Software

In any society if the people truthfully dislike their leader then that leader will be replaced. Long ago Microsoft applied this by developing great development tools. They managed to get people to use their libraries and their platform. From there the developers created better applications which in turned won over more users to their platform, other wise known as Windows.

Now, the same thing is happening with google, they are releasing lots of tools that developers can use like Calendars, Maps and many other apis. Their platform is the web and their massive server rooms. The latest volley in this is the Code Search .

Now to the average person this is completely useful, though for the developer it can be very useful. Soon the developers will integrate this into the tools they use every day. This will be done so they can easily find code samples to make their job easier and build applications faster.

The way google will get ahead is quite simple, make code that is good to use on their platform rank higher then something that would work on say some other empire. This way over time plenty of applications will be using parts of googles api's, web site, databases and so on.

If you are questioning why is google building such simple gadgets that will not make as much money as their adwords, adsense product. Then most like you have not taken account into what happens when you went over the people.

Brick by brick google is taking over the web and using the power of the search to do this.

A few times a year someone asks me to break copyright laws. From there I do my best to suggest getting the proper agreements to prevent having to make a court appearance.
Most of these requests come from people who see a site and really want a feature added to the site which in its self would be a money maker. The money is in the data mining of the data on the other persons company or site. Expect often if someone does not want their data to be copied a screen scrape is needed. This is where it gets tricky.

Here is a few links to copyright Myths and related info.

An article by Brad Templeton 10 Copyright myths

An article by Eric Sink Copyrights, Trademarks and patents

For Canadians, there is copyrightwatch.ca. This blog is supported by a team of academics, public interest advocates, and creators concerned that copyright serve the interests of ordinary Canadians. CopyrightWatch.ca

For real life example - Westjet vs Air Canada
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20040920_88645_88645
It ended up costing them 15 million...
http://www.cbc.ca/calgary/story/ca-westjet-settlement-20060529.html

AOL has made some fireworks with their release of search engine data. What they wanted to do with this data was provide something researchers could work with. The data its self only confirms what I have seen for many years in web logs. That is searches that are done are not very complex, which is why the power options like - / + really are not useful. Why build something no one is going to use ?

Other things that the data made me realize is there is lots of opportunity for keywords to be associated to a certain web site or brand.

The other day the big news for software was Bill Gates stepping down, my question is, did he all ready step down years ago and now is just making is public ?

For some reason when someone asks me to make something "Exactly like xyz", I have this feeling I should turn around and run. Perhaps they are really saying, if you do the exact same thing as someone else you will get a different result. Which we all know is not true.

It looks like break.com has been in the user created media arena for a few years now and has 9 million videos shown per day. Where as youtube.com has fine tuned and modernized the concept. Their boarder market appeal allows for the higher traffic and partnering up with existing media is smarter then fighting them.

I dislike software that is time comsuming to install, software that is easy to install usually gains more popularity vs software with lots of features and only advanced users can install.

With imp requiring imap for php it can cut out a number of users by cutting out the entry level.

My old setup of a deicated server on a cable connection had started costing me more money to deal with the outages then it would to get a VPS.

The company I choose for a Virtual Private Server was http://www.rackforce.com, it appears to be middle of the market. Not the most expensive which would include service options I do not need and not so low rent that it would be of poor quality.

They run Virtuozzo as their vps software which is a bit different then Xen.
http://www.rackforce.com/dds_dedicated_servers/dds_technology.html

Pros

• So far for the past month it has no downtime.


• Cpu time does not seam to be hogged by other vps


• When I need more their deticated servers are in my budget range

Cons

• Disk speed is fairly slow, not great for db intensive stuff. I had uploaded a 1 gig db for testing which worked, expect not very fast. Which means that those on a deticated server should stay there.


• I customized my apache for hosting.is.ca a free hosting service, it broke plesk very easily.

Years ago I started setting up chroot access to limit visibility of file systems and some what increase security. Now we have products like Xen, http://xen.sf.net and linux vserver http://www.13thfloor.at/vserver/d_rel26/v2.1.0/

I have setup Xen and to me it looks very promising and plan to have my hosting setup converted from a chroot. Also with the price of virtual servers now, it will be more cost effective to purchase a virtual account rather then buy new hardware.

