Dan Appleman: Kibitzing and Commentary

You’d think getting rid of an old computer would be easy.

Now, if it’s not a very old computer - say, a year or three, it’s easy: just restore the computer from its restore partition or backup DVDs, run a program like Eraser to overwrite the unused space with random data to make sure no personal information is left, and give it to a friend or donate it to a local organization.

But what if it’s a really old computer - say 10 years or so? In that case you have a much bigger problem. Disposing of the hardware itself won’t be hard - your local electronics recycler will be glad to take it off your hands. But that’s the easy part.

I know what you’re thinking. What am I doing with a 10 year old computer? Well, as you know, I run a software company. And we still occasionally get support calls on very old legacy software, which means we need to maintain the ability to debug or build some pretty ancient code. So when a new machine comes in, the previous machine remains frozen in time.

Now you may think you don’t have this problem, but let me ask you - how long have you had a computer? It may well be 10 years or longer. If so, you may have some old documents from back then that you’ve been carefully backing up or copying to your new machines each time you upgraded. But can you read them?

Read the rest of this entry »

A few  months ago I wrote a column for Visual Studio Magazine titled “Where have all the developer’s gone” in which I pointed that interest in programming and computer science seems to be dropping - at least in the United States. And in fact, much of the interest in learning programming seems to be in countries like China, Pakistan, etc. I concluded with a somewhat cautionary note that if we want our kids to become the technologists of the future, it’s up to us to do something about it.

This brought forth a great deal of comment, one of the most interesting questioning why anyone would encourage their kids to go into the software business in the first place. Why would you go into an industry where it’s increasingly difficult to keep up, where jobs are increasingly being outsourced, and where there is rarely long term career viability? Doctors can continue treating patients into their 60’s and 70’s, Lawyers continue lawyering, bankers banking and politicians politicking until they drop dead (and sometimes longer in the case of politicians). But past 40 or so, software developers who aren’t fortunate enough to have solid management gig are likely as not to find themselves unemployed or in some other career.

I’ve been particularly fortunate in this regard. Through a combination of being self-employed, honestly passionate about technology, and a bit of talent, I’ve had the opportunity to continue coding. What’s more, I’ve had the freedom to diversify into all sorts of new technologies beyond my core expertise. But keeping up is an effort. I often compare the life of a software developer to that of Alice in “Through the Looking Glass” - where Alice is told by the Red Queen that she has to run as fast as she can just to stay in place, and to make progress she has to run even faster

Why would anyone wish this on their kids?

It seems that our interests as a nation are radically different from our interests as individuals. There is no doubt that we need a lot of skilled engineers and programmers going forward. Not only do we need to maintain our existing technological base, there’s going to be increasing demand for power engineers and some incredibly sophisticated software to handle the future smart grid (or EnergyNet” as Juval Lowy calls it). Where are those developers going to come from?

I suppose we can continue to import them. But will the United States continue to be a desirable place for migrant technologists? To some degree it is likely, but as their local economies develop, they may find better opportunities at home. And many engineers consider foreign workers to be part of the problem - competition that makes it even less desirable to enter the business. But let’s assume for the moment that for the foreseeable future foreign nationals will continue to provide needed support our technological society, and that it is in our national interest for them to do so - thus making home-grown talent less essential.

What do you encourage your kids to study if not technology?

Read the rest of this entry »

About two years ago I wrote an entry titled “This Old Machine” in which I described my search for a travel laptop - something to use on casual trips when I didn’t need to lug around the full sized laptop I used for conferences. I had some specific requirements - it had to be small and light, and low stress - meaning that if it did get lost, broken or stolen, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. And while the goal was to use it primarily for Email, web access, and storage/editing of vacation photos, it had to have enough horsepower to handle serious applications in a pinch: Visual Studio, SQL Server Express, etc - the kinds of applications that a professional developer might need to use.

At the time, I ended up upgrading an old Thinkpad 240 - a machine that today would be called a Netbook, but that anticipated that class of machines by almost a decade. And it served tolerably well. It was slow enough to be annoying, and the battery life was worthless, but it was good enough.

This summer I wanted something better, and with all the talk about NetBooks I decided it was time to take a look and see if any of the new machines would serve my needs. After reviewing specifications and reviews, I ended up snagging an Asus Eee 1000HE PC.

Honestly, I did not have high hopes - laptops are almost by definition studies in compromise. But I ended up being blown away. This is a nice machine. You can read the full review in my gadget column. Suffice to say that with a 2GB memory upgrade, it has plenty of power for casual development work, is easily small enough to fit into a book bag or backpack, and at a hair over 3 pounds with over 7 hours of battery life is truly portable.

