Dare Obasanjo's weblog

Twitter: Another Cross Over Success for Bloggers

Back in the day, before Microsoft realized the power of bloggers to create positive buzz about a product I often had to chime in on discussions about why it was important to take into consideration the opinions of the vocal minority in the blogosphere. One of the things folks like Robert Scoble and myself would point out is that mainstream reporters often get their stories from blogs these days. This means that if a product is getting a lot of good press among a few key blogs it eventually makes it into the mainstream media.

The best example of this I've seen in recent memory is the hype storm around Twitter. The tipping point in mainstream coverage of the service seems to have been when a bunch of bloggers who attended the SXSW conference started using the service. According to Google Trends interest has been increasing steadily in the service but mainstream coverage was lacking until after SXSW. Since then we've had articles like

Business Week: Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time
Wall Street Journal: Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration
San Francisco Chronicle: Austin's SXSW festival atwitter over Twitter

With results like this, it is no wonder PR flacks of all sorts are circling blogs and other ~~anti~~social media like groupies at a rock concert hoping to infect us with their ~~disease~~ message.

Categories: Social Software

March 22, 2007

@ 09:27 PM

Comments [4]

Top Ten Signs Your Software Project is Doomed

Raymond Chen has a blog post entitled You don't know what you do until you know what you don't do where he writes

I've seen a lot of software projects, and one thing I've learned is that you don't have a product until you start saying "No".
In the early phases of product design, you're all giddy with excitement. This new product will be so awesome. It will slice bread. It will solve world hunger. It's designed for everybody, from the technology-averse grandmother who wants to see picture of her grandkids to the IT manager who is in charge of 10,000 computers. It'll run equally well on a handheld device as in a data center.

When I see a product with an all-encompassing description like this, I say to myself, "They have no idea what their product is." You don't know what you do until you know what you don't do. And the sooner you figure out what you don't do the better, because a product that promises to do everything will never ship.

In my five years at Microsoft, I've seen a bunch of projects fail. Some were public flame outs that are still embarrassing to mention today while others are private mistakes that you'll never hear anyone outside the b0rg cube mention. A few months ago I wrote a blog post entitled Top 5 Signs Your Project is Doomed and since then I've considered a few more entries that should be on the list bringing the total to 10. The list below are common signs that a software project is doomed. Meeting one or two of these criteria isn't necessarily the kiss of death but three or more and you might as well start circulating your resume.

Trying to do too much in the first version. See Raymond's point above.
Taking a major dependency on unproven technology.
Competing with an existing internal project that was either a cash cow or had backers that are highly placed in the corporate hierarchy.
The team is understaffed. If you have less people than can handle the amount of work you have to do then the right thing to do is to scale back the project. Practically every other choice leads to failure.
Complexity is one of the goals of the project because "complex problems require complex solutions".
Schedule Chicken
Scope Creep
Second System Syndrome
No Entrance Strategy. When a project can't articulate how it goes from a demo or prototype to being in the hands of end users, there's a problem. This is particularly relevant in the "Web 2,0" world where many startups only strategy for success is getting a mention on TechCrunch and the fact that their service has "viral" features.
Tackling a problem you don't know how to solve. It's pretty amazing how often I've seen this occur.

Categories: Programming

March 22, 2007

@ 06:55 PM

The Org Chart for Microsoft's Online Businesses

According to the Infoworld article entitled Microsoft names leaders for search-and-ad unit

Microsoft Wednesday named Satya Nadella to lead the newly formed Search and Ad Platform group, the software giant's effort to optimize the advertising revenue-raising potential of its search business.

Nadella, previously corporate vice president for Microsoft's Business Solutions group, will report to Kevin Johnson, president of the Platform and Services Division, the company said in a statement.

I'm not sure this information is accurate since I haven't seen any sign of it on Microsoft Presspass nor has Satya Nadella's corporate profile been updated. However if it is, it would then create three VPs under Kevin Johnson who are in charge of Microsoft's three Web brands; Windows Live, MSN, and Live Search. The org chart representing all the folks who are in charge of Microsoft's online businesses would then be

if the Infoworld article is accurate.

The only relevance this has to people who read my blog is that it gives a nice visual of where I fit in the org chart. I'm in Blake Irving's group, working on aspects of the Windows Live Platform that powers services used by the Windows Live Experience group.

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

March 19, 2007

@ 04:26 PM

Living Without Database Transactions

Via Joe Gregorio I found a post entitled Transactionless by Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler writes

A couple of years ago I was talking to a couple of friends of mine who were doing some work at eBay. It's always interesting to hear about the techniques people use on high volume sites, but perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits was that eBay does not use database transactions.
...
The rationale for not using transactions was that they harm performance at the sort of scale that eBay deals with. This effect is exacerbated by the fact that eBay heavily partitions its data into many, many physical databases. As a result using transactions would mean using distributed transactions, which is a common thing to be wary of.
This heavy partitioning, and the database's central role in performance issues, means that eBay doesn't use many other database facilities. Referential integrity and sorting are done in application code. There's hardly any triggers or stored procedures.

My immediate follow-up to the news of transactionless was to ask what the consequences were for the application programmer, in particular the overall feeling about transactionlessness. The reply was that it was odd at first, but ended up not being a big deal - much less of a problem than you might think. You have to pay attention to the order of your commits, getting the more important ones in first. At each commit you have to check that it succeeded and decide what to do if it fails.

I suspect that this is one of those topics like replacing the operations team with the application developers which the CxOs and architects think is a great idea but is completely hated by the actual developers. We follow similar practices in some aspects of the Windows Live platform and I've heard developers complain about the fact that the error recovery you get for free with transactions is left in the hands of application developers. The biggest gripes are always around rolling back complex batch operations. I'm definitely interested in learning more about how eBay makes transactionless development as easy as they claim, I wonder if Dan Pritchett's talk is somewhere online?

The QCon conference wasn't even on my radar but if Dan Pritchett's talk is indicative of the kind of content that was presented, then it looks like I missed out. Looking at the list of speakers it looks like a conference I wouldn't have minded attending and submitting a paper for. I wonder if there'll be a U.S. version of the conference in the future?

Categories: Web Development

March 19, 2007

@ 04:10 PM

danah boyd on Narcissism and Twitter

danah boyd wrote two really interesting posts this weekend that gave an interesting perspective on a couple of headlines I've seen in blogs and mainstream news. Her post on narcissism gave an interesting perspective on stories such as CNN's Study: Vanity on the rise among college students which had me curious for more details when I read it originally. The post on Twitter gives a practical perspective I hadn't considered or seen mentioned in all the blogosphere ravings about the service since the hype storm started after the SXSW conference.

