Dylan is at number one with Together Through Life, reports the BBC, showing his enduring appeal:
Dylan now holds a record, previously held by Tom Jones, for the longest gap between solo number one albums.
No denying Dylan’s long-term appeal (and he deserves it), but I’m guessing it shows something else, too: that the age profile reflected in the charts is older than it has ever been, and album charts are no longer a reliable measure of musical taste.
On 21st April Adobe’s Ben Forta told a user group that Flex Builder 3 for Linux is on hold, citing lack of requisition, which is corp-speak for lack of demand.
Note that the Flex SDK does run on Linux. It is just the official IDE that is in question.
Linux is a free operating system, and this could be evidence that users of a free OS are less likely to purchase software than users of a paid-for OS. Or it could simply reflect poor market share for Linux outside servers. Even if it has just hit 1%, as hitslink reports, it is still barely more than 10% of the Mac share and a little over 1% of the Windows share. Some of those Linux machines will also be netbooks – secondary systems for users with a Windows or Mac for serious work such as design and development.
Nevertheless, I suspect there is more to it than that. I suspect Adobe would like to support Linux, because it wants to portray Flex as an open platform – the SDK is open source, though managed by Adobe, but the runtime engine is closed-source and proprietary. This may be another sign of Adobe’s financial stress. The company reported reduced quarter-on-quarter revenue for the the 3 months ending February 2009, and has been cutting staff numbers.
The backdrop to this, in contrast, is that Adobe is having great success with its Flash platform. There is no sign of Microsoft’s Silverlight denting the popularity of Flash on web sites, either for applets or media streaming.
The recession then? Partly; but this is also about Adobe’s business model. Adobe does not break out its figures in detail as far as I know: the last financial statement merely shows that its revenue is nearly 95% from product sales, the rest being services and support. Still, I’d guess that the largest component of its product sales must be Creative Suite. In other words, its business model is based on selling tools and giving away runtimes. When 47 million people watch Susan Boyle on YouTube, Adobe doesn’t make a penny, even though they are almost all using Flash to do so.
The tools market is a difficult one for various reasons, including competition from free products and the fact that the number of people needing development or design tools is always much smaller than the number needing runtimes. In a recession, deferring a tools upgrade is a obvious way for businesses to save money. Remaining primarily a tools company is a limit to Adobe’s growth and ultimately its profitability.
This is of concern to all Flash platform users. Adobe has proved to date a good steward of the technology. Some of us would like the balance of proprietary vs open tilted further towards open, but I doubt many would welcome a takeover or merger such as we have seen with Sun and Oracle (and there are a few parallels there).
There would also be many cries of “foul” if Adobe sought to further monetize Flash by starting to sell, say, a premium version of the Flash runtime.
Adobe is still a profitable company, and maybe when the economy recovers all this stress will be forgotten. Still, I’d guess that long-term Adobe will want to shift away from its dependency on sales of tools; and how and what it does to achieve that will have a big influence on the future of its RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform.
After the intense interest in OOXML vs ODF during last year’s ISO document standardisation wars, I’m surprised that the inclusion of OpenDocument support in the newly-released Office 2007 SP2 has attracted so little attention. Well, not really surprised. The general public doesn’t care much about document formats as such, just that the documents they send and receive open OK. The anti-OOXML fervour was about exploiting a chink in the armour of Microsoft’s de facto near-monopoly in Office suites.
Well, Microsoft has ticked the box now. I haven’t done exhaustive tests; but I did some sanity checks. I opened a .docx (OOXML) in Word, saved it as OpenDocument Text; opened in OpenOffice.org, saved it out to a new .odt document, opened that in Word, saved it out as docx. And you know what? It looks the same. Even the styles are still there. What’s more the conversion was fast and convenient, just a Save As. All in all, a contrast with the wretched experience I had with the earlier Microsoft-sponsored converter.
Next, I tried a small stress-test; a .doc bidding card for Contract Bridge that has some tricky tables. This document crashed WordPerfect’s .odt converter. Word could happily save it as .odt and reopen. Opening the exported .odt in OpenOffice showed some minor differences – part of the table went slightly out of alignment, as the illustration shows (Word is on the left, OpenOffice 3.0 on the right), but nothing drastic.
Is this the end of the format wars? Not quite; there is still a long list of features not supported by the conversion, and if you want an easy life it still pays to stay with one vendor’s Office suite. My impression though is that Microsoft has done a decent job, and that for everyday documents the conversion will work as expected.
For the OpenDocument crowd, getting the format incorporated into Microsoft Office is a victory of sorts, but not the real goal, which is to establish it as the universal document format. Microsoft is betting that its inclusion will help it sell Office, but that customers will still mostly use .doc or .docx (and the Excel equivalents). If enough institutions mandate OpenDocument, that bet could yet fail, but right now that looks unlikely.
Update
Ivan Zlatev reports on a less successful import here.
