Month: March 2008

I did not list these companies in the order of importance, but each of them is a part of my daily routines, and it “s going to stay this way for a while.

Microsoft

During the last 20 years, when I turn on my computer it displays the familiar logo of Windows OS. Isn “t it something? Can you name any other software which became a fabric of life of so many people around the world and has such longevity? I can “t. Microsoft is also the most popular object for bashing. Programmers of all nations love to hate Microsoft. They “d give you some technical reasons trying to explain why Windows sucks while Linux or Unix or Mac rules.

While I can often understand technical reasons for not liking a specific feature of Windows, I do not accept the amount of anger in most of the blogs or articles writing about them. IMO, there are two main reasons for such anger:

a) In the nineties, MS was attracting the best programmers in the world, and it would give a warm feeling to an average Joe when he could point at bugs or design issues in Windows;

b)Bill Gates is a filthy rich person and Joe is not.

The freedom of blogs allows everyone to proclaim something like, “Bill Gates sucks rdquo;. For some people it became a daily habit like brushing teeth.

I “m not a Microsoft developer. I know that Microsoft is not a kosher company when it comes to running business (who is?). But I always remember that Microsoft is a part of my life one way or the other, and I give them a credit for this.

Sun Microsystems

Back in 1998, I was programming in PowerBuilder and was looking to make a move to another field. It was a kind of a jumping the sinking ship situation. This ship was not exactly sinking at that time, but I was an independent contractor and was looking for a way to maximize my hourly rate. PowerBuilder as all other programming tools or languages are just the tools, and I try not to get emotionally attached to them. If it does the job, fine. If there is a better tool for the job ndash; just use it. Do not fall in love with a programming language. You can “t love a screwdriver, can you? Do not love something that can “t love you back.

Anyway, I switched to Java and do not regret it. Today Java is a backbone of most of the enterprise IT shops, which makes me feel home in so many working places. For many years Java put bread and butter on my family “s table, and this is something that can “t and won “t be forgotten. And my family is just one of the millions and millions of homes that make a better living than in a pre-Java times. Let alone families ndash; countries. Java brought such a huge country as India to a different level of their history. For thousands of people in India Java gave a chance to break out from poverty, to break the written in stone caste laws that stated that if you were born to a family of a street vendor, you did not have a chance to move to a higher society.

I remember Raj Kapoor movies from my childhood hellip; Most of these movies had pretty much the same plot ndash; a poor guy working in the factory falls in love with a beautiful girl (with a sexy belly) from a rich family. Her parents would never allow a marriage with this low caste guy. The entire movie theater was in tears. If only Raj knew Java! He “d go to America, made some serious dough and would have come back to his loved one in white Toyota Camry (remember the ending of Pretty Woman with Richard Gere?)

Seriously, Java affected my life in a very positive way. These days it lost its glamour, people are complaining that it “s not sexy anymore, it “s obese and has cellulite. Maybe. But I still like it and respect Sun for giving us such a solid product.

Google

Its search engine is sooooo fast that it changes the way I do things. I never counted, but I go to google.com at least fifty times a day. Google makes everything a click away. Need to find help for the API you are currently using? Google will respond faster that the IDE of this API that is installed on your local hard disk. Want to purchase a dog that has long years, one leg longer than other and blue eyes? Google will connect you with the right breeder in another part of the world in split of a second. Need to send a $1000-an-hour prostitute to your hotel room in Washington? Go to google.com. I like gourmet food, and a couple of Zagat guides that rate restaurants are sitting on my book shelf. But, why standing up and making a step toward the book case to pick this Zagat if I can go to Google and get up to date info about dining places?

BTW, was there life before Google maps? How people would find places without it?

How about this simple and smart advertising business model that was overlooked by Microsoft that was positive that the only way to make money was selling licenses?

Last year I got a call from Google “s recruiter asking if I wanted to apply for a job there. I did not apply for a simple reason ndash; did not feel like going through their humiliating interviewing routine what a 25-year old kids would ask me question like, “How would you count all lakes in the USA? rdquo;. I “m embarrassed to admit, but I have no idea how to count these freaking lakes. Just do not want to fail the interview. But Google is da man, and I really like the fact that it “s a part of my life.

