Visa DHL delivery på en större karta

Like most people living in Stockholm (and other cities I guess) I live in an apartment building to which you have no access. Also, like most people, I work during the day. Nothing special, just normal office hours, about the same hours when your drivers drive around the city trying to deliver stuff to the empty homes of people who are at work.

Knowing that you will fail to enter the building where I live (it doesn’t really matter since I’m not at home anyway), I have tried to contact you to see if I can do a part of your work by going to your terminal myself to pick up my package.

For some unknown reason you can’t refrain from trying to deliver it my empty home. Maybe it is in he nature of logistics people inherited in genes from loyal post office workers of the good old days?

Anyway, this means I have to wait for you to fail delivery and take the package back to your terminal and then send me a message (through regular mail) that you failed. A process that takes several days.

When I walk home from work I pass a 7-eleven with a sign that says “DHL Servicepoint”. It is bright and yellow and only about 150 yards from my home (I can almost see it if I lean out through my living room window). Intrigued by the words “service” and “point” I inquired, though your eminent call center, if it was possible to have the package delivered there instead? I was hoping I could save both you and me some work (and time). For unknown reasons you are not allowed to deliver my package to your own servicepoint. Words fail me.

My second suggestion was to change the address so that you may deliver it to my workplace instead. It is a bit of a gamble since I am in meetings throughout the day and may not be around at the exact random time your delivery guy tends to show up. This was possible, your friendly call center employee told me, but we have to try to deliver the package to your empty home first.

How hard can it be? I had a crazy idea. What if logistics was all about making use of information to optimize flows of goods?

Visa DHL delivery på en större karta

That image stuck with me (and a lot of other people I guess). But interesting things have happened over the years that changed how I think about Sun:

1. Bad: At one point I got the impression that Sun wanted Java on pretty much any platform you could think of. We were supposed to have java on the desktop, server, mobile phone, client, backend, both country and western as Mark Pilgrim would have put it. The Swing based GUIs really didn’t help the user experience in the early days.
2. Good: Someone sent me an email sometime in 2005 saying that Sun was going to let people borrow a T2000 server for free. I checked prices and even though it was expensive compared to a grey box it was a major dent in the Sun-is-expensive image I had had previously. I know other people were talking about this as well even though we mainly did business consulting at the time. Must have been a marketing genious that came up with that plan. I didn’t even work with hardware and I still remember the campaign!
3. Good: Sun open sourced Solaris. This was a major one. I downloaded the DVD image files as soon as they became available. I know a lof of other people who did this as well. Never used it since even though I have looked for it.
4. Good: Zones. At one point I believe everyone I knew wanted to set up their own hosting business selling zones to Rails and PHP developers. Noone did. I don’t know why, but Linux virtualization was beginning to increase market share. Having tried both Xen and Zones, Zones felt a lot better. But everyone is selling Linux-based virtualization with Linux-based OSs anyhow (try filtering for Solaris in the list). Why?
5. Good: And now the storage thing. Having seen the bill from a government agency for their current storage solution I am beginning to think that Sun storage will have a huge impact.
6. Good: Glassfish. I know a lof of people doing Rails development and many are starting deployment on a tiny Linux VPS and then move it to a Glassfish instance once income is increasing.

So, in the end I guess Sun isn’t that enormous massively over priced giant anymore. But why aren’t people running their web apps on Sun hardware or on Solaris? I guess one of the reasons is about scaling down. There are many Linux-based VPS providers out there running on cheap hardware. The cost/Mb RAM for a VPS is tiny these days and maybe it is too costly to get even a small Sun server up and running you want to resell capacity.

So, why aren’t everyone using Open Solaris on beige boxes? Beats me. The community seems helpful. Maybe there just isn’t enough tutorials/blog articles about getting Rails, Django and Drupal installed and configured. Maybe it needs a better package system and/or setup tool for the command line?

What do you think?

(note: if everyone in my feed does this there might be a slim possibility to see all my followers looking like me. Apart from me, who will look like someone else. Ah, the excitement!).

So no, we don’t hire architects. We hire developers. In a small team, there is no room for management deadwood.

I agree completely. My view is that the title “Software architect” is a misnomer for what most architects in the software industry do, or at least what they should be doing.

It is part of the weird trend that career advancement means getting away from actual programming for some reason. Maybe that is part of a bigger problem when the only way to get a higher pay is to become a manager of some sort? A couple of years ago, most programmers I knew aimed for a project management position. Programming was a dirty job that you had to put up with during the first years in consulting.

When my title was “business analyst” I tried to do as much programming I could and I haven’t regretted that for a moment. In fact, I believe that more people from the business side should get involved in programming to get a better understanding of the fundamental principles. For example, it would be great if business people could write their own acceptance tests and with the booming trend of DSL:s you will probably get involved anyway.

If you’ve made the transition from a hierarchical environment to an agile, self-organizing team, you know what I’m saying. You won’t ever want to go back.

Absolutely. It is the same thing as discovering things like Ruby/Python/Rails: it makes you wonder what the hell you were doing earlier. In many ways I feel sorry for young software developers that go straight into Rails or similar frameworks today. They are not as appreciative as the rest of us:-)

I have been running the beta version of MailPlane which provides at desktop version of Gmail (using Webkit). Apart from keeping Gmail in a separate branded window it also provides standard mac shortcut keys as well as desktop integration for screenshots and other file related things. Pretty sweet.

I was interested to see if Prism could provide a similar experience. Prism is currently an early beta at version 0.8 so it isn’t fair to expect too much of it. The feature wish list looks great.

Launching prism and creating a Gmail app worked great. However, Prism currently has some issues:

• It consumes close to 100% of a CPU core on my MacBook which makes it unusable for now.
• Font size can not be adjusted (should be a parameter?).
• There is a white space at the bottom of the app screen which reduce valuable screen estate.

I would also like to see an option to map access keys to native OS keys (e.g. Prism forwards ⌘+r as alt+r to the web app). This would allow users to work with the application in a way indistinguishable from a desktop application. also, if there was a way to interact with files (drag and drop etc) à la MailPlane I could see how Prism could be the preferred choice of many application developers in the future.

Couple it with a stand alone Ruby on Rails app (by using Joyent’s Slingshot) and you have a whole new way of developing applications that work offline, online and in a coherent way with other desktop apps. The future is bright!

Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.

The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. As you may know the OOXML format has been heavily criticized (by many e.g. Google (PDF)) for allowing embedding of closed Microsoft-specific objects in the document standard and thus making it difficult for non-Microsoft software to read OOXML documents.

Unfortunately, SIS is an organisation where anyone can become a member. Member organizations can send participants to a working group for a fee. The current rate is 17,000 SEK (~$2,500). The day before the vote that decided if SIS would say yes to OOXML in the ISO there were a couple of new members in the SIS/TK321/AG17 working group:

And so, Sweden will be voting yes to make OOXML an ISO standard.

For more information see:

• Patrik Fälström’s post “Microsoft managed to buy the vote of Sweden in ISO?“.
• Slashdot.
• Dagens Nyheter (in swedish).
• noooxml.org.
• Matusow: Open XML – The Vote in Sweden

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“Seam carving” allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping, but also without distorting important features in the image (such as faces).

The video shows some intresting results when using this method too much, but the overall result is very impressing.

Hackzine has more details.