rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Monday, 22 July 2002

Brett Morgan comments on Building Business Relationships via the Blog: Big business is really a reaction to the lack of being able to find business opportunities without the leverage of a big companies marketing budget. Blogs, and the personal interaction, is going to disintermediate the whole market. The reduction in friction in the market will be quite startling. And the BigCo's will go out in a big way. While I do think Blogs are an amazing business tool (I'm explore daily what they can do for my business relationships) - I'm not sure they will bring down BigCo 11:11:30 PM  comment []      Liverpool: I Wanna Hold Your Spam - two bizarre things about this article. Firstly, does banning email one day a week from your organisation really combat 'organisational spam'? And secondly, online advertising must be really struggling if Wired is running ads for Fast Company - AFAIK they are not owned by the same group? 11:08:10 PM  comment []      Game Theory, Open Source, and the Copyleft.. Jon Schull and Mikael Pawlo both have fascinating insights into how game theory might affect Open Source software. I'd say neither is 100% correct, largely because both completely ignore the notion of profit! Sure - a few companies might not Open Source  their software because they are afraid of competitors stealing their ideas. But surely many, many more don't do it because they make money from selling that software? If it were free, 98% of their users would no longer pay and they would go out of business? IMHO only a few types of software can be made by profitable (or even viable) Open Source businesses. IMHO these types share one of two common attributes: massive market - there must be lots of users, s**tloads of them. This means 2% sales or support is enough to make money. (See Ximian, Red Hat etc) huge amounts of customisation and maintenance - a lot of people pay companies to configure Apache and Linux because it's complex to install and maintain. (See Red Hat, Covalent etc) 6:43:16 PM  comment []      Scott on Email Interface Design 101. And, what have I been coding all day?  A natural language parser for treating emails sent to a common address like todo@ yourdomain.com as task list items -- but inferring properties like Priority, Status, Project, Categories, Who to Assign them to, etc.  Serendipity in action.  It's all database driven a pretty cool piece of code that knows that "Paolo" = www.evectors.com = IdeaTools and that tasks from Paolo have a higher priority than tasks from other sources, etc.  More details as it gets more features and such. This sounds funky. A lot of people seem to be doing applications to 'improve' email at the moment. Whatever happened to Zaplet? They're still around but it seems to be only corporate-focused now. I know Brett is after a combined email and KM program. Not sure this will ever happen, but it would be cool.  6:23:03 PM  comment []      New essay: REST + SOAP. Very interesting essay. And on the day when JIRA becomes REST enabled. Is an RSS API REST? I think so. SOAP is still coming. [Sam Ruby] 6:16:24 PM  comment []      JProfiler 2.0.3 is a $548 payware profiler based on the Java virtual machine profiling interface (JVMPI that can report on CPU usage, memory size, threads, and "VM telemetry"(whatever that is).Version 2.0 adds snapshot saving and loading, monitor contention analysis, thread state selection in CPU views, integrated source and bytecode viewers, J2EE integration wizards, package level statistics, dynamic view filters, improved garbage collector functionality and data export capabilities. Looks cool - and it's not ugly! That's a big factor in me buying software. I like to get that 'fuck me it looks good' feeling. IBM's alphaWorks has updated RBManager, a tool that automates many of the tedious tasks associated with creating, updating, and managing resource bundle files.Version 0.6 was released only because the previous version had an expiration date that recently expired. This also looks very useful. We'll use it in the upcoming JIRA i18n effort! [Cafe Au Lait] 6:10:52 PM  comment []      Sam Ruby upgraded Gump yesterday. For those not familiar with Gump - Gump is a social experiment. The primary goal of Gump is to get diverse projects to communicate early and often about integration, dependencies, and versioning management.  Gump is a cool concept. It's continuous integration (very like Cruise Control without testing) on a massive scale. Very cool. What it needs now, is if they could integrate a unit test harness that ran at the same time, and logged bugs into a bug tracker (of course I'd recommend JIRA but I believe some people at Jakarta prefer Scarab - I have no idea why! If you know - tell me.). Both of those things would improve Gump hugely IMHO. Oh, I know it would take a lot of effort to write tests for all the Jakarta projects - but formalised unit test suites would be a good idea. A lot of projects actually have them already. 1% of the code tested daily is better than 0% tested never! [Sam Ruby] 5:47:19 PM  comment []      hahaha this is pretty dumb but funny - Google Groups Art. 5:34:50 PM  comment []      Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar is the coolest application I've found in a month. Small, simple and it works perfectly! (And customisable up the wazoo!) I've already written a service to search jira.atlassian.com (syntax: "jira <query>") from the taskbar. Download it and customise for your own JIRA installation if you want. Very funky app. 3:54:50 PM  comment []      David wrote an Ode to complainers. This is why complainers, the folks who really care enough to complain, are a wonderful thing. So if you like to bitch and whine about every little thing, here's to you. I would of course agree completely. I had a long email conversation over the weekend with a customer who was concerned about our upgrade policy. The fact that he was concerned enough to put together a long email discussing the pros and cons of our policy, as well as giving comparisons with other software companies, meant a lot to me. It meant he cared enough about a product, that he hadn't even bought yet, to try and improve it. These people are rare. If you find them, keep them, care for them and they will pay you back in spades. 9:42:17 AM  comment []      JIRA 1.3.3 beta was released on Friday. I'm extremely excited about this release!  Why is it exciting to software developers? Because JIRA is a kick ass issue / bug tracker. Why is it especially exciting to bloggers? Because 1.3.3 contains a full RSS API! I believe this is the first bug tracker in the world to support RSS (read: I can't find any others that do it). The RSS API enables JIRA to be used as a REST style web service. The API is URL based but there is a cool GUI configuration tool (the Issue Navigator) to build RSS URLs. Each feed is RSS compliant, but also contains a lot more data (such as versions, description etc) in XML format if you want to use it. The possibilities this opens up are vast. Imaging 'subscribing' to a feed of the latest bugs in your Radio aggregator. You could display a list of ths highest priority features in your website (built using any language). You could create a list of the most pressing issues affecting different components on your intranet. This is very cool stuff - I can't wait to see how people use it. (The upcoming SOAP API is even more exciting - stay tuned) 9:37:14 AM  comment []