BKeeney Briefs

I’ve said this in a few posts, in RB Developer Magazine, and when speaking at REAL World:  Don’t say anything online that can harm your business image.

Take for example the latest flap in Kansas City over Larry Johnson’s Twitter posts.  Full store here:

http://www.arrowheadpride.com/2009/10/26/1101039/chiefs-rb-larry-johnson-starts-war

I’m not going to defend the guy since this isn’t exactly new territory for the troubled Kansas City Chiefs running back.  In fact, I call him stupid for saying anything on Twitter about his coach, his team and teammates, or his host city.  As a member of any organization you represent the organization that pays you – no matter what.

The fact is, regardless of your business (and playing football is a business), what you say in public, whether in be at a conference, in a restaurant or bar, on Facebook, MySpace and, yes, Twitter can be used against you.  This is why you will NEVER see me talk about sex, politics, or religion because I know it will piss someone off (Even this post will most likely piss someone off but that’s the point!).

With me, I could lose a consulting client or two and maybe lose some software  sales.  I can move on.  I can change careers or I can make amends to rehabilitate my image.  A movie star, professional athlete or politician may not have that luxury and they may cost themselves a job and potentially millions of dollars in income.

Look, I know he’s human.  We all make mistakes and say stupid things.  I wish I had a dollar for every time I said something I’d like to take back.  But I’m not a professional athlete, politician or have a super high profile position and salary.  If I did, though, I’d be more circumspect in what I said especially if I knew the media was going to parrot what I said.  There are certainly plenty of examples of high profile people using social media properly and not airing their dirty laundry for the world to see.  Likewise there are high profile people in bad situations that keep their message positive.

In Johnson’s case he may have hurt his chances of every playing football again.  I expect the management and coaching staff of the Kansas City Chiefs and their fans won’t mind at all if LJ sits out the rest of the season and ends his career sooner rather than later.

How many times will they take the verbal abuse from a player that has always been a problem child?  LJ’s had more chances than most – mostly because of his athletic ability.  I think he’ll learn the lesson the hard way – through his paycheck.

If you’re thinking about an eReader for a Christmas gift you should probably read this:

http://technologizer.com/2009/10/26/the-e-reader-explosion-a-cheat-sheet/

I’ve been more or less happy with the Sony eReader.  It works ‘good enough’ but if something better comes along I’ll drop it in a heartbeat.  I’ve not been happy with either their Mac or Windows software that lets you purchase from their book store and sync to your device.  ‘Abomination’ comes to mind….

Of course, IF Apple ever does a tablet device of some sort, all bets are off.  Plus, the iPhone, despite its size, is really a very good eBook reader and it’s always with you rather than one more device to carry with you.

File this under the “how not to make a good first impression” section.  I’ve had a miserable 24 hours.  I’ve spent many hours working with VMWare trying to get Windows 7 installed.  After a couple of missteps I finally hit the right combination.

My first issue was that my VM image that was running Vista wasn’t big enough.  Of course it couldn’t tell me right away but only after installing temporary files and starting the installation process.

So I created a new VM image.  The installer gets to the point where it asks for the 20 character product key and it just says the product key is invalid.  No other explanation given.  I suspect, but have no idea because it doesn’t tell me, is that the activation process was looking for a previous installation.  But since my VM disk wasn’t big enough I had to do a clean install.

Finally, in desperation I did some research and came across an entry from January 2009 on how to install the beta of Windows 7 in VMWare.  I created a new VM using the Windows 2008 Server setting, did a clean install and did NOT try to enter my product key and activate.  Then I followed the instructions at http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/23/clean-install-windows-7-with-upgrade-media-the-answer.aspx.  After that everything (so far) has been working fine.

Come on Microsoft!  You REALLY need to work on the end user experience and that starts with the installer.  Really!?  I have to edit the registry to get it to install?

How come I can’t get a better error message when the product key was failing?  If it was because it didn’t detect a previous installation then just say so.  Don’t make me Google it and guess.

VMWare:  Your support section sucks.  How about something that’s easy to find stuff?  You would think that Windows 7 would be THE #1 topic this week.

Look, I’m not a Windows person.  I admit that AND I’m running it in VMWare so it’s NOT just Microsoft and it’s NOT just VMWare.  Just frustrating.

Hopefully someone else finds this useful.

Christian writes of his frustrations with the REALbasic community.  Blog post here: http://www.pariahware.com/blog/?p=231

I don’t disagree with his assessment though I do have a few more types to add to his list:

Type 3:  The I’m-Too-Busy-To-Think-About-Helping developer.  Personally I think this is a cop out.  We’re all busy.  Volunteer organizations, which ARBP is, is totally dependent upon volunteers.  We all have some quick and dirty proof-of-concept code that we could share.

