23rd World

photo by optovox on Flickr, check out his giant fish art bike made with recycled AOL CDs!
There’s much ado about AOL (formerly America Online) these days. Blogs have been buzzing for weeks about AOL’s recent security blunder – publicly releasing over search records on 650,000 users, which evenutally resulted in their CTO’s resignation which was widely reported this morning.

“If you are an AOL customer, I feel sorry for you.” says Michael Arrington in his article in early August, AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data, and continues, “AOL is hitting bottom when it comes to brand image. This story comes on the heels of the recorded phone call with customer service disaster as well as a just-in story about a woman who is unable to cancel her deceased father’s AOL account, nine months after his death.”

As if that weren’t enough, I recieved notice through my webhost this afternoon that an email alias I set up for a friend (so email @theirdomain.com could be forwarded to their AOL account) wouldn’t work anymore because AOL’s technologically stunted anti-spam measures automatically block all of Dreamhost’s IP addresses because they don’t target only the original spammers.

This is just another slap in the face, as far as I’m concerned. In August of 2005, America Online settled with the office of NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer over complaints about how arduous AOL made it to cancel service. Consumerist posted AOL’s Retention Manual that instructs it’s customer service reps on how to make it difficult for people to unsubscribe. Before that there was their preposterous email tax idea where you pay them to ensure your doesn’t get tossed in the spam bucket.

I was suprised to find only 28,000 hits for the literal string “i hate aol” on Google. I searched for “i love aol” and was shocked to see almost 26,000 results…but then I started reading some and many turned out to be satirical citing reasons like “an endless supply of coasters” and I Love AOL = I Love ‘All Outdated Logic”.
Related:

AOL on Wikipedia – company history, major events and general info

AOL Chief Technology Officer Resigns – New York Times

Heads Roll At AOL – TechCrunch

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time – PCWorld Magazine (guess who’s number 1!)

No More AOL CDs – a website that collects AOL CD’s with plans to dump them at AOL headquarters when they reach a million.

My first blog post back in 2000 was powered by Blogger, though my site runs on WordPress now. A few of my client’s blogs are still powered by Blogger and everything still works great, helped in part by the fact that Blogger has changed very little. When Google bought Blogger in the summer of 2003 many people were left wondering why. Their questions remain unanswered, and then people wondered why Google has let Blogger stagnate the past few years as both blogging and blog software options exploded on the web. And now Google junkies and tech gossips will doubtless mull endlessly over the sudden beta release of the new, improved, Google-integrated Blogger.

Reminiscent of Flickr’s move to YahooID’s after their buyout, my Google Account was already detected and a link encourageming me to switch my Blogger user account was presented. Already, I like this. I use several Google services including Gmail, Calendar and Sitemaps and like most people, I’d like everything to be simpler and easier. Integration all communication tools holds great efficiency potential.

I doubt the redesign will have much impact on self-hosting bloggers…that is, people who run blog software on their webservers as opposed to a hosted version. WordPress and similar full blown open source software applications boast incredible flexibility, customization capabilities and user-based support. Where blogger could pull ahead is in your hobbyist and non-tech blogger realm. They must realize that as the three features the beta highlights are:

New ways to customize your template – Drag and drop page elements and easily change your template’s font and color scheme.

Private blogs -Create a blog visible to just your friends and family, not the whole world.

Labels -Give your posts a category label so that you and your readers can easily sort by topic.

All of these things essentially make it easier for regular (non web-coder folk) to customize their blogs.
The new template customization seems to use the concept of web parts – movable configurable zones, similar to your customized Google, MSN or Yahoo homepage. This will allow people a more organic way of customizing thier site and allow them to feel in control without knowing any code.

Giving users push-button ability to make thier blog private is truly brilliant. All the loud mouths (like me) that want to shout their business to the world are already blogging – those left that don’t have blogs are either uninterested, intimidated by the technology or are concerned about privacy. Way to read your target audience Google!

The label feature is really just Blogger catching up to everyone else. Labels are more commonly referred to as categories or tags. Google’s chronic use of the word ‘labels’ instead of the popularly accepted ‘tags’ is perplexing and possibly confusing for some folks (IMO – it really just irritates me).

