Monthly Archives: January 2008

My buddy Al, who works at Amazon, posted an interesting comment on my recent next-gen web hosting post. In it he mentions this Forbes article, The Death of Hardware, that discusses the pendulum swing back to timesharing, a.k.a. utility computing.

Snippets:

The company divulges almost nothing about its costs or margins but is said to run its Web Services business on huge networks of computers costing as little as $300 each. Ten cents an hour adds up to $876 a year in revenue (assuming nonstop usage). If hardware lasts two years and if, let’s say, electricity and other overhead cost as much as the hardware, Amazon would have a gross margin of 45%, better than what it gets on books.

In the last two months of 2007 the number of items stored at Amazon Web Services grew 40%, to 14 billion units. (Units vary in size from a couple of bytes to 5 gigabytes, and Amazon keeps the totals secret.) That’s a faster growth rate than in the April-October period.

Amazon’s s3 storage service now handles 30,000 requests to its database per second.

Surely it is just a matter of time until Google and Microsoft do some flavor of this.

I can see two strategic challenges that would make it tough for Microsoft: deciding which platform to use (versus offering naked or nearly naked linux boxes like Amazon does and Google probably would) and putting together a billing infrastructure for purchasing cloud software and services.

Thanks for the link and your thoughts, Al.

Interesting WSJ article out today: Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a "creative capitalism" that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

Outgoing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talks to The Journal’s Rob Guth about his concept of creative capitalism. (Jan. 23, 2008)

"We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Scott Annan, CEO of Mercury Grove, followed up on my recent blog posts on tools for private online discussion forums. He wanted to find out a bit more about where Mercury Grove fell short on my requirements, and get any constructive feedback I was willing to offer. Oh, and maybe make me more of a believer in the product while he was at it.   Based on Scott’s input I made a few updates to my second post. I’ve also summarized our discussion below.

Scott explained Mercury Grove is aimed at both intra- and inter-group collaboration, especially within organizations that have lots of group activities or projects running in parallel. In my case I’m really after more of a free-form discussion forum for a relatively small number of people… I don’t have a need for the collab-related features such as task lists, projects, blog integration, and calendars.

I stated in my second post that the integration of blogs struck me as a little odd. Scott tells me this feature is actually used a number by companies with geographically dispersed groups that need an easy way to keep up to date on other groups’ news. Makes sense.

One nice ability that I didn’t notice on my quick test drive was the centralized summary of activity across all groups you belong to. Related web groups need not be information silos.

We also talked about differentiation between Mercury Grove and other online collaboration services like Basecamp. It’s a crowded space. Mercury Grove is targeting the middle to upper end of the market, from what I can see. Pricing is a particular challenge; many people expect everything to be free on the Web nowadays, at least at the entry level. Like Basecamp, Mercury Grove has a free "Community" entry-level offering, which gives you up to 50MB of disk space. I do suspect there is a gap between their Community and SMB lines where they’re losing price-sensitive tire-kickers. Perhaps a Ning-like pricing structure, where you can buy additional storage in 10GB chunks for $10, would make sense? Of course, adding billing and storage in small increments isn’t zero cost. And positioning your product as one-size-fits-all rarely works either, especially when some of your customers are large companies that want to pay a lot more than the little guys. Tough strategy challenge.

In any case, next time I am looking for project collaboration tools I will give Mercury Grove a deeper look.

Thanks, Scott, for getting in touch.

This is the second in a two-part post on software tools for hosting private online forums. Part 1 is here.

Alternatives to Google Groups and why I didn’t pick ‘em

In descending order of preference:

• Ning: Too strongly focused on member-to-member networking and marketing/promotion. Looks great for building a custom social network, though, if you don’t mind someone else owning your member list.
• Basecamp: Nice tool for project management, not so great for discussion. I’d use this to manage a simple project.
• PbWiki: good wiki with notifications, but no discussion support. I’d use this to get a group of people to collectively build a knowledge base. (In fact, I started to once, but got too busy with other stuff.)
• Yahoo! Groups: I took a very brief refresher look. Still too commercial and self-promotional for my taste. Inline self-promotional ads… yuck.
• Mercury Grove: the combination of project management and blog-like features struck me as odd. I prefer Basecamp for project management.
• CollectiveX: I balked at the overly grabby registration page. Gender? Birthdate? Sheesh. Read about Permission Marketing.

Details follow.

