Older blog entries for apenwarr (starting at number 462)

12 Dec 2008 (updated 11 Feb 2009 at 18:03 UTC) »

Lotus Foundations, now with "viral" marketing

Lotus Foundations, if you're just tuning in, is the Linux-based network appliance formerly known as Nitix. I co-founded the company and it was bought by IBM earlier this year.

dcoombs, another co-founder, sent me this link to what is apparently a Lotus Foundations "viral" video marketing campaign.

I suppose I don't really have the moral high ground in putting the "quotes" around "viral" since I'm here posting it, just like the sucker that they presumably hoped I would be. But it is sort of cute, in a sappy sort of way. Presumably there will be more of them.

Syndicated 2008-12-10 04:08:50 (Updated 2009-02-11 18:03:20) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

10 Dec 2008 (updated 11 Feb 2009 at 18:03 UTC) »

Ethernet over power (as opposed to power over ethernet)

Specifically, the D-Link DHP-300. You get two of them, you plug them into the wall, and you plug an ethernet cable into each one, and it's sort of like a big, long ethernet cable.

After considering fancy-pants wireless extender antennas, I decided to go with these in order to connect the two parts of what you might call my "disjoint apartment," which consists of some rooms that are just not reachable from other rooms. Imagine a labyrinth in which you can't actually get from the entrance to the exit. And you're an electron. ... It's a long story.

A quick review: well, in short, everything they say here is true. It's sure as heck not getting the "theoretical" 200 MBits. In my apartment, which admittedly has some very bad ancient wiring, I get somewhere around 8 MBits when it's in a good mood, which is sometimes.

Performance depends on which outlet you plug it into. Some don't work at all, probably due to split-phase related problems. Oddly, the extra outlet on my stove works best (yes, I tried them all). But somehow that just doesn't seem like a very good idea.

I've seen a few comments to this effect, but I can absolutely confirm: DO NOT use a power bar, surge protector, or even one of those multi-outlet plugs with these things. The signal quality degrades dramatically. Plug it straight into the wall, and save your power bar for other stuff.

Of course, plugging my wireless router into the other plug on the same outlet also greatly degraded my signal, which is rather inconvenient. I had to plug it into another outlet across the room. Sigh.

Also, turning the room lights off make the signal worse. But only temporarily.

So I suppose the real story here is that maybe I should have just bought the new and improved wireless antenna after all. All that said, though, it's somewhat amazing that it works in the first place. They deserve some credit for that. And since all I need it to do is cover my 6 MBit cable internet connection, it's actually just fine. Even Skype (with video) works perfectly, with no extra lag.

This sort of thing is doomed to remain a niche product, though, as long as it requires so much fiddling.

Syndicated 2008-12-10 03:59:07 (Updated 2009-02-11 18:03:20) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Coalition of the stupid

Okay, I admit it. I was wrong. I said that it would be pretty much impossible to get the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc Quebecois to agree on anything except blocking the most egregious violations attempted by Canada's Conservative government. Sadly, I was too optimistic. The other thing they can agree on is that they don't like the Conservatives, period. So out of spite, they'll just grind our legislature to a halt.(1)

As I mentioned last time I dove into the stinky mess that is politics, we were actually in a pretty decent situation: as long as the Conservatives didn't propose anything totally awful, it would be very hard to summon enough votes to defeat their individual bills. Perfect! That means they could actually get some work done - which Canada most certainly needs, particularly in an unstable economy(2) - but only within fair constraints defined by the other elected MPs.

Remember, I'm not trying to draw any conclusions about human nature here; I'm just doing the math. The math says you have to pile up an awful lot of dissent before you can defeat a Conservative bill.

The problem is, the math is much worse the other way. If the other three parties form a coalition government, then all three parties will have to vote in favour of everything in every bill. That's about as likely as them voting down a specific Conservative bill. In other words, terribly unlikely. You have to pile up an awful lot of assent before you can pass a coalition bill.

In other words, a coalition will surely be defeated almost instantly, and we'll be back to another election.

Stephen Harper's Conservatives have already taken the record for the longest running Canadian minority government in history. What that means is, statistically speaking, anybody trying to beat them at this game is almost certainly going to do worse.(3)

If you're in favour of the idiotic Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition, you're in favour of another election ASAP. That election, which will have been caused because your idiotic coalition members got disorganized and couldn't pass their own bill, will probably give the Conservatives their majority.

And that, as much as I dislike the Conservatives, will still be better than nothing, which is what we've got, thanks to the coalition.

