Wayport wireless at DFW airport

Thank you, WayPort, for selling Wi-Fi access in the American terminal in Dallas-Fort Worth airport.  Not enough time to post an interesting tidbit about the use of Linux by Hannaford Bros., a large grocery store chain, that I found in Chain Store Age magazine.  More later -- stay tuned.

It's all about convenience

I'm off to Dallas to do a presentation at the NACS (National Association of Convenience Stores) technology conference.  John Hervey, the CTO of the group, was one of InfoWorld's Top 25 CTOs in 2001.   The convenience story industry is truly massive and as wrapped up in the development of standards as any other industry.  It's not just Slurpees and hot dogs any more -- it was a $283 billion business in 2001.

Update: I was on my way out to the airport and forgot to link my source for the stat above.  Also wanted to add a link to some interesting facts about technology and convenience stores. 

Groove: the downsides

Dave Winer points to Jeroen Bekker's weblog with two different views of Groove, one of them mine, which was deemed "positive" (and it was).   Jeroen references a negative review from vsabu.org that is a nice balance to my own breathlessness about Groove -- sometimes I get excited.  I read through V. Satheesh Babu's points and I have to say he's right on a number of them.  Some of them don't seem to matter as much in my particular environment, but then again, I've rolled it out to the IT group, which is used to rolling with the punches when it comes to trying new software.  We'll see how it works in broader circulation.  Anyway, back to Satheesh's points (and be sure to read at the bottom of the points on his page why he also likes Groove):

No printing.  I have run into this one as well.  I wanted to print something from the Sketchpad tool and was unable (or at least unable to figure out. . . and honestly, I haven't read the manual.  I've been able to print items in the Discussion Tool and other places, however.  There definitely should be some consistency here.

Huge download, every time.  Groove is somewhat of a download, but this hasn't been a problem.  We stick it on a server and let folks download it within the office LAN. 

Resource hungry.  No question about this one.  Groove is the most resource-hungry app on my laptop right now (1.1 ghz, 1GB RAM, WinXP), using about 26MB RAM by itself.  For comparison, Radio Userland is around 20MB and Mozilla is hovering around 15MB.  RAM is relatively affordable these days, but there's no denying that you need plenty.  (I haven't really analyzed CPU usage)

Platform for development.  I haven't even gotten into this one too deeply yet, but simple tools like the Tim Knip's Groove Interop Tool for Radio give me the impression that there's a lot to be leveraged underneath Groove's web services covers, and hooks are a Good Thing.

Intranet versions / security.  Like Satheesh, I haven't gotten too deeply into this either, but there is plenty of material available on the subject from Groove.  (Jon Udell gave Groove a 10 for security in his review.)  Groove also has intranet products (which mean more $$$ of course) to bring management completely in-house.

Saving spaces into corporate servers.  Haven't gotten into this yet and probably won't, so no comment yet.

Works only with Windows.  No doubt about that.  This is the most frustrating part for me, but again, I'm pleased to see that Ray Ozzie is listening on this point.  Using Virtual PC is the hack solution, but I can already see the help desk phone lighting up for Mac users who don't want to run a PC, much less one inside a virtual machine.

Stay tuned for how things with Groove continue to go here. . . should be interesting.

Getting the Mac Groove on

I'm glad to see that Ray Ozzie is listening to the folks who are begging for Groove on Macs.  I'll add my name to the list. 

I demo-ed Groove to the edit staff here last week and everyone is ready to roll it out but the Mac question persists -- though we will probably be using Virtual PC to deal with that issue.  Groove has already become the collaboration platform of choice within the InfoWorld Technology department, barely three weeks after we introduced it into our environment.  I haven't seen something catch fire this fast since a developer in my department starting using IM a few years ago, and the next thing I knew, we all just had to be using IM.  Groove is so powerful that I'm not sure I can do it justice, so I'll point again to Jon Udell's review of Groove Workspace 2.5.   Bottom line for us internally at InfoWorld:  it solves a lot of our problems, which is what good software is supposed to do.

Solaris for Intel?

A reader writes about my recent column describing how I was "forced" into the loving arms of Microsoft and Intel when my old Sun box got pegged on a key application here at InfoWorld.  The application in question was only supported on Solaris and Windows 2000.  The question:

Chad, what about Solaris on Intel?

