Symphonious

A couple of days ago we had an issue where a new test I'd checked in passed locally but failed on the build machine and I didn't get a build failure notification. Everyone who did get a build notification thought I was working on it and the build stayed broken overnight. Clearly, we need a really obvious way of reporting build failures that everyone notices and continues to notice until the build is fixed again.

The classic way to achieve that is with lava lamps but that generally requires X10 hardware and with our office layout it wouldn't be in everyone's line of sight anyway. Instead, I took the old PowerBook G4 that I needed to get rid of before moving and set it up with a simple shell script and an mp3 of Beethoven's 5th. Voila, one build siren at no cost and about 30 minutes worth of effort.

If anyone's interested, the script is available but it does require OS X and iTunes. Should be trivial to adapt it for Linux by using mpg123 instead of iTunes though. It even mutes the sound volume when it's not meant to be playing to avoid any extraneous system beeps.

Can anyone provide pointers to who the reliable mobile phone and broadband internet providers in the UK (Slough area particularly) would be?  In Australia there are a number of smaller providers (but significantly bigger than mum & pop shops) that give better deals than the major providers but I'm not sure if that's true in the UK or how I'd find such second-tier providers anyway.

When the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard first came out it was supposed to bring in a new era of compatibility between content repositories and put an end to the content silo. There was, and still is, a lot of talk about it and just about everyone added JCR compliance to their marketing materials. Unfortunately, that's mostly where things stopped - the implementation work that followed was generally done was buggy or incomplete and the only viable JCR implementations that I've seen have come out of Day Software, who lead the JCR spec effort. There are a few CMSs around that do have good JCR support - Alfresco for example - but they're few and far between and even with that, there isn't a lot of people taking advantage of that support and the standardization of the repository interface.

Then along came Atom which is all about remote access and manipulation of data and missing probably 90% of the functionality that JCR offers. It really isn't a competitor to JCR at all and yet it's doing more to break down content silos than JCR ever has. Atom support isn't just being added to the marketing materials, it's actually shipping and is usable in a lot of places - IBM's Lotus Connections has Atom APIs to everything and, as best I can tell, only Atom APIs to it's repository.

Atom seems to have walked the line between simplicity and power just right, and even in the cases where it's too simplistic it's extensibility is so effective that you hardly notice. Connections for instance makes heavy use of the pagination extensions to make sure that content doesn't drop off the bottom of the Atom feed and out of existence. Having Atom support in your product, serving and consuming as necessary is becoming an extremely powerful feature.

I'm setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I'll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled "Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management". Sadly it's been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you're around I'd really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it's not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I'm really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners - they don't tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.

From there it's back over to Lake Tahoe for a fancy corporate retreat and a whole lot of major planning which should be fun.

Finally, I'll be spending February in London to help kick our European sales along, so if people are around I'd love to catch up and meet some new people.

Since I'll be doing a fair bit more travel in the future, I've joined up with Dopplr to help keep track of it and succumbed to the horrors of widgets in my sidebar to display my upcoming trips. If you're using Dopplr I'm registered under adrian@symphonious.net (screen name ajsutton) so feel free to follow my trips and let me know if we're passing by. I'm really looking forward to meeting new people now that I'm getting around the world some more so don't be shy.

PS: Apologies to the Planet Ephox subscribers who have now had three posts about Lotusphere in rather quick succession.

Tim Bray's second, very short notice, prediction for 2008 is that Windows is going to "look bad". It's probably a good prediction - Vista simply didn't do enough to make Windows competitive for the next 3 years or so they'll take to get the next release out. Obviously Windows isn't going to disappear but there is already a strong trend towards alternate platforms, mostly OS X, which is very likely to increase over the next 12 months. Even my wife has become an Apple evangelist (more so than me) ever since she got my old powerbook to use in front of the couch. It seems the in-laws will be making the switch in the next year as well.

In the anti-trust trial, I seem to recall it being ruled that Apple and Linux were not viable competitors for Windows and thus Microsoft held a monopoly. I probably wouldn't go so far as to say that's no longer true, but it's certainly less clear cut.

As Tim says:

Microsoft’s continuing extraction of monopoly rents is dependent, near as I can tell, on just two things: 

1. MS Office staying good enough that people don’t mind paying the fearful Windows tax that goes with it. Except for, Office runs better on OS X than on Windows.
2. The Exchange/Outlook lock-in. This seems the big one to me.

If Office 2008 (the OS X Office update to be released Jan 15) can read and write Microsoft's new force-you-to-upgrade document format natively1, I think point 1 will be well and truly taken care of - at least until Microsoft break the format again. The current Office for Mac is painful because it runs in Rosetta so it just isn't as snappy as it should be, particularly if you have a number of other apps using a lot of memory.

The second one is going to get very interesting. I don't rate Google any chance of knocking off Office - Google Docs and Spreadsheets is way too primitive and buggy - but their flagship AJAX app is GMail and it's really good. With IMAP support now available, all that's missing is a good syndication system for Google Calendar. There's a lot of work to be done, but if Google can bring it's calendar offering up to par with GMail, we should see it starting to gain significant traction by years end.

What I find interesting in this, is that there's little indication that AJAX is going to take over, it's the combination of AJAX, desktop applications and open protocols to access and synchronize data that makes it all work. In other words, if the major trends of 2007 all came together, you'd really have something.

1 - and given the lack of uproar from the peanut gallery, er blogs, I assume it does↩