Adobe

Three years ago I knew that Adobe is a little company that created a PDF Reader and a couple of tools for photo hobbyists and illustrators.

Two and a half years ago they “ve purchased yet another small company that had a couple of little known overpriced tools for Web developers and a player for Internet banners and skip-intro pages. After the merger, a new version and new pricing policy for their tool Flex was announced, and it was clear to me that this is the best Web API for server side Java applications.

Two years ago I was writing a book about use of Flex; my two co-authors and I have founded a company to help enterprises develop rich Internet applications that include Flex. This is a good example of technology driving business. Today, more and more companies realize that Flex is the best choice for RIA, but we had a good nose and were one of the first adopters of this technology, which opens up a market for us that will only get bigger and bigger. Flex allowed to add a little of black caviar to Java “s bread and butter. Do you want to share this dinner with me?

Farata Systems

This company is influencing my life for a simple reason – I am one of the founders of this small software development and consulting boutique. In my rather long programming career several times I either had an idea of developing some product, or I was approached by other programmers, “Hey, I “ve got this idea – let “s develop such-and-such program together. It “ll sell like hot cakes rdquo;. I was always rejecting these offers understanding that the main word in a life cycle of any product is “sell rdquo;. You can have the greatest idea in the world, you can even implement it, but selling the software is an art that must be backed by some substantial and often expensive PR and marketing. But two years ago I broke the rule, and we “ve created this company. We have our own software, we consult, we write, we hire and manage people, we speak at the conferences promoting our services and software products. We are building a brand, which is a time consuming but interesting job.

There is a lot of good software companies out there, and each person has his favorites. I listed mine and wish all of them success and prosperity.

Fast spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a grid there, gray background. There users were happy cause they did not see any better. The application delivers the data ndash; what else to wish for? Enterprise business users are not spoiled and works with whatever is available ndash; they need to take care of their business. It is what it is. Is it really? Not anymore. I “ve seen excellent (from the UI perspective) functional specs for financial applications made by professional designers. Business users slowly but surely become first-class citizens! The trend is clear: developer “s art does not cut it anymore. You need to hire a professional Web designer for your next Web application.

The vendors of the tools for RIA development recognize this trend and are trying to bring designers and developers closer to each other. But the main RIA tools vendors, Adobe and Microsoft, face different issues.

Adobe is a well known name among creative people (Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash) and now they are trying to convince developers that they have something for them in the store (Flex, AIR).

Adobe is trying to win developers hearts, but does not want to scare designers either. In addition to various designer-only tools, they are developing a tool called Thermo that will allow designers create Web application without knowing how to program.

Microsoft comes quite from the opposite side ndash; they have legions of faithful .Net developers, and now are creating tools as a part of the Silverlight offering trying to convince designers to create UI for RIA in Expression Design and Expression Blend IDEs that produce code for .Net developers.

Recently, I “ve attended an interesting event for educators. Adobe has invited professors from different schools discussing what has to change in the curriculum of Visual Design and Software Engineering disciplines so designers can understand programming better and software developers would be a better at designing user experience. In my opinion, it “s a complex and not necessarily achievable goal.

Do we need to breed new creatures called d-e-s-i-g-n-o-p-e-r and d-e-v-i-g-n-e-r?

I do not think so. Developers are from Mars, designers are from Venus. I know this first hand. My son has graduated from School of Visual Arts majoring in classic animation. I am a software developer. We are people from different planets even though he is my son. Several times I “ve approached him offering to teach him Flex programming so he could have double his income. He rejects saying that it “s boring to sit in front of the computer all day writing code. He does not find boring spending hours drawing or animating, go figure.

No one will be able to make me a good artist either.

If I “d be staffing a RIA project I “d rather hire two different talents ndash; a creative person and a Web developer hellip;budget permitting. But if the money is tight, I lsquo;ll have to bring on board either designoper or devigner.

