Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • “The Cloud” is Now Meaningless

    I guess it was inevitable. It started with “Cloudwashing” where PR folks started calling everything the cloud. Now we are to the point where the “cloud” simply means “not on my computer”.

    When Aon eSolutions claims to be “the original cloud provider to the risk insurance and safety community” you know the term cloud has no real meaning.

    I guess it should be flattering to Origami. At first, competitors were telling prospects not to use us because the cloud is scary. Now they are saying they’ve been cloud all along.

    But cloud computing has real meaning. It’s about being able to harness resources on the fly with drastically reduced costs.

    Here’s a simple example. Microsoft is close to releasing the new version of SQL Server, “Denali”. Everyone is excited about the new capabilities. There’s a release candidate out there to test. But it’s a bit of a pain to buy a new server, install Windows and everything else and then install Denali.

    Amazon and Microsoft got together so that Amazon EC2 can offer a pre-built image of Denali. So we can bring up a Denali server to test with a click at minimal cost. That’s the cloud.

    I always go back to Werner Vogels description of the key benefits of a true cloud. His point was that if your “cloud” doesn’t have these benefits then it’s not a cloud:

    The cloud:

    • Eliminates Cost. The cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating costs. The utility-based pricing model of the cloud combined with its on-demand access to resources eliminates the needs for capital investments in IT Infrastructure. And because resources can be released when no longer needed, effective utilization rises dramatically and our customers see a significant reduction in operational costs.
    • Is Elastic. The ready access to vast cloud resources eliminates the need for complex procurement cycles, improving the time-to-market for its users. Many organizations have deployment cycles that are counted in weeks or months, while cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 only take minutes to deploy. The scalability of the cloud no longer forces designers and architects to think in resource-constrained ways and they can now pursue opportunities without having to worry how to grow their infrastructure if their product becomes successful.
    • Removes Undifferentiated “Heavy Lifting.”The cloud let its users focus on delivering differentiating business value instead of wasting valuable resources on the undifferentiated heavy lifting that makes up most of IT infrastructure. Over time Amazon has invested over $2B in developing technologies that could deliver security, reliability and performance at tremendous scale and at low cost. Our teams have created a culture of operational excellence that power some of the world’s largest distributed systems. All of this expertise is instantly available to customers through the AWS services.

    Of course, Origami doesn’t really argue that our product is better because it’s in the cloud. Sure, we do derive the above benefits from being in the cloud.

    But we’re winning because Origami is just a better product.

  • Bad Month for Tech

    This is a much geekier remembrance than for Steve Jobs, but I might argue just as important in the tech world. I started my tech existence reading Dennis Ritchie, as did anyone who learned C.

    If you are programming for the iPhone, you are probably using Objective-C which is an extension of original C. Frankly most programming these days owes something to the original C language (Origami is primarily C#, another extension of C).

    So a farewell to someone that no one outside of tech has even heard of. But should have…

  • Jobs

    Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

  • Social Network Overload

    OK, I’m on Google+ now. So I’m on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

    Facebook I almost never use. Not sure why, just never got hooked on it. If I want to post pictures I usually do it here.

    I used to be primarily a Twitter guy. Twitter worked well for me for quite a while as a mechanism to just have a general sense of what a small group of friends are doing. But over time, most of those people fell off Twitter. So now on Twitter I’m primarily following bloggers that I like. But if none of my friends are actively on Twitter, posting something to Twitter is pointless. And I follow the bloggers via RSS so Twitter is somewhat redundant. It’s primary purpose seems to be to circumvent the NY Times pay wall, but there’s NYTClean for that. So Twitter is slowly dying for me.

    LinkedIn is just a work tool. I don’t really do anything social with it.

    So that leaves me with Google+. Some of my friends seem to have migrated from Twitter to Google+. So I’ll give it a shot.

    Maybe I’m just not that social…

  • If This Then That

    An interesting site that I stumbled upon is iftt.com. The URL stands for “if this then that”. The site is designed to monitor various social sites for you and if one thing happens, trigger another.

    In it’s simplest form, it can monitor the Weather Channel for your location and send you a text if it’s going to rain tomorrow.

    But with “channels” including most of the major players (Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Gmail, LinkedIn, WordPress, YouTube, Instapaper, and a bunch more), the combination of things you can trigger becomes more interesting.