Update 2
While word processing import and export is reasonable in some circumstances, there is a deal-breaking problem with spreadsheet import and export: all formulae are either ignored or broken. That is, you can save from Excel to .ods, open in OpenOffice.org Calc, and get cells like msoxl:=SUM(C6:C8) (in plain text). You can save from OpenOffice.org Calc, open in Excel, and find formulae converted to plain text. If you save and open sheets from Excel, but in .ods format, it works; the clue why is in the OpenOffice.org rendering. It appears Microsoft has stuck by the letter of the standard, which does not specify how formulae work, but broken any kind of meaningful interoperability.
The poor performance of Outlook 2007 has driven many users to Google for solutions, and a good proportion arrive at this blog, which is why there are nearly 200 comments to this post.
Microsoft says it has fixed the problems with Office 2007 Service Pack 2 – though this comment disagrees. Personally I’ve not installed SP2 yet, but I did apply a February update which as I understand it has most of the performance fixes, and I’ve found noticeable improvement.
On my 64-bit desktop, with Outlook 2007 set with cached mode turned off (not the default) I’m enjoying excellent performance despite a huge mailbox.
Microsoft has sponsored a benchtest [pdf] that shows (as you would expect) substantial speed gains in SP2, and claims that the number of disk writes the latest Outlook makes is much reduced. There’s also a performance tip buried in there: turn the To-Do bar off if you want best responsiveness.
I’m sceptical about tests like this which often don’t match real-world experience. I wonder if the testers had anti-virus software running, as highly recommended by Microsoft, but which slows down performance a lot particularly where there is intensive disk activity.
Still, it’s encouraging that Microsoft has taken the problem seriously.
Update
I installed SP2 shortly after writing this post. So far, no noticeable impact on Outlook vs the February update.
Windows 7 will be on sale pre-installed from 23rd October 2009, according to plausible leaks. So much for “when it’s ready.” You heard it from me first though: on 29th October 2008 I posted that Windows 7 may be less than a year away.
The OEM vendors need at least a couple of months to prepare and distribute their machines with the release build. Vista was done on November 8th 2006, even though it was not “launched” until January. RTM July for Windows 7?
I made my pilgrimage to see Dylan last night, at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham.
I call it a pilgrimage because first, I am in awe of the man, and second, my expectations in terms of entertainment are modest. He does gruff these days – very gruff. That’s how it is, and you have to get over it or not go.
I started my evening with a drink at the Prince of Wales, a traditional pub in the middle of Birmingham’s urban desert. It felt very much as it did a couple of years ago when I last saw Dylan. Mostly older fans, and many of the ones I spoke to had not seen Dylan for years; 1978 in one case. I did meet a hard core fan though, who had already seen Dylan at Sheffield and at the Roundhouse in London. Sheffield was better, he said.
Dylan’s new CD is just out. I asked the tour veteran if he would play anything from it. “No chance.” Why not? “Because he’s crackers. He really is”.
I turn down a programme at £12 and a poster at £7. I still want a souvenir, so I pick up a free flyer instead. My ticket is an eticket, which lacks soul; I found myself picking up someone else’s discarded ticket at the end as a memento (I still have my Earls Court ticket from 27th June 1981; great memories).
I am seated in the middle of the stalls, just in front of the soundboard. It is a good spot for sound, but my advice if you go to see Dylan is to get as close to the front as possible. Otherwise, you will be surrounded by chatterers, as I was. Pleasant people I am sure; but I did not spend my money to hear them. One woman tried to engage me in conversation during Stuck inside of Mobile. She saw me taking notes and said, “Are you putting all this on Facebook?”
All this highlights the problem with this kind of concert: Dylan is out of sorts with his audience. He plays keyboard most of the night and faces sideways across the stage, maybe signifying lack of engagement. I enjoyed the concert, mostly, and at times it was outstanding. Gruff Bob works best on songs like Workingman’s Blues and Ain’t Talkin’. Mystical and powerful. But many of those present do not know these songs and do not respond. Unfortunately, the songs they do respond to, like Mobile, or Highway 61 are all too often performed as throwaways; enjoyable, but much less than Dylan is capable of.
Dylan’s fairground keyboard conveys a cheery mood – almost too cheery for my taste. I prefer my It’ Ain’t Me Babe or Man in the Long Black Coat dark and intense. His voice is still powerful though. I am convinced that at the right moment Dylan can be as utterly transcendent in 2009 as ever in his career.
Desolation Row – not a great performance, but I love to hear this song. The lyrics are endlessly fascinating. The big acoustic bass works well.
Towards the end we get Watchtower, a favourite of mine. “Nobody knows what any of it is worth”, sings Dylan. The point is reinforced when I pass a couple of fans on my way back to the station. “I’m sorry it wasn’t very good”, one says to his friend. I say nothing of course, but I am surprised by my internal reaction. What do you mean? YOU JUST SAW BOB DYLAN.
The set list:
The Wicked Messenger
It Ain’t Me, Babe
High Water
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
Man In The Long Black Coat
Desolation Row
Honest With Me
Workingman’s Blues
Highway 61 Revisited
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)
Ain’t Talkin’
Thunder On The Mountain
Like A Rolling Stone
All Along The Watchtower
Spirit On The Water
Blowin’ In The Wind
Roger Jennings shares his frustration that after nearly two years in beta, Information Card management for Windows Live still does not work reliably.
I’ve tried this before, but since switching to 64-bit Vista I’ve not used CardSpace. I had another look.
My first experience was poor. I headed to the card management page, entered the details of a Live ID, and clicked Change. Internet Explorer appeared to hang. I then tried to open CardSpace in Control Panel, but it gave me an error message. I looked in the event log and found a series of event 269 errors, with the message:
The Windows CardSpace service is too busy to process this request. User has too many outstanding requests.
along with a .NET stack trace.
Undeterred, I rebooted and tried again. I took the precaution of adding a card to CardSpace before visting the sign-up page. Everything worked, and I associated a new card with my Live ID.
Here’s how it works now. Let’s say I’m not logged in and I try to visit a Live property such as SkyDrive, my favourite:
I get redirected to the Live sign-in page, where I can choose between password and information card in a drop-down menu:
I still have to type my email address. I’m not sure why that’s necessary, since the email address is also on the card. Still, I go ahead and then get to select a card. The dialog appears on the secure desktop, always a slightly jarring experience. I choose the one associated with Windows Live, which happens to be the only card I have:
Shortly after, I’m in:
Did I gain anything over typing the password? In terms of user experience, not really. Still, I never typed my password, which means it could not be phished. Even if I attempted to send my self-issued card to a fake site, it still would not be any use to the phishing site. If I could use the same card for multiple sites, and had cards from trusted third-party identity providers, then I would begin to benefit further. This paper from 2006 – three years ago – has more information.
Whenever I’ve researched CardSpace or talked to its champion Kim Cameron I’ve been impressed. It’s tough for journalists though, since the system is hard to explain in a few words, and few people understand it. It is even harder because Microsoft has done so little to promote it. Further, if both Jennings and myself had problems using it, that does not say much for the reliability of the client. Since rebooting my PC fixed it, it suggests the problems may not be at the Live.com end, but it is hard to tell. Overall, an opportunity squandered.
I ran into a small but thought-provoking problem in my sample Silverlight database application. I wanted to call a web service, and only call a second web service if the first was successful. The problem is that all web service calls are asynchronous, so you cannot do this with a simple if statement. The quick fix I used was to store my intended operation in a PendingOperation variable. When the first web service completes, it checks for a pending operation. If the first call succeeds and finds a pending operation, it calls the second web service to complete it.
My workaround is OK, but it got me thinking about the best way of doing this. What if you had a sequence of web services to call, and wanted to check for the success of each one before proceeding to the next? I discussed this on the Silverlight forums and was directed to this article by Daniel Vaughan which describes how to do this in a background thread. I haven’t tried his code yet; but it strikes me that this could be useful; I’d like to see Microsoft build something like it into the core framework. Since all the calls take place on a background thread, there is no danger of locking up the user interface.
If RIA programming is as important as some suggest we will have to get used to this kind of problem.
I’ve been amusing myself creating a simple online database application using Silverlight. I had this mostly working a while back, but needed to finish off some pieces in order to get it fully functional.
This is created using Silverlight 2.0 and demonstrates the following:
You can try it here. I’ll post the code eventually, but it will be a couple of months as it links in with another article.
MVP Ken Cox notes in a comment to Jesse Liberty’s blog:
Hundreds of us are scouring the Internet for a realistic (but manageable and not over-engineered) sample of manipulating data (CRUD operations) in a Silverlight 2 application. There are promising pieces of the puzzle scattered all over the place. Unfortunately, after investing time in a sample, we discover it lacks a key element – like actually saving changed data back to the database.
I can safely say that mine is not over-engineered, and that yes, it does write data.
It’s so easy. Install your virus or worm on a USB memory stick, set it to run automatically via AutoRun. An obvious security risk, and I’m surprised that Microsoft hasn’t already disabled the feature by default in a security update or service pack for XP or Vista.
The company is finally paying attention:
AutoRun entries on non-optical removable storage devices have been disabled to ensure that you are able to make a considered decision before running software from removable media such as USB drives. Worms sometimes attempt to use AutoRun as a vehicle to install malicious software onto your computer. CDs and DVDs, which are not subject to worm injection after manufacturing, will continue to expose the AutoRun choice to enable you to launch the specified software.
says the press release for Windows 7 RC. Personally I think it should apply the same logic at least to writable CDs and DVDs. I’ve disabled AutoRun on my PCs and don’t miss it. I agree though that USB sticks are the biggest risk today – though a little bit of social engineering will probably persuade many users to run a setup file on a USB stick anyway.