Type 4:  The I-Don’t-Care-Because-It’s-Not-My-Responsibility developer.  That’s called apathy.  For the REALbasic community to succeed more of us need to care and actually do something.

Honestly, this list isn’t much different than any other volunteer organization I’ve belonged to.  This includes my college fraternity, several churches and even Habitat for Humanity projects:  Most work is done by a very few, highly motivated, people.

Here are the facts.  ARBP has been a part-time job for me.  In 2009 I’ve tracked all of my time (using Task Timer, of course) and I’ve spent 15% of all my working hours working on ARBP.  That’s nearly a day a week that I take a away from paying work.  And that doesn’t count the emails that I’ve answered in off hours.  Since we don’t get paid that’s tough to justify in the long run.

Any criticism you have of ARBP is okay.  You probably have some justification.  We’re all volunteers.  We need more help.  We need more examples in the source code repository.  We need more writers.  We need more training video’s.  We need a Joomla! expert.  We need someone to help coordinate next years ARBP Summit.  In other words, if you volunteer I guarantee that we can find something for you to do.

The RB community needs you!  Help out where you can.  Not only will you feel good about sharing your knowledge and experience but you’ll be helping the community out as well.

If you’ve ever been approached to do revenue sharing on a development project this is a must read for you and the people asking for it:

http://tapadoo.com/2009/the-problem-with-revenue-share/

The few times it’s come up with my potential clients I’ve always turned them down because I thought the risk was too high on my end and none on theirs.  Of course, if the right one comes along….

It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on our marketing.  Very early on we decided to start integrating social media into our portfolio.  As you’ve probably seen, we’re now active on Linked-In, FaceBook, and Twitter to name a few (the person doing our marketing is probably on a dozen more and, really, I don’t want to know all of them).  Part of our routine when announcing updates is to make sure we post on all of them as well.

I’ll be honest that I was a bit skeptical at first.  Maybe I’m just old enough to not ‘get it’.  I understand the importance of search rankings and all that but the social media thing has been somewhat of a mystery.

One of the first things we installed on our various websites was Google Analytics and I must admit that I get a kick out of seeing where people are coming from and what they’re search for.  Google Analytics is why I know people are coming from the social media sites.  I find it fascinating that some relatively obscure comment or article is drawing people.  As they say, the more eyes that see your product the better chance they’ll at least try it.  Leading them to your website is at least half the battle.

Since we’re heavily into Mac OS X software it comes as no surprise that a lot of referral traffic comes from MacUpdate www.macupdate.com and Version Tracker www.versiontracker.com.  Windows traffic isn’t nearly as clear cut and we’re working on how to get better exposure on that platform.  It’s obvious that the users of the two platforms research and consume their software differently.

I’ve heard some of the buzz about Woopra but I’ll wait a little bit before delving into it.  If you have any first hand experience with it I’d love to hear about it.  What is its strength and is it really useful for a small business like us?

The other thing we’re doing is making sure we get our press releases out.  I hate doing them myself because I have enough stuff on my plate as it is (and marketing speak is anathema to an engineer).  I’m glad to have turned that responsibility over to someone who likes doing them (at least more than me).  We are using prMac http://prmac.com/ and it is obviously making a difference because of its distribution network.  I find links from all over the internet based on the press releases.

Certainly one of the issues we struggle with is finding the time to do it all.  We’re lucky, to some extent, by having multiple employees who can do a bit of everything.  We hired a part time marketing person to help us out with all this stuff.  I know a lot of you don’t have that luxury.  How do you find the time for marketing?  Do you have any marketing tips for the small, independent software developer?

This just in from an official email from REAL Software:

We are sorry to inform you that the REAL World Regional Events have been cancelled.  Though we had a lot of initial interest, we found that a number of people who intended to come are not able to due to schedule conflicts and other reasons.  While we are selling more licenses this year than last and the REALbasic community is growing, we have concluded that the reality is people are still watching their expenses more closely due to the economy.

Wow.  I’m not even sure what to say about this.  I was supposed to speak at the REAL World Chicago event.  I’m so glad I was procrastinating in figuring out travel plans.

From an ARBP standpoint I’m very ticked off because people canceled their reservations to the RB Colorado Summit because they were going to the regional events.  This took the wind out of the ARBP conference and cost us attendees.  I know this because more than a few attendees pulled out just after RS’ announcement.

What are your thoughts on this?  Why do you think they canceled the events?  Was it because of the lineup?  Was it not technical enough?  Was it the cost?  The economy?  What does this say about their commitment to the RB community?

