Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software , Business of Software blog and Business of Software conference has created network.businessofsoftware.org, a social network “For anybody interested in building long term, sustainable, profitable software businesses” (as opposed to burning millions of VC money to ‘buy eyeballs’ and then flipping to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft). It is free to join. They have a Pizza and beer evening in London on 12-Nov-08.
The good folk at WordPress (where this blog is hosted) are offering a $30/year ‘no ads’ upgrade. Before I rush out and pay my $30, I am wondering how many of you actually see ads on this blog. Please add a comment below to let me know if you see any ads on this page. A simple “yes” or “no” will suffice. If the answer is “yes” a screenshot of the page would also be appreciated ( email it to andy [at] oryxdigital.com ).
Publishers of technical software books and magazines seem to struggling against the relentless onslaught of the Internet, crushed between the twin rocks of rapidly changing technology and free online content. In a recent .NET Rocks! podcast, accomplished technical author Charles Petzold (of Programming Windows fame) discusses the grim commercial realities of writing technical software books in the 21st century. It doesn’t sound good. His recent 3D programming for Windows book took 8 months to write and has sold less than 4,000 copies worldwide. As he gets royalties of around $3 per copy sold (less when sold outside the US), this equates to less than $12,000 for 8 months work. He could have made around $9,000 flipping burgers for minimum wage over the same period[1]. Ouch.
[1] Assuming 40 hours per week.
Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky’s programmer’s Q&A site stackoverflow.com has now gone from private beta to public beta today.
I have been one of the private beta testers. I find the badges a bit patronising (I’m a 42 year old professional, not a boy scout), but otherwise I have been very impressed with the site. I think it is going to be a great resource for developers – assuming they can control the group dynamics of a large number of developers (the ‘herding cats problem’) while keeping the spammers at bay. A lot of thought has gone into the reputation system, voting, badges etc so it will be interesting to see what behaviour emerges.
Go and take it for a spin. It has been designed to be ‘low friction’ – you don’t even need a login to get started.
Google continue on their path to world dominance by releasing their own browser today. It is open source and builds on elements of Apple Webkit and Mozilla Firefox. Currently the beta is only available for Windows. Whether this is going to help web app developers by adding more capabilities and setting new de facto standards, or hurt them by further fragmenting the market and creating more compatibility issues, remains to be seen. For more details see the Google Chrome blog post or the Google Chrome ‘comic book’.
Amazon have launched their Amazon payments ecommerce service. From a quick browse it looks quite similar to PayPal and GoogleCheckout in scope and pricing. It doesn’t say in the FAQ which currencies and countries are supported, so it may only be US dollars/USA at present. I already offer payment by PayPal, GoogleCheckout, 2Checkout and cheque, so I don’t feel any need to be an early adopter of Amazon. I will be keeping an eye on it though and a bit of extra competition for PayPal and Google is welcome.
image from wikipedia
Bletchley Park is a location of huge significance in the history of both the UK and the IT industry worldwide. It was at Bletchley that British codebreakers[1], including early computer science genius Alan Turing, broke the ‘unbreakable’ Nazi Enigma code during WWII. As part of this work they designed and built Colossus, arguably the first programmable electronic computer.
The breaking of the Enigma code had a huge impact on the war. Many historians believe it shortened the war significantly and saved many lives (on the winning side, at least). But the codebreaker’s huge achievements were kept secret for many years after the war, receiving no public recognition. Turing himself committed suicide after shameful treatment at the hands of the British government.
Now, to compound the neglect, Bletchley has been left to fall into increasing state of disrepair due to a lack of funding. The site was only just saved from property developers in 1991. Things have now got sufficiently bad that 97 prominent IT experts and computer scientists have written a letter to the Times this month condemning the state of repair. The Bletchley Park Trust are doing the best they can, but receive no public funding.
We are just about surviving. Money—or lack of it—is our big problem here. I think we have two to three more years of survival, but we need this time to find a solution to this.” Simon Greenish, director Bletchley Park Trust
It would be a tragedy if such a historic site was not saved. So what can you do? If you are a UK citizen you can:
and anyone can:
I hope the government will wake up to the fact that we are losing a site of national and international historical importance. Lets hope they don’t leave it too late to act.
** Interesting trivia **
The ability to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes was used as a recruitment test for codebreakers. The newspaper was asked to organise a crossword competition, after which each of the successful participants was contacted and asked if they would be prepared to undertake “a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort”. (from Wikipedia)
[1] Building on important earlier work by Polish codebreakers.
PayPal appear to be having major reliability issues over the last few weeks. When someone buys my software through PayPal I should get a PayPal notification email and PayPal should send an IPN to e-junkie. The IPN to e-junkie causes a temporary licence key to be emailed to the customer immediately and the full details of the transaction to be emailed to me (I then send a permanent licence key at my leisure). But sometimes the IPN is sent 30+ minutes after purchase. The leads to very unhappy customers. They have paid for their licence and they want the key. Now. Other times the PayPal notification email never arrives. This is less of a problem, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.
It is not just me having these problems. I have seen complaints on quite a few blogs and forums. The problems seem to be particularly acute for subscription payments. This is causing huge problems for some companies. It is rather worrying that:
a) PayPal broke something so fundamental as subscription payments. Don’t they have proper testing before they roll out changes?
b) It still wasn’t fixed 12 days later.
c) PayPal seem completely unresponsive to requests for information from developers when problems occur.
I have also noticed the PayPal sometimes includes the referral data I read from cookies in customer notification emails. There is no reason why customers should see custom data I pass through to PayPal for tracking purposes. I’m not trying to hide the fact I use cookies. But I don’t want to shove it in their face either. Whether they include this custom data in notifications emails seems quite random. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
Reliability is my top requirements for a payment processor. PayPal can’t really afford to drop the ball on something as basic as this with GoogleCheckout and Amazon payments breathing down their necks. If I was running PayPal head would be rolling. I hope they sort all these issues out soon. A bit more transparency wouldn’t hurt either.
Double amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius has finally been given the chance to qualify for the Olympics after the the IAAF’s ban on him competing against ‘able bodied’ sprinters was overturned. Oscar’s achievements in battling against his disabilities and a unsympathetic IAAF is an inspiration to everyone struggling to achieve their personal goals.
Über bloggers Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are joining forces to launch stackoverflow.com .
According to Jeff Atwood:
Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
According to Joel Spolsky:
We’re starting to build a programming Q&A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free.
There is nothing there yet, apart from a podcast. But, with their combined talents and high profiles, it could be a great resource for software developers. I will be watching with interest.
Successful Software 