The Codecruncher

Good news for all of us, here, among other places. Some Dave Mitchell, a freelance English programmer and sysadmin, who bought a Dell laptop, has managed to get back the money that Dell charged him for the bundled O.S., a Windows XP Home I guess. Mitchell asked for his money (45 GBP) back arguing that he never used and never was going to use that Windows license, and invoking Microsoft’s own EULA for it.

Good for him. That’s something we all should do, Linux users or not. For example, my own HP Pavilion W5080 (I can’t link it, because after less than two years is already out of HP catalog) comes with a bundled Windows XP Home, that I was never going to use. No setup CDs, no manuals, everything stored on a recovery partition on the main hard disk. If you install any other O.S., even from the same family, you’re screwed (spanish link, sorry), you just made your warrant void. Even if your problem has nothing to do with the O.S.

I heartily dislike this solution because:

1. I don’t see the reason why I have to pay for an O.S. I’m not gonna use. Moreover, if the O.S. I’m going to use is not free; I have to pay twice for the same concept.
2. The computer’s manufacturar has no right to tell me how I must setup my hard disk.
3. Usually the recovery partition is bigger than needed. Because of their saving on buying complete Windows licenses, I lose hard disk space.

Let’s hope this catches and more people decides to ask for their money back for an O.S. they’r enot going to use. And it shouldn’t be necessary: manufacturers should realize this and give the customer the choice of preinstalled O.S., if any.

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In the spanish main version of this blog I’ve just translated and published an original Rob Walling post, Nine things developers want more than money. It’s a great article, and since this is in English I’ll merely link to it here. My thoughts about it, coming up.

Or how Google made its very own SourceForge.

Google has made avaliable for all of us with a GMail account, Google Code Hosting, a repository for Open Source projects hosted by Google. It uses Subversion, and allows the project administrators to manage a bug tracker, the project collaborators, add links to external webpages about the project, and so on.

I’ll keep telling you things as I keep trying it.

Video in YouTube, SFW

While some of us, myself included, are sometimes tempted by the siren songs of Web 2.0 and announce the desktop as a dead and buried paradigm, others persist in telling us that it’s far from defunct.

What you can see in above’s video is a demo of a 3D desktop prototype, using real physical data to emulate a real life desktop. With it we will be able to order the icons in piles, drop them, wrap them, make them bigger or smaller, classify them, put them on bookshelves, and so on… Taking into account the enthusiast reception to the idea, they’re thinking in making the step from prototype to product and they’re searching for expert C++ and OpenGL developers. More info, on their site, where you can also download a better quality version of this same video.

I have my reservations about the real usefulness of this new desktop system, mainly because of my particular way of using the desktop. While other people have their desktops completely crowded with dozens of icons and documents, I keep it as clean as I can: normally only My PC and the Recycling Bin icons. In my case, the desktop is not a workplace: I only see it just as I’ve started, right before I start opening windows. Curiously, that spartan discipline I impose on my computer desktop has absolutely nothing to do with the very real mess my real desktops are, at home and at work. First BumpTop’s disadvantage would be, then, how easily you could emulate real life mess in your virtual desktop. I can only imagine then that the time I spend re-organising my real-life desktops, and the nanoseconds it takes the mess to reign supreme again, would have their loyal virtual counterpart with BumpTop.

The second disadvantage, for me, is that with something so very beautiful we won’t need the web anymore to procastrinate: we could do it directly on the desktop.

‘Cause I sure don’t.

For the larger part of this past week I’ve been in posession of a 60 Gbs iPod. A friend of mine, living in the country, asked me to pick it up for his girlfriend, as a gift. Besides, he asked me to load some music into it, so the gift was more complete. And, of course, I couldn’t say no: everything for a friend.

Of course I tried changing his mind, to no avail. There are better alternatives. And after having an iPod (yes, I also gave it a test drive) for the last week I’m certain of it: it’s a very beautiful gadget, but you won’t ever see me with one. For starters iTunes, that mutant media library-music player-music buyer won’t be able to touch none of my systems with its poisonous claws while I draw breath.

You have to admit the sucker is beautiful. Very beautiful.

But we’re not talking here about a picture or a statue: it should be beautiful, it has to be functional. And functionally speaking, iPod’s a disaster: a not very loud maximum volume, a pathetic audio quality, not to mention the pitiable speakers, and the wheel thingie (I refuse to call that an interface) is confusing at best, iTunes obsession to clasify your music using its arcane criteria so every song you put into it is going to be missed, and don’t get me started on the battery problem, and so on.

There has to be an alternative.

And there are: at Anything but iPod they’re actively searching for them. Among all their findings, I really like this:

Avaliable at 1, 2 and 4 Gbs; it also plays photos, short videos and FM radio. It has a line-in cable to connect the device directly to a music source and save MP3 without the need of a computer, it has a joystick instead of the wheel thingie, and it’s amazingly beautiful and small.

I have my alternative, what about you?