    And you can post a “recipe”, which is a template for how to monitor something, that other people can then use. Makes the site easier and also gives good ideas.

    For example, there’s a recipe where you can automatically tweet a “welcome” tweet as a direct message to anyone who starts following you. Kind of cool. If you are tagged in a Facebook phote, it could be automatically saved to your DropBox. I could automatically tweet every new blog post (would that be annoying or cool?).

    You can even tell it to give you a wake up call every morning.

    Truthfully, I’m not sure how much I’ll use it. But it seems pretty cool…

  • Simple Technology

    Sometimes I take for granted how simple technology makes certain tasks. This morning I needed to refill a prescription for Victoria, but I misplaced the bottle. So I wanted to call the Walgreens pharmacy. But I don’t know the phone number.

    – I touch the microphone icon on my Google widget on the home screen of my Android phone.

    – I say “walgreens locations”

    – The software recognizes what I said and does a search.

    – But since it’s my phone, it knows approximately where I am so it automatically lists the three closest Walgreens

    – And since it’s my phone, it offers a button which the phone number of each of those locations that I can click and call.

    Sure, all this location stuff has privacy concerns, but damn that’s easy.

  • Toggl

    I hate time tracking. It’s a big fat pain in the ass. No one likes doing it.

    But when clients are paying by the hour, or have purchased X number of support hours, there’s no escaping time tracking. Oh, the horror.

    Enter Toggl.

    One of the crucial things about any good software interface is figuring out the essential things and making them easy while figuring out what isn’t important and eliminating it.

    Toggl nails this. Their slogan is:

    Time tracking so easy you’ll actually use it.

    I’ve actually found myself tracking time on things that I’m not even required to track, just to know. Because it’s so easy to do. They have Android and iPhone apps but I find the web interface so good I never use anything else.

    Of course, many large companies could not use Toggl because their time tracking system has to integrate with 37 legacy systems while running on the corporate intranet.

    We are not such a company. Toggl works great. And oh yeah, it’s cheap…

  • Disney Fail

    Even the best companies screw up the little stuff. This had a major impact in our household as Danielle is suddenly way into Club Penguin…

  • IM Blues

    The oddest thing happened the other day. For reasons that are still not explained, I stopped receiving instant messages from one of my partners, Tim. I could IM him and he would get it, but his responses simply didn’t come through. It happened with one other colleague, but no one else. It was totally bizarre.

    It made me totally realize how dependent tech geeks are on IM. Tim and I regularly have conversations via IM. Email would be too clunky. Of course we could actually pick up the phone, but being tech geeks we hate that.

    I regularly use the phase, “I was talking to Tim about that”, when in fact we did not talk at all, we simply IM’d. It is truly the optimal medium for developers.

    Thankfully our IM started working again as mysteriously as it stopped. God forbid I actually talk on the phone…

  • Conscience and the NY Times

    I like the NY Times. For all of its flaws, I still believe it is the best newspaper in the country and The Grey Lady is truly “the newspaper of record” in the U.S.

    And I am a generally honest person. I’ve even been accused of being honest to a fault.

    So why am I stealing the NY Times online?

    It’s an interesting conundrum. I have a hard time paying for content on the web because the precedent has been set. I’m used to getting content for free and I expect to see ads.

    But the Times is premium content. And I appreciate the quality. Under some circumstances, I’m sure I would pay for this content. Yet I’m circumventing the paywall. Why?

    Truthfully, a big part of the reason is how ridiculously easy they made it to get around the paywall. If my favorite musician gave a concert and charged $20 which I would gladly pay, but left the side door to the concert hall open and some front row seats vacant and unwatched, I’m sorry, I’m going in the side door.

    It’s bad enough that if you see an article you want to read (all the main pages are free) you can just Google the title and read it via the search engine (yes, there’s a cap on search engine links, but there are lots of search engines). If there’s a columnist you like, you can just follow his/her twitter stream and get unlimited articles via Twitter (no cap on Twitter links that I’m aware of).

    But the fact that the NY Times spent $40 million developing a paywall that can circumvented by three lines of javascript is the clincher. As a technologist, that is basically saying to me:

    You must pay for the NY Times.

    Unless you are stupid.

    Dude, I’m not stupid…