Mike Slinn



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Recent Comments

• Sending custom events between components « Price Talk on Debugging Flex Events Generated by Custom Components
• Jono Bacon: Community Leadership Summit 2009 Retrospective | Full-Linux.com on Community Leadership Summit /09
• Community Leadership Summit 2009 Retrospective | jonobacon@home on Community Leadership Summit /09
• wadearnold on Flex, Linux and Winning the RIA War
• mslinn on Converting Java to ActionScript 3

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• Sony and Apple Products Are Not For Me
• Shutting down Zamples.com
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• Community Leadership Summit /09

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Years ago I decided against purchasing products from Sony and Apple.  I believe that these companies do not balance the needs of their customers against their own.  In Sony’s case, it is a relentless drive to planned early obsolescence.  Apple demonstrates an ideological fervor for putting out vertically integrated products that do not serve the interests of their customers and does not play with other vendors.

I value compatibility and open choice over vendor lock-in for the premium flavor of the month.  I also find it interesting when people who work with open source software select a closed, proprietary computing platform.  That strikes me as voting with one’s wallet against one’s self-interest.

Looking past the glitz and cult-like following, one can’t help but notice the tall piles of high-tech trash of obsoleted older models from these vendors.  Ever-more-restrictive DRM means that the media that was purchased for the discarded devices means that consumers are forced to repurchase media which they wish to continue to enjoy.

If one views technology as a fashion show, then one should accept responsibility for a portion of the financial and environmental impact of their purchasing behavior.  Purchasing products has a cost beyond what was paid.  Corporatism would be a lot less powerful in a culture that wasn’t driven so strongly by thoughtless consumers.

I’ve decided that it is long past time that zamples.com was shut off.  The site got steady traffic, but it generated no revenue and demanded a lot of my time.  Now that the server needs to be replaced, it is time to say goodbye.

I first created the predecessor to Zamples in 1994 for The Internet Factory, manufacturers of the first programmable web server.  Eleven years later, it is abundantly clear that no-one really cares about live online code examples, at least not enough to spend money for the privilege of using the facility.

If anyone who reads this found the site useful, I’d love to read your comments.  It’s rather sad to turn the switch off, but I won’t miss spending any more time and money on Zamples.

I’ve been a heavy user of the Motorola Droid phone that I bought the day after it was released. I discovered two killer apps (the Google Voice Navigation app and the Amazon Mobile app) and lots of rough edges. This device is not ready for prime time, but already it has changed my life in important ways.

The Apple iPhone is typical of their philosophy: Apple controls everything to the extent that they do not play well with others. Android-based phones take the opposite philosophy.

iPhones have two layers of vendors; capabilities are added and subtracted by each layer: Apple and the network (AT&T.)  In contrast, Android phones have four layers of vendors. The layers are: Google’s Android O/S, the phone vendor (Motorola, in this case), the network (Verizon) and the applications you want to run, such as Skype.  Android’s extra layers result in a lot of finger pointing.  For example, Verizon’s network does not allow simultaneous voice and Internet transmission; is this why Skype for Droid does not offer SkypeIn or SkypeOut?

My top issues for Motorola Droid:

• Decent end user documentation has yet to be produced.
• 100% voice activation should be possible.  The phone should ‘pay attention’ when addressed, and invoke a function.

Google’s choice of colors seems deliberate in retrospect, doesn’t it?

I attended the first open source CLS this weekend. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager, and the other volunteers did a terrific job of putting this together. I had a chance to get to know and renew acquaintances with some fascinating people from Canonical, Cisco, Collab.net, the Linux Foundation, the Linux Fund, Novell, the Open Voting Consortium, O’Reilly Media, Red Hat, the Software Freedom Law Center, Sun and two of the the ‘old men’ of the open source world, Bruce Perens and Larry Rosen.

“I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I’d probably have never created Groovy.” – James Strachan.

I performed at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club with Cindie Steinmetz Thursday evening. We had been invited to preview a jingle I wrote entitled “I Love Chocolate” for the “Women and Chocolate” event. I played the rest of the evening, while enjoying excellent wine and chocolate.

Summary: Adobe should address developers with a marketing program that is separate from their designer marketing program, and offer products aimed at hard-core developer interests. The goal would be to leverage the influential developer community to drive sales of products that designers and other non-programmers purchase, not to maximize ROI for developers.  At stake is RIA domination and a sustainable and profitable business for Adobe, its partners, and its customers. I submit that the converse – failure to engage effectively with developers and to recognize the strategic value of the developer market as a loss leader – would result in losing the RIA war and making the rest of Adobe’s products vulnerable in a way that they are not at present.

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Someone pointed out that the Weekly Industrial Standard published an article three days ago that links to a blog posting I wrote a few years back.  The article, written by an Industrial Standard columnist, cross-promotes another Industrial Standard columnist, David Pogue: “probably the world’s most widely read and watched tech product reviewer.”  My blog was background information on how geeks view technology, while Mr. Pogue apparently writes for regular folk.