Interesting excerpts from danah boyd's post entitled fame, narcissism and MySpace

For those who are into pop science coverage of academic work, i'd encourage you to start with Jake Halpern's "Fame Junkies" (tx Anastasia). For simplicity sake, let's list a few of the key findings that have emerged over the years concerning narcissism.

While many personality traits stay stable across time, it appears as though levels of narcissism (as tested by the NPI) decrease as people grow older. In other words, while adolescents are more narcissistic than adults, you were also more narcissistic when you were younger than you are now.
The scores of adolescents on the NPI continue to rise. In other words, it appears as though young people today are more narcissistic than older people were when they were younger.
...
My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we're blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let's unpack that for a moment.
American individualism (and self-esteem education) have allowed us to uphold a myth of meritocracy. We sell young people the idea that anyone can succeed, anyone can be president. We ignore the fact that working class kids get working class jobs. This, of course, has been exacerbated in recent years. There used to be meaningful working class labor that young people were excited to be a part of. It was primarily masculine labor and it was rewarded through set hierarchies and unions helped maintain that structure. The unions crumpled in the 1980s and by the time the 1987 recession hit, there was a teenage wasteland No longer were young people being socialized into meaningful working class labor; the only path out was the "lottery" (aka becoming a famous rock star, athlete, etc.).

Interesting excerpts from danah boyd's post entitled Tweet Tweet (some thoughts on Twitter)

Of course, the population whose social world is most like the tech geeks is the teens. This is why they have no problems with MySpace bulletins (which are quite similar to Twitter in many ways). The biggest challenge with teens is that they do not have all-you-can-eat phone plans. Over and over, the topic of number of text messages in one's plan comes up. And my favorite pissed off bullying act that teens do involves ganging up to collectively spam someone so that they'll go over their limit and get into trouble with their parents (phone companies don't seem to let you block texts from particular numbers and of course you have to pay 10c per text you receive). This is particularly common when a nasty breakup occurs and i was surprised when i found out that switching phone numbers is the only real solution to this. Because most teens are not permanently attached to a computer and because they typically share their computers with other members of the family, Twitterific-like apps wouldn't really work so well. And Twitter is not a strong enough app to replace IM time.

Read both posts, they are really good. And if you aren't subscribed to her blog, you should be.

Categories: Mindless Link Propagation | Social Software

March 18, 2007

@ 06:58 PM

Comments [8]

Search Engine Bribery: iTWire Needs to Get Its Facts Straight

The Australian iTWire has a rather biased and misinformed article entitled Official: Microsoft ‘bribes’ companies to use Live Search which contains the following excerpt

Microsoft’s new program is called “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” and has been unveiled by John Batelle’s ‘SearchBlog’. The money on offer is significant, especially when multiplied across thousands of PCs. The deal means that companies can earn between US $2 and US $10 per computer on an annual basis, plus a US $25,000 “enrollment credit” which is a nice big wad of cash that will likely need a large-ish, strong and sturdy brown paper bag to hold securely while being passed under the table.

For companies that have thousands of computers, this could translate into anywhere from US $100,000 to $200,000 per year, which is money that could be put to good use in the IT department or elsewhere in the company.
...
Former Microsoft employee and blogger Robert Scoble who served as the online face of Microsoft during his three years at the company is not impressed with Microsoft’s moves in deciding to offer companies money to use search. His arguments are quite valid and boil down to Microsoft really needing to create better products, rather than needing to pay companies to get more traction for Windows Live. After all, Scoble isn’t the first to observe that Google doesn’t need to pay anyone to use its search services – people use them voluntarily because of the quality of the results

The amount of bias in this article is pretty amazing considering that Microsoft is primarily reacting to industry practices created by the Google [which have also been adopted by Yahoo!]. Let me count the ways Google bribes companies and individuals to use their search engine

Google pays AdSense publishers for each user they convince to install Firefox with the Google Toolbar installed. Details are in the documentation for the AdSense Referrals Feature. Speculation on Slashdot was that they pay $1 per user who switches to Firefox + Google Toolbar.
Google paid Dell $1 billion dollars to ensure that Google products are preinstalled in all the computers they sell and the default search engine/home page is set to Google. Details of this deal were even published in iTWire.
Google paid Adobe an undisclosed amount to bundle Google Toolbar [which converts your default search engine in your browser to theirs] with all Adobe products.
Google entered a distribution deal with Sun Microsystems to bundle Google Toolbar [which converts your default search engine in your browser to theirs] with all new installations of the Java runtime.
Google products which converts your default search engine in your browser to theirs are bundled with the Winzip archiving utility. Financial details of the deal were undisclosed.
Google is the default search engine for both the Opera and Firefox browsers. Both vendors get a cut of the search revenue generated from user searches which runs in the millions of dollars.

I could go on but my girlfriend just told me it's time for breakfast and I'm already in trouble for blogging on a Sunday morning. However the above links should be enough to debunk the inaccurate statements in the iTWire article. I guess iTWire's "journalism" is further validation of the saying that you should never let the facts get in the way of a good flame.

Categories: Competitors/Web Companies | Windows Live

March 16, 2007

@ 04:37 PM

Two Lessons On Branding in Software

Whenever I talk to folks at work about branding and some of our products I usually get two kinds of responses. On the one hand, there are those who think branding is important and we could be doing a better job. Then there are others who believe we should focus on shipping quality products and the rest will fall into place. The second position is somewhat hard to argue with because I end up sounding like I advocate that marketing is more important than shipping quality products. Luckily, I now have two real world examples of the importance of getting branding right for your software even if you do have a quality product.