The honest truth is that in my deliberations about this with my department -- a department filled with folks who really know and like Linux, but will settle for Solaris (which they also know well) -- not one person even thought of Solaris for Intel.  The e-mail above got me thinking. . . . yeah, what about Solaris on Intel?  I had totally lost track of it.  This is a bad thing for Sun, because Solaris used to be my server OS of choice until the price of hardware started getting in the way.  I decided to check further. This is what I found:

Sun has Free Solaris Binary License Program that states: "For only the cost of media plus shipping or download related costs, you can use the software for non-commercial usage on single processor systems supplied to you by Sun or its authorized distributors or based on the x86 architecture."  Sounds like the free option is there for a low-end single-CPU app, but for a "real" license, the pricing isn't all that different from Win2K.

In the end, the idea of Solaris for Intel just didn't occur to me, and I'm guessing it wouldn't occur to a lot of people in my position.  Most people I talk to are either firming their commitment to the Microsoft platform or moving as much as possible to Linux, usually on vanilla Intel from whatever vendor has the best price.  I'm not sure where Solaris for Intel fits into that trajectory, but this is still of serious interest to folks out there.  As far as I'm concerned, Sun has been too flaky on the whole Intel platform for me to jump behind it.

Incidentally, InfoWorld's Alan Zeichick has just published a review of Solaris 9.

Analog

Documentation for 5.1

Bandwidth charge hell

Glenn Fleishman writes about the price of online popularity in a web-hosting world that mostly still charges based on bandwidth.  I hear you, Glenn.  Even at InfoWorld, my excitement about traffic spikes is tempered by the realization that I'm getting the bill at the end of the month.  Fortunately, Glenn got off without a large bills as Level 3 (his provider) excluded some hours of peak usage.

Most hosting setups I've dealt with bill you on for 95th percentile traffic, i.e. they take bandwidth samples every five minutes during the billing cycle and at the end of the month, they lop off the top 5% and average the remaining data points to compute your bill.  We've had times where traffic has been 20x average, but at the end of the month, our bill was typical.

Udell's 500th, Open Source, outsourcing, and Brian Behlendorf

Jon Udell (who's taking a rest after his 500th blog post) did an excellent interview with Brian Behlendorf about (among other things) the conventional wisdom in business circles that software is something that can be built on spec by any software developer in the world.  Thankfully, Brian attacks that line of thinking in the context of open source software development, something he knows plenty about as a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and CollabNet:

One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn't just a Web server, it's a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition. There was a lot of noise a couple of years ago about building corporate component libraries. But the problem is that by simply having that code there, you didn't have the context. [full interview]

Brian also has a new blog.

Tom Yager is back

After an earlier entry into the world of blogging, Tom Yager returns with a vengeance with comments on the release of the AMD Opteron.

Flat files: the ultimate high-performance database

LAP to LAMP: Tim Bray writes about his experiences upgrading his blog-building backend, adding MySQL to his existing Linux/Apache/Perl setup.  Tim notes that he's skipping the database except at publish time:

Mysql may be in the picture, but that's just at publish-time; all of ongoing is still served as flat files out of a directory tree. If you can possibly arrange this, the payoffs in terms of performance and robustness are just immense. Of course, often you can't, but I'm going to hang on here as long as I can.

I couldn't agree more, and I would extend Tim's comments to say that not hitting a database is possible in even the most unlikely circumstances.  It just takes some thought -- going straight to the database is the lazy developer's choice (but a DBA or sysadmin's nightmare).  When I was working with a team to architect and build a massive sports site back in 1997, we hit the database at publish-time frequently enough but ultimately used the lowly server-side include to power the "dynamic" site, and we found that our in-game updates were as fast -- and often faster -- than other mega-sports sites who most certainly pounded a database on the backend.  The elaborate scheme of SSI's relied on an array of naming conventions for the tens of thousands of updates per day we did -- we processed everything from pitch-by-pitch Major League Baseball data to shot-by-shot NBA data (at the same time during this sports-heavy time of the year).

