techno.blog("Dion")

As the Olympics comes to a close, I remember seeing the frolics of the opening ceremony, and thinking about how the London contingent must have felt as they are reminded “oh yeah, we are following China.”

To think that London will be mainly hosting in the beauty that is Stratford and the like. I hope the workers are getting paid overtime to make it happen!

China was a coming out. An East meets West. London needs a mission too. If you can look past the infrastructure issues, and how the M25 and Tube will explode, there is a lot going for it. Having the tennis happen at Wimbledon, and some footy at Old Trafford and Wembly, and using other great sites. That could be impressive.

Also, we are lucky that shows such as X-Factor, Pop Idol, and “Brits have some got talent somewhere” will be able to find the two kids to make a different. The cute one to lip sync, and the other one who can actually sing.

Can’t wait to be there for London 2012. It has got to be better than the logo!

Athens was returning to the roots, to the country that invented the Olympic Games. China was the most populous country in the world.

London is the capital city of the country that has invented modern sport, that has invented the rules of the sports, and the values of fair play.

It is a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-religious city and that’s something they can build on.

I am in a paradox this morning. I found myself managing a million friggin updates to various software and components.

There were the iPhone Apps (keep hoping that NetNewsWire will get stable :(), and the software updates, and the browser plugin updates, and the list keeps going on.

It is interesting, because at the same time, if I download an application that doesn’t tie into an auto-update framework, I get frustrated. I am maddened as I know that I won’t stay on top of the versions, and I shouldn’t have too!

So, I want all of my software to update, but I don’t want to be bugged all of the time. Hmm. How about silent installs? What if I could say for a set of apps “just keep these puppies up to date and don’t even bug me”. Maybe just a growl “hey, just so you know, I updated NetNewsWire to the latest point release, and if it isn’t working well, you can revert”. Having revert would be cool (but potentially more work).

But wait a minute, what if that happened and suddenly something stopped working, or I just didn’t like the new version? Well, revert can help there, but maybe you could have a setting where silent updates happen only for point releases.

What about security though? This would allow developers to sneak in some code without me even knowing! True. That sounds scary doesn’t it. However, isn’t that bogus? They could just put it in the new release and you would update anyway! I doubt you are cracking open the .exe to look for malicious code :)

The fact is that we rely on trust. We weigh up trust. And, I am willing to trust certain companies and people to do silent installs.

In fact, someone on the Gears team mentioned that they think it is the developers responsibility, and that it has to be taken seriously. What if there is a security breach? If you have the ability to push out a fix in short order, you can minimize the scope. Else, there will always be a serious of people who never upgrade and are taken over. How many 5 year old worms and viruses are out there that still propagate due to your aunt running Windows 98 with no changes to it. Ouch.

So, I am all for a change. Time to allow more silent upgrades. Developers, protect me, and don’t bug me all the time!

Loopt looks very cool. I downloaded it early on for the iPhone 2.0 software, but after I set up an account I saw the “Invite Friends” step, and I just couldn’t do it.

Even though the service ties into my iPhone contacts, and online allows me to blast my contacts on Gmail etc (although not using the Google Contacts API so you have to give them your email password which is a password to everything since people can “forgot password?” you) I still couldn’t do it. I couldn’t ask my “friends” to go through yet another process to show that we are friends.

I have noticed this from the other side. Plurk comes out, and you get a set of emails from people asking to connect. I don’t need another Twitter, even if it scales.

You start to see the same faces again and again. FriendFeed asks if Bob is your friend. Yes, yes! He is my friend on Facebook and Twitter!

Where is the magic “just do it already” button that takes this over for me. Where is the data portability + with ease. Everyone needs to do more, and there are hard problems there, but I am slowing down on services until it happens.

I click on less as they come in. And, I take less time to go and friend back the person, again even if I have already done so on another service. It’s just too much.

So, sorry Loopt. It isn’t you, it is me. I don’t have the energy to do it, so I will leave my account up with 0 friends, and as the odd people find me I will accept, but I am not going to go after anyone…. until the systems talk to each other and I don’t have too.

I witnessed yet another “dynamic vs. static” argument between a couple of developers today. The age old debate just keeps on going.

I totally understood both sides. I have been in both positions. If you look at the Rails code for example, it takes you quite awhile to grok what they are doing with tons of meta class stuff. It can be a little frustrating to open up classes that all look like “class Foo; end” and you growl “where is the functionality!”.

On the other hand, I have worked with plenty of Java codebases that have me jumping through the IDE following the class - abstract class - interface trail where it seems that a ton of code could be shortened to 1/40 the size.

Obviously, it is easy to write bad code in any language (and I have done plenty of that!).

What makes matters worst is when you have the team with the one wizard. This is the guy that builds code that bit twiddles your bytecode so much that you get exceptions when testing that send you to weird anonymous blocks that don’t actually show you what is going on. You curse as you are in static language land with a great IDE like IntelliJ yet all of the information is gone. The worst of both worlds.

