I've sat in this seat and often pronounced my discontent with Microsoft or a Microsoft technology, while still proclaiming myself to be a Microsoft enthusiast. Co-workers have often called me a Microsoft or Windows bigot. People would even give me written job recommedations pronouncing me as "one who particularly knows and understands Microsoft technologies".

But lately over the last year or two I've been suffering from malcontent, and I've lost that Microsoft spirit. I'm trying to figure out why. What went wrong? What happened?

Maybe it was Microsoft's selection of Ray Ozzie as the new Chief Software Architect. Groove (which was Ozzie's legacy) was a curious beast, but surely not a multi-billion-dollar revenue product, at best it was a network-based software experiment. Groove's migration to Microsoft under the Office umbrella would have been a lot more exciting if only it was quickly adopted into the MSDN vision and immediately given expansive and rich MSDN treatment, which it was not. Instead, it was gradually rolled in, and legacy SDK support just sort of tagged along or else "fell off" in the transition. Groove was brought in as an afterthought, not as a premier new Microsoft offering. Groove could have become the new Outlook, a rich, do-it-all software platform that brought consolidation of the team workflows and data across teams and diperate working groups, but instead it became just a simple little "IM client on steroids and then some" and I quickly abandoned it as soon as I discovered that key features such as directory sharing weren't supported on 64-bit Windows. So to bring Ozzie in and have him sit in that chair, and then have that kind of treatment of Ozzie's own Groove--Groove being only an example but an important, symbolic one--really makes me think that Microsoft doesn't know what on earth it's doing!! Even I could have sat in that chair and had a better, broader sense of software operations and retainment of vision, not that I'm jealous or would have pursued that chair. The day I heard Ozzie was selected, I immediately moaned, "Oh no, Microsoft is stuck on the network / Internet bandwagon, and has forgotten their roots, the core software platforms business!!" The whole fuzzy mesh thing that Microsoft is about to push is a really obvious example of where Microsoft is going as a result of bringing in Ozzie, and I hardly find a network mesh compelling as a software platform when non-Microsoft alternatives can so easily and readily exist.

Maybe it's Microsoft's audacity to abandon their legacies in their toolsets, such as they have done with COM and with VB6. There still remains zero support for easily building COM objects using the Visual Studio toolsets, and I will continue to grumble about this until an alternative component technology is supported by Microsoft that is native to the metal (or until I manage to get comfortable with C/C++ linked libraries, which is a skill I still have to develop 100% during my spare time, which is a real drag when there is no accountability or team support). I'm still floored by how fast Microsoft abandoned DNA for .NET -- I can completely, 100% understand it, DNA reached its limits and needed a rewrite / rethink from the bottom up, but the swappage of strategies is still a precedent that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I want my personal investments in software discovery to be worth something. I'm also discouraged--the literal sense of the word, I'm losing courage and confidence--by the drastic, even if necessary, evolutionary changes Microsoft keeps doing to its supported languages. C# 2 (with stuff like generics support) is nothing like C# 1, and C# 3 (with var and LINQ) is nothing like C# 2. Now C# 4 is being researched and developed, with new support for dynamic language interop (basically, weak typing), which is as exciting as LINQ was, but I have yet to adopt even LINQ, and getting LINQ support in CLR object graphs is a notorious nightmare, not that I would know but everyone who tries it is pronouncing it as horrible and massive. Come to think of it, it's Microsoft's interop strategy that has been very frustrating. COM is not Remoting, and Remoting is not WCF. WCF isn't even supported in Mono, and so for high performance, small overhead interprocess communications, what's the best strategy really? I could use WCF today but what if WCF is gone and forgotten in five years?

Maybe it's the fact that I don't have time to browse the blogs of Microsoft's developer staff. They have a lot of folks over there, and while it's pretty tempting to complain that Microsoft "codes silently in a box", the truth is that there are some pretty good blogs being published from Microsofties, such as "If broken it is, fix it you should", albeit half of which I don't even understand without staring at it for a very long time. Incidentally, ScottGu does a really good job of "summing up" all the goings on, so thumbs-up on that one.

I think a lot of my abandonment of loyalty to Microsoft has to do with the sincerity of my open complaint about Internet Explorer, how it is the most visible and therefore most important development platform coming from Redmond but so behind-the-times and non-innovative versus the hard work that the Webkit and Mozilla teams are putting their blood, sweat, and tears over, that things like this [http://digg.com/tech_news/Time_breakdown_of_modern_web_design_PICTURE] get posted on my wall at the office, cheerily.

Perhaps it's the over-extended yet limited branding Microsoft did with Vista, making things like this [http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13549_7-9947498-30.html] actually make me nearly shed a tear or two over what Windows branding has become. That Windows Energy background look looks neat, but it's also very forthright and "timestamped", kind of like how disco in the 70's and synth-pop in the 80's were "timestamped", they sounded neat in their day but quickly became difficult to listen to. That's what happens with too strong of an artistic statement. Incidentally, Apple's Aqua interface is also "timestamped", but at least it's not defaulting with a strong artistic statement plastered all over the entire screen. I like the Vista taskbar, but what's up with the strict black, why can't that or other visual aspects be tweaked? At least it's mostly-neutral (who wants a bright blue or yellow taskbar?), but it's still just a bit imposing IMO.

I'll bet it has to do with the horrifying use of a virtualized Program Files directory in Windows Server 2008 where the practice was unannounced. This is the sort of practice that makes it VERY difficult to trust Microsoft Windows going forward at all. If Windows is going to put things in places that are different from where I as a user told them to be placed, then we have a behavioral disconnect--software should exist to serve me and do as I command, not to protect me from myself while deceiving me.

At the end of it all, I think my degrading sense of loyalty could just be the simple fact that I really am trying to spread out and discover and appreciate what the other players are doing. I mentioned before that Mac OS X is still the ultimate, uber OS, but now that I have it, I confess, I had no idea. Steve Jobs is brilliant, and it's also profound how much of OS X is open source, basically all of the UNIXy bits, which says a lot about OSS. Mind you, parts of the Mac I genuinely do not like and have never liked, such as the single menubar, which violates very key and important rules for UI design. I also generally find it difficult to manage multiple applications running at once, for which I much prefer the Windows taskbar over the Dock if only because it's more predictable, and although it violates UI principles I prefer Alt+Tab for all windows rather than Command+Tab just for applications because every window is its own "workflow" regardless of who owns it. But, among other things, building on PostScript for rendering, for example, was a fantastic idea; on the other hand, Microsoft's ClearType would have been difficult to achieve if Windows used PostScript for rendering. Anyway, meanwhile, learning and exposing myself to UNIX/Linux based software is good for me as a growing software developer, and impossible to cleanly discover in Windows-land without using virtual machines.

In other words, the only way one can spread out and discover the non-Microsoft ways of doing things, and appreciate the process of doing so, is to stop swearing by the Microsoft way to begin with, and approach the whole thing with an open mind. In the end, the Microsoft way may still prove to be the best, but elimination of bias (on both sides) is an ideal goal to be achieved before pursuing long-term personal growth in software.

Since everyone loves to pick on Microsoft, I think we can summarize exactly what has caused such a commotion among technology enthusiasts. The areas where Microsoft has been given most reputational grief have been where the bar was raised higher by a third party, or else where a third party has made people scratch their heads and wonder, "Why am I using Microsoft's technology, anyway?" So I'd like to suggest a list of technologies that shame Microsoft.