While not nearly as dynamic, we followed the same model when I was at Salon, and now we do the same thing at InfoWorld. 

Incidentally, while I'm thinking about SSIs, when we migrated to Apache 2.0 at InfoWorld, we found that the SSI directive below didn't work when we tried to serve it under Apache 1.3.26.   Perhaps there's a bug in the flow control SSI code in 1.3.x?

<!--#if expr="$QUERY_STRING = /something/" -->
print this
<!--#elif expr="$QUERY_STRING = /something else/" -->
print that
<!--#else -->
print something else
<!--#endif-->

In the end, it didn't really matter, but it was puzzling nonetheless.  I wish I had saved the error we got in the log files (it was a crazy time), but all I remember is typing the error into Google and my top result was the Apache code itself.  When you Google an error and your first result is the source code, start hacking.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows 2000

In my InfoWorld column this week ("Wagging the Dogma"), I write about problems that arise when IT shops become so committed to a particular OS that the IT tail risks wagging the business dog:

At one of my earlier jobs, I worked in a staunchly Solaris shop, where we were evaluating high-throughput e-mail delivery systems. The vendor for the leading product recommended that we benchmark its solution on Windows NT and Solaris. We did, and NT consistently beat Solaris -- for this particular application. After much hand-wringing, we decided to run the application on NT because it met these particular needs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much consternation within an IT department. Although we very much wanted Solaris to be faster, it just never came out that way. It was odd to see a group look so defeated after finding a better, faster solution.

The plot outline on IMDB for the movie I am referencing in the title of this post, reads:

An insane general starts a process to nuclear holocaust that a war room of politicians and generals frantically try to stop.

Hmm.  Maybe I'm trying to tell myself something.

It's better by bus

Phil Wainewright at Loosely Coupled writes:

This week was a great week for those of us who long for the day when technology finally catches up with the way businesses operate in the real world.

Here's why.

Doc on XMPP, SIMPLE, POGE

Doc points to our own Cathleen Moore's piece "XMPP rises to face SIMPLE standard" with excellent commentary on a subject that I've been only tracking superficially -- until now:

XMPP and Jabber are taking off because they are (truly) simple infrastructural building materials that are highly compliant with the NEA nature of the Net. SIMPLE is being pushed by IBM and Microsoft for a variety of reasons; but that very variety may be the core of a problem.

I especially appreciate Doc's explanation of the (POGE) Principle of Good Enough as it relates to this issue:

SIMPLE may be a fine protocol when it's done; but it's not. And from the sound of what Microsoft says above, it risks violating POGE: the Principle of Good Enough. Without POGE we would have no TCP/IP, no HTTP, no HTML, no SMTP. In other words, no Net, no Web, no Net-based email. POGE also accounts for the success of XML and Linux. It's why XML-RPC moved faster than SOAP.

Yes.

The XMPP working group's charter is worth a quick read if you're not familiar with XMPP. 

Oops

Somehow blew my home page away trying to route a category to another FTP server.  Guess I'll try again.

Bricolage and memory lane

Thinking about Salon and Bricolage took me for a walk down memory lane.  Through the wonders of Google, I found a PowerPoint from 2000 that Andrew Ross (Salon's VP of Business Development and one of Salon's founders), presented at Seybold about MPS (Millenial Publishing System), named so by Ian Kallen (the chief developer and architect of it) since we were in the year 2000.  MPS had been preceded by SPS (Salon Publishing System), which was developed by Shane Holland in the heady days of early 1999.  Shane and I worked on similarly designed systems (i.e. web-based frontend with Solaris/Oracle/Apache/Perl backends -- we should have called it SOAP!) back when we built CNN/SI in 1997 -- at the time, the largest web site (in daily page updates and sheer number of pages) at the largest media company in the world (Time Warner).  (Some of the people who were there are present in blogspace:  Paul Beard, Paul Holbrook, Frank Steele).  One day I'm going to work with all of those guys to sketch out the lineage of this thing like one of those BSD/System V charts.  In any case, the system would have ended up in the dustbin of technology history without David Wheeler keeping it going.

