Dear Dave,

I hope you might catch this post before I head over to Web 2 Expo next week in San Fran. Would love to buy you a beer and shoot the breeze about just about anything you want (I’m a big fan by the way in case you haven’t guessed by now).

No big deal, no pack drill, just a few beers. no offence taken if I never hear from you, but you can catch me at Joe at joedrumgoole.com if you fancy the idea of teaching a new guy some old dog tricks.

yours sincerely,

Joe

A bully in a playground approaches three kids. He hits the first child, who does nothing. He then hits the second child who runs away crying. He then hits the third child who hits him back.

Question : Which child won’t get hit tomorrow?

I joined the executive board of the Irish Software Association yesterday. Why? Because I think it is a worthwhile effort to devote some of my time to making the ISA more relevant to the Irish Software startup community.

Historically the ISA has done a very bad job of engaging with young startups, and I hope to improve that situation over the next few months, but I need your help.

I have the following two things on my agenda,

• Reducing/eliminating the fee for all startup companies younger than 3 years
• Getting information out using a better mechanism than email and and RSS free websites

What else are people looking for?

First post!

There is a poll here, but its not rendering in Google Reader at the moment.

<a href=”http://www.polldaddy.com” >surveys</a> – <a href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/465590/” >Take Our Poll</a>

For Tom.

Ronan Geraghty wrote a long and informative email to my previous rant (since removed, I wasn’t comfortable with it) about Microsoft. I repost here with his permission.

Developers have consistently written applications which require excessive user rights and Windows privileges meaning that enterprises have had to prioritise ease of deployment over security. As you probably know one of the major goals of Vista was improved security, and one of the design goals of UAC is to prevent installations being run without the user’s knowledge, requiring explicit consent for writing to protected locations. As you know, %ProgramFiles% is a protected location and is a good example (along with say writing to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software) where applications that do not separate user and admin functionality run into problems.

 

Bearing all this in mind, the aim of virtualization is to improve compat for _legacy_ apps running as standard user on Vista.

Taking your main point:

‘Well not anymore, nope with UAC (User Access Control) turned on, config files written under the C:\Program Files directory get virtualized. i.e. This is not a normal file system any more, its some weird, hacked up, broken, not the file system you were brought up on. So edits with notepad don’t work, file saves don’t work right and uninstalls and upgrades just go straight to hell in a hand basket.’

The rule is that if an app hasn’t requested explicit permission to write to a protected location then virtualization kicks in. Below is an example of this on my machine. Note the “Compatibility Files� button on the explorer bar. The reason for this is that when it’s run this particular application attempts to write a log file to %ProgramFiles%. Since that’s a protected location if the app is run as a standard user the file is virtualized, hence the compatibility files button shows up in explorer. From that point on app reads will be from the virtualized folder, so rather than attempting to edit e.g. the log file or config file directly you should click this button and it will take you to the location where you can use e.g. Notepad to edit your virtualized files. In my case for example editing my virtualized sim.cfg file with Notepad allowed me to hide/show a toolbar in the application.

Bear in mind that Virtualization is for legacy applications : new applications ideally should strive not to use Virtualization i.e. not cause files to be written to the virtualized store. Say you have an app which attempts to save user preferences such as window co-ordinates in your config file to %ProgramFiles%. The first time this is run by a standard user the file will be virtualized for that user. Subsequent updates to the config which are pushed out by e.g. SMS will be picked up by first-time users but not by those users which have already used the app and been virtualized. Also, on uinstall, the virtualized files won’t be uinstalled.

To reiterate, Virtualization is there to enable legacy apps, however the long term approach should be to fix the app to take UAC/least privilege into account, and actually request permission to write to the protected locations if that’s required. In fact if user settings are separated out then there may be no need for the app to write to the protected location at all.

A quick solution for your existing app is to right click it and select Run as Administrator. Or alternatively users can apply a compatability fix to indicate that the application requires administrative privileges.

I see that the Auctomatic boys got bought by Communicate.Com. TechCrunch says they got $5m but Damien disagrees.

I’m happy for the lads that kicked off Auctomatic and my congratulations go out to them, but this was not an Irish company, this was an Irish idea taken to America for execution. Y-Combinator has a proven model and an excellent collection of catchers mitts for good ideas. We cannot hope to emulate that kind of investment environment in a country of 4m.

Anybody can choose to take their ideas to America and take their shot, I guarantee you any of the Paddys Valley companies would triple their chances of success by moving to San Francisco.

I and (and I suspect the others on Paddy’s Valley) have chosen to be successful here in Ireland and despite the difficulties I predict several of us will succeed.

This may also be unpopular but I think it should be said, the 2-3m USD valuation is hardly what I would call a spectacular world beating exit for a Valley company. It was a successful technology sale rather than the sale of a hugely successful company.

We are looking for a bunch of willing participants in a PutPlace scalability test. You will need to install the PutPlace client and login at the the appropriate time  and upload a biggish chunk of data. The idea is that we slowly build up a posse of users over a day or so and see how our (small) test grid responds. This will indicate the performance limitations on the larger PutPlace grid.

Drop me a comment to this post or email me Joe dot Drumgoole at PutPlace dot com.

We have a real problem celebrating our own success so although I missed this earlier on I wanted to draw attention to Headway Software who won a Jolt Award recently. I had the pleasure of working for a while with headway’s founder Chris Chedgey just after leaving college. He has always had a deep and original vision about how software should be designed and developed and much of that vision has been poured into Structure 101, Headway’s main product.

Structure 101 gives you a global, graphical view of your software allowing you to hold in clear sight both a macro and a micro view of the structure and detail of your (or others) development projects.

Its a great tool and is now available for free on Open Source Projects.

Ace, king, check it out!

Aehso drew my attention to this article in Harpers entitled “The Next Bubble : Priming the markets for tomorrows big crash”.  Ireland is a FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) economy too.

Couple this with the hilarious and informative tutorial on the subprime crisis on tax123.ie and you are ready for your economics degree.