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Content Tagged with AllPeers + Software

TechCrunch is running a guest post of mine about the exciting new field of site-specific browsers. Needless to say, it’s a honor to be on TechCrunch, and I hope my article will help to increase awareness of what SSBs are and why they’re important. Personally I’m convinced that they represent the future of web apps.

I haven’t seen any sign yet of the “gaggles of groupies” that Mike promises in the post’s comments, but I’m sneaking out the back door to pick up a sombrero and some wraparound sunglasses, just in case.

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Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis caused a blogostorm with his candid treatise on making every startup dollar count. The controversy is not especially surprising when his list of tips for thrifty includes such items as “fire people who are not workaholics” (which provoked so much ire that he felt compelled to change it to “fire people who don’t love their work”). Some went as far as to label Calacanis a “prick“, with the obligatory observation that they’ve never heard or his company, but love to death the products of cooler companies who pay for their employees to go backpacking.

I’ve seen both approaches in action in my day. More than one startup founder has told me that they keep the hours reasonable because they “don’t want to burn out their staff.” Sorry, but what I heard was “I’m too lazy to work long hours so I can’t expect my staff to.” Of course, it depends to some degree on your ambitions. If your goal is to earn a good living with a bunch of smart, like-minded folks tackling some not-too-intractable problem, with plenty of free time to bungee jump from helicopters or make erotic origami, that is doable. But if you want to create a world-beating company, Mike Arrington has it nailed: your odds of succeeding are long enough without four-day weeks and ambling trips to the local juice bar five times a day.

Besides which, software geeks don’t have the same view of life/work balance as most people. In their response to Jason’s post, 37signals explain that:

Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

Probably the guy who wrote this is a graphic designer or something, since for all the real programmers I know, the most interesting subject imaginable is the software project they are currently working on. That’s why our social skills suck so bad. When we run into someone who isn’t a geek, we have no idea what to talk about. Naturally this gets old eventually, and even the pocket protector set ends up settling down, getting a dog and starting a family. Ever wonder why most startups are populated mainly with 20-somethings?

Which brings me to my real point: in light of this state of affairs, does Europe have a chance in the software biz? I’ve been working in European software startups for 15 years (and running them for 10). Having grown up in America, I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of obsessiveness when it comes to driving the company’s success. Programmers on this side of the pond work a lot harder than, say, post office clerks, but traditionally it’s still been a far cry from the mattress-under-your-desk workathon of the American startup nerd. When Arrington mocked the idea of “three weeks vacation” I had to smile. Over here, the big question is whether we can beat our staff down from five to only four weeks.

The good news is that the situation is changing. I’m seeing more and more startups built up around the American model. Globalization, more awareness of “cool” company cultures like Google’s and a few European home runs (such as Skype) are helping to reshape attitudes on this side of the pond. Lack of precedents for success, paucity of venture capital, stifling regulation and excessive risk aversion have conspired with our generally sedate work habits to lock Europeans into second-class citizen status in the software world. As we overcome these obstacles, I expect we’ll mount a much more credible challenge to America’s technological dominance.

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You think you’ve put it all behind you, but one tiny script and you tumble off the wagon. Such is the fate of the Greasemonkey addict. Someone mentioned yesterday that MXR search results should include a link to CVS Blame. (Regular readers of this blog are used to ignoring me when they don’t know what I’m talking about, right?) Rumor has it that real support for this is in the works, but I went ahead and wrote a script, just because I could. After all, the hallmarks of a good Greasemonkey script are quick-and-dirty hacks and planned obsolescence, and this one emphatically has both:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Add MXR blame links
// @namespace      http://justdiscourse.com
// @description    Add links to CVS Blame to MXR search results
// @include        http://mxr.mozilla.org/*search?string*
// ==/UserScript==

var results = document.getElementsByTagName("ul");
for (var i = 0; i 

Click here to install (Greasemonkey required).

It’s incredibly empowering to have this kind of client-side control over your browsing experience. One of these days someone is going to do this right and it’ll take over the world.

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The inimitable Robert X. Cringely, who writes a much-read weekly tech column for PBS, brings new insights to the white-hot Microsoft/Yahoo merger story in this week’s piece. Cringely may or may not be talking out of his hindquarters with his speculation that Microsoft’s main motivation for the takeover attempt is to achieve a culture shift inside the company, but at least he brings something new to the party. Indeed, the most interesting part of the article is arguably the first paragraph:

It’s a challenge for a journalist coming late to a story like Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo. I had literally just pressed the SEND key on last week’s column when news hit the wire. What to do? The way things are structured at PBS I couldn’t just pump out another column (that structure may be changing by the way), so the big question was whether the passage of seven days would make pointless anything I would have to say. So I waited and waited, and it is a testament to the shallowness and endless repetition of both the tech and business media that there is still plenty to say about the deal, the true nature of which few people yet understand.

