Category: Rants

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?

I have a Windows Home Server Vision

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

While I’m not that concerned about offsite backup for my Window Home Server. The problem has been dealt with in detail by a few fellow beta testers.

Check out a detailed look at the problem here and a further look at setting up IDrive-E with WHS ( the chosen solution) here.

Now, it seems pretty clear that an offsite back-up solution is a gaping hole in Windows Home Server. This is the case for one of two reasons. Either Microsoft deliberately decided that it was not going to bother ( possible, but unlikely in my view). or Microsoft has something up its sleeves ( if not for this first release of WHS, then then for the next one).

Now entirely by coincidence (sarcasm intended), Microsoft announced a limited private beta of its Live Folders service.

At the moment its limited to 500Mb of storage.

What if Microsoft integrates the two services together (Live Folders +WHS)? I mean, think of it.

  • Your OS files don’t need to be uploaded since Microsoft already has the original files (Since you are using a Microsoft OS). Only the Changes need to be backed up.
  • Microsoft products like Visual Studio, Office and Flight Simulator ( all three are the largest installed programs on my PC) don’t need to go since Microsoft already has the original files
  • This leaves us with your personal files. Once all your stuff is up, only changes need to be moved, making it much faster.

Once 20 Million households (the current MS estimate for the WHS market) all upload their data, Microsoft can literally organize the worlds data far more conveniently than Google.

Not that I’m being alarmist, but its a scary thought.

I can see Google coming out with a similar app, but in the form of a Universal Binary to reach a cross-platform audience (case in point – a friend of mine mistakenly reformatted a UNIX drive. WHS could not have been used to recover lost data. Any suggestions on recovering the data on the drive?).

In closing, Mary Jo Foley says, ominously:

Software+Services (S+S) is Microsoft’s alternative to software-as-a-service (SaaS). Unlike Google, Salesforce.com and other pure-play Web 2.0 companies, Microsoft is making sure that there’s both a services and a software component to all of its products, going forward. That’s the crux of S+S.

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?

Green with Envy

~ rbonini

Scott Hanselman has us all green with envy at his  soon-to-be built $1900 PC. And that includes getting permission from his wife.

Here’s the list:

  • Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case – Retail
    Item #: N82E16811129025 $154.99
  • MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail
    Item #: N82E16813130081 $144.99
  • 2 x MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC GeForce 8600GTS 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Over Clock Edition HDCP Video Card – Retail
    Item #: N82E16814127284 $337.98
  • Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive – OEM
    Item #: N82E16822136012 $199.99
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM
    Item #: N82E16822148136 $119.99
  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80562Q6600 – Retail
    Item #: N82E16819115017 $531.90
  • Scythe SCMN-1100 100mm Sleeve CPU Cooler – Retail
    Item #: N82E16835185037 $32.99
  • CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 520W Power Supply – Retail
    Item #: N82E16817139001 $129.99
  • 2 x Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model KVR800D2N5K2/2G – OEM
    Item #: N82E16820134117 $216.98
  • LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with 12X DVD-RAM write and LightScribe Technology Black E-IDE/ATAPI Model LH-20A1H-185 – OEM
    Item #: N82E16827106055 $33.99
  • Subtotal: $1,903.79

    • I’m keeping this list handy for the next time I have £800 in spare change.

    The above list put my PC to shame. Its only a year and a half old. What A Pity.

    HD versus Blu-Ray

    ~ rbonini

    Note: I’m far from an expert on this subject, but have been watching from the sidelines

    I was at ASDA yesterday (that’s Walmart here in the UK) and found a few titles in both HD and Blu-Ray formats. It was exceedingly modest compared to the huge “normal” DVD collection that surrounded it. It seems to drive home the point that a single, unified format that runs on all devices works.

    My collection of DVD’s ( about 100) can be played on any capable device I can find. From my PC to the my laptop to the DVD player to the Playstation 2. The only thing that changes is the screen size and controller format. Simple – no thinking require, literally.