EXHIBIT A: Topix.net

In a blog post entitled Kafka-esque! Rich Skrenta writes

I'm in the Wall Street Journal today, with a story about our purchase of Topix.com for $1M and the SEO issues related to moving the domain.
...
Back in 2003 when we were looking for a name, we came across Topix.net. The name 'topix' really fit what we were trying to do, it was a heck of a lot better than the other names we'd come up with. It turned out we could buy the name from a South Korean squatter for $800. So we took it. Of course I knew we were breaking one of the rules of domain names, which is never get anything besides the .com. But I thought that advice might be outmoded.
...
Surely, the advice that you had to have a .com wasn't as relevant anymore?
Well, we got our answer when our very first press story came out. This was in March 2004 when we got a front page business section launch story in the Mercury News. They gave us sweet coverage since we were the only startup to come out of palo alto in months (this was just as the dot-com crash was beginning to thaw). Unfortunately, while the article clearly spelled "Topix.net", the caption under our photo -- the most visible part of the story after the headline -- called us Topix.com. Someone had transcribed the name and mistakenly changed the .net to .com, out of habit, I suppose.
Since that time we've built up quite a bit of usage, and much of it return visitors who have bookmarked one of our pages, or become active in our local forums. But still, we continued to have issues where someone will assume a .com ending for the name. Mail gets sent to the wrong address, links to us are wrong, stories incorrectly mention our URL.
Beyond that, as part of some frank self-evaluations we were doing around our site and how we could make it better, and the brand stronger, we ran some user surveys and focus groups. "What do you think of the name?" was one of the questions we asked. The news was good & bad; people actually really liked the name 'topix', but the '.net' was a serious turn-off. It confused users, it made the name seem technical rather than friendly, and it communicated to the world that "we didn't own our own name."

EXHIBIT B: Democracy Player

In a blog post entitled A name change Nicholas Reville writes

This is some big news for us. We are planning to change the name of Democracy Player.

We chose the name ‘Democracy’ almost two years ago when we were first setting up PCF. We knew it was an ambitious name, but we thought that it made a clear statement about how important it is that an open internet TV platform is for our culture.
...
And, even though I’m about to explain why we need to change it, I’m glad we’ve had this name for the past year. It’s funny that a name like ‘Democracy’ can become a name for software– I think it turned out to be less odd than we expected. When people hear a name, they tend to accept it. And it helped us assert our mission clearly: free, open, and dedicated to democratizing video online. I think conveying that mission so strongly was crucial for us.

But the name also confused a huge number of potential users. In all our debates about whether you could call something ‘Democracy’ and how people would react to the name, we hadn’t realized that so many people would simply assume that the software was for politicians and videos about politics. We hear this response over and over, and it’s a real limitation to our user base.

So we’re changing the name to Miro.

Categories: Windows Live

March 15, 2007

@ 03:39 PM

Comments [9]

Amazon S3 & EC2: What's the Endgame?

A number of blogs I read have been talking about Amazon's S3 service a lot recently. I've seen posts from Jeff Atwood, Shelley Powers and most recently Dave Winer. I find it interesting that S3 is turning into a classic long tail service that works for both startups who are spending hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year to service millions of users (like Smugmug) to bloggers who need some additional hosting for their cat pictures. One reason I find this interesting is that it is unclear to me S3 is a business that will be profitable in the long term by itself.

My initial assumption was that S3 was a way for Amazon to turn a lemons into lemonade with regards to bandwidth costs. Big companies like Amazon are usually billed for bandwidth using 95th percentile billing, which is explained below

With 95th percentile billing, buyers are billed each month at a fixed price multiplied by the peak traffic level, regardless of how much is used the rest of the time. Thus with the same nominal price, the effective price is higher for buyers with burstier traffic patterns.

So my assumption was that S3 allows Amazon to make money from bandwidth they were already being charged for and not using. As for storage, my guess is that they are either making a miniscule amount of profit or at cost. Where this gets tricky is that, if S3 gets popular enough then all of a sudden it no longer is a way to make money from bandwidth they are being billed for but aren't using but instead impacts their actual bandwidth costs which then changes the profit equation for the service. Without any data on Amazon's cost structure it is unclear whether this would make the service unprofitable or whether this is already factored into their pricing.

On the other hand, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) isn't something I've seen a lot of bloggers rave about. However it seems to be the service that shows that Amazon is making a big play to be the world's operating system in the sky as opposed to dabbling in providing some of its internal services to external folks as a cost savings measure. With EC2 you can create a bunch of virtual servers in their system and load it up with an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). An AMI is basically a server operating system and the platform components you need on it. Typical AMIs are an instance of a LAMP system (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl/Python) although I did see one AMI that was an instance of Windows 2003 server. You can create as many or as few server instances as you need and are billed just for what you need.

I suspect that the combination of EC2 and S3 is intended to be very attractive to startups. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building out clusters of servers, you just pay as you go when you get your monthly bill. There are only two problems with this strategy that I can see. The first is that, if I was building the next Digg, Flickr or del.icio.us I'm not sure I'd want to place myself completely at the mercy of Amazon especially since there doesn't seem to be any SLA published on the site. According to the CEO of Smugmug in his post Amazon S3: Outages, slowdowns, and problems they've had four major problems with S3 in the past year which has made them rely less on the service for critical needs. The second issue is that VC money is really, really, really easy to come by these days judging from the kind of companies that get profiled on TechCrunch and Mashable. If the latter should change, it isn’t hard to imagine dozens of enterprising folks with a couple of thousand dollars in their pockets deciding to go with S3 + EC2 instead of seeking VC funding. But for now, I doubt that this will be the case.

What I suspect is that without some catalyst (e.g. the next YouTube is built on S3 + EC2)these services will not reach their full potential. This would be unfortunate because I think in much the same way we moved from everyone rolling their own software to shrinkwrapped software, we will need to move to shrinkwrapped Web platforms in the future instead of everyone running their own ad-hoc cluster of Windows or LAMP servers and solving the same problems that others have solved thousands of times already.

I wonder if Amazon has considered tapping the long tail by going up against GoDaddy's hosting services with S3 + EC2. They have the major pieces already although it seems that their prices would need to go down to compete with what GoDaddy charges for bandwidth although I suspect that Amazon's quality of service would be better.

Categories: Competitors/Web Companies | Web Development

March 15, 2007

@ 03:38 PM

Comments [10]

Trackback Spam

My blog has been slow all day due to an unending flood of trackback spam. I've set up my IIS rules to reject requests from the IP address ranges the attacks are coming from but it seems that this hasn't been enough to prevent the trackback spam from making my blog unusable.

It looks like I should invest in a router with a built in firewall as my next step. Any ideas to prevent this from happening again are welcome.

Categories: Personal

March 14, 2007

@ 09:19 PM

Microsoft Announces "Games for Windows - LIVE"

From the press release entitled Microsoft Unites Xbox and PC Gamers With Debut of Games for Windows — LIVE we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — March 14, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the extension of the Xbox LIVE^® games and entertainment network to the Windows^® platform, bringing together the most popular online console game service with the most popular games platform in the world. Debuting on May 8, 2007, with the launch of the Windows Vista™ version of the Xbox^® blockbuster “Halo^® 2,” Games for Windows — LIVE will connect Windows gamers to over six million gamers already in the Xbox LIVE community. Then, launching in June, “Shadowrun™” will for the first time connect Windows gamers with Xbox 360™ players in cross-platform matches using a single service. “UNO^®,” releasing later in 2007, will also support cross-platform play between Windows and Xbox 360.