To Microsoft's Fame

Before I get started, I want to point out the areas that Microsoft has excelled in:

1. Microsoft Word & Microsoft Outlook
   • Word processing has become a staple of the computing world. Apart from web browsing and e-mail, the word processor is the next most important and relevant "killer app" of computing technology. Microsoft Word continues to astound us with major new features with every release. It has evolved in sophistication regularly. It is not without its quirks -- for example, there's nothing more annoying than running out of callout diagram graphics due to fixed memory allocation -- but Microsoft has consistently tried to keep Word up-to-date with the demands of its users, and no other word processor can compare with its overall user experience.
   • Microsoft Outlook might feel a little sluggish for some, and I still resent the fact that Microsoft never implemented NNTP support within Microsoft Outlook, but it is still the ultimate app for the office. Maintaining e-mails, calendaring, and task lists in one application, it is always the first app to run when I get in at work, and the last app to close, if I ever close it. And it gets the most attention every day.
     • Microsoft Outlook's greatest area for growth is project management support. Outlook would be a natural environment for managing projects. If the communications and collaboration environment that Outlook already is was consolidated with issue tracking, resource allocation (perhaps merge with MS Project), and even basic SCRUM, professionals would be flocking to the platform all over again. There's always Sharepoint for team collaboration, but Outlook being a desktop application with tuned responsiveness, it blows any AJAX web application out of the water (and please don't even think Silverlight, with its lack of OLE integration, limited [or no] drag-and-drop, limited contextual menu support, and no windowing support). I think Microsoft has regularly missed opportunities to make Outlook the ultimate "portal" for all things related to collaboration.
2. Visual Studio, .NET, and C# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/
   • A few years ago I sent a big gripe e-mail to one of Apple's feedback e-mail addresses. It said something along the lines of, "You guys just don't get it. There's a really good reason why more apps are written for Windows rather than for the Mac, and it isn't because Windows is superior. It's because Microsoft pours boatloads of its money into developer support. The MSDN program is probably more important for Microsoft than Windows itself. The return on investment that Microsoft gets with all of its investments with development tools is a no-brainer. If you guys would establish a 'developer network', provide refined developer tools, and make being a Mac developer one of the most exciting and rewarding things about your technology, people would be flocking to your platform." I still believe that this is true. Ironically, a few months after that e-mail there was a huge developer tools push by Apple. Heh..
   • Visual Studio and the core Microsoft SDKs blow all of the competitors, even the latest and greatest iterations of IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans, completely out of the water. Don't get me wrong, I love what I see in focused IDEs like Aptana. But as a do-it-all toolset, Visual Studio 2008 is just insane. I actually don't think there's anything, except for easy COM object development (*sob* I still miss VB6), that Visual Studio can't do. C# (which is Microsoft's invention and part of the Visual Studio and MSDN strategies) is an incredibly elegant language, even more so than Java, and that's saying a lot because Java as a language was very nice. Using Visual Studio for web development is also very rewarding; I work with it every day.
     • Microsoft is doing something very right with CodePlex and Microsoft's open source initiatives. However, I think that Microsoft should put the plug back in on their idea that they prototyped during the VS 2005 beta of community-generated libraries directly integrated in a community browser. This is a huge feature of Eclipse and NetBeans alike, and if we could get our third party open source Visual Studio plug-ins and API libraries from a common interface it would be quite ideal for the developer community. Perhaps an open source initiative can be established for this.
3. Silverlight - http://www.silverlight.net/
   • I'm still not quite sold on WPF because of its bloat, and Silverlight 2 is still pretty painfully stripped-down, but what it does introduce is very, very exciting. Adobe Flash would have easily become a product technology to shame Microsoft, but when it comes to what Silverlight 2 and Blend 2.5 promise and are already delivering in beta form, Microsoft has taken the higher ground. Granted, Flash has the user base. But being a geek, I don't care; I firmly believe that the user base will follow the superior toolset.
     • I think that Microsoft still needs to implement a few things before Silverlight will really become a "killer app" technology platform, keeping in mind that for every Flash-based banner ad or RIA, there is a Flash game being introduced on the web:
       1. Limited windowing support. Please. I want to open a Silverlight window, without opening a web browser window with another isolated Silvelight app. Let me. 
       2. GDI+-esque bitmap manipulation support. For example, we should be able to render to a canvas, buffer to a bitmap, and reuse the bitmap as we like. Let us render pixels. I don't know what kind of installation footprint a rasterization API would introduce, but it seems like it would be pretty light.
       3. WPF-esque 3D support by befriending OpenGL. Please. Every platform supports OGL. EVERY PLATFORM!
4. DirectX and XNA - http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/
   • DirectX is the responsible runtime API for, what, 90% of modern commercial electronic games today? At least, that is certainly accurate of PC games. Direct3D is feature-rich, setting the bar for the programmability of a video card's GPU (using a Shader Model programming API), to say nothing of supporting a complete set of interfaces for generating 2D and 3D scenes with lighting and high resolution textures. XACT offers a complete audio API and toolset, after years of one tool experiment after another for audio and music. DirectX also has networking APIs and input device APIs (flight sticks, gamepads, steering wheels, etc.). All your game engine needs are met with DirectX ... except for the game engine itself. That's where XNA comes in.
   • Direct3D is clearly superior in featureset than OpenGL.
   • DirectX as a suite of APIs specifically targeting Windows is vastly superior to SDL.
   • While I still scratch my head wondering why XNA and WPF are so completely isolated, and that there is neither XAML rendering support in XNA nor XNA features in WPF, I am very impressed with Microsoft's XNA. XNA had a warm welcome to the community in 2007, I feel. But XNA was quickly forgotten by the general developer community by the end of 2007, until XNA Game Studio Express v2.0 was released.
     • Microsoft's XNA strategy has been very thorough, with the Creators Club web site completing the big picture. But what Microsoft still needs to do with XNA to continue to gain and retain amateur game developers and establish the "YouTube For Games" community that it intends to foster is to convince developers to deploy Windows game install packages today, and to feature XNA games on Windows before the roll out XNA games on Xbox Live Marketplace. Microsoft should create a web service driven "XNA Amateur Games Browser" for Windows, now! It should be an optional Windows Update download for Windows Vista Ultimate. Microsoft has really blown it in gaining and retaining amateur game developers' attention on the Microsoft Windows platform. XNA has been a missed opportunity; the technology and toolset are solid, but XNA is till marketed, intentionally or not, as an Xbox technology that requires $99 to participate in, which is tragic. Most game developers would opt for spending that kind of money on such cross-platform technologies as Torque and Unity (http://unity3d.com/). Microsoft XNA needs an InstantAction-like community before it seeks out the Xbox Live Marketplace community.
5. Windows Server 2008
   • In some ways, Window Server 2008 represents the culmination of all things heavily tested, refined, tuned, and applicable for both simple and complex scenarios and for executing both simple and complex computing applications. It compares quite closely with Mac OS X. Mac OS X, being built on a UNIX foundation, comes straight out of the box with the rich featureset of UNIX network and system tools, to say nothing of its extensibility to support additional UNIX apps that can run naturally and stably on it. But not only does Windows Server 2008 support all of the essentials of an operating system workstation as well as an IT server, it also has a UNIX compatibility subsystem, and on top of that it sets a MUCH higher bar in many areas of server technology that currently other platforms simply do not support. Just browsing the optional features one can install onto Windows Server straight out of the box, suddenly even the beta-quality grab bag of nifty new technologies one can choose in a modern Linux distro is not able to compare, even in features alone.
   • Not long ago, I posted a blog entry indicating that I'd prefer Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 over Windows Server 2008 as a web developer workstation. I think I may have to retract that opinion. Other people have posted performance comparisons of these two operating systems and have found that Windows Server 2008 performs significantly better than Vista SP1. This is very disappointing as I love Vista and was very much looking forward to SP1 picking up he pace to be on par with Windows Server 2008. 
     • I have three workstation-related complaints for Windows Server 2008, based on my watching my co-worker's / buddy's experiences with using it as a workstation:
       1. No sidebar even with Vista experience installed?!
       2. COD 4 BSOD's on Windows Server 2008 on an nVidia Quadro 1500 card that worked fine for me on Windows Server 2003, as well as for me on Vista x86 and on Vista x64. Sup widdat?
       3. What's with that awful addressbar/progressbar locking up Windows Explorer functionality just because the OS is (I guess) indexing system contents?? My buddy couldn't even right-click a folder and view Properties at times because of this stupid indexing lock-up. This went on for a month or so before it apparently went away on its own, we figured it finally managed to index everything, or something. But this one thing kept me from making the switch from Server 2003!! 
6. IIS 7.0 & WCF
   • IIS is now fully programmable on all parts of a request pipeline, even at the protocol level (IIS is no longer a web server, it is a network application server).
   • Microsoft has taken their experiences of the nightmares that came about with COM/DCOM/COM+, MTS, .NET 1.x Remoting, and ASP.NET Web Services, and made a simple yet pretty complete solution for it all. As long as you code all your software around data contracts, you have WCF-handshakeable, interopable software that can cross most any boundary. Hosted on IIS 7, said software can cross any physical boundary.

To Microsoft's Shame

These things said, here's a list of technologies and third party products where I think Microsoft should be paying closer attention as they bring shame upon Microsoft.

1. Keynote (for Mac) - http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/ 
   • When Scott Guthrie came here to Scottsdale (that's where I live) this year, Hamid Shojaee from Axosoft did a little presentation for his company's products, and he used presentation software that kept me blinking in awe. Although judging from the presentation the presentation software he used looked like it was pretty lightweight in features (I found out later it was Keynote for Mac), based on Hamid's presentation Keynote had one thing that made me realize that Microsoft is going about its PowerPoint strategy all wrong. I realized that rock-solid, eye-catching presentations are all about being flicker-free, with full 3D fly-ins and no visible pause between tween frames. I noticed this about Silverlight; when I look at http://www.quiksilver-europe.com/ and hover my mouse over the video player, I see something that Flash can't do, which is look frame-free and flicker-free because its animation engine is time-based, not frame-based. Between WPF and Silverlight, Microsoft already has the technology to support all this. If the next version of PowerPoint is not overhauled to look this smooth, Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves!
2. Firefox and Webkit (TIE)
   • Once upon a time, Microsoft innovated in the web browser technology market. They introduced a powerful software plug-in model with ActiveX and pushed it out on Internet scale. They invented the fully programmable HTML DOM.
   • Eventually,
     • C# was introduced.
     • Firefox came on the scene.
     • George W. Bush was elected president.
     • Microsoft got complacent about their web browser strategy, and made it official that they would never innovate on the browser again.
   • The effects of Microsoft taking their genius Internet Explorer innovations staff (the Trident team) off of Internet Explorer and onto WPF and Silverlight has taken its toll. As web technology has evolved, Internet Explorer has become the uber-pimple of the computing world. It's the annoying, ugly blemish that people want to pinch and pop but not only won't go away but it's right out there for everyone to see on the face of Windows and you can't get rid of it. It has a slow release schedule, its dev team has been silent towards the community, and it is clearly not a part of Microsoft's MSDN strategy, yet at the same time it is one of the most prominent and heavily used development platforms that runs on Windows. I'm greatly looking forward to IE8, but Microsoft is still playing catch-up with the other browsers.
   • Microsoft has a lot of nerve to suggest that the different meanings of the word standards ("standard as in popularity? standard as in typical? standard as in standards-body documented standard?") are applicable to web technology. If you're going to put yourself out there on the web and interoperate with a platform-agnostic network, to the extent of those agnostic technologies (HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.) there is only one definition of standards, and that is the definition of standards that comes from the international standards bodies, in this case the W3C. Microsoft can do what they want with XAML, VBScript, and ActiveX, but if they're not going to submit to standards bodies on platform-agnostic technologies, they should drop IE and adopt Firefox or WebKit, or else they will risk their users doing as much which in effect would significantly lessen the necessity of Windows (the necessary host operating system of IE).
   • Mozilla, Safari, and Opera leaders are actively leading in innovating on the web standards, like HTML 5, a practice that Microsoft started in the early days of the web, and later abandoned. Microsoft is still not actively participating in these discussions.
   • XPCOM and XPI! Make it so!!
3. Mac OS X
   • Earlier in this blog post I mentioned Windows Server 2008 being most like Mac OS X. But Mac OS X still sets certain standards for the Ultimate Operating System. Granted, Windows Vista and/or Windows Server 2008 is still the OS of choice for practical use because of the rich developer tools that Microsoft offers and because of the extent of third party apps that are available because of it. But Mac OS X still sets the bar for
     1. True "it just works" plug-and-play functionality. I don't know what Apple is doing to make things "just work", but all of the iterations of the Mac have always been rediculously clean and easy to use, for both hardware add-ons and software installations.
     2. Application packaging; Mac apps continue the trend today that they've always had, of getting both Apple apps and third party apps (except MS Office for Mac) all presenting themselves as a nicely packaged, self-contained file, rather than a gajillion DLLs among one or several shell-executable files. Mac users don't use a Start menu because they don't need one.
     3. Platform interopability. Virtualization is not platform interop. Microsoft's UNIX compatibility layer is a step in the right direction, but it isn't enough. Windows is still proprietary Windows; UNIX apps have to be re-compiled to work on the UNIX compatibility layer, and for that one might as well use Cygwin which is far easier and "funner" to use (which isn't saying it's fun). A more appropriate approach might be andLinux.org's.
     4. With Mac OS X's UNIX based core, the rich suite of well-established UNIX applications are at OS X's disposal, including Apache Web Server. Apache in itself is not all that astounding in contrast to IIS, but it is one little tool in a long list of applications that make any non-Windows computer user compelled to stick with the Mac.
     5. The new file browsing features in the latest version of the Mac that put Windows Vista's thumbnail and slide show views to shame are absolutely astounding.
     6. The new video conferencing features in the latest version of the Mac are also astounding. Windows doesn't have anything like that.
4. iPhone
   • I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The Start menu on a mobile device is perhaps the suckiest, stupidest design idea ever invented and implemented in mainstream technology. To the same extent, though, the iPhone's multi-touch, naturalistic, responsive interface is perhaps the greatest interface design ever conceived and implemented in mainstream technology. The bar has been set about 3 times higher than it was; now Microsoft needs to measure up with its Windows Mobile strategy, and until they do I will never buy a Windows Mobile device, not when there is the iPhone, now with binary SDK available for 3rd party developers. (The 30% commission requirement only ups the quality requirement for the third parties.)
5. VistaDB v3
   • Q: What if a different, solid commercial database was built versus Microsoft SQL Server?
     • A: It might be called Oracle, which is butt-ugly and has a cuture of its own full of down-trodden people who don't smile.
   • Q: What if someone open-sourced a complete database server for production web and entrprise apps as free alternative to SQL Server?
     • A: It might be called mySQL, which is feature-incomplete, and until recently lacking in administrative tools worth touching with a ten foot pole.
     • A: It might also be called Firebird, and although it has the maturity timescale and featureset of a complete DB, it also lacks the polish, usability, documentation, and presentation that geeks of today demand. (That or maybe I just don't like their web site.)
   • Q: What if Microsoft built a tiny-scale, .NET-based version of their SQL Server product?
     • A: It would be called SQL Server Compact Edition, and it would suck (meaning, lacking of features and being generally non-innovative)
   • Q: What if someone built a tiny-scale, native database engine that could be used anywhere?
     • A: It would be called SQLite, and although it rocks, it is a half-baked solution with no associated administration tools or C# managed API hooks in its core implementation.
   • Q: So what if someone built a Microsoft SQL Server look-alike, with decent performance, deep joins, T-SQL transactions, T-SQL sprocs, triggers, and managed assembly plug-ins, all in managed code, and with elegant administration tools, and produced it into a small compiled codebase that can be deployed on anything from medium scale web or enterprise apps to tiny-scale mobile applications?
     • A: It would be called VistaDB, and Microsoft should be astounded, if not absolutely frightened.
6. Lucene / Lucene.Net / Solr
   • Every time I see another search indexing technology show up on Windows, I moan. "Index Server". "Office Search". "Microsoft Search". "Desktop Search". "Microsoft Search Server". For goodness sake, come up with and standardize on a solid API already!!
   • Apache Lucene is a blazingly fast text indexing software library. It can be used as a super-fast alternative not only to Google but also SQL Server.
   • Apache Solr, a server implementation around the Lucene search engine, is to search technology is what, say, early iterations of mySQL might have been to SQL databases. It is a buggy but functional demonstration of a complete and rediculously powerful data indexing and querying engine that can be used with both REST and JSON queries.
   • Microsoft Search Server is just a stupid pre-fab web page, a Googlish front-end to a spidered web site, proof that Microsoft just doesn't get it. Microsoft's indexing strategy is limited to file scanning and reproduction, a la Nutch. Microsoft clearly hasn't figured out how technologies like Lucene can render database engines like SQL Server's Full-Text Indexing obsolete.
7. jQuery and the tersed Javascript community
   • Where jQuery shames Microsoft is where it also shames some of the other Javascript libraries. jQuery is to Javascript and DOM objects what LINQ is to C# and database objects, XML, and managed objects. It trivializes querying them, collecting them, calling on them, and performing operations on a group of them in one line of execution code (without a for loop).
   • The team that jQuery shames is not the LINQ team, but rather the ASP.NET AJAX team that implemented the Javascript framework. (A nice job they did, by the way, but heck, jQuery shames everybody!) See, Javascript already has a language community and culture, like C# and Java have community and culture. The Javascript community favors terseness and shortcuts by way of minified libraries that do much with little effort. Even in the simplest sense, this might mean short, terse, lower-cased code. Microsoft favors Pascal Casing and long namespaces. They went halfway and shortened the "System" namespace in Javascript to "Sys", but it still uses long, Pascal-Cased namespaces and OO-esque coding style rather than terse functional programming coding style.
   • Part of the terseness and "easy calling" approach pursued by the Javascript community is the simplistic approach of using one-liner databinding of HTML forms to REST URIs. The same community also typically interoperates with an MVC-oriented server architecture like PHPCake or Ruby On Rails. ASP.NET AJAX's approach, meanwhile, is to maintain viewstate and pass everything including the kitchen sink in a slow, klunky ASP.NET page postback lifecycle that could, and should, be cleaned up with a RESTful WCF / MVC AJAX view lifecycle.
8. HD Homerun
   • Any time a corporation makes a commercial product that sells well and is very innovative but is being purchased primarily as a workaround for a failure of Windows or other Microsoft product, it brings awful shame upon Microsoft. In this case, the shame is the failure on Microsoft's part to support unencrypted QAM on Windows Media Center.
9. Microsoft's own Xbox Live Dashboard / Marketplace -- Hello, Windows Team??
   • No competing technology platform has trivialized the usefulness of Microsoft Windows like Microsoft's own Xbox Live Dashboard and Marketplace. This was a hugely missed opportunity that Microsoft completely overlooked, whereby the rich, consolidated, packaged user experience that is enjoyed on the Xbox 360 could be transferred to the Microsoft Windows platform.
   • Web pages (@live.com) don't cut it. Putting Microsoft Downloads on Silverlight doesn't cut it. You have a rich Presentation Foundation on Windows that could have been used to deploy rich interactive experiences, as well as even rediculous DRM functionality built into Windows Vista, why isn't all of this being featured in Windows Ultimate?!
   • Valve's Steam cuts it for the game side of things, but lacking the WPF wow and full-screen experience that Microsoft could have introduced, and lacking the media purchases and downloads, it isn't enough.
   • Windows Media Center (which, by the way, I do use several hours every single day) would have cut it, if only it natively and more seamlessly supported the same package-extensibility featureset, marketplace integration, and Games category where marketplace demos can be downloaded and played, that are enjoyed on the Xbox.
10. SVN (added 4/19/2008)

