Cheerful Curmudgeon

I run my company using OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office. It does everything we need and costs a whopping $0.00; not a bad deal for a small business. To be more specific, OpenOffice.org

• Gives us word processor and spreadsheet programs that more than handle our documentation needs,
• Allows us to open Word and Excel documents which clients send to us,
• Allows us to save our documents in Word, Excel, and Adobe Reader (PDF) formats, and
• Runs on Windows and Linux, which is critical since three of us use Windows and one uses Linux.

About the only fly in the ointment is that OpenOffice.org version 2 cannot open Microsoft Office 2007 documents (e.g., .docx files). In practice, this has not been too much trouble since everyone who has sent such a document to us has been able to send us an older format .doc file upon request. Still, I would like to avoid bugging clients with such requests.
Relief is on the way, though. OpenOffice.org Ninja OpenOffice.org 3.0′s new features, an early look includes this snippet, along with several other cool features:

Microsoft Office 2007 (also called Office Open XML) file formats include .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx. Despite the similarity in names, these formats are significantly different than the Microsoft Office formats used since 1997. OpenOffice.org 3 will offer native read and write support.

There are lots of other useful, new features, too. See the article for “full disclosure.”

The scheduled release date is still about six months away but one of the nice things about open source software such as OpenOffice.org is that you can download the early versions if you want them.

Sure, Microsoft Office provides features that OpenOffice.org does not. But for the vast majority of home and office users, OpenOffice.org will do everything you need and save you hundreds of dollars in license fees. Download it and give it a try.

I don’t worry about kids these days becoming so involved with social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and instant messaging (AIM, text messages, etc.) that they become isolated from real human contact. Why not? XKCD says it perfectly:

Long distance relationships are hard. IM can turn a friend down the street into a long distance relationship.

Excuse me. I’d write more but I need to go hug Candy. But before, I go, here’s one for you: <hug>

Do you remember all those pearls of wisdom that your mom uttered when you where a child? Of course not; you weren’t listening. (I’ll admit it: neither was I.) Some of what mom said was good, solid advice, though. Here is your chance to reclaim those lost gems without having to relive your childhood. Just give Anita Renfroe a little less than three minutes of your time.

Here are the lyrics: Read the rest of this entry »

It is almost never good when your locality is mentioned in the same sentence with Detroit.

USA Today’s article, City Council pays for lessons in civility, takes an in-depth look at acrimonious squabbling on the Ashland, OR city council and includes,

More recently, public fireworks have been reported on city and county panels in Detroit; San Francisco; Chesapeake City, Md.; Mount Dora, Fla.; Milton and Alpharetta, Ga.; and the Missouri towns of St. Peters, O’Fallon and St. Charles. [emphasis added]

For several years now, my wife and I have been bemused by the goings-on in these local city councils. All three groups (St. Peters and O’Fallon city councils, especially) act like groups of misbehaving kindergartners, each member (and mayor) generally disrespectful of opposing viewpoints. The cities seem more interested in becoming “big government” and collecting graft than governing well.

Obviously, what we thought was petty king-making and marginally entertaining is a much bigger problem. As our civic leaders, we expect them to grow up and learn to get along.

It’s time to renew your Do Not Call listing and it’s even more important than renewing that library book which you lost but don’t want to pay an overdue fine for. According to Yahoo! News, Do Not Call listings aren’t forever

Numbers placed on the registry, begun in June 2003, are valid for five years. For the millions of people who signed onto the list in its early days, their numbers will automatically drop off beginning next June if they do not enroll again.

Just jump over to the national Do Not Call registry and sign up again. Quick and (relatively) painless. They even explicitly allow cell phone numbers.

Spam disgusts me. It has rendered free email, one of the most heartfelt examples of human cooperation, completely untenable.

I have been relying on email, for business and personal connections, since I worked at TRW in 1980. I used to run a medium-sized UUCP hub at FileNet in Orange County, CA on a VAX 750 named Felix with five 2400 baud Racal-Vadic modems. Email was not really free in those days. Everyone paid for their equipment and their phone calls with real cash.

The beauty of the email system, though, was that we all cooperated. We relayed each other’s email on the assumption that if everybody did what they could, then everybody would benefit. It worked. For the person with fingers on the keyboard, email was free and pretty darned quick. Even for-fee email systems like CompuServe and MCI Mail installed gateways between the “free” outside world and their customer base.

When the ARPAnet opened up into the publicly available internet, the intricate cooperation of UUCP sites relaying email after 11:00pm (when the long distance telephone rates were at their lowest) was no longer necessary. Virtually any company could have “an internet connection” and it got a whole lot easier to send an email message.

The advent of the internet meant that there was no direct relationship between the number of messages sent (or the size of the messages) and the cost to the company. The T-1 line cost the same whether it was sending email messages or sitting idle. The notion of free email persisted, easily transitioning from “free because of my neighbors’ generosity” to “free because no one wants to do a cost analysis of the networking hardware and connections and allocate it to individual email messages.”

In our naiveté, we cared about staying in touch with each other so much that we had built a system to make communication easy without worrying much about security. After all, if you send an email message, presumably you want the recipient to respond. If that is the case, why would you use a forged return address?

It turns out that there are several reasons to tweak your return address, if not forge it outright. The most common is that you are sending your email from one computer (at work, perhaps) but you want the responses to go somewhere else (to your home, for instance). This is almost always true, especially today when extremely few of us actually log into the computer which handles our email.

In 1984, the Moscow Institute for International Affairs demonstrated another reason to fake the return address: April Fools Day. If you remember the political climate in 1984, you can well imagine the belly-aches and belly-laughs which ensued when the Kremlin sent a message directly to American computer users! You can still read the original message, archived at Google Groups, and you can read about the hoax at Wikipedia.

A decade later, the most nefarious reason to forge a return address cropped up: the message is spam and the sender most definitely does not want the recipients to respond via email. The spammer just wants your money, usually illegally, and wants to hide his identity. This is so effective that we are all drowning under a deluge of crap which obscures the messages we do want. We waste time dealing with the spam. We waste money on software to filter out the spam. If we are employers, we waste money paying our employees to deal with spam instead of doing their jobs.

So if we all hate spam, why does it keep getting worse? The answer is surprisingly easy: money. It turns out that we don’t all hate spam. A few people actually spend money in response to receiving spam: not many but enough to make spamming wildly profitable. I won’t delve into the details; you can look them up on Google. Try searching for “spam economics” or something similar. The bottom line is that it costs essentially $0.00 to send a spam message. If you can send a million spam messages for free and you make a few sales, you have made a phenomenal profit.

I love technology but I have to admit: technology is not solving the spam problem. Spam keeps getting worse. My business, Hen’s Teeth Network, is pretty typical. Here is a graph showing our incoming email volume over the last seven days:

The dark green stuff at the bottom represents the only messages that I want to receive. The rest is crud, a lot of it downright dangerous.

If technology won’t fix the problem, how about the law? The feds passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and not only has it failed to solve the problem but spam volume continues to escalate. Many states have passed their own anti-spam legislation. None of it matters. Few would argue that we see less spam in 2007 than we did in 2003.

One good option remains: change the financial environment in which spam thrives. If it costs more to send spam then the money to be made off of it, spammers will stop sending the stuff. For the spammer, it’s all about the money. You can be certain of this: the spammer has nothing personal against you. He does not want to annoy you. He just wants your money. More to the point, he wants to receive more money than he spends. We may be failing abysmally at reducing the amount of money that the spammer receives. Fortunately, we can easily change the amount of money that he spends.

It is time to abandon the “free” email system that we built back in the good ol’ days. Let’s start paying to send email messages.

Holy cow! Did Art really say that?!

Yes, I did. Email has never been free, anyway. It cost significant amounts of money way back when and it still costs money now. These days I shell out hard cash for spam filtering software and I do it every month. Obviously, I’m willing to spend money to send email. You are, too. You spend money for an internet connection. You spend money for virus scanning software (to make your email and web surfing safe). You probably spend money for spam filtering and anti-phishing software. Here is my proposal:

Let’s establish a completely new email infrastructure where it costs a penny to send an email message. Messages sent via the new system land in a separate inbox from the traditional email. Spammer’s won’t use this system because their profit margins are nowhere near 1%. They would lose money big-time if they tried to pay $0.01 for each message.

But the spammers already use hapless victims’ computers to send their messages. This just means they will spend the hapless victims’ money, too.

No, it doesn’t. We are really good about protecting the things we spent money on. When was the last time you let someone steal your postage stamps or place unauthorized calls on your cell phone? Perhaps you would buy a “roll” of a hundred email stamps. If this vanishes, you’ll sit up and take notice. Sure, you only lost $1.00 but it is still a tangible loss. The flip side is that once your “roll” of email stamps is gone, your machine will no longer spew spam. At a cost of a whole dollar, we have both stopped the spammer dead in his tracks and brought to your attention that someone is stealing from you.

A penny per message is too much. Small businesses and individual people can’t afford it.

Oh come on. Get real. I send a lot of email. In the first half of 2007, I sent 2,343 messages. That would have cost me a whopping $23.43. That includes 1,753 business messages ($17.53) which my company would have paid for and leaves me with a personal six-month bill of a massive $5.90.

We can afford a penny per message. We are already paying way more than that.

Unless you live under a rock or have never used the web for research, you are almost certainly aware of the ongoing debate over the veracity of Wikipedia vs. the traditional encyclopedias such as Britannica and World Book. On the one hand, Wikipedia supporters point to the breadth and currency of its articles and the rapidity with which errors are corrected. On the other hand, supporters of traditional encyclopedias point out that the paid, expert editorial staff guarantee uniformly high quality to the articles.

I think that the debate is over; Wikipedia is well recognized as a reliable source of information, not just by individuals but by the publishing giant Condé Nast. If you trust Condé Nast then you are trusting Wikipedia. For example, yesterday’s article on Wired.com, May 18, 1953: Jackie Cochran, First Woman to Break the Sound Barrier, ends with a reference to just one source: Wikipedia.

I seem to be an internet omnivore, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Omnivores make up 8% of the American public.

Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

Where do you fit? Take the quiz to find out. Candy and I each fit into groups with median ages two decades younger than we are. I guess that means we have something in common.

As much as I love technology toys tools, there is one category that does not seem to pique my interest: e-books and e-magazines. Despite that, Zinio recently caught my eye. Unlike the on-line versions of magazines, Zinio is offering scans of the paper product. That means that you can read the ads. You can see the photos. Everything.

I like their business model. You can subscribe to pretty much any magazine and read it on your computer. You can buy single issues. Subscription prices are the same as paper mail subscriptions. You can cancel subscriptions for refunds of the unused portion, just like paper mail subscriptions. You can even print (most) magazines, although only two pages as a time.

Zinio’s software particularly impresses me. When reading an article, all you have to do is push the space bar. That will move the “viewport” down the page. When you get to the bottom of the page, it will move the viewport to the top of the next column. Very clean and intuitive. If you are zoomed in, Zinio even zooms out briefly so that you can see where you are going; then it zooms back in.

Unfortunately, as good as Zinio is, it cannot overcome my barriers to e-magazines: I do not carry my laptop with me everywhere that I want to read. Instead, I keep most of my magazines in the library. Last night, it was a simple matter to scoop one up as I left to pick my son up at the YMCA. When I finish with a magazine, I usually toss it onto my son’s bed so that he can read it. None of these things are impossible with a computer, just more difficult.

Sure, there are e-book readers but with prices significantly greater than $0.00, I am unlikely to have one in the library, one in my briefcase, one by my easy chair, one by my wife’s chair, etc.

When I say, “Documentation,” how do you react? Probably with one of these: Bleh. A drag. Who reads it? The code is self documenting. Or my favorite: It’s intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.

This morning, I ran across Slashdot’s article, Five AJAX Frameworks Reviewed

Dr. Dobb’s Journal reviews 5 AJAX frameworks:… [the] reviewers… eventually settled on the Yahoo! User Interface Library.

This piqued my interest because I had to make a similar review, and consequent decision, seven months ago.

Let me be perfectly clear. I am not professing that my decision-making process is appropriate for all situations. Specifically, I am not even suggesting that it would have been right for the T. Rowe Price project which formed the basis for the Dr. Dobb’s article.

After reading the blurb in Slashdot, I was initially gratified to see it support my own framework decision: Yahoo! User Interface Library. Then I realized that there is something much more interesting operating here. Turner and Wang used a much more exhaustive, time consuming, and expensive evaluation process than I did. My method required one person to invest about about two hours. But both they and I arrived at the same point.

Here is my thought process:

1. I decided that my project required a good user interface, ease of programming, and an expectation of successful results (no dead ends). The project did not require any bleeding edge stuff; it just had to work well for the end-user.
2. A quick bit of Googling led me to four possible toolkits which seemed to have wide acceptance.
3. All four frameworks had been used to build and deploy real web sites so I knew that, technically speaking, all four “worked.”
4. Just one of the four, YUI, included excellent documentation with code examples.
5. Using the documentation and code examples, I was able to have a prototype of the key component of my project up and running in about an hour.

My experience with the last step gave me the confidence to select YUI and move into development with it. Every time I hit a hiccough while writing the code, the YUI documentation came to the rescue. The project (Memory Lane Designs) was completed without mishap and works well.

The key difference between Turner and Wang’s evaluation technique and my own is simple: I skipped the technical evaluation. The existence of the Yahoo! web site (and several other YUI-based sites) was sufficient for me. I felt no need to spend any time actually writing code to “see if it worked.” I looked only for the differentiators between the toolkits and the YUI documentation immediately leaped to the fore.

I bumped into a somewhat related decision process recently. A friend was evaluating Zend’s IDE and ActiveState’s Komodo IDE. He was spending hours flipping back and forth between the two, digging into the depths of each, trying to pick the right one. I pointed out that the $300 price tag for each was less than the billing rate for the hours he was investing. In other words, it would be significantly less expensive to simply buy one and then buy the other if the initial decision proved to be wrong.

We can get so enamored with an evaluation process that we forget the environment in which the decision is being made. Often there are shortcuts to the right decision which include trusting your gut feelings and trusting the work of others, even if that work is not a rigorous evaluation. Following the shortcuts (intelligently) can save many hours and a ton of dollars.

We have all seen them: web sites that have great stuff on them but which look like they were designed by a trash compactor. Mark Daoust of SiteReference delves into them in his posting, The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites.

He makes some good points, in particular that some target audiences will be put-off by a site which looks too professionally designed. You may be able to gain mileage with the mom ‘n’ pop, home-baked look.

His article is a good read, but in case you are short on time, here is the gist:

There are two general rules that you must keep in mind when building your website: 1) What type of message will resonate with my visitors, and 2) Is the site easy to use?

Nothing earth-shaking here but I do agree with his back-to-basics message. It is very easy to get caught up in the ancillary details of your web site and to lose track of its purpose: Does your site do what you need it to do and do your visitors find it easy to use?