Global Nerdy

It'll be a busy day for me today, as I'll be flying from the Tucows offices in Toronto to Santa Clara, where I'll be attending, manning the Tucows booth and moderating a panel session at ISPCON Fall 2006 in Santa Clara at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I'll be filing stories as usual throughout the week, both on the goings-on at ISPCON and the 'net in general.

This will probably be my only shot at posting here today, so I thought I'd go wide and cover a number of stories.

Hanging Out with Doc Searls

The opening day keynote at ISPCON will be Internet Service: The Fifth Utility? and will be presented by Elliot Noss (Tucows CEO and my boss' boss) and Doc Searls (Cluetrain Manifesto co-author, Linux Journal editor and adult supervisor of the blogosphere). I'll shoot video of the keynote and I'm hoping to catch Doc for a quick podcast interview as well.

A New Toy!

Tucows has purchased a new toy for me to use: the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 digital recorder. It'll get its first serious shakedown at ISPCON, where I'll use it to conduct on-the-spot podcast interviews and take notes from my trip. While I'm at it, I'll keep notes on my experiences with it and post a review here.

“What the Web 2.0?”

On Wednesday afternoon, I'll be moderating a panel at ISPCON titled What the Web 2.0? in which the panelists and I will talk about the implications of Web 2.0 for ISPs and hosting services. Here's the description of the panel, straight from the conference site:

You can talk all day long about blogs, tags, MySpace and YouTube
without putting a single dollar in your pocket. We're going to spend
this hour together doing the exact opposite. First we'll cover the
“what and why” of the subject through an overview of the direct and
indirect value these big trends represent for ISPs, Hosts and
customers. Then, we'll address the “how” of providers and customers
alike who are leveraging these technologies out in the wild with some
best practices. Finally, the “wow” being the business impact it is
having, it's potential, overall customer behavior/usage habits, effects
on bandwidth, churn, ARPU, adoption and of course how this all
translates into real dollars in your pocket, better customer
relationships and unique value in the marketplace.

And here are the panelists:

• Javier Hall, CCO, Userplane
• Kevin Henrikson, Director of Engineering, Zimbra
• Josh Jones, CJO and Co-Founder, DreamHost
• Ivaylo Lenkov, CTO and Founder, SiteKreator
• Dallas Bethune, Co-Founder / CTO, DreamHost

It's great to have these guys on board; I'm really looking forward to moderating this panel. Once again, I'll record audio (and possibly video) from this session.

Web 2.0 Conference

In San Francisco — 40 miles north of ISPCON and on the same days — venerable publishing company O'Reilly will be hosting the Web 2.0 Conference 2006. Expect O'Reilly and company to take a little razzing for heat for their registration of the phrase “Web 2.0” as a service mark for their conferences; you may remember the controversy that cost them a little community goodwill back in May. The practical upshot of the service mark is that only O'Reilly may use the term “Web 2.0” in the name of a conference.

Seeing as my only scheduled obligation at ISPCON is to moderate a panel on Wednesday afternoon, I might find a way to sneak up north and crash a couple of Web 2.0 conference parties and chat with some of the players and hackers. If I do, you'll read about it here.

Timed to coincide with the Web 2.0 Conference is the O'Reilly report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices. Tim describes it in a posting in the O'Reilly Radar blog:

So it's with a great deal of pleasure (less travel required!) that I'm
announcing a special report that I've been working on for the past few
months with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com fame, entitled Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices. John has taken my What is Web 2.0?
paper and expanded on it, producing a detailed analysis of the Web 2.0
core principles that I outlined there and has specified best practices
that are derived from them, a number of drill-down analyses of sites
(including amazon.com and flickr) to show how they apply those
principles, and perhaps most importantly, a self-analysis tool.

The PDF version of the report sells for US$375. According to the promo material, the report:

• identifies eight core patterns that are keys to understanding and navigating the Web 2.0 era
• details the problems each pattern solves or opportunities it creates
• explains the technological, economic, and demographic market trends driving the development and adoption of Web 2.0
• illustrates best practices through case studies of industry leaders
• provides tools for hands-on self-assessment.

