Dr. Dobb's Journal September 1998
My father was once working on his car, hood up and hands greasy, when a goofy-looking guy walked up, leaned over dad's shoulder, and asked, "What's she got in 'er, an engine or a motor?"
To some people, the technical terms that you and I live by are meaningless tokens to be inserted into any conversational slot where they seem to fit.
Any day now I expect to be hunched over my Powerbook, Internet link up and eyes bleary, when some goofy-looking guy walks up, leans over my shoulder, and asks, "What's she got in 'er, a platform or a portal?" Grumble, grumble.
It's that time of the month again.
Column deadline time.
I'm no fun to be around when this is going on. I always get irritable and emotional and I can't keep my mind on one thing very long. That's why this month I'm talking about:
And I will probably also mention in passing the Y2K crisis, the D10K crisis, the Euro crisis, the solar storm crisis, and the latest redesign of my web site. It's got both a platform and a portal.
I slipped out of Web Design and Development '98 (Web98) at Moscone Center in San Francisco for an afternoon at the Lilith Fair down Highway 101 at the Shoreline Amphitheater. At about the same time, the Women in Technology Conference was going on at the San Jose Convention Center. I missed that show, but understand it had a feature in common with Lilith -- no men's bathrooms. Much as I enjoyed seeing Natalie Merchant in person and much as I would have enjoyed seeing Esther Dyson ditto, I must say I was relieved to get back to Web98, where Microsoft and Netscape were hawking the next versions of their browsers, the show floor was crowded, and the sessions I sampled were well and enthusiastically attended.
Most of the expected players were there: Macromedia, Symantec, InfoSeek, Microsoft, Lotus, et al. There was a truly fresh keynote hosted by Eric Paulos of Survival Research Labs that looked at work (artwork, that is) that deliberately blurs the line between cyberspace and physical reality. At one point, audience members were invited to come to the podium and click a button on a screen, with the understanding that this would cause a gun to be fired in some unspecified remote location. One company that did not appear on the exhibitor list managed to get their product into my hands during the show, and I took some time to look it over somewhat carefully.
The product is an integrated development environment for Perl. Perl Builder from Solutionsoft (http://www.solutionsoft.com/) of Sunnyvale, California, is the first IDE for Perl, and its developers hope it will attract new recruits to the Perl camp. They also hope that old hands will find that it fits like a glove.
Hmm. Maybe, but -- well, let me tell you about the product. It's written native for Win32. It comes with a CGI Wizard that will automatically generate code for processing forms, user-input validation, and sending e-mail messages. The editor color codes keywords and has an integrated debugger with breakpoints and single-stepping. And the coolest thing is that it simulates CGI behavior so that you can test CGI scripts on the desktop rather than online. Does Perl Builder offer anything for newbies? Sure it does: It makes it easier to produce CGI scripts without coding or without much coding, it helps (a little) in understanding Perl syntax, and the offline testing of CGI scripts could be a real time saver.
I've seen concerns raised about newbies using the product, generally along these lines: Managers had better not buy Perl Builder for rank amateurs and think that it will turn them into web-site managers. Okay, I'll buy that, and I'll agree that you definitely don't want to turn your web site over to someone who doesn't know what's what. But there's a difference between knowing the pitfalls of web-site management and being a Perl maven. There are people who are willing and able to master the former and who don't want to give up the time required for the latter. For them, Perl Builder ought to be useful. It's not a matter of casting Perl before swine.
What Perl Builder offers to Perl experts is more problematic. First, it's not free. Solutionsoft wouldn't be in business long if it were, but it is addressing a market -- Perl users -- who are used to free code. Perl Builder will have to sell them on its benefits before they'll fork over $149, which is, let's see, an infinite percentage increase in the Perl-scripting budget for many.
But if it actually makes Perl scripting significantly easier, maybe that's not a bad price.
Does it? Do you need a visual tool for a language you're only using to write UI-less CGI scripts? Most CGI scripts are not all that difficult, and if the tool gets in your way, as Perl Builder sometimes does with many gratuitous comments and with assumptions about the user environment that may not be valid, you may decide to chuck it. If you resist that urge, you may find that the integrated editor and debugger and the ability to test scripts on the desktop make it worth the money and the minor annoyances.
Minor, say, compared to the Y2K crisis, or the D10K crisis. D10K crisis? you ask. Well, the Dow Jones Industrial Average keeps edging closer to that 10,000 mark. When it hits it, an unknown percentage of financial programs that shortsightedly allocated four digits to the DJ average, will perform in unknown ways. Fun stuff.
I've seen Usenet referred to as the unappreciated trove of the Internet. That's fair, but on the other hand, we all know that there's a good reason why it's unappreciated.
If you're looking for a community of individuals who share your interest in some subject and are willing to share their knowledge of same, Usenet is your meat. But if you're looking for a quick answer to a question, you soon learn that the aforementioned treasure is of the buried variety.
Eric Hahn hopes to help unearth Usenet's buried treasures, or at least to help some people who hope to do that. Hahn was recently Netscape's CTO, and before that, the founder of a startup, Collabra, that Netscape bought. He's back in startup mode, or more precisely, in the mode of a startup starter -- not a new company category exactly, but a currently popular one with former company execs who think that they owe it to society to spread their vast wisdom as widely as possible. Or as widely as profitable, anyway.
Hahn's new company, Inventures Group, based in Palo Alto, California (but do we care where companies are physically located any more?), helps startups get funding and advice. His first fundee and advisee is Supernews, which plans to repackage Usenet newsgroups. That turf is already occupied by DejaNews (http://www.dejanews.com/), but both DejaNews and Supernews are planning to recast Usenet access more along the lines of a portal, for those folks whose net-experience expectations have been trained by Yahoo and Netcenter. Hot topics, what's new, "channels." You know. The portable computer user interface is the LCD (liquid-crystal display). The Internet user interface is also the LCD (lowest-common denominator).