    As far as I could tell (and I didn’t look that hard to be honest – I wasn’t planing to write this post), the only device capable of playing either format was the PS3 (of which there were only 4 on sale). The reason for the lack of a) players and B0 titles to choose from comes from the confusion over which title is going to make it to the big time. Its a rather chicken-and-egg problem. Do you take a risk and back one over the other and hope that it will make it with enough pushing? or do you sit it out and wait for it to make it to the big time.

    The thing is that once a format dominates, both manufacturers studios and retailers stand to make huge amounts of money since all the confusion will have cleared up and consumers will feel much more comfortable spending large amounts of money. Its not just the disks, its the whole eco-system that surrounds it. I’ll have to buy a new CD-drive capable to playing the new format. I’ll have to by a new player for the TV. I’ll have to by a HD-TV ( already done). I could go a bit further an by a HD set top box. And then there’s the disks (both with movies on them and for burning stuff to )

    Since there is so much to gain, I don’t get it when manufacturers are prepares to duke it out to the death (or one or the other does a repeat of VHS’s move against betamax)

    The thing is,  a push is already happening:

    On the one hand, it looks like Blockbuster is going all Blu-ray (in other words, no more discs that conform to the HD-DVD format). According to a story from the Associated Press as seen on Fox (there’s also a blog on News.com about it)

    …

    Could Blockbuster’s move mean the death knell for HD-DVD? Is Blockbuster even relevant in this market where people are getting their video on-demand and through outlets like Netflix?

    …

    Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Net, questions are being raised about Blu-ray discs engineering. Via Engadget comes a report that certain Blu-ray discs are “rotting” to the point that they’re unplayable.

    I watch with interest, while I save my pounds and penny’s to spend on the winner – to the victor, the spoils.

    Scoble, Facebook and Zoho

    ~ rbonini

    I’ve just been reading Scoble’s latest post. Its a long rant about Facebook (and maybe Social networking in general).

    Now I don’t use any Social Network (Gasp!Say its not So! 🙂 )and its mainly because I prefer handling my friendships the old fashioned way – face to face. Any contacts go either on my phone, Outlook (Another gasp!! Outlook? OUTLOOK??? 🙂 )or Gmail.

    But that’s not the point of the post.Its abut contacts in general. Outlook doesn’t do any sort of tagging. Gmail has tags. But not to the degree that Scoble suggests:

    Let me define different behaviors for each tag. “LOVER” tag might go into one page with a password, for instance, that isn’t publicly available. That way Maryam and I could use a social network to send sweet nothings back and forth (I can’t use any of these networks for THAT kind of social networking). “BUSINESS ASSOCIATE” could have a form that includes why I care about that person, business wise. So I could put Fred Wilson there, add that he’s a VC, add his blog, add his Twitter account, etc.

    Which is pretty clever.

    They say genius is lightning across the brain. And as I read the above paragraph, a tool to do the job jumped instantly to mind –Zoho Creator.

    Raffic Aslam, of Zoho, left this comment to my last Zoho post:

    Dear User,

    Thanks for your compliments )

    I hope you would have checked out our scripting language – Deluge, which helps users to build powerful applications easily. I request you to try out Deluge Script and share your valuable thoughts.

    Check out Deluge Scripting Video here –
    http://static.zoho.com/creator/v2/collateral/delugescript/index.html

    Thanks Again
    ~Raffic Aslam

     

    The link is actually to a video of said scripting language in action, which you can view below (thanks to YouTube):

    Its quite incredible. So this whole post is essentially a note to self reminding me to have a crack at this problem the next time I have a free afternoon. It’ll be more of a mashup than anything, but its a good idea to test Creator’s limits on.

    Safari for Windows Beta 3

    ~ rbonini

    I must say I’m impressed with this addition to the browsers I have installed.  Along with Firefox and IE7, Safari rounds everything off in minimalist style. It invokes the Apple user in be to start clamoring for a Mac (or a Microsoft version of Boot Camp).

