Archive for the 'Software' Category

Setting Up My New Apple MacBook Pro

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on August 9, 2007
in Mac OS X, Software, Startups and Technology
. 0 Comments

I recently celebrated a birthday.

Some people don’t like birthdays. They fear growing older.

I don’t have that reaction at all. About a birthday, I always say: "It beats the alternative!" And, I truly believe that.

My fiancée bought me the best gift ever. Something that I will use many hours a day, every day of the week.

A shiny, new Apple MacBook Pro.

OK, so now I have to move everything off my old Apple PowerBook G4 and turn it into a dedicated software test machine.

The easy way is to use the excellent Apple Migration Assistant tool. I didn’t want to do that, however, because I wanted a fresh start. You see, as part of what I do, I install a lot of crap on my system. A fresh computer every couple years is always an opportunity to get a fresh start. So, that’s what I did.

I downloaded the latest versions of all the software that I use the most. And, I kept track, just for you. Here’s the list:

  1. Quicksilver β51
  2. Safari 3 Beta for Mac
  3. VMware Fusion Beta
  4. VoodooPad Lite
  5. Inquisitor 3 for Safari
  6. Set up Mail.app (accounts, rules)
  7. Transfer files from old Mac (using FireWire Target mode)
  8. Backup/Recover Address Book and iCal databases
  9. SpamSieve (export/import the old corpus)
  10. Windows XP (under VMware Fusion)
  11. Windows Live Writer Beta (under Windows XP; took forever for Service Pack 2 and .NET junk). Thank goodness Windows boots incredibly fast under VMware Fusion!
  12. Remote Desktop Connection for Mac (get the new Beta)
  13. Firefox
  14. F-Script Anywhere
  15. Aperture (actually was pre-installed)

    • Move over Aperture and iPhoto Library
  16. Xcode
  17. AppleCare Online Registration
  18. Google Desktop for Mac
  19. Google Earth & Picasa Uploader (easily from Google Updater)
  20. Adium
  21. Copy over login.keychain (since "Export" option doesn’t work)
  22. Adobe Reader
  23. Application Enhancer with SDK
  24. Safari Bookmarks (export/import)
  25. FlickrExport Lite for Aperture
  26. KeywordAssistant for iPhoto
  27. Full Tilt Poker
  28. Quinn
  29. Bluetooth Connection and iSync my Nokia E61

    • Customize modem script to access Internet through phone’s EDGE connection
  30. DarwinPorts and Subversion
  31. Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac
  32. RsyncX
  33. Chicken of the VNC
  34. Flip4Mac

That’s enough to get me going.

Now, off to order that new 24" iMac for the office computer… So glad that I own Apple stock.

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Final Thoughts on EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 8, 2007
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

So, EclipseCon 2007 has wrapped up today. Some final thoughts.

  • The conference was well attended and organized. Near as I could tell, everything went off without a hitch. There were some problems accessing wireless from the Hyatt, but I was only out there once. The food and booze was good. And, yes, I packed on a couple more pounds with the ever-present cookies and brownies. Ugh. Conferences. Sheesh.
  • Eclipse used to be just an IDE for developing Java applications. Now, it’s so much more. It’s now a really, really good IDE for developing Java applications. It’s also a platform for applications to run on top of (see Eclipse RCP) used by tools like Azureus and the Actuate BIRT Report Designer. Even more, the Eclipse Foundation brings together all the projects and makes sure that everything is legal and structures. When you say "Eclipse", you really are saying a mouthful.
  • The conference had the expected amount of talk focused on Eclipse and a variety of the extension work being done either directly in Eclipse, or as a plug-in, or on the platform.
  • All 3 of the Keynote talks were very good and entertaining. None of them focused on Eclipse or the Eclipse ecosystem, but they were all very good nonetheless.
  • Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised to see all the focus on OSGi at the conference (OSGi was formerly the Open Services Gateway initiative, and is now the OSGi Alliance). There were numerous really good sessions talking about the current progress of the OSGi Alliance and related projects. This stuff is finally maturing. Lots of Open Source technologies available now, like Equinox, Knopflerfish, Apache Felix, and Newton. There is even talk about getting Spring and OSGi working together with the Spring-OSGi project.
  • Looking downstream, however, it may make the most sense to combine OSGi, Spring, and SCA (the Service Component Architecture) to form the best-balanced service fabric. Paremus appears to be leading the charge here, and announced such a product, Infiniflow, at the conference. Very cool.