Yakov Fain, developer

In the USA, your profession often suggests what car to drive. Lawyers, doctors and real estate agents drive luxury cars to make a statement that they are successful. But if you are a software programmer, in general it ‘s not a good idea to drive a luxury car to work. Other people driving Toyota Corolla ‘s won ‘t say anything, but they won ‘t like it. Ten years ago I was working for a small company, and the owner, supposedly educated person, simply said, “All Lexus owners are assholes “. As simple as that.

Last year I was working with a very good programmer who was driving Mercedes S600 to work, which I think was wrong (he bought it used though). A guy driving S600 and coding in a cubicle looks as strange to me as these women in New York subways with Louis Vuitton bags purchased for $20 in China Town. Things have to match.

But currently I work for a client, where half of the parking lot consists of Mercedes cars driven by regular people like you and me. While Google offers their employees car wash on premises, these people enjoy discounted car prices, inexpensive short term leases, test drives of luxury cars for a couple of days. They work for a company called Mercedes Benz USA.

In the hall of the company you can often find the cars that you won ‘t see on the streets. For example, here ‘s me pretending to be a race car driver next to a sport model of MB McLaren. This upgraded model cost about $1M and has a reinforced 670 horse power engine and bald wheels. No cup holders of fancy leather inside.

While the original consumer ‘s model shown below has only 617 horses.

There is this popular Web site where former classmates register to find people they did not see for 20-30 years. They upload their photos. Often people pose next to a nice car or in a luxury Carribean hotel to show that they are doing good. There was a funny post on that Web site asking people to stop taking pictures by expensive cars cause it makes it harder to figure out the real financial status of the person. For simplicity, the poster suggested to post photos next to your yearly income tax return statement.

Since I can ‘t upload my photo with McLaren there, this blog is the only place where it belongs.

Today is the first day of the AJAXWorld conference that takes place in New York City at the Roosevelt hotel. I was delivering a talk comparing various technologies for creation of rich Internet applications. The room was packed. People were sitting on the floor. This is an yet another evidence of the growing interest to RIA among enterprise management and developers.

On this photo I ‘m with the creator of Sys-Con Media, a publisher of lots of technology magazines and books, Fuat Kircaali.

This was the first time I ‘ve included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it ‘s mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit for RIA that require solid processing power on the client. I need to spend more time studying this language to form an opinion about this language Curl.

Today, besides AJAXWorld, Roosevelt hotel hosted sort of a job fair for the Bear Stern employees who all of a sudden lost their jobs. I ‘m sure you know that this Wall Street giant was purchased by JP Morgan for a price of a good football player. A friend of mine has overheard a conversation between two of the Bear ‘s people. You might find it interesting.

“Man, I lost a lot of money last week, but I ‘m still OK ”

“Me too, but John ‘s broke. He ‘s lost everything and now he ‘s down to his last ten millions “.

Isn ‘t it cute?

Here ‘s a little web page that I created last year and use daily – in the car, in the office or at home. These are the Internet radio stations that I listen to.

Hope you like it. I ‘d appreciate if you could share with me what are your favorites.

Last Wednesday I started teaching a class for yet another Wall Street client. Nicely equipped high-tech training room, excellent view, but for some reason they did not put a chair for the instructor. No biggie. In the evening my left big toe started to hurt after standing for 8 hours. I did not pay attention , but on the second day I grabbed a chair for myself and had a chance to sit once in a while, but it was a little too late.

My left toe started to hurt really bad and became swollen. I could not sleep at night, and could not wear shoes in the morning. The third day I showed up in the classroom in sleepers. After lunch (Friday), I realized that if I won ‘t see a podiatrist, I ‘ll have to spend a large portion of Saturday in emergency room in the hospital, which sucks in general plus it ‘ll make me several hundred bucks poorer particular (yes, I have medical insurance).

This was a hands-on training, and when students started to work on assignment, I went outside and called to about 15 podiatrist offices asking for an appointment. “Sorry, we do not have anything available for today. I love Jewish doctors, but finding on Friday afternoon is not realistic. I started to look for Chinese name (Wall street is in just a couple of miles from China town). Yes, this was a right decision, and I got an appointment!

