We are using the gauges image as a metaphor for thinking in classes and objects, which, in the software world, are the building blocks of abstract thinking.  We are doing that because it is easier to demonstrate an abstraction when it applies to something that you can see, rather than something that is invisible.  Notice the commonalities of the gauges objects: they all are processes which convey information from the automobile to the driver.  Although they differ in their detail, they all possess the property of being able to convert the voltage into usable information.  They all have scales, labels, pointers and the necessary equipment or functions to convey their respective information to the driver.

In a smaller sense they do have meaningful differences.  Their scales are different; their labels differ; and  their sizes differ.  And depending on the model of car, their shapes and colors can be different.  However these smaller differences can either be built in to the classes that define the gauge, or passed in as parameters.

It is the commonalities of these structures it would make our gauges and excellent example of a candidate for an abstract object.  Software designers refer to code that is a blueprint for these objects as ‘classes’.  Objects can also possess powers known as functions or methods which enable an object to perform its expected tasks.  In the case of the gauge object these methods are limited to those that receive and transmit information.  The gauge objects all receive information in the form all of voltage from a wire connected to them.  And they confirm that information and output it to move their needle pointer to an appropriate level all in the gauge’s scale.

Notice that in the case of the speedometer and tachometer, there are additional digital gauges which are used to convey the information of mileage.  However even in these embedded digital gauges, information is derived from the same voltage current sources.  It is also significant to note that these embedded gauges demonstrate another important principle of abstraction: that classes can be and frequently are composed from other classes, and can inherit and/or override properties from their more primitive ancestors.

It is this object oriented approach which is the hallmark of modern database and software design.  The practice of discerning, building and re-using practical and useful software objects creates synergies and efficiencies for both the software design process and the client, bring value to both.  It is also the best way to evaluate and test the integrity of the output, and maintain or modify the resultant code.

The ability and skill with which a software designer/consultant is able to visualize and perceive abstract components in the systems which the software designer is modeling is the most important and direct indicator of the web development consultant’s value and integrity in the quality of his work.

There are several distinct types of mashups – consumer and enterprise. Enterprise mashups usually occur over secure networks, and are processed on a server, while consumer mashups are more forgiving, and accomplished on the users’ desktops. Web-based mashups usually use the clients web-browser to do the combining and reformatting of data. The various data streams must be sent to the client device as individual data streams so that they can be processed. Server-based mashups will do the analysis and reformatting of the data on the server side and send the data to the client as a single data stream.

Early mashups were created manually by programmers. As with many programming break-throughs, they were first done by enthusiastic programmers just to see if it could be done. As mashups became more popular, there arose a market for tools to simplify and speed up the creation of mashups. Software companies responded by creating tools that allow designers to construct mashups in a visual environment. All the potential components of a mashup are presented in this visual environment and can be connected to create the desired mashup. While mashup editors have made the process of creating mashups much simpler, they have not done a lot to create new ways of accessing the data to be combined. Mashup Enablers address this problem by adding new types of data that can be added to a mashup. A mashup enabler is defined as “the service and tool providers that make mashups possible”.

This type of technology was impossible until recently because of the speed of the average consumer internet communication. The number of http requests needed to ‘feed’ one page of data necessitates a high speed connection to the internet. And the very nature of the requests makes pre-made dataset presentations unfeasible. Associated technologies such as XML, SOAP, JSON and evolutions in Javascript capabilities have also facilitated adoption of slick representations of this and other Web2.0 applications.

Here’s a mashup created using Yahoo pipes. Yahoo pipes is a graphic interface which allows querying, filtering, sorting manipulating and formatting output from sources across the internet. This particular one taps several RSS feeds using technology from Yahoo and Delicious. The combines them into a single feed which is sorted by dates so that the most recent articles appear at the head of the list. If left to its own devices, the pipe would return hundreds of thousands of articles! But for our purposes, we limited it to the 15 most current articles.
(add references to other Paladin articles above)

However, with the advent of readily available high speed processing on the desktop and high speed communications, this mashup technology is beginning now to come into its own. Web pages that before were static and ‘dusty’ and were outmoded before they were published are now beginning to give way to dynamic conversations between the provider and user. Mashups are one way of delivering custom tailored content to a hungry consumer with an ever shortening attention span and an ever expanding demand for information.

