/me thinks

My old manager at Novell contacted me the other day about moving some web applications to Flex.  He remembered that I became an RIA advocate after I developed a prototype of the GroupWise Instant Messenger using Flex.  The following is taken from an email I wrote to him yesterday explaining my reasons for moving to Flex at EnticeLabs.

I feel very strongly that it has been one of the best decisions we have made as a company.  There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Reduced development time.  I think this comes down to the fact that you don’t have to spend time making your application work on multiple browsers and platforms. At EnticeLabs, we also use standard HTML/JavaScript for parts of our service and I’m always shocked at how much time it takes to develop in comparison to Flex.

2. Customer feedback.  To date, not a single customer has taken issue with our decision (most of them don’t even realize that it’s Flash).  In fact, we routinely receive compliments about our applications from our customers.  Also, since we’re in the business of serving up millions of advertisements accross the web, we have been able to independently verify Adobe’s claims that over 90% of Internet users already have the Flash Player installed.

3. Easy to staff.  I see Flex as a great compromise between web application development and desktop application development.  Although Flex is a relatively new technology, we have had great success in training developers from both backgrounds to develop on Flex at EnticeLabs.  Web application guys appreciate the familiar scripting language and UI markup, while desktop application guys appreciate developing in a stateful environment that provides a comprehensive set of reusable controls.  It doesn’t bother us that Flex developers are hard to find; we’ve found that any good user interface developer can learn to use Flex quickly.

As for Sliverlight, I think it’s going to be one to watch but it has a lot of ground to cover if it’s going to be a real challenger to Flex.  Adobe (Macromedia) has been perfecting this technology for years and feature for feature it has the advantage over all of its competitors for the moment.  I think it’s safe to say that if you’re planning to do RIA anytime in the near future you’ll be much more satisfied with Flex than Sliverlight or JavaFX.

AJAX (or more specifically JavaScript, HTML and CSS), however, is not going away anytime soon.  I’m not convinced that Flex is the answer to all of our web development problems.  It’s about using the right tool for the right job.  Web services that have analogous desktop applications are prime candidates for RIA as are specialized widgets or applets that enhance websites.  On the other hand, services that present pages of searchable content (Wikipedia, blogs, etc.) are not going to benefit much from an RIA makeover (it might actually be a bad move).  Of course, the distinction between these types of services is becoming more blurred as time goes on so it’s anybody’s guess where we’re headed in the long run.

My first niece, Cora, was born on Sunday.  Finally my girls will have a cousin that they can play with when they’re older.

Megan (Cora’s mother), went into the delivery expecting to receive an epidural but was denied because of a low platelet count (which apparently can lead to things like paralysis).  The nurses and staff were all very impressed with how well Megan coped with the situation.

When we went to visit them in the hospital last night, Ava and Lola were not good guests.  They were both very interested in their new cousin but haven’t learned how to keep their voices down yet.  I took a few pictures of their visit.  The first is of the twins looking at Cora and calling her ‘baby doll’ and the other is of Ava trying to hold Cora.

Congratulations Hayes family!

I looked up this article about Qantas Flight 30 this morning after hearing on the radio that some passengers vomited after exiting the plane.  I should have left it alone at that point, but instead I decided to lookup this arcticle about Alhoa Airlines Flight 243 and saw this scary photo from 1988.  During the Aloha flight, the cabin depressurized and the entire roof of the plane was ripped off.  A flight attendant named C.B. Lansing was simultaneously sucked out of the cabin.

Ugh.  I think I’ve had enough scary plane crash thoughts for one morning.

As I was reading about the retirement of Bill Gates after a 30-something year career at Microsoft, I also found myself installing Windows on my home desktop for the first time in nearly 8 years.  While most of my friends would probably be shocked to hear this (I’ve been a staunch Linux desktop user for many years) I can’t help but feel a bit surprised that I didn’t make the move back to Windows sooner.  When I first started to experiment with Linux back in college, Windows XP was a brand new operating system (my last Windows was Me) with lots and lots of bugs (maybe not as bad as Vista).  Today, I’m returning to discover that it has grown into a solid and mature platform.

So, what really made me drop Linux in favor of Windows?  I suppose it’s about productivity.  If the past 9 months at a start-up have taught me anything, it’s that time is precious.  When I first started at EnticeLabs, I requested a MacBook but was given a Dell desktop with Windows XP instead (in retrospect, a smart move by our CEO, Ryan Caldwell).  As I re-learned to use Windows, I couldn’t help but to also notice how much the OS had stabilized over the years and how much it didn’t get in the way of what I was doing.  By contrast, my Ubuntu desktop always seemed to be consuming a lot more of my time than it should have been.

I’ll sum it up this way: In the past, I cherished an opportunity to roll my own Linux kernel; today, I’ve just got too much work to do.

I had been thinking about installing Windows for a while, but the straw that finally broke the camel’s back was an update (speaking of which, Ubuntu really needs to do something about the frequency of their updates) that prevented me from being able to start a GNOME session.  I’m sure there was a perfectly reasonable solution, but after about 45 minutes of trying the obvious ones, I realized that I just didn’t have time for this game anymore.

I wonder if I’m the only one.  Have I finally outgrown Linux?

I hate blogging.  It just takes too much time.  But, occasionally, I do get the urge to expose my thoughts to the universe against my better judgment.  So, here it is, once again–my stupid blog.

I finally made the decision to leave my comfy job at Novell for the white-knuckle thrill of a small startup.  My last day will be Friday the 21st.  I’ll post more when I feel like wasting some more time blogging.

If you weren’t convinced that he was an idiot before make sure you don’t miss this article about Kanye West.

From the article:

In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video “Touch The Sky,” because it “cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons.”