This is pretty cool and I saw some of the demos when I was at CES in January. The funny thing is that one of my coworkers told me that we were announcing this soon but I thought he said "Games for Windows Live" so I thought he meant we were rebranding MSN Games. I didn't realize it was actually "Games for Windows — LIVE". This might get a tad confusing.

Categories: Video Games

March 14, 2007

@ 05:00 PM

Comments [3]

Brendan Eich on Mozilla and the Future of AJAX

Brendan Eich has a post on the Mozilla roadmap blog entitled The Open Web and Its Adversaries which references one of my posts on whether AJAX will remain as the technology of choice for building Rich Internet Applications. He writes

open standards and open source both empower user-driven innovation. This is old news to the Mozilla user community, who have been building and feeding back innovations for the life of the project, increasing over time to include Firefox add-ons and GreaseMonkey user scripts. (BTW, I am pushing to make add-on installation not require a restart in Firefox 3, and I intend to help improve and promote GreaseMonkey security in the Firefox 3 timeframe too.) Without forking, even to make private-label Firefoxes or FlashPlayers, users can innovate ahead of the vendor's ability to understand, codify, and ship the needed innovations.
Consider just the open standards that make up the major web content languages: HTML, CSS, DOM, JS. These mix in powerful ways that do not have correspondences in something like a Flash SWF. There is no DOM built inside the FlashPlayer for a SWF; there's just a display list. There's no eval in ActionScript, and ActionScript features a strict mode that implements a static type checker (with a few big loopholes for explicit dynamic typing). You can't override default methods or mutate state as freely as you can in the browser content model. Making a SWF is more like making an ASIC -- it's "hardware", as Steve Yegge argues.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; it's certainly different from the Open Web.
...
Dare Obasanjo argues that developers crave single-vendor control because it yields interoperation and compatibility, even forced single-version support. Yet this is obviously not the case for anyone who has wasted time getting a moderately complex .ppt or .doc file working on both Mac and Windows. It's true for some Adobe and Microsoft products, but not all, so something else is going on. And HTML, CSS, DOM and JS interoperation is better over time, not worse. TCP/IP, NFS, and SMB interoperation is great by now. The assertion fails, and the question becomes: why are some single-vendor solutions more attractive to some developers? The answers are particular, not general and implied simply by the single-vendor condition.

I'm surprised to see Brendan Eich conflating "openness" with the features of a particular technology. I'll start with Brendan's assertion that open standards and open source enable user-driven innovation. Open source allows people to modify the software they've been distributed however they like. Open standards like HTTP, FTP and NNTP allow people to build applications that utilize these technologies without being beholden to any corporate or government entity. It's hard for me to see how open standards enable user-driven innovation in the same way that open source does. I guess the argument could be made that open source applications built on proprietary technologies aren't as "free" as open source applications that implement open standards. I can buy that. I guess.

The examples of Firefox add-ons and GreaseMonkey user scripts don't seem to be an example of open source and open standards enabling user-driven innovation. They seem to be examples of why building an application as a platform with a well-designed plugin model works. After all, we have plugins for Internet Explorer, Gadgets for Google Personalized Homepage and Add-ins for Visual Studio which are all examples of user-driven innovation as plugins for an application which are built on a proprietary platform often using proprietary technologies. My point is

open_source + open_standards != user_driven_innovations;

Being open helps, but it doesn't necessary lead to user driven innovations or vice versa. The rest of Brendan's post is even weirder because he presents the features of Flash's ActionScript versus AJAX (i.e. [X]HTML/CSS/Javascript/DOM/XML/XmlHttpRequest) as the conflict between properietary versus open technologies. Separating content from presentation, dynamic programming languages and rich object models are not exclusively the purvey of "open" technologies and it is disingenious for Brendan to suggest that.

After all, what happens when Adobe and Microsoft make their RIA platforms more "Web-like"? Will the debate devolve into the kind of semantic hairsplitting we've seen with the OpenXML vs. ODF debate where Microsoft detractors are now attacking Microsoft for opening up and standardizing its XML file formats when their original arguments against the file formats where that they weren't open?

Personally, I'd like to see technical discussions on the best way to move the Web forward instead of the red herring of "openness" being thrown into the discussion. For instance, what are the considerations Web developers should make when they come to the crossroads where Adobe is offering Flash/Flex, Microsoft is offering WPF/E and the Mozilla & co are offering their extensions to the AJAX model (i.e. HTML 5) as the one true way? I've already stated what I think in my post What Comes After AJAX? and so far Adobe looks like they have the most compelling offering for developers but it is still early in the game and neither Microsoft nor Mozilla have fully shown their hands.

Categories: Web Development

March 13, 2007

@ 06:18 PM

Wikipedia: Who's Your Daddy?

What is OpenID Good For?

Tim Bray has an excellent post entitled OpenID which attempts to separate hype from fact when it comes to the technorati's newest darling, OpenID. He writes

The buzz around OpenID is becoming impossible to ignore. If you don't know why, check out How To Use OpenID, a screencast by Simon Willison. As it's used now (unless I'm missing something) OpenID seems pretty useless, but with only a little work (unless I'm missing something) it could be very useful indeed.
Problem: TLS · The first problem is that OpenID doesn't require the use of TLS (what's behind URIs that begin with https:).
...
Problem: What's It Mean? · Another problem with OpenID is that, well, having one doesn't mean very much; just that you can verify that some server somewhere says it believes that the person operating the browser owns that ID.
...
Problem: Phishing · This is going to be a problem, but I don't think it's fair to hang it on OpenID, because it's going to be equally a problem with any browser-based authentication. Since browser-based authentication is What The People Want, we're just going to have to fight through this with a combination of browser engineering and (more important) educating the general public
...
The Real Problem · Of course, out there in the enterprise space where most of Sun's customers live, they think about identity problems at an entirely different level. Single-sign-on seems like a little and not terribly interesting piece of the problem. They lose sleep at night over "Attribute Exchange";once you have an identity, who is allowed to hold what pieces of information about you, and what are the right protocols by which they may be requested, authorized, and delivered? The technology is tough, but the policy issues are mind-boggling.
So at the moment I suspect that OpenID isn't that interesting to those people.

I've been thinking about OpenID from the context of authorization and sharing across multiple social networks. Until recently I worked on the authorization platform for a lot of ~~MSN~~ Windows Live properites (i.e. the platform that enables setting permissions on who can view your Windows Live Space, MSN Calendar, or Friends list from Windows Live Messenger). One of the problems I see us facing in the future is lack of interoperability across multiple social networks. This is a problem when your users have created their friend lists (i.e. virtual address books) on sites like Facebook, Flickr or MySpace. One of the things you notice about these services is that they all allow you to set permissions on who can view your profile or content.More importantly, if your profile/content is non-public then they all require that the people who can view your profile must have an account with their service. We do the same thing across Windows Live so it isn't a knock on them.

What I find interesting is this; what if on Flickr I could add http://mike.spaces.live.com as a contact then give Mike Torres permission to view my photos without him having to get a Yahoo! account? Sounds interesting doesn't it? Now let's go back to the issues with OpenID raised by Tim Bray.

The first thing to do is to make sure we all have the same general understanding of how OpenID works. It's basically the same model as ~~Microsoft Passport~~ Windows Live ID, Google Account Authentication for Web-Based Applications and Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication. A website redirects you to your identity provider, you authenticate yourself (i.e. login) on your identity providers site and then are redirected back to the referring site along with your authentication ticket. The ticket contains some information about you that can be used to uniquely identify you as well as some user data that may be of interest to the referring site (e.g. username). Now we have a high level understanding of how it all works, we can talk about Tim Bray's criticisms.

TLS/SSL
On the surface it makes sense that identity providers should use SSL when you login to your account after being redirected there by a service that supports OpenID. However as papers like TrustBar: Protecting (even Naïve) Web Users from Spoofing and Phishing Attacks, SSL/TLS does little to prevent the real security problems on the Web today, namely Web page spoofing (i.e. Phishing) and the large amount of malware on user PCs which could be running key loggers. This isn't to say that using SSL/TLS isn't important, just that it's like putting bars on your windows and leaving the front door open. Thus I can understand why it isn't currently required that identity providers support SSL/TLS. However a little security is better than no security at all.

What Does It Mean?
I agree with Tim Bray that since OpenID is completely decentralized, websites that support it will likely end up creating whitelists of sites they want to talk to otherwise they risk their systems being polluted by malicious or inconsiderate OpenID providers. See Tim Bray's example of creating http://www.tbray.org/silly-id/ which when queried about any OpenID beginning with that URI instantly provides a positive response without authenticating the user. This allows multiple people to claim http://www.tbray.org/silly-id/BillGates for example. Although this may be valid if one was creating the OpenID version of BugMeNot, it is mostly a nuisance to service providers that want to accept OpenID.

Phishing
Using susceptibility to phishing as an argument not to use OpenID seems like shutting the barn door when the horse has already bolted. The problem is that security conscious folks don't want users getting used to the idea of providing their username and password for one service whenever prompted by another service. After all, the main lesson we've been trying to teach users about preventing phishing is to only enter their username and password to their primary sites when they type them in themselves not when they follow links. OpenID runs counter to this teaching. However the problem with that teaching is that users are already used to doing this several times a day. Here are three situations from this morning where I've been asked to enter my username and password from one site on another

Connected Desktop Apps: Google Toolbar prompts me for my Gmail username and password when I try to view my bookmarks. The goal of the Google Account Authentication is to create a world where random apps asking me for my Gmail username and password by redirecting me to the Google login page is commonplace. The same goes for the the various Flickr uploader tools and Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication
Importing Contacts: On Facebook, there is an option to import contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL and Gmail which requires me to enter my username and password from these services into their site. Every time I login to Yahoo! Mail there is a notice that asks me to import my contacts from other email services which requires me to give them my credentials from these services as well.
Single Sign-On: Whenever I go to the Expedia sign-in page I'm given the option of signing in with my .NET Passport which happens to be the same username and password I use for all Windows Live and MSN services as well as company health site that has information about any medical conditions I may have.

Given the proliferation of this technique in various contexts on the Web today, it seems partisan to single out OpenID as having problems with phishing. If anything, THE WEB has a problem with phishing which needs to be solved by the browser vendors and the W3C who got us in this mess in the first place.

Attribute Exchange
This usually goes hand in hand with any sort of decentralized/federated identity play. So let's say I can now use my Windows Live ID to login to Flickr. What information should Flickr be able to find out about me from talking to Windows Live besides my username? Should I be able to control that or should it be something that Flickr and Windows Live agree on as part of their policies? How is the user educated that the information they entered in one context (i.e. in Windows Live) may be used in a totally different context on another site. As Tim Bray mentioned in his post, this is less of a technology issue and more a policy thing that will likely differ for enterprises versus "Web 2.0" sites. That said, I'm glad to see that Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity has submitted a proposal for OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 which should handle the technology aspect of the problem.

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of OpenID by Microsoft or an indication of the future direction of authentication and authorization in Windows Live. This is me brainstorming some ideas in my blog and seeing whether the smart folks in my reader base think these ideas make sense or not.

Categories: Web Development

March 13, 2007

@ 04:33 PM

Comments [13]

One of the links referenced in my recent posting about Wikipedia led me to reread the Wikipedia entry for "Dare Obasanjo". It seems there is still an outstanding issue with my entry according to folks on the Talk page because there isn't a non-blog source (i.e. mainstream media) that verifies that my dad is Olusegun Obasanjo.

For some reason it irritates me that I have a Wikipedia entry with a giant banner that claims I'm lying about my parenthood.Given that I'll be back home in a few weeks to belatedly celebrate my dad's seventieth birthday, I wonder if any Wikipedia savvy folks can point out what kind of "evidence" usually satisfies the bureaucrats on that site. Will a photograph of us together do the trick (if so I already have a few at home I can scan and upload to Flickr)? Will it have to be a photograph printed in a newspaper? Or is the only way that banner comes off is if there is a Nigerian newspaper webpage on the Internet that says he's my dad.

I need to see what strings I have to pull to get my name cleared.

Categories: Personal

March 11, 2007

@ 02:14 PM

Comments [3]

What Time Is It?