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Scott Adams on Dilbert at EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 7, 2007
in Entertainment, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, did a great job with the EclipseCon 2007 Keynote talk on Tuesday.

While the talk was certainly entertaining, the thing I liked most about his talk was the focus on things like "failure", "timing","luck", and "persistence".

Scott pointed out that his "list of failures" got to 29 items before he stopped counting. Of those 29 failures, most would have been successes had they been shifted forward or backward in time by as little as 5 years. As I’ve said before, timing is everything. Startups are often too early to market. Lots of VC-backed startups do not have the patience to wait for the market to catch up to them. Patience.

In addition to his 29 failures, Scott did recognize 3 successes. And, certainly, a bit of luck played a part in the successes.

However, Scott’s spin on "lucky" and "unlucky" people was interesting. Lucky people are those that expect success to happen to them and, as a result, they have a broader perspective of the world around them. Unlucky people do not expect success and often miss the signs that would otherwise drive them toward the right opportunity. Interesting. Don’t forget to look around.

Finally, don’t ever give up. Be persistent. Create a "product". Create lots of products. Something will eventually stick, perhaps with that component of "luck" playing its part when you least expect it.

Nothing in here about Eclipse or EclipseCon 2007. Still, very well done, informative and entertaining.

Be sure to take a look at the Dilbert Blog.

Open Source Business Models at EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 6, 2007
in Open Source and Software
. 0 Comments

Brent C. Williams, an independent Equity Research Analyst, gave a quick-paced ride through some Open Source Business Models and key activities from 2006 at EclipseCon 2007.

Some takeaways about a couple of big activities in 2006:

Case 1:

  • Oracle decides to "clone" Red Hat Enterprise Linux in October 2006, and to offer it for half the price of Red Hat. Stats: First 90 days, about 9,000 downloads of the product. Compare that to 1,000,000 people who downloaded Fedora Core 6 from Red Hat in its first 90 days.
  • Red Hat ignored the move by Oracle - no price reduction, no individual deal discounting. Red Hat has a premium brand. Software is not price-competitive at the market level.
  • Oracle announced that they will join the Eclipse board and donate a number of technologies. This is a good, smart move for them, however not big enough to overcome the blowback from the cloning experiment gone bad.

Case 2:

  • Novell - Microsoft licensing deal.
  • Novell recently reported $91M of invoicing for Linux subscriptions, up 650% over the previous year. However, $73M of that was from existing customers. Sounds like small change to me.
  • Novell thinks their problem is trying to catch up to Red Hat. Novell needs to build a brand identity for SuSe that is something other than "We’re not Red Hat".

Brent’s Prediction: If Microsoft sues anybody for patent infringement in 2007, that there will be an Open Source community response such that each of Microsoft’s existing software patents would receive prior-art petitions filed against them with the patent office (and 70% of such petitions are accepted by the Patent office).

What do investors care about for 2007?

  • Simple. More revenue. Either "Economies of Scale" revenue (sell copies to more customers in existing markets) or through "Agility" revenue (open source companies are more agile and can branch out into adjacent markets easier).
  • Example: Actuate and their BIRT efforts have helped to boost their stock price.

Miscellaneous points:

  • Software Market is not a Commodity Market.
  • Open Source Software market is even more of a branded market than proprietary software (strong emotional preferences found in the Open Source community).
  • Interface Standards do not affect pricing. Implementation of the "standard" interfaces is what customers are buying.

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IP Issues - Mixing Commercial and Open Source Software at EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 6, 2007
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

Panel of Palamida, OpenLogic, Black Duck Software, IBM, and BEA Open Source licensing experts at EclipseCon 2007.

