you want to start something?

I’m really tired tonight. I helped my sister move house and even though we had the help of two neighbours and three work colleagues, I’m absolutely shattered. So tired I can’t even face looking at the ever mounting paperwork which I need to get through. It didn’t help that we were given 3 hours to empty a house…

The new house seems smaller, now that everything is still in boxes. The telephone is STILL not connected and it’s 23:20 and BT promised they’d get it connected today. If it’s not connected by midnight, someone is getting a phone call in the morning. This lack of connection holds up the installation of broadband at the house (though I’m 99% sure that I never want to do any more business with BT ever again due to poor customer service and may just get a Wireless Broadband link from NTRBroadband, assuming that Lisburn is within their coverage). I am, frankly, sick to the teeth of BT and yes, I know it’s the people. They just lie and lie and lie. You’d think they still maintained a monopoly and didn’t give a damn about their customers. Duh!

On Tuesday, one of my employees at Mac-Sys, Wayne, leaves for pastures greener in Minnesota where he’s joining his lady love. She’s American you know. While I may question the sanity of anyone moving to the USA these days, I can understand that it’s a great opportunity for him and I really hope it works out. I have no wish to visit Minnesota but it’s nice knowing people all around the world.

Anyway, this is the last blog post for 1H06. See you on the other side (and Sunday is my birthday so I doubt I’ll blog )

Technorati Tags: blogging, broadband, wireless

Tags: Commentary by mj
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I was mailed the other day by a Google recruiter, asking if I was interested in working there. My first reaction was to say no (and that’s been my final reaction too) but I took a bit of time to examine why. This actually started out as a comment on MJs recent post and has turned into a bit of ramble.

I’ve always been a bit *thingy* about Google. I think it’s because I worked at Inktomi during the “search engine wars”. Google came along and stole the Yahoo! search engine provision from Inktomi (which consequently went against Yahoo! – everyone started using Google directly instead – ironically, Yahoo! ended up purchasing Inktomi in 2003).

During 2001/2002, Inktomi ran a few marketing campaigns designed to win back the Yahoo! account – I remember seeing a big truck with a poster board on it driving around Santa Clara saying “Yahoo! – Google is stealing your customers” or “Do you, uh, Google?” For a while, Google actually blocked Inktomi employees from using their search engine while at work. We could all access Google via dial-up or some other subnet, but anything that was specifically Inktomi had been blocked.

So why did I turn down the possible job? (This wasn’t an offer of employment, just an expression of interest). I think it was because I was intensely loyal to Inktomi – they gave me almost 4 years of a great career and let me live in London, Boston and San Francisco while really learning a shedload about the IT industry. I still see Google as a large reason why Inktomi ended up going under (the other large was reason was the 2001 post-dot-com recession), and thus a reason why I ended up not being able to stay in the US (my visa ran out when my job did). Seems silly when I write about it, but at the same time I still feel it – even knowing it’s silly.

Today I use Google for searching due to lack of any real alternative – given that I use Safari for browsing and I can’t change the search engine used in it, and that nowhere else that I know of gives comparable results. I don’t use Google Maps because their coverage of N. Ireland is poor. I occasionally use their image search, although I’ll just as often use Altavista for that. And I don’t really use anything else they have – Orkut, Gmail, Gcal (if it can be called that). I still feel like a bit of a sell-out for using them.

Once OmniWeb 5.5 comes out in Universal (or when I switch back to PPC mac – OmniWeb on my MacBook is a bit flaky) I’ll be able to try out using other search engines again. I know it’s a bit of a cop-out (I could after all just bookmark Yahoo! for example) but the convenience of typing in the search box means I’ll not switch till my browser supports it.

Update:Thanks to Zimba™ for pointing out that I could change my default search engine in Safari (and also pointing out I’d missed out the paragraph explaining why I didn’t want to work for Google).

Tags: Commentary, infurious by mj
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Last couple of days we’ve been running SyncBridge in a production environment and adding some last minute features, future proofing, feedback about APIs and turning off debug messages. It’s been error free for a while which is so nice. It’s not a bad feeling when people using the app in production manage to find some bugs that you never even considered could occur.

We also have new icons. They’re simple, iconic, abstract and suitable for an app that you might run once or twice.

“Once or twice?” I hear you say?