Yesterday I went shopping and every store had reminders that daylight saving time begins today. Every year before "springing forward" or "falling back" I always double check the current time at time.gov and the US Naval Observatory Master Clock Time . However neither clock has sprung forward. Now I'm not sure if who I can trust to tell me the right time. :(

Update: Looks like I spoke too soon. It seems most of the clocks in the house actually figured out that today was the day to "spring forward" and I had the wrong time. :)

Categories: Technology

March 10, 2007

@ 05:53 PM

Comments [4]

Seattle Startup Shoutout: AgileDelta

Every once in a while someone asks me about software companies to work for in the Seattle area that aren't Microsoft, Amazon or Google. This is the third in a series of weekly posts about startups in the Seattle area that I often mention to people when they ask me this question.

AgileDelta builds XML platforms for mobile devices that are optimized for low power, low bandwidth devices. They have two main products; Efficient XML and Mobile Information Client. I'm more familiar with the Efficient XML since it has been selected as the basis for the W3C's binary XML format and has been a lynch pin for a lot of the debate around binary XML. The Efficient XML product is basically a codec which allows you to create and consume XML in their [soon to be formerly] proprietary binary format that makes it more efficient for use in mobile device scenarios. A quick look at their current customer lists indicates that their customer base is mostly military and/or defence contractors. I hadn't realized how popular XML was in military circles.

AgileDelta was founded by John Schneider and Rich Rollman who are formerly of Crossgain, a company founded by Adam Bosworth which was acquired by BEA. Before that Rich Rollman was at Microsoft and he was one of the key folks behind MSXML and SQLXML. Another familiar XML geek who works there is Derek Denny-Brown who spent over half a decade working as a key developer on the XML parsers at Microsoft.

Press: AgileDelta in PR Newswire

Location: Bellevue, WA

Jobs: careers@agiledelta.com, current open positions are for a Software Engineer, Sales Professional, Technical Writer and Quality Assurance Engineer.

Categories: Seattle Startup Shoutout

March 10, 2007

@ 03:25 AM

Wikipedia is a Giant Joke

Today I was taking a look at my referer logs and stumbled upon a post entitled TechCrunch Resolution on Wikipedia by Jonathan Stokes which contains the following anecdote

A Brief History

The edit war was prompted by the now famous scandal in which Microsoft paid a Wikipedian to favorably edit Microsoft articles on Wikipedia. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch covered the Microsoft story in a post that was largely sympathetic.

Perceiving unfairness in the issue, Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo, aka Carnage4Life, retaliated against TechCrunch by adding an extensive criticism section to Wikipedia’s TechCrunch article. He then wrote about his “experiment” on his blog, 25HoursaDay.com.

Ensuing Uproar

Michael Arrington was not happy to be slandered by a Microsoft employee, in response to Microsoft coverage. Obasanjo expressed surprise at Arrington’s response, but did not apologize. I blogged this chapter of the Microsoft controversy.

Judging from his blog comments, Dare does not seem to have a high respect for Wikipedia. He has previously violated Wikipedia rules by anonymously writing his own Dare Obasanjo article on Wikipedia. Humorously, it appears to include inside jokes with other Microsoft employees, such as:

Dare has lunch once a month with Don Box to rinse the SOAP off of Don while Don simultaneously attempts to lather up Dare.

Edit War

With traffic pouring into Wikipeda through TechCrunch and Digg, an all-out edit war ensued between long-time Wikipedians and anonymous vandals. The vandals began attacking the userpages of Wikipedians trying to protect the TechCrunch article. It finally escalated to a point where this anti-TechCrunch user was banned for repeatedly blocking out user pages with disturbing death threats.

Resolution

Wikidemo came to the rescue by establishing a Wikipedia Mediation. She invited all editors involved to the discussion, even going so far as to invite me on this blog, and Dare Obasanjo on his blog.

Anthony cfc handled the mediation. Notably, none of the controversial IP’s showed up to state their case. With help from Anthony cfc Computerjoe, we have now restored the Wikipedia TechCrunch article, and hopefully made a few minor improvements as well. and

In the process, I earned my first Wikipedia Barnstar for Civility from Anthony cfc. Kind of neat to see Wikipedia in action.

Some days the Daily Show just writes itself. I'm crapping myself in amusement at how seriously these people take this nonsense. I am especially amused by all the bits in red font since they are either borderline libel or just straight up hilarious. And I thought Mike Arrington emailing folks at Microsoft trying to get me in trouble after I apologized on his blog was the most absurd turn this story would take.

It's like Nick Carr wrote in his post Essjay's world, Wikipedia seems to be full of the kind of people who used to play Dungeons & Dragons back in the day and now have difficulty separating the real world from the fantasy world they've created in their heads.

Categories: Personal

March 8, 2007

@ 12:56 PM

Upcoming Outage

My website is going to be down for a few days as I make some changes. While I'm gone you can check out some of these blogs instead

Jeff Atwood - Programmer Geek
Omar Shahine - Microsoft Geek
Danah Boyd - Social Software Geek
Scott Adams - Funny Geek
Chris Kelly - Liberal Geek

I'll see y'all this weekend.

Categories: Personal

March 7, 2007

@ 09:15 PM

Michael Gartenberg Leaving Microsoft

It seems just like yesterday when the tech blogosphere was abuzz with news that analyst Michael Gartenberg was leaving Jupiter Research for Microsoft. So you can imagine my surprise to fire up his blog today to find the post And Back to Analyst… where he writes

This is a difficult post to write. But after much of thought, I have decided not to remain with Microsoft and I am returning to JupiterResearch as of Monday 3/12.

At my core, I am an analyst. It’s what I do and I do it well and after much thought, I realize I’m just not ready to stop doing that job just yet. I believe Jupiter itself is poised for some amazing things in the future and I’ve invested too much in the company to feel good about walking away at this point. Therefore I have decided to return and I am pleased that I have been welcomed back. My thanks to everyone I have worked with at Microsoft.

Wow, that was quick.

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

March 7, 2007

@ 06:47 PM

Captain America is Dead!

Marvel comics has been ticking me off for a few months now with their mediocre Avengers Disassembled, House of M and Civil War trilogy but it looks like they finally found a way to push me over the edge. According to MSNBC in Death to ‘America’: Comic-book hero killed off

Captain America has undertaken his last mission — at least for now. The venerable superhero is killed in the issue of his namesake comic that hit stands Wednesday, the Daily News reported.
On the new edition's pages, a sniper shoots down the shield-wielding hero as he leaves a courthouse, according to the newspaper.
...
In the comic-book universe, death is not always final. But even if Captain America turns out to have met his end in print, he may not disappear entirely: Marvel has said it is developing a Captain America movie.

