Category: Uncategorized

My, how the mighty have fallen from grace.

Not long ago, Apple (especially the Mighty Mr. Jobs) could do no wrong at all.  They were the cool geeks, leading the world out of the dark canyons of Wintel captivity.  But slowly, ever so slowly, chinks have appeared in their iArmor.

You've probably seen the latest - Apple is fighting like hell to punish the free spirits who've dared to unlock their iPhones.  One update after another is pumped out by Apple, preventing people from loading their own MP3s as ringtones, and now bricking the unlocked phones.

But now, reports are starting to come in that some people who haven't tampered with their phones are having problems with these updates, too.  This is going to really hurt Apple.

These are some of the same people who stood in lines for hours and hours just to buy one of these new phones.  Why?  Because Apple wasn't just another phone company, and they weren't going to treat their customers like regular phone customers.  No, these people were special.  They were the iFaithful.

Sorry, folks.  Apple's chasing those bad, bad iUnlockers with such vigor that they're running over their best customers.  That's going to leave a mark.

In case you're keeping score at home, kids, here are some of the lowlights Apple's hit over the last few months:

• Jobs stock option scandal.  Teflon Steve seems to have wriggled out of this, but we'll see if he stays clean.
• iPhones can't be activated (link no longer active).  Apple sells half a million phones, but only 146,000 are activated because AT&T customer service bites.
• No open platform for iPhone (link no longer active).  In today's Facebook and widget environment, more people than ever understand why open is good.  Steve doesn't.
• iBills come in boxes.  Not looking too green, Apple.
• Ringtones are locked.  Then they're unlocked.  Then they're locked again.
• New iPods have problems.
• Apple bricks unlocked phones.
• Apple messes up "good" phones.

Let me know if I missed any.

So I really think someone should jump on this and make a new "Mac Guy" vs. "Motorola Guy" or "Sprint Guy" or something like that where the Mac Guy is stuck in jail, or Steve Jobs comes out with a hammer and pummels his phone or something.  Let's see who's got the moxie to take the first shot - I can't wait!

You can tell the difference between a Kia and a Mercedes with your eyes closed, can't you?  It's more than the look of the car; it's a host of little experiences that tell you how the car was built, and that someone really sweated the small stuff.

You can feel quality when you reach for a knob - it's in the right place, even though you've never thought about what the right place is.  You can feel it when you twist the knob or flip a switch - you can tell that knob is going to be working just fine the umpteen-thousandth time you reach for it.

Doors are a good place to look for quality.  I owned an Acura a couple years ago, and it had a little electrically-actuated finger that grabbed the door when it reached the door frame and pulled it in tight to latch.  I hardly ever noticed it until I got rid of the car, but then I really missed it.  Other high-quality cars pride themselves on a solid, muted "chunk" that could just as easily come from a bank vault.

Software has quality, too.

You may not be aware of the dozens of subconscious signals that transmit software quality to you, but they're there, too.  The first thing that people think about when "software quality" comes up is coding quality - how many bugs are there?

You've probably seen the jokes that talk about using the horn, turn signal, and gear shift to restart the car when it breaks - that's a reference to coding quality.  We don't want our cars to leave us stranded by the side of the road, and we don't want our software to puke its guts out all over our screen every time we look at it sideways.

Coding quality gets a lot of attention from QA departments who want to automate them away, and from development departments who want to unit-test them away.  Coding quality improves when teams work together, and when individuals learn the craft of software development (hint: pick up a copy of Steve McConnell's Code Complete).

But coding quality isn't the end of software quality.

Design quality is perceptible in the layouts of screens and the ease with which new users find themselves around for the first time.  It's like the bank vault car doors.

What is platform quality?

Platforms show their usability in all these ways, but there are other aspects of platform quality that are more subtle.  I've been working pretty extensively with two different platforms over the last several months, and I am struck every day with the difference in "feel" I get from these two platforms.

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS).  It's the software that powers  this blog, and I've also deployed it into a couple other environments.  I have worked with other LAMP-based CMS systems (PHP-Nuke, PostNuke), and I have no problem putting Drupal on a pedestal above those other platforms.  Drupal does enough things so very, very well that I've begun to think of it as a general-purpose web platform rather than just a CMS.

I like it a *lot*.

SugarCRM is a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM / CRMS).  It's a Salesforce.com competitor, and it's available in open source (Community) and two paid versions (Pro and Enterprise).  Even though I'm going to pick on some aspects of SugarCRM, I have to begin by saying that I really admire what they've done.  The value to be had here by customers relative to the commercial alternatives is impressive.

