August 2007 - Posts
This is great, now somebody needs to implement Windows Live ID with this...
&referrer=)
Well, if you didn't know, I joined the EDASC Swing into the Holidays event committee. After our business part of the first meeting we went on a boat ride and later a few of us went out again whale watching. I took this video with my little Sony camera.
Quote
EDASC Committee Meeting boat ride video
Video: EDASC Committee Meeting boat ride video
flickr photo feed I posted some photos on flickr under GeekGuy.
Been there, done that... Although, usually it involves pizza and lots of caffeine...
This should be fun. I've been to The Porterhouse before and the food is awesome.
MS-GearUp.com is the biggest busted piece of crap I've seen yet! Yeah, it works fine if you're starting a new agreement from scratch, but if you're trying to do a quote for a renewal/2nd/3rd year open value agreement it is hopelessly broken. It's either truly "smarter" than you, or... it's acting like it's smarter than you. Not to mention that tech support is email only for this, which is next to useless since it would take 3-4 days to explain what you're trying to do to some guy in another country who has no clue what you're talking about in the first place and is about as woefully untrained as the Licensing/Partner Resource Desk people. Wait, maybe I should call my SBSC T-PAM? No, wait, maybe I should have them call the Licensing Desk and conference in the Partner Resource Desk so they can all have a big 3 hour conversation and still come to the conclusion that I should talk to my ALP because NOBODY has any F&#KING clue how the H3&& this stuff is actually supposed to be properly licensed. Oh wait, Eric Ligman knows... He's the guru, but what's his email address again???
Maybe I should just take my customer to the Microsoft store with my "buddy's friend's cousin's neighbor" and buy all their software at a super discount. That's what everybody seems to do around here anyway. What's wrong with Microsoft, can't they get a handle on this $H!T?
The real problem with licensing is not piracy but the stupidity of the vendors and support system that is supposed to enable these sales. If it wasn't such a cluster-f&#k to figure out what to buy and who to buy it from they'd sell a lot more of it. Honestly anymore I just call the vendor, add up the licensing myself based on what the client has, buy it according to what the vendors tell me and walk away. If it's wrong then who cares, Microsoft's not going to do anything about it in the first place. Case in point, I have a previous customer who still has an active Open Value agreement that didn't pay their 2nd year to my knowledge and should have been terminated, but it's still Active. WTF?
Not only that, but the certification logo programs are largely a joke. Half the partners in the local phonebook have misused Microsoft's logos according to the guidelines they posted. And it isn't just locally that it's messed up, check out the Seattle phonebook if you really want a laugh.
The bottom line is, if Microsoft wants us as partners to sell more of their software they need to get out of the way. The programs need to be simple, there should be a single point of contact that is smarter than an outsourced human phone directory, and the products themselves should be of better quality than the previous versions.... to the average person, not just us geeks. Case in point, half my clients are on Windows Vista and the other half are on XP. The ones on Vista were mostly early adopters and had few issues, but many have had so many line of business applications fail to run, even after trying to fix them with compatibility toolkits and such, that they are now seriously considering downgrading back to Windows XP until their software comes of age, which could be a decade for some of these people!
For these people the perception is that Vista is buggy and doesn't work. Many are waiting for SP1 before reverting back to XP but this has tarnished Microsoft's already shaky reputation for buggy software. I personally really like Vista, don't get me wrong... but for some people it just doesn't work, at least not yet. I can't have it all my way but come on...
Anyway, my caffeine is starting to wear off so I'll be going now, but I seriously hope somebody does something about this stuff. I seriously doubt it though.
For quite a while now, since I was involved with the Rainbow Portal Project I have been kicking around this idea for an item based Web, or rather an item based computing experience. Restricting it to the Web or even the Internet is a mistake. The idea is really simple and yet I haven't found anyone who has implemented it in its entirety. All of the technology exists to make this a reality. So what's this idea, you ask?
Say you have a Thing. Microsoft often uses Item or Object to refer to Thing. Your Thing has properties (like name, description, etc), attributes (like width, height, size, etc), and content (like a photo). Thing also has methods or functions that you can do to/with it (like Resize, Email to a friend, Blog it, fix redeye, etc).
The Thing contains enough information about itself to completely reproduce itself. The part that has been most notably lacking has been its ability to completely self-describe its methods and to bring them along as it travels throughout different computers and programs. Now, I've used Thing with a photo as an example but Thing could really be anything, even a person.
Things should have the ability to self-host their translators and descriptors. So, one type of thing could be a PhotoTranslatorThing that can take in a photo and turn it into another type of thing, like a FileThing or a UrlThing or a MapThing, or even a PersonThing. The translators are one of the keys to how things move between applications and systems. Things should be able to be translated without losing ANY data. That means that you store your Things in a generic data store (say, SQL?) and move them to XML, and then later move them to some other format, but they always have all of their data tagging along with them, or at least a reference to their data so that when they are translated again it will arrive for them, a RemoteThing (or similar to an object proxy as web services gurus may say).
Here's another example of the use of Thing. You make a type of Thing that is say, a store item like a shirt. You like the shirt and so you copy and paste it from its icon on your desktop to an email and send it off to your friend. She gets the email and thinks it's cool and wants to sell it in her online store so she drops it into her accounting system and it instantly drops into her store as well. Somebody goes to her store and has a ProfileThing that tells the store their t-shirt size is XL. They click on the buy button and say quantity 1 at which point the Thing checks the originator location of the Thing to see what it's cost is and uses the ProfileThing to figure out the billing & shipping information to drop ship it to them. Once the store has that information in place it asks the accounting system about the markup and sale price for the TShirtThing. The person buying it hits checkout and the accounting system uses the RemoteThing method of the TShirtThing to place the order with the original Thing's creator while providing a TShirtThing to the person buying it that they can then send on to their friends.
Of course the original vendor would have to provide some of that functionality on the Thing to begin with, but that could be automated into a shim layer if need be for a particular store. They'd also need some kind of reseller login mechanism for the backend to ensure "normal" people didn't get reseller pricing.
All of these ideas are what I believe a large part of the plumbing on the next level of the Internet will be. I know some of the ways this could be achieved and I have ideas for how to make this a reality. My only problem is resources at the moment. Making something like this real means that people need to want it, and then someone with a lot of money has to back it and give birth to it in a way that lets the largest number of people possible access and utilize it. I would love to be a part of this process, but I lack the resources to do it on my own. It is very frustrating as you can imagine.
Ray Ozzie: Wiring Progress...
2007-08-14 Church Fire
A few doors down from our office there was a church on the corner. I say was because it caught fire and burned down last night. I only had my camera phone with me but I took a few photos of the blaze. It was definitely a sight to behold and they don't show it well at all, but it's better than nothing. No word on how it started or if anyone was hurt in the conflagration, but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough as the papers come out this morning and later into the day.
ROFL! Bad language warning...
Quote
Mac attack
Video: Mac attack
Wow, that's one huge burger! A couple of friends and I have compiled a list of local restaurants and what time they close. We eat out a lot and kept running out of ideas. Anyway, we're putting the list into a database and I'll make it available one way or another in the next week or so.
This is just funny...
Quote
Zeroes
Ordinary people...pointless abilities.
I posted some photos from Nate's birthday party yesterday here:
