I keep seeing otherwise intelligent people1{#footlink1:1251967506123.footnote} encounter problems with software but never actually report them to anyone who could fix them. For commercial software opening a support ticket takes just a few minutes and usually gets the issue resolved pretty quickly so you can stop wasting time suffering through it or complaining about it. For open source software it’s often a bit more difficult – you need to join the users mailing list and ask questions there, follow up if you don’t get a response and maybe even put together a solid bug report. Still nothing ominous.

Every so often while using NetSuite, it pops up and asks me to fill in a quick little survey – basically how likely are you to recommend NetSuite and why? This is annoying when your in a rush but on balance not a bad way for them to ensure their customers are happy.

There’s just one catch – every single time I tell them that I’d never recommend NetSuite and that they should improve product quality, specifically they should handle escaping XML tags correctly. As a company that makes HTML editors, we quite often send and receive emails that talk about HTML tags rather than just including them. Unfortunately, NetSuite for the past 5 years or more has happily messed these emails up and we’ve had to come up with complicated ways to get the original email text back out. We’ve reported this to them on multiple occasions and at one point had to actually put in a XSS exploit to get them to understand how big a problem it was. Over time they’ve shifted where the correct HTML will appear in the system, but never actually fixed it entirely.

I really don’t understand why companies don’t think Google has made their apps enterprise ready. I’ve been playing with the premium version of Google Apps the last few days and it shows all the important characteristics of enterprise software:

Innocent Looking Settings That Break Everything

Google has this in spades. My favorite is the fact that if you happen to disable a service such as e-mail, all the settings continue to apply, but disappear from the admin dashboard. The net result for me was that all the Google Apps suddenly failed to send any e-mail (but e-mail from every other source worked perfectly).

For ages now I’ve been keeping the EditLive! installer for my demo environment in subversion. Having the ability to roll back quickly and easily if something goes wrong has given me the confidence to track the development branch reasonably closely and then be able to show people the features that have just finished being developed which is fantastic market feedback. I’ve never actually had to rollback before, but today I found an alternative use: reproducing bugs.

Back in 2007 I looked at EC2 for a web server and while it wound up being feasible it had a number of drawbacks:

Those familiar with EC2 won’t be surprised to hear that we won’t be going with the service for three reasons:

1. It’s at least as expensive as the dedicated server we’d need.
2. The filesystem gets reset everytime the server reboots (S3 provides a REST API to store and retrieve data, not a filesystem)
3. The server gets a new IP address every time it reboots.

Since then Amazon have rolled out new services that solve problems 2 and 3 and reserved instances to help with 1. What surprises me after a couple of years running a single EC2 instance with an app that’s using S3 for storage though is just how stable it has been.

Remember back when the iPhone first came out and Steve Jobs proudly announced that the SDK for it was “the web”? Apparently history really does repeat itself because now Google is trying the exact same thing with Chrome OS:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. The decision was extremely unpopular with the iPhone but no doubt it will be extremely popular with Google because it matches people’s expectations. Interestingly, the most common reason people give for the iPhone’s success is now the App Store. I guess we’ll get a chance to see if they’re right or not. I don’t see the web as the only API working even though it would work very well for a large percentage of computer usage. Twitter would be a particularly good example of why – you can use Twitter via the web and certainly some people do, but the standalone clients are by far and away the best way to use it. The same generally applies to instant messaging as well.

It’s been ages since I posted anything about photography here, but I’ve been having fun learning how to take advantage of my camera more. I don’t take anywhere near as many photos as I should to really get good at it but I can see a gradual improvement which is good. I’m pleased to say that I’m quite confident shooting in AV mode now and despite never having enough time in post-processing, have a streamlined workflow that’s now reliably matching or bettering the automatic settings.

Dave Walker – Proper Care and Feeding of Computing Consultants: Excellent set of things you should do to get the most out of a consultant visit. I haven’t been consulting very long and it’s not the main part of my job, but I’d add:

• Let them know the hours you want them to be on site. It’s no fun for a consultant to be sitting outside the building at 8am when you start at 9:30. Similarly if you have an awesomely laid back European culture and finish at 4 they may be able to get an earlier plane home so it’s good to know in advance.
• Make sure the consultant knows the exact name of your department (and how to pronounce it if it’s a foreign country to them)
• Make sure you’ve lined up the important people your consultant will need to work with so that they are available. You don’t want expensive consultants wasting time waiting for people to come back from a meeting or trying to find the right people in the maze of your company.
• When they arrive show them where the bathroom is – where to get water from is important too.
• Recommended travel details if the place is hard to get to. Of course, flying into a different country and driving works out well if you just so happen to be upgraded to a convertible for free…

I think this photo more than any other symbolizes stupidity. It was taken quickly on a first generation iPhone so if you can’t see clearly what’s wrong, it’s a photo of our new screw driver set. The packaging includes a clear plastic overlay which, you guessed it, is screwed down.

That would be just normal stupidity except for the fact that the package is advertised as a DIY getting started pack, containing the essentials to get you started. Except of course, now you need the DIY getting started pack, opener pack. It’s beginning to sound like an enterprise software sale…

Stephen O’Grady:

Remember that, at its core, the iPhone offers not a whole lot more than a phone, browser, camera, iPod and GPS. Which, ok, is kind of impressive. But not truly differentiating, Apple’s acknowledged strength in user experiences aside. As good and smart as Apple is at design – and they are very, very good – they’re never going to be as good and smart as everyone else. We see this in the enterprise world frequently, where vendors that foster an ecosystem succeed and those that don’t, well, don’t. But we haven’t seen too many examples of this play out in the consumer world yet, which is one of the reasons the iPhone is such an interesting platform. With the App Store, Apple’s attempting to cement its role with a community play.

I was reminded on the weekend of how much I like working with parser generators – they’re just so pure and clean. You really feel like you’re working with a grammar and all those CS lectures come flooding back. Writing code to parse the same content by hand just never has that feel. Plus they create incredibly accurate parsers in very little time at all.

A few things I’ve discovered today that look potentially useful in the future:

• Antenna House Formatter V5 – converts HTML and CSS to PDF, including support for MathML. Heck, supporting CSS well is a plus – most HTML to PDF conversions don’t. Hat tip to one of our clients for finding that.
• jQuery Tools – there are plenty of JavaScript UI libraries around, but this one looks better componentized than most. It’s also a good, small set of components that normal web pages are likely to want, rather than being more specifically useful in web applications, though it could be used there too.
• FlowPlayer – actually I knew about this one but only just got around to looking at the details. Handy looking open source flash video player. They’ve somehow converted the GPL into a license that requires attribution which is really odd, most likely to keep their commercial licensing option open. It’s their license so they can do what they want with it but I would have thought there’d be a better fitting license.