Footnotes

(1) Yes, I saw the announcement that parliament has been suspended today at the request of Prime Minister Harper. But it would have been deadlocked anyway, because the idiotic other three parties were going to vote against anything just out of spite. You suspend parliament for the same reason you suspend trading a stock in the stock market: to let people's emotions cool down before they're allowed to act.

(2) There are many morons complaining that the past and present Conservative government has "done nothing" about the economy. This is simply not true. I submit for your perusal: the tax free savings account. Here's how it works: the current economic crisis is caused by lenders not having enough capital to lend. If you give people a tax break for saving more, they will deposit their money in a bank. That will increase the amount of capital held by said bank. The bank will then be able to lend out that money about 17x over, due to the magic of banking laws. Think about that for a second: problem = too much spending, not enough saving. Response = give people tax break for saving. Wow! Okay, now let's compare that to the gigantic bailouts going on in the U.S. Problem = too much spending. Response = spend more money. Which government is "doing something about the economy," again?

(3) And in order to defeat the Conservatives, this needs to be a three-way coalition, which is vastly harder than even a normal two-way coalition. In all of Canadian history, even two-way coalitions have always failed, and fast.

Note to self: stop following politics.

Syndicated 2008-12-05 00:19:17 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

3 Dec 2008 (updated 4 Dec 2008 at 22:06 UTC) »

Avery at CodeRage III - see my presentation for free

Tomorrow evening, at 7pm PST (10pm EST), I'll be doing a presentation about Schemamatic and Squel at CodeRage III, a "virtual conference" put on by the creators of Delphi. If you want you can sign up for free just to see my talk.

Interestingly, the presentations are all pre-recorded, but there's live irc-like chat *during* the presentation, and a non-recorded voice Q&A session afterwards.

Hope I'm not too boring; trying to pre-record a talk without an audience in front of you sounds hard, but it turns out to be even harder than it sounds.

In other news, Camtasia Studio is really, really good software for recording screencasts. Highly recommended.

Syndicated 2008-12-03 22:14:40 (Updated 2008-12-04 22:06:24) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

3 Dec 2008 (updated 4 Dec 2008 at 14:03 UTC) »

Bankrupting third-world countries

Today governments have created a legal status of interim bankruptcy, which allows corporations to dispense with lender and employment rights without losing their corporation. All they have to do is reorganize themselves. The Third World debt situation could at any time have been erased in just such a calm and orderly manner. Commentators would point out that many of these indebted nations have incompetent, self-serving governments and don't deserve such an opportunity. But surely that is also the case of many troubled corporations.

-- John Ralston Saul

Syndicated 2008-12-02 02:20:17 (Updated 2008-12-04 14:03:25) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

22 Nov 2008 (updated 11 Feb 2009 at 18:03 UTC) »

More Lotus Foundations, formerly Nitix

Lotus preps small biz software appliance. (Thanks to Ian for the link.)

In which they manage to make the new release sound super-secret, even though almost all the software running it has been released and available for months. People have reviewed it and there was a keynote.

And about the web server? "Which one, IBM is not saying." Ooh! Whatever could it be?! An unanswered question that hides huge competitive advantage, no doubt.

They're also raising the price.

Still, it's fun to watch.

Syndicated 2008-11-18 17:07:31 (Updated 2009-02-11 18:03:20) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Microsoft played Yahoo, and they're totally playing you too

So I haven't commented on the Yahoo-Microsoft merger yet, making me probably the very last of an endless horde of clueless people to be talking about it. But the announcement that Jerry Yang will be retiring as CEO reminded me that there is still something important to say.

Quick summary: Yahoo lost the game because Microsoft set the rules.

Until earlier this year when Microsoft proposed to buy Yahoo, nobody but its shareholders had really even noticed that Yahoo was in trouble. Really, Yahoo was just sitting quietly in the background, trying not to get noticed, lest people realize that they were way overvalued and going downhill fast. People blame current CEO Jerry Yang for that situation, but that's ridiculous; there's no sign that anybody could have done any better. Google was eating their lunch; to make Yahoo more successful, they would have had to beat Google. Unlikely.

Microsoft, of course, despite their zillions of dollars selling Windows and Office, was losing the war for Internet search and advertising just as badly as Yahoo. They had plenty of embarrassment to cover.

So what did they do? They chose to be the ones with more power, by framing the situation to make them look good. Brilliantly, they offered to buy Yahoo, even though that obviously made no sense.