Some takeaways:

  • Lots of organizations have no idea how to make the risk/reward analysis of when they should use Open Source Software and when they should not.
  • Some companies go so far as to have policies that forbid the use of Open Source Software within their products, or even block access to sourceforge.net from the office. None of these tactics work to stop the developer from bringing the code in anyway.
  • Most organizations really have no idea how much Open Source Software they are using in their product, or which licenses those products are using.
  • TiVo, Linksys, and Progress Software/MySQL case identified as some big/well-know cases of companies using Open Source with some kind of legal action taken against them with respect to their use of Open Source Software, Check out gplviolations.org for more information (at least within Germany).
  • Companies should have Open Source areas of expertise. An individual or group that understands these IP and licensing issues and can communicate with executive management, engineering,and the legal department effectively. Or, companies should use an Open Source consulting firm, like the Olliance Group.
  • The major Open Source communities have gotten really good at certifying the originality of the work that is contributed. Buyer must still beware, however. There is risk associated with any software that is developed through an open, community process.

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At EclipseCon 2007 - Look Me Up!

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 5, 2007
in CVS, Open Source, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

I’m at EclipseCon 2007 this week, in sunny Santa Clara, CA. I’m very much looking forward to the event. Lots of great sessions lined up and this year’s conference looks to be bigger than ever.

The ecosystem that has developed around Eclipse is remarkable. Definitely shows the power of Open Source within the developer community (something I was lucky enough to contribute to with CVS).

If you’d like to chat/meet, please drop me an email.

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FeedBurner Validates Google Reader Domination

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 28, 2007
in Blogging, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

The folks over at FeedBurner released a nice overview of how they see the web-based RSS/Feed reading market. I.e., which web-based clients are reading the most feeds/articles. Great article.

It pretty much confirms what I expected. I previously wrote about my switch to using Google Reader. Apparently, many others have as well.

Burning Questions • FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market

TopAggregatorsByView.gif

Notes yet again:

 

  • Given the way Google Reader renders HTML (see here for an explanation on our Publisher Tips blog), the 59% figure is actually conservative. Since Bloglines and other clients render all HTML on a page at one time, rendered item views are likely greater than the actual number of stories “read” by their users.
  • The top 4 aggregators as measured by views - Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator and Netvibes - account for 98% of all item views recorded.

There are still many features that I would like to see added to Google Reader. Customized search through my feeds is a big one. As well as "smart tags" which would do such a search and dynamically organize it under a tag. Maybe some day. For now, Google Reader works pretty well. And, I’m not alone in that belief.

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OpenID Enabled

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 27, 2007
in Blogging, Open Source, Software and Startups
. 1 Comment

I’m OpenID enabled. Check out the Wikipedia OpenID article for a great overview. The high points include:

When you post on a blog using OpenID, the blogger’s site asks your OpenID provider to log you in; when your provider verifies you, you are guaranteed a unique identity without maintaining an account for that blog.

On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users do not need to register and manage a new account for every site before being granted access.

Sounds pretty good to me! Also, take a look at the Simon Willison Screencast on How to use OpenID.

The other thing I like about OpenID is that I can make my website/blog address be my OpenID. I.e., my OpenID is brianberliner.com. So, what do I get with this:

  • An easy username to remember that works on multiple web sites.
  • Muy OpenID maps to me, my brand.
  • No need to create yet another password to forget (there’s only ONE PASSWORD) to manage.
  • My very personal OpenID URI will only authenticate to me.
  • I can change the back-end provider that does the actual authentication at any time, and the OpenID that the rest of the world sees does not change.

So, how did I do it?

1. Check out Simon Willison’s article on How to turn your blog into an OpenID.

I chose VeriSign Labs as my OpenID provider, since I trust the VeriSign brand. They are the one’s that will do the heavy lifting of securely authenticating me on multiple OpenID-enabled sites using my single sign-on password (yes, ONE PASSWORD!). I’m
brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com.