State of the Blogosphere

I'm going to read Dave Sifry's latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report on the flight to San Jose. Here are some quick highlights from the report:

• Technorati is currently tracking over 57 million blogs.
• The blogosphere doubled every 5 – 7 months from Q2 2004 to Q2 2006, and today the blogosphere is doubling in size every 230 days.
• They've been aggressively removing spam blogs, a.k.a. “splogs” from their index — the fraction of the new blogs that get into Technorati index that are splogs has been reduced from about 8% to about 4%.
• The total posting volume of the blogosphere is about 1.3 million posts a day, which is double that of this time last year.
• The top languages of the blogosphere, in order of decreasing popularity: English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish, with Italian, Portuguese, Russian and French sharing a four-way tie for fifth place.

State of the Computer Book Market

Tim O'Reilly has posted the second part of his quarterly “State of the Computer Book Market Report” on O'Reilly Radar (in case you missed it, part one is here). Here are some highlights:

• Web Design and Development has been the most substantial
  bright spot in the market, with 22% year-on-year growth in this
  category. This might well be expected in a period in which Web
  2.0 is the buzzword du-jour. In addition to breaking topics
  like Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Javascript, and ASP.Net, there's been
  nice growth in books on web design and web page creation. Books
  on blogging and podcasting have also finally caught on, after
  several prior false starts.
• Microsoft's server release earlier in the year is still
  driving strong sales of books on C#, Visual Basic, and SQL Server.
  However, other database topics are also up modestly.
• The growth in books on digital photography has slowed
  considerably. If not for the inclusion of the iPod category, the
  Digital Media supercategory would be flat.
• The hardest-hit part of the market was books on consumer
  operating systems, down 17% from the same period a year ago.
• The professional development and administration segment was
  down 2%, but might have been worse but for the strong performance
  of Microsoft languages, Python, Ruby, software project management, and database topics.
• Ruby has continued to grow apace, although its 255% growth rate
  is off last quarter's torrid 687% increase! Interestingly, PHP
  also picked up some steam, up 11% vs. last quarter's 6% YoY
  increase. Python's 27% YoY gain, up from last quarter's 6% gain,
  shows even more strength. In short, while Ruby has become the language
  of
  choice for many web startups, PHP and Python are both far from
  out of the game. With the addition of web frameworks like
  Django and Pylons, Python is becoming a real contender
  as a first rate language for Web 2.0 applications. (Google's commitment
  to the language doesn't hurt either, as Google is a hiring magnet, and
  Python skills are much in demand.)
• The decline of Java book sales has accelerated, while C#
  books have continued their steady increase. When you aggregate
  books on both C# “.Net Languages” (books that cover both C# and
  VB.Net), the C# book market is now about 12% larger than Java. (Of
  course, some of those .Net Languages book purchasers could be buying
  them for their coverage of VB.)
• Javascript book sales are up 152% — actually less than we
  expected given the new release of JavaScript this fall. If you
  aggregate sales of ActionScript books with JavaScript (and
  ActionScript is, after all, a dialect of JavaScript), it is now
  the 2nd largest language (after Java), in terms of book sales. (It's
  third if you aggregate the “.Net languages” category entirely to VB
  rather than to C#. See the note above about Java vs. C#.)
• While sales are still tiny, we see signs that developers are
  taking a second look at languages such as Lisp and
  Scheme. Specialized languages such as MDX (used with SQL Server) and Lua (used for game programming) are also showing growth.

30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed

Last but not least, one more ISPCON presentation: my boss, Ken Schafer, will be making his presentation, 30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed on Thursday. Here's the offical conference description:

Many ISPs and Hosts fail to realize the full potential of their own
websites and spend little time updating, let alone optimizing them to
achieve key business objectives. What's the desired outcome for your
site? Serve as a local community portal, a customer extranet for
support or webmail, a place to showcase solutions, convert new leads to
customers or just tired brochureware for that snazzy $19.95 dial-up?
During this fast-paced “no holds barred” session, Internet best
practice expert Ken Schafer will guide you through 30 ways to make your
site dramatically better and meet key business objectives. Using dozens
of examples, we'll provide eye-opening insights into how these Quick
Wins and Big Ideas can shape your site and provide an unfair advantage
over your competitors. GUARANTEE: If at the end of the session you
don't feel you have at least five techniques that will improve YOUR
site, Ken will personally assess your site and give you five ways to
improve it!