I also re-discovered a very well-done and beautifully designed article about Salon from DesignInteract.com, detailing our decision to build our own CMS -- and a great glimpse into what is was like to work at Salon (i.e. very, very fun).  I'm glad they took a screenshot for the article or I might have never seen the system again.  You'll notice the Creation Engines logo in the top left -- that's a longer story that is best left out of blogspace.  I'm saving that one for the book -- or the time when you buy me a drink and ask me to tell you the story.

MySQL vs. Postgres (and Oracle and Sybase)

Peter Marklund comments on our interview with Marten Mickos of MySQL and reflects on his choosing Postgres over MySQL last year.  In a past life, I was managing the group building the CMS at Salon that ultimately emerged with the Perl-based open source CMS Bricolage (a project now run by David Wheeler), something of which I am still quite proud.  Back then (two years ago), we chose Postgres as well, but with MySQL planning views, triggers, and stored procedures in version 5, the choice between Postgres and MySQL (and Oracle and Sybase for that matter) is getting much, much blurrier.

Lawyers read InfoWorld, too

In the rarified world of enterprise IT publishing here at InfoWorld, it's interesting to see non-IT people reading us.  Dennis Kennedy is no stranger to technology as an attorney in the Intellectual Property and Information Technology Group at Thompson Coburn LLP in St. Louis.   Dennis writes in his blog:

Tom Yager's Ahead of the Curve column in Infoworld has recently become one of my favorite reads because he addresses the implications of technology in addition to the implementations of technology. For example, his recent column called "Natural Selection" is an thought-provoking (in the best sense) meditation on consolidation in the IT industry and its implications.

That's our Tom Yager -- thanks for reading InfoWorld, Dennis.  If you're an attorney or an IT person supporting attorneys, check out Dennis' Top Mobile Computing for Lawyers: From Wired to Wireless.

MS Office 2003, Open Office/Star Office, and XML

This week in my InfoWorld column, I wrote about my mixed feelings about Microsoft's InfoPath:

...the realization of Jean Paoli's XML vision in the beta release of Office 2003 is truly a big deal and might be the most important Microsoft release for businesses since Windows itself. I just wish that InfoPath was bundled in all business editions of Office, and that I didn't have to ghettoize my Mac users yet again.

. . . noting earlier in my column:

As compelling as this new release is, every nickel and dime still counts in most businesses. In fact, I spoke to the CTO of a large company who is piloting StarOffice as a complete replacement for Microsoft Office, which, across thousands of desktops, could save the company millions of dollars.

Clearly, despite the announcement of Office 2003, the CTO I spoke with is not the only one considering alternatives.  A reader writes today in e-mail:

Just wondering if you had looked into the XML creation ability in Star Office/Open Office.  It creates very clean code, as opposed of Office 2000 or even Office XP (which I've evaluated).

Most of the benefits Microsoft is touting with "Infopath" are inherent in just switching to XML as a primary document standard.

I'm sure "Infopath" provides some nice "pre-canned" interface, but the capability to easily generate web forms based on XML already exists.  We certainly do it on a regular basis, and we are at Office 2000 (we haven't upgraded to Office XP yet, let alone considering Office 2003).  We are looking at Open Office.

I took a look at what the Open Office team is doing with XML, and while they don't appear to have an "InfoPath killer" (yet, that I'm aware of anyway), the groundwork is there and people are using its XML capabilities already.  This is definitely something to watch.

More Groove experiments

Lots and lots and lots of experimentation with Groove over the past week to ten days, hence the long pause in posting. In short, the P2P model really makes sense in practice for an IT department that doesn't want to buy a server product to help employees collaborate, although you can still do that with Groove's Enterprise Management Server if you want to.

For now, you can see what Groove looks like running with a Terminal Services window on OS X. I haven't had time to figure out how to share files between the Windows environment and the local Mac (or if it's possible), but I'm working on it. No matter how you do it, putting a Windows app in a difficult-to-use place on a Mac desktop doesn't seem to be a formula for bringing the Mac folks over the other side. It's a nice little science experiment at best, not unlike installing Linux on a wristwatche just to see if you can do it.

