Michael Sanford

… is truly a beautiful thing!

Testing 1, 2, 3…

I learned from Chris Sell’s blog that there is an effort underway on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site which allows volunteers to scan satellite images in hopes of finding Jim Gray’s sailboat.

Read more about the story here.

Please take a few minutes to help.

I spent about an hour scanning images.  While I did not see anything at all of interest, my mind wandered a bit and I could not help but wonder if he might in fact be down there somewhere, looking up to the heavens for help.  I wonder if he realizes just how many souls are actually looking back down at him…

Phil Haack, a great blogger and the founder of the open source SubText project (a DotText offshoot), dropped a hint that he is planning a release part in Second Life when they SubText 2.0!

I’m glad to see more of the tech community spending time in SL.  It’s definitely got some limitations, but the implications of this type of virtual world are so thought provoking, it’s amazing!  Oh yeah, and it’s pretty fun too!

Hey Phil — I’m Michael Hansen in Second Life.  Look me up sometime!

The launch of Vista has meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but for Jim Alchin, Co-President of Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division, it must be a bittersweet moment.  Jim has given the last 17 years to driving innovation in Microsoft products, but yesterday was his final day as a full time Microsoft employee.

His final post entitled ”What Comes Next” is really quite funny, though he never even hints as to what the one email he did get was all about.  Hmmm…  I bet it went something like this:

Dear Jim,

Please come back!  We really need you buddy!

Love,

Bill G.

P.S. I’ll even play drums in your new band!

Seth Godin, who I listen to very intently for his thought provoking and innovative thoughts, posted something this morning that I had to laugh about.

In a post titled “Wow!” he pokes fun at Microsoft’s new Vista/Office launch campaign by posting a pic from the New York Times that shows Balmer and 5 other individuals from Intel, Toshiba, HP and AMD sitting on stage with somewhat straight faces.

Apparently to please Seth, these 6 top executives should have been dancing around on stage for each and every camera shot in sheer state of glee and exuberance, completely ignorant of the fact that they appear to be listening intently to something going on to their immediate left.

Sorry Seth, but these aren’t Detroit Auto Show models there to charm you with their curvy figures and gorgeous smiles.  These are distinguished individuals whose words and opinions are what matter.  Are you planning a follow-up post to talk about what they each had to say?  Are you seriously suggesting that Vista must not be very exciting because these guys aren’t smiling big enough for you?

Tags: Rants

A company by the name of slimCODE caught my attention this morning while I was reading Mike Gunderloy’s Daily Grind.  slimKEYS is a “Universal HotKey Manager” with a simple plug-in system.  Plenty of those around, but what really caught my attention is that you can pick your own price for the software.

According to the site, you can pay them anywhere from nothing at all to as high as your imagination can go.  The only exception is that you can’t pick a price between $0.01 and $3.99 since they incur transaction fees for receiving payments.

This is a fascinating approach to shareware pricing in that it leaves it to you and your conscience to pay what your comfortable with.  It gets the tool in your hands no matter what, but if you have the money to flip the author $20.00, you can.

I say Kudos to these guys for their novel approach.  Double Kudos for openly sharing the results right on the site!  For example, as of this morning, the average price was $5.38, the average price for those who paid anything was $14.00.  The % of people grabbing a copy for free was 62%, while the smallest price paid was $5.00 (excluding freebies) and the largest price paid was $20.00.

I’m not sure if the product is good, but I’ll be checking back out of curiosity just to see how these numbers change over time.

Good luck slimCODE!

P.S.  They have a blog!

I’ve been away from the blogsphere for a while and have definitely steered clear of the installation tools community, but this morning, the latest controversy was brought to my attention and I just had to add my two cents.

First, the background about me and why I’m interested in this sort of drama.  In 2001 I set out on a journey to create a better Windows Installer authoring story than what the competitors at the time had to offer.  The result of two years of seriously hard work was a super cool, VBA-enabled installation authoring environment for Windows Installer called ActiveInstall.  After nearly being acquired by eHelp (now part of Macromedia (now part of Adobe)) and  SourceGear, Zero G finally came along and made the right offer.  Recognizing the impending threat, InstallShield/Macrovision acquired ZeroG and the obvious conflict was promptly deep sixed, never to be seen again (don’t mind that soft sobbing sound coming from my direction…).  The whole experience was a complete nightmare of lies and deceit that I hope never to experience again in my life.  Someday I’ll write about it, but for now, trust me when I say I was glad to be out of that niche part of the industry.

Ok, on to the good stuff!  After ActiveInstall, a handful of new products starting up, one of which was named “InstallAware” and was founded by a former employee of InstallShield named “Sinan Karaca”.  I remember taking a look at the product and thinking that it showed promise, but lacked originality and seemed to be shooting for the goal of being an InstallShield clone, rather than a “unique” or god-forbid, “better” product.

Last January, Macrovision sent a letter (link via InstallSite) to InstallAware calling them out for an obvious theft of the ZeroG site design as well as copyrighted text taken straight from the ZeroG website.  InstallAware tried (in vain) to spin things in their favor by claiming that Macrovision was trying to crush the little guy who was beginning to pose a threat (yeah, right…), but looked more ridiculous than ever by not just owning up to the dirty deed.  I got a kick out of the whole thing, but bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.

A lot of people took notice, and like me, made a mental note and moved on.  Whether they knew it or not, InstallAware had branded themselves as liars and crooks in the minds of a lot of influential people in the community.  People, who, someday when you needed them, you would want on your side.

Well in early December, InstallAware came calling on Microsoft and WiX founder Rob Mensching to pimp their latest offering called “WiXAware”.  Appearantly, WiXAware is an IDE that supports visual authoring on WiX xml documents.  (WiX is an open source, xml based, command line driven toolkit for creating Windows Installer packages.)