As with the other Tucows-sponsored ISPCON events, I'll be recording this one and I'll tell you where you can find it once it's been posted.

Finally, a blog that brings a Whig-ish sensibility to the 21st century! It looks like The Economist has had a blog going since late last month.

Link

Tags: MSM, blogging, The Economist

Well, since Joey asks, I do have an opinion on this "Microsoft (hearts) Novell" thing. And, he's right, it's more of the eye-glazing, important-for-enterprise-IT nature than really interesting for normal people stuff.

Microsoft's embrace of Novell's SUSE Linux looks like they're extending an olive branch to open source, but may really just be a step towards extinguishing Red Hat and VMware.

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft^® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows^® and Linux.

“They said it couldn’t be done. This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company. Resolving our patent issues enables a combined focus on virtualization and Web services management to create new opportunities for our companies and our customers.”

The agreement begins with patent cross-coverage. Microsoft and Novell each pledge not to assert their patents against each other (or drag their customers into it) until at least 2012.

Technologically, the two companies say they will work together on three fronts. First, they'll collaborate on virtualization offerings. Second, they'll improve customers' ability to manage mixed SUSE and Windows environments by improving their respective system management tools and directory services. Third, they'll work on document format compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.

Now, if this was truly a customer-driven initiative, it would make far more sense for Microsoft to have partnered with the company selling the top Linux distro in the enterprise, Red Hat. The fact that Microsoft's giving a boost to the #2 player (and just days after Oracle took a kick at Red Hat's core maintenance business) clearly begs for a second, cynical look. I think Alfresco's Matt Asay's onto something when he says:

Microsoft clearly does not view Novell as a threat. You don't link up with those that threaten to crush your business, not unless customers are demanding it. Given the relative market shares of Red Hat and Novell, it's a near certainty that if Linux and Windows integration is desirable (and it is, and customers are asking for it), then the most desirable partner for Microsoft (from a customer standpoint) would be Red Hat.

If SUSE gains from these agreements ("It's the Linux that Microsoft loves!"), it will come at the expense of Red Hat.

And while each element of this relationship is designed to, in some way, make life difficult for Red Hat, I think the virtualization aspect is also meant to address another of Microsoft's competitors. After all, as Mary Jo "All About Microsoft" Foley says, "Microsoft didn't need a special alliance with Novell in order to get Windows to run virtually on SUSE Linux or to make SUSE Linux to run on the Longhorn Server Hypervisor."

When you hear "Microsoft" and "virtualization" in the same sentence, it's usually a hint of Microsoft's pitched battle with VMware for the virtualization market. Thus far, Microsoft has had trouble dislodging the industry leader, but they're trying their damndest to change that with upcoming releases of Windows Server Longhorn and Windows Virtual Server. They're planning to optimize ("enlighten") how Windows Server Longhorn performs with their their "Viridian" hypervisor (all part of an ongoing overhaul of Windows Virtual Server), so a Windows guest OS will perform better than another guest OS (say, RHEL) running on Windows Virtual Server. VMware, of course isn't keen on Microsoft being able to tout a proprietary performance advantage for their server consolidation solutions. Does the Microsoft-Novell deal mean that SUSE will selectively be given access to Microsoft's optimizations, so that SUSE Linux outperforms Red Hat when running on a Viridian hypervisor? Not only would that ding Red Hat, it would also create some pain for VMware. (A related, but tangential question would be whether anything in this agreement will lead to a SUSE-controlled virtualization platform will be able to take advantage of Microsoft's Enlightenment API, thus allowing Windows Server Longhorn to run just as well on SUSE as it does when hosted on Windows Virtual Sever? That may mean licensing some very non-GPL code to XenSource, so we'll have to wait and see)

