We’ve come a long way since 1984!

Today I was thinking a bit about where I’ve come from since my first computerdays. I was searching youtube for old demos and presentations and this is one I really liked. It is Steve Jobs giving a demo of Machintosh back in 1984.

Look at the crowd: they go nuts!

Software award scams exposed

We, as MicroISV’s, are forever in debt to Andy Brice. Andy is a MicroISV himself and the creator of PerfectTablePlan.

He did an experiment in submitting a fake piece of software to more that a thousand shareware sites and wrote an article about the results.

He got 16 awards already for his “awardmestars” software. This means that some of these sites are automated and hence render their awards useless…

While I always thought it was very strange that some crappy softwares are awarded, now we now for sure.

But there is also good news! over four hundred sites rejected the software. These are the good ones!

Andy submitted the software to so many sites trough a service I had never heard of before: SubmitEverywhere.com. They submit your software to some 1200 download sites for only $70. But not only that, it seems they will actually support the submission process as well! I will certainly give them a try when my new software is release ready.

Google Gears and the death of the desktop

I was reading up on how to make a webapp available offline. I want offline runnable webapps. The biggest argument I allways hear about webbased (business) apps is: “Yeah OK, but what if my internet connection fails?”

I’ve got a whole array of ready made answers to these questions but in the end, the best answer should be “No problem, it just keeps runnig, with a cached dataset, look”.

So a while ago I stumbled on Google Gears. This holds the promise of achieving just that. Among a lot of blogs on this, I came to this one: Google Gears Takes Web Apps Offline. Look at the comments.

So what’s wrong with GG? A lot I think, lemme explain. On this post, on another blog, I commented about the problems we traditionally had with desktop apps such as problems of deployment, cross platform compatibility and maintainability. Yes, you have to install a webbrowser extension (users often dont trust these anymore), you have to copy some files from a website (again: users often dont trust these anymore), and then run the app locally.

The next issue I have with this is that the entire app has to be written in Javascript. I felt like being thrown back in the stoneage (about 10 years ago in IT land).

I want apps that just run, without installing anything on the client side. I’m probably living in utopia…

I think the desktop is going to die, but not at the hand of Google Gears…

VMware Predicts Death To Operating Systems

InformationWeek’s reporter Antone Gonsalves and Computerworld’s Robert Mullins commented on Mendel Rosenblum’s closing keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference. He is chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware.

In a nutshell, he says that today’s operating systems are too bloated and too complex to maintain. I think we can all agree to that. So the future could hold stripped down OS’es like a stripped down Linux kernel and only the software really needed to run one specific app.

This would then be deployed on one or more machines, that expose their hardware trough a hypervisor (virtualization layer). In this manner, the app thinks it is running on one machine, while in reality a whole array of machines is serving the app.

 On this “cluster cloud” a lot of apps could run, each in their own stripped os. This simplifies things a lot and benefits security tremendously.

I’ve been using virualized servers for about a year now and I must say that they rock! If I want a new server, I prepare the whole machine on my laptop and than just FTP it to my server cluster. I “mount” the new virtual server and presto. It just runs!

I find almost no performance impact on the performance, indeed performance is better because I use more than one machine.

If one machine fails, no one ever notices. I just replace it with new hardware and inform the cluster of a new member. That’s it!

ASP.NET on Linux pt2: It works!!!

Holy tamole!!!

I take a lot of my words from my earlier post and comments back! I got it running!

So what did I do wrong the first time?

This time I installed an Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop, the previous time I had installed the server version. (in retrospect I think it will work on a server edition too).

I followed Timani’s first post to the letter. Everything was fine and dandy and the xsp2 webserver was happily serving on port 8080. Only one small issue: his post says:

For the ASP.NET 2.0 environment
$ cd /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
$ xsp2
$ sudo cp /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index.aspx /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index2.aspx

But this should be

For the ASP.NET 2.0 environment
$ cd /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
$ sudo cp /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index.aspx /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index2.aspx
$ xsp2

Notice the cp statement comes before running the webserver.

Now came the time to get apache serving the aps.net apps

I headed over to Timani’s second post and again followed it rigidly.

Everything went fine until I got to sudo a2enmod mod_mono. This said the module was already enabled. Step 2 was also not needed. The module was loaded already.

After everything was done I pointed my browser to: http://localhost/AspOnApache/

Nothing nada zip I was very dissapointed, again… A nice 503 greeted me, again… I thought this cannot be, what is the matter here.

So then, I looked very carefully at the configuration file /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. I noticed that from copy/pasting from Timani’s post some quotes (“) where replaced by a dot (.). Don’t ask, I dont know why.

After retouching the conf, I reloaded apache again and reloaded http://localhost/AspOnApache/ in my browser. WELL WELL!!! It shouted a parser error at me! At least apache wasn’t hicking up anymore.

In the aspx file, the same foul play as with the conf happened, so I gave the aspx some love and reloaded http://localhost/AspOnApache/ once more.

IT WORKS!!!

Last notes: thanks to Timani and Viraptor for gently kicking me in the rear end! Persistance does pay off!

What next? I’ll see if I can serve some small asp.net 2.0 app i created some time ago. I’ll post the results.

UPDATE: *** I’ve struggled some more these last few days,  trying to get two apps of mine to run on the box. To no avail, I’m giving it up for now, due to too much work ***

ERP solutions of the future

The advantage that ERP systems have is the centralisation of data and applications. When we go to new customers we see a lot of excell islands all over the company.

The disadvantage is often that for small companies they are not affordable. Especially when they want customisation, which is often why they want a certain erp system in the first place.

So how can we address this? How can we make it affordable for small companies to have a piece of custom software?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Seoul Digital Forum amongst other things when asked to define web 3.0: “applications that are pieced together” and also ”very customizable”. (See the video on youtube)

With todays web 2.0 apps that all have interfaces and api’s, I believe he could be right! (think about freshbooks invoicing data that was written in Basecamp)

So, you make your pick from the web 2.0 apps out there (one or more) and provide the glue between them and maybe add some extra’s. Such services you could sell that to the customer. He ends up with an app that costs a fraction of the cost of a full fledged erp system, with the customisation benifits!

This could be the next wave for Web applications!

Custom Software differentiates you and your business

It is often debated whether to buy a standard package for your business administration or resort to custom software. In this post I explain my vision on this.

In today’s computer governed world, there is imho no business process that has not been implemented in software somewhere. If you google enough, I’m sure you will find something that could support your business. Maybe you will have to tweak your processes a bit but you should get a fit.

But wait a minute! SHOULD you tweak your business processes?

I vote NO!

What differentiates you and your business from all the other folks in your neck of the woods? They all sell apples, the same apples.

I believe it is how you sell your apples and how efficient your supporting business processes are. When it comes down to it, you do things just a little different to your neigbour. And you should! That’s what makes your business!

So, if you and fifty other applesellers use the same supporting software and hence business porcesses, your competitive advantage over them fades.

To resolve this, I say you should use a standard package and implement the things that separate you from the lot, in custom software.

Design Inspiration Gallery.

I got some graphic inspiration already here: Design Inspiration Gallery – FAVEUP

It seems like this site is very new but it has some nice content already. The aim is that people will show off and share their desings here and hopefully get some exposure in return.

If you have some good graphics, I hope you like to share too!

ASP.NET applications served on Linux

I was talking to a friend of mine who said that he was running an ASP.NET 2.0 app on a Linux machine. That would be too good to be true wouldn’t it? Well he indeed showed me and thus I had to believe him. He was running the app on a Redhat linux box with Apache2 and Mono.

I was intrigued and toyed with it myself for several days but could not get it to work. Since then, I allways wanted to try again. If he could do it, I certainly can! I hate to admit failiure…

So, I’m going to have a shot at it again, this time following this post: Timani’s Blog » Blog Archive » Installing mono, apache, mod_mono and deploying applications in Ubuntu

I will let you know what I find out!

Have any of you guys done it before?

Integrating Script.aculo.us with Asp.Net

I’ve been playng for a while with ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. and I like it. Having studied Rails, I was missing some things I missed from Script.aculo.us so I tought that it was impossible no one would have used Script.aculo.us with ASP.NET. My collective memory (google) led me to this article: CoreWeb :: Script.aculo.us, Prototype and Asp.Net Best Friends Forever

I will check it out tonight and see what I can learn from that.