Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

I just noticed nabble.com and on the first look they seem like a great service for hosted forums.

Personally, I find this a very useful service. For example, a small company (software or otherwise) might use that for hosting forums for their products. An open-source project might use that for hosting forums for users of the software and for developers.

I find that option much more attractive than hosting your own forum software. Even though I have my own server that I can abuse and technical knowledge to do the abuse, I’m not interested in spending time installing/managing/upgrading the software and making sure that it’s secure. Administration overhead is a real problem.

Another problem is that most of forum software are phpBB-look-a-likes (phpBB probably wasn’t the one to invent the look, it’s just an example) and the look is ugly. I couldn’t find a decent looking, open-source forum software. The one I like isn’t publicly available.

There are existing solutions, of course. Yahoo! Groups has been there forever and I actually used it once in the past to create a forum. I hate the way they look (even after their re-design) and behave. I follow an Io forum on Yahoo! Groups and it’s just painful.

Then there’s Google Groups, which works better than Yahoo! Groups but their RSS feeds are broken (no full-text, don’t work in bloglines) which is important to me.

To be fair, Nabble doesn’t have RSS at all, but I’m hoping they’ll implement it.

In addition to hosting your own forums, Nabble also works as a mailing list mirror.

I don’t like flooding my mailbox with mailing-list traffic and I don’t like the fact that you have to subscribe to post. Nabble solves both problems: you can read the list via web-interface (RSS feed would be much better) and you can post directly from Nabble.

Compare the Nabble version of any mailing-list hosted on SourceForge - the contrast is striking (I hate how SourceForge handles mailing lists of their project).

My only concern is their viability. They’re self-funded startup and they admit that they have no idea how will they make money, just yet.

It’s great that you can get a free, useful service, but it’s not going to be great if the service will vanish because Nabble can’t pay the bandwidth bills.

Here’s me hoping they’ll find a way to get revenues and that they’ll add RSS feeds.

RIM got hit hard when they settled for $612.5 million with NTP (despite the fact that it looked like all of the patents were or would be judged invalid). They started lobbying for patent reform.

Rumor has it that Sony will have to stop selling PS2 due to patent case. If that happens, that will cost them dearly.

Rumor has it that Microsoft (who lost a few costly patent cases as well) started lobbying for patent reform.

Will costly patent lawsuits bring an end to patent insanity?

The current patent situation is insane. Ask anybody.

Ok, maybe not anybody. Apparently it’s completely sane to U.S. Patent Office which seems to be in a race with itself to approve as many pattents as possible.

It’s also completely sane to patent lawyers that get paid by companies to submit patents. Unfortunately both Patent Office and lawyers have a lot of influence on the shape and form of patent system and they both have incentive to encourage patents for as many things as possible. Patent office because it wants more power, patent lawyers because they want more money.

Fortunately, patent office and lawyers are not the only ones that influence the law. At some level you would hope that wise congressman or congresswoman would realise the insanity and change the law.

As it stands, the wisdom is generally not generated from within the congressman or congresswoman, but rather trickles down from those who have the biggest influence on getting them elected. Which is not you and me but Various Interest Groups With Money To Spend On Election Support.

Large tech companies are one of those interest groups. It stands to reason that when large tech companies realise the insanity of patent system, they’ll pump enough money and do enough lobbying to change the law.

It doesn’t seem like those large tech companies noticed the insanity just yet. My theory is that it’s because of Lottery Effect (aka Las Vegas Effect). Everybody knows that playing lotter is tax on stupidity. Chances of winning lottery are so small that it’s a waste of money. Human nature being what it is, this fact is promptly discarded by our brain when we start fantasizing about the imaginary fortune. The cars, the girls, the houses we’re buying in our minds with the money we will never win is enough to shame probability theory into disappearance. Besides, someone wins so it just as well might be me.

A similar reason drives patents. All the talk about protecting innovation and the right to make a profit from your hard work is smoke and mirrors. What we really dream of is a NTP-like homerun where a few ideas we came up with in the shower and a little bit of struggling in the court will net us $600 million. It’s all about the greed.

I’m guessing that a conventional wisdom in large companies is still based on assumption that loading up with patents might help large companies stop other large companies from making money. Patents, being a monopoly on an idea, have this nice Winner Take All property.

The bigger you are the more patents you can afford and therefore the more monopolies you can get therefore the more you gain therefore you should lobby for patents.

Bzzt. The last assumption is wrong and recent patent lawsuits are starting to show that.

Patent system has an imbalance in that even a small player can hit hard a large company. When it’s large company vs. large company, they’ll probably find enough patents to sue each other so the likely result will be an impass.

A small patent troll i.e. an organization only interested in acquiring patents (which isn’t terribly expensive) and going for homeruns (i.e. suing large companies with lots of money for infringing on one of their trivial patents) might seriously damage a bottom line of a large company. The larger the company, the bigger of a target it is since it’s more likely to infringe some random patent.

Companies are run on greed (”maximizing shareholder value”, as they like to call it) by smart people. At some point those smart people will realize that the benefit they get from patents they own doesn’t cover costs of paying for patents owned by others. When that happens, they’ll start trickle that wisdom in the direction of congresspeople and lobby for the change of laws.

Look at RIM, it’s already started.

The more large companies are hit with costly patent lawsuits, the more likely it is that they will realise that rampant patentism isn’t good for them.

Therein ends my small contribution to the pool of patent rants.

Building communities with software by Joel Spolsky is an old but very worthwile post to read.

One of the many things I like about it is that it shows the thinking beside the design. It shows that thinking about the design is actually important and that conventional wisdom isn’t so wise after all.

An interesting software phenomenon is that any succesful product creates a lot of “me too” imitations. I’ve seen in over and over again. Forum software that all look the same. Text editors that only differ in which UI toolkit they use or which scripting language they support. File managers. Tracker programs (Amiga owners know what those are).

At the same time other useful product categories can be underserved. For example, there was a time, many moons ago, that you could choose from 10 different 3D modelling programs for Amiga but 0 decent word-processors.

The other problem is that it’s hard for humans to break free from dominant form. Since the days of Norton Commander pretty much every file manager has 2 panes (and you can find lots of other examples of non-innovation).

Which is why it’s refreshing to read an article that shows that design should focus on thinking about doing things that make most sense, not necessarily doing things the way the’ve always been done.

More an impression than a mini-review.

Inscape is an open-source vector drawing program. Think Illustrator.

I’ve tried the Windows version. My only frame of reference is Illustrator and even that only used a couple of times. I’m not a graphic person but I had to draw a logo so I decided to give Inscape a spin.

It worked surprisingly well. As expected I was confused at first by all the differences from the Illustrator but I quickly got the basics.

I was positively surprised that some of the basic things (like resizing) were done better than in Illustrator (at least in my opinion). I was able to export to plain svg format that I could import in Illustrator.

Inscape has all the basic features. Illustrator, not surprisingly, is much more capable and many things are done better (for example, saving an illustration as an image has a preview in Illustrator).

To conclude, I was able to design my simple thing. I can’t say how well would Inkscape work for more complex design tasks.

What better use for blogs than as a distributed bug database?

Since I’m a good boy and believe in providing feedback, here’s the message I sent to Bloglines through their contact page:

As far as I can tell the way Bloglines treats Google Groups RSS/ATOM feeds is broken.

I tried subscribing to various feeds (e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/webpy/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml) and they work as expected in e.g. Google Reader or RSS Bandit but they don’t work in Bloglines (when first subscribed I saw outdated messages and they don’t seem to get updated).

On a separate note, Google Groups RSS/ATOM feeds prove that Google doesn’t get everything right.

First, they cut off the posts (which might be motivated by the understandable desire to make money through ads that only show up on the website, not in the feed). What’s worse, sometimes you can’t tell if a post was cut off or not from the text, depending on where the cut off point happened to be.

I’ve also sent that feedback to Google Groups team.

The most important thing you can do to make your software more useful is to write docs for it. This is especially important for Unix’y command-line tools.

Ok, maybe not the most important thing, but I want to make a point.

I was wasting my time reading weblogs and one link led me to cook a better make than make. I hate make and a like trying new software (even if ultimately I don’t use it) so I wanted to check it out. I didn’t because of lack of any useful documentation. I assume the author does care about other people using his software since:

• he put a lot of effort into writing the code
• he maintains a mailing list for users
• he maintains a website for the program

At first I was hopeful, because there is a link to “Cook Reference Manual” on the webpage but it’s very unhelpful. First, it’s a PDF, even though the content is just a plain text rendering of a couple of man pages. Second, man pages are the worst documentation idea that refuses to die.

Earth to people writing documentation: what I want to read about is “a gentle and concise introduction to using cook” i.e. how to compile the simplest project using cook. When I do that and it works, I might graduate to slightly bigger examples. When I’m comfortable with that, I will need a detailed reference guide, describing each possible option and command line switch.

A man page just slaps me in the face with its detailed reference of all possible options, arranged in alphabetic order, with no examples of how to achieve the most frequent tasks.

It’s a cultular thing. When Unix programmer needs to solve documentation problems, he writes a man page. Now he has two problems.

It’s quite amazing:

• the inability of intelligent people to see how awful man pages are and break free from harmful tradition that originated in times when restrictions of computers was forcing design decisions
• compared to writing code, writing docs is much easier and takes less time, but people are willing to spend infinite amounts of time on code but none on reasonably useful docs

Having used Digg for a while, it seems to me that there’s a growing appetite for crafting the headlines in a way that attracts the attention the most.

Those two examples from today’s list propelled me to make that observation:

• Former Google Employee says don’t buy Google stock. Given the exoribitant price of Google stock, that’s a very rational advice. But the headline makes it seem like it means more than it does (as if ex-googler has any special insight into Google’s stock price).
• Motorola stock stumbles over 2 percent (in reference to problems with Razr phones). A great stumble indeed.

Which is understandable: the point of posting an article is to have it digged by as many people as possible so that it appears on the main page. A catchy headline helps in that (since very few people bother to actually read the article and ponder its worthiness) so people try to create catchy headlines. Nothing new, really (we see that in newspapers, we see that in blogs) but still sad.

Says he who’s been guilty of that in the past and will be guilty of that in the future. Which brings me to When the Anti-Choice Choose as a great example of how good humans are at self-deception and condemning activities they themselves engage in from time to time.

I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft’s documentation team. Writing good technical documentation (e.g. API descriptions) is very hard and rarely do I see it done well.

One way to improve you documentation is by allowing readers to tell you about your mistakes and fix them. As simple as it concept seems, I don’t see it implemented very often. Which is why I was positively surprised that Microsoft actually responded to the feedback I’ve sent them about lacking documentation of syntax for setting breakpoints in Platform Builder IDE.

All it took was clicking on an e-mail link inside help (*.chm) file. That opened default e-mail client with subject pre-filled with the location of the section I was complaining about. I wrote my thing and sent the e-mail. I wasn’t expecting any response, but it did come. I was notified that the owner of this topic was notified and even got an updated version from the writer.

Looking at msdn website it seems like this feature exists but isn’t consistent (e.g. there’s a “Send comments on this topic” link for C# docs or Windows API docs but not for Windows Mobile docs so there’s still room for improvement.