I am planning to be at Premier-Pizza at the Rivermark location at 7pm this Saturday to attend the blogger dinner there. Dave, Marc, and Scoble will be there as well. I think the guest of honor is Mimi who is probably the world's youngest multimedia guru.
Are you coming?
Recommended dress code: tacky Hawaiian shirt. Camera around the neck is optional. <g>
Aside from everything else, I would like to thank "Dave" for handing over stewardship of RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman Center and making it available under Creative Commons license. Well, done. I wish W3C and OASIS would do the same so people can create subset specs without getting on their knees.
Regarding the comment about "an emperor with no clothes", I prefer the "empress with no clothes" version of the story.
Tim's The Door Is Ajar post has some right and some wrong, but I have to say the goal is a worthy one. Unfortunately, I don't think his proposal will go anywhere even if everyone does it. Wearing buttons don't stop wars and "Use a Better Browser" button will not make much difference.
What we need to do is build a pipeline into every Windows desktop to deliver new software and updates just like Microsoft currently can. There will be some technical and social infrastructure that needs to be built for security and payment processing, but this proposal can void much of Microsoft's advantages in the desktop software market.
New browser? It's already there and ready to go with a single-click from the user. Need to use a 3D modelling software for a week? One click to turn it on, one click to turn it off, and an aggregated bill will arrive once a month. Crazy? Microsoft already has most of the pieces there to do this for Microsoft products as well as third-party products.
I just read On Identity and Edits by Shelly Powers, author of Practical RDF, which talks about blog editing problems and policies. It's a good post that examplifies how Shelly thinks. The part that shocked me was this:
In an earlier version of the "Thanks for the E-Mails" posting, he wrote that the campaign against him was organized by "an alcoholic, a representative of BigCo and a 16 year old kid".
This excerpt from a response to Shelly's post illustrates how I felt:
"Now, I’ve heard that Dave Winer called Mark an alcoholic and Mark’s recent post about not drinking suddenly clicks into place. Oh Boy! I’m actually quite annoyed by Dave Winer now."
Flash Mob phenomenon is still going strong. There was one planned in SF last Wednesday at a bar near O'Farrell Theater, but I couldn't make it. Anyway, I am wondering what a Flash Mob of shoppers would be like. It seems silly to go to all that trouble without getting a discount. Maybe, stores will start giving out Flash Mob Discount for publicity and profit. This could be a way to help out small local stores too. Stores can host their own Flash Mob event too with Flash Mob Sale RSS feeds. Cool!
Once in a while, I would sit and think about why I keep associating women with food.
My mother fed me when I was young. My wife feeds me now. Women feed men. When my son was a baby, he called his mother 'UmMa' and food 'MamMa'. One connection there.
When I was a young man, whole world of restaurants and exotic food opened up to me. Likewise, there was a whole world of women suddenly. Discovering new food, exotic drinks and women was a weekly event then. My mantra at the time was You are not trying hard enough if you don't get at least two No a week. The mantra helped ease the pain of refusal. The amazing part was where I found the mantra: in a fortune cookie. When I cracked it open and read the paper, I said "Wow!": a hormone-loaded enlightenment.
As I aged, I learned to appreciate good food over new food and good women over new women. Some looked good, but tasted bad. Some look so so, but tasted good. I started to appreciate the cost too. I weaned off expensive food and women who demanded too much of my time.
These days, I eat at home mostly. But occasionally, I feel like eating out. Thankfully, my lazyness keeps those urges in check when they raise their head. It takes a lot of energy to eat out you know.
I understand that being compared to food is degrading to most women. If you feel offended, sorry about that. If you like, you are welcome to compare me to food, pasta preferably. I like pasta.
I am sure this post will upset a lot of people, but I have had this opinion for a while and I felt the time has come for me to let it out. Even if you disagree with my opinion, it will at least improve your complexion.
.NET sucks as a whole currently. ASP.NET is not bad but it is not quite up to Java yet in most aspects. For writing GUI apps, .NET sucks some more. Configuration, upgrade, and administration is still not smooth despite being designed in. Most importantly, the world is not yet ready for .NET, meaning people are not yet disgusted enough with other technologies that they have already sunk money into.
But all the pieces are coming together despite all the animosities, suspicions, and alliances against Microsoft and its habit of shooting itself in the foot. People will get the clue when .NET 2.0 is released and they will be rocked when .NET 3.0 is unleashed. People talk about IE standing still and emergence of rich clients but most of them don't seem to realize that .NET is the future of IE as well as the ultimate foundation for rich clients.
Tim's post about sharecropping is interesting, but .NET is the equivalent of Industrial Revolution. Just think about the dam that is holding us all back, the dam called Client Distribution Problem. Look behind you and see how many amazing technologies and startups ended up as roadkills simply because they couldn't get their software to the desktop.
