Remember the Milk is just such an application. Its a task list manager – an application that almost all of us have used at some time or another. Make a list, check off the tasks as you complete them, rinse and repeat. Simple… and RTM can be used in exactly this way. But for those desiring more, there’s plenty of horsepower under the hood here. Do you need to prioritize? Just select some tasks and press 1, 2 or 3. Do you want to keep track of a due date? Just select a task and enter “2 weeks from Friday” in its “Due” field. Do you want to establish tags for searching? No problem. Recurring tasks? Enter “20th of each month” into the “Repeat” field. Do you need reminders sent to your cell phone? Suffice it to say this is a task list on steriods.

But oh so simple and accessible. The thing I like the most is the natural language approach to the setting of due dates and establishing repetition. This is a sweet bit of code. In my pipeline integrity application “ProActive”, establishing these data items is much less convenient — i.e. a cumbersome calendar control or, for repetition, a combination or 3 or more controls. Take a lesson, Ron, sheesh.

RTM offers a free version to get you started. However, the “Pro” version is only $25 a year. Well worth the price if just to insure that these guys keep churning out the great software.

But anyway, even though FOWA is short for “Future of Web Apps” (and although there was some mention of that here and there) this was a show about software development; how to do it better, how to get paid, what you are doing right, where you are going wrong, and just what the hell were you thinking???? This was just what I needed personally. Reminders to step back and rethink the process, measure and improve. Plus a good kick in the pants there at the end courtesy of Gary Vaynerchuk.

I really enjoyed Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky. Both were predictably great. This is the first time I’ve heard either of them speak, though I knew who Jason Fried was and I’ve been a customer of Joel Spolsky’s CityDesk and FogBugz for years. Both had great ideas for improving software development and, in fact, business processes in general for that matter. Say Joel, that “General Motors” style of organizing the developer space — that bears a striking resemblance to what I endure daily. Gotta make some changes there.

Jason, Joel and Gary were the highlights of the show for me. I enjoyed the Virgin guy’s “People are the new brand” idea. But I can’t glean anything actionable from it. (Except that I opened a FaceBook account for the first time today so maybe something stuck.)  A lot of people seemed to be very impressed with the Atlas demo by the guy from Cappuccino. To me this was a demo just like a lot I’ve seen in the past that appear to show something akin to drag and drop programming. These products demo nicely, but get them outside the confines of a demo and you start to see the drastic limitations. Then the shine comes off the apple so to speak. So color me skeptical — and I definitely do NOT think software development just changed very much. That comment by Ryan Carson was just a little over the top, in my view. But it was very good theater. And maybe I’m wrong about Atlas. Time will tell, I suppose.

I also enjoyed the demo of Ubiquity which is an wonderful FireFox plugin that definitely breaks new ground. I actually installed it a few months ago and had a play with it. It is definitely impressive. If you use FireFox you most certainly need to check this puppy out.

I wish I was better at networking and going up to strangers and introducing myself.  There was no shortage of interesting looking people to talk to. And after one of these shows I always feel a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t interact with the people more. Another one of those personal things to work on, I guess…

One of the benefits of being a minor mover and shaker in the early days of personal computers is that I got to personally meet a number of people now considered legends. My path crossed with Bill Gates of Microsoft fame a number of times. I had a product named “Show Partner“, a graphical presentation program for MSDOS which was like the eccentric (and possibly senile) grandfather to modern programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint. But it was a compelling enough application in those days to win a bundle deal with the Microsoft Mouse.

In fact, the Brightbill-Roberts business in those days was chiefly centered around turning these Mouse Show Partner users into full-on Show Partner F/X users at $300 a pop. I think it was around 1986 or so when IBM attempted to increase its dominance of the pc market by introducing its PS/2 line of computers. The PS/2 line had a number of enhancements not the least of which was drastically better graphics capability. As you might imagine given the sort of program I was authoring, this was a very big deal for me. But, try as we might, we could not get IBM to disclose the technical details to us for its new computers. We were a direct competitor to one of their own products — Storyboard. And perhaps that coupled with our small size made us beneath consideration in IBM’s eyes.

Enter Microsoft. They were working away on making sure everything in the mouse box would work with the new PS/2 line. Without disclosure, the update to Show Partner was going to be coming in well after the PS/2′s release. So began my short but (I’d like to think) illustrious career at Microsoft. I resigned from my own company and hired on at Microsoft after the attorneys had reviewed everything. I lived out of the Residence Inn in Redmond for 3 months, flying back to Syracuse every once in awhile when circumstances dictated I had to be there. And I feverishly worked on adding support for the additional “VGA” graphics modes of the PS/2.

