Ed Dale is closing doors on Immediate Edge! Hurry up!!!

Got a mail this morning at about 8 AM CET from Ed Dale saying this:

“There are currently 31 slots left, and after
they are filled I will be taking the offer
down, and no, we are not just raising the price,
but WE ARE CLOSING THE DOORS…”

The mail also said:

“This is only going to cost you $1 for a 14
trial, which gives you plenty of time to check out
what we have to offer…”

It is now almost 8PM CET and I just still had the opportunity to sign up for a trial of 14 days for 1$. Not only that but upon leaving I got prompted to have a conversation with a bot (!?) who urged me to sign up for 30 days for 1$!!!

Spare the sales crap if you do want to sign up for 30 days for 1 dollar on this  link: http://www.immediateedge.com/amember/signup.php?price_group=-2

Is business that slow that Ed cannot fill 31 subscriptions in 12 hours and practically gives the stuff away?

Does anyone even fall for such sales nonsense?

Let me know what you think!

Dragon naturally speaking 10

Together with my copy of Sams Teach Yourself WPF in 24 Hours, I bought a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred.

I have set up two users one for my native language Dutch and another one for English.

So far I am very pleased with the results, actually I’m speaking to my computer right now so all this in my previous post are spoken rather than typed.

I haven’t used the system very much yet. It is amazingly flawless, albeit it does make a mistake here and there. I do believe that when you correct your errors it does learn from it. So I guess using it more often should improve the quality.

Actually the idea of starting to talk to the PC is something I’ve tried with Dragon NaturallySpeaking eight and I was not very impressed at that time. The new version however is way better than the previous.

I haven’t started to learn how I can send commands to my PC, but that should be doable to. One of the best things I find so far is that you never make grammar mistakes. It is always correct.

Been a while

Sure has been a while since my last post… So what have I been doing?

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting work for a Dutch company calles Qurius.

The end customer was BIS Industrial Services. They do insulation, scaffolding and a host of other services.

What I did for them was create a portal for their remote employees for registering time spent on projects. They register time for about 3000 employees. This is done by about 35 administrative employees.

The technology used was ASP.NET 2.0 on IIS6. The backend was Microsoft Dynamics Nav.

Where am I going?

I’m doing a small µISV project which has allready been sold for a company in Roeselare. They want a small program that allows them to register communication between the company and external contacts. They have been doing this for years an see real added value in this business process.

Until now, they have been registering their communications in an excell spreadsheet. This of course has some drawbacks in a multiuser environment. Another major drawback is that their contact details are in their Microsoft Dynamics Nav System.

Yes, that Nav again. I did design the app to allow for a pluggable dataaccess though, so it can easily be coupled to other software. The app is in C# ASP.NET and I’m probably not going to use the ajax control toolkit but rather Gaia Ajax Widgets.

I will probably post about my experiences with those in the next few days.

MySQL is giving us a hard time

I used to love MySQL!

 It was fantastic you found what you needed immediately, you downloaded it, no questions asked. You installed it and you where up and running in no time. It was simply the best DB I had ever had.

These days, if you go to the MySQL website, it is certaily not obvious where to go to download the free version. A lot of blabla for their enterprise version but the rest is very obscure. A first time user would not know immediately there is such a thing as a free version.

There is a small link in the top of the website that says “community”. When I see a “community” link, I think of open source developers, support forums, blogs etc. I do not immediately think that there could be another version which I could maybe download there.

They call it the “Community Version”, tsss. But where to get it? I had to google a while to get pointed in the right direction. When I finally wanted to download the 5.1 community version, I got to a page where at first it seems you have to register go on. There is just a small link that is not obvious that say ‘no thanks…’ But when I clicked it, it did absolutely nothing!!!

This could be due to some bozo IE setting but anyway, it should just work!

In the end I did manage to download it and in retrospect it seems logical how they organised the community download but I did not find it intuitive. I strongly believe I’m not the only one.

 Anyway, if I think about the way things where with MySQL and where they come from and their attitude today, I don’t get a lot of warm feelings…

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!

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!

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.

Are Desktop Applications dead or not?

Antonio Cangiano blogged a response to a claim that Desktop Apps are dead: Desktop Applications are not dead!

This is going to spark a hot debate it seems.

Here’s my take on it: as a µISV, I don’t care much about the underlaying technology of my customers. Why? Because I’m never able to know who is going to buy my software and what environment they will run the app in. Also, because I have many small customers, instead of e few large ones, their technology choices are even more diverse.

So what do I do? I work with web based apps. This way, I only have to make sure that the software I make will run on one (virtual) machine, over which I have complete control.

The only thing I have to worry about, is the several browser flavors out there. But I find that it’s not that big an issue.

So how do you feel? Are Desktop Applications dead or not?