Basecamp Summary

I’ve used Basecamp before to do project management. It’s clean and simple. As an aside, I’ve always been impressed by their pricing and signup page… if you’re ever thinking about how to do an easy-to-understand pricing model, check out their pricing page.

Notable features:
* UI is very clean and simple
* To do lists
* Messages + comments + per-message subscriptions for email notification
* File sharing
* Milestones / calendar
* Permissions per user, per project
* Data export as XML file
* Developer API
* Pricing: there is a free 1-project plan; other plans give you more projects, more security, and more storage, starting at $12/month and maxing out at $150/month

Mercury Grove Summary

This is another project management tool, much like Basecamp. Calendars, tasks, lists, projects, contacts, tasks. In fact, aside from the blog-style discussion forum and blog feed integration, I find it hard to tell the difference. After this post I learned more about the product from Scott Annan, Mercury Grove’s CEO. You can read about that here.

Notable features:
* Look and feel: small set of themes. rather bland design. no ads, though, which is nice.
* Blog-like discussion board with 2-way comments + options to notify all members or just the poster via email
* Integrate feeds from external blogs to your group
* Drag and drop calendar and task lists
* Email notifications and alerts – but I don’t see a way to control frequency of notification
* Storage: 50 MB free
* Pricing: community groups are free, small/medium biz is $100/month, enterprise is $450/month

Ning Summary

Ning lets you build your own custom social network, and then helps you grow it by inviting friends, distributing promotional badges, monitoring visitor stats, and so on. Ning provides many of the key features you expect to find in social networks like Facebook as a white-label service. I find the UI design particularly slick… it’s highly interactive (done with dojo); you can create a very professional looking site in just a few minutes, and turn big chunks of features (forums, blogs, groups) on and off easily. I’m quite impressed by the breadth of functionality Ning offers.

Notables:
* Look and feel: drag and drop web site designer plus a gallery of customizable themes
* Discussion forum: posts, replies, optional topic categories, automatically follow discussions you reply to
* Send broadcast messages to all network members
* Blogs, which can be private if you are posting in a private network
* Groups
* Photo and Video widgets
* Customizable profile questions you can ask of members when they join the network
* Storage: 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth per month, free. upgrade units of storage+bandwidth for $9.95 per month.
* Pricing: free ning networks are funded by google ads. upgrade to ditch the ads and promotional widgets and get more storage.

PbWiki Summary

PbWiki lets you create a simple, secure wiki, and invite people to contribute. The baseline offering is free. As with other wiki softwares, PbWiki is geared at building up a repository of shared knowledge, rather than enabling the "live discussion forum" paradigm that I’m looking for. That said, you could certainly set up a wiki page for each discussion topic, and sign up to receive notifications of wiki page edits via email.

Notable features:
* Notifications: you can receive email for wiki updates, and/or subscribe via RSS. You can control the frequency of email notifications through the account settings page, but I don’t see a way to selectively subscribe to updates for particular pages.
* Storage: all wikis come with 10 MB of storage that is backed up automatically. Ugprade to get more.
* Attachments are supported
* Export: wiki page contents can be exported as a zip
* Look and feel: there are templates and skins for customizing the wiki look and feel
* Security: wikis may be private or public.
* Security: free wikis have a simple access control model: each person gets full read/write access, or none. 
* Security: upgrade to get more granular control over admins, moderators, contributors
* API: there is a developer API available
* Custom domain name
* Pricing: non-premium wikis are free; premium wikis have per-seat charges, starting around $100 per user per year, with volume discounts

I’m planning to set up an invite-only online forum for collecting feedback from a group of people using a private software beta. I pinged folks on TorCamp what their favorite private forum tools are — see their very helpful responses here — and then did some further evaluation on my own. I looked at Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, Ning, Basecamp, CollectiveX, PbWiki, and Mercury Grove.

This ended up being a lot of writing, so I’m breaking it into two parts.This first post summarizes my requirements and conclusions so far. The second post, which I’ll publish on Monday, gives details on the services I evaluated.

The Requirements

Must-Have features:

• online access via web browser
• secure: invite-only, users must login, admin controls access
• threaded discussion with an archive and search
• simple… clean and usable UI, easy to use for anyone web-savvy, easy to set up and manage
• email integration, e.g. message digests, post-from-email
• data export, so that I can switch to another provider if I want to
• good value. free is nice, but not necessary.