For the business owner, it is also a boon. Here is an excellent way to provide up to the minute content which can be tailored to the needs and desires of an interested customer – kind of like an MIRV missile (multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicle). This is very powerful magic from a marketing and business development point of view. And even more exciting is that after the relatively small initial setup cost, the business owner can have his website updated and fresh, targeted to any individual customer or prospect by piggybacking on the technology of someone else!

Here’s a mashup using Flickr.com and Flickriver.com. Flickr is the repository of data containing the photographs, and Flickriver provides the technology that produces a randomly ordered list of up to 500 separate images from a pool of Flickr files. The list is different every day, so this blog article will show a different crop of images every day -automatically!

No, this is not plagiarism. It is perfectly legal and respectable. The providing companies expose their API (application programming interface) to the public exactly for that reason: they are anxious for other sites to share their technology because it establishes themselves as an industry standard, and makes it more likely that they will get a larger share of the business generated by the downstream customers .

If you feel that your company might benefit from such an enhancement to your web site and marketing program, please feel free to contact us. Additionally, we welcome comments on our articles in the space provided below.

I read an article about 10 days ago which was critical of Microsoft’s efforts to gain a toehold on the web that got me to thinking.  The premise of the article was that Microsoft has thrown huge sums of money into developing a web presence, but has so far failed.  Kevin Kelleher, the article’s author advances an argument that Microsoft should throw in the towel, and get out of the web business, because Microsoft obviously doesn’t do ‘it’ well.

My own vantage is one of an early and ardent admirer of Microsoft.  My Company, Paladin Consultants, LLC ,was one of the original Solution Providers (later renamed Microsoft Partners Network).  Over the past 20 years, we have  designed hundreds of custom software projects for many big name clients using Microsoft Sql Server database, Visual Basic,  .Net Projects in C#, and extensive application development using the Microsoft Office Products (including programmed routines in Word, Excel, and full blown small database system in Microsoft Access).  A few of the larger projects are detailed on our website.

Gates & Co. has changed the world through their innovations, and they are deserving of every nickle they have made.  Microsoft’s software products set a standard for quality, ease of use, and innovation that the rest of the industry used as a standard.  And for years we have been a strong supporter of Microsoft products.

But something happened in the mid ‘90’s - a number of things, actually, that changed the character of Microsoft, and of the playing field.

First, Microsoft seems to have lost its spirit of innovation.  Their execllent ideas like Windows, Visual Basic, SQL Server, and Office have only been marginally improved since the mid ‘90’s.  Their PR machine would, perhaps vehemently disagree with that assertion, but, aside from the cosmetics, and being easier to connect with those programs, the functionality has been little changed for the good of the user.  Their foray into the browser market is a case in point.  They built Internet Explorer into their Windows software to preclude competition from other browser manufacturers like Netscape.  They were sued by the U.S. Justice department  and by the E.U for anti competitive practices.  The corporate culture for some reason elected to compete in the market with anti-competitive practices, rather than innovation.  The Netscape browser was, unfortunately a casualty.

Second, the terrain of the battle shifted dramatically.  Although Bill Gates paid lip service to the concept that ‘ the future of the information business is the internet’, in practice his actions showed that he didn’t get it.  For instance, take a look at this snippet of text taken from a word document:

In an effort to make IE and Word indispensible, Microsoft allowed Word users to save their documents as HTML files.  The only problem was that in order for those files to render properly, the user was required to use IE.   Here’s a snippet of the HTML generated by Word.  Notice how the tags are largely proprietary, and not able to be interpreted by other browsers:

The larger thought is that the very gestalt of Internet is to have as open a system as possible.  The internet is home to many different operating systems, and APIs.  The nature of the beast is that all participants must be able to share those resources freely.  Microsoft’s view of the world, however, is that they want everybody to use their products, and will do anything they can to ‘tie’ as many people as possible to their paradigm.  In a real sense, thse two competing philosophies and business models are incompatible.  Another example of this is the Microsoft .Net platform.  We develop on .Net for clients, but invariably, there are open products that are available that do just as good a job, if not better, faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain.  The same can be said when comparing Windows Internet servers with Apache Linux servers.

So, when it comes to Internet products developed by Microsoft, by the time the product comes to market, there are already superior products available from their competitors.  VBScript vs Javascript, MSN vs Yahoo, Bing Vs Google, IE vs Firefox, Frontpage vs Dreamweaver and the list goes on.

