On Wednesday, I'd posted about a conversation that my boss and I had, about whether or not Google would supplant Microsoft on the desktop. Here's an interesting article from Computerworld that states that "only 2.3% of Americans regularly use Google Docs or Apps." This buttresses my assessment: That Microsoft's continual tweaking of the office and desktop experience will continue to give them an advantage over competitors for whom price (read: advertising supported) is the primary advantage.

I also noticed that there have been clashes between the relatively small Christian minority and Hindu right-wingers in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. Could this be an indicator of rising Hindu nationalism?

Finally, I found a syteline forum, here: http://www.syteline7.com After looking through the forum, I am of the opinion that I am treading rarefied ground. I suspect that wisely, or foolhardily, most do not attempt the level of integration with the syteline database that I have undertaken, choosing instead to customize the existing fat-client syteline interface and to work with crystal reports.

I do quite a bit of work with Imfor's Syteline ERP product, and with Defran's evolv product, and have developed quite a library of custom stored procedures, views, etc. for extracting necessary data from their databases for inclusion in custom reports.

I'm contemplating adding pages to my web site where I would post these SQL snippets, however I am somewhat leery. A preliminary google search has not revealed other sites where this is done. I have two theories as to why this is so:

Theory #1: Folks are afraid that posting such SQL would somehow be a violation of copyright. It seems a bit of a stretch, but who knows...lawyers are known to be quite flexible in their interpretations of the law. Just ask those who have had visits from the RIAA merely for having P2P software installed on their PCs.

Theory #2: Folks who use ERP and case management software tend to be pretty specialized and so such posting/sharing takes place, but under the umbrella of users groups and forums, rather than web sites.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some notable events of the past few days:

1) Benazir Bhutto's assignation brings chaos on many fronts. The most foreboding possiblity is that Pervez Musharraf is toppled in some sort of coup precipitated by unrest resulting from the assignation and that the coup results in Al Queda having closer ties to the Pakistani government (and its nuclear weapons).

Tangentially related to this is a Nasa news release that a-bomb markers were not found in Tibetan ice cores. This might not seem to be very portentous news, however as the article points out this means that the Himalayan glaciers which provide potable water for something like 20% of the world's population are shrinking rapidly. This UNFA report predicts severe water shortages in as little as forty years.

So what happens when both India and Pakistan start running out of water? Well, a common enemy unites. I predict rising tensions as stressed national governments try to deflect internal criticism by ratcheting up tensions. Perhaps we'll also see some sort of Hindu ultra-nationalist version of Al Queda. Almost certainly life in southeast Asia will become more perilous.

Of course, we in America are not free from our own water concerns: Both the southwest and the southeast have experienced record droughts which in combination with rapid population growth is stressing already stretched local water resources.

In the long term, this lends merit to Dr. Jared Diamond's forecast of the fall of western civilization.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the short term, this probably means lots more apocalyptic movies such in the grain of I am Legend and Cloverfield.

My speech server is communicating happily with my DMG1000 now, and it's time to put Michael Dunn's book through its paces. Tomorrow, I plan to get the speech server development environment up and running on my primary development PC.

On another tact, I've been doing a little work with bar codes lately. It's similar to the charting work that I've done and I've posted code for dynamic 3-of-9 bar codes that can be included on web pages, here. 3-of-9 bar codes are very simple to implement but when time and demand permit, I'd like to explore code 128 and 2D bar codes which are more complex.

Christmas went well this year. There's an interesting op-ed in the NYTimes today about how the real St. Nick was much less colorful and a lot more heroic than the jolly ole consumerist Santa Claus we have today. It's tough as a parent as kids really do light up when they receive new and interesting toys, and it is such a rush to see them excited and enthusiastic.

A fair number of people have been looking at the two projects that I posted on CodePlex, but no one has said anything yet which means that: a) everything's working really well, or b) they're scared to open them up for fear of catching a virus, or c) they're scarfing up chunks of code for inclusion in their own projects, or ...

I noticed today that Microsoft is intending to post the source code for FoxPro on CodePlex. That seems like a big deal to me, however I do think that open source often is a dumping ground for software that isn't commercially viable. My boss's boss (who is a very untechnical guy) gave him an article he had clipped a few days back from one of the big dailies. The article was about how google is going to nail microsoft, and my boss and I discussed this possibility.

We're somewhat at odds: My boss thinks free is overwhelmingly powerful. Why buy office (and powerful PCs to put it on) when you can rent someone elses'?

My take is more pragmatic: Why bother updating open source software when you don't get paid for it? What's in it for Sun/IBM/Corel/Oracle or whomever is currently supporting the various open source office platforms, other than a chance to take a swipe at microsoft? What's the profit motive?

Microsoft, hate them or love them, is constantly bringing technological innovation to the table. Open source (lamp) is trailing the curve, in large part and as I told my boss, as long as microsoft continues to invest in research, development and developer support, companies will continue to purchase software licenses from them.

My Dialogic DMG1000 arrived on Monday, and I've been able to use its built-in diagnostic software to successfully make a test outbound call. This is after an initial blip when at first I didn't realize that by default the diagnostic tool just verified that a call *could* be made but did not actually make the call (I was confused because my test phone didn't ring). It turns out that this default behavior can be changed by changing the call connection mode setting from Instant to OnAnswer

I'm now working to get the DMG1000 to communicate with Speech Server. So far, I've been unsuccessful but I really have only spent about two hours working on the problem. At this point I suspect the problem might be related to firewall settings. I did configure a SIP server in speech server and have configured the gateway to point at the server. Network monitor shows that the gateway is at least trying to talk to the speech server.