Quite. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve simply become bored with the self-referential ranting of the tech blogosphere or whether it has actually become boring. I still read Techmeme every day, but I’m increasingly drawn to a select group of publishers: mainstream publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc.), a small handful of professional-quality tech news/analysis blogs (Ars Technica, Read/Write Web, sometimes TechCrunch), individuals with real credentials (Nick Carr, John Battelle, etc.), speciality blogs (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, TorrentFreak, etc.), company blogs and the occasional random article that catches my eye.

Granted, this is still a pretty broad group, but I don’t read all of them all the time. I try to get news about a given story from the best, most authoritative sources. For example, for analysis of the Microhoo sturm und drang, I read articles in the NYT and WSJ and the announcement on Microsoft’s web site. Why would I spend the time reading six or seven rehashings on all the “A list” tech news blogs out there? What purpose do these me-too pieces actually serve?

I predict a slow decline in the number of such blogs. It’s kind of harsh to put it this bluntly, but if you don’t do any real reporting, don’t write exceptionally well and stir up interest mainly through wild speculation, your long-term prospects probably aren’t great. Instead, the mainstream news outlets (and their blogging arms, like Bits and AllThingsD) will win the battle for general tech news and analysis. They’ll buy the best blogging networks, so TechCrunch and Read/Write Web are heading for a big payday. The other A listers will fade into oblivion as tech news junkies like me realize that they have better ways to spend their time.

The other area that has a bright future is specialty blogging. Rather than reading what some dude who has built up a big audience by blogging something generic about absolutely every story that crosses the wires has to say about the ruckus du jour, folks will seek enlightenment from the blog best placed to have inside information or true insights. Incidentally, that’s one of the main reasons I decided to set up my own specialty blog, Just Browsing, rather than continue to pen my own uninformed opinion pieces on random topics here on Peer Pressure. Yes, like this one.

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I can’t resist this one. I was already shaking my head in disbelief when prominent Wall Street idiot Henry Blodget pipped the blogging world at the post by publishing what is doubtless the worst idea of 2007 on December 29th. Does anyone still believe the laughable notion that a failed, tired brand has some great intrinsic value? If so, perhaps they should consider for a moment the purchase of the Napster brand by Roxio in 2002 for $5 million. Brands have momentum, and if someone had snapped up the Napster name in its heyday to launch a legal music service, it would doubtless have been worth much, much more. As it transpires, Napster was dead and gone in letter and spirit by the time Roxio bought it, and as of May 2006 the service had lost them a further $175 million. But hey, the Netscape brand has done so much for AOL, right? It takes some serious balls to make this proposal in the face of (nay, as a consequence of) direct proof that it has already resulted in one dismal failure.

His previous bout of Mozilla blathering having presumably resulted in a satisfying bump in traffic, Blodget is back with an even stupider idea: a Mozilla IPO. My issue with the post isn’t that an IPO would be counter to the open source ethos or that it would alienate the all-important Firefox community, although there are strong cases to be made for both of these. I’ve argued in the past that Mozilla would benefit from stronger capitalist motivations. Nor do I dispute his assessment of Mozilla’s value. If anything, $4 billion seems conservative for a company with its assets.

No, the real issue is his total lack of understanding of the Mozilla community ethos. Again, this mind set often frustrates me, but the reality is that Mozilla management would never, ever contemplate an IPO, anymore than they would plaster ads on the Firefox start page to generate more revenue (another of Blodget’s priceless suggestions). It’s more than a bit like suggesting that the Dalai Lama could make a mint by setting up an international “Dalai’s Lama Hut” franchise chain (”buy two tender Bodhisattva Burgers and get a Spiritual Strawberry Shake absolutely free of charge!”). Ain’t gonna happen. Sorry.

Even more to the point: isn’t this totally, utterly illegal? Can a non-profit launch a multibillion dollar IPO? Wouldn’t that amount to tax evasion on a stupendously massive scale? Maybe I’m wrong, but I would have thought that Blodget, supposedly a financial expert, would have at least addressed this.

