Come On!  XDocs is Easy to Understand !

I keep seeing comments about the new Microsoft XDocs like this:

You know Microsoft has a marketing problem when none of us (Dave Winer, or the MVPs) can figure out what XDocs are for. I've been looking at the Web page and I still don't understand.

The Scobleizer

This really isn't very hard to understand at all.  Here's what I think:

1. It's a slam against Adobe Acrobat / PDF and PDF Forms which Microsoft really doesn't like.  Acrobat is really a platform level technology and we all know that Microsoft really wants to be the only platform vendor.
2. It's a super forms tools.  Forms are useful but not groundbreaking.  Still this is useful for capturing data.
3. It relies on .NET (not stated explicitly but you can guarantee it).  I'm sure what's going to happen here is that internal developers will use it to create data capture applications and then it will drive installation of the .NET runtime as well as the next version of Office (that depends on whether or not there is a runtime engine or if you need the next version of office to use it).  If you think this is like the Word 97 file format change which drove the Office 95 to Office 97 migration then take the gold star !  That's right.
4. And, most of all ... It's an AntiBrowser !  Yup.  An AntiBrowser.  This is the first real potentially mainstream product which you can use to capture data that isn't a browser / web server application.  Think about it -- how many data capture applications these days are built using a browser as the front end?  Lots and lots.  And those aren't all powered by IIS by a long shot.  This is a direct move against the thin client revolution.  And that just plain sucks.  Sure it makes sense to deploy executable code to capture data.  Sure it makes sense to update it and have even fatter client computers.  DOH ! 

Microsoft XDocs.  It's Just a Bad Idea.  Repeat After Me:

Microsoft XDocs.  It's Just a Bad Idea.

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10 - 12 Software Development Jobs Available !

Posting this as a public service.  Finding 10 - 12 software development jobs in one place is unheard of in this day and age.

Online URL for this job: http://jobs.perl.org/job/489

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Posted: October 10, 2002

Job title:
Software Developer -- Herndon, VA -- Perl, JavaScript, CGI

Company name: Kam Enterprises

Internal ID: 1010

Location: United States, VA, Herndon

Pay rate: $60K+

Travel: 0-25%

Terms of employment: Salaried employee

Length of employment: Indefinite

Hours: Full time

Onsite: yes

Description:
10 to 12 software development positions available. Developers must  be able to work as a team. Project will concentrate on  web development using the following technologies: JavaScript, Perl, HTML, web servers (such as Apache), SQL, CGI, DBD/DBI. Candidates with experience in DHTML will be a plus.  Positions will be based out of the Herndon, VA area.  Perdicted travel will be 1 week per 3 months to North Carolina, although we have no problems with developers who would like to travel more often.  Security  clearance needed at the Secret to Top Secret level.  However, exceptional developers with no clearance should apply also.  If interested, please send your resume in text or Word format to Irene Kam at ilkrecruit@cox.net.

Required skills:
* Perl, JavaScript, HTML, web servers (such as Apache), SQL, CGI,    DBD/DBI.  * Candidates with experience in DHTML will be a plus. * Secret/TS clearance (exceptional developers with no clearance    should also apply) * Travel 1 week per 3 months * Submit resumes to Irene Kam at ilkrecruit@cox.net

Contact information: Irene Kam (ilkrecruit@cox.net)

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ISP Horror Stories from Hell

If you think that title is redundant then read Russell's Rant.  Ouch.  In another post he states how he likes register.com as a Name Registrar.  I'd caution him against that.  Register.com is hugely expensive compared to competitors like 000Domains and if you need to transfer a domain to another registrar?  Good luck.  I tried all summer long without success (that's why I own fuzzygroup.net and fuzzygroup.com).  I'd strongly recommend 000Domains.  They seem to be rock solid and they just plain rock.  Also like Register.com you don't need a name server.  That's pretty damn cool.

And to throw in a plug for the boys over at RackSpace, they aren't perfect but they're damn good.  I often get asked why I pay for a premium priced server and now I'll just point them to Russell's rant.  It says it all.  It really says it all.  As a general comment, hosting companies with options at the $10 per month or lower (even if they have higher priced options) seem to always end up with problems because the customers you attract drain the lifeblood from your support techs.  And then service suffers.  And then you get Russell.

As this google search shows he's not the only one with problems with CWI.  The "Condompower" result near the end also shows why if you host Adult sites you don't want to intermix them with your non-adult sites.  Searching for CWI juxtaposes the text interestingly.  There are apparently postive ways to use the word "sucks".

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If You Take Prescription Drugs Visit RxNorth

Here's one of those success stories you love to hear.  A little Canadian company decides to sell prescription drugs over the Internet significantly cheaper than Americans are used to paying.  2 years later they have 170 employees.  Here's an example of the savings: 2 months of Novaldex for $220 in the U.S. costs just $42.78 (that's a different pharmacy than RxNorth but their savings are very similar; I just didn't have the right example to use RxNorth).  Given the obvious issues with health care and insurance in the states anything that makes things cheaper is a rich and forthy goodness.  Kudos to RxNorth, well done!

[ Go to RxNorth ]

[Facts from the Wall Street Journal but written by me]

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Your Past Returns or The Largest Email You've Ever Seen

If you are any kind of developer then something you may know or may not know is that your past returns.  And while it's sometimes good, the way in which it returns is sometimes odd at best, bizarre in the middle and just plain freaking ass weird.  From 1987 to 1996 I ran a hypertext tools company named NTERGAID that made a product named HyperWriter (among others).  Yes that was pre-web.   And, yes Virginia, hypertext existed long before the web.  The product and company were ultimately acquired and our award winning products were utterly and completely shelved.  So shelved in fact that when this company's technology assets were sold off, our tools weren't even listed on the due diligence forms meaning that the acquirer didn't actually buy them.

Anyway yesterday I get a random email over the transom looking to convert our document databases into HTML.  I can't legally provide the tools (I could do it but that could get me into legal issues since this stuff is very unclear and just finding out the answer could take months).  So I offered to look at it as a consulting project.  And I very foolishly said a fatal statement "Zip it up and email it to me".  One thing that I didn't tell you is that towards the end our products were mostly used for building CD-ROM titles.  And she did zip it up 250+ megs and send it to me as a 73 meg zip file.  That's right.  A 73 meg email.  Oh dear god.

So Outlook got just plain weird and refused to pick up my mail.  Finally looking thru the QMail directory structure, my buddy Apokalyptik realized the problem and said (approximately) "Dude.  You got a 73 meg email !!!" (and then laughter ensued).  His second comment was "That's the largest email I've ever seen". 

Emails by outlook can rarely be retrieved when they are greater than 5 or 6 megs.  I'm past that by more than a factor of 10.  This then raises the issue of "How do you download and extract the attachments from a 73 meg email".  We kicked it around again and I thought about switching to Outlook Express or Eudora both of which tend to be better in my experience for big emails.  But I knew that was a stretch so then we came on the idea of FTPing it to my local box and "de-mimeing" it with a script.   Mime stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is the technical standard that encodes an email message for transfer.  It also encodes the attachment so "de mimeing" is the process of extracting an attachment.  I've done this before in Perl and I know there are PHP tools so it was off to Google.  After looking at a bunch of php and Perl stuff, none of which looked fast or easy, I raced over to Download.com and guessed that there must be a utility for this.  I mean I can't be the only one who's ever been stupid with email?  Can I?  Apparently not.  There were several tools there and after sorting through them I found the Decode Shell Extension from FunDunc.  It worked absolutely rippingly well.  About 2 minutes after download I had my 250 odd meg set of files on my hard drive.

All that just to get a damn email.  Now you are probably thinking "Why didn't you just ask her to FTP it to you".  Answer a) Geek Pride.  Answer B) When I saw how large it was I realized that this wasn't a trivial consulting job and could be real revenue and I didn't want to do anything to possibly mess up the deal.  I told her to email it to me and she did so.  It's not her fault that I was a bloody idiot.

So then I went to extract the data and realized that a bug in the last release of our old software would mean that I would need to press ENTER more than 22,000 times to extract the data.  And so it goes.  Need to try again with different extraction settings?  Another 22,0000 times.  Sigh.  Maybe I can train the cats to hold the ENTER key down.

And so it goes.

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