But where Drupal inspires confidence to look for new places to use it, SugarCRM makes me want to stay in its comfort zone.  I'm pretty sure SugarCRM is going to do well at the things it does natively, but extending it hurts.  Salesforce.com is actively working to transform their CRM platform into a general-purpose web platform, but SugarCRM isn't ready for that yet.

Even though these are two completely different applications, they are similar in the sense that in most implementations, the "stock" product isn't quite right for the job.  That's clearly true for Drupal, where you are very likely to customize the UI and add modules to get the right mix of functionality for your site.

SugarCRM is more likely to have most of what you need out of the box, which is a testament not only to the complex nature of the CRM space, but also to the high level of functionality in the box.  It's probably also fair to point out that the business processes and data relationships in CRM are more complex than for CMS, but for now, I'm going to ask to have my cake and eat it, too.

I'm going to compare these two platforms in a number of areas, pointing out the ways that each of them build up or tear down my confidence in the platform, and where applicable, showing where an idea from one would work really well in the other.

(stay tuned for more on this in future posts)

Ok, did anyone else ever read Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi novel, Rendezvous with Rama?  The connection here is a little thin, but I had a distinctive flashback when I saw it.  In Clarke's story, astronauts land on a visiting spaceship, initially thought to be dead, but which later turned out to be the home of all sorts of robots. 

Everything on Rama reflects a theme of "three", including one type of robot that Clarke describes in great detail.  This spider-robot is said to look like a three-legged daddy longlegs, and the way it moved sounded pretty far-fetched, at least until I saw this robot from Virginia Tech.  I'm sure this won't turn out to be the most practical form of locomotion, but it's a wonderful example of thinking outside the box.  (read more about it on Engadget)

In my earlier post about Open Source Customer Service, I mentioned GroundWork Open Source.  I found these guys while searching for a Nagios VMWare appliance image.  GroundWork has taken Nagios and wrapped it and extended it to add functionality and to make setup and administration a ton easier.

If you're worried about how to get started with GroundWork, their download area has options to install it yourself, boot an ISO "Live" image, or run it as a VMWare or Virtual PC VM image.  You should be able to find at least two good ways to get up and running in a hurry.  Documentation is good, and as a bonus, I received a number of emails with sincere offers to help if I needed anything.  I didn't feel like I was being ambushed by used-car salesmen, though (you've probably experienced that from some vendors).

Like other mixed-source vendors (ex: SugarCRM), GroundWork has a free Open Source option as well as paid options.  I worked with the Open Source product, which has been plenty-powerful for me.  Paid products add features and support.  GroundWork just announced GroundWork Connect, a support portal for paid customers.

I haven't been able to spend the time required to really explore all facets of this framework, and despite the excellent documentation and support, it'll take time to really get the most out of a system like this.  Although you can view a network monitoring solution as an application, it really bears a lot of resemblance to a programming environment in the way you organize your work, collect bits of logic into modules, and coordinate the operation of those modules.

At the simplest level, this system will tell you what machines are up and which are down, but there are lots of systems that will tell you that much.  Things start getting interesting when you begin to factor in which applications reside on which machines, which machines depend on which other machines, which applications depend on which other applications, and so on.  There are some really powerful possibilities here for someone who takes advantage of them.

Personally, I'd like to look at incorporating some response-time / QOS metrics in at least one scenario.  I have a feeling that using GroundWork to collect some real information would allow me to produce some pretty compelling pictures about what's happening to application-level quality under different loads.

The only thing I've seen so far that you may want to look into before diving in is hardware requirements.  Depending on the size of your organization and the amount of sampling you're going to do, hardware requirements can start to creep into the range of a "real nice machine" -- a powerful CPU and multi-Gig RAM setup is described for large-scale monitoring.  I expect that most organizations will get by with lots less horsepower, but check this out when you evaluate.

Hopefully, I'll be able to share some more input on GroundWork after I put a few more miles behind me.  I've seen a lot to like so far.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've run across a couple of open source projects that have really jumped out of the pack with their attention to customer service.  This first of these is Apatar.  I found these guys as I was searching for a way to get data from a Salesforce.com system migrated to SugarCRM. 

Anyone who's ever done data migration for a project knows how quickly this task can suck the life out of a schedule.  Apatar's product looked to be just what I needed: an open data migration framework with end-point plug-ins for all sorts of systems, including my "from" and "to" systems, so I gave it a try. 