Long story short… a fully updated Show Partner shipped with the new Microsoft Mouse on the same day the first PS/2 computer shipped. IBM’s own Storyboard update did not ship for another month after that… the schmucks. Ah, yes. Glory days.

So during this period there were 5 buildings on the Microsoft campus with, I think, 2 or 3 more under construction. I remember attending a full Microsoft company meeting in a high school gymnasium (yes, the entire company fit inside at the time) where I was referred to as “half an employee” by Bill in his speech… as in “and the hardware department has now grown to 9 and a half employees (heh heh)”; an inside joke about my coming to work there as an end-around IBM’s stonewalling.

I met with Bill Gates several times while working there and a few times after leaving the company, returning to my own fledgling firm. It must be tough being Bill – he is invariably going to be the smartest guy in any room he walks into. Not to mention the richest. Its going to be difficult for anyone to relate to him as a peer in any given situation. Certainly I did not consider myself to be his peer in programming, business or anything else. Ha! Except maybe in poker. I think Steve Brightbill actually came out on top in a poker game that included Bill at a trade show in San Diego one year. Steve was extremely proud of that as I recall.

Bill Gates also had some behaviors that I now associate with mild autism or Aspergers syndrome. The rocking and repetitive movements while concentrating, for example. These behaviors always seem to come part and parcel with super-extraordinary intelligence, at least among those few geniuses I’ve had the good fortune to meet. On the other hand, Bill was reasonably extroverted and gregarious. And he is and was a fine public speaker. Witness his recent stunt of releasing a swarm of mosquitos into an auditorium as part of his TED speech on malaria. These traits are very un-Aspergers like. So I definitely consider Bill Gates to be one of a kind — all the good stuff and none of the downside.

In the final days of Brightbill-Roberts & Co., as things were starting to come unglued, I went back to the Redmond campus on my return from Seoul where I had been helping a company translate HyperPAD into Korean Hangul. I stopped off to interview for the post of managing the multimedia department there. But as I talked with the programmers there I realized I really had no insight into the stuff they were working on. Microsoft Windows was making my existing programming skills obsolete and I didn’t know a filter graph from a hole in the ground. But the trip was not at all a waste of time as I got to pay a final visit to all the friends I had made at Microsoft over the years. I have many fond memories of my time there.

FreshBooks provides an api (application programming interface) for manipulating the functions of the service from another program. You could, for example, write an application for your PocketPC-based cell phone that would allow you to enter an order from a customer while at his location and have FreshBooks deliver the invoice instantly via email. Or you could review your client’s payment history, log time against a project, add travel expense, etc. If you were proprietor of Accounting software, you could offer a link to FreshBooks as a replacement or alternative for printing invoices and envelopes.

My wrapper classes allow a C# programmer to easily access the functionality of the FreshBooks.com web site. The first few classes were started by Donald Halloran and I later picked them up and extended them to cover the entire api. I also created a test routine that exercised a significant portion of the methodology. The project is being released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which means it is free software that can be used for any purpose, free or commercial. Derivitive works, such as a repackaging of the library or expanded the library to include additional functions, must also be distributed under the Lesser GPL.

And let me give a shout-out to the team at FreshBooks.com. They have scarily reposonsive customer service and the developers are fully engaged and communicating. I admire them a great deal and would like to reshape my own development team along similar lines.

Wicked Cool PHP

Books on programming are not typically the most enjoyable things to read. However, I can’t help but be very entertained by . I bought this book in combination with one of those giant programming reference books for PHP. But I started reading this one first because I was intrigued by the title.  Now at the end of this book I find that I am getting quite proficient with the PHP language and have not felt the need to even crack open the giant reference. I think I will just put it up on the shelf for future reference. Meanwhile I can see the my copy of Wicked Cool is already dog-eared and showing some wear.

Now for the disclaimer – I am a seasoned programmer and master of many programming languages old and new. So what suffices for me may be different than what might suffice for, as an example, a script kiddie trying to patch a php-based web site.

But even in that scenario, I think the kid could glean some worthwhile insight into the language, its syntax, and how to use it all in the real world. So I think I will add this to BitLizard’s bizarre Bazaar for the consideration of any programmers who find their way here.

A great way to see what the program can do is to check out the tutorials on the product site. Or there’s some also some great stuff on the fan site gimp-tutorials.net.