This week it appears that Microsoft screwed the pooch and lost everyone’s data that was using Sidekick on T-Mobile.  Microsoft should have known better and had proper backups and Hitachi (who was doing an upgrade for them) didn’t check either.  Expect some major finger pointing (and lawsuits) going on in the upcoming weeks. Regardless, there are multiple layers of failure and plenty of blame to go around.

It’s why I chuckle when people talk about ‘cloud computing’ being the wave of the future.  I have no doubt that we’ll see more cloud computing but there are just certain things that don’t belong in the ‘cloud’ and should be taken care of by your own IT department.

I did a fair amount of work a few years ago on a commercial accounting application and every now and then the boss would get all excited about cloud computing and he’d kick the tires and make some noise about moving the entire operation towards it.  At first blush it makes a LOT of sense to have the software and data reside elsewhere because it puts the burden on the host company to keep the software up to date, upgrade the hardware on a regular basis, have regular on-site and off-site backups and have decent security.  And then you realize that its strength is also a weakness as the Microsoft case has shown.  You are depending TOTALLY on someone else doing the right thing.

The other reason is the data.  For many companies their data IS their business.  It’s their competitive advantage.  You really trust all the pipes between your office and the cloud computing servers?  Sounds paranoid but this is your sensitive data you’re talking about, right?  How many stories have been published about SSN and credit card numbers being compromised (at the minimum) and outright stolen (at the worst) in the past couple of years?

If you’re in a larger metropolitan area you probably have decent internet access, with decent speeds, that never goes down.  There are a lot of places even in the United States where this is simply not true. I’ve always enjoyed pulling the network cable from a computer when someone is on their high horse about cloud computing.  Tough to get work done when you can’t load the software or the data.  At least with the software and data on my computer and local network I can still get work done.  My job requires internet access and I can tell you that when my internet goes down I’m not very productive (and keep in mind that I’m in a top 40 metropolitan area with all underground utilities!).  I’ve also had web servers get attacked and be so unresponsive that they might has well have been shut down.

In the long run, can you go to your boss and guarantee (because it might mean the difference of having a job or not, after all) that the data is 100% secure, backed up and available 24/7?  Food for thought, no?

It’s amazing what a couple of days away from the office will do to the backlog of work.

REALbasic 2009 R4 was released last week.  The two new features, build steps and reporting, have some serious bugs which makes it pretty much worthless to me.  It’s a shame, really, because I could use both of those features RIGHT NOW!  Definitely not one of RS’ finer releases in my opinion.

I suspect that there will NOT be a 4.1 release and instead there will be an R5 release before the end of the year.  I think this only fuels the fire that  RB’s rapid release model isn’t good for us.  A 4.1 release makes them look better in my opinion (even if it’s not easier for them).

My biggest issue with R4 is that the PostBuild scripts that we’ve been using for several releases do not work at all in R4.  Since the build steps don’t work I’m forced to use R3.

Honestly, I expected REAL Reports to be buggy.  It’s not a feature (reporting) you can slap together quickly.  There are a ton of permutations when dealing with pagination and other standard reporting features so it doesn’t surprise me it has bugs.  A couple of no-brainer bugs got through though which, to me, speaks volumes for:  a)  the lack of testers; and b)  the beta process is broken because a new major feature was allowed to get into final candidate status with known, show-stopper bugs.

I wrote up an R4 release review in the Blogs section of the ARBP webite.  The review was written before some of the big bugs were discovered and also most of it was written while I was out of town where I couldn’t do extensive testing.  But then again, if you don’t need reports or build steps then it’s probably a decent release.

Some of the Einhugur plugins had to be updated for the R4 release.  The new FontUnits class caused some issues if you were creating Windows and Linux apps that weren’t using the default size of zero.

Snow Leopard finally caused me to swear at Apple the other day.  One of the things that’s broken in Snow Leopard is the Apple Indexer app no longer takes some of the parameters it was using before.  It appears that the replacement is hdutil(1) but I’ve not followed up on it.  This breaks all of our PostBuild scripts as well as Mac Help Writer from Artistic Techworks.  So now I’ve got a regular Leopard machine to do builds on until we figure out the workaround.

The REALbasic Colorado Summit was a decent success.  A basic review is in the ARBP Blogs section.  A good turnout considering the compressed time frame we had (under two months).  I’m hoping that if we do one next year we have at least 4 months notice so we can line up better speakers and get better attendance.

The one day REAL Software regional events in Atlanta and Chicago are coming up the first week of November.  I’m speaking at the Chicago event on November 5th and I’m talking about the REALbasic Community.  It’s a big topic so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll talk about.  ARBP for sure.  Probably where to find help learning RB and how to find professionals to help you out.  If I have time I might talk about some of the plugins available, alternative controls, etc.

Thoughts?