Ben Balbo

There is devilry afoot in the Redmond offices. That tautology became stronger on the 5th of November with this press release:

SAN FRANCISCO, November 5

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Microsoft BizSpark, a global program designed to help accelerate the success of entrepreneurs and early-stage startups. BizSpark provides startups and entrepreneurs with fast and easy access to current full-featured Microsoft development tools and production licenses of server products with no upfront costs and minimal requirements. BizSpark also provides technical support and market visibility. BizSpark is structured to take advantage of the resources and support of a global network of hundreds of organizations such as economic development agencies, university incubators, hosters and investors, including The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). These BizSpark Network Partners provide guidance, mentorship and resources to help drive startup success.

See full press release here.

You might consider this as a sign that Microsoft wants to support small and enterprising startups, but what’s the real story behind this?

The pessimist (or realist?) in me looks back at other Microsoft campaigns to build their customer base and assumed this is yet another attempt to lock people in to their proprietary formats and systems.

As someone who runs his own company based largely on only open source software, I find it hard to understand why people and organisations would opt for systems that lock you in even if it is cost-free. The problem here is the time-limit part of the deal. After the three years of cost-free access, you will be required to pay for the services you use, or migrate to another system.

Migrating is often an arduous task and most organisations will opt for lower short-term costs in licence fees over the cost of porting their systems to new infrastructure. The long term financial costs will keep adding up though, and over time the migration process will become more complex and less attractive. You will be heading down a spiral towards total dependence on Microsoft products!

Consider now a business such as mine that is not reliant on any proprietary software or services. I’ve been using these systems for well over three years now and have paid nothing and will continue to pay nothing. Sure, there are costs such as hardware, power, Internet access; but these are common across all businesses. I might also have spent a little more time in setting up my infrastructure initially, but having been a Windows administrator in a previous life I can attest to the fact that maintaining my infrastructure after deployment is less intensive and demanding than the Microsoft alternatives.

I’m also freer than any business that runs Microsoft products. If I want to change the way OpenOffice.org works for me, I can change it, or pay someone to change it for me. You cannot change the way Microsoft Word works. If I want to recompile the Linux kernel to increase performance or hardware compatibility, I can do that. You cannot run Windows on any hardware you like. If I buy a new computer, I can copy all of my applications over and run them on both machines at the same time. You can also do this, but that would contravene the end user licence agreement you agreed to when installing the software.

So tell me now, why would you take up Microsoft’s BizSpark offer if the open source world can offer your business the same service with no lock-in, no cost and more freedom?

I was just going through a list of sites that link here and stumbled back upon Russ Weakley’s Anatomy of a comment. Having wanted to try and tick all his boxes for a while, I think I’ve managed to make my comments section a little more accessible.

Russ identifies these attributes of a comment:

Author name – who wrote the comment

Authors url – the authors website

Authors avatar – the digital representation of the author

Permalink – a permanent link to the specific comment

Number – A reference number for the specific comment

Date – date of comment

Time – time of comment

Comment – the actual comment

Edit this comment – allows authors to edit their comments

Other comments by this person – see example

Site owner flagging – some sort of visual distinction to shows comments from the site owner/s

At the time of his post (9th Feb 2008) my site showed the author’s name, comment date and time and the comment itself. That’s essentially the bare minimum.

If you check out any of my posts that have comments today, you’ll find the author’s name, their web site url, avatar (the little picture), a permalink to the comment, the comment number for that post, date, time, comment and site owner flagging. I might add an “other comments by this author” feature at some point.

Russ also discovered there are many ways in which permalinks are offered:

1. Date
2. Time
3. Date and time (by far the most common option)
4. A graphic icon
5. The # symbol
6. The word “permalink”
7. Comment title

My site used the date and time version, but I’ve now also linked the comment number and added the text (permalink) after the date.

So what’s the point of all this? I’m not sure!

Perhaps I felt I had to fill in the gaps that Russ had identified. Perhaps my pedantic nature won’t allow me not to make this site as accessible as possible. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that last sentence which will no doubt bite me in the backside when people point out obvious omissions in accessibility on my site.