The less I use Microsoft products, the more I miss them. Books, tutorials, manuals, a complicated in itself third-party software tool which smells worse than its namesake animal and which is, of course, awfully expensive; all of this to try to manage that arcane, meaningless, cryptic and obscure piece of bloatware that from now on I’ll refer to exclusively as Obstacle. I’ve never seen a software less usable and more unfriendly: everything with it is complicated, or slow, or difficult to do. Failing that, you don’t have permissions to do it. It gives, really, the impression that Obstacle is so badly designed purposefully, so that a legion of arcane priests, also known as consultants, can perpetuate themselves and their inmoral high fares just by adoring this hellspawn.

Everything I’ve learned to do in SQL Server has been done with my mouse’s right button. Simple, elegant, intuitive and usable.

And no, sorry, but I’m not admitting that Obstacle is faster, or more powerful. It’s irrelevant to the argument at hand: I could have a very powerful and very fast Ferrari, but what’s the use if it has a potato for a driving wheel?

For all this ¹:

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1.- And much more: there’s no boolean type field, but you have a VARCHAR2, for God’s sake! What in blazes is a VARCHAR2, and how the hell did it make it past the (very early) stages of development?

Will the day come when all of our aplications running in our computers will be hosted on remote servers? Right now, two of the most used kinds of applications the world over are already avaliable via Web: Writely for word processing and iRows for spreadsheets.

Other, more heavy-duty applications such as Photoshop, programming language IDEs or 3D design applications may seem by definition out of this. As of today. Five years ago it was unthinkable that one could use Web applications to create documents or spreadsheets, right?

Will the day come when the Web browser will be the only application we’ll need running on our systems?

You can accuse Gates to make boring presentations (easy when you’re a Mac zealot) but maybe I’m weird. I strongly prefer being bored on a presentation than being taken for a damned fool. But I’m weird like that.

Take a look at this job offer (in spanish, sorry). Just in case you don’t speak it , I’ll translate (and yes, I’ve chosen which words to make bold):

Vacant job: Salesman
Category: Salesman - Sales
Department: GENERAL MANAGEMENT
Number of vacancies: 1
Offer Description: 6 MILL ¹

HEAD OF SALES DEPARTMENT

Will be responsible of any and all commercial actions of the firm.

Will be the head salesman, and his/her main tasks will be selling with virtual reality.

Must be a professional illusion seller, because the product is on construction.

It doesn’t matter if later on the product (on this particular case, houses) does not respond to the initial expectatives, it doesn’t matter if later on the product is a complete piece of crap, even more it doesn’t matter if at the end the product doesn’t even exist. The head salesman has already done his job, he has already illusions with virtual reality (you can talk louder, but you can’t talk clearer) and has already taken home his hard earned money.

This here offer is for construction business, but it can be sadly and perfectly translated to our field: how many examples do we know about salesman execs selling first rate smoke and promising prospective customers virtually anything just to get the customer to sign a contract, the make the sale and get their bonus. And we I mean anything I mean it: the original contract for the disaster project I’m currently working on specifies that the Web application we’re building has to be able to connect to external devices to information treatment purposes. It doesn’t specify if said devices are external servers, Web services, the CEO’s son PSP or his wife microwave oven. Virtual scenario that can seem hilarious to the untrained eye, but if the customer watns to give us a difficult time they can do, and there’s nothing we can do legally. There’s a contract that one of our sales people happily approved and our CEO signed without revising. Not the problem of the salesman, of course: he has already make the sale, he has already make his job; and now the customer wants that his illusions make the step from virtual to real, a trivial task not corresponding to the illusion seller but to the software developers. People that, funny enough, on most cases don’t make six million¹, neither they make five, nor even four on some cases for the ungrateful and unsung job of making right the awful wrongs usually made by the illusion sellers.

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1.- Six million pesetas/year, gross. Roughly equivalent to €36K/year, gross. Though Spain is not using our old currency, the peseta, since 2002 at least there are still some job offers speaking the old language. By the way, that kind of figures more or less matches the salary of a well paid project leader.

Via Mike Gunderloy (again… if you’re not suscribed already, don’t know what you’re waiting for) I’ve found two amazing libraries for ASP .NET.

First, BusyBoxDotNet, a server control which displays a wait message on the page stating that the server is performing a time-consuming operation and unabling the user to do nothing else but wait. The message is shown on a layer which moves automatically when scrolling, and allows to gray out and lock the back of the page (that is, all the rest of it) while the message is displayed and the task is (hopefully) being performed, to dissapear without a fuss at the end. You can try a demo right here. Really useful. Kudos.

And second, hot in the Web 2.0¹ hype, we find MagicAjax.NET. It allows us to enter AJAX techniques on standard out-of-.the.box ASP .NET server controls, which I find particularly useful for applying AJAX on an already developed or well underway ASP .NET application. It also has a demo avaliable.

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¹ And no, it’s not only to make rounded borders to visible layers. Neither putting an RSS feed on your pages, neither using words such as sinergy, community, collaborative or even tags. Even if you place a Beta label neatly by the side of your application’s title, you fall short. Besides all that, you have to make your web application more intuitive, more responsive, more agile. Less goings to the server for information, at least in appeareance. Yes, it has to be as similar as possible to an old desktop application, even imitating them completely. Live and see.