    • Nothing makes it seem to the software community more so than SVN that Microsoft "knows" software from only the confines of their own innovations and culture. On this technology alone, it sometimes seems like they live in a box and engineer in a cave.
    • Visual Source Safe is not version control. It's change control. The difference is as much cultural as it is functional; think a bunch of productive engineers in an agile group ("update", "OK, merged"), versus a bunch of wedgie-suffering tightwads in a red tape overwhelmed corporation ("can you please check that in so I can edit some of the code?")
    • I tried and failed to install Team Foundation Server three times and never got it right. The list of steps is a full page long, and each step takes several minutes of installing stuff -- set up Windows, figuring out whether or not to set up Active Directory, set up SQL Server Std. (not any version but Standard!), set up Windows SharePoint (don't confuse it with Office SharePoint! Don't confuse the version number!), optionally configure SharePonit for Active Directory, etc., etc. In the end, I always had something up and running, but when I would go load the SharePoint intance up in a web browser it would give me some stupid IIS error. Was I not supposed to hit it with a web browser? I don't know; the Help file didn't say.
    • I don't consider mysef a genius, and I don't consider myself a moron either. I consider myself having slightly-better-than-average intelligence. I think my I.Q. was measured 115 when I was a kid, whoopty doo. But I can set up SVN server and SVN client (w/ TortoiseSVN) without a lot of effort, as well as a few free issue tracking web sites like Gemini. I don't have Visual Studio integration (but you can use Ankh or Visual SVN), but I do have version control and a tracking system.
    • This blog post is very telling of the whole cultural situation over there in Washington.

Notice that I didn't mention things like mySQL, Ruby, PHP, Apache Web Server, Flash/Flex, Java, or Ubuntu Linux as key items on the list. All of these, while in some cases being innovative and even heavily used, simply don't match up with the depth of features, usability, and/or stability of those mentioned above. mySQL is a half-baked wannabe, Rail's founder presents himself to supporters having "constructive criticism" with a big "F*** YOU" on the overhead projecter, PHP is at a technical level no more special than ASP Classic using Javascript, Apache now needs to contend with IIS 7, Flash/Flex has been ousted (for its toolset) by Silverlight, Blend, and Visual Studio, Java has been beaten by C# / .NET, Ubuntu is just another Linux distro that wants to mean something special but comes up short (yes, even with Compiz-Fusion). They're good, but not good enough to bring shame upon Microsoft, or else Microsoft has finally managed to catch up, and get a little ahead.

I noticed in my Start menu that I had installed VirtualBox a few weeks ago. In a bored moment, I fired it up for the first time and started up the Installer/LiveCD for Ubuntu 7.10.

When I went to install Ubuntu, I got stuck right from the get-go. I couldn't click on 'Next'! The installer screen was way too large, and the high resolution VGA drivers weren't installed yet (as Ubuntu wasn't installed yet) so I couldn't change the resolution.

Classic moment of pure ludicrous idiocy here. Those Linux folks are always so smug, with such attitude, they deserve shame when they screw up this bad. Yay for corporations with coordinated QA teams!!

And yes, I did try using tab + spacebar. Got me to the next screen (time zone map), but tab doesn't work to change button focus on that screen; once the drop-down list has focus it won't let go of it with tab. 

Geek buddy says, "That's normal. Your environment can't support graphical mode installation. Graphical mode installation is for systems that can support it. Yours can't, because your VM video card isn't on the built-in drivers list."

That's crap. Hardware vendors, not OS distros, provide hardware drivers. Generic VGA @ 800x600 is a well-established minimum common standard. You install the hi-res video driver post-install; the fact that OS distros often have the driver bundled is just a bonus. Besides, I am in graphical mode!! If it's not supported because of resolution, it should say, "Sorry, you must reboot and enter Text mode to install, because in graphical mode we want to be promiscuous with your screen real estate when installing, and we don't know how to do that with your hardware." But that would still suck. Best to just scale down these rediculous installation screens! Or, at *least* set a maximum window height to the desktop and insert ugly window scrollbars if the height has max'd out.

Sure, perhaps I can track down valid hardware drivers (in this case VirtualBox drivers) and activate them somehow at runtime, just to get to the Next button. That's not the point. Sure, I can choose install in text mode. That's not the point, either. The point is that this is lunacy. If they just scaled down these windows, the user experience would have been acceptable. It's like these Linux people DEMAND and ENFORCE that you geek out just to get yourself initiated. Yet they keep bragging about how user-friendly Ubuntu and other distros like it are.

Over at http://www.codeplex.com/singularity I came across mention of these...

• http://www.ensemble-os.org/
• http://www.gocosmos.org/
• http://www.sharpos.org/redmine/wiki/3

Cool! I'll have to poke at these.

I have always been adamant that as a web developer it is far better to use Windows Server 2003 rather than Windows XP as your primary workstation. This view became necessary primarily because Windows XP had a stripped-down set of IIS services, namely it was IIS 5.0 rather than IIS 6.0, and it was constrained to not allow multiple virtual hosts on the same machine. This made XP worthless; being a web developer, having the process forced down my throat of building entire web applications as "subwebs" made things infinitely more difficult to develop against. For example, you could never have a simple hyperlink that starts with a slash ("/"). You had to build everything around the ASP/ASP.NET coding model of application root ("~/"), which required you to move all of your hyperlinks to server-side code (<asp:Hyperlink>, or <img src="<%= ResolveUrl("~/") %>images/bleah.gif">).

No more. Windows Vista has multiple web server support. Microsoft perhaps got tired of basically every web developer on the planet expressing their animosity towards the Windows team for their crippling of IIS without even so much as an alternate "IIS add-on for MSDN Universal subscribers" or something. It's full-blown IIS 7, same as in Windows Server 2008.

Now that Windows Server 2008 is released, the inevitable questions should be asked (rather than the answers assumed based on prior experience with XP / 2003): does Windows Server 2008 have any new features that Windows Vista doesn't have, that a typical ASP.NET web developer would want on his workstation, and does Windows Vista have any undesirable features that are not present in Windows Server 2008 that cannot be removed from Vista?

While the answer to both of these questions were "yes" in XP/2003, for Vista/2008 I think the general answer to both of these questions, I believe, is "no".

