Software

If you’re looking to install Google Gears on OS X, installation order can be somewhat important. The Safari version installs as a standard OS X browser plugin and will be picked up by all the browsers on your system. Sounds good, except that the Firefox version is actually a standard Firefox XPI extension and the two will conflict — you actually won’t be able to install the XPI unless you first disable the plugin via the Tools > Add-ons > Plugins menu option. ...

And furthermore, Peachtree sucks. Last weekend I battled this error thrown by the Peachtree 2008 installer and this weekend I had the great pleasure of upgrading to Peachtree 2010 and being greeted by the very same error. The fix in both cases? Simply copy the contents of the CD to the local harddisk (a network share works just as well) and then run setup.exe from there. Don’t be fooled by the suggested “solutions” from Microsoft or Installshield like I was. ...

sigh.

Del.icio.us (sorry, it’s just plain old “Delicious” now) 2.0 finally launched a few days ago and the response so far has been mixed. But now that the dust has settled some, it’s time to think about just how we got here and if it was really worth all the trouble. According to the official blog post, the new and improved Delicious brings us speed, usability, and oh so good looks among other features and it was a long time in the making. The Yahoo acquisition was announced on Dec 9, 2005 and the new site finally went live a little over two and a half years later on July 31, 2008. So why did it take them so long? ...

MySQL is generally an all-around kickass piece of software, and like any good open source application, there are a host of tools you can use to squeeze every last drop of goodness out of it. Nearly all of them, however, are geared towards the operational DBA, leaving the wayward developer out in the cold.

Indians are everywhere in the software world — from engineers to CEO’s — but they all share one thing in common: the products they’ve helped build are all for companies based outside of India and for the most part in the US. I had this very conversation with one of our developers in Chennai on my last trip to India. He’s also spent time abroad, in the UK, but had not noticed it until I pointed it out to him. My guess is that there’s just no domestic market for many of the products being developed abroad. Especially with regards to the Internet, with access at home out of reach for most people, it’s not hard to see why most entrepreneurs might end up in California instead of Bangalore. ...

I still intend to finish the series of posts I started earlier, but this quote pretty much sums it up: In this regard management is also to blame, especially when it comes to dysfunctional schedules, wrong incentives, poor hiring, and demoralizing policies.

On Thursday, Amazon announced SimpleDB, “a web service for running queries on structured data in real time.” As many others have noted this more or less completes the cloud computing stack that Amazon has been steadily building, ever since they launched the Simple Storage Service (S3), early last year. Where their earlier releases (S3, Elastic Compute Cloud [EC2], Flexible Payments, Mechanical Turk) commoditized much of the infrastructure required for building scalable applications, SimpleDB (SDB) and the earlier Simple Queue Service (SQS) are bringing cutting edge technologies and design patterns to the masses. First they made it cheap and easy to have a cluster; now they’ve made it cheap and easy to use a cluster! Amazing. ...