Either You Succeed or Explain

It's time to explain (as opposed to succeed)

The links in my blogs are broken. You can read the front page, but navigating further into articles will probably fail with a 404 or some other error. I'm aware of this problem and I thank the readers who brought this to my attention. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for the TypePad technical team to solve this issue. 

If you're having trouble with my blog, I sincerely apologize the inconvenience and I hope this will be fixed soon. Your patience is appreciated.

In the mean while, I invite you to cheer up and have a laugh. Failure always reminds me of the FAIL blog. It's one of my favorites.

Don't you get it? The Apple laptops just got a docking station

Like many other Mac fanboys around the world I followed the introduction of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros this week. I also followed the reactions. Many people are complaining about the lack of firewire in the MacBook, the glossy screens and the list goes on. Yet, it seems that all major blogs are missing one crucial detail: Apple just introduced a docking station for its' new laptops.

The last time we've seen an Apple docking station, AFAIK, is the PowerBook Duo. Its would fold and slide into the Duo Dock. There were speculations that we will see an iMac like docking station. In this weeks' announcement we got a new player: the LED Cinema Display. It's not a docking station. Yet, it comes with one cable which easily connects to the laptop video, power and USB ports. It gives you external speakers, iSight camera and a USB hub. This makes it the only connection you will need. You arrive at your desk, put your laptop on the table, plug the 3 connectors and you're set. It's on one side, it's in one neat cable. It's a beauty.

You're probably saying - "that's not a docking station". And, you're right. It's not. I used to have a ThinkPad before I had a MacBook Pro. I had a docking station. It was very easy to connect and disconnect the laptop, but it had a major disadvantage: it was too low on the table so I couldn't comfortably use both monitors (you already have a second monitor so why not put it to good use). For that, you will need some elevation and you'll need some space to work under your laptop. Check out the snapshot of my setup. My laptop stand is custom built, BTW.

The new Apple docking philosophy is cool: arrange your own workspace the way you like it and dock your machine with one cable. It's comfortable yet flexible. It's such a small invention which makes a huge difference. It's truly remarkable. 

One final note - I suggest watching the video on the construction of the new MacBook. It's a cool method, but that's not why I recommend it. In the short video you'll see Jony Ive, SVP of Design talking about the MacBook. I don't remember the last time I've seen somebody who talks so passionately about a product. I was moved. I almost cried at the end :-). It's very emotional.

Sometimes I get it right

Back in March, I wrote an article titled "Microsoft plays nice on the web, heading for Eclipse?" which discussed the interest the Microsoft is showing in Eclipse. I predicted that we will see a Silverlight development tool based on Eclipse that will be cross platform.

Seems like I was right. A new tool was released this week called eclipse4sl which is exactly an Eclipse based Silverlight tool. It is not cross-platform yet, but it will be. There's also a proposal for a new Eclipse sub-project called SLDT - Silverlight Development Tools. It's all funded and driven by Microsoft itself.

Another interesting anecdote is that the new tool also brings a C# editor into Eclipse. It's not the first attempt at such a tool, but this time it is supported by Microsoft itself. Are we going to see a competitor to Visual Studio for .Net development rising here?   I don't think so. Visual Studio has a huge arsenal which will take years to replicate on the Eclipse side. Nevertheless, it's nice to have a choice. Especially when it's free.

Getting Ready to Launch

It's been a quite couple of weeks in my blog and it's been longer since the last time I wrote about my upcoming product. Before I get down to business let me just wish you a happy new year (that's according to the Jewish calendar).

In the last couple of weeks, I've been mostly busy with preparations for my beta launch. My product is now packaged and ready to ship. There are known issues, but no show-stoppers. I even have some basic license management capabilities, so I'm ready to rock. 

On the marketing front, I'm working on setting up a web site. Part of the reason for not exposing my product name is that I don't own the domain yet. I named my product when I started the development, although the specific domain was taken. At the past couple of weeks I made an effort to either acquire the domain or come up with a new name. 

After many hours of searching I decided that my original name will remain, even if I don't get the exact domain. Many great software companies and products don't have the domain which is exactly their name and that's just fine (BaseCamp at basecamphq.com, Omni at omnigroup.com to name a few). My attempts to buy my domain are not over and that's a topic which is post-worthy.

In the mean while, I'm working on setting up a web site. In order to minimize expenses, I'm doing the site myself. I decided to go for a Content Management System (CMS) rather than develop my site from scratch. I checked several popular CMS systems and found that Drupal feels more comfortable than other popular systems like Joomla and Plone. 

I decided to start working on Drupal using Linux, so I installed Ubuntu 8 on my MacBook Pro using VMWare Fusion. It took me about 10 minutes and just a few clicks to install. I was mostly busy doing some other work at that time. You've gotta love virtualization. 

Once my site will be ready I'll need to host it. My main concern is keeping up with traffic spikes. That's an advantage when using a platform like TypePad. My usual traffic is low, but when an article gets submitted to Reddit the traffic can really soar. TypePad can handle the load, but a single installation of Drupal may cave in. If you have any recommendations based on your experience, drop me a line.