ( that is authority as in “do people listen”).

Hey Robert, now that you’ve got  2 days on your hands, how about some arm farting lessons?

Shel Isreal needs help

~ rbonini

Shel’s engaged in a new project to, in his words:

I have 60 days to produce three anecdotal research reports on The Americas; Asia Pacific and Europe-Mediterranean-West Asia and I need your help.

A report on what?

Here’s what I am doing.  I am trying to answer a single, overwhelming question: “What is going on in the world with regard to social media? I am looking for useful statistics, but those are often outdated before they are published as we learned with the book.

And Shel needs our help on this project:

I suggested to Mike that we conduct and report on this project, transparently, online on this site in the same way Robert and I wrote Naked Conversations. If the book had magic, had not come from the research or the actual writing.  It came from the collaboration we had shared with the blogosphere.  Bloggers gave us leads. They corrected the facts.  They let us know when we were making valid points and when we had gone over the top.

I proposed that we do the SAP Global Social Media Research on this blog, in collaboration with the blogosphere, that we do it transparently and that what we find we share on this blog. This, as far as I know, would differentiate it from any market research and the process in itself would become an example of thought leadership.

…

I want your stories.  For those of you who started reading this blog after the book was published, I interviewed most of the people in a Q & A style and posted them on this site.  Then other people left comments.  Those interviews got incorporated into chapters.  Early versions of the chapters were then posted and we received more comments before finalizing the chapter.

So, please start those cards and letters coming now.  If you have a story that reveals something about blogging, blogging trends in any country of the world please let me know.  SAP is more interested in business than consumer, but what people are doing is  valuable in that it shapes  all markets. You are encouraged to leave a comment here.  If you are shy you can email me at shelisrael1@gmail.com.

 

I’m looking forward to seeing this unfold ( I missed this the first time around with Naked Conversations). I fully intend to participate.

Well, what are you waiting for?

Software Engineering

~ rbonini

Steve McConnell, of Code Complete fame, just put the following post up on his blog:

The February 2007 issue of IEEE Computer contained a column titled “Software Development: What Is the Problem?” (pp. 112, 110-111). The column author asserts,

“Writing and maintaining software are not engineering activities. So it’s not clear why we call software development software engineering.”

The author then brushes aside any further discussion of software development as engineering and proceeds to base an extended argument on the premise that software development is not engineering.

The post caught my eye as I’m thinking of switching from a Computer Science degree to a Software Engineering one.

Steve says:

Numerous software development activities have clear counterparts in other engineering disciplines, including:

  • Problem definition
  • Creation of models to verify the engineer’s understanding of the problem
  • Feasibility studies to verify viability of design candidates
  • Design as a central activity
  • Creation of detailed plans for building the product
  • Inspections throughout the product-creation effort
  • Verification that the as-built product matches the product plans
  • Ongoing interplay between the abstract knowledge used by engineers and the practical knowledge gained during construction
  • etc. 

 Which is why software development is often compared to bridge building ( albeit one can only take the comparison so far).

Which brings me to Scott Rosenberg’s book, Dreaming in Code. In the Epilogue , he tells the remarkable tale of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The construction of the bridge was halted by Governor Schwarzenegger  in December 2004 and a new design was called for (which arrived in July 2005 in the guise of an exact copy of the original). By this time the bridge was nearly half built. Says Scott:

As I read about the controversy, I couldn’t help thinking of all the software management manuals that used the rigorous procedures and time-tested standards of civil engineering as a cudgel to whack the fickle dreamers of the programming profession over the head. ” Software development needs more discipline”, they would say. ” nobody ever tried to change the design of a bridge after it was already half built!”

The State of California had done a fine job of undermining that argument.

Touche

All joking aside, however, Software development is indeed treated as a field of engineering. Says Steve:

  • The Computer Society adopted a Code of Ethics for Software Engineers almost 10 years ago.
  • The IEEE Computer Society approved the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge 2.0 in 2004, which was adopted as an ISO/IEC Technical Reference 19759:2005.
  • Curriculum guidelines and accreditation standards have been established for undergraduate software engineering programs.
  • In the United States the official engineering accreditation board, ABET, has accredited 13 undergraduate software engineering programs since 2003, and in Canada 9 such programs have been accredited (by CEAB).
  • Numerous provinces in Canada license professional software engineers, and professional engineers are chartered in software in England. 