So I saved myself and my company $700 today and got the job done in fine style. Can’t beat them apples!

1. Are you frustrated with how long feature-bloated Microsoft Word takes to even start executing? You are waiting and waiting for a host of features to load, most of which you will never in your lifetime ever use. The better choice is the free, leaner and meaner OpenOffice software. The newest version is fully compatible with all the Microsoft Office file formats — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. — and has all the bells and whistles you could want. Even though MS Office was provisioned on my computer at work I use OpenOffice exclusively for my everyday office document needs.

2. The best operating system for the casual home user is not Windows. My recent experience with Ubuntu Linux and Linpus on the Acer Aspire One netbook computer has convinced me that most non-technical users would be far better served by these great Linux bundles. Both distros include OpenOffice and the Evolution email client (similar in functionality to Outlook). The operating system loads quickly, maintains itself with automatic updates and is rock solid. And I don’t get many “Hey Dad!” requests for technical support, unlike the never ending cries from the Windows users.

3. With my day job all about writing Windows software, when I wanted to try out Linux to see what all the excitement was about I decided to go “virtual”. Virtual Machine technology is really quite old – we used it in the 70′s on IBM’s big iron – but has now become popular on the personal computer. Basically VM software allows you to create a virtual computer that runs in a window on your physical computer. So though my laptop runs Windows Vista, I created a virtual machine that boots Ubuntu. VM software can be a little expensive but I decided that I would try out the free VirtualBox software which is a project originated by Sun Microsystems. While it took me several hours of googling and fiddling, I managed to get a decent little virtual machine running Ubuntu on my laptop. Now, I wouldn’t say that a non-technical person could succeed in doing the same thing, but the fact that this can all be accomplished with free software is mind boggling. This is fabulous technology! Today I use my Ubuntu virtual machine to run a few network services that are consumed by the Windows side of my computer. It all works flawlessly.

4. I don’t really know whyI run WinAmp instead of Windows Media Player. But the telling fact is that whenever I receive a new computer, within 3 months I have downloaded and am running WinAmp. I think my usual motivation is to view some media in a format that WinAmp supports and WMP does not. But even if that was not the case, WinAmp is just a better user experience and I much prefer the design.

5. For web browsing and email, I like the offerings from Mozilla. Thunderbird (with the Sunbird add-on) let me retire Microsoft Outlook at last, while Firefox is a great alternative to Internet Explorer. Having said that, I find myself using Google’s Chrome browser most of the time now; reverting to Firefox only when Chrome cannot render a site properly. All of these wonderful programs are free. But Thunderbird remains a cornerstone application on my laptop.

6. And I would certainly be remiss if I didn’t mention the free software with which Iam creating this missive. The WordPress authoring software is a tremendous collection of free technologies for creating and publishing web sites. Even with my minimal php skills I was able to get this blog site up and running in just a few hours. And the depth of the support by the community of programmers for this platform is very impressive. This web site incorporates nearly a dozen pieces of contributed technologies in the form of plug-ins and widgets; all obtained free. It is a great credit to all those involved and I am sure its best days are yet to come.

7. Lastly, I love the functionality of desktop side bars. While Windows Vista and Google both have their good points, my favorite package for this technology is Yahoo! Widgets. It looks good and the functionality is a cut above, in my opinion.

Free software has really come of age. These packages are as good and often better than their non-free counterparts and deserve your consideration. Merry Christmas!!

Well, since I run Ubuntu Linux in a VirtualBox on my laptop, my first thought was to run the Linux vpnc client. And I got this working – nearly. I got it to connect but then, within 5 minutes or so, it would suddenly stop communicating. The client thought it still had  a connection but nobody was home on the other side.  <heavy sigh> Rather than beat my brains out trying to find a solution to that, I went back to Windows land to search for a third-party solution.

I found my solution in the NCP Secure Entry Client, a $144 software package. Since I didn’t have much of an idea of how the Cisco PIX at the other end was configured, it took me an hour of hit and miss before I finally got my first connection. But I can report that the software is golden and the connection is rock-solid — which it should be since this is the sort of software that you typically get for free, or a least at a hidden cost. There are a multitude of supported options in this software and you definately need to be a techno-geek (or conscript one) to get it configured. But with Windows Vista x64 its really the only option.

Oh, and I will not ever again willingly buy another product from Cisco or Linksys (now a Cisco company) if a customer-friendly competitor’s product is available for the same task. I’ve learned my lesson.