Project

Here is a project I've been working on in my spare time. Originally, I was only going to be involved in this as an "advisor", but as always, I've found myself pulled into something :-) Not that I'm complaining though.

Anyway... Here's the link: Providence Canadian Reformed Church.

iPod nano Impressions

So I've been using it for about a week and a half now, and have some general impressions to share. The most dissapointing aspect is the battery life; I get eight, maybe ten hours depending on how loud I have the volume (which is typically at about 50-60%). The headphones would have been a dissapointment, but I've had other iPods and wasn't expecting much, so I'm not too shocked that they are horrible. They don't fit well, and the sound quality is just garbage compared to my Sony MDR-EX51 earphones.

OK, enough of the bad. The player itself is pretty incredible. It's just so small. While I usually find myself laughing at the typical Apple marketting, the iPod nano's description of "impossibly small" is very apt. Then there's the screen; it's tiny, but readable, and the colors are just brilliant. Once you have a good pair of headphones, the sound is great too.

Overall the iPod nano is a hit. Apple is going to sell a billion of them.

Blog on TV

Whoa, I just heard some say "Blog" on TV (How I met your mother).

Microsoft, stop charging for the tools!

Nick Sieger has an excellent post about the importance of the desktop in todays world, as well as a strategy Microsoft could use to really help out developers.

More PDC '05

The new Office 12 interface is starting to grow on me. I hate to use that paradigm word, but I think Office 12 requires it; it's a new paradigm for working with office documents.

Oh, and the Microsoft Gadgets stuff is pretty cool. I can see the sideshow gadgets being very practical and useful.

Channel 9 Videos

I really can't stand it when Channel 9 videos don't have download links! It's frustrating because I can't watch them behind a proxy!

Microsoft Gadgets

Microsoft Gadgets. Interesting. I'm sure there will be comparisons to Apple's Dashboard, followed by arguments over who had or did what first :-)

PS: The Microsoft Gadgets site needs some work in FireFox. Things are not quite right.

Windows Vista Versions

Seven different versions! Wow, that's a lot for the average consumer to have to think about. Of course, that's just on the desktop too, and doesn't take into account the different server versions. I'm really hoping that Windows Vista Enterprise Edition or Windows Vista Ultimate Edition includes some of the "Windows Vista Server" features and functionality. Right now, my primary development system is a Windows Server 2003 box, with my laptop running Windows XP Pro.

Office 12

Office 12 looks very different from it's current form. I hope MS doesn't shoot itself in the foot here. A new learning curve could really turn people away, especially considering some of the low cost open source solutions, like Open Office, that are out there.

PDC '05

PDC 2005 starts today! Already, there are tons of blogs and news sites with all kinds of great information out there.
http://scoble.weblogs.com/
http://www.activewin.com/
http://www.neowin.net/

Oh, and Atlas looks very interesting indeed!

Blogger for Word

This would have been my first post to Blogger via the Blogger for Word addin, except it didn't work. In theory, Blogger for Word is an addin that will allow you to post to your Blogger account right from within Microsoft Word. I’d heard about this a while ago, but didn’t really understand how nice it was until I saw Scoble’s video on it.

Only one problem. It didn't work. After I had entered my login credentials, and created a new blog entry, I clicked the Publish button, but received an error message stating "An error has occurred (#407)".

CommunityServer

Well, apparently I am not impressed with Blogger thus far. My biggest complaint is that it doesn't support tagging. I've started evaluating a CommunityServer installation, and it has a tagging-like feature which it calls "categories". So far so good. CS is a lot more flexible (which is to be expected given it's a package I have to install on my own server), and it supports both RSS and ATOM rather than just ATOM, but I may have to get a commercial license, even though I'm not really making $ off this blog. Well, not yet anyway :-)

Web Application Integration

The most frustrating aspect of web applications and web application development to me is integration. I use a variety of web based applications, including free, open-source, and commercial software to manage and run my business.

• FogBugz: I use this to track software development issues, including feature requests and software bugs. This is hosted on my own web site.
• ASP.NET Time Tracker: I use this to help track time on various contracts I am working on. This is hosted on my own web site.
• 37Signals BaseCamp: I use this to manage various client projects. This is not really a product per se, but a service hosted by 37signals.
• DotNetNuke: I use this to run and manage several client web sites. This is hosted on my own web server.
  
• Client Manager: This is a simple web application that I use to store information on client contracts and invoices. I wrote this myself, and it is integrated with my business web site.
• Online Banking: I use online banking to pay bills and help track the financial well-being of my business.
  
• QuickBooks: I evaluated the online edition of QuickBooks, but it didn't quite have all of the features that I required, and so I am stuck using the desktop-based version.
  

Not only is each one of these tools accessed from a different URL (some of that being a necessity), but each one handles user authentication in it's own particular, proprietary way, meaning I need to keep track of literally dozens of usernames and passwords just to complete each days work. It makes me wish that Microsoft's Passport project had been a success, and I could use a single user account to login to everything!

Legal Advice

Here is an interesting article on legal advice for micro-ISVs.

Expenses and Revenue

One of the most basic truths about running a successful business is that you must be taking more money in than you are spending. In other words, your revenue needs to be exceeding your expenses, or you're going to be in trouble*.

Confining this discussion to the world of small (or micro) businesses, this probably sounds like the most obvious thing ever; if you are spending more than you are making, you are not going to last very long. Yet, even though this seems so obvious, how many of us actually know what to do with this most basic rule? At a small business seminar I attended a few months back, most of the attendees admitted that they often only step back to look at the financial well-being of their business every few months or so.

At this point, alarm bells should be going off.

I strongly beleive that a good general rule for running a business is to consider the ratio of revenue to expenses, and the lower that ratio; the further back you need to pull from the business and the bigger a picture you need to examine. I also think it is important to set a realistic threshold for your revenue, and if your revenue does drop below that threshold, it's time to take a serious look at your business plan. Oh, and yes, sorry to burst your bubble, but you really do need a business plan (and no, I'm not just going to leave it at that, I very much intend to talk about business plans at length in the future).


* Yes, I know this rule is not always true for startups, and businesses whose business plan includes a (realistic) loss of revenue for a (reasonable) period of time.

Small Business

Right now, small businesses are the new big businesses in the software industry. Companies such as 37signals and Delicious Monster, to name but two, are making headlines all over the internet. What's interesting here is that the software they are producing is not really anything new, it's just software that's done really really well.

We've reached a point in history at which the internet is very much mainstream. What happens on the internet affects each and every one of us, and what happens in the physical world affects what happens on the internet. The first interesting point to note is that the relationship between the physical world and the internet is becoming closer. There is an almost real-time connection between what goes on in each. If you were paying attention, you noticed that I said "physical world" and not "real world"; the internet is becoming less of a "world" unto itself, and more and more an extension of everyday life.

It's a new world, one in which individuals have the ability to broadcast out thoughts and opinions to massive audiences.

Of course, at the same time, businesses are also gaining these abilities. A few years ago, smaller companies were less viable, as they simply didn't have the means to reach the huge audiences that they now have access to. So now small businesses are becoming even more important in an economic and innfluential sense, and because smaller businesses can be more "lightweight" and agile, they have the ability to out-manouver businesses that are much larger and slower moving.