Ogden  Nash : “People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.”

Ogden has obviously not had to call out a emergency plumber or glazer in Dublin recently….

It helps to know that Orlaith is Sean O’Sullivan’s sister. If he’s the big cheese (at Rococo) she’s the big chalk. Compare and contrast!

So instead of whining about it, I decided to scratch my itch. So here is a feed for Enterprise Ireland upcoming events scraped courtesy of feed43.com.

Add http://feed43.com/enterprise-ireland-events-2006.xml to your favourite feedreader. Service only guaranteed while they keep to a consistent format.

Joel Spolsky yet again seems to divine whats in my head and articulate it ten times better than I could, when talking about what programming language you should use for your development project.

When I started Secantus (now PutPlace.com) at the start of this year we had several candidates for development,

• C#/.NET
• J2EE
• PHP
• Ruby on Rails
• Python
• Perl

We had a few constraints and some previous knowledge that allowed us to make some rapid eliminations.

1. We wanted tight integration with the local file system (Windows, OS-X and Linux, and mobile phones to follow)
2. We wanted to produce a downloadable component that ran on the users local system
3. We wanted a good set of infrastructure libraries so we weren’t constantly reinventing the wheel
4. We wanted to make sure to choose a technology that wouldn’t have investment partners spitting the dummy

Tight integration ruled out Java due to its execreable I/O libraries. .NET fell at the OS-X hurdle. PHP is really only suitable for webside applications and even then its dire for writing daemons. Ruby on Rails was a contender, but its just a little to immature and still reeks of its UNIX/Linux heritage. Perl I like personally, but the OO support is pretty awful and the risk to a project while they have the engine out on blocks building the next version of the language was too great.

That left Python, Python! I hear you say? Well the language is nearly 15 years old, its got the sweetest syntax, great platform support (including Nokia phones), wonderful infrastructure libraries and a Rails like environment in Django.

We’ve been using it for 6 months now and are very happy with it. I expect to incur some recruitment costs in converting existing Java/.NET programmers to the language, but this is a small price to pay for the flexibility and portability that Python buys.

They’ve moved the date. Fantastic! BarCamp is now on on the 30th in Cork. I’ll talk a little about all the startups I’ve passed through in Ireland, including Generics, CR2, CapeClear, LeCayla and my own startup PutPlace.com, if I’m let!

See you all there…

What great organisation, everybody I meet there is helpful, responsive, they’ve been invaluable in getting my business started, especially the CORD grant.

But why does your website still not render properly in FireFox? Why is there no RSS feed for breaking news and events? Why is the Leadership 4 growth page still advertising places when you closed this course to applicants several days ago.

Why can’t I register to get email telling me about every possible event in the software sector that Enterprise Ireland has involvement (I have yet to find about any EI event directly from EI).

Don’t get me wrong, you do a great job, but these are small things that could make an entrepreneurs life so much easier!

John Keyes has come up with a sweet hack to a problem I’ve been seeing since we switched to gmail for domains. He uses the stylish plugin for FireFox to restyle the google fixed font to be courier. Without this hack any formatting (e.g. —+ style boxes so beloved by Trac) all get screwed up. Run over there and try it out.

If you use IE your SOL….

If you know any thing about Bruce Schneier or have ever had to struggle through “Applied Cryptography” then The Bruce Schneier Facts site should crack you up. A small taster,

• Bruce Schneier once killed a man using only linear cryptanalysis
• Bruce Schneier reads RFID cards with the knuckles of his clenched fist
• Alice and Bob got Eve pregnant together; the result was Bruce Schneier
• When Bruce Schneier decrypts the Da Vinci Code, the ending doesn’t suck

You need to vist the site and see the pictures to get the full value…

So now you have unbounded programmatic access to computing and storage resources via EC2 and S3. Anybody who has a moderate amount of programming skill (skilled in the art as the patent people say) and has access to a credit card can slap together their own grid in no time at all. More importantly you can resell a grid to a vertical market.

Now a whole plethora of companies have been trying to flog Open Source stacks to corporate America, and to my mind corporate America (and corporate everywhere else) is not ready to take these companies offerings on board for a number of reasons,

• Certification is no good without delta change detection. Your stack might be good the day it deploys, but is it good after 6 months of production tinkering?
• Most customers need some kind of customised stack, rather than an off the shelf offering, so configurations proliferate and the costs for both the vendor and the customer escalates
• None of these guys wants to play nice with the rest, so how do you integrate stacks from different vendors
• Isn’t Open Source supposed to be free as in beer 🙂

However the whole game changes if instead of offering an installable package you offer a managed EC2 image with all the good juice pre-canned and ready to go, and you manage the customers application deployment on top of that image and then cut a new precanned EC2 image with all the good stuff in one bundle. Tinker away all you want and deltas can easily be identified by comparing the production image with a clean install of the original.

Customisation becomes delta management with everything being a managed delta of a base kit and integration of different stacks can be easily tested because the base infrastructure is already deployed into an image ready for merging.

Expect to see lots of people offering layered services on EC2 fairly rapidly with simple Apache, MySQL and J2EE and ESB instances appearing in short order and more complex three tier and N-tier packages  following on rapidly. Also expect the monitoring and management vendors to offer layer packages that plug straight into these environments.

Can Google trump this?

I like it. Very slick, proper wysiwyg, support for categories, nice easy configuration to boot.