Yes, once or twice. The beauty of SyncBridge is that it ties into the system so well that when you make changes in iCal, these are automatically communicated to SyncBridge and, if you have a net connection, these are then sent to the server automagically.

Anyway, I’ll finish up with some of the best feedback I’ve ever seen.

Tags: Cool, News, infurious by mj
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Dave Winer riffs off Google Checkout being “baaad mmkay” because one day his “idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip”. He says they started to act like Microsoft. I’m wondering when they started this and in what ways. I know people have a lot of opinions about Microsoft and their success has certainly brought them contempt (and Dave is absolutely right that their success made them arrogant and left us with browsers that were malware-riddled as well as behind the times.)

Google on the other hand doesn’t seem, in my opinion, to have done anything like Microsoft. I don’t hear stories of Eric Schmidt throwing a chair across a room in a fit of rage. We don’t have embarrassing videos of Larry Page dancing around at a developer conference. Google have not been convicted of leveraging a legal monopoly to illegally destroy competitors. Or did they bundle Orkut with Sketchup and Google Maps so that we’d be forever nagged at to use their branded products?

Dave makes it out to be a trust issue. That he doesn’t trust Google. I don’t trust Google either. Nor do I trust Microsoft. I don’t even trust Apple (and that’s the devil I do know). And I certainly don’t trust Dave Winer. Never met the bloke.

I just get the feeling that Apple dominates the headlines when they’re popular because everyone wants to see them and the iPod take a fall. Similarly with Google we have some wanting to be the person who predicts their downfall.

If you’re going to criticise a company, be less vague. Does Google Checkout mean that Google wants to be the identity czar of the Internet? Dave really complains about companies being untrustworthy.

It’s not the companies, Dave, it’s the people. If someone doesn’t pick up the hotel bill they promised, it’s because a person didn’t do their job. It’s not a big conspiracy. There might be a reason – maybe you pissed off the CEO. Maybe someone who looked like you hit on his wife. There’s always reasons and it boils down to people.

Anyway. I just realised I totally missed the summer solstice. It must be all the world cup fervour. I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 5 minutes watching some men kick an inflated bladder around a field and that it was more than enough.

Technorati Tags: google, trust

Tags: Commentary, infurious by mj
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It never occurred to me until yesterday just how much SyncBridge has been my little child.

When I first created the sync engine, it wasn’t allowed out of the house, although I occasionally sent photos to close relatives (I was using it to synchronize between multiple user accounts on my machine, and I made a simple movie and sent it to MJ (who was on the other side of the world at the time)).

Then it grew up a bit, and I let it out to play with some well trusted supervision. (I added a simple GUI and sent the code to MJ and we started sharing calendars).

Then it went through puberty, and I taught it to be trustworthy and it earned my trust, and generally got more exposure to the real world (I fixed a lot of bugs and tested it! We also showed it to more people and talked/blogged about it).

In human terms, SyncBridge has reached the age of 16 or so. Legally able to leave home and earn money, but still with protective parents who want to make sure it’s well behaved and well adjusted in society.

Yesterday I installed the SyncBridge server for the employees at Mac|Sys and they all installed the client on their local machines. This morning, they started sharing in earnest. It’s like seeing my kid go out to work for the first time – I’d be ruffling SyncBridge’s hair if it had any

So far, we’ve had only one real issue which has been with people renaming each other’s calendars. I’ve added a simple fix and everything continues along nicely. The biggest eye-opener so far has been in ensuring that people know how to use the software. What we think is blindingly obvious just isn’t to people who’ve never used it before. Good thing MJ has written docs – tonight we’re planning to add them to the app!

Currently looking very likely to have our semi-public beta start this weekend. By semi-public I mean we’ll let those people who volunteered use the software – this will be the first time the app goes to someone we don’t know personally.

Biggest possible hold-ups for the beta are infrastructure things: getting the server upgraded to handle SyncBridge software properly, getting a support issue/bug tracker available to the world at large, etc.

Biggest possible hold-ups for going live (aside from heretofore undiscovered bugs) is setting up mundane things like a bank account, some kind of shopping basket, etc.

All the things mentioned above are underway, and we’ve got a month or so before our target go-live date (August 1).

Tags: Code, Commentary, Cool, News, infurious by mj
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