Their product is a Java-based canvas that hosts migration steps, where the steps perform any number of functions, including mapping between two data sources.  Using the pre-built connectors for SalesForce and Sugar (both using these products' SOAP interfaces), I was able to wire up a test migration harness very quickly.

I really liked the fact that I'd be able to construct a migration job that I could run again and again, and I loved the availability of all the plug-ins.  The company is a mixed-model organization - Apatar is available in open source and "Enterprise" variants.  As with other companies in this model (SugarCRM comes to mind), it is important to gauge the vitality of the open source community if you're interested in that variant.  In Apatar's case, they've got a really nice developer portal (good), but the featured content is anywhere from a couple weeks to several months old (not great).  If you're interested in Apatar, I would definitely suggest testing the response time and accuracy of the community support before betting the farm on it.

It turns out I wasn't able to use Apatar for my project -- partly due to problems in my infrastructure.  The production SalesForce system I was migrating from didn't have the SOAP API enabled, which really eliminated Apatar as a migration tool.  I tried using Apatar to read a CSV file and upload to Sugar, but I ran into problems there, as well.  To be fair to Apatar, I've used the Sugar SOAP API separately, and it is pretty touchy.  When it encounters a problem, it throws exceptions first and asks questions later. 

Error handling is one area where Apatar could use some improvement, though.  Instead of just aborting the whole job or logging the fact that x-thousand records had errors, it would be nice if Apatar would log the problem in a form that lets me go back and examine the input and output rows.  After all, if more than 5-10% of my records are failing, there's probably something in my mapping I'm going to have to fix, and that's going to be a whole lot easier if I can see what was coming in and what was going out.  For bonus points, give me an interactive debugger to let me look at the data values.

Early in my evaluation, I got an email from Apatar asking if I needed any help, and another asking for my feedback.  When I got to the point where I was able to give some constructive comments, I got in touch with them and exchanged emails with one of their techs.  There was really nothing to be done about my #1 problem (no access to SalesForce's SOAP API), but I offered my feedback about error handling, and it was well-received.

I'll definitely keep Apatar on my radar to see if they continue to grow and improve.  They've got the potential to be a great tool to have in the chest.

A while back, I replied to a post on a Joel-on-Software forum about how to compete with an open source competitor.  In my reply, I suggested that the author look at usability and customer service, as these are often two weak links in open source projects.

Since then, I'm happy to say that I've come across a couple of organizations that have proven me wrong.  Both of these organizations "get" what it means to be a software product.  They understand that there's a lot of work to be done once the software is written.  The thing that really caught my attention about both of these organizations, though, is that they both reached out and contacted me personally to see if I needed help.

What a breath of fresh air.

How many times have you had a software vendor contact you in this way - regardless of the price of the software?  This little touch does a lot to reassure the person on the other end that there's help available if they need it.  It's an easy way to start a relationship off on the right foot.

Watch for a couple of mini-reviews about Apatar and GroundWork Open Source - both are great examples of proactive customer service.

We're in QA on a .Net project right now, and as QA cycles so often do, this one is flushing out some varying opinions on style. As much as we try to get people to specify this stuff early on, there's nothing like a running system to uncover the closet usability experts.

One of these bugs had to do with the content and style of the message we display when a grid has no data items. I was aware, of course, that the minute I changed it, someone was bound to jump up and ask for the style to be just a little different, so I wanted a solution I could use everywhere, and that would let me change the style when I wanted to.

We'd been using the EmptyDataTemplate in our Gridviews, which would've let me change the style, but wouldn?t let me change the message depending on why the grid had no rows. The EmptyDataTemplate looks something like this:

  <EmptyDataTemplate>
      <asp:Label ID="lblNoData" runat="server">No data found.</asp:Label>
  </EmptyDataTemplate>

Why not use EmptyDataText?  We probably could have made that one work if we?d hard-coded a red font style (bad), or hard-coded a div tag around the text (better, but still not great because we?d have to repeat that all over the place).

So I decided to use a custom template class. I'd never worked with ITemplate before, but I really like it. It reminds me a lot of the stuff that open-source CMS's like PostNuke and Drupal have been doing. I can definitely see using this more in the future. The code for the template class is below, in Listing 1.