Nice-to-Have features:

• wiki or some place to put static (non-discussion) content
• ability to upload/attach documents such as JPGs
• sub-groups, e.g. to have a group focused on a particular topic (versus creating an entirely new, parallel group)

Don’t-want or don’t-really-care-about features:

• calendar and project-management goo
• social networking between members
• member profiles
• custom domain name
• features for promoting my forum (since it’s private)

Bottom line: Google Groups seems to fit the bill

Based on the services I evaluated, Google Groups seems to best fit the requirements. It has all the features I need:

* threaded discussion forum with excellent email integration
* private groups (also supports public and "announcement-only" groups)
* simple social networking features, opt-in
* look and feel: simple, clean UI; small themes gallery
* create basic web pages for posting static (non-discussion) content
* file attachments, up to a total of 100 MB

Better yet — in what turned out to be the real differentiating factor — Google Groups has none of the features I don’t want. For instance, it doesn’t push my group members to network with each other if they don’t want to, it doesn’t nag them to fill in user profiles, and it doesn’t force them (or me!) to answer unnecessary registration questions. It also gives users sufficient control over how frequently to be notified of updates. And while Google Groups does have ads, they’re off to one side of the page, rather than inline within the group content (ahem… unlike Yahoo!).  Lastly, the price is nice: free.

Part two: In the second part of this post I’ll write about the other alternatives and why they didn’t fit the bill.

About a year and a half ago, after much hemming and hawing, I bought an Asus W3V laptop. 

I was pretty happy about it.

I even blogged about it.

I knew at the time that I was ignoring Mike Zintel’s First Rule of Laptop Purchasing: “Osh, don’t be a chump, buy an IBM.” (Insert your name to customize this rule to your own situation.) Mike and I worked together for years, and we had a tradition whereby I would buy a new laptop — not an IBM, usually some sort of Toshiba — and Mike would then make predictions on mean time to failure, until the laptop duly failed. He was usually right on target.

But I’d done my research this time. After all, Asustek makes heaps of hardware for other OEMs, including, apparently, the motherboards in many PCs. I figured they would be amply capable of making an Asus-branded machine. And besides, as their home page explains, they are “No. 1 in Quality and Services”. So I toodled off down to College and Spadina and bought one.

The Honeymoon

It was good. The shell was metallic gray. The screen was wide, and shiny. The CPU was fast. A little hot, maybe, but fast.  Wheeee!

Prelude to the Fits: A First Inkling of Something Not Quite Right

After using the laptop for a few days I was happy, but puzzled by one annoying design flaw: the Super Weird Launcher Buttons. (I don’t know what Asus officially calls them, but this name seems appropriate to me.) These are programmable hardware buttons situated on the left and right edges of the laptop, exactly where you would naturally put your hands in order to grasp and lift a laptop off a table.

Now, if these buttons had no function other than to look cool, this wouldn’t be a design flaw. But they do things. And they’re placed so that it’s nearly impossible to lift the laptop without inadvertently pressing a button. As a result, whenever you move this laptop, Unfortunate Things happen… disabling the wireless network, for instance, or disabling the mousepad, or (my personal favorite) launching the built-in DVD Movie Player software. Why you would ever want an easy-to-trigger hardware button to do any of these things, much less ten such buttons, one of which launches a DVD movie player, is beyond me. Perhaps nobody at Asus actually tried moving the laptop? Or maybe I was going about my laptop-lifting the wrong way. Anway, I decided to avoid the SWLBs.

Week number two revealed a second design flaw: the BBBBL (Blindingly Bright Blinky Blue Light). Now, don’t get me wrong, I like blinking lights. Especially red ones. And flashy things! But this laptop — even in standby mode — has a power indicator so bright it lights up a decent-sized room at night. And it flashes. You can see it lighting up my 3rd floor office from the sidewalk. It is not possible to sleep in the same room as this laptop (hey, I like to be near my computers), unless you cover it up. With something thick.

I couldn’t find a software fix for disabling the light. After some web searching the best solution I came up with was to color over the blue light with a black permanent marker. Sigh.

Design flaws aside, it ran fine. For about a month. Until…

Fit the First: Power Management Has Trouble Coping. Screens Turn Blue. Data is Lost.

It was a bad day. The blue screen made me sad, and reminded me of the time I worked on Windows NT 3.51, and got made fun of by Dave Cutler for having a strange name, even though I was just an intern. Fortunately I found a fix. I even blogged about it.