I’ll bask in the glory of third-hand fame, while I give the propellers on my cap a little twirl

I have a client that had a slow Grails application.  Although Grails is slower than Java, a properly designed and deployed Grails application can still perform well and scale. Grails applications are actually Spring applications, and usually run on Tomcat.  This means that normal Spring and Tomcat performance issues will impact Grails applications.  Here are some of the possible reasons for a slow Grails application:

• Running from a command line using grails run-app; this is not recommended for production or performance testing
• Not using a database connection pool, compiled SQL, or an object/relational cache.  GORM would address all of these issues; GORM is built upon Hibernate.
  • Database connections take a long time to create (this is an ‘expensive’ operation).  Each database request requires a new connection, and once finished the connection is thrown away.  A database connection pool would reuse connections between database requests and introducing a connection pool would likely provide the most dramatic speed increase.
  • Each SQL statement is created dynamically, then compiled and executed.  SQL compilation is expensive, although not as expensive as creating a database connection.
  • Object / relational mapping (ORM) is an art unto itself.  The technique used in this Grails application seems primitive and does not support caching.  A lot of CPU horsepower is required to serialize a database record into the equivalent Grails object, and back.  Caching is most useful when most of the database access is for reading, not writing.  I suspect that this is the case for this application.
• Poor database schema (expensive joins are a common reason)
• Not enough database indices (searching for a key value by scanning every record instead of efficiently checking an index)
• Inefficient object model (Java spends more time doing garbage collection than doing work)
• Improper memory allocation (causes swapping and/or garbage collection)
• Poor thread management (lockouts, race conditions, etc.)
• RPC or other timeouts
• … and other, less common reasons

The private equity roundtable vSIG is focused on applying virtual worlds to solve pressing business issues.  The group meets once a month on Sandhill Road in Palo Alto, CA. Members include software entrepreneurs, VCs, academia and researchers.

This will be part two of two. During the last meeting I introduced the topics of modeling relationships and behavior and presented background concepts.  The main points I made were:

• Relationships are far more than just directory entries, they are the foundation of expression and provide context for interpreting behavior
• The ability to recognize another individual is necessary in order to form a relationship with them
• Personality is perceived, not an absolute or fixed quality
• Behavior is defined by responses and is contextually dependent
• Today’s artificial beings suffer from Alzheimer’s
• It is more useful to model an entire community than a single individual
• Personas represent an individual in various contexts

I then briefly introduced EmpathyWorks, a generalized relationship and behavior modeler.

On March 5 I will discuss EmpathyWorks in greater detail and explore potential applications.

This is a red/blue/purple map of the lower 48 states of the USA, with a non-linear color scale and distortion added to indicate the number of voters in a geographic area.

You can read the article where this image can be found here.

Eagle or Phoenix, you decide.

Craigslist.org is a very useful community site, available for many North American cities.  It carries so much traffic, however, that finding what you are interested in can be a challenge. 

Leave CraigsWatch running on a computer and it will check Craigslist for ads that you are interested in, and email you the result. The software is easy to use and reasonably smart. Admittedly, CraigsWatch is rough around the edges, but for $8 one has no right to complain. Below are shots of the two screens. Click on them to view them full size.

Wish there was a web service that did this so I don’t have to keep my computer running 24×7 to run CraigsWatch. If I had time, I’d write one.  Hasn’t anyone done this yet?

I’m now blogging at InsideRIA.com, an O’Reilly site. Check out my first two blogs:

Hello, World!

Vote for AIR support in Ant Tasks!

In his keynote presentation to the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto entitled “The Wisdom of Experience“, Alan Cooper has a great sentence that describes the ‘first to market’ goal behind some products:

“There is no large group of people out there waiting in a breathless delirium to purchase your lousy product sooner rather than later.”

Sure, it is terrific to be first.  But the product still has to be good.

Alan also makes some good points about design, engineering and construction.  He took the long way around, because he doesn’t get into his main topic, interactive design, until slide 75. Requirements are discussed starting at slide 87. In the slide entitled “Requirements are not design”, Alan says:

• Giving people what they say they desire does not result in success.
• Your customers are not the same as your users.
• Neither your customers nor your users know what they want or even what they do.
• What people tell you has little bearing on the truth.
• Good user experience is not dependent on features
• Radically different products can have identical features.
• A list of features is not the same as the design of behavior.
• Expertise in a subject does not correlate to expertise in designing software behavior.

Philosophy starts on slide 92.  I like philosophy, it is one of the foundations of architecture.

I’m interested in low power systems, such as might be found on a sailboat.

Tom’s Hardware reports: ” Under idling conditions, the AMD system consumes 1.7 watts less than the Atom embedded board from Intel. At only 38.8 watts, the Athlon 64 2000+ system breaks a new record for desktop systems in our lab. Under full load conditions, the AMD processor remains a step ahead. With 2.3 watts less energy consumption, the Athlon 64 2000+ system beats Intel’s Atom-based board. At 41.9 watts under full load conditions, AMD also sets a new record in our lab.”

Here are the details of the test systems; the Atom board name is buried in the article (it is an Intel 945G ECS 945GCT-D.) All of this hardware is cutting edge, some of it is not generally available. The only reason Atom lost was because the low power support chipsets for Atom are not yet available.

This story continues on from the previous stories I have recently written about Moblin.

The Intel hardware group’s working philosophy is quite different from the software group’s philosophy, as can be seen from the following Q/A I had today with the Intel hardware group. I expect that the hardware group controls the platform and will cripple or even negate some of the efforts of the Intel software personnel who organize and run Moblin.org. I thought I saw a lot of disconnect between the two groups by the wide range of answers given in response to the hardware-related questions that I raised with Moblin.org personnel at Moblin Community Day earlier this week. The following Q&A confirms the disconnect. Although many individuals at Intel understand open source software and make significant contributions, the hardware group’s policies and operating practices seem better suited for business as usual, with Microsoft, than with open source projects such as Moblin.
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