TechnoMagicians Blog

I'm getting really really tired of seeing everything hyped up and sprinkled with AJAX fairy dust. I've been tired of it for about 8 months now but haven't brought myself to blog about it so here it goes.

If your only claim to fame for your website is the fact that it is using AJAX, then as far as I'm concerned, you are a few years behind. You're not impressing me. You're not impressing anyone that has been doing this for years. You're not doing anything new. You're using what I would consider current web development methods. Nothing else. Nothing special. Nothing new. Nothing to talk about. Nothing to hype. Nothing to obtain funding about. Nothing interesting. Nothing earth shattering. Nothing intelligent. Nothing but a programming technique that is as common place as a “Hello World” program written in BASIC.

Lets get it straight, AJAX is just a programming technique that any joe blow developer/programmer should use when appropriate. It is nothing else. If you are a developer thinking that you're the brainiest guy on the planet because you use AJAX, think again. You're just about ready to turn into a fossil.

Having said all that I'm moving onto Web 3.0 with Zeldman. Anyone else with me? Web 2.0 has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Then again, if I'm looking for funding for a project I'll sprinkle my AJAX fairy dust and Web 2.0 potion on it just in case a VC gets a whiff of the dust or a taste of the potion and is taken by its spell.

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Here is yet another e-learning website with nothing new except a bit of AJAX fairy dust sprinkled on it, some Web 2.0 wording and claims of breaking new ground. It amazes me that it will (already seems to be) get the kind of hype they are looking for.

I don't want to completely rip apart Nuvvo as I'm happy for any eLearning companies to do something useful on the web for education but lets look at a few things.

I hate to break Nuvvo's bubble but we used AJAX in 2000/2001 with QuikkTutor (an online tutor service). It should be of no surprise that Brent Ashley, who I will now claim is the father of a particular method of “remote scripting”, was on the development team at QuikkTutor. His Javascript Remote Scripting (JSRS) library was being built at around that time.

Another first for Nuvvo is the use of Skype. Technically that may be correct (even that I doubt) but it certainly isn't the first learning system to use voice over the Internet. We were using voice in 2000/2001 with QuikkTutor. Sure, it wasn't Skype (since they didn't exist) but it was voice over the Internet with headphones and a microphone (imagine that). We were just getting into using SIP with one of our voice providers back then as it was relatively new. For those of you who would like a very small Internet history lesson, there were many many companies similar to Skype that have come and gone over the years and voice over the Internet has been around in some way shape or form since at least the 90's.

I can go on about there being no business model here, how their LMS is not conducive to learning on the web etc, but it is not my job to give out free consulting. If they would like to hire me for some advice I'm available.

Don't get me wrong, I like what I see with Nuvvo, its just that its about 1/10th (if that) of what is required for a decent eLearning play and a drop in the bucket with what QuikkTutor had 5 years ago.

I get more and more confirmation every year on how far ahead of our time we were with QuikkTutor.

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Well, looks like there is a service now to do this. I experimented with doing this over a year ago but didn't keep up with it since it was more of a manual procedure. I could have automated it but it wasn't really worth my time.

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Another annoucement to the still unnofficial KosmoBlog:

Introduction

In response to market demand, multilingual capability is being added to KosmoBlog. In this first release three versions of English and Spanish are supported. The KosmoBlog Publisher Control Panel and the blog interface will be presented in the selected language. Location dependent fields, such as the date and time, will be set based on the Locale that corresponds to the language. More languages and locales will be added in phases throughout 2006.

Supported Languages and Locales

English  – United States
English  – Canada
English  – United Kingdom
Spanish – European

Scope of Multilingual Presentation

The KosmoBlog Publisher Control Panel and Blog interface will be presented in the user's language of choice. Messages generated by the KosmoBlog system and presented on the blogs themselves will be presented in the users' language of choice (e.g. Login button).

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Looks like Om is picking up on what I was complaining about back in July in his post here.

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Guy on venture capitalists lies can be found here. Might as well repost here:

1. “I liked your company, but my partners didn't.” In other words, “no.” What the sponsor is trying to get the entrepreneur to believe is that he's the good guy, the smart guy, the guy who gets it; the “others” didn't, so don't blame him. This is a cop out; it's not the other partners didn't like the deal as much as the sponsor wasn't a true believer. A true believer would get it done.
2. “If you get a lead, we will follow.” In other words, “no.” As the old Japanese say, “If your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle.” Well, she doesn't have balls, so it doesn't matter. The venture capitalist is saying, “ We don't really believe, but if you can get Sequoia to lead, we'll jump on the pile.” In other words, once the entrepreneur doesn't need the money, the venture capitalist would be happy to give him some more–this is like saying, “Once you've stopped Larry Csonka cold, we'll help you tackle him.” What entrepreneurs want to hear is, “If you can't get a lead, we will.” That's a believer.
3. “Show us some traction, and we'll invest.” In other words, “no.” This lie translates to “I don't believe your story, but if you can prove it by achieving significant revenue, then you might convince me. However, I don't want to tell you 'no' because I might be wrong and by golly you may sign up a Fortune 500 customer and then I'd look like a total orifice.”
4. “We love to co-invest with other venture capitalists.” Like the sun rising and Canadians playing hockey, you can depend on the greed of venture capitalists. Greed in this business translates to “If this is a good deal, I want it all.” What entrepreneurs want to hear is, “We want the whole round. We don't want any other investors.” Then it's the entrepreneur's job to convince then why other investors can make the pie bigger as opposed to re-configuring the slices.
5. “We're investing in your team.” This is an incomplete statement. While it's true that they are investing in the team, entrepreneurs are hearing, “We won't fire you–why would we fire you if we invested because of you?” That's not what the venture capitalist is saying at all. What she is saying is, “We're investing in your team as long as things are going well, but if they go bad we will fire your ass because no one is indispensable.”
6. “I have lots of bandwidth to dedicate to your company.” Maybe the venture capitalist is talking about the T3 line into his office, but he's not talking about his personal calendar because he's already on ten boards. Counting board meetings, an entrepreneur should assume that a venture capitalist will spend between five to ten hours a month on a company. That's it. Deal with it. And make board meetings short!
7. “This is a vanilla term sheet.” There is no such thing as a vanilla term sheet. Do you think corporate finance attorneys are paid $400/hour to push out vanilla term sheets? If entrepreneurs insist on using a flavor of ice cream to describe term sheets, the only flavor that works is Rocky Road. This is why they need their own $400/hour attorney too–as opposed to Uncle Joe the divorce lawyer.
8. “We can open up doors for you at our client companies.” This is a double whammy of lie. First, a venture capitalist can't always open up doors at client companies. Frankly, he might be hated by the client company. The worst thing in the world may be a referral from him. Second, even if the venture capitalist can open the door, entrepreneurs can't seriously expect the company to commit to your product–that is, something that isn't much more than a slick (10/20/30) PowerPoint presentation.
9. “We like early-stage investing.” Venture capitalists fantasize about putting $1 million into a $2 million pre-money company and end up owning 33% of the next Google. That's early stage investing. Do you know why we all know about Google's amazing return on investment? The same reason we all know about Michael Jordan: Googles and Michael Jordans hardly ever happen. If they were common, no one would write about them. If you scratch beneath the surface, venture capitalists want to invest in proven teams (eg., the founders of Cisco) with proven technology (eg., the basis of a Nobel Prize) in a proven market (eg., ecommerce). We are remarkably risk averse considering it's not even our money.
10. I'm at a Starbucks in Hawaii writing this blog. I've been at it for ninety minutes. I don't have my charger with me. My PowerBook is out of gas. You're going to have to be happy with the top nine lies of venture capitalists until “Dear God” ships the PowerBook Vaio.

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I'm glad Guy Kawasaki is blogging now. His view on mission statements and mantras:

The ultimate test for a mantra (or mission statement) is if your telephone operators (Trixie and Biff) can tell you what it is. If they can, then you’re onto something meaningful and memorable. If they can't, then, well, it sucks.

And I particularly like the pointer to the mission statement generator here.

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I've been noticing way too many issues with Bloglines lately so its time to try some other aggregators out there. The most annoying issue is that it seems to be loosing track of what I've read and I'm constantly having to figure out if I've read something already or figure out half way through reading something that it isn't deja vu but actually that I've read this before. Also, some feeds seem to contain many many duplicate entries and then other feeds just don't display the latest entries. I have no idea if these are feed related issues or not but I'd bet they are Bloglines specific.

I guess it was just a matter of time that Bloglines would get very little attention while they try to figure out how they fit into Ask Jeeves. Surprised it took this long.

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As per usual another excellent article by Joel Spolsky:

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

When I went to University, we were never taught a language. We were expected to already know it or learn it overnight to do an assignment. Depending on what theories they were teaching we'd use any number of languages like Cobol (maybe one assignment), Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, Ada, and “C” (I'm probably missing a few). Of course anything serious in later years was programmed in “C” (with Assembler where required).

This next paragraph from Joel brings back just way too many memories. I wouldn't want to try and figure out how many hours in my University life were spent chasing down the all too familiar “segmentation fault”:

The lucky kids of JavaSchools are never going to get weird segfaults trying to implement pointer-based hash tables. They're never going to go stark, raving mad trying to pack things into bits. They'll never have to get their head around how, in a purely functional program, the value of a variable never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!

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We're getting closer to bookmarking and annotation of webpages getting into the 21st century. I've been waiting many years for something useful that I would actually use. Not sure if these are it yet but I'll likely be checking them out in more detail soon.

See this TechCrunch article.

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