 So do we treat software design in the same way as we treat algorithms, or do we try to do new and novel things  (the way I like thinking of engineering) with our software?

Perhaps both. While there are well established principles when it comes to bridge building, bridges ( or, indeed, any kind of construction – take the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain) emerge from construction rather unique. Each bridge features something new and novel.

So is Software Development more a blend of engineering and art?

Life as a Beta

~ rbonini

Steve Rubel  is right on ( for the philosophically inclined):

From adolescence onwards, you’re in a perpetual beta mode. As an adult you’re constantly learning new skills and capabilities, even as you age. The best and brightest among us are constantly growing. As a human being, you really don’t “ship” (as the technology parlance goes) until you’re dead.

For the geeks among us :

This week Apple, a company that certainly strives for perfection, launched a new beta version of its Safari Web browser. It’s buggy on both the Mac and Windows and lots of people are grumpy. It even broke several of my Dashboard widgets.

Yet, Apple, as a technology company, seems to be allowed to make such mistakes. They are permitted to learn and grow out in the open by slapping the “beta” label on products and services. Everyone else, however, is expected to be perfect. That’s like asking Curt Schilling to pitch a perfect game every outing. It’s ludicrous.

 

And so, in a eureka moment, I figured out why  Google has  two thirds (maybe more) of its software with a Beta tag, even though the software works perfectly well.

Seriously, people ( or should we say beta testers??) are more forgiving with Beta software. I mean, that’s why we’re testing the software in the first place.

This’ll keep me warm  in the long hours ahead as I prepare my Windows Home Server for an upgrade to Release Candidate 1.

Windows Home Server

~ rbonini

The black box has been humming along quite nicely for the past few weeks. I’ve nothing to actually say about its because nothing has really gone wrong.

The folder duplication works great. My only small gripe is that it keeps reminding me that duplication is failing for one file in  my Music folder. And I can’t tell it to ignore this issue. So I’m reminded of this about 10 times a day. This is actually a good thing as its driving me to get a new hard disk  – its an itch  that needs to be scratched. Once I get around to buying it, the new hard disk should take me well over 1Tb of storage. Which is perfect for SageTV (which I will take a more serious look at once WHS has been released).

The only other small thing that I’ve found is Remote Access goes out the window as the Router changes the Servers IP address and messes up the port forwarding. If the Wizard actually worked, I wouldn’t have this problem.

Its rather startling to have a Microsoft product that just works. Its uncanny. After years of using XP is till have to wrestle go get stuff done occasionally. WHS is totally a painless experience (unless you happen to be testing extreme use cases).

The rumor mill reports that a Release Candidate is due to be released in the very near future. And once again I will spend a happy weekend installing it.

Now for WHS news that is sort of connected, but isn’t really, the WHS team has a new member ( blog here). The official blog post announcement from the team:

The Windows Home Server team decided to offer a summer internship to one of our earliest beta testers and top forum contributors.  Tom Z. is a high school student from Arizona and he will be spending the next 2 months with us working on a wide variety of projects from building home server demo hardware for various events to trying to code his first add-in

Its really interesting to get an outsiders view of a) the team and b) Microsoft.

If you read a few of his previous posts you’ll see that he’s also beta testing Windows Server 2008. I assume that this will be come the backbone of WHS 2. The fact that the server can be installed in a Core configuration has interesting ramifications for WHS. if you look at the Server Storage tab you’ll  see that the OS takes up 10GB. Under a Core setup, the OS could install in 1 Gb or less.

My point is simply that WHS 1 is the beginning of something extra ordinary. I can’t think of any other company that has ever tried to target Server- grade software into the homes of ordinary people.  And bring about a product that works as slickly as WHS.

In short I’m excited at the prospect of what WHS 1 will do (as in, turning the whole network into one massive PVR via SageTv), I can’t wait to see what the Team have up their sleeves for the next iteration of this grand experiment.

 PS. This is my third post with the new Live Writer. Its a great improvement over the old one. More later.