My Life Blog

With all the talk about Web 2.0 on the blogosphere this week, I thought this post talking about SOA 2.0 might be interesting reading to the techies out there.

My favorite possibility is “uncontrolled reuse”…

Check out this site.  I’m sure he’ll appreciate the trackback, but he certainly doesn’t need it.

The site sells advertising pixels in blocks of 100 and each pixel sells for $1.  So far he’s made a quarter of a million.  Unbelievable.

I have tried far harder to make far less.  So the most profitable ideas do not require as much work as you think. 

www.ritarelief.org

Looks like we’re preparing well in advance on all fronts.  That said, their web page does appear to be registered by someone wishing to ward off the scam artists of the world.

Its early, but I fear we may all be soon considering contributing to the clean up of the Texas Coast.  If there can be any good news coming from Katrina, its that we appear to have learned some lessons.  Mandatory evacuations and residents-helping-residents operations are already underway.

I’m no expert, but if you could pick a city besides New Orleans which is extra vulnerable to damage from a hurricane, Galveston would have to rank high.  This due to the fact that they are a barrier island and aren’t far above sea level themselves. 

Here’s hoping for the best…

Wow!  I recently bought a Linksys Range Extender to cover some wireless dead spots in my own house.  However, according to this it looks like Google may be working on a HUGE Wi-Fi network and thus maybe I wasted my money!

If this is true, a lot of business models will be trashed, but having widespread Wi-Fi coverage would be a great step forward to most.

From time to time, its worth looking at the Internet Usage Statistics to ensure you have an accurate perspective on where the web is going. 

Of note, North America represents 23.8% of the World Users with a penetration rate of 68%.  But look at Asia, Europe, and Africa who currently represent 34.5%, 28.7%, and 1.7% of the World Users.  If you thought North America dominated the Internet, think again. 

Once those regions increase their penetration rates (they are 8.9%, 36.8%, and 1.8% respectively), North America will be even more outnumbered.

So if anyone wonders whether their app should be internationalized, there’s evidence to say that the audience is certainly there.  That is, of course, if the app is the kind that might have a world-wide audience.

My mother recently pointed out that she enjoys the humor and life portions of my weblog, but is bored by the deep ones.  In addition, I’d already been thinking that I needed to perform a little redesign magic on the site since I’ve been riding along with a thieved version of Zeldman’s site.

So I’m thinking about getting my money’s worth out of Typepad and setting up a few additional blogs to serve as "channels".  I know that sounds completely silly.  And yes, I know that those who want to could filter by category.  However, I think the channel blog idea has some merit.  She can subscribe to my "Life" blog and be spared by other deep-thinking.  My buddies and my step-dad can subscribe to the "Sports" blog.  And everyone else can enjoy the more branded professional blog.

I’d like to tie all this together under my main domain name, www.billeisenhauer.com, so I’m thinking of wrapping these blogs and a few other assorted pages together under a coordinated design.  That’s actually not a trivial undertaking since I have to delve into the Advanced Template Design features of Typepad and pretty much roll my own blog markup and CSS.  I’m up for the challenge, but it begs the question:

After everyone visits once and resubscribes, who will ever see the design anyway?

If most of you are like me, you have an RSS reader and you read posts straight off of there.  You rarely enjoy the site design itself.  So should you think much about the design of your weblogs? 

Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes for all of us.  All of you web designers out there must take special care.  Not only is it your branding, but its a part of your work portfolio.  For me, an application architect, entrepreneur, and a few things otherwise, it represents extra polish on my evolving personal brand.  So while I could short-arm the design, I probably will not.

So hopefully in a month or less, I’ll be able to let you know that the site has a new look.  At that point, you can enjoy my XHTML for once.

This is the beginnings of part 1 of the Kevin Kelly New Rules of the New Economy review series.  I introduced it here.

If you’d like to take a quick read of Kevin Kelly’s Embrace the Swarm chapter, an online version is here.

In that chapter, he has a few interesting headings (these are concept introductions or even statements outright) like "the power of decentralization", "the net is our future", "dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results".

One overwhelming example of his theories would have to be the evolution of Open Source in the last several years.  The Net has created the opportunity for otherwise independent and geographically disparate software developers and thought leaders to organize together and create software components that have drastically changed the face of software development.  Prior to the net, most software was either completely home-grown or built with purchases components.  We now see entire systems comprised of glued-together Open Source components.  If you aren’t in the industry, this may be lost to you, but trust me, this is really big.

Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google who have opened up their platforms with web services which, to some degree, represents an embracing of the swarm.  This would not have been done were it not for the Open Source movement and I’m personally curious to see what interesting applications the world of creative developers create.

Blogs and podcasting are now all the rage.  While people write independently, it really turns out to be one big intertwined conversation.  Someone introduces an idea, another expands upon it or questions it, and the idea gets explored till the next idea takes priority.  For those active in the blogosphere, it is not uncommon for their opinions to be shaped by the conversations they are having with bloggers that they’ve never met.  This is in stark contrast to years ago, where opinions were probably more influenced by traditional media, friends, and family.  Now it is possible to have conversations with anyone in the world.  In my opinion, this is as big as the Open Source example and we are just seeing the beginning of it.

Kelly’s book examples draw more on connecting devices and other objects, but my examples have emphasized connecting humans.  However, we are seeing trends toward connectedness in many areas, its just that sometimes the connections are invisible or very subtle. 

Having said that, I do not think, however, that we’ve quite advanced as Kelly might have believed in making our objects connected.  I cannot really say that the gadgets that surround me are as connected as they could be.  So on that, I think we’re still waiting.

Next up, Increasing Returns…

The airline industry is in turmoil as further exemplified by the bankruptcy filings by Delta and Northwest Airlines. American Airlines has lessened their bleeding, but I believe they are still losing ground. I haven’t researched the facts, so I’m not completely sure about that, but that’s my perception.

Meanwhile, the steady rise of gas prices cannot be good. But the trend most likely to affect the airlines is probably the continuing massive deployment of broadband. With increasing deployments of broadband, it becomes possible to improve the quality of interactivity across great distances. A by-product could very well be less business travel and thus an ever decreasing source of revenue for the airlines.

But the airline industry in some form must survive. I, for one, as evidenced in my Kauai posts, like to travel, so I’m pulling for the airline industry to figure something out. My prediction is that the airlines industry will see major changes to their business models — so major that air travel will be radically different in the future.

Technology is the ultimate disruptor and I think we’re only a few years from seeing how this is going to play out. So get yourself to your favorite destination now!

I didn’t think it could be done, but they’ve found a way to add a fifth blade.  Take a look at the Gillette Fusion.  I didn’t happen to read if it vibrates, though.

And now back to technology. 

Nokia has a deep investment in ClearCase as their configuration management tool.  Trouble is, its slow, does not support remote access (well, at least), and requires a full-time administrator for each deployment. 

Its also quite complicated, based upon my perception, though I admit my view of it could be considered limited.  In our environment, many of its features have been locked down.  Some of these features include branching and merging.  We develop off the trunk which limits us greatly.  My theory is that because these features are under such tight control that developers have omitted them from their SCM vocabulary.  And as each new developer comes aboard, they are trained to do things as we’ve always done them — develop from the trunk.  Branching and merging are features not to spoken of.

But many of us in my organization do not have our heads in the sand.  We know that the Open Source world has used CVS for years and that Subversion represents and improvement upon CVS.  We see that either of these handles every single use case we could think of and so there is a grass roots move to use them.

However, in doing so, we are meeting with curious resistance.  Even though we can make an air-tight case for Subversion, we are still met with questionable reasons why we must still use ClearCase.  So now I’m wishing who these people are that say that we should continue to use ClearCase.  Are they familiar with our workflow and ever increasing need to work remotely?  Its doubtful.  I think this is a classic case of sunk-cost infrastructure.  As in, we paid for it, thus you shall use it.

Dovetailing off of my previous Thing Big, Act Small post, I think the right thing to do by our organization is to make the proper decision that suits our needs as if we were in business by ourselves.  I know that sounds like I advocate defying corporate standards, but in this case, the standard doesn’t make sense.  We require the above-mentioned features and there is no requirement to share our repository globally.  That had been one of the counter-arguments used by the other side.  But in my mind, this is akin to the errant requirement to write portable code — how often do you really port code?

So what will we do?  Probably beg for forgiveness.  I installed a Subversion repository on my laptop and hooked it into to a test project in 10 minutes — and I did so without an administrator.  Hopefully, we’ll survive the corporate paddling.  I just hope that we get to turn around and see whose wielding the paddle.  For him, her, or them, I have questions.