I attended a talk given by Dave Nielsen entitled “Marketing to Web 2.0 Developers” at the Marketing SIG of SD Forum. I spoke to another CEO of a widget making startup, so the crowd was interested in the topic. But the talk was more a disconnect with what the crowd was expecting.

Dave Nielsen is best known as the author of PayPal Hacks, a great book if you want to use any of PayPal’s more advanced features on your site. The info in his talk was at too high a level for most people. That CEO that I mentioned above left the talk early. It just did not give him the practical info that he wanted. The talk was spent mainly defining terms. Ironically, the speaker did not even mention Web 2.0 until the last 10-15 minutes of the talk. Mostly it was ancient history. In Nielsen’s defense, ancient history for the Internet is last year, and his audience was a mix of technical and non-technical people.

The biggest issue that I had with his talk was his definition of “developer”. Nielsen defined developer very broadly as anyone who uses an interface to customize something. Our biggest disagreement is that he seemed to use “developer” interchangeably with “early adopters”. By this definition, the first users of YouTube to upload and share videos with their friends were developers because they “created” their own YouTube page with the YouTube interface and spread the gospel of YouTube to their less technically sophisticated friends.

In my point of view, such early adopters are your first customers who are using the product that your engineers designed in the way that it was designed to be used. They are customizing the product to their wants into something that has not been produced before, but they are not developers. I would think that a better word than developer might be content creator since that is what these customers are really producing that is unique.

On the other hand, I do believe that a person that creates a new widget or app for Facebook is a similar site is a developer. While they are using an interface developed by, for example, Facebook engineers for third parties to develop apps on Facebook, these new apps really are like new programs being built in the “Facebook programming language and interface.”

Teh Geogad web site will be going through a transition as new features are added in the next few weeks.  In the meantime, I am having the fun of getting the new site set up.

It never fails to amaze me how stupid computers are.  I am really not worried about them taking over any time soon.  Just the difficulty involved in getting a computer to find a few files assures me that humanity does not have much to worry about any time soon.

I would love to get some comments from some of those lucky people who are getting ready for Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  As I program, I think, “I wish that I were there.”

If you are there, send me some photos and go ahead and rub it in. 

Technorati tags: New Orleans, Mardi Gras, programming

Ah, the joy of learning a new computer program.  I am not sure what is more fun, knowing that the software package should be able to do something but not knowing where to find this function and/or keystrokes or wasting several hours trying to get the software package to do something that is does not seemed to be programmed to do.

Today was a day for both of these scenarios.  It makes me think of the best definition of computer programming that I ever heard.  The IEEE magazine definition for computer programming is “…a pastime akin to repeatedly banging your head against a wall, but not as enjoyable.”

I spent several hours trying to figure out how to mask areas of an movie in Flash.  I spent a good deal of time to program quasi-masks using graphics that are the same color as the background to cover the movie.  Over time, the quasi-masks shrink and fade out.  It turns out what I did manually can be done automatically with built-in timeline transitions functions.  I am not bummed out at finding this function after I came up with my own fix because I prefer my transitions.  But it would have been nice to know that they were there.

The real frustration was in my attempt to create real masks that faded away over time.  There may be ways to do this using just the timeline and using just Actionscript methods.  But I was not able to get the timeline methods to work.  According to the book, Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity, the key may be converting the masks to bitmaps using the Actionscript code:

mask_movieclip.cacheAsBitmap = true;

Still working on this.  More fun ahead.  Hold on tight!

Technorati tags: Flash, Flash masks, programming, learning new software, fades

Let me start out by saying how wonderful it is to find and use all of this opensource software written in PHP. To all of the developers who have worked on this in your spare time, I say a very sincere “Thank you.”

Now, to the one point about open source PHP software that drives me crazy, and I am not sure why it is this way or how to fix it. I have downloaded and worked with three different PHP open source software packages so far. All three of these packages send password data using unsecured HTTP connections. I am sure that PHP can use secured HTTPS connection from what I read on the web. But for reasons that I don’t get, these secured connections are not used.

Coming from a Java background, this security hole blows my mind. I can easily see how I might want to check my software as I am traveling. When I travel, I tend to use wireless connections in public libraries or coffee shops. I was burned once when I checked my email while traveling this way. Someone in a coffee shop was packet sniffing and got my password when I logged in. My only defense in this situation was that my previous ISP has not set the email login using SSL, and I had never noticed before. I had just made the assumption that an IPS would set secured pages, like login pages, to use HTTPS by default. After that, I switch ISPs to one that has a better grasp on security.

But what to do about these PHP open source packages? I was comparing how to set up socket connections in PHP and in Java. Java takes care of most of the underlying connection code making it easy and very seamless to the programmer. PHP seems to be not as advanced in this area. With PHP the programmer has to know much of the details of his system.

I will keep working on securing my site. But I am still at a loss to understand why this is not done automatically with these open source programs.

open+source php java software ssl security programming