On a related topic, I just purchased my first ebook. It's Pro: Microsoft Speech Server 2007 by Michael Dunn. The ebook turns out to be a password-protected PDF file. This format is cheaper than paper and it's nice to be able to organize the book along with my other documents. It's also convenient in that it doesn't take up space on my already too-crowded desk. The book looks to be a pretty good overview of Speech Server 2007 although I will have a more informed opinion later on, after I get my Speech Server up and running. I do think that the setup and installation part of the book could be expanded on, but I'm not carping--the book is pretty thick as it is and it's impossible to cover everything.

On an unrelated topic, my Creative Labs Zen V died again for the second time in 18 months. The first time they sent a replacement but now it's out of warranty. The volume switch isn't working. Whenever I adjust the volume, it readjusts itself to silence almost immediately. The annoying thing about this is that I have been pretty kind to my Zen V. I use it almost exclusively in the car, plugged into my car stereo. If it lasted 18 months in this kind of environment, imagine how it would fare in the possession of the typical teenager. I've learned my lesson though. Next time I'll either go super-cheap with the idea that I'll throw out the MP3 player when it breaks, or I'll go IPod with the idea that it won't break.

I'm glad they're tackling doping in major league baseball. The behavior of many professional athletes both on and off the field is appalling, and more so because many children regard these people as roll models. However, I doubt much will change. There's too much money at stake.

Today is a Monday and it's been a pretty busy one. However, I did find time to read the news, and found a pretty cool new charting applet from the folks at google:
http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/12/10/new-google-api-serves-charts/

There's also an interesting discussion on code quality over at Slashdot:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/10/0744259

Code quality is something I've often thought about. Years ago, I had written a program to analyze VB4 code for McCable metrics, and have worked hard to make my code as reusable as possible, given time constraints. I do have to admit that it can be very tempting to unfairly criticize unfamiliar code. One sometimes feels that fixing an existing simple application might take more time than just rewriting it. Why? Because time is necessary both to understand the current and original requirements, as well as to understand the previous programmer's logic.

For a lot of folks, code is business. You do what you have to, in order to get the job done, get yourself and the company you work for paid, and go home to your family (or to the beach, or whatever). Those folks are happy as long as the code works and is reasonably maintainable. They aren't going to notice if you make it clean as a whistle and efficient as all get out, or if it's clunky and crunky as a coal-fired sewing machine. You do the best you can because it reflects morally on yourself (cut corners unnecessarily, become an unconscientious person) not because anyone will likely notice the difference.

The article does mention open source as a way to improve one's code quality. This appeals to me, mostly because I tend to think that copyrights are both over- and mis- used. The elephant in the room with open source is: who pays the developers' bills while they are so generously donating their time to the public good? I'm unclear on this issue. I do like to contribute to the public good and so as an experiment have decided to create an open source project on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source hosting environment for the jChart (for jlion chart) charting tool that I developed for my own use. We'll see if anyone comments on it one way or the other. I do think that commerical projects are likely to be of higher quality, if for no other reason than because they can pay developers to spend time working on them.

Now that I've finished "The Dark Tower" by Stephen King, I'm on to "Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Dumb Ox (Unabridged)" a biography of St. Thomas Aquinas written by GK Chesterton. Chesteron contrasts Aquinas with another contemporary, St. Francis. He describes St. Thomas as a philosopher who struggled to reconcile reason with spirit, and St. Francis as a humanist, who worked to bring Christian doctrine from the ivory tower to the common men and women of the time. I've long had an interest in St. Thomas, not least because my grandfather named his cat after him and when I was five I thought "St. Thomas Aquinas" was a very unusual and cool name for a cat. I constantly struggle to marry the spiritual and logical parts of my being. I think that both are valid, and find that most embrace one more fully than the other. Hopefully St. Thomas can help me find a middle way.

After 10 minutes of research I've found this blog entry describing how the AssemblyVersion build and revision numbers are determined if you use the following syntax in the AssemblyInfo.vb file (found in the "My Project" folder of your component or application)

<Assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")>
<Assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.*")>

It seems that build is the number of days since a predetermined date (controlled by a windows registry setting and by default Jan 1, 200) and revision is the number of seconds since midnight.

I've started displaying this information on some internal web pages so I can track what build/revision of various DLLs were in place when an error occurred.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I rediscovered www.codeplex.com today. I have several utilities that I wrote that I think I will post out here, starting with my jChart charting library. I've installed TortoiseSVN and SVNBridge and am now looking at how these tools are used.

I've finished "The Dark Tower" by Stephen King. I found this series to be clever and rich and thought-provoking. I highly recommend it.

King writes that the Dark Tower series was based on a poem by Robert Browning called "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came". The text of that poem can be found here.

The Dark Tower series, I think, is two things: It is a study in the evolution of Stephen King as a writer being written, as it was, over the course of many years. It is also a study in the afterlife. Who can know what lies beyond? Perhaps we're all virtual, collections of on-bits and off-bits in some alien teenager's equivalent of sim-earth. Perhaps the Hindus are right and fate is a wheel which we work over the course of many lifetimes to escape. Perhaps the Christians, Jews and Muslims are right and all has been created by an omnipresent and all powerful God. Or perhaps, as King imagines, the truth is some combination of all of these. If you liked "The Matrix" because it called into question your preconceptions about reality, then you'll love "The Dark Tower" series.

Recently one of King's short works which I liked came out on film. "The Mist" from "Skeleton Crew", a collection of short stories, was released to theaters in November. I haven't seen the film, but I do think that it would be quite difficult to make a movie out of the "Dark Tower" series. There's just too much going on, and it's all interweaved too tightly.

Finally, I do think that the conclusion of the series is not as strong as it could be. When I arrive at the end of this wild tale I see that King has ended with a bit of humor and a final allusion back to Browning's poem that puts the entire series in context as merely a literary exercise. It's not a work of philosophy, it's a work of fiction.