    Its a Beta and an Apple App running on Windows, so crashes are de rigueur for this kind of thing ( forgive my french) .  And, yes, its crashed more than a few times since I switched to it full time last night (read: 24 hours ago).

    As luck would have it, Safari crashed as I was reading this TUAW post. Specifically, it crashed as I read the line:

    It has tons of new great features as well as the cursed instability issues…

    The Unofficial Apple Weblog post has a nice rundown of the features, some of which I’ve never heard of.

    In using any Apple app, you can expect the design ethic of His Steveness to permeate every aspect of the UI. Any Windows app feels like a chain saw in comparison ( that’s right, that goes for those toolbars).

    I had one problem with regard to actually surfing. The booking process at easyjet.com broke down in Safari round about Step 4. The Safari team might want to look at their asp page support.

    In the final analysis, Safari for Windows lives up to all the hype and is all that we’ve come to expect from Apple

    Google Privacy Row – Roundup

    ~ rbonini

    Since last night there’s ben a huge row over this report from Privacy International slamming Google over its user privacy policy/practices.

    For a taster Mitch Ratcliffe has this to say:

    Giving up our privacy for a little Web functionality and storage capacity is like handing over the mining rights to ancestral lands to the first guy who comes along with a better shovel

    And he was responding to this :

    It’s funny how they know so much about their horrible practices when they even admit Google didn’t respond to their request for information. Certainly that means their practices are the worst on the Internet.

    Scoble weighed in by saying:

    I was hoping this report was more factual than it looks cause we need to have a real conversation about privacy. If you read the privacy report you should read Danny’s blow-by-blow response to it.

    That said, Google’s PR is really stinky. Google isn’t paying attention to what normal people think of it anymore and it’s getting a bad reputation because of that. I heard it slammed over and over again for street-level views on Google Maps and no one from Google responded in most of the mainstream talk shows I heard talking about it. They should have a full-court “feel good” initiative where they have normal everyday citizens come in and meet the engineers, and look at the privacy issues.

    Danny Sullivan has a pretty good blow-by-blow account of the report (its a must read):

    Overall, looking at just the performance of the best companies PI found shows that Google measures up well — and thus ranking it the worse simply doesn’t seem fair. But the bigger issue is that the report itself doesn’t appear to be as comprehensive or fully researched as it is billed.

    Frankly, about the only thing saving Privacy International from many more companies or services being upset over this report is that they singled out Google as the worse. That’s almost guaranteed to make players like Microsoft and Yahoo shut their mouths and point at this silently as vindication they aren’t so bad.

    To save itself, I’d like to see Google appoint a privacy czar, someone charged with, as I’ve suggested above, assuming the worst about the company and diligently working to ensure users have as much protection as possible.

    All that said, Matt Cutts responds:

    Google didn’t leak user queries

    In this past year, AOL released millions of raw queries from hundreds of thousands of users. Within days, a journalist had determined the identity of an AOL user from the queries that AOL released. But AOL got a better grade than Google.

    Google didn’t give millions of user queries to the Dept. of Justice

    In 2005/2006, the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 different companies requesting users’ queries and other data. In fact, the original subpoena requested all queries done by users for two full months. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all gave some amount of users’ queries to the Department of Justice. Google fought that subpoena (full disclosure: I filed a declaration in that case). The judge sided with Google; no queries from Google users were given to the DOJ. But Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL got better grades in this report than Google.

    Google will anonymize query logs

    In March, Google announced that it would begin anonymizing its logs after 18-24 months. Google has continued to communicate on the issue, including a post on the Google blog in May discussing the reasoning behind that decision. In fact, we talk a lot about privacy, from blog posts to Op-Ed pieces in the Financial Times. To the best of my knowledge, no other major search engine has followed suit in a plan to anonymize user logs.

    I Don’t think I can really add to all that. Other than the idea that Google is firewalking here. As soon as it makes I really, really clear what its policy is, in detail, and appoints a Privacy Czar, things may well quiet down. Google just has to get used to the idea that this is going to happen more often.

    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.