Recent developments on three different technological fronts promise to reinvent books and book publishing.
First, new printing and binding technologies from Xerox and IBM are about to make publishing-on-demand a reality. You order the book and they print it for you. I'll have the Wit and Wisdom of Sören Kierkegaard, and could I have that with a red cover, please? The first books will be out this year.
The IBM InfoPrint 4000 prints black-and-white pages, the InfoColor 70 prints four-color covers, and another machine binds the pages and covers into finished paperbacks. The whole system is capable of printing and binding a book in a minute and of cranking out a million books a year, yet doing them strictly to order.
Although the cost involved in the printing and binding is not anywhere near competitive with existing batch printing and binding technology, perhaps $5 per book compared to $1 per book, the savings in wasted books and inventory storage are expected to make up the difference. But the real benefit is that books that would otherwise never get printed are now economical to print. New books that publishers currently wouldn't touch, and old books now out of print. "Out of print" will cease to be a meaningful concept. This is great for people interested in old, obscure books (or at least old, obscure books that someone has in digital form), but it will also mean that book contracts will have to be rethought. I have two books that I've written that are out of print, the rights have reverted to me, and I'm negotiating with publishers for a second edition of one of them. What will that contract say about "out of print," I wonder?
That's the first development. Second, "electronic books" coming to market this year promise to make printing of books obsolete, at least for some segment of the market.
Past attempts to create an electronic book were basically notebook computers that displayed book pages on a screen, the books themselves were stored on cartridges or disks.
Two new companies are tweaking with that idea by streamlining the device and tying in the Internet. You buy this book-like device that has a flat-panel display and you also get a dedicated connection to a bookstore site, where you can buy and download books to read on the device.
The companies are NuvoMedia with its RocketBook and SoftBook with its, er, SoftBook. Book publishers are signing on. This time, it could be real.
That's two developments.
Third, for those who still like paper but just wish it were smarter, you're in luck. Yes, even that technology seems to be coming together, although it's not quite as far along as books-on-demand and electronic books. It has, however, just come out of the lab and into the market.
E Ink (http://www.electronic-ink.com/) has come up with a product that is thin, reflective, flat, and flexible -- like paper -- but that is, in fact, a display screen. It's based on technology that E Ink's principals developed while they were undergraduates at MIT, inspired by Joe Jacobson, an assistant professor at MIT's Media Lab. It could find application in books, newspapers, and cereal boxes.
The idea, as Eugene Kim pointed out in a June 1997 DDJ "News & Views" item, is that you have a book with reprogrammable pages. You read it just like a real book, but when you're done with it, you download a new book to the pages. Well, that's one idea, anyway. Currently, the technology isn't at the stage where they can bind a bunch of these pages together into a book. They're more at the one-page demo stage.
The E Ink page has millions of dot-sized microcapsules containing colored ink and white paint particles. There's a background substrate that carries a grid of electrical charge, and the charge attracts or repels the white chips, so you see either the white (paper) or ink (print) on the page. So far they've got J.C. Penny interested in the technology for in-store signs carrying prices. The Penny's people are thinking automatically updated, nationally synchronized price lists.
It's good that they're not trying to synchronize internationally, because the Europeans are having trouble getting their act together by the deadline for conversion to one currency, the Euro. One example: Your computer can't display the Euro symbol, which is okay, because there is no ASCII code assigned to the symbol yet. Electronically, it doesn't exist yet. I dunno about you, but I'm keeping my millions in dollars for now.
"Millions of OS/2 users are bitterly disappointed at IBM's failure to promote and improve the OS/2 platform as an alternative to Microsoft Windows," Ralph Nader and James Love wrote to IBM chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner in June.
Nader and Love said they are surprised that IBM would not sell an Aptiva with IBM's own operating system installed, and that the only choice for a user who wants OS/2 on an Aptiva is to buy the machine with Windows 95 installed, buy OS/2 shrinkwrapped, install OS/2 themselves, and return Win95 for a refund. The refund, they discovered to their surprise, is $0.
Ralph is often surprised by things that the more jaded among us take for granted. That's part of his charm, and part of his effectiveness. Ralph (and Love, who is with Nader's Consumer Project on Technology) suggest that IBM release the source. How this addresses the concerns of the bitter millions is not immediately clear, but you can see the logic: If you're not gonna play with that shiny toy, can I have it? As of press date, Gerstner had not responded.
You've heard about The Pixel Company's cute trick called MySpace? It's a control bar, like the Windows taskbar, with TV-like channel buttons from which apps can be launched or a web site can be linked to. The trick is that it exists outside Windows, in a couple of senses. First, the bar resides in the overscan area, in the 25 or so pixels below where the Windows taskbar typically sits, in unclaimed screen space. Second, MySpace loads before Windows and talks directly to the VGA driver. So it is really outside Windows.
The Pixel Company (http://www.thepixelcompany.com/) is leasing space on the bar. Amazon.com, ABC News, ESPN, and Nasdaq have already signed on, and Packard Bell and NEC expect to be selling MySpace-equipped machines this year.
The next customer for The Pixel Company may be OS vendors. Can you picture a "Switch to Unix" button just below your Windows taskbar? No word yet on how Microsoft will react, but you know they will. But if your Internet connection, your pager, and your telephone all space out together in the next couple of years, don't automatically assume it's Microsoft's doing. It could be the latest cycle of solar storms that are expected to peak in 2001, knocking out communication satellites right and left.
Anyway, we could use a little offline time, right?
DDJ