This reminds me of a headline from the 1990s, Superman killed by falling comic book sales, when DC Comics tried a similar stunt back in the day. The overuse of cross over stories and super hero shockers (like radical changes to a character's history or killing them off) seem to be symptoms of the death of comic books as an entertainment genre. I buy comics from a local comic book store on a monthly basis and I don't think I've ever seen anyone under the age of 25 in the five and a half years that I've been using that store. Well, there was the one time that one of the guys who worked there brought his grandson into work.

Even though super hero movies featuring A-list and B-list superheroes from Spider-Man to Ghost Rider are making hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, they are pretty much milking a fan base that grew up with these heroes instead of introducing these characters to a new audience. This is similar to the way that George Lucas milked a fan base that grew up on Star Wars with his series of horrific prequels although in his case I suspect that there probably is a market for Star Wars pre-prequels in another 20 years.

Without a continuous influx of fans who are interested in the source material (i.e. comic books), there won't be a next generation of fans to buy all the overpriced merchandising and special effects laden movies. However I doubt that stunts like this are a good way to get people reading the comic books again, even though it did work when they killed Superman...I was one of the suckers who bought all the books. :)

Although Cap is dead, his memory will live on...on YouTube.

Categories: Comics

March 6, 2007

@ 03:33 PM

API Hall of Shame: Lucene's IndexReader and IndexWriter

When JSON isn't JSON

The hottest story on Planet Intertwingly today is Rob Yates' blog post entitled Safe JSON which goes over a number of security issues one can face when exposing services using JSON. He goes ahead to describe the following approaches

Approach 1 - Plain JSON: Simply return JSON

Approach 2 - var assignment: Assign the JSON object to some variable that can then be accessed by the embedding application (not an approach used by Yahoo).

Approach 3 - function callback: When calling the JSON Web Service pass as a parameter a callback function. The resulting JSON response passes the JSON object as a parameter to this callback function.

There are a number of good responses in the comments. The only thing I wanted to point out is that only Approach 1 can really be called using JSON. The other two are "accepting arbitrary code from a third party and executing it" which is such a ridiculously bad idea that we really need to stop talking about it in civilized company. It seems silly to point out specific security or privacy issues with using that approach when the entire concept of building Web services in that manner is fundamentally insecure and downright dangerous.

PS: It looks like Rob Sayre beat me to saying this. :)

Categories: Web Development

March 6, 2007

@ 03:11 PM

Comments [16]

What Comes After AJAX?

I've been thinking about AJAX a lot recently. Between reviewing a book on the subject, reading some of the comments coming out of the Adobe Engage event and chatting with some coworkers at dinner about WPF/E I've had a lot of food for thought.

I'll start with an excerpt from Ted Leung's post entitled Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web

The problem as I see it
I think that a lot (but not all) apps will become RIA’s, and the base platform technology for RIA’s is very important. Too important to be controlled, or designed by any single party. The current vogue toolchain, AJAX, has this property. It also has the property of being a cross platform development nightmare. On the desktop, you commit yourself to a single cross platform library/technology, and then you spend the rest of your time wrestling with it. In AJAX, you have multiple browsers on each platform that you want to support. Not only that, you have multiple versions of each browser.
...
Flash/Flex
Enter Flash/Flex. Flash has a great cross platform story. One runtime, any platform. Penetration of the Flash Player is basically the same as penetration of browsers capable of supporting big AJAX apps. There are nice development tools. This is highly appealing.
What is not appealing is going back to a technology which is single sourced and controlled by a single vendor. If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web?

Most people who've done significant AJAX development will admit that the development story is a mess. I personally don't mind the the Javascript language but I'm appalled that the most state of the art development process I've found is to use Emacs to edit my code, Firebug to debug in Firefox and attaching Visual Studio to the Internet Explorer processes to debug in IE. This seems like a joke when compared to developing Java apps in Eclipse or .NET applications in Visual Studio. Given how hypercompetitive the "Web 2.0" world is, I doubt that this state of affairs will last much longer. There is too much pressure on Web companies to improve their productivity and stand out in a world full of derivative YouTube/MySpace/Flickr knock offs. If one company finds a way to be more productive and/or build richer Web applications the rest of the industry will follow. This is pretty much what happened with Google and AJAX as well as with YouTube and Flash Video. Once those companies showed how much value they were getting from technologies which were once passe, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. This means that it is inevitable that Rich Internet Applications will eventually be built on a platform that provides a better development experience than AJAX does today. The only questions are how quickly will this happen and which technology will replace AJAX?

Ted Leung mentions two contenders for the throne; Flash/Flex and OpenLaszlo. I'll add a third entry to that list, Windows Presention Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E). Before discussing what it will take for one of these contenders to displace AJAX, I should point out that being "open" has nothing to do with it. Openness is not a recipe for success when it comes to development platforms. According to TIOBE Java is the most popular programming language today and it was a proprietary language tightly controlled by Sun Microsystems. Before that, it was commonly stated that Visual Basic was the most popular programming language and it was a proprietary language controlled by Microsoft. I believe these count as existence proofs that a popular development platform can rise to the top while being controlled by a single vendor.

So what will it take for an RIA platform to displace the popularity of AJAX besides being able to build richer user interfaces?

Ubiquity: Over 95% of the Web users are using an AJAX capable browser. Any replacement for AJAX must have similar penetration or it's dead in the water. No one wants to turn away customers especialy when it's competitors aren't doing anything that stupid.
Debug Once, Run Anywhere: The biggest problem with AJAX is that it isn't a single development platform. Being able to write an application and debug it once instead of having a different debugging and runtime experience for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari is the killer productivity enhancer. Of course, there will always be differences between environments but if we can move to a world where RIA development is more like cross-platform Java development as opposed to cross-platform C++ development (yes, I know that's an oxymoron) then we all win.
Continuoum of Development Tools: I don't need expensive development tools to become an AJAX developer, however if I feel that I need heavy duty tooling I can buy Visual Studio 2005 then download ASP.NET AJAX to get a fancy integrated development environment. Any platform that expects to replace AJAX needs to have a continuoum with high quality, free & Open Source tools on one end and expensive, proprietary and "rich" tools at the other. The Java world with it's culture of Open Source tools like Eclipse, JBoss and Hibernate coexisting with overpriced tools from big vendors like IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic is the best example of this to date. That way the hackers are happy and the suits are happy as well.

So far Adobe seems closer than anyone in getting the trifecta. In a year or two, things might look different.