All was good, again. For a while. But then…

Fit the Second: Power Management Turns Ugly. Frustration Mounts. Global Warming Accelerates.

More blue screens, this time with nasty beeps. Three minutes to resume from hibernation, or worse, no resume at all. I searched the web. I tried Uninstalling Things. I even tried communicating with Asus technical support. Like my highschool French teachers, the Asus staff seemed nice, but unable to help me. Fixing would require sending it in, which I was unwilling to do: work stoppages are bad.

This time my solution was to give up on hibernate altogether. Who needs it anyway, right? Hibernation’s for sissies and scaredy cats. And besides, there’s boatloads more oil left in the ground, so who cares if I burn a few more watts by leaving my machine on standby instead of hibernate. Let’s move on.

I moved on. Six months passed peacefully.

(Except for kicking the power cord, thereby breaking the power connector, and subsequently frying the keyboard. That was entirely my fault. So now I have to use an external USB keyboard. I can type sitting two feet away from the screen. How cool is that? The other mobile workers in coffee shops are secretly jealous of me.

)

Fit the Third: Support Expires. CD No Read-ee.

This laptop has a CD/DVD drive built in. It worked fine until about three months ago, when it began struggling with reading CDs. Some CDs were OK, others were not. Perhaps a comment on my musical taste. The drive would make nasty buzzing noises for about thirty seconds and then give up. No fix for this one. Sadly, and perhaps cunningly, the machine was by then out of warranty. On principle, I refused to buy a new drive. Masochism is a terrible thing.

More time passed.

Fit the Fourth: Chronic Fatigue Sets In. The Freewheeling Untethered Lifestyle Comes to an End.

Recently I realized the battery would no longer charge to 100%. In fact, as I write this, my laptop has been plugged in all night, and when I detach the cord the battery shows a 60% charge. And that drains to zero in about half an hour. I could buy a new battery, but I refuse, again, on principle. A battery should last more than 18 months. The show must go on.

By this time I was starting to feel a little bit down about the W3V. My faith in Asus was weakening. Had I chosen wrongly? Was Mike “Yoda” Zintel to be proven correct, yet again, despite my feverish pre-purchasing research? I needed inspiration. I needed encouragement. I needed a visit to the Asus website.

Once there I read this:

ASUS products’ top quality stems from product development. It’s like learning Chinese Kung-Fu; one must begin with cultivating the “Chi” and inner strength.

Bracing! Exactly what I needed. Cultivate Chi.

Fit the Fifth: Burn, Baby, Burn! The MacBook Beckons.

Last week I decided to burn a CD, and found the CD burner would no longer burn. More buzzing and grinding noises. Refusal to
acknowledge blank CDs. Repeated Windows Media Player crashes. Cats and dogs, sleeping together. Defcon 5. Incalcitrance.

Desparate, dazed, despairing, I turned on Katrin’s Macbook and fired up iTunes. Five minutes later I had a finished CD in my hands, courtesy Apple Computing. No buzzing. No blinking blue lights. No wmplayer.exe lockup. Just a soothingly simple experience and a freshly burned CD.

Five days passed, and then…

Fit the Sixth: The Hard Drive Ticks. Death Approaches.

In the middle of a particularly vigorous programming session a few days ago, the hard drive started ticking. Have you ever heard a hard drive tick? For your sake, I hope not. Hard drives shouldn’t tick. Ever. And certainly not in the middle of programming sessions, vigorous or otherwise. Ticking — or any noise other than a quiet susurrating whir — means your hard drive is probably about to die, taking all of your data with it to wherever it is that dead hard drives scuttle off to when they expire. 

I got lucky. My hard drive didn’t die. And it hasn’t, yet. But the computer did crash again, this time by slowing to a halt over the course of ten minutes. Good thing I used Foldershare to back up my files. Sure hope none of them were corrupted before being backed up.

This brings us to the present.

Here I sit, two feet away, USB keyboard in hand, waiting for the ominous ticking to signal its last goodbye. 

Thanks to my clumsy mishaps and Asus’ product development Chi I now have a laptop that…
- must remain plugged in almost all the time
- when unplugged, drains to zero power in thirty minutes
- rarely resumes properly from standby
- requires an external USB keyboard
- selectively reads CDs and DVDs
- no longer burns CDs
- ticks

The Blindingly Bright Blinkly Blue Light and the Super Weird Launcher Buttons still work, though. Perhaps they’re run by a separate motherboard.