Russ was looking at this from a developer’s point of view. I’d like to hear the readers opinion.

So tell me, do you care? Do you ever bookmark comments or just the whole post? What about emails to friends and colleagues? Do you care that it’s comment number 45? Does it help or distract when the author’s posts are highlighted? Do avatars annoy you or do you like them?

This email came to the Melbourne PHP Users Group today:

Hello Ben
I am trying to urgently locate someone who could assist my son with a web programming Uni assignment, which needs to be finished by Friday. The person would be well remunerated.

I look forward to your reply.

Annette

To which I responded:

Hi Annette,

As a former University tutor, I’m abhorred by your request. Please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to be rude or insulting, but your son’s University project is designed to test his ability to meet the requirements of his course, and I cannot condone offering assistance in this regard.

Please note that my views might not reflect those of the Melbourne PHP Users Group, but, as a group that promotes learning, I doubt any member would feel differently.

I wish your son the best of luck with his assignment.

Ben Balbo

Outrageous!

Update: 2008-10-16 16:16

Reply from Annette:

Hi Ben, thanks for your email. But, as you should have seen, I was asking for assistance ­ tutoring and mentoring ­ not asking for someone to do his assignment for him. There are times when we all need help, and while he left it a little late to seek assistance, I am trying to help him. Don’t kids get outside tutoring at all ages these days, from primary school to university level…

My Response:

[Re: misunderstanding the request]

I’m afraid your original email didn’t carry the sentiment you were
striving for. Asking for someone to:

Assist [your] son with a web programming Uni assignment, which needs
to be finished by Friday

sounds very different to asking for someone to tutor your son in PHP.

[Re: extra tuition and running out of time]

Absolutely, extra tuition is not uncommon. I think the problem here is the lateness, as you point out. I don’t begrudge you trying to help your son, but if he’s not able to make adequate use of the, in my experience, extremely accommodating support network of his lecturers and tutors and identify issues in his time management then there are larger issues at stake.

University courses are not solely designed to teach skills to students; there is as much of an emphasis on self learning, time management, communication skills, issue resolution, risk analysis, and so on. Universities teach people how to operate in a working environment. Employers consider University degrees to denote a person has the ability to work independently (whether by themselves or in teams) – something that is not assumed of high school graduates that enter the workforce without a degree.

I say all of this not to assume some position of authority or to be condescending, but to hopefully assist your son in completing his degree and benefit to the fullest extent possible. On a more personal note, I didn’t discover or fully comprehend any of this until the final year of my University degree and believe it would have helped me enormously if I had worked on the non-academic skills I should have developed in the previous years.

Regards,
Ben Balbo

According to yesterday morning’s ABC Radio National show, cloud computing will pose a danger to your on-line privacy and security with people able to read your email, see what web sites you’ve visited and reconcile your on-line activities, banking details and buying habits. We’re also going to hear a lot about cloud computing in the coming months because Google have just released their latest product, Chrome.

That’s what I understood from the show. I’m not entirely sure how Chrome fits in to the equation, but I’ll get to that later.

So apparently cloud computing is a system that allows applications to run “in the cloud”* where all data is accessible by Google. The presenters did single out Google but added that other cloud computing providers could also access any data in their part of the cloud.

Experts were also quoted as being concerned about the security of the data in cloud computing environments as, not only does the user need to trust the application developer and maintainer, but any other third party that the application hosting is reliant upon. Currently people only need to worry about the software producers as all data is stored on your local computer.

I think there’s a massive amount of confusion here, or perhaps I’m the one that’s confused.

Let’s examine my view of what cloud computing is: computing power that resides “in the cloud” and isn’t dependent on one piece of hardware. I’ll flesh that out a little.

* Just a comment of “in the cloud” – in network diagrams “clouds are used to represent networks external to the one pictured for the purposes of depicting connections between internal and external devices, without indicating the specifics of the outside network” [wikipedia]. Generally this refers to the Internet.

In the beginning there were servers. Real, physical boxes that ran an operating system. They would be web servers, database servers, email servers, and so on. Some servers would provide more than one function, offering web, database and email hosting, for example. People had the choice between having their own dedicated (physical) server or hosting in a shared environment where multiple clients’ web sites were hosted on one physical box. The latter option was much cheaper but also provided less flexibility in terms of server configuration for the end client.