To use the template class, set the template based on what's going on (ie, a search). You don't even have to check to see if you have any results - the grid will only display this when there are no rows.

  grdSearchResults.EmptyDataTemplate = 
      new NoDataTemplate("No records match your criteria.");

There?s also a parameterless constructor that defaults the message to ?No matching records.?, and another that lets you specify a reason why the results are empty:

grdSearchResults.EmptyDataTemplate = 
    new NoDataTemplate(NoDataTemplateReason.NoResultsFound, 
    "No profiles match your criteria.");

Values for this enum are NoSearchMadeYet, NoResultsFound, and SystemError - default is NoResultsFound. You can mark up styles in your CSS corresponding to these reasons if you want to alter the appearance of any of them:

/* Search results messages when no data present */
.SearchResultsNoSearch 
{ 
    /* no style changes yet, but reserve this spot.  */ 
}
.SearchResultsNoData 
{ 
    /* no style changes yet, but reserve this spot.  */ 
}
.SearchResultsError
{
    color: red;
    font-size: larger;
    font-style: italic;
}

 

Listing 1: NoDataTemplate

 

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

public enum NoDataTemplateReason
{
    NoSearchMadeYet,
    NoResultsFound,
    SystemError
}

/// <summary>
/// Summary description for NoDataTemplate
/// </summary>
public class NoDataTemplate : ITemplate
{
    private NoDataTemplateReason reason = NoDataTemplateReason.NoResultsFound;
    private string message = "No matching records.";

    /// <summary>
    /// New template to display when no data present for grid, defaulting Reason to
    /// NoResultsFound, and Message to 'No matching records.'
    /// </summary>
    public NoDataTemplate()
    {
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// New template to display when no data present for grid, defaulting Reason to
    /// NoResultsFound.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="Message">Display this message in grid.</param>
    public NoDataTemplate(string Message)
    {
        message = Message;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// New template to display when no data present for grid.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="Reason">What is the reason for no data?</param>
    /// <param name="Message">Display this message in grid.</param>
    public NoDataTemplate(NoDataTemplateReason Reason, string Message)
    {
        reason = Reason;
        message = Message;
    }

    #region ITemplate Members

    public void InstantiateIn(Control container)
    {
        string divText;
        switch (reason)
        {
            case NoDataTemplateReason.NoSearchMadeYet: divText = "SearchResultsNoSearch"; break;
            case NoDataTemplateReason.SystemError: divText = "SearchResultsError"; break;
            default: divText = "SearchResultsNoData"; break;
        }

        Label l = new Label();
        l.Text = "<div class='" + divText + "'>" + message + "</div>";
        container.Controls.Add(l);
    }

    #endregion
}

I'm crossing over to the dark side. Behold my first iPhone post - but it's not about the phone, it's about the bill.

Justine Ezarik (aka iJustine) has stirred some attention by posting a video unboxing of her first month's iPhone bill from AT&T. It shipped, as she points out, "in ... a ... box." I'll let others handle the tree-hugging, chest-thumping, save-the-environment bit. Instead, I want to tell you a story.

It all started in 1994. A young, energetic, rock-star programmer (modest, too, as it turns out) had just joined a regional long-distance phone company. His charge? To write the next generation of electronic phone bill reporting software. This phone company, you see, sold mainly to businesses, and some of the phone bills got quite large. Cases of paper, large. The electronic call records were provided to the businesses mainly so they could charge LD back to business units and/or employees. Somebody else, apparently, was assigned the responsibility of handing out little lumps of coal to the poor employees.

So the young programmer built the new system, and it was good. It ran on Windows, and it was faster than all of the competing products (it flat smoked AT&T's product, incidentally), and it let users customize the reports. The totals totalled, and the numbers balanced back to the "real" invoice, and people started to ask questions.

"Here I have in my hand a shiny new CD in its easy-to-mail envelope," they began to say, "and there on the floor, in the large cardboard cases, is the invoice. What's up with that?"

So they marched into the conference room and they deliberated. They talked about legalities and customer service. They talked about cost savings and convenience, and they questioned whether anyone who ever received phone bills in cases ever really took the paper out to read any of it. Whiteboards rattled, papers shuffled, gestures were exchanged, and when the doors opened, there was A PLAN. It went something like this:

Customers would be offered the option to receive their invoice in summary form only (cutting the cases of paper down to a few pages), and their call detail electronically. They would introduce this as an option for their largest customers, and expand as it caught on. The stalwart tree-killers couldn't be completely squashed, for they would still mail a summary, but it was a hollow victory. The writing was on the wall, and the age of electronic phone bills was nearly upon them.

That was 1994, folks.

Where are we today? The default phone bill for AT&T is full-detail, printed on paper. There is an option for an electronic bill. That's fifteen years of progress.

I don't lay all of this on AT&T, or any of the other phone companies, for that matter (I happen to know that Sprint & Verizon aren't distinguishing themselves greatly in this area, either). An awful lot of this problem stems from the fact that technology adoption is just a hell of a lot slower than we'd like to think it is.