Categories: Web Development

March 5, 2007

@ 06:20 PM

Comments [11]

For the current release of RSS Bandit we decided to forego our homegrown solution for providing search over a user's subscribed feeds and go with Lucene.NET. The search capabilities are pretty cool but the provided APIs leave a lot to be desired. The only major problem we encountered with Lucene.NET is that concurrency issues are commonplace. We decided to protect against this by having only one thread that modified the Lucene index since a lot of problems seemed to occur when multiple threads were trying to modify the search index.

This is where programming with Lucene.NET turns into a journey into the land of Daily WTF style proportions.

WTF #1: There are two classes used for modifying the Lucene index. This means you can't just create a singleton and protect access to it from multiple threads. Instead one must keep instances of two different types around and make sure if one instance is open the other is closed.

WTF #2: Although the classes are called IndexReader and IndexWriter, they are both used for editing the search index. There's a fricking Delete() method on a class named IndexReader.

Code Taken from Lucene Examples

public void  DeleteDocument(int docNum)
{
	lock (directory)
	{
		AssureOpen();
		CreateIndexReader();
		indexReader.DeleteDocument(docNum);
	}
}

void  CreateIndexReader()
{
	if (indexReader == null)
	{
		if (indexWriter != null)
		{
			indexWriter.Close();
			indexWriter = null;
		}
		indexReader = IndexReader.Open(directory);
	}
}

void  AddDocument(Document doc)
{
	lock (directory)
	{
		AssureOpen();
		CreateIndexWriter();
		indexWriter.AddDocument(doc);
	}
}

void  CreateIndexWriter()
{
	if (indexWriter == null)
	{
		if (indexReader != null)
		{
			indexReader.Close();
			indexReader = null;
		}
		
	}
}

As lame as this is, Lucene.NET is probably the best way to add desktop search capabilities to your .NET Framework application. I've heard they've created an IndexModifier class in newer versions of the API so some of this ugliness is hidden from application developers. How anyone thought it was OK to ship with this kind of API ugliness in the first place is beyond me.

Categories: Programming

March 5, 2007

@ 05:29 PM

Seattle Startup Shoutout: iLike

Every once in a while someone asks me about software companies to work for in the Seattle area that aren't Microsoft, Amazon or Google. This is the first in a series of weekly posts about startups in the Seattle area that I often mention to people when they ask me this question.

The iLike service from GarageBand.com is one of a new breed of "social" music services which is a category popularized by Last.fm. The service consists of two primary aspects

A website where one can create a profile, add friends, view stats about the music you listen to and see what music is popular among iLike users.
An iTunes plugin which recommends songs from signed and unsigned artists based on what you are listening to and also allows you to see what your friends are currently listening to.

I tried the service and definitely like the concept of getting music recommendations from directly within iTunes. The only downside is that you get samples of the recommended songs (probably the same snippets from the iTunes music store) instead of having the entire recommended song streamed to you. I guess that makes sense since it is a free service and likely makes money via an affiliate program. The company recently got a bunch of funding from Ticketmaster so I expect that they will soon start integrating concert ticket recommendations into their user experience which would explain why they require a zip code when signing up for the service.

The president of iLike is Hadi Partovi who recently left Microsoft for the second time after a stint as a General Manager at MSN where he greenlighted start.com which eventually morphed into the live.com personalized page. One of the key developers of iLike is Steve Rider who was the original developer of start.com.

Press: Seattle Times on iLike

Number of Employees: 25

Location: Seattle, WA (Capitol Hill)

Jobs: jobs@iLike-inc.com, current open positions are for a Web / Server (Ruby) engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test, Web/DHTML engineer, Database engineer, and desktop client engineer

Categories: Seattle Startup Shoutout

March 4, 2007

@ 09:17 PM

RSS Bandit v1.5.0.10 Released

Although this has taken much longer than I expected, the Jubilee release of RSS Bandit is now done and available for all. Besides the new features there are a number of performance improvements especially with regards to the responsiveness of the application.

Major differences between v1.5.0.10 and v1.3.0.42 below

Translations
This release is available in the following languages; English, German, Polish, French, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Serbian and Bulgarian.

Installer
Download the installer from RssBandit1.5.0.10_installer.zip . A snapshot of the source code will be availabe later in the week as a source code release.

New Features

Comment Watching
Items marked as read when viewed in the Newspaper
Date-based grouping in the list view
Options for opening tabs in the background
Favicons
Enclosures treated as attachments
Certain user defined enclosures treated as podcasts including adding to playlists in iTunes and Windows media player
Remembering application state on restart - This will work similar to the Session Saver extension in Firefox in that open tabs and the tree view state will be remembered on restart
Revamping the search feature - We've moved the implementation of feed search to Lucene.Net from our custom feed search implementation which should make searches faster and provide richer search options. The syntax for performing Lucene search queries is available at http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html
Support for Atom Threading Extensions
Easily configurable keyboard shortcuts - Just right-click when hovering over the toolbar menu and choose "Customize". This feature came as a freebie from switching to Infragistics NetAdvantage for some of our UI components.

Major Bug Fixes

Feed items appear in wrong feed folders - we now apply a set of heuristics to prevent this problem from surfacing ever again. I'm pretty sure this problem is due to bugs in HTTP Pipelining. However it is unclear whether the bugs are in the .NET Frameworks HTTP library, proxy servers that RSS Bandit is passing through or the Web servers that the application is fetching feeds from.
Relative Links in Atom 1.0 feeds appear incorrectly - now that this is fixed the links Tim Bray and Sam Ruby's feeds now work correctly
Atom feeds from the Blogger beta site show no posts when viewed in RSS Bandit - this was just a dumb bug on my part.
Sites with malformed cookies cause feeds not to be fetched - Specifically, fetching cookies from sites such as Windows Live Spaces results in the "An error has occurred when parsing Cookie header". Now we just ignore the error and soldier on.
RSS Bandit needs administrator privileges on first run - the fix for this was so esoteric it boggles my mind.
RSS Bandit stops downloading feeds after a while - This was actually two bugs. The first was that the application stopped automatically downloading feeds if any of them timed out while being fetched. The other was that feeds with whitespace in the URLs were not being updated.
Application doesn't work in Windows Vista - this has been tracked down to our use of old versions of the Divelement controls. Although these issues have been fixed in newer versions of the Divelement controls we have decided to move to NetAdvantage for Windows Forms controls for unrelated reasons. The new controls should work fine in Windows Vista.
Application crashes with NullReferenceException during Web browsing - this is another issue which should be fixed with our move to the NetAdvantage for Windows Forms controls.

Categories: RSS Bandit

March 2, 2007

@ 12:23 AM