But then let’s remember why he’s famous in the first place: for jumping on the dot.com hype bandwagon in front of the curve and looking like a genius for a total of, what, two odd years, until it all crashed back to earth around him? Why should we care that he turned out to be completely off target, or that he was then booted off Wall Street for securities-related improprieties? I guess it’s oddly appropriate that in the modern media environment, you can become famous and influential simply for being wrong on a sufficiently heroic scale.

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UPDATE: Based on some discussion on IRC I probably should have given some more background to this post. In a nutshell, we are a Firefox extension and we store data in SQLite. For our extension’s user interface we want to generate markup (specifically HTML) from this data using templates that describe the page to generated, with placeholders for dynamic data. Something very similar to PHP, JSP, ASP, etc. in other words, but running on the client inside the Firefox process.

I’ve felt for some time that we need to change the way that AllPeers generates its user interface. For the most part, this is currently accomplished using a rather byzantine JavaScript-based framework loosely inspired by Eclipse. Experience has shown that this framework is a) rather slow, b) difficult for people to learn and understand and c) completely non-standard. At the same time, it’s proven challenging to find a viable alternative that meets all our requirements:

• Minimal code footprint
• Fast
• Support for recursivity (iterating hierarchical structures)
• Support for polymorphism (different template fragments for different types of data when iterating over a set)
• Support for streaming generated markup
• Execution possible in a background thread
• Simple syntax conducive for working with graphic designers

The last point rules out XSLT, in my mind, since it’s too difficult to work effectively with a graphic designer who creates static HTML pages. How are such pages to be maintained once they have been broken up into lots of little template rules? So we took a close look at the various open source templating engines out there. There are some appealing options based on Python, but we decided that shipping the Python runtime with AllPeers is not realistic, which narrowed the choice down to two C++-based solutions: CTemplate and Clearsilver.

Then I read a recent blog post by Mark Finkle, prompting me to look again at an option that’s been kicking around in my head for ages: using XUL Templates. When I first investigated this a couple of years ago, they didn’t appear up to the task, but substantial improvements have been made since then. The ability to graft straight onto a SQLite database, in particular, is of great interest to us.

The main issue I see with XUL Templates is that we may want at some point to move AllPeers to its own process, leaving only a thin UI layer in Firefox. This implies that our future template engine will have to generate markup to a stream rather than manipulating a DOM directly. In addition, we may want to do this in two phases, initially running the generator in a protocol handler inside the Firefox process. So it has to work on a background thread. To my knowledge, XUL Templates currently can’t do either.

Do we go ahead and adapt an outside framework like Clearsilver for our purposes? Or do we try to soup up XUL Templates to meet our additional requirements. I’d love to opt for the latter since I think these improvements might be of value to the Mozilla community at large. But it’s a tough call without knowing the answers to the following questions:

• Is anyone else out there interested in using XUL Templates to stream markup, run on a background thread, etc.?
• How much work would it be to adapt the XUL Template engine to our requirements?
• Is there a “third way” that I am missing?

Any input on either of these points would be greatly appreciated.

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Brendan Eich delivers a vicious smackdown to Microsoft for dissembling their motives regarding ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2). In essence, Microsoft is pushing back against ES4, claiming it is unnecessarily complex, while simultaneously touting its own full-blown web development framework (C#, .NET, Silverlight and friends). The reeks of hypocrisy and serves as further proof that Microsoft is continuing to employ its famous “embrace and extend” strategy on the web.

I can’t resist pointing out that, when I made a similar argument for improving web markup, the very same Brendan smacked me down for pragmatic reasons:

jgraham already pointed out the Prisoner’s Dilemma facing browser vendors trying to gain market share. Cooperate with the purity police while IE continues to defect? You lose.

Be that as it may, we’re all on the same side here, and the real question is how to push forward innovation on the web despite the daunting inertia of a billion legacy web browsers, most of which are controlled by a corporate entity that is pursuing its own strategic agenda. Whether we’re talking about better markup or better scripts, we quickly bump up against the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” that Brendan evokes.

I can see two possible solutions. One is a true paradigm shift. If people stop using web browsers as we currently know them in favor of, say, Rich Internet Application platforms like AIR or Prism, there will be an opportunity to deploy superior technologies that break with the past. In this scenario backwards compatibility is nice-to-have but not essential. For example, Google might decide to implement some future generation of Gmail on top of an RIA runtime in order to provide a more compelling user experience. In this case, I could easily see them opting for Mozilla’s open Prism technology rather than Adobe’s or Microsoft’s proprietary stack. If most people end up with Mozilla’s runtime on their machines, strategic control of web technologies would slip from Microsoft’s grasp.

