Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I've got a bit of egg on my face today. 

August 29th I wrote to Microsoft about Windows Vista quality.  I made some strong statements about my views on Windows Vista quality, and, it turns out that I was wrong. The problems I had with Vista were caused by a faulty 1 Gig stick of RAM.  When I pulled that stick of memory out of the PC a week ago,  replacing it temporarily with a 512M stick, everything stabilized, and I've had no problems since. 

Similarly, last week while at the Red Herring conference I had a catastrophic meltdown on my tablet.  At one point there were seven blue-screens in a 2 hour period.  I had to shut it down and put it away.  The culprit? Memory again.

In the case of the first computer, it was difficult to figure out.  The PC finally reached a stage where it would load Windows part way, and then simply blue screen and reboot.  I panicked, and put the Windows setup disk in the drive to see if I could load a fresh copy of Windows Vista and at least get access to my data.  It blue screened as well… which meant that the problem wasn't Vista, but the hardware itself.  So, I systematically started removing and replacing components, beginning with the graphics card, until I was able to boot the PC again. 

My tablet was a little easier to figure out.  It produces a log file to send to Microsoft, and on two occasions that file was corrupted.  Windows guessed that the reason was memory.

In retrospect, the only real complaint I might have had with Microsoft was that the diagnostic messages were unhelpful, or even misleading as Windows suggested on several occasions that the problem was a faulty driver.  The quality of the Microsoft software was not the issue.  Rather, it was the quality of the hardware that was the problem.

There you have it.

I did buy a new PC Saturday as well.  I did not, however, buy a Mac.  I bought the HP Pavilion DV6000, a dual core Turion 64 machine with 2G of memory, NVidia graphics, a 15.3 inch widescreen display and a 200G hard drive.  At $999 it was a steal compared to the equivalent Macbook Pro at $2199.99.  Add in the costs of obtaining Mac Office, and the headaches of integrating the Mac with my all Windows network, and it was a no-brainer.

And by the way… Windows Vista, and Office 2007… very very smooth on the dual core machine. 

Jim Courtney knows mashups.  He's been a judge recently in the Skype Mashup contest, and has been a proponent of the concept since the Voice 2.0 Manifesto was published two years ago.  That's why his latest piece, The Dawn of the Mashup World - Part I: Challenges, Why and Expectations, makes for such an authoritative and interesting read. 

Jim mentions iotum as a mashup publisher.  It's absolutely true.  We do it because, in addition to all the good reasons that Jim lists in his piece, it's the cheapest way to build applications.  For example, our latest effort — Free Conference Calls on Facebook — is a Ruby on Rails application hosted inside Facebook.  It uses XML interfaces to communicate with our conference bridge, and the text messages it sends are delivered by California-based business partner 4INFO.  Because each of these components is discrete, and provides well documented web services interfaces, we were able to very quickly deliver some key pieces of software. For example:

• much of the conferencing development work was done by a third party.  The Facebook application wasn't actually interfaced to the bridge until quite late in the process.
• the business portions of our agreement with 4INFO were actually substantially more time consuming than the work to interface our application to their network.  Their choice to present the 4INFO service as a web service made our job easier.

Stay tuned for the rest of this series.  It promises to be a very interesting read.

On Friday morning at 10 AM I was having a lively discussion with an acquaintance about Microsoft vs RIM.  This individual asserted that it was only a matter of time before Microsoft passed RIM.  I pointed out that RIM had some advantages that differentiated its products, including its network operations center and the business models which it allows.  There's a certain irony, I suppose, to the fact that as I was having this conversation, RIM service across United States was apparently down.  It's unclear whether Friday morning's RIM outage affected us in Canada.  Certainly the BlackBerry's we own at iotum were unaffected, but that's because we run BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and don't rely on the carrier BIS service.   

That's two major outages in a year for RIM.  How many "nines" of reliability does that represent?  Should we have the same expectations for reliability from the BlackBerry service as phone service?