Oh yes, and I will never buy another laptop without a multi-touch touchpad.

Read my full review

Yesterday I needed to do a simple Excel add-in.

No problem, right?

Being an experienced .NET developer, I figured this would be a good time to try the Visual Studio Office system - to create the add-in using VB .NET. I mean, how hard could it be?

Not hard at all as it turned out. The project template for the add-in worked well, and it took no time at all to find some simple examples online to build on. I had enough familiarity with the Excel object model to make short work of the task at hand, and the integration that allowed debugging of add-ins in Visual Studio worked brilliantly.

Then it came time to test deployment - as I needed to provide this add-in to a couple of clients.

What a fiasco.

The setup project that was created didn’t work. The instructions on MSDN and other sites for diagnosing problems were complex and unreliable. I found additional articles with suggestions for creating custom installation actions to handle the security issues that might have been the problem. There were clearly differences between versions of the Visual Studio office runtimes depending on framework version and versions of Excel to support, with no clear explanation of which to use and how to create a deployment that will work with both.

I spent as much time trying to figure out the deployment as I did creating the add-in when I decided I was wasting my time. The Visual Studio office support may be nice, but the deployment solution and documentation is abysmal. Microsoft should be ashamed to have released it. It is perhaps the most disappointing experience I’ve had with any Microsoft developer technology.

I ended up porting the code to VBA in an Excel workbook and creating a .xla Excel add-in. Though I missed the intellisence of Visual Studio, the building and debugging experience was fine. And deployment was trivial - save the workbook as an add-in. Deployment consisted of browsing to the add-in file and enabling it - and the add-in worked perfectly on Excel 2003 and 2007 the first time I tried it.

I’d come to think of .NET as current technology rather than the wave of the future. It’s clear to me that at least when it comes to Office, .NET is still future technology - costly, complex and unreliable. If I need to do any more Office add-ins, you can bet I’ll stick with VBA.

The Author’s Guild has objected to the text-to-speech features of the new Kindle, suggesting that it somehow jeopardizes the rights of authors (See: will lawyers kill the Kindle). They are wrong on many counts.

First, it is not a copyright violation.

If you read a book out loud, is that different from reading it silently? If someone reads a book to you, does that mean you both have to buy a copy of the book? What if you hire someone to read to you? Of course not. So why would an automated reading device be any different? It is not.

Now a true audio book is different from a printed book. Why? Because it is a derivative work - a performance of a book. It is a new work that is derived from the original.

Some might argue that speech-to-text is also a performance of a work and subject to a new copyright - and it would be, if you tried to sell and market such a work. A similar situation exists with translations. If you wish to translate a book and sell the translation, you have to get permission from the copyright holder. But if a friend comes over to read a book in a foreign language and translates it for you as they read, that is perfectly fine. Text-to-speech is that high-tech friend.

But the copyright argument is not the biggest reason that the Author’s Guild is wrong about the Kindle. The real problem is that they are acting against the best interests of authors.

Here’s why.

Let’s consider audio books on CD in two categories. In general fiction Amazon.com shows 13867 results. In SF and fantasy, 1891 results.

Why would someone buy an audio book? Possibilities include:

• Unable to read (visually impaired)
• Too lazy to read
• Wants to utilize commute time (while driving, on public transit).
• Enjoys the performance.

Let’s assume that the first three of these represent 75% of the market, and that it can be replaced by text-to-speech. Let’s also assume that few people would buy both the print and audio book. Since audio books cost more than print books, text-to-speech technology should result in some drop of income to these authors as people choose to buy the print book instead of the audio book. If audio books represent 10% of a book’s total sales, and if we assume the audio book pays an author twice what a print book does, the author will lose 50% of 75% of 10% of their income - a drop in 3.75% of their income.

Of course, this would have a much greater impact on audio book publishers - but then why isn’t the audio book publisher’s guild complaining? Surely the Author’s Guild wouldn’t make such a fuss over a 3.75% drop of author’s income.

Especially when you consider the following:

Amazon lists 403,000 results just in general fiction, almost 90,000 books in SF and Fantasy. Or put another way, maybe 3% of printed books have audio books available. If there’s one thing we know about the market - when prices drop, people tend to buy more. Text-to-speech effectively reduces the cost of audio books which means people will buy more - and now they’ll be able to choose from any title, not just those with audio books available. Ultimately this will benefit far more authors as book sales increase overall.

While the numbers I use are largely hypothetical, the principle is clear - text-to-speech is good for authors. It makes their existing books more accessible and opens them to markets (commuters, visually impaired) that were otherwise closed to them. Authors win. The consumer wins. A few authors might lose a small amount. And audio book publishers potentially lose - they will have to market their good purely based on the quality of their performers, not just on the fact that it is an audio book.

The Author’s Guild should live up to its name and acknowledge the fact that the Kindle’s new text-to-speech feature is neither a copyright violation, nor is it counter to the interests of authors.

New article published on Visual Studio Magazine.

As an active software developer, I know that technology advances rapidly. My nose is rubbed in that fact every day as I work to keep up, catch-up, and occasionally learn something new. It therefore leaves me somewhat bemused when I am surprised by huge changes in technology in areas that I don’t focus on daily. Intellectually I know they must be changing, but I’m too busy to pay attention to them, and when I do - I discover all sorts of surprises.

For many, many years tax preparation time was a routine - buy the latest edition of TurboTax, do my taxes and send them in. The only big change was switching to e-file from paper returns some years ago.

But this year that was shaken up. I was about to buy TurboTax when saw that for some reason this year’s version was getting one star rankings on Amazon.com. What could have happened? I wrote about this in my gadget column in “TurboTax takes a wrong turn- will TaxCut become the #1 tax software“.

Because that price increase (since reversed) would have doubled my costs, I started looking for other options for the first time in many years. One of the things I found was that there were numerous online options for doing taxes. What seems to have happened is that the IRS was planning its own free online filing system (it’s far less expensive and far more accurate for them to process an electronic return than a paper one). Tax preparation software companies got together to oppose this and created the “Free File Alliance” to try to protect their revenue. The way they do this is by using their free filing options to upsell other features -and to charge for filing state returns. Though officially this free filing is limited to incomes of $56,000, in fact many of the vendors don’t abide by this - neither TurboTax, TaxCut or TaxAct mention any income restrictions.

So, to my surprise, instead of reviewing the tax preparation software packages, I found myself first reviewing the free online services (See Free tax return software reviewed: TurboTax vs. TaxCut vs. TaxAct).

What really floored me was TaxAct. Their free edition could even handle my return (which is moderately complex). And the upgraded version is only $9.95. Now, I wouldn’t actually use it for my return - I find standalone software has other features that are important to me (something I’ll discuss when I review the software packages) - but it demonstrates that there has been some real progress in the area of tax return software that I had been completely oblivious to.

Makes me wonder what else I haven’t noticed recently….

This one was just for fun to end the year.

See Top five fictional gadgets of 2008

My latest article, title “Show Me The Money” about what it means to be a software developer in recessionary times, has been posted on VisualStudioMagazine.com.

With a loss of 538,000 jobs in November announced today, I really, really wish I hadn’t been quite so prescient when I submitted this a month or two ago….

This week, Wired posted two articles on device convergence: Five Gadgets That Were Killed by the Cellphone and Seven (More) Gadgets Killed by the Cellphone. I responded in my Examiner.com column first with Five Gadgets that were supposedly killed by the cellphone, but aren’t dead yet and today with Five gadgets that won’t get killed by the cellphone.

It wasn’t really until my second response that I really tuned in to the real philosophical difference between my approach and that of Wired. I get a sense, reading the Wired columns, that there is a fundamental approach that convergence is good and inevitable, and that ultimately cell phones will become good enough and powerful enough to effectively obsolete everything else.

Now, I’m enough of an Science Fiction fan to concede that someday this may be true - it’s quite possible that in a century or so we’ll all have cell phones embedded in our skulls providing full 3D sensory communication and gaming experiences, while shooting photos through our optically enhanced eyes and quietly irradiating our brains.

But barring breakthrough of that magnitude, it seems to me that the Wired columns, like those of many authors, are far too focused on the technology and not nearly enough on the people who use it, and how they relate to it. For example: it’s easy to look at teens and young adults and how they have adopted and use certain technology and assume that is the future for everyone. But you can’t really extrapolate that way until you’ve seen what happens once they get older. The constant text messages and Facebook posts of the young 20-something professional might be replaced by something else once she’s a harried mother trying to maintain a career.

I invite you to visit my column at Examiner.com, where I’ll always try to remember that the people are more important than the gadgets. And I’ll continue to post here on my blog additional commentary that doesn’t quite fit in the column itself.

• Five Gadgets that were supposedly killed by the cellphone, but aren’t dead yet
• Five gadgets that won’t get killed by the cellphone