Steven Boynes, Internet Technologist

Google Enterprise: Application Development

2008-04-09T23:29:00.001-07:00

I briefly glossed over the announcement on Techcrunch about Google going the way of SalesForce with its Solutions Marketplace. I'm still thinking about cloud computing...what's the future of application development going to look like given these new platforms.

Head in the Cloud

2008-03-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

I've been working on my new home dev server for a while now. Its pretty easy to set up a server with Microsoft technologies... but then I looked at licensing costs. If you're looking to scale the costs to deploy additional servers is horrific. So I scratched that idea and looked to open source. Linux, Apache, etc. So thats where I'm at now: CentOS, HTTPD (Apache), Sendmail, and Tomcat. Actually I'm still working on Tomcat - its giving me some grief. I've been thinking to myself, if I went Microsoft I could have had something up and running in a day - but where's the fun in that. Anyways, I also got to thinking about cloud computing. Its like managed hosting taken to the next level. Eventually no need to know anything about infrastructure - but is that a good thing?

Rambling

2008-03-09T01:09:00.000-08:00

Today I caught an interesting show on Discovery about the Internet Browser wars. To summarize it was about how Jim Clark and Marc Andressen got clobbered by Microsoft and then ended with Microsoft's Anti-trust case and inferred that this pushed Gates to his current philanthropy and that Google has/is the new Microsoft. Interesting. What really caught me was how Microsoft profited by owning and controlling the platform - duh. The thing is, no one controls the Internet - and hopefully that will remain true - Net Neutrality. This got me to thinking. At one point a lot of people said that Google was a threat to Microsoft because they wanted to take over the desktop - thinking back to desktop search, and also to their competitive suite of apps that challenge MS Office. I never really got that back then - how could you have an Internet based Operating System? I mean your browser has to run on your local system - whats going to interface with your hardware? And that doesn't seem to be the threat at all. They just want to index the worlds information - and then use that knowledge to sell advertising. Highly targeted and lucrative advertising. Mike Arrington hinted at this on Charlie Rose - saying that the Microsoft/Yahoo thing is really about getting Microsoft into a position such that they can leverage Yahoo's advertising relationships to build and compete with Google. Google runs a great utility service, "search", and from it has developed a great business model. Why acquire YouTube - to index video information, or to tap into another medium with lots of advertising potential. For some reason it makes me sad that this seems to be the point of Google - to make money via advertising. They do indeed have some great services - besides search I always also use Maps and Goog 411. Free services that of course are paid for by advertising. Seems self sustaining - I mean after all the capital from search advertising they're able to develop all sorts of services and give them away for free. This is great for consumers. But what about startups...is advertising the best monetization goal or strategy?

Augmented Reality = Blown Away!

2007-11-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

I was doing some research on the use of AI to break CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) when I came across a posting on what it essentially augmented reality - see the embed below. All I can say is wow, its a very cool use of optical recognition technology.

All Things D

2007-10-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

Late last night I got a chance to catch up on some media. The event is way past, but I was playing around with my new Nano and got a podcast video of Gates and Jobs at D5 earlier this year. It was good to watch. It really got me thinking about paradigm shifts, and more on post PC devices. I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago - and there's a lot of stuff floating around in my head about the topic. It is very exciting to watch things unfold, and even more exciting being a participant - but not quite where I want to be yet in terms of that-- yet. One things for sure, I feel the same way that they do about technology.

Flipping Sweet!

2007-07-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

If you read the title...you know who you are, yes, imitation is the highest form of flattery =)

But these are the best words I can think of to describe the results of me attending FlexCamp. Adobe really did it up right. I got a free copy of FlexBuilder 2.0, and an O'Reilly book to boot. I expect my productivity to soar. I just finished reconfiguring my desktop for development - fresh install of CF8, SQL Server 2005, and my new copy of FlexBuilder 2.0. Finally I'll have code hints and color coded ActionScript and MXML. As a matter of fact I just import my project and did a compile...no more ANT, batch files, and command line. Woohoo!

T-6 Days and Counting

2007-07-21T16:28:00.001-07:00

FlexCamp!

SilvaFUG

2007-07-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

I attended SilvaFUG on Thursday, and have to say that I was pretty impressed. Great group of folks there - I'll definitely be back for the next monthly meeting. One good take away was that someone created an open source physics engine in ActionScript. One of the demos implemented it to create a UI similar to the Microsoft Surface. Or to be more correct, similar to the technology that was developed much earlier and was presented at the TED conference. Anyways - I checked out the site for the physics engine and it could come in handy for what I'm working on.

Not much tech at the New Tech

2007-07-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

Just got back from the SF New Tech meetup/conference thing. It was worth my 5 bucks to see Guy Kawasaki present on his new site Truemors. All in all though, I have to say that I'm not too much impressed. I'm a developer mind you - so I know what it takes to put functionality like that together; not much. But above and beyond that I just don't see the value of his service. I should have piped up and asked what the majority of his $12k to start it went to. There wasn't a whole lot of tech tonight - the only thing of note was this guy Mo's little Flash app to add animated talking mouths to photos. Using the mic interface and then binding a selected region of the image to the waveform for the motion (thats my theory at least). I'm looking forward to the SilvaFUG (Silicon Valley Flex Users Group) meetup tomorrow night, maybe I can pick up some new stuff.

Fast and loose

2007-06-27T21:50:00.000-07:00

I'm busy learning how to code in Flex. I have to say that I'm liking it. Goes back to my days reading Code Complete - highly cohesive, loose coupling.

Get some AIR

2007-06-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I attended a BACFUG meeting about Adobe's new Integrated Runtime. Interesting concept. Basically it allows web developers to leverage their skills to create what one of my friends would call a "real" application - that is, a desktop application. The advantage is that this platform is similar in concept to the J2EE framework - write once, run anywhere (in theory). The discussion was pretty interesting. The room was full of CF developers, a Rails developer, and a member of the Adobe team who worked on a version of the Kuler app implemented with AIR. The key take away from this is that you can use web skills, whether they be Javascript and HTML or Flash and Flex to develop an installable desktop application. Also the AIR runtime has SQL Lite so you can create an offline app that can use a client datasource when disconnected and then synch up later. Its still fresh in beta (1.5 weeks according to Jen Larkin) so I wonder what use cases will come of this. The one biggie is eBay's disconnected app that was demo'd previously when the platform was called Apollo. I can think of one system I previously worked on that would be an excellent candidate for this platform. I have some hesitation in regards to security and how it will affect user adoption though. The big barrier is trust. Would you trust installing such an app on your system?

More than just a pretty face

2007-06-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

First make it work, then make it look pretty. I think thats a pretty common viewpoint amongst "programmers". Its something I've heard many times, and something I agreed with whole-heartedly when I began my programming career back in 2003. Functionality is king - isn't it? I mean whats the development process: Get the user requirements, determine the scope of whats to be addressed, created a functional specification. What about UI? Who cares right - as long as it does what the user needs it to do. I was thinking about this today because someone gave me a hard time for suggesting that we implement a solution using Adobe's now open source Flex framework. My response would have been the same four years ago. I studied engineering in school - and the goal always seemed to be to find a succinct solution. Thats what makes a solution beautiful - simple sophistication - no fluff. But I think one thing does get lost, and its something I heard from a colleague who had started with a design background before moving into programming: Computer science is both an art and a science, it is both form and function. I heard this again a few months ago while attending the Web 2.0 Conference at the Moscone. I sat in on a presentation by Kelly Goto of gotomedia. She described a shift in development - a narrowing of the chasm between traditional back end server side programmers and graphic designers - to that of a new hybrid developer, knowledgeable of both aspects. It makes complete sense and I think that as we move forward and begin to see more applications span across different mediums it will behoove us to be fluent in each. Don't get me wrong though - there is and always will be a place for specialists - just given the nature and resources of my current work I find (and don't mind) being somewhat of a generalist. But let me get back to my point about UI. I too once chuckled at the mention of Mac computers and took for granted the value of graphic design. The fact of the matter is that UI matters! An excellent example of this is MPEG audio players. There were tons of MP3 players on the market before the iPod - but why was the iPod such a huge success? Same functionality. Different interface. It made a world of a difference. I think that as the internet moves forward and continues to be distributed to and through different devices the biggest challenge will be creating usable interfaces - interfaces that can be created with programmatic elegance and sophistication, is easily maintainable, yet provides functionality through an easy to use and appropriate interface over different mediums.

You down with OOP?

2007-06-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I found a project to undertake that really caught my attention. I'll blog more about it here after I get my code together, but at the most basic level it involves graph theory, or more specifically, trees. I needed a refresher so I cracked open my McGraw Hill Algorithms book from Davis and started reading about edges, vertices, DFS, BFS... all good and well. Took things a step further and started implementing some code in ActionScript and made some nice visuals in Flash. Turns out though that it its much more efficient to do the work in SQL! A really good resource is Joe Celko's "Trees and Hierarchies in SQL For Smarties" -- who would of thought of using SQL to work with trees? Joe did, apparently. So after conquering my concerns with building and manipulating tree structures I made a decision to also learn a new scripting language - why do things the easy way? I've been stuck in the CF world for quite some time so time to learn me some PHP5. OO is the way to go... You down with OOP? Yeah you know me =) The only tough part is getting familiar with the syntax. I don't know how many times I tried using the "." operator instead of the "->" operator. All in all not too shabby though, I've been making great progress.

Iteration 1.0

2007-06-14T21:42:00.001-07:00

This is my first attempt at entering the blogosphere. For someone who calls himself an "Internet Technologist" I must seem pretty late to the game. So let me clarify, I'm not claiming to be knowledgeable of all things internet -- just that I have a very strong desire to, as much as is humanly possible. For the past year or two (or maybe more), I've been sitting on the sidelines of the Social Media scene mostly a passive observer. Now that I think about it I'm not sure exactly when the internet became "social". Curiously when I think back the initial attraction to it was anonymity. Mind you however that when I say "thinking back" I'm referring to the time when a suite of internet applications was Mosaic, Archie, Finger, and Usenet. Fast forward to the present and almost everything and everyone has an internet presence. For example, have you Googled your name in quotes? I did and was surprised to find this: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52896.html -- an email that I sent to Dr. Math in 1995... yes that was me, and yes I'm that much of a geek. So back to my point, I have been a passive observer, and now its time for to become a semi-active participant. Its all quite odd though - if I speak will people listen? And if no one listens, then what? I guess I'll find out.