Papers on Programming

As an old code cutter from way back programming still interests me even though I don't get much chance these days to actually write programs (unless you count Excel macros). I came across the following two papers though which I found quite interesting.

A paper from 1984 on functional programming, Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughs.

An article on moving Forth interpreters from one CPU to another, Moving Forth by Brad Rodriguez.

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

Fast and Compact Object Serialization Library

We generate a lot of transactions in our business and many customers want continuous feeds of summary information about these transactions. This sounds easy and a nice JSON document published regularly can solve the problem but we're always looking to save cycles and bandwidth so I was very impressed with the MessagePack Project http://msgpack.org/.

MessagePack provides a high performance library for compact binary-based object serialization which has fast implementations to support several languages. It also supports an RPC solution.

You should also take a look at BERT http://bert-rpc.org/ if you are interested in these kinds of software packages.

Our application is server to server so compact and fast solutions are an important aspect of our design.

Why do you have a website?

I have just spent a frustrating hour trying to track down the contact details of a potential partner company who sent me their details via a third party service; it's not LinkedIn but it's that kind of service.

The direct email of the person trying to contact me is not provided, nor are any of their other contact details, just a form to send them a message. A form which doesn't work, has no email contacts and just annoys the hell out of me every time I look at it.

But this is the internet, I thought, so I'll just search for the contacts name, find his company website and I'll have an email or a phone number I can use in no time. A bit of google'ng and there was the website and another one of those forms that didn't work.

So I worked my way through every page of this website, About Us, Contacts, Products, even their Board Members and no phone numbers, no office address not even an email accounts was listed on their website, only the contact form which was as broken as the first form they sent to contact me to discuss doing business together.

So this "used to be" potential partner is someone I can't contact, so there's no business opportunity for either of us - regardless of the size of the deal, how good the market fit, or the compatibility of our technology.

Do you have a website without contact details? Would you print a brochure without this information?

So please, if you want your website to do one of its most important jobs, open it now and make sure it lists an email address and a phone somewhere on the site. Next to the form on your contacts page sounds like a good place, don't you think?

Travel Industry commentary ignores First Class

I read an article tweeted by @ireckon (http://twitter.com/ireckon/statuses/10534190685) about the travel industry and how it "sucks" because it provides a poor customer experience http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=9004 and it made me laugh.

Sure, a lot of travel products are undifferentiated from competitors offerings and, at the cheap end of the market, traveling can be tiresome and boring but its just not true to say that travel companies don't supply products to bypass queues and offer an exemplary experience to their customers. They even have a name for this product segment, its called "First Class". If you want to sail through check-in, never be bothered with rental car lines and be feted by attendants then buy yourself a first class ticket and see what the travel experience can be.

For the ultimate, shell out nearly $500,000 for a six month round the world cruise on the Queen Mary 2, no crushing your luggage into an overhead locker during that trip.

Most people want to get from A to B as cheaply as possible because their hard earned dollars are spent at their destination. And if your boss has you schlepping from greater to less Podunk its not meant to feel like a vacation but spare a thought for the John Adams, who rode on horseback 640 km through winter snows from Braintree to Philadelphia at the time of American Independence and had to pack his own bags.

My take after a lot of trips to a lot of destinations is that if you just go with the flow even modern day travel can be a great experience.

Does Apple really hate it's customers?

Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests

It seems Apple is up to it's old tricks of treating customers with total disregard and artificially slowing the performance of Flash by blocking Adobe from using hardware accelerated graphics API libraries. These libraries in Windows caused a five fold reduction in CPU usage for some Flash functions so you would think Apple would want to pass this benefit onto its customers, but it seems not.

Wasn't this arrogance the same thing that caused them to lose their way before?

Partnering Works

It seems the GFC was not the problem many people expected, February job ads in Australia were up more then 19% on the previous month and business confidence indexes are at an 8 year high.

Such a business environment can sow the seeds of its own destruction with the growth being experienced by some companies hard to absorb without straining the resources of people and processes within the organisation.

I've faced this issue with the development of our Facebook apps, after releasing some basic solutions a few months ago, we never seemed to have free resources to allocate to getting the next release of our Facebook apps into production. Having to choose between paid customer work or investing in a business development initiative that could be a nice new revenue stream is a hard choice to make, especially when clients are clamouring for their work to be delivered.

In the end, we did something that can be quite a difficult decision to make, we partnered with an outside web development company to deliver an updated Facebook application that connected with our game engine. The whole process has been fairly painless and the new app is about to go live without impacting on other schedules.

I recommend considering partnering as a solution to capacity issues in the current rapid growth business environment.

Paying for News

I've been reading a number of interesting views on Rupert Murdoch's announcement that News Corp will soon be charging for its content, including Woolly Days, Jeff Jarvis and the earley edition amongst many others on this topic.

National or international news is going to be hard to sell since it seems its going to be widely available, especially since Thomson Reuters President Chris Ahearn says he's happy for people to link to Reuters.

Dave Earley is right that the debate turns on how much original content News Corp can create that is worth buying. I doubt local news will be that compelling as its already available from sources as diverse as free community newspapers and city council websites.

Hard hitting investigative journalism doesn't seem likely to attract a regular mass audience and sounds expensive to produce.

Guess that leaves opinion pieces and I can already read blogs on every topic imaginable, see open.salon.com for examples of the diversity available online. Let's not forget that many online blogs are written by qualified journalists many of whom have probably freelanced for News Corp at sometime or another.

My son is picking his subjects year 11 and last night each subject teacher got to give a 15 minute talk on why a particular subject was worth studying. The words of the economics teacher stuck with me, "Economics will teach you how the world works and why people do the things they do". I don't know if people will pay News Corp to access the unique and original content they are going to create and put behind their paywall. But we're going to find out, it's how the world works.