On the other hand, you want to bring good practices from other lessons learned. When I write Java now I often use closure-like semantics. However, I try to think about who the users of the code are, and how they are likely to think about things. If you always give people a clean API (again, very hard) then you can do a bit more magic under the hood (until it breaks and the developers can’t debug the darn thing).

As we move to the world of the polyglot, it will be interesting to see how developers cope thinking in various paradigms in the same codebase.

I wondered why Scott Adams was following me around, and my coworkers were pointing things out!

I like the idea of TwitterFone. It would be nice to be out and quickly call in a tweet. I got an invite, and tried it out this week, and then remembered that voice recognition is really hard. Doesn’t it always seem to be one of those technologies that is “10 years out.”

My test tweet occurred after Man U beat Chelsea for the Champions League trophy.

I said:

I’m really excited that Manchester United won again today but I can’t believe that it went to penalties.

and I saw the following in my twitter stream a few minutes later:

I’m really study the dimensions unit one again today but I can’t believe that it went to penalties.

To be fair, they did pretty darn well. It is hard to expect them to know something like Manchester United. Unfortunately, even though they did well, it would be hard for anyone to understand what I was saying.

I then thought back to Twitter Translate. In that case we are translating between languages, and it is also often “off”. However, you can normally work it out, and there is a key difference. I expect that if I translate something that it will be a bit off, and I will cope with that. However, something like TwitterFone is happening without the consumer knowing, and thus it comes across as gobbledy gook as they don’t have the context (other than seeing “twitterfone” if they look carefully).

It seems that there are many use cases where it is OK that translations of some kind are “good enough”, and others where it does matter. You could get into trouble too, such as the comic above which messes up the “d” for direct message and changes it slightly so you say something totally different.

You could go from: “I like yoghurt and peas” to: “It hurts when I pee”.

Then there is the 140 character issue. It is impossible to do the math as you are speaking a sentence, so you will often run on.

Nice idea, but we need the technology to get to the next level for this kind of input to be used in a case like this. Using it for GOOG-411? Perfect… you can keep saying the same thing again.

Every other day you see a post like this or this.

I wonder if the downtime that Twitter has, may have been a good thing in some ways. It gets people riled up, and we all rant about how it is crucial that we have a Twitter that is up. But, it isn’t down enough to make people switch to Pownce, which doesn’t seem to go down (or at least you don’t hear about it) so it therefore doesn’t get in the news.

I wish we could have a parallel universe that could compare the growth of a service with zero downtime versus a touch of it, in this case.

When should you eat your own dogfood? I saw two contrary thoughts recently that showed how sometimes you are damned either way.

Microsoft Silverlight Dogfood

I hit Channel9, or some baseball thing, or any random video site that uses Silverlight and I get the in-your-face “upgrade for a better experience” message. This has me thinking “geez, why wouldn’t they just use Flash here for the cheesy little video.” It feels forced and gratuitous.

But, then….

Curl using Flash

If you go to Curl.com you will see Flash content everywhere. It is easy to laugh and say “wow even Curl doesn’t use it!” and “How can they not eat their own dogfood”. Or, you could look at it another way: “They realise that they are enterprise players, and they don’t want to force a download on people who are just browsing their website.”

All of this brings us back to the question of when to eat your own dogfood, and it appears that the answer is nuanced. You don’t want to be bloody minded about it either way, and it depends on what you are doing. Are you forcing dogfood on your own teams that have a vested interest in making the thing better? Are you trying to shove it down other peoples throats? Could you even do both. For example, if you have Curl installed use that (showing something cool in addition), else, show Flash but have a small link to the Curl version if people are interested.

Someone shoots you some Java source code, you try to just open it up in IntelliJ, and then you realize that you need a freaking project. Instead, you open it up in Textmate and go from there.

Hence, the definition of an IDE:

If you have to create a project before you to open a file, you are using an IDE

Good tools can be very rich, but not enforce this. Emacs can act as the mother of all IDEs when it comes to functionality, but you can also right click and open a darn file. At this point, I would never build a programming tool that didn’t work in either mode.

I had a conversation at JavaOne yesterday with a couple of chaps who had some interesting thought processes on taking a new job.

One of them had an offer from a company that he liked, that would have him changing location (which he wanted) but he was wondering if he should wait for WWDC and see if a new Macbook Pro comes out, and thus join afterwards getting the laptop. The thought of joining now, getting a current version, and then seeing a new one came out would be torture.

I sat and listened for quite some time before suggesting that if this was SO important to their package, that maybe they just tell the prospective employer and if they want them, they will probably buy the bugger a new laptop when it comes out.

Always funny to hear the priorities of the developer. Laptops, free t-shirts, and free food.