The cost of labour for the System Administration, Hardware Maintenance and collocation
is cumbersome. I want my business to focus on providing services for my customers rather then playing with hardware that will fail and need to be upgraded.

In the past people use terminals and would dail into a mainframe to use cpu time, now this computing model is coming back big time with the Internet and regular problems with windows maintenance.

After reinstalling Windows XP and every other application Quickbooks finally installs and works. After the long battle with Quickbooks I have grown my apperication for web applications and the time it takes to install Unix based solutions.


Windows is fine for simple home applications, expect once you get into more complex applications of the operating systems you constantly require more and more tools to make up for the OS its self.


My guess is, if microsoft provided a way to segment installs of applications a little more then this would be less of a problem.

After reading some of the sec filings on Intuit it is clear that they are depending on new products and features to create future revenue. Though from looking at Quickbooks, they have rewrote the database interface and SDK. These improvements appear to be at the cost of imporved install ablities on Windows XP.


Putting my self in their shoes and if I was an accountant pulling the strings, ith a new release of windows comming out, the investment on extra testing for XP might of seamed unneeded. In the end with the amount of problems that it has caused is not going to be postivite for them on this year. Maybe next year they will increase the budget ? Or maybe they are just getting their customers to beta test the software even though they declare it as stable.

I can only guess that their stock will drop somewhat after losing a bit of market share and 2007 will be a better year due to more offerings.

Quickbooks Pro 2006 has been very Quick at sucking up 6 hours of my time trying to do installs. Repeated errors over AnswerWorks 4.0 , dll files missing, on top of that I seen a number of interesting things.

Quickbooks Pro 2006 is suppose to be a complete rewrite or at lest a large update, though to me that just appears to be a marketing thing. Perhaps it is just the USA version that is a rewrite as Quickbooks Pro 2006 looks like a rehash of the older version. Two things that I noticed,

1. Install scripts referring to 2003 Quickbooks.

2. The large amount of problems with people installing Quickbooks on XP and yet Windows 98,Me,2000 all seam to go much smother then Quickbooks on XP.

This is based on me testing installs on various machines around to see how things work out. Xp is the only one that seams to have some serious issues.
Which is very silly considering XP is about to be replaced, so my guess is that once Vista is up and running XP will be fine, then some where in 2007 to 2008 they will drop windows 98,Me,2000 support so it handles the Xp / Vistia Kernal much better.

My History

After looking at various way of handling my accounting, I decided on using Quickbooks for the 2006 year. Before hand I had used, Simply Accounting for a couple of years and then had a in house solution. Rather then spending the money to have the in house solution upgraded I am looking to have the Custom software integrated with QuickBooks.

Why QuickBooks ?

Both software products have very similar product lines, features and prices. Leaving out those options it was left up to who had the best developer program. Intuit won easly due to the avaliablity of their sdk. I contacted Sage / Simply Accounting a while ago and yet to receive a response. To me, that is a clear indication that my business is unwanted.

Simply Accounting - cloak and dagger

Personaly I do not like cloak and dagger companies when it comes time to integrate with their solutions. In the past when I have tried to work with companies that use this model they attempt to have you contract the integration work out to them or just make it plan difficult to do any thing.

Simply Accounting seams to be more of a Training company then a software development company. If you look at their Simply Accounting 8.0B from 2000 it is all most the same as their current 2006 version. The big improvement was made in their help files.

Intuit - Freedom

Intuit makes the documentation for their sdk open to developers who opt in, this gives the freedom to do what is needed. When a company runs with a model like Intuit does, development of applications usually goes much faster, bug free, smoother and the end result in more Orders.

Never Enter Data Twice! (NED2 ^TM) http://www.developer.intuit.com/QuickBooksSDK/Features/

The NED2 policy is exactly what I am looking for, any company can benifit from avoiding repeating of tasks.

My brother told me of a local Halifax company called Sports Direct, http://www.sportsdirectinc.com After looking at their site I ponder on if they are looking to be bought out by a larger media company.