This class was over, and by that time literally was not able to walk. I needed a cab. All yellow cabs were passing by with passengers. A Lincoln Towncar pulled over, and a Chinese driver asked me where do I need to go. China Town, where else. Get inside.

I love riding in large American cars. They are quiet and comfy like large ships. Unfortunately, they are not reliable, so I drive either Japanese or German cars. Many years ago my wife was driving an old Caddy. I read that an average age of a Cadillac driver is 60. When I suggested to my wife to by a new one, she said that it ‘s only 60 because she (a young woman) was driving one, otherwise it would be 80. But this is a whole another story.

Chinese driver asked me an address of the place I need to go, I gave the address, and the driver entered it in the navigation system. Boy oh boy, if every taxi driver in New York would have a navigation system, I would not hear all these horror and funny stories about cabbies that not only do not speak English, the do not know the city either. But this is yet another story…No, let me tell you just one now.

My friend Gregory immigrated to New York from Russia thirty years ago. He did not speak English at all. His wife did. A little. Gregory decided to find a job driving a cab, and he had to pass verbal exam to get an appropriate license. His wife Natali helped him to memorize all questions and answers without understanding a single word. Before going to the exam, Natali said, “Grisha, if you do not understand the question, just say, lsquo;Next question, please ” rdquo;. Greg went into the room for an exam, and his wife was waiting in the corridor. In about 10 minutes, a red-faced inspector rushed out of the room right to Natali, “Are you Greg “s wife? I keep asking him, What “s your address, and he keeps saying, Next question, please! rdquo;

OK, when I said to me Chinese driver that I was going to see a Chinese doctor, he was surprised hellip;I “ve entered a building that looked anything but a place where a doctor “s office can be. A multi-story building with lots of tiny rooms with all kinds of businesses. Here “s the really small room 507. No visitors. Two Chinese women started to look at my insurance card. Soon I realized that one of them was a doctor, because she said in a very poor English, “Come with me, please rdquo;. She took me to another tiny room in the back, flushed the toilet for some reason and put me on the chair. When she saw my swollen foot, she said something similar to “Inflammation rdquo; and asked if I dropped anything on it. No, I did not. The she tried to explain why such inflammation could have happen. I did not understand, and asked her to repeat. She did. I gave up. My foot was swollen and hurt badly. She said,

“I “ll prescribe you the pills rdquo;.

“Can you please do something now, I can “t walk and need to go home ndash; I live in New Jersey rdquo;.

“I can give you a shot, but usually people are afraid of pain hellip; rdquo;

“I am in pain anyway, please do it rdquo;

“OK, I need to take an X-Ray first to make sure there is no fracture there rdquo;

The door to her closet was opened ndash; a bucket with a mop, Windex, and other junk was stored there. She went inside and rolled out a tall and old looking device. I guessed that this was an X-Ray machine. Its plate with a model number read 1987. The good news ndash; I did not have a fracture, she took a disposable needle, and hellip;I saw black sky with lots and lots of blue little stars.

This woman kept saying, “Quick relief, quick relief hellip; rdquo;

She let me go, and gave a prescription for the pills too. Another cab to the bus station, picked up the pills in the local pharmacy, and took one before going to bed.

It “s Saturday morning. My toe is still a little swollen, but it does not hurt and I can walk! Now I love Chinese doctors and feel obligated to write about it, hence this blog. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Update. Four days later. The inflammation is gone, but the foot still hurt. Need to go to a podiatrist…This time I ‘m not going to China Town.

I was not planning to write about it, but ran into a related blog this morning and decided to add my two cents.

Speaking and teaching engagements are often being evaluated by the audience, and the speaker/instructor eventually receives the results of this eval. Usually it ‘s a simple procedure – whoever wants fills an eval sheet and returns it. In some cases filling eval forms is really a big deal. For example, close to the end of my courses that I teach at NYU, someone from administration comes to the classroom with a sealed envelop. I ‘m expected to select a student that will handle the eval process, then I should leave the classroom for 10 min or so, the students write what they think of me, seal the envelop and the designated person drops it into a special box with a narrow slot at the top.