Then there were virtual private servers. Imagine a physical server that contains multiple virtual servers. Each virtual server has its own operating system, its own disk space and can run its own programs. This provided the functionality of a dedicated server at a fraction of the cost.

Now imagine having a virtual private server but you don’t know where it is. You don’t have a concept of it residing on a physical server – it’s simply out there “in the cloud” somewhere.

That is, in my view, cloud computing. Removing the “isn’t dependent on one piece of hardware” part of my definition would make any server fit the description of cloud computing.

So why are all these people concerned about cloud computing being such a threat to privacy? Cloud computing will allow web-based applications to scale more readily to demand, so perhaps more web-based applications will be hosted in a cloud computing environment. Perhaps it’s also because Google’s online applications (Docs, Calendar, Reader, etc.) are perceived to run in a cloud computing environment and that Google are the custodians of your data. Together with their Adsense technology, it’s assumed that Google know everything about you.

The dangers are, of course, already there. I use Google calendar for all my appointments, so they know whom I know, where I’ve met them and when all my friends’ birthdays are. My news reader of choice is Google Reader. I use Twitter to share my current actions, feeling, learnings, rants. Technorati and Google Blogs index my blog. I used to use Saasu for all my business accounting and billing. Running these applications in a cloud computing environment is not going to make these data any more reconcilable than they already are.

One example given of the privacy concerns was that people will now be able to read your email and see which web sites you’ve visited. Well, I can (but don’t) read all my clients’ emails – they’re stored on my server. My ISP can see every web page I’ve requested (and most of the time its contents) and probably passes that information to Hitwise. Google Analytics knows a fair amount of where I’ve been and what I like.

Caveat lector: I have not managed to determine what Google’s policies are on data stored on Google’s App Engine. If you know, please add a comment to this post.

In my view this is all hype about nothing. We’re no less secure than we were before. The goal posts have not moved, we’ve just been given a different playing field in which to kick our balls around.

And as for Google Chrome being part of this whole cloud computing thing, it’s a browser! It’s as much part of cloud computing as Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer are. Sure, it runs Javascript faster, is apparently less likely to crash completely and might be a superior browser when using online applications. It’s also been said that Chrome could be the Google Operating system that was being talked about many moons ago. Chrome is the operating system that provides access to the applications that reside in the cloud. But it’s still just a browser.

Given my near-paranoid tendencies when it comes to security and privacy, should I be worried?

I’m surprised I haven’t blogged about this yet, but as some of you know, I have this “vanity folder” in my RSS reader. It’s an idea I got from elsewhere quite some time ago, but essentially you search Google News, Google Blogs, Technorati, etc, for your name, domain name, company name and so forth. Each of these result sets are available as an RSS feed which you then add to your reader.

Every time someone says something about you or related to you (according to your search conditions) it’ll appear in your reader. One instance this came in useful is when someone misspelt my name in their article and I was able to be notified, notify them, and have it fixed.

Yesterday I noticed Glen Stansberry’s article, 10 Principles of the PHP Masters, quoted me. It seems his article has been really popular, as it’s now also available in Spanish and Bosnian!

So while it might feel a bit egotistical to check out who’s talking about you, sometimes it can help you rectify small, or even large, errors about you, your company or your brand. It helps you find out who’s interested in what you’re doing which could help you expand your professional or social network.

And sometimes it just shows you an interesting trend, like the Spanish and Bosnians are interested enough to translate the 10 Principles of the PHP Masters – I haven’t found (or looked especially hard for) a French or German version yet.

In related news, Twitter has acquired Summize, a service that allowes you to track words and phrases across the public twitter timeline. I’m currently using TwitterSpy with my jabber account and every time someone mentiones my name, company name or keywords of interest to me (i.e. streaming) I get a jabber message. This allows me to find other Twitter users that have similar interests, and I’ve already started following a couple of “strangers” after finding them through TwitterSpy!

How do you track yourself on the Internet? Have I missed some great tool? Drop me a line in the comments section!