We live in the technology fast lane. We're always-on, wireless, and connected, but lots of other people aren't. Walk into a bar in St. Louis and ask the first guy you see if he twitters. When you wake up, you'll know what I mean. We take Web 2.0 for granted, but when we make design decisions that impact users, we need to make sure we're not excluding a big hunk of user base as a result.

Back to the iBill. Who really gets the blame for this? Apple. Ol' Steve & the Apple designers. Back in that old phone company, they understood that the most visible, tangible manifestation of "product" was the phone bill. Dialtone was taken for granted - that's what it means to be a utility. The phone bill, though, was the "user interface" for the phone company.

Steve Jobs rocked the UI on the iPhone. I'm not a fanboy, but there's no denying Apple's knack for reinventing the familiar and making us all ask why it wasn't that way in the first place. Sadly, they stopped with the phone and missed the rest of the user interface.

I'm afraid to imagine what we'll have in another fifteen years.

They both like Yahoo! stock right now. CNNMoney just reported that Susan Decker bought Yahoo! stock (YHOO) to the tune of about $1m. They note that this buy was "just the fourth by any Yahoo insider in more than four years; and, the largest by any Yahoo insider in more than four years."

Scoble? Well, he's not voting with his dollars like Decker, but he's noticed a change there that could be a sign of better times.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if something good happens there. Yahoo's been the subject of a lot of interesting speculation over the last few months. From takeover target to the next great thing in advertising, they're getting a lot of attention. Add to that the fact that they've had their stock beaten down to the point where any good news is going to lift them.

I'm no expert in insider trading law, but I think that if Decker is buying a bunch of stock right now, we can rule out a short-term takeover, so that leaves earning money the old-fashioned way, and that's ok with me. No matter what you think about Yahoo!, they still have a huge audience with an awful lot of page views. It's quite a launching pad for an underdog with a mission.

Here's one I've been meaning to get around to for a while. Marc Andreessen commented on some decisive action from the Governor of Minnesota following last week's tragic bridge collapse:

New York Times home page: The governor of Minnesota and officials from several other states have ordered all bridges to be inspected...

Sadly, this is Standard Operating Procedure whenever there's any sort of calamity on a scale that causes people not to be re-elected. Earlier this year, a whole lot of personal information suddenly went "missing" when a backup tape was stolen out of an intern's car. Yes, you read that right -- an agency of the Great State of Ohio was sending backup tapes home with an intern, and the intern parked his car somewhere with this tape in it, and the tape was stolen. Oops.

So, there's a whole lot of blame to go around on this one, isn't there?

There's the intern, of course. Lots of people have been pretty hard on him, in part because he was actually named pretty early in the unfolding of this debacle. I believe he's now been fired, in fact. Sure, he shouldn't have left this tape in his car.

But seriously, who really expects an intern to be setting and executing policy decisions for identity protection for a state agency? Go read some Dilbert strips with Asok the Intern, and you'll be in a better mindframe to appreciate how ridiculous this is. I've worked with interns before, and I never resorted to making them get me coffee or pick up my dry cleaning, but it wouldn't have been a huge stretch. Interns do what you tell them to do. That's what it means to be an intern.

Meanwhile, the Governor was springing into action, furiously covering his backside and simultaneously searching for someone to hang out to dry. Here's a bit from a press release he tossed out a couple days after this story broke:

The governor has ordered the cessation of this data management practice, a review of the events that led to the data being compromised, and will take appropriate disciplinary action when the facts are known.

The governor has directed by executive order that state information technology managers immediately review, and if necessary change, the procedures for handling back up information to ensure that information is secure at all times.

Whew. That was close. Good thing the Governor stepped up to tell everyone to cease and desist the intern backup rotation. Eerily similar to the Minnesota Governor's release, isn't it?

So am I blaming the Governor for the data theft? No, not really. Ted Strickland just took office in January, and considering the real problems he's got to deal with (like, get an economy), I really would have hoped that he could focus on the big stuff while someone whose business it was to manage data worried about whether backup tapes were sitting in the back seats of cars.

Sadly, the guys in the middle, one or more of whom really *are* responsible in this case, have remained largely anonymous. I've seen a couple articles where various middle administrators have shucked off blame and deflected responsibility, and this is where you find the heart of the problem: a successful career in government (no, not just politics) depends on one's ability to avoid and/or deny any real responsibility for anything, while managing to be involved in everything.

Sound familiar?