Inspirational Technology

Well, we’d like to think virtual appliances are only used for good, but it looks like there’s also a virtual appliance floating around that can be used to activate the corporate version of Windows Vista without paying for the licenses.

The MelindaGates hack uses a VMware image of a KMS server to activate — and keep activated — a pirated edition of Windows Vista Business. “Looks like Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0 is a big bust,” wrote a user identified as “clank” on the PirateBay Web site Friday.

I’m not much of a fan of the activation nonsense that Microsoft has been putting into their software, so it’s kind of interesting to see it defeated so easily. It looks like the use of a virtual machine may have been a necessity in this case as well. This current trend of tying software to hardware is kind of interesting when you consider that the hardware that’s being presented to the OS now is increasingly just software itself. I suspect we’re going to start seeing some lobbying for some way to allow software running in a virtual machine to gain more access to the physical hardware for the sake of licensing and “security”. If that happens then we’re really going to have a mess to deal with.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new release of Berkeley DB XML, I probably just wasn’t paying attention, but I did see Oracle has released Berkeley DB XML 2.3.8.

This release of Berkeley DB XML improves many aspects of query planning
and execution. Using indexed node storage, users will generally
experience significant speed increase. A new event-style layer allows
for tight coupling between Berkeley DB XML and other XML processing
code. This greatly enhances integration with programming languages and
XML parsing libraries by eliminating the need to create and then
re-parse XML content. The W3C XQuery 1.0 specification is nearing
completion and this release of Berkeley DB XML is compliant with the
current Proposed Recommendation.

Would you want to live on a ship? This has actually been around for a while, but I just came across this company called SeaCode that’s proposing to use Cruise ships to house software development teams off the coast of California. The teams would be made up of foreign workers and the idea is to bring cheap labor closer to the US to cut down on communication overhead. Since they sit off shore, they’re not subject to any US immigration laws. It’s a pretty odd idea and I wonder how many engineers would actually go for the idea of living on a ship. We may never know though, all the press on the web site is from 2005, but it is a kind of interesting idea.

Chris Tingom of Tornado Design has announced that Viddler, a new social video web site has launched. Chris gave a demo of Viddler at Phoenix BarCamp over the weekend and it looks really interesting. The ability to add tags and comments to particular points in a video is pretty cool as is the ability to send a link to a particular spot in the video. There’s been a lot of activity in this space lately, but Viddler looks like it might have enough interesting features to get it on the map.

Grid7 Venturecast #10 with Pat Sullivan founder and former CEO of ACT! Software and SalesLogix is now up on the Grid7 website. Pat has been a leading figure in the Arizona software community for a long time and has now moved on to found something a little different in Jigsaw Health.

Phoenix BarCamp is tomorrow, if you’re a geek in Phoenix it’s the place to be. This will be held at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe starting at 9AM.

This event mainly exists to get people in the technology community around Phoenix into a single place so we can have some good discussions on technical and creative topics. It’s an event for both the development and the design communities and the schedule for the day will emerge as it occurs. If you’re planning to come, please be prepared to truly participate, this isn’t an event for people to get up in front of a crowd and just give presentations.

We’ll have free tshirts and lunch, thanks to the BarCamp sponsors: Microsoft, Neurogami, Integrum, Grid7 and JumpBox.

Mark Suster CEO of Koral is talking about his experiences raising a round of venture capital.

So I’m stuck with the paper shuffler and the Blackberry man. I am not kidding you when I say that I was on the verge of literally saying, “let’s just call this meeting a day. It’s clear you have no respect for me and no interest in my company.” I bit my tongue (which my wife will tell you is rare). I finished the next 15 painful minutes and said goodbye. My only regret … the $25 I had to pay to park in their building. They were seriously the most pompous, self-centered, unprofessional group of people that I have come across in a long time. I went to back to their website and unsurprisingly there were no great companies I had ever heard of. I later learned that they were a spin out from an investment bank. It all made sense. They were not “real” VCs. If you are raising money in the Bay Area and want to know who this firm is to avoid them drop me a line at msuster@koral.com and I’ll tell you the name.

Not kind words for this particular firm.

I saw Mark demo Koral at the Office 2.0 conference and it looked like a pretty compelling product, certainly one of the better products falling into the “Office 2.0″ bucket. It’s a shame this group couldn’t give him the respect he deserves, ultimately though, it’s just an opportunity missed for them. I’m sure Mark will have no trouble finding the money he needs elsewhere.

Pete Lacey has an excellent post up about why all the teeth knashing over REST vs. WS-* and W3C XML Schema vs. Relax NG doesn’t really matter within the corporate space. I’ve certainly argued about this enough to know the sad reality that he’s right … as much as I hate to admit it. No matter how much simpler things could be if we chucked the whole WS-* stack, in the corporate world nobody is listening. All they hear is what the big vendors say, and all they talk about is SOAP and WS-* and W3C XML schema and a bunch of other really complex crap that just makes people’s jobs harder.

I think it’s naive to believe that this isn’t intentional, the complexity is there because it requires tools to make it usable and it just so happens that all those vendors that corporate developers are so fond of, sell tools. It’s good for their business to make technology as complex as possible. In fact it’s my distaste for what the big vendors are doing that keeps me from leaving the startup world. In that world we pick technologies that we can actually understand and that we know will work. Simple is always better than complex, and anything that requires an expensive suite of tools to make it simple is looked at with great skