In the Small Business section on washingtonpost.com, Sharon McLoone notes that Sunrocket was booted out of the Better Business Bureau. Here's what she writes:

The Internet-phone service provider SunRocket was kicked out of the BBB about a year ago after "we didn't like what we were seeing with their complaints and they had an unsatisfactory record," said Ed Johnson, the president and CEO of the BBB chapter overseeing the D.C. metro area. "Our reports are a good gage about a business - for both businesses and consumers." SunRocket of Vienna,Va., shuttered its doors last week, deeply in debt while leaving its customers with no service.

My interactions with SunRocket's customer service were always prompt and courteous but we did have quality-of-service issues which we may or may not have experienced had we been with a different VOIP provider.

***

Think estimating how long it will take to create a new application is difficult? How about estimating how long it will take to modify an existing application that you've never seen before.

In particular I find that folks sometimes don't understand the time necessary to familiarize ones self with a strange application. That it takes time doesn't necessarily mean that the program is shoddily constructed or that the programmer is incompetent. Not taking time to learn the architecture is like walking into a building and knocking down walls without first checking to see if they're structurally important, and the result can be the same: A big crash.

Back in February there was an interesting discussion of software quality on Slashdot.org that includes some of these issues.

***

Yesterday CNN reported that Matt Damon, star of the new Bourne movie feels that James Bond is a "an imperialist and he's a misogynist" and that "what the character is is something from the 1960s". I can't say that I disagree, though I always did like Bond's gadgets. However, Damon's comments got me to thinking about secret agents and I decided to go back to the source, so I've started reading "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad.

Conrad has always been one of my favorite authors. "Heart of Darkness" was, of course, mandatory reading in high school. Later on, I found "Nostromo" which I enjoyed immensely. So I'm looking forward to "The Secret Agent".

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Joseph Conrad and another of my favorite authors, HG Wells, were contemporaries (Conrad was 9 years older than HG Wells). Jules Verne, although born in 1828, could also be considered part of this era of great fiction.

I wonder if 100 years from now people will look back with the same amazement at the foresight of authors like William Gibson and Phillip K Dick ?

***

I subscribe to the audio version of the Harvard Business Review and in this month's edition is a thought provoking article by Neil Howe and William Strauss entitled, "The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve". To briefly summarize, Howe and Strauss believe that some traits are common to a generation and moreover that generational traits are cyclic.

Thus, if you can determine what type of generation you're looking at, you can look back at past examples of that type to see how they'll typically behave. The authors describe generation X (of which I am a part) as obsessive parents who are distrustful of authority and who are comfortable taking risks. The millennium generation that my kids belong to will, they say, be a generation of respectful and compliant artists.

We've been sunrocket subscribers for about a year. In case you're not familiar with them, Sunrocket is a VOIP provider similar to Vonage. They offered us a great deal that worked about to about $15/month for unlimited long distance. The service had been working wonderfully for us. Perhaps too well, as a couple of days ago I received email notification from sunrocket's customer service department indicating that sunrocket would be ceasing business operations. "Dear customers," the email stated, "SunRocket is in the process of closing its operations and therefore will no longer be able to provide you with the phone service that you have been accustomed to." Thankfully, we can transfer our service to one of several alternate providers.

I wonder if Sunrocket's woes are due to poor business decisions such as a perhaps too generous welcome package for new subscribers, or to the threat of lawsuit gathering on the horizon.

---

Yesterday I summed up what I know about google for a fellow that runs an ecommerce site. Today, I'm putting those same thoughts down here:

• Perhaps the most important factor in your site's page ranking is content. Google says that it uses your page's content as well as the content of neighboring pages to determine if your site is relevant to a particular search term. I read this as a directive to specialize,
  specialize, specialize. If you want to appear at the top of the search when someone performs a search for "wooden model P41" then not only should your site have lots of text about wooden models and P41s but any digression into alternative topics such as italian politics or if the simpsons movie will be a hit will drive down your rank.



• Also very important is who links to your site and who you link to. Says google: "google considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value." This is a really complex topic and a lot is said about it. I like what these folks have said as it seems clearer than most.



• Metatag content does not affect search ranking. It may govern what text appears adjacent to the link in google' search results.



• Google has a supplemental index dead zone into which your site will fall if google thinks that your site has excessive duplicate content, too many variables in the URL, "includes excessive reciprocal links", "links to spammy neighborhoods" or engages in "link buying/selling.". Sites on the supplemental index are not scanned as frequently by google for updates and are searched after the primary index guarenteeing that your site will not have a high page ranking.

In today's Slashdot there's an interesting forum on the topic of how corporate tech media (such as Network Computing) are being replaced by blogs and how bad this is or whether it's bad at all, or just simply inevitable.

What I see is that a log of folks out there try to aggregate others' efforts by creating "communities". Some are very successful and useful, such as http://www.codeproject.com/. Others, as near as I can tell, add nothing to the original information, such as http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/default.aspx or http://www.thescripts.com/ and exist mostly by consolidating information scraped from other sources.

What you get (got?) with professional tech media is (at least in some cases) professional research and professional writing. There is some level of accountability and some level of fact checking. There's a consistency of quality that comes from paying someone to do research and to write about it that often is missing when the person is a blog poster volunteering in his or her spare time.

I think there's a demand for the level of professionalism delivered by tech media, and the printed magazines may go away (save the trees!) but demand for the services provided by the legions of editors, writers and researchers employed by those magazines will not. Instead, you'll see an increasing trend toward pay-per-view tech sites such as sswug.org or http://www.devx.com/.

I'm listening now to a collection of short stories by Southern writers now which are mostly very good. The particular story that I'm listening to now is unusual for the collection in that it seems to be science fiction or fantasy. A man drives across the country in a U-Haul truck to meet his wife in an unnamed west-coast city, to which she has driven on ahead. The man, who is not wealthy, has made a deal with a mysterious "Mr. Griffen" to pick up a series of packages along the way and deliver them to him in the west-coast city when he arrives. In return for collecting and delivering the packages, the man will receive a large sum of money.

And the packages are in strange places--submerged and tied to a buoy floating in a lake, taped inside a dumpster, on top of a rest-top shelter, and must be collected at specific times. The narrator, afraid to be late, drives on without sleeping then finally crashes into a ditch. He walks the rest of the way. Is he alive? Is he dead? Is he dreaming? The story ends without a resolution, or perhaps it has one and I missed it. The name of the story is "Tired Heart" and the author is South Carolina's own Keith Lee Morris.

---

Yesterday while I was waiting for the chinese food that I had ordered I happened to pick up a paperweight that someone had left on the countertop. It was a clear cube of lucite with colored bars embedded within the plastic, forming a 3-D chart. Etched on the four sides of the cube were numbers in different scales. The top was clear. On the bottom was the logo of some pharmaceutical company. What a neat way to look at a 3D chart, in your hand where you can tilt it to different angles, peer in at the bars.

---

I like to develop software from scratch. I perceive a problem and the idea for a solution immediately begins to coalesce in my imagination. I think of the quidditch from the Harry Potter movies. A small, fast and hard to see idea flitting and darting while I try to trap it with visio diagrams and user interviews.

For example, a user came to me last week with a report. "Can you add a column for job order to this report," he asked. I looked at the report, which was dense with data already, and had a sense that this was not the first time the user had asked for this particular report to be enhanced with the adding of a column; my feeling was that he, a battle-hardened cost accountant, was using the report as a catch-all for materials-related problems.

"Why do you want the column?", I asked him. He looked surprised and annoyed, perhaps thinking that I was challenging him, doubting his need to modify the report. Seeing this, I continued: "What problem are you trying to solve? What issue prompted the need to modify the report?"

He described a scenario where variances of a particular sort arose. To identify and resolve the variances required that he and another accountant laboriously pour through screen after screen in our ERP system, comparing numbers shown there with those printed on another report. Having the numbers on this report would not eliminate the pouring, just the screens...

I could feel the spark: We could, I thought, with a query or at most a mildly complex stored procedure specifically identify the jobs where the variances existed so that the accountant no longer have to search line by line through 100 page reports for the culprit jobs. Moreover, we could make this a scheduled job with the report emailed on a nightly basis, so the accountant wouldn't even need to spot the variances--the system would automatically alert him when they were found. I was excited.




The necessary database query was already starting to come together in my head. Where do I find this kind of data, I was asking myself as I mentally reviewed the various ingredients that I would need.

Then my manager walked in. Quickly sizing up the situation, he asked the accountant what he needed. "Oh," he told us. "There's already an ERP report that does that. Come, let me show you," he told the accountant and led him away, out of the IT area and back to accounting.

Later, I told him about my idea for automatically identifying the variances and alerting the accountant of them. "It will save tons of time," I promised confidently, sure that there would be no rebuttal to that promise of increased productivity.

"But we would have to maintain it," my manager replied. "Let's pick our battles."

And, as Shakespeare might have phrased it, "therein lies the rub."

---

The initial idea, be it ever so good, is but a small part of the effort required to create a viable software solution to a problem. Even the effort required to implement that idea pales before the immense weight of a lifetime of maintenance.

See, what happens is that quick little solutions calcify over time. The original author, with his intimate understanding of the application's architecture moves on, and someone with a less intimate understanding is forced to make necessary changes; perhaps support for some new feature, or the changing of a business rule or even to update the application to be compatible with a new release of some new system on which it is dependent. The clarity of the initial architectural vision is muddied, the quality of the software degrades and it becomes more susceptible to defects.

So my IT manager looked this problem and saw that, sure enough, a simple application could quickly be developed that would elegantly address the cost accountant's issue. However, he realized, that simple application would almost immediately become part of the fabric of the company; would need to be maintained and modified as operating systems and database servers changed, would need to be enhanced to support the next version of the ERP system and the version after that, would need documentation and training so that future help desk personnel could support future cost accountants and would know where to go when the cost accountant didn't receive his email and submitted a help desk request.

Today is Friday the 13th and it's morning. Through the windows to my left I can see that the sky is blue, with wisps of cloud hanging in the upper atmosphere like strands of torn tissue. It looks like it will be a hot day.

The June Edition of Network Computing Magazine is apparently the last (printed) edition of this fine and (relatively) ancient magazine. On page 12 of the copy that I received in the mail a week ago, editor Art Wittmann writes that "the issue you're reading now will be the last standalone print edition we produce."

I've been reading Network Computing for years. I'm not a network engineer and so only about 30% of the content made sense to me--many of the product reviews were for software that I would never use (being large enterprise in nature) and did not have the necessary background in routers and switches and protocols to completely digest. Nevertheless, every month seemed to offer up some morsel of useful information such as an article a year or two back on cellular repeaters that would allow cell-phones to function in otherwise serviceless areas (such as the bowels of large buildings), or another on email spam filtering software that happened to be published just as I was looking at getting an exchange server implemented.

Once I even had a Network Computing representative come out to talk to me in person. I had received a telephone call from the representative asking if he could stop by the following week to ask me a few questions. "Of course!" I said, thinking that for some odd reason he wished to interview me and that perhaps I would be mentioned in the magazine. All week long, I waited and wondered and anticipated. Would I be famous? How had he heard about me? What would he talk to me about?

Finally the day of the "interview" arrived and I received a call from the receptionist to alert me of the magazine representative's arrival at the front desk. I had booked a small conference room in advance and guided him to it, trying to be my most obsequious. He carried a small satchel. We made ourselves comfortable in the small conference room and as we chatted about the hot summer weather and the traffic he removed from the satchel a clipboard and a copy of the most recent copy of Network Computing.

It took me two moments to realize that this was not be be an interview and my disappointment was crushing. He proceeded to show me various cover illustrations and advertisements from back editions of Network Computing and to ask me if I remembered reading the issue, seeing the advertisements and what my reactions had been. Some of them I remembered--most I did not. I couldn't (and still can't) believe that the magazine would go through the expense of sending someone out to ask questions like that of readers in person.

Well, my first thought upon reading that Network Computing was to cease printed publication was that the magazine had been yet another victim of the internet. In fact, a Slashdot.org thread a few days back discussed this topic: The Neilsen ratings company had announced that they were changing the system by which they rated web sites to favor web sites with indepth content where visitors stayed for extended periods over sites (such as google) that have high numbers of unique visitors but where visitors rarely remain for long.

Can a printed magazine such as Network Computing compete with dozens of blogs offering similar but less polished content, such as http://www.tomshardware.com/ and the ilk? Web sites and blogs have a fraction of the costs of a printed magazine. Instead of sales reps there are internet ads provided by Google or Yahoo. The need for graphic designers is lessened and copy goes unedited to the blog.

However, I think Network Computing's demise as a printed periodical is due less to the rising popularity of blogs than it is to the decreasing popularity of bleeding edge network hardware and software. My CycleWorld magazine and my wife's Oprah magazine seem as plump as ever. I'll bet that what's happened to Network Computing is less an indication of the future of printed media than it is an indication of the leveling out of the demand for network technology.

A lot of folks believe that the big oil companies manipulate the price of gasoline by, for example, taking refinery capacity off-line for maintenance in the middle of the summer or failing to invest in sufficient refinery capacity to meet demand.

From a posting in today's Slashdot comes one that would not have occurred to me: That gasoline prices are calibrated based on 60F temperatures but that in many states the gasoline is sold at higher temperatures.

The SlashDot article suggests that the oil companies, by refusing to account for the changing density of the gasoline as temperatures rise, are manipulating consumers. Since gasoline expands as it warms, consumers receive less energy per gallon when they purchase warm gasoline than they would if the gasoline they purchased were colder.

Most gasoline is stored in underground storage tanks where it is relatively unaffected by the heat of the day---still, some gas is stored in the pump itself, so gas purchased in the cool of the morning is, at least fractionally, cheaper than gas purchased at high noon of a hot day.

I really like web deployment projects. However when I recently had to reinstall Visual Studio I realized I'd forgotten how to set Visual Studio up to support web deployment projects.

A little research revealed that The old way has been updated and it's now no longer necessary to first apply a patch. Just make sure you're at Visual Studio SP1 and install this addin: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336619.aspx

I'm working on a user information system now, and need it to be tightly integrated with active directory. The adminpak.msi is proving to be a very useful tool--it installs the active directory management screens on my PC so I don't need to be constantly remote-desktop-ed into the server to view active directory settings.

In today's SSWUG.ORG email, Stephen Wynkoop mentions the DMVStats project. This is a tool to monitor various SQL Server 2005 statistics. I think it duplicates part of what SQL Auto Doc v2 will do. I'm pretty close now to having most of the obvious (to me) deficiencies/bugs in SQL Auto Doc v2 fixed. Next, I will need to figure out how to build an installer for it, and I will need to create some documentation.

Baseline Magazine is one of my favorite business magazines. In general, I like the case studies that they do, but occasionally they come up with other gems as well. In this month's issue there's this chart that shows the top 40 software companies by revenue growth, income growth and size. It shows a lot of information at a glance.

I've been working in IT now for a lot of years and people have always talked about the quick rate of change. This forum on Dice.com is interesting as it's a place where people talk about how they are reacting to that change. How does your future career strategy measure out? Check out the forum and see what others have to say...