Third, Microsoft has an extremely poor record of loyalty to its ‘partners’.  They have shown this again and again that when it becomes advantageous for MS to desert their partners, they will do so in a heartbeat.  The loyal army of Solution Providers were presented with a more and more expensive and onerous set of hoops to jump through that it became not a good business proposition for most of them.  In the beginning, Microsoft was a good source of referrals for many of us.  It was advantageous for them to establish themselves as the default platform.  But after a few years, those referrals invariably went to the ‘partners’ who sold the most Microsoft desktop products.  So, like their own internal innovation, relations with their ‘partners’ also fell prey to the drive to stoke consistent quarterly earnings growth.  Their relationship with RealPlayer is another example of this kind of ‘partner’ dissolution.  RealNetworks ended up suing Microsoft and winning $3/4 billion, in addition to the $600 million fine levied against Microsoft by the E.U. related to the RealNetworks suit.

I am concerned that as the desktop market matures along with the growth of Internet and cloud computing that Microsoft will continue to suffer reversals.  Of course, it is possible that the company will experience a resurgence in its innovation, but at this point it is difficult to see the theater that will make this likely.  Contrast this to the buzz that frequently comes from the new product machine at Apple. Growth in Internet based computing shows no signs whatever of slowing down.

We are Paladin Consultants, LLC, and, for the past 20 years,  have been in the IT consulting business concentrating on developing custom software, and web services for clients in primarily the Ny/NJ metropolitan area.  As our website suggests (Http://www.paladn.com ), we have been involved in as diverse a mix of software and web projects as one might imagine one would find in a company which has been developing mission critical software for that period of time.  As technology has advanced, we have always been enthusiastic to see new applications and techniques developed.  And, when they offered real value. We have been quick to recognize their contribution to the growth of our industry.

One such candidate for recognition is Microsoft’s OneNote.

In the more recent and advanced versions of their Office program, Microsoft has added an additional offering called OneNote, to go with their Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access programs.  They (Microsoft)  have not done a very good job at marketing it, but it is a very powerful program.  Billed as a portable notebook, it is much more like an idea laboratory and collaborative resource.  I have found it to be extremely valuable in a number of applications, which I will try to explain in the article, and perhaps a few following it.

There are a number of quite good sites devoted to OneNote, such as www.onenotepowertoys.com, and www.iheartonenote.com which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of the product.  But here in a few humble articles, I would like to show how we use the product, and why we find it so powerful.  First of all, it is media agnostic: pictures, text, movies, sound – virtually anything available today will be accommodated in OneNote.  Second, it’s flexible: anything can be positioned anywhere, and moved at will – either in a document, or copies and pasted, or renamed to other notebooks, or pages.  Interoperability with other Office programs is simple and easy.  And you can copy and paste from any URL you can get on your browser (any browser ) either in whole or in part.  It’ll send and receive email, and interface with the tasks in Outlook.

Recipes

I enjoy cooking a wide variety of dishes, in various cuisines.  While recipes are available on line, and in many many cookbooks, I enjoy the creative expression that comes from ‘doing it yourself’.   But who wants to reinvent the wheel.  When I get a dish to where I want it (which may take several iterations), I want to preserve that knowledge.  I have found that OneNote offers an excellent interface to this process.

I start with a basic recipe, either from my own idea, or from another source.  Then, using a two column approach, I record the ingredients, and method in the right hand column.  Opposite the preparation, I record the critique.  Over several iterations of this process, I arrive at a satisfactory result, which I ultimately record in my database, but save the ‘experiment process’ on its own OneNote page.
The process looks like this:

The process looks like this:

The process includes as many steps as necessary to achieve the desired result, and frequently will include pictures. Here’s an accompanying image clipped from a OneNote recipe page on making salsa.

Market Techniques

I have been an active trader in the equity, bond, and futures markets for over 30 years.  OneNote has helped me categorize my knowledge of the behaviors of the markets.  I have written many software routines on the TradeStation platform which measure and predict the behavior of the markets.  As part of the feedback process, a large database of images and actions has grown over the years.  These images and accompanying indicator readings are then identified as categories of patterns, and each category has a OneNote page, which might consist of scores of examples of a pattern exemplified in various markets under various conditions over time.

A OneNote based system for visually categorizing market patterns.

In contrast to the recipe process, which seeks a perfect solution for each category, this process seeks a common denominator for each identified pattern, and seeks to isolate the seminal , or minimum characteristics which will successfully identify opportunities and risk profiles in each category.

The trick is in the software which identifies opportunities and categories of patterns, interaction between the software and the database, and between the database and the OneNote gallery of patterns and narratives.

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