From there, the media took over. A few people did notice the offer was dumb; how could Microsoft possibly win by buying up a known-inferior company with a known-inferior search engine? They already had their own inferior ones! But a news article about how Microsoft, which never makes collossally stupid business decisions, was inexplicably doing something collossally stupid, just isn't believable enough. So the story here has to be that Microsoft is smart, and therefore whoever they're dealing with is stupid.

You see, the whole story was written even before Yahoo found out there was an offer to buy them. There were two versions of the story: Yahoo is dumb because it jumped at the first offer (who does that??), or Yahoo is dumb because it refused the first offer (don't they know how desperate they are??).

I imagine the conversation went something like this:

Yang: Wow, Microsoft wants to buy us at a premium over our stock price! And here we were thinking we were over-valued. Let's do it!

Old, Jaded Board Member: You never take the first offer. It makes you look desperate.

Yang: But OJBM, we are desperate! Sure, we might make more money someday, but Google's slowly killing us. There's no guarantee. If we sell out now, we lock in the profits.

OJBM: It's not that easy. You think they just make an offer, and we take it, and that's it? This process will go on for at least a year, and they could back out at any time. We have to play this just right. And I guarantee you, if we accept their first offer, they'll know it's too high and they'll run away fast. The whole world will know we don't have confidence, and our stock price will tank.

Yang: But the offer is already generous. If we don't take it, they might just walk away.

OJBM: Nobody walks away in the first round just because you asked for a higher price. Everybody knows you always ask for a higher price, because the first bid is always low. If they walk away, then they were planning to walk away in any case. So we're better off if they walk away before they send in their "experts" to do their "due diligence" and learn all our company's secrets. Microsoft frequently kills their competitors by offering to buy them.

Yang: So we can't take the deal.

OJBM: Not yet, at least.

...

And a couple of weeks later, Ballmer "changed his mind" and decided not to buy them after all, at any price. Right.

Microsoft never wanted Yahoo, they just wanted its market share. The fastest, cheapest way to get there: help them die.

Steve Ballmer isn't new to this game, and Microsoft is smart. Scary, but smart.

Syndicated 2008-11-18 17:07:20 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Hard money seminar?

What's with all the new spams trying to get me to go to conferences about "Hard money?"

It used to all be about easy money. That was, frankly, much more my style. How do I unsubscribe again?

Syndicated 2008-11-11 23:29:04 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

See Avery @ CodeRage III on December 4, 2008

My conference presentation about Schemamatic(1) has been accepted for CodeRage III, a virtual conference with virtual presentations put on by the Delphi guys.

I have never been to a virtual conference -- ha ha, I mean, nobody has, but I haven't even watched presentations from one before. The idea is that you make a pre-recorded webcast of your presentation, and then they play it at a particular time while you and your audience all hang out in the same online chat room. The idea is kind of nifty, because you can answer questions about your talk, live, while you seem to be talking.

It seems I've been assigned the crazy timeslot from hell, 7pm PACIFIC time on December 4th. That's 10pm here in Eastern time, which would be ridiculous if it weren't exactly the sort of time I'd be working anyhow. I guess somehow they knew.

Anyway, conference registration is free and you don't have to even go anywhere, so please feel free to sign up by following the link above. I haven't talked about Schemamatic here yet, but it's pretty amazing and this particular version was Translated from The Perl (and then greatly improved) almost entirely by cpirate via a contract to The Navarra Group.

As part of the demo I'll also be presenting my own amazing and life-changing new program, Squel, which you don't know about yet.

Footnote

(1) I can't reasonably link to Schemamatic yet, because it's an as-yet-undocumented part of Versaplex, which is also undocumented. I guess I'll have to try to sort that out in time for the conference :)

Syndicated 2008-11-07 20:53:38 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Another note on banking

Awash in Latin American gold and silver from the sixteenth century on, the Spaniards mistook bullion - money - for wealth, that is, for a form of reality, and so undermined their own economy. Because they had the money, which is normally the outcome of making and trading something, they didn't think they had to bother with the production side of their economy. So once the bullion was spent, there was nothing left. They had mistakenly seen some divine providence in the ease with which so much had fallen into their hands. Here was an early warning of the dangers attached to confusing economics with belief systems. Spain didn't understand tht the only purpose of money was as a grease or glue for reality. Today that Spanish imperial childishness seems very modern.

-- John Ralston Saul in The Collapse of Globalism

Syndicated 2008-11-02 19:38:40 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

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