Beta blogs are invite-only (no one invited me *schniff*) so for now head over to Google Operating System and TechCrunch for an inside look at the new blogging features.

A couple of things jump out immediately:

• They’ve recruited and listened to some UI experts
• It’s not terribly different from Enterprise Manager

I honestly didn’t think I would like the new SQL Server Manager…mostly because I already like Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer. I was SO wrong, yippee! It’s flippin sweet. I especially love the new integrated script features – you can script just about anything you would do in the GUI. This is most excellent for learning and uber useful for making triggers and DTS pacakage and all sorts of things! Check it out…

The merging of SQL Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer will save plenty of time going back and forth, it’s an obvious move… Another obvious enhangement to Windows apps in general, one that gives me hope in terms of M$‘s direction, is the easy copying of error messages, relevant error messages and a help feature integrated in the error dialogue itself that lets you select different portions with which to query online help. It’s like they don’t want to torture us anymore!!!

Don’t tell my linux friends please, but I’m getting really excited now about Longhorn coming out. It could be much easier to support.

I’ve been doing a lot of .NET tutorials but hadn’t yet applied much to the real world. The one .NET app I’ve done for work so far was largely designed to the constraints of my experience, unfortunately. I was curious to see how difficult it would be to design a dynamic ASPX page that lived up to my usual standards – aesthetically, usability-wise and functionally. In this case, I wanted to add a summary table of all the data collected from a web form that was written in classic ASP, XHTML/CSS and Javascript.

Easier than I thought! I created a “new website” in the location of the old asp pages, Visual Studio automatically adds server extensions (an isolated app pool) and, though VS actually warned me, I had to manually set the directory to use ASP.NET 2.0 framework. The solution explorer view automatically included all of the content in the website project. I created a new web form page, copied the framework xhtml from another page in the directory (sans ASP) by viewing the source in a browser (there were a lot of logic loops so it was much easier this way), fixed a couple small errors that VS 2005′s intellisense picked up right away, and then went into design view – dropped an Access (OLEDB) datasource and a datagrid to consume it on the page, configured that, added CSS classes to make it pretty, and walah! I couldn’t flippin believe it
It’s so easy to expose database data and include paging and sorting automatically. That’s the power of the datagrid – displaying data from a database in ASP is no big deal (once you’ve worked out security issues and connection strings in your environment) but extra things like paging and sorting, while certainly doable, are no where near as easy. What surprised me the most, other than the shocking ease of creating a more or less XHTML compliant page using asp.net datacontrols, was how nice Visual Studio 2005 was as a general editor for old ASP pages and CSS files.

It was timely coincidence that an article called Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: Productivity Study appeared on the top of the article stack that is presented to you on opening VS 2005. The article had a big callout stating:

ASP.NET 2.0 developers accomplished 113% more tasks in the same amount of time as ASP developers; ASP.NET 2.0 developers created web content pages up to 357% faster than ASP developers.

I actually thought the first number was low, if in fact they were using experienced .NET developers, as so much is automated, you have a full programming language to use and a plethora of built-in objects to leverage. But then the article continued:

The approach to this study was to recruit experienced developers in each of the development disciplines, ASP and ASP.NET 2.0. This resulted in two equal-sized developer groups, four developers in each group.

And then I stopped reading. I mean, why bother? A total of 8 developers made up their test case? WTF?! This is a pseudoscientific approach that is more like a raffle than a real study you can actually derive meaning from.

From my personal and to date, somewhat limited, perspective – I think it’s the paradigm shift and learning curve that makes new developers (like me) slow as molasses on .NET. There are a lot of developers who are really comfy in classic ASP and having gone from PHP to ASP for work, I can say it’s much easier than going to .NET…initially.

Once a developer has a good grasp on OOP and resources available in .NET framework I would guess the numbers are likely more disparate. Throw in a few different types of programming challenges, a larger test case, and make sure to include some projects the devs don’t already know how to do…then you start to see how much more (or less) developing in .NET is. I would like to read that report when and if it becomes available.