Over the years, after teaching hundreds of students, I got accustomed to the fact that no matter how good you are there will be always someone who will badmouth you. If the majority of evals are good, I just ignore these splashes of anger. Constructive suggestionsare always well taken.

But I never curse while speaking or teaching. IMO, this is just very unprofessional.

Here ‘s the blog of Doug McCune who honestly describes the results of his evals after presenting at a recent conference in Atlanta, GA. I have not been at this presentation, but I ‘m sure it was well done, but as Doug admits, he often uses the words fuck and shit in his casual conversations, and did the same during his presentation.

Some people in the audience got offended, and I agree with them. There is a big difference between giving a fuck in a private conversation with a peer who can return you the fuck back, and a situation when a person(s) can not respond the same way. In this case, Doug had an advantage because he was the guy at the podium, and the audience (respecting the presenter) never fucks back. The other case that I really do not like is when a corporate manager casually fucks during business meetings. His subordinates understand that if the boss fucks in public, it does not mean that they are allowed to do the same. Which is a similarly unfair situation.

The highest fucker in the IT industry is Bill Gates. Joel Spolsky in one of his blogs has written that they were judging Bill ‘s opinion about a project status by the number of times he said fuck. The less, the better.

It ‘s great that Doug has written openly about his experience, and next time I ‘ll be attending a conference where he speaks, I ‘ll sit in the audience counting fucks 🙂

But my message to you is this:

Cursing in public in not cool. Try to find other ways to impress people, especially those who paid money for the privilege of listening to you.

I am not a saint myself, and curse once in a while too. If I ran into a really bad situation while driving, I say fuck to myself and it seems to help. Here ‘s another example where saying Fuck is the only way to deal with the situation: you are carrying a grand piano to the seventh floor of a building without an elevator, and after passing the sixth floor you drop it right on your foot. I ‘m sure that there are a couple of other use cases when the word fuck helps…

I do not know how to properly end this blog, let ‘s just say

The End

If you are evaluating which technology to use for your next rich Internet financial application, do not miss a one day event Flex on Wall Street that will take place in New York City on April 18, 2008. This is your chance to meet with real-world practitioners who have been using Adobe Flex for developing financial systems and can address your concerns and help you in making a Deal/No Deal decision.

I ‘ll be presenting there too and will be glad to talk with you personally about your RIA plans.

Purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems for $1B for a company that makes $80M a year? This raised lots of questions. Let ‘s use smaller numbers cause it ‘s not easy to think billions. Say you want to purchase a pizza store that makes $80K a year.

Would you pay 12.5 yearly incomes for this pizza store? I would not. But Sun did and explained this purchase . But are there other reasons?

MySQL Server is an excellent DBMS. MySQL is a lot better than SQLLite.

Maybe Sun purchased it to make sure that their competitors won ‘t be able to buy it? The fight for the rich desktop client is just heating up. Both Google Gears and Adobe AIR use SQLLite database on the client. What if they ‘d purchased MySQL before Sun did? It ‘d make competitors stronger. Now it won ‘t. Google ‘s Gear is not dangerous, but AIR is a direct competitor to Java on the client. If this is the actual reason behind this purchase, Sun Microsystems did a very smart move. Eventually, when JavaFX will start competing on the client, having such a great client DB as MySQL will become quite handy.

Does this thought sounds stupid to you? If yes, I got another one. Information Week sites Jonathan Schwartz saying “I think what you ‘ll see from Sun is that we ‘re just going to take the ‘J ‘ off the ‘JVM ‘ and just make it a ‘VM ‘ “. That ‘s perfectly fine – JVM shines and it makes sense to use it as a runtime for multiple languages, not just Java.

My other stupid question is “What ‘s going to be the next ticker of Sun Microsystems? ”

SUNW turned into JAVA last year. What ‘s the next one?