.NET will solve all that, in time. When it does, everyone will suddenly recognize that IE is the platform and Windows is IE. Distinction between applications and IE will start to blur. Ultimately, IE will be the Universal Document Viewer. But guess who is going to be standing at the bridge to the desktop with its hand out?
Meanwhile, Java will disappear from desktops. Flash will be decimated and casted aside like yesterday's manga when innovators jump in with competing tools and players. Why attack the strong when there are weaker preys? Chaos will rein in the application market and no one will be safe except Microsoft. Bloody it will be, but anything is better than now.
Of course, I am assuming that Microsoft knows what it is doing. If not, never mind.
Update #1: I have just posted a substantial comment to interesting points other commenters made. Please be sure to read through the comments.
Version 2.0 of JCLA (Java Language Conversion Assistant) is here. FYI, JCLA is a VS.NET tool that converts Java source code into C# source code. You'll need Visual Studio .NET 2003 CDs to install it (it doesn't support older version of VS.NET). Here are the list of changes from JCLA 1.0.
Considering that JCLA 1.0 was pretty much useless, I hope this version is at least functional instead of taking forever to spit out doubtful cryptic code. Most importantly, I should be able to trust the code it spits out.
One .NET tool I would like to see is a Language Morpher, a tool that translates .NET code from one language to another and back without mangling or lossing necessary information like names and comments. VB.NET to C# to Python to Perl to J#. Cool.
I don't have much hope for such a tool, however, because of all the legacy baggage each language comes with like language-specific standard libraries. C# is the purest of them all because it has zero legacy baggage.
Macromedia is making babysteps toward a collision course with Adobe. Upcoming Macromedia Contribute 2 has a feature called FlashPaper which captures any printable documents into a Flash animation. Sounds familiar? Yup, it works just like Acrobat does, through a printer driver.
There are some third party tools that convert PDF (Acrobat file format) into SWF (Flash file format), but FlashPaper is a whole new ball game straight up Adobe's alley. Flash is faster at rendering these pages and each FlashPaper comes with the viewer inside it so you can view FlashPaper on most computers.
It does have some seemingly needless limitations:
Don't you think the list of limitations point straight at Acrobat? While they might deny it, I think this is the first shot of a long war. With Microsoft's ongoing efforts in this area, I think we got some excitement coming our way.
[I erased my little pseudo-rap. It sucked.]
I drove down to Palo Alto today and had lunch with three of the co-founders of Voltage Security. Smart guys. They are a well-knitted team with personalities and perspectives that complement each other well. I liked that.
Three Volts: Rishi Kacker, Guido Appenzeller, and Matt Pauker
This is how their key product, SecureMail works:
Alice at Company A would like to send her customer, Bob at Company B, a sensitive email that must be secure for compliance reasons. She uses Voltage SecureMail to send the secure email to Bob.
Alice sends a secure email to Bob
After Alice composes the email, she simply hits the Send Secure button, which automatically secures the email, along with any attachments, using Bob’s email address “bob@b.com”.Voltage SecureMail does not require pre-enrollment of users to receive secure email; even if Bob has never previously communicated with Alice or has never used Voltage SecureMail, he is still able to receive secure email from Alice.
Bob receives the secure email
The first time Bob receives the secure email on his laptop, Bob clicks on a link in the message header and downloads the Voltage SecureMail client. He then proceeds to enroll and authenticate to Company A’s SecurePolicy Suite. The method used to authenticate Bob is completely flexible to the requirements of the enterprise.Bob decrypts and views the email message
Upon completion of proper authentication, the SecurePolicy Suite will present Bob with his private key to read the sensitive email. Alice and Bob can now communicate securely with Voltage SecureMail.With his private key downloaded to his laptop, Bob can decrypt and view his received secure email even when he is offline on an airplane. Bob can even read his secure email at a business center using Voltage SecureMail's transparent roaming capabilities.
As you can see, Voltage neatly sidesteps the need to build expensive PKI infrastructures. Although their biggest weakness is the need to install software on the client, the problem is offset to some degree by the viral aspect of the solution:
Alice infects Bob by sending an encrypted mail that prompts Bob to download and install Voltage client in order to read the encrypted message. With client installed, Bob can send encrypted mail to others as well, infecting them in the process.
They chose a good name for their company because another way to look at it is electricity (security) flowing and spreading across the Internet via e-mail, charging everyone in the process with higher security. Voltage Security sounds a whole lot better than Viral Security, no? <g>
Update #1: I changed "three co-founders" to "three of the co-founders" after reading Scott's post. There are four co-founders of Voltage as you can see here.
Don Park's Weekly Habit 