Groove and Macs

I'm trying to introduce Groove into an environment that has a considerable number of Macs, so I'm gathering various thoughts on how to do it best.  My colleague Tom Yager suggested using the Terminal Server Client for Macintosh and having the Mac users run Groove that way -- that seems to be the best idea so far.   Some people in the Groove Forums suggest using VirtualPC.  This approach clearly allows users to share files between their Mac desktops and the Virtual PC desktop, at least according to Connectix, who recently sold their Virtual PC line to Microsoft. 

Anyone have any suggestions?

Supply-chain panel post-mortem and InfoPath

Here's the InfoWorld story on the panel I moderated yesterday here at CTO Forum in Boston: XML the supply-chain missing link.   As moderator, I'll admit that I let the discussion stray a bit from a pure discussion of supply-chain management by letting Jean Paoli talk a great deal about Office 2003 and its native XML capabilities.  It's a big deal, and when you have the co-editor (with Tim Bray) of the XML spec on stage talking passionately about a revolutionary change in the most widely-used software product in existence, straying from the topic a bit is probably worth it.  In a nutshell, Jean's goal for 2003 is to "democratize XML."  I always liked the teachers who strayed from the lesson plan when another learning opportunity arose.  Justin Abel of Reuters, George Rimnac of WW Grainger, and Kaj van de Loo of SAP did a fine job bringing their expertise into the discussion.

I'm really not a big Microsoft fan, but at the same time, I've beat my head against the wall of building web-based forms for applications that demand a richer environment with things like spell check, formatting text without knowing HTML, etc.  I left the panel thinking that Office 2003 could make our MS Word-dependent workflow a lot simpler -- but I'm still wondering how to deal with the Macs in our environment because OS X is not supported.  Microsoft's split development of Windows and Mac versions of Office is a big pain for someone manageing a heterogeneous desktop environment.

I happened to read Tim Bray's comments on Microsoft's decision to not include InfoPath in the basic MS Office 2003 suite and it does seem unfortunate that InfoPath will only be available in the Enterprise version.   Since there are six versions of the Office Suite and the news stories I'm reading are a little confusing, here is a simple breakdown of what each version of MS Office includes:

• Enterprise: InfoPath, Access, Business Contact Manager, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher
  
• Professional: Access, Business Contact Manager, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher
  
• Standard: Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word
  
• Small Business: Business Contact Manager, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Word
  
• Basic: Word, Excel, Outlook (installed on new PCs only, not available for purchase)
  
• Student and Teacher Edition: identical to Standard, but for education market

The exclusion of InfoPath from 5 of 6 Office bundles doesn't take away from Microsoft's commitment to native XML in Word, Excel, and the other parts of Office, but it sure would be nice to have InfoPath everywhere.

CTO Forum: Copies of presentations

Copies of presentations by Ian Foster and Adam Bosworth can be found here.  Simon Pugh's presentation will be posted as soon as he's done with his presentation later today.

Unix as literature

In a conversation with Jon Udell a short while ago, I was trying to remember an essay I had read about the relationship between artists and literary types and Unix -- I was trying to remember Thomas Scoville's essay "The Elements of Style: Unix as Literature":

"Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression."  [full text of essay here]

For us English majors who hold Linus Torvalds and James Joyce in equally high esteem, this essay makes a lot of sense.   It's one of my all-time favorites on any subject.

Rob Flickenger at O'Reilly referenced Scoville's essay in another piece about OS X.  Scoville also wrote an entertaining serial novel called Silicon Follies originally for Salon.com that ran 57 chapters and became a book.

CTO Forum -- Supply Chain panel later today

Just had breakfast with Jean Paoli of Microsoft, Justin Abel of Reuters, and George Rimnac of W.W. Grainger to talk about our supply-chain and web services panel later today at CTO Forum.  Judging from the sparks flying in our brief discussion over breakfast, this panel is going to be very compelling. 

More than ever before, this discussion about web services and XML had the feeling of all the dots finally connecting, largely due to Jean Paoli and Microsoft's vision for bringing XML to the masses via Office 2003.  As Jon Udell noted back in November 2002 (way ahead of the curve as usual): "This is a really big deal." 

CTO Forum -- Ian Foster and Grid Computing

I was a little under the weather for the first day of CTO Forum, but fortunately, Jon Udell was blogging Ian Foster about five feet away from me.