The other option is to out-embrace and out-extend Microsoft. This might involve taking a page out of Adobe’s book by developing an ActiveX for IE that let’s users run ES4 and other goodies without having to convince Microsoft itself to play along. As it transpires, an ActiveX control for the Gecko rendering engine already exists, so there may not be too many technical obstacles to achieving this. Much more of a challenge, of course, is getting the deployment story right so that enough people end up installing the control in their browser.

The sad fact is that cooperating with web standards efforts that threaten the viability of its own strategic web initiatives is simply not in Microsoft’s interest, maddening as this may be. It won’t be easy, but pulling an end run around the Evil Empire and beating them at their own game is probably the only real option. And it’ll be oh so satisfying if we can pull it off.

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I wrote a while back about our intern Luděk’s work on demonstrating how AllPeers can be extended by installing additional Firefox extensions that we call “extras”. The first extras added support for uploading images to Flickr and links to del.icio.us as part of the sharing process. They aren’t really ready for primetime, but they are good demonstrations of how one extension can extend another (in general) and how new features can be added to AllPeers (specifically).

Since then, Luděk has been hard at work writing additional AllPeers extras. It is certainly a goal for these to be useful to some AllPeers users. With a bit of luck they will also be useful for those thinking about the requirements for adding real support for extension dependencies to Firefox. And, ideally, we’ll eventually see third parties motivated to write extras for AllPeers. You can see all the extras currently available on our new extras page.

As far as the Flickr and del.icio.us extras are concerned, it occurred to me recently that a better approach would be for these (and potentially other services) to be available in a way analogous to normal contacts. So I can share an image with my friends Bob, Fred and “Flickr”. The latter would result in the image being uploaded to their website rather than being shared via the AllPeers network. Luděk seems to agree so expect to see this in a future version.

Another cool extra provides operating system shell integration. After installing it you get a new context menu option in your file manager to share files with AllPeers. This makes it quicker and easier to share files without having to go through a potentially cumbersome drag-and-drop process. It works both on Windows and on GNOME’s Nautilus, KDE’s Konqueror and Dolphin and XFCE’s Thunar (which I like to refer to collectively as “Linux stuff”).

The final extra lets you set up a special user who will automatically receive any files you share. So if you have one machine that’s always on, you can install the caching user there and be sure that your files will always be available even if the computer you shared from (e.g. your laptop) isn’t. This is an elegant solution to the “no sources” problem that plagues all peer-to-peer networks.

I hope that these will be of both educational and practical value to others. I’ll blog about other extras as they appear. If anyone has ideas, drop me a line.

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When the iPhone was released, there was plenty of bellyaching about the lack of an SDK for third-party apps. Then Apple stepped up and announced that the “SDK” for the new device would be the Safari web browser, combined with Web 2.0 techniques (i.e. gobs of JavaScript on the client). Some hailed this as a visionary idea while others griped (somewhat paradoxically) that “web apps are not applications”. The situation became muddier when rogue developers quickly released a user interface toolkit and a package manager that makes it braindead simple to install native (albeit unauthorized) OS X apps designed for the iPhone.

I’ve been plugging the idea of web apps as the future of applications for a while, with a particular emphasis on WebRunner. So naturally I’ve been intrigued by Apple’s decision to make the web their official SDK. Having got my hot little hands on one, however, I’m disappointed by the current lack of features that would make this direction viable. As far as I can see, you can’t even add an app to the pretty grid of colorful icons that serves as the iPhone’s main menu. Besides integration with the underlying OS, there are many other gaps if the browser is to serve as an application platform: offline storage, Flash, more sophisticated web forms, etc. (Mike Shaver had a great overview of future web browser features at Mozilla 24.)

When Apple announced Safari for Windows I hypothesized that this would allow them to roll out exactly these kinds of proprietary browser-as-a-platform features. I still think that the use of web apps as the standard iPhone development paradigm is brilliant, but the current offering is totally inadequate. I predict that Apple will start to announce fancy new features for Safari or (hopefully) jump on board of existing efforts like XUL, Flex, Google Gears and the like.

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So Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington are calling for a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web which can be summarized with 3 words: Ownership, Control and Freedom.

Well well well… How interesting! This is exactly what I have been writing about for the last 2 days and what we’ve been saying amongst ourselves for 4 years. It is so refreshing to see that people are waking up to this. I’m not sure where this will go but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

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