Destpite my getting into a speculative lather, I think this agreement nets out to a few things: Microsoft wants to put the boots to Red Hat, and if they can take on VMware too, so much the better. Novell's probably got intellectual property assets in operating systems (they own UNIX), networking, and office productivity that make them a formidable legal threat to Microsoft, so a patent truce is probably worth everyone's time. The technological points of collaboration as described don't seem so deep as to merit a formally announced relationship, so what gives? All we can do now is wait to see how it shakes out, and speculate in the interim.

Link

Tags: Microsoft, Novell, Windows, Linux, SUSE, virtualization, VMWare, patents

How hot does the triple-core PowerPC chip in the XBox 360 run? Hot enough to boil water, flame sambuca and cook scrambled eggs, if this video is any indication.

I am so buying a Nyko Intercooler this weekend.

Link

I'm having trouble maintaining any level of interest in the strategic partnership/unholy alliance between Microsoft and Novell. Maybe it's just my developer's perspective, but all I see is a partnership between the people who make the operating system that geeks don't like and the people who make the Linux distribution that geeks don't care about.

Maybe George has some insights.

Link

Someone at the office told me about an article in Google Blogoscoped that said that Gmail now offers to let you edit spreadsheets attached to email. I decided to give it a try.

First, I created a dirt-simple spreadsheet. No formulas or calculations, just a table. This is hardly an unusual use of Excel; lots of people use it for creating tables and lists like this:

I then saved the spreadsheet and mailed it to my GMail address. Checking GMail, I saw that it offered an option for the spreadsheet attachment: :

Clicking on that link led to a short wait, which resulted in this page:

I have no idea how complex a spreadsheet Google Spreadsheets will support, but it's a sure bet that full Excel compatibility (or at least a very high degree of compatibility) is Google's goal. The .XLS format is the lingua franca of spreadsheets, and Google is embracing it through support and extending it by taking away some of the pain in the tedious “download/edit/upload” dance that we all do when working collaboratively on a spreadsheet.

I wonder how long it'll be before they do the same thing for Word documents.

Link

As a “regular” of Logan Airport's Terminal C (perhaps a little too regular), I know how to get free wifi there. If you take your laptop to the seats near the Terminal C side of the walkway joining Terminals B and C, you'll be within range of the Continental President's Club's open wifi connection. I discovered this trick while stuck at the airport for hours during the blizzard of January 2005.

If you want to access wifi anywhere else in Logan, the only way to do it was to fork over US$7.95 to use the wifi service run by Massport, the public authority responsible for running airports, seaports and the transportation infrastructure in the state of Massachusetts. Massport has always jealously guarded its wifi monopoly in the airport, forbidding tenants to run their own wifi access points, citing bogus safety reasons. In addition to their long-standing wi-feud with Continental, Massport has also crossed swords with T-Mobile, forcing them to shut down their Terminal B access points and threatened Delta with legal action if they offered wifi in Terminal A.

The two-year battle between Continental and Massport ended yesterday when the FCC issued its ruling in Continental's favor, stating that they have a clear right to offer their own wifi service (one of the standard amenities of the President's Club). Hopefully, this ruling will set a precedent that prevents landlords from forcing their tenants to use a landlord-controlled wifi service.

The general reaction to the decision has been positive, but it can't hold a candle to the over-the-top statement made by FCC commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein:

Today we strike a victory for the WiFi revolution in the cradle of the American Revolution…The WiFi movement embodies the spirit of American freedom, and in our action we say “Don't tread on me.”

One wonders what he'll say if we ever get network neutrality enshrined in law or practice.

Not everyone's cheering, however: David DeJean over at InformationWeek believes that it's a victory for big business. Massport, he argues, is a government agency and as such was providing a public service for a minimal charge. He states that the ruling effectively privatizes a public service and that in the end, it was just the FCC serving its corporate masters at the expense of the public. I think my bullshit detector is about to overload.

Link