Well as it turns out, the brainiacs at InstallAware decided to steal the design of Caphyon’s AdvancedInstaller.  Rumors are floating too surrounding the striking similarities between the UI found in Dacris’ ActiSetup and WiXAware.  Screenshots are here and here.  Both of those companies are keeping pretty quiet about all this, hopefully because their attorney’s are on the job!

I believe (this is strictly MY opinion) that while on one hand, Rob was pleased to see a visual environment for WiX, he was still disgusted with the previous conduct of these clowns and the fact that they were planning to capitalize on an open-source project that they had never bothered to participate in or contribute to.  Nonetheless, I think he kept his professionalism and avoided any confrontation with them.  Shortly after the meeting, Rob posted a candid review of the product, in which he shared some of his honest, personal feelings, not all of which were bad.  Well this candid account from Rob struck a nerve with this guy who really wanted Rob’s help to promote and “bless” the new offering, so they fired back with an email accusing Rob of all sorts of things like being biased and judgemental.  Rob responded and was big enough to openly admit his bias and explain exactly why he came into it with a chip on his shoulder.

Stefan Krueger wrote about the whole thing here, which started yet another “debate” with Sinan, but suffice to say all he offers is rhetoric, lip service and a complete lack of ethics and/or accountability for his actions.

My Opinion:

One one hand, the guy is acting like a total loser.  You’d have to be nuts to give him any money or depend on his products in your production environments.  He strikes me as reckless, completely devoid of any conscience, and absent of any sense of right and wrong.  He also seems to stand an excellent chance of being sued and having a court order shut his entire operation down.

On the other hand, you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him.  It’s easy to see he has put a tremendous effort into building these tools, and if he only had someone to control him and keep his ethics in check, he’d probably be a force to be reckoned with.  In other words, he may be a brilliant guy.  He may be capable of easing a lot of peoples pain through good tools, but the simple truth is he has burned his bridges in this niche and won’t ever achieve any success unless he does some serious soul-searching, changes his name and finds a new industry to explore.

Rob Mensching and I have not always seen eye-to-eye, but on this, I have to take a stand and say that we should not stand idly by and watch people stoop to such despicable tactics.  Rob has my total and complete support (whatever that may be worth), and I personally, would encourage you to think very hard about the kind of conduct and ethics you are endorsing if you ever buy one of this guys products.

Sinan — I don’t know you and have never met you.  You may well intend to be offering up good solutions to customers, but when you act as you have, your words fall on deaf ears.  Truly, your actions speak much louder than your words.  Earn back a little bit of my respect by owning up to your acts, and issuing a public apology.  Start putting ethics and morality into your vocabulary and I’ll be happy to post a review of your product(s) once they are truly your own.

You can read more about this whole saga (and even view pictures which clearly illustrate the blatant theft) on Stefan Krueger’s Blog and his EXCELLENT InstallSite.org web site.

By the way — If you think this is the only drama happening in this space, think again!  Of course there was the whole ActiveInstall debacle (oh the things I could tell you…), but remember when Wise was sued for corporate espionage for allegedly hacking into InstallShield’s systems?  Or how about when Macrovision sued Altiris for patent infringement?

Business can get a little dirty sometimes, but my advice is to stay far away from this particularly slimy segment of the tech industry!

The picture you see above is my so-called “Identicon”.  It is an image created from an algorithm that hashes my current IP Address then creates an image from the resulting data.  The net result is a unique little image that is different for (nearly) everyone.

Don Parks invented it, and now Jon Galloway has created an ASP.NET HttpHandler to produce em now.

Mike Gunderloy was a little skeptical about it in today’s Daily Grind, but I think he is missing the point of the whole thing.  While it’s true enough that IP Addresses are fluid and will change over time, the point is that they don’t (usually) change in the course of a single day or two.  More often they change pretty infrequently.  What this means is that if I post a comment on someone’s blog, then come back later and respond again, or respond multiple times in a forum thread over the course of a few days, the Identicon will provide a visual cue to the reader as to who is saying what.  It’s kind of liking temporary branding for each individual in a conversation.  It helps you mentally keep track of who is saying what in lengthy conversations.  Take a look at the comments thread on Don Park’s blog post to see what I mean.

In summary, I love the idea!  It’s clever and effective.  Now, let’s just hope someone doesn’t file a patent application on it…

While I haven’t been what you’d call a prolific blogger in the past, I certainly have stayed glued to the happenings in and around blogging and the blogsphere.

Yesterday Dimitry over at CodingRobots announced the release of BlogJet 2.0.  I was already pretty impressed with the simplicity and convenience of the first version, so I was anxious to get my hands on the latest version and see what kinds of things had changed.

First of all, I was really impressed with the new look of the site, and the nice clean look of the 2.0 UI as can be seen in the screenshot on the home page.

From Dimitry’s blog, here are the top 5 new features:

• New user interface. It is easier, more complete, and has themes (looks native on Vista).
• Post management with local cache. Your posts are stored in local cache, so you don’t need Internet connection to access them anymore.
• Instant search. Finding posts is easier because of the instant search, which shows results as you type.
• Tags. Finally, you can tag your posts easily. No more plugins, no more hacks. And if your blog platform supports tags natively (currently only Movable Type 3.3 or later), BlogJet can use them.
• Blog autodiscovery. No more troubles with finding the right API settings – just enter your blog’s address, and BlogJet will configure itself.

These are great features, but personally for me, the ability to have images automatically uploaded for me, the Flickr and YouTube integration, and clean intuitive UI are the biggest wins!

In summary, BlogJet 2.0 is well worth the $39.95 for first time buyers, or the $19.95 to upgrade from a previous version.

Enjoy!

Tags: Blogging, Software