In Windows 2008 there are a gajillion new services that the next wave of Internet technologies will need on hand for regular development. For developers of one of these next-gen technologies, Server 2008 might be essential. But for basic ASP.NET and WCF development (in other words, for most web developers), Vista can suffice.

And 2008 doesn't really filter out anything from the Vista experience except for the fact that the Vista experience is an option rather than mandatory. That's nice; but if it's going to be used for a workstation, it makes sense to just add it. Only problem is, it's not a complete Vista experience; you don't get the sidebar, for instance, and Call of Duty 4 crashes on a co-worker / friend who agreed to be a Windows Server 2008-as-a-workstation guinea pig. And to be honest, I feel a lot more uncomfortable with all the undesirable new bells and whistles of Server 2008 being available to my workstation than with them missing from a Vista environment.

The only features I saw in Server 2008 that I didn't see in Vista that might be worth something to me were: Multipath I/O, TCP port sharing, and hypervisor (native virtualization) support (which is still in beta). Actually, Vista might have the first two of the three, I don't recall. But I already have VMWare Workstation, which I continue to prefer over that awful Virtual PC platform. Meanwhile, pretty much all of the other stuff, while some of it may be valuable, it's all so server-oriented and not development-oriented that it would make more sense to move that stuff to a VM or external environment anyway.

So my tentative conclusion is that Vista Ultimate is already the ideal environment for a web developer. With it, you have all the basics that you need to build multiple IIS solutions and to test basic WCF solutions. Meanwhile you get to keep the fluff you like (and I do like some fluff on my workstation, gimme Sidebar and stuff), while you can still kill off the fluff you don't like.

This is just something I've been pondering lately. I've been doing a lot of work this year with Lucene.Net (a port of Lucene, which is written in Java, to .NET) to manage a search engine. In our configuration, it uses RAMDirectory objects to retain the indexes in memory, then it searches the indexed content as though it was on disk. It takes up a lot of RAM, but it's very performant. A search query, including network load of transfering the XML-based query and the XML-based result set (over Windows Communication Framework), is typically in the range of about 0.05 seconds over a gigabit switch using standard, low-end, modern server hardware.

We don't just spider our sites with this stuff as with Google (or Nutch). We manually index our content using real field names and values per index, very similar to SQL Server tables except that you can have multiple same-name fields with different values in the same index record ("document") which is great for multiple keywords. If we could get it to properly join index on fields like in SQL Server you can join tables on fields, as well as to perform arbitrary functions or delegates as query parameters (which is DOABLE!!), we'd have ourselves something that is useful enough for us to consider throwing SQL Server completely out the window for read-only tasks and get a hundredfold performance boost. Yes, I just said, that!!

Because of the load we put on RAM, trying to keep the I/O off the SCSI adapter and limit it to the memory bus, all of this has led me to question why network and RAM capacities have not evolved nearly as fast as hard drive capacities. It seems to me that a natural and clean way of managing the performance of any high-traffic, database-driven web site is to minimize the I/O contention, period. I hear about people spending big money on redundant database servers with all these terabytes of storage space, but then only, say, 16 GB of RAM and gigabit switch. And that's fine, I guess, considering how when the scale goes much higher than that, the prices escalate out of control.

That, then, is my frustration. I want 10 gigabit switches and adapters NOW. I want 128GB RAM on a single motherboard NOW. I want 512GB solid state drives NOW. And I want it all for less than fifteen grand. Come on, industry. Hurry up. :P

But assuming that the hardware became available, this kind of architectural shift would be a shift, indeed, that would also directly affect how server-side software is constructed. Microsoft Windows and SQL Server, in my opinion, should be overhauled. Windows should natively support RAM disks. Microsoft yanked an in-memory OLE-DB database provider a few years ago and I never understood why. And while I realize that SQL Server needs to be rock-solid for reliably persisting committed database transaction to long-term storage, there should be greater design flexibility in the database configuration and greater runtime flexibility, such as in the Transact-SQL language, that determines how transactions persist (lately or atomically).

Maybe I missed stuff that's already there, which is actually quite likely. I'm not exactly an extreme expert on SQL Server. I just find these particular aspects of data service optimizations an area of curiosity.

At work, in any workplace really, the leaders and supporters (including myself, in whatever role I play as a consultant or software engineer or otherwise) are notably hindered and evaluated for the value of the work on a one-to-one basis of how spread out they are. I tend to look upon myself with shame, for instance, when I see myself as a "jack of all trades, master of none", which is something I really don't want to be. I'd much rather be "knowledgeable of much, master of much", even if "much" does not come anywhere close to "all". I feel like I should be able to afford that since I am single, have no life except the life in front of my computer(s), and my sole hobby is software. Even so, I struggle to master my skills and to stay on top of current technologies.

When we take our talents and spread them too wide in the workplace, we find ourselves making excuses for not taking the time to produce quality work. Mediocre output starts getting thrown out there, and no one is expected to apologize because everyone was too busy to take the time to pursue excellence in the output.

I've started to notice that the rule of "spreading yourself thin makes you worthless" is a universal truth that doesn't just apply to people but also to software. I've been "nerding out" on alternative operating systems so that's where I'm applying this lately. The Haiku OS project is distinct from some other projects in this way. Tidbits of wisdom like this have been sticking in my head:

http://haiku-os.org/documents/dev/what_are_you_looking_at

While we developers are used to getting into "the zone" and flinging code that (mostly) works way it should, this is not the kind of focus to which I am referring. When developing an application, the main thing that must not remain as the sole focus is the technology. Technology is the means to the goal. Should we focus on the cool stuff we can build into software, we lose sight of what it is ultimately supposed to do — just like running a marathon while staring at your feet, one tends to not see problems until one quite literally runs into them. What is the goal? The ultimate goal is to write good, fast, stable software which does exactly what it is supposed to do — and nothing else — while making it accessible to the intended type of person, and only one person of that type. 

This goes along with so many different ideologies in software architecture discussions that had me scratching my head as I had a hard time swallowing them, like, "Don't add members to your classes that are not going to meet the needs of the documented requirements, no matter how useful they seem." It took me a few days to accept that rule, because I constantly have ideas popping up in my head about how useful some method might be but I couldn't show for the requirement for it yet. But I later learned why it was an important rule. Once it gets added, it becomes a potential bug. All code is a potential bug. The bugs get QA'd on behalf of the requirements, not on behalf of the presence of the class members. Of course, TDD (test-driven development) and agile / XP practices introduce the notion of "never write code until you write a failing test", so that your new experimental method becomes integrated with the whole test case suite. But now you've just doubled to quadrupled your workload. Is it worth it? Well, it might not matter for a few simple methods, but if that becomes a pattern then eventually you have a measurable percentage of experimental code versus actual, pratical requirements implementations.

There is one thing to keep in mind about the above quote, though, and that is the fact that the above philosphy applies to applications, not to operating systems. The above-quoted article is about building user interfaces, which is an applications-level subject. Whereas, the operating system should have, at one level, a reverse philosophy: technology over function. But let me qualify that: in an operating system, the technology IS the function. I say that because an operating system IS and MUST BE a software runtime platform. Therefore, the public-facing API (which is the technology) is key. But you're still focused on the requirements of the functions. You still have a pre-determined set of public-facing API interfaces that were determined ahead of time in order to meet the needs of some specific applications functionality. Those MUST be specific, and their implementations MUST be strict. There MUST be no unsupported public interfaces. And because the OS is the runtime environment for software, the underlying technology, whether assembly code vs. C runtime API vs. Common Language Runtime vs. Java Virtual Machine, etc, is all quite relevant in an operating system. I'd say that it's only relevant at the surface tier, but it's also relevant at lower tiers because each technology is an integration point. In the Singularity operating system, for instance, which is 99.9% C# code, it's relevant down the deepest tier.

The reason why I bring up Haiku OS vs. other open-source initiatives, as if they had contrasting interests, is because they very much do. Haiku does in fact have a very specific and absolute milestone to reach, and that is compatibility with BeOS 5. It is not yet trying to "innovate", and despite any blog posts indicating opinions otherwise, that may in fact be a very good thing indeed. What happened with the Linux community is that all players are sprawled out across the whole universe of software ideas and concepts, but the end result is a huge number of instances of software projects, all of them mediocre and far too many of them being buggy and error-prone (like Samba, for instance).

More than that, Haiku, as indicated in the above quote, seems to have a pretty strict philosphy: "focus on good, solid, bug-free output of limited features, rather than throwing in every mediocre thing but the kitchen sink". Indeed, that's what Linux seems to do (throw in every mediocre thing but the kitchen sink). There's not much going on in the Haiku world. But with what little it does have, it sure does make me smile. I don't suppose some of that .. or maybe a lot of it .. has to do with the aesthetic design talent involved on the project. Linux is *functional*, and aesthetics are slapped on as an afterthought. Haiku appears at first glance as rather clean, down to its code. And clean is beautiful.

Going around adding futuristic stubs to code is something I've been guilty of in the past but I've found it to be a truly awful, horrible practice, so much so it makes me moan with disgust and terror. It makes a mess of your public-facing APIs, where you have to keep turning to documentation (and breaking tests) to discover what's implemented and what is not. And it leaves key milestone code in a perpetual state of being unable to be RPM'd (released to manufacturers). The best way to write software is to take the most basic functional requirement, implement it, test it thoroughly until it works in all predictable scenarios, add the next piece of functionality, test that piece thoroughly (while testing the first piece of functionality all over again, in an automated fashion), and so on, until all of the requirements are met. In the case of an operating system, this is the only way to build a solid, stable, RTM-ready system.

Microsoft published some beta Managed DirectX 2.0 code a while back, and I posted on their newsgroups, "Why on earth are you calling this 'beta' when the definition of 'beta', as opposed to 'alpha', is that the functionality is SUPPOSED to be there but is buggy? Only 'alpha' releases should include empty, unimplemented stubs, yet you guys throw this stuff out there calling it 'beta'. How are we supposed to test this stuff if the stubs are there but we don't know if they're implemented until we try them?" Shortly after I posted that rant, they dropped the Managed DirectX 2.0 initiative and announced that the XNA initiative was going to completely replace it.  I obviously don't think that my post was the reason why they dropped the MDX2 initiative, but I do think it started a chain of discussions inside Microsoft that made them start rethinking all of their decision-making processes all the way around (not exclusively, but perhaps including, the beta / alpha issue I raised). Even if just one of their guys saw my rant and thought, "You know, I think this whole MDX2 thing was a mistake anyway, we should be focusing on XNA," I think my little rant triggered some doubts. 

The React OS project also had me scratching my head. Instead of littering the OS with placeholders of wanted Windows XP / Vista UI and API features while the kernel is still painfully unfinished, which indeed I have observed, what the React OS team should be doing is saying, okay, we're going to set these milestones, and we're not going to add a single stub or a single line of code for the next milestone until the current milestone has been reached. Our milestones are specifically and clearly defined:

1. Get a primitive kernel booting off a hard drive. Execute some code at startup. Master introspection of the basic hardware (BIOS, hard drives, memory, CPU, keyboard, display, PCI, PCIE, USB controllers).
   • Test, test, TEST!! Stop here!! Do not pass Go! You may not proceed until all tests PASS!!
2. Basic Execution OS. Implement a working but basic Windows NT-like kernel, HAL, FAT16/FAT32 filesystem, a basic user-mode runtime, a basic Ethernet + IPv4 network stack, and a DOS-style command line system for controlling and testing user-mode programs.
   • This implements a basic operating system that will execute C/C++ code and allows for future development of Win32 code and applications.
   • Test, test, TEST!! Stop here!! Do not pass Go! You may not proceed until all tests PASS!! 
   • Making this milestone flawless will result in an RTM-ready operating system that can compete with classic, old-school UNIX and MS-DOS.
3. Basic Server OS. Implement Windows 98-level featureset of Win32 API functionality (except those that were deprecated) using Windows XP as the Win32 API design and stability standard, excluding Window handles and all GUI-related features.
   • This includes threading and protected memory if those were not already reached in Milestone 1.
   • Console only! No GUI yet.
   • Add registry, users, user profiles.
   • Add a basic COM registration subsystem.
   • Add NTFS support, including ACLs.
   • Add Windows Services support.
   • Complete the IPv4 network stack, make it solid.
   • This implements a second-generation command-line operating system that will execute multi-threaded Win32 console applications.
   • Test, test, TEST!! Stop here!! Do not pass Go! You may not proceed until all tests PASS!! 
   • Making this milestone flawless will result in an RTM-ready, competing operating system to Windows Server 2000.
4. Basic Workstation OS. Focus on Win32 GUI API and Windows XP-compatible video hardware driver support. Prep the HAL and Win32 APIs for future DirectX compatibility. Add a very lightweight GUI shell (one that does NOT try to look like Windows Explorer but that provides mouse-driven functionality to accomplish tasks).
   • This implements a lightweight compatibility layer for some Windows apps. This is a key milestone because it brings the mouse and the GUI into the context, and allows the GUI-driven public to begin testing and developing for the system.
   • Test, test, TEST!! Stop here!! Do not pass Go! You may not proceed until all tests PASS!!
   • This milestone brings the operating system to its current state (at 0.32), except that by having a stricter milestone and release schedule the operating system is now extremely stable.
5. CLR support, Level 1
   • Execute MSIL (.NET 2.0 compatible).
   • Write new Windows services, such as a Web server, using the CLR.
   • This is huge. It adds .NET support and gives Microsoft .NET and the Mono project a run for their money. And the CLR alone gives understanding to the question of why Microsoft was originally tempted to call Windows Server 2003 "Windows Server .NET".
   • Test, test, TEST!! Stop here!! Do not pass Go! You may not proceed until all tests PASS!!
   • This introduces another level of cross-platform compatibility, and makes the operating system an alternative to Windows Server 2003 with .NET.
6. CLR support, Level 2, and full DirectX 9 compatibility
   • Execute MSIL (.NET 3.0 compatible), including and primarily
     • "Avalon" / Windows Presentation Foundation (XAML-to-Direct3D, multimedia, etc)
     • "Indigo" / Windows Communication Foundation
     • WF (Workflow)
     • .. do we care about InfoCard?

These are some really difficult if not impossible hurdles to jump; there isn't even any real applications functionality in that list, except for APIs, a Web server, and a couple lightweight shells (console and GUI). But that's the whole point. From there, you can pretty much allow the OS to take on a life of its own (the Linux symptom). The end result, though, is a very clean and stable operating system core that has an RTM version from the get-go in some form, rather than a walking, bloated monster of a zillion features that are half- or non-implemented and that suffers a Blue Screen of Death at every turn.

PowerBlog proved to be an interesting learning opportunity for me in this regard. There are a number of things I did very wrong in that project, and a number of things I did quite right. Unfortunately, the number of things I did wrong outweighed the other, most notably:

• Starting out with too many features I wanted to implement all at once
• Starting implementation with a GUI rather than with the engine
• Having no knowledge of TDD (test-driven development)
• Implementing too many COM and Internet Explorer integration points (PowerBlog doesn't even compile on Windows Vista or on .NET v2.0)
• Not paying close enough attention to server integration, server features (like comments and trackbacks), and Atom
• Not getting around to implementing automatic photo insertion / upload support even though I basically understood how it needed to be done in the blog article editor side (it was nearly-implemented on the MetaWeblog API side)
• Not enough client/server tests, nor mastery of C# to implement them quickly, nor knowledge of how to go about them in a virtualized manner
• Too many moving parts for a single person to keep track of, including a script and template editor with code highlighting

What I did right:

• Built the GUI with a specific vision of functionality and user experience in mind, with moderate success
• Built the engine in a seperate, pluggable library, with an extensibility model
• The product did work very well, on a specific machine, under specific requirements (my personal blog), and to that end for my purposes it was a really killer app that was right on par with the current version of Windows Live Writer and FAR more functional (if a bit uglier)
• Fully functional proof of concept and opportunity to discover the full life-cycle of product development including requirements, design, implementation, marketing, and sales (to some extent, but not so much customer support), and gain experience with full-blown VB6, COM/ActiveX, C#, XML, SOAP, XML-RPC

I suppose the more I think about the intricacies of PowerBlog and how I went about them, I have more and more pride in what I accomplished but that no one will ever appreciate but me. In fact, I started out writing this blog post as, "I am SO ashamed of PowerBlog," but I deleted all that because when I think about all the really cool features I successfully implemented, from a geeky perspective, wow, PowerBlog was really a lot of fun.

That said, it did fail, and it failed because I did not focus on a few, basic, simple objectives and test them from the bottom up.

I can't stop thinking about how globally applicable these principles are at every level, both specifically in software and broadly in my career and the choices I make in my everyday life. It's no different than a flask of water. Our time, energy, can be spilled out all over the table, or carefully focused on meeting specific objectives. The latter offsets a world of refined gold from a world full of mediocrity and waste.

There is one good thing to say about spreading yourself out in the first place, though. Spreading out and doing mediocre things solely for the intent of learning the idiosyncracies of all that gets touched is key to knowing how best to develop the things that are being focused on. One can spend months testing out different patterns for a simple piece of functionality, but experiencing real-world failures and wastes of efforts on irrelevant but similar things causes a person to be more effective and productive at choosing a pattern for the specific instance and making it work. In other words, as the saying goes, a person who never fails is never going to succeed because he never tried. That applies in the broad and unfocused vs. specific and focused philosophy in the sense that just pondering the bigger scope of things, testing them out, seeing that they didn't work, and realizing that the biggest problem was one of philosophy (I didn't FOCUS!) not only makes focusing more driven, but the experience gained from "going broad" will help during the implementation of the focused output, if only in understanding the variations of scenarios of each implementation.

We had an old ("old" meaning installed a year ago) installation of Fedora v3 running a CMS that was publishing data to Windows Server 2003 over Samba. Occasionally, at the same time in the middle of the night that the publishing occurred, Windows Automatic Updates would download some patch for Windows and reboot the server. Obviously that was a mistake on our part to let these two actions coincide. But the bigger problem was that the Samba link didn't just drop when Windows rebooted. Instead, it locked up. So by the afternoon the next day, people are pulling their hair out trying to figure out what the @#% is wrong with this stupid CMS server, and why it just starts working again when we reboot Linux. We finally narrowed it down to a Windows server reboot--a Samba failure to drop the link.

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/98115-samba-mount-does-not-drop-timeout.html

What should happen is a timeout should occur, an error should be raised to the calling application (the CMS service), the service should halt, and then when the Windows server comes back up and the CMS service on Linux reattempts to access the path, Samba should reattempt to build the link and either succeed or fail.

That was Fedora v3. Now were' using RHEL 5, and meanwhile I'm using Ubuntu 7.04 at home on my laptop. I'm expecting a much smoother Samba experience now. But unfortunately, we cannot even seem to get our Samba links to even work, much less behave correctly (i.e. drop) when the Windows server goes down. Now I'm having all kinds of different issues.

The first issue is on my laptop at home, when I use the Network browser in Nautilus to browse my shared folders on my home machines, everything goes erratic. It sees everything really fast one minute, then it locks up for five minutes the next. I click on a folder, it becomes a file. I hit refresh, it can't "see" anything. I go up the tree a couple branches, it finally starts seeing things. I go back into the branch I was in, and it displays it pretty quickly. I copy a folder to the clipboard, and paste to /home/jon, and nothing happens.

Now it could very well be a Nautilus issue, but then here's the other problem ...

At the office, we now have RHEL 5, we have been trying to migrate off the old Fedora 3 system and onto the new system. And now this happens:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/102298-samba-cifs-mount-point-wont-allow-read-write-non-root-user.html

Essentially, once the Linux user writes to the Samba share, the share becomes "owned" by root and the user can't do diddly squat. This essentially breaks our publishing plans, rendering the Samba link useless.

Fortunately, Microsoft was kind enough to implement NFS support in Windows Server 2003 R2, and R2 is the build we just erected for the new environment. I'll try that next. But it still makes me wonder, what on earth happened to Samba?? It's only been around for, like, a decade!

A week or so ago I posted a blog entry describing why I felt that Linux simply isn't the long-term answer for the need for an open-source, community-supported desktop operating system. I got some good feedback on this, as well as some not-so-helpful feedback ("here's another troll", "this goes out to everyone ELSE, not to Jon Davis, who has clearly made up his mind", etc). I also commented that Haiku looks beautiful and is quite promising since it is based on (that is, inspired by and compatible with) Be OS, which is the closest I've seen yet to an OS done right, but that Haiku won't be the answer, either, until it gets past R1, which may or may not ever happen. Meanwhile, I brought up ReactOS and how it isn't the answer, either, because if we wanted Windows we can just install Windows. (Couldn't say that about Haiku / Be OS because Be OS is no longer available.) Over the last week I downloaded the latest React OS build and ran it in VMWare. It's not nearly as far along as Haiku is, in terms of stability (not to mention the front-end aesthetic talent). Finally, one of my biggest complaints about Linux--the rediculously arcane file system layout which never seems to go away--seemed to have been resolved in Gobo Linux, until I realized that it's even worse: it's Proper Cased, and since Linux uses a case-sensitive file naming system (which sucks), that makes Gobo Linux nearly unusable for administration, having to constantly check the case of each and every letter rather than just trust that everything will be lower case.

I came across a few interesting tidbits of information since that post. I also received my old laptop from repair (replace the keyboard for a missing 'O' key), an Acer Aspire 5050 that I got at Wal-Mart about ten or eleven months ago, and I decided that since the laptop has since been replaced, before I go pawn it off I should format the drives and actually try installing Ubuntu Linux on it so that no one can say that I've only tried Ubuntu within VMWare. Unfortunately, the latest Ubuntu Live CD doesn't even boot on my newer Toshiba Satellite X205-S9359, so I couldn't even try to install it on my old laptop hard drives that were replaced. Sheesh.

Compiz-Fusion seems to be for Linux what Aero is for Windows, at least in theory. I still have not gotten it to work; "GL Desktop", which I assume is related, doesn't seem to do anything when I turn it on from the System menu. OpenGL stuff does work--I ran the OpenGL implementation of Tux Racer, worked beautifully. I tried the drivers from ATI/AMD but the stuff won't execute. Changing the Compositing option in the xorg.conf file doesn't help. *sigh* Oh well I'll keep tinkering.  UPDATE: I did get it to work, partially. At least, I get the wobbly windows. Not much else, though, like I can't get the Emerald themes to turn on. Seems there's some limitations on my video card chipset such that they disabled 3D support (even though my video chipset fully supports high-performance 3D).

Device support for Linux at install-time is improving, as are the tools for device support, but it is still an awful mess. I have never seen so many files fly across my terminal screen in my life just to try to install the ALSA audio driver. And with it installed, there's still no sound. Hello, guys? If there's no sound, the audio control panels shouldn't behave like everything's hunky dory. For the specific sound card driver I've scoured Google and Ubuntu forums regarding ALC883 support and it's clear that other people are having trouble with this sound card, so I'll have to keep tinkering with this. But that's not the point with regard to it being a mess. Scanning the forums for support, it confounds me how comfortable people are with opening up configuration files and toying with them, the only difference now is that they use gedit instead of vi. Holy cow, someone needs to give these Linux developers a lesson on UX! It has nothing to do with editing in a Windows-like editor--I have actually finally gotten used to vi, and prefer not to have to move my hand to a mouse to reach the scrollbar.

The ideal desktop operating system should not use antiquated techniques like service-proprietary configuration files, or configure / make / make install, not even if that stuff is hidden from view using some wrapper shell which in the long run only makes things more complex. In fact, compiling anything outside of a JIT'er seems rediculously arcane to me. Call it a matter of opinion, but that's one thing I really like about having a central authority (like Microsoft) to basically say this is exactly how hardware drivers should be deployed. Don't get me wrong, Windows is a mess of its own with its Registry mess, etc. But then why do you think the notion of open source desktops has gotten me curious (and critical) lately?

On that point, yes, I get it, I get that Linux's advantage is that, being an open system, it is necessary for stuff to be "recompiled into the system" but really makes me wonder why Bill Gates, rather than Linus Torvolds, is given the Borg treatment, when assimilation is done in Linux at a technical level at runtime in much the same way Microsoft traditionally did using business agreements. For that matter, what's so wonderful about a system being "open" for some source code to compile against any of its many flavors and then (crossing fingers) maybe run, as opposed to having just a few "flavors" and putting time and energy (and, yes, money) into making sure that the stuff has already been compiled, is already known to run, and will almost certainly "just work", assuming that there are no device hardware driver conflicts.

Wouldn't it be ideal if there was a cleaner pluggable hardware abstraction model that the operating system exposed and that drivers could just plug into in a cleaner fashion than the nerdy way the stuff is managed now? Isn't that essentially what a kernel is supposed to do, along with executing user-level applications? Virtual device drivers suddenly popped into my head, a la VMWare and its virtual machine and virtual devices. Abstraction is so cool. Say, why can't each basic hardware function that software expects to be able to use--file system I/O, video card / display, audio, keyboard, mouse--all be cleanly tucked into a clean API that the hardware manufacturers' drivers sit on top of, rather than vice-versa. Why can't we put them into a virtual hardware sandbox? Why can't hypervisors be taken to such an extent as to allow for physical base-level hardware to be virtualized, so that each hardware device driver "sees" a virtualized reality?

Of course, then performance and virtualization management become the huge issues.

More importantly, this isn't particularly a realistic notion since currently hardware drivers literally read/write to/from memory spaces that the kernel maps to the physical device, and execute by way of things like IRQ events. Sometimes I wonder, though, why even that shouldn't be rethought. But now I'm getting into real physical hardware design space, so it's not like I can just pull up a trusty C compiler and recompile a new motherboard. Besides, putting hardware device manufacturers into a software sandbox certainly stifles their opportunities to innovate.

Over last weekend I thought it would be cool, if naive, to actually spawn off YAOS (Yet Another Operating System), derived from nothing, but appended with virtual support for Win32 (like WINE) and Linux (like Cygwin), but inherently have its own system. After all, that is essentially what hypervisor operating systems propose to do. The difference is that it would be ideal if the hypervisor operating system itself could be a viable operating system.

VMWare ESX and Xen, being hypervisor operating systems, run on the Linux kernel variants.

Windows Server 2008, having hypervisor support (however limited, I'm not sure), runs on, well, Windows.

Good starts on hypervisor concepts, but why not take the opportunity to flush out this legacy stuff and build a hypervisor-supporting system that can also be a new OS? Oh how I would love it if, once R1 stablizes, the Haiku operating system added hypervisor support!

I'll post to my blog here at http://www.jondavis.net/blog/ as I continue to tinker with Ubuntu on real hardware.

Alright, now that I've downloaded the demo VM I previously linked to, the one that has several BeOS apps installed, I've reached a new conclusion about Haiku.

My conclusion is this: Haiku is to BeOS what ReactOS is to Windows NT 4.0. It's a whole lot of effort to emulate an old architecture all the way down to the bottom-most level, but ultimately being a third party rehash it will never perfectly emulate, and it will always reflect the old milestone of the OS it was trying to emulate.

In other words, Haiku OS is not a futuristic operating system, it's a remake of an old one, and it has some problems.

• It's focused solely on legacy support. What a horrible way to build a new operating system; yes, I know, the advantage is you get all this BeOS software up and running on the system right away, but a) it will never work like it did in Be, and b) software on Be in general only had a few short-lived years to mature. Or let me put it this way, I'm really happy and excited for Haiku for being what it is--a nostolgic OS that might still have a future once they wrap up R1 (whenever that happens, if ever) and get started on R2. But until R1 is out of the way, there's nothing really I for one can do; I'm NOT going to write BeOS software targeting R1 considering R1 emulates a Windows 98 generation operating system.
• I posted last night that I thought its base directory structure was perfect. Poking around now with a more loaded system, I retract that. For example, I don't like the idea of apps being installed three different places: in the root directory, in a "home" directory, and in the "beos" directory. WAY too confusing. You have "develop" and "apps" directories in the root, in home, and in beos, but they should all be in root and there should only be one instance of the set.
• I see no user profile support here. I don't recall, did BeOS have a login process? The old Mac environment didn't force you to log in and access the OS through a user profile, but in my opinion that is simply the evolution of operating system technology, like multiprocessing. Without a user profile, you have a single-user machine, which makes the OS good for, yep, good ol' mobile devices. (No wonder BeOS was sold to Palm!)
• The yellow/orange titlebar taking up only the width of the title is not just an aesthetic statement, nor does it appeal to my inner sense of geek, as in, "Cool, a window that isn't perfectly rectangle". It's actually an annoyance. My mouse scrolls on the right, always. It accesses the deskbar on the right. It usually resizes the window from the right. Why must I move the mouse all the way to the top left in order to relocate the window or hit the close button? And yes, I know you can move the window around using the border. But it's such a tiny little border. I've got a 20" monitor running at a resolution of 1600x1200, running Haiku in this little 800x600 VMWare window. It's dang hard for me to find those one or two pixels of border width where I can hold the mouse button down to drag the window; I'd rather move the mouse to the top-left where the titlebar is. Which brings me back to my original complaint; make it flush right, please. Not to mention, it makes a terribly 90's-ish aesthetic statement. (I can get left-aligned narrow title bars in Microsoft Windows using Stardock's WindowBlinds. Needless to say, I have no interest in using it.)
• Half the apps lock up when I try to close out of them. This is because it's pre-alpha, though, so no real surprise there.

I notice Fedora there in my VMWare VMs list, and I ask myself, how does that make me feel? I feel like I miss Fedora, with all its many features and completeness. Which is ironic because I just posted a long post last night about how unimpressed I am with Linux. I'm reminded yet again of what it takes to build an OS. These guys have been at it for six years, yet they don't have an Alpha release done yet. No wonder the geeks hesitate, despite the tools. Without many millions of dollars on hand to invest in people's efforts, and at least as many years, there's just not enough motivation to get something like that done, or done right.

I must admit, though, the idea of seeing a fork of Haiku once it reaches some stable state, and producing an alternate "distro" with all new rules for toolset and GUI, appeals to my imagination. But now suddenly I am more able to understand why there are hundreds of distros of Linux.

I suppose my interest in alternate OS's is related to the wish for a good, approachable, maintainable, community embraceable OS that abandons UNIX or other unapproachable geekiness as well as proprietary and abusive underpinnings like Microsoft's inconsistent and overuse of the Windows registry. I'd love it if I could just sit down with some architects and plan out how a good operating system should be built. As I said before, Be OS came (and Haiku comes) close, but it's already old and just short of archaic considering all that we enjoy in Windows Vista and Mac OS X from both a programmer and a user perspective.

I will keep a close eye on Haiku for a while. Were I to just sit down and construct an OS (and I were a god, which I ain't, and if I was a billionaire, which I also am not), I'd probably start with Haiku, because I like its simplicity in its basic setup--no "/var/", "/opt/" or other gobbligook, and libraries are pretty plainly organized--and I like its performance, basic device support, SMP support, and the total elimination of text-mode bootup junk. I'd add a registry, and build it on something like SQLLite or Berkely DB, something like Elektra. I'd make it user profile oriented, and put users in a 'users' directory, like Vista. I'd make sure that the file system had all the key features of NTFS like security and self-repair... or heck maybe just add full NTFS support and disk checking. In so doing I'd make sure ACL (access control lists) were supported per-file, per-directory, and per other objects. Then I'd tack on cross-platform APIs like Java and Mono. Then I'd get a killer C++ IDE added and fully functional, something on par with Eclipse for Java (oh and for Java support I'd make sure Eclipse worked well). Then I'd tackle 3D graphics API, and push beyond OpenGL and look for a Windows Presentation Foundation API look-alike that had a small footprint but supported 3D and other multimedia. I'd rewrite the shell in that API, taking a cue from Windows Vista Aero. (The goal being not to make it bloated but to make it both fast and powerful, by harnessing the power of modern video cards and delivering powerful, clean, and convenient programming APIs.)

Or, I'd rebuild something from scratch like what I've heard of Singularity, and tackle features on a per-application-requirements basis.

My original silly idea which led to last night's long-winded rant was that someone should sit down with Linux, and just completely refactor the whole thing top to bottom, throwing out legacy compatibility but using GNU tools and clean the whole thing up, starting with the elimination of those oddball directories, replacing the X-Window subsytem with one that is more to-the-metal, basic, and user and developer friendly (and that starts up first to hide the text-mode startup junk), killing off or completely deprecating old-school tools and ways of doing things, add hidden symbolic links for those old, ugly paths to a compatibility subdirectory, and reworking developer tools like Java and Python, one by one, to be compatible with this new system. I'd sell it off as a whole new Linux "distro" like Debian but even much more heavily reworked.

But then I realized, all of that is almost what Haiku does. Except Haiku's focus is to reproduce Be, not to refactor Linux top-to-bottom without constraints. I think the latter is more attainable, useful, and future-friendly.

Honestly, I don't know. I'm awfully naive, but not so naive as to think that my imagining these things should be taken seriously. As much of a geek I am, I&#