2. Configure your website/blog software to include two additional links in the header.

I edited my Wordpress 2.1 theme to add the following two lines to the <head> section:

<link rel="openid.server"
    href="https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate"
    href="http://brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com/">

And, that’s it! Do these two steps and you too can be OpenID enabled.

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NetNewsWire Beta Goes Public

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 20, 2007
in Blogging, Mac OS X, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

Back in November 2006, I wrote the article, Google Reader: Actually Quite Good.

In that article, I noted how surprised I was that Google Reader was such a good online RSS news reader. I had been using the desktop application, NetNewsWire 2.1.1, on my Mac and was overall pretty satisfied with it (except for some scaling issues)… Then I moved up to the pre-release version of NetNewsWire 3.0 and found that things had not really improved.

I even complained that the developer, Brent Simmons, had not made much progress on NetNewsWire since the acquisition of his company, Ranchero Software, by NewsGator, over a year prior (October 2005).

The result was that I switched my RSS news/feed reading experience over to Google Reader and wrote about the switch. And, the Blogosphere responded.

Brent Simmons wrote a personal email to me to let me know that development was progressing along nicely and that he hoped to entice me back to NetNewsWire with the 3.0 official release. I thought that was awesome! In that note, Brent added:

I’m more excited about the 3.0 release than I have been about any software I’ve ever worked on.

Very cool. Brent is an excellent programmer and excited programmers can change the world.

Fast-forward. I noticed today that Brent has released a new pre-release version. I downloaded it and kicked the tires. I have to say that the performance of the Combined View and search functions were much nicer now. I may use Google Reader and NetNewsWire in parallel, or may just decide to wait for the official NetNewsWire 3.0 release to give it it’s full due.

Bottom line: Many thanks to Brent for engaging the community and continuing to make NetNewsWire great. I look forward to the official 3.0 release!

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As Predicted, VMware will IPO in 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 8, 2007
in Software, Technology and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

In October, 2006, I wrote the article, "VMware as LBO Opportunity for EMC?" The article examined the impact that the VMware acquisition has had on the EMC bottom line and speculated on some ways that EMC could benefit its shareholders by spinning out the EMC asset with an IPO in 2007.

Looks like I was pretty close to right on this call.

Yesterday, EMC announced that they will sell approximately 10% of VMware in an IPO to happen sometime in the summer of 2007.

Just as it was a smart move for EMC to acquire VMware back in early 2004, this is also a smart move on their part. And I’m not just saying that because I thought it was a smart move last year. Well, OK, I am saying that (a bit). Briefly, it’s smart because:

  • EMC shareholders will see increased shareholder value. The positive uptick has started already, as EMC gained 6.62% in the first day of trading after the announcement. Witness:
  • VMware, as a separate and public entity, will be better positioned to offer transparency to their shareholders.
  • VMware will be much better able to attract, reward, and retain the key talent they will need to ride the Virtualization market as it blossoms over the next 10 years.
  • EMC retains 90% ownership of the public entity. So, if the Market Cap of VMware hits $20B in 5 years, then EMC is sitting on an $18B gold mine. Of course, we’ll know much more when we see the S1. The high-level breakdown of the cap-table will tell us what’s left for recruiting and acquisitions.

So, let’s do some more speculation. I reported on VMware’s Q42006 numbers earlier. They did $232M in revenue in Q42006, total revenues for 2006 of $709M, and EMC is projecting $1.2B total revenues for 2007. Since their CAGR numbers are astronomical, I’d be comfortable pricing them right now at 4x forward revenues, or about a $5B Market Cap (give or take $1B). If EMC sells 10% of the company, we’re looking at a $500M IPO. This move could very well jump-start the IPO market for high-tech companies back into existence.

The only downside to this that I can find is that the company will not truly be held by the public. We just get to join along for 10% of the ride. I would much prefer that Joe Q. Public had a larger stake in any public entity.

Other interesting blog coverage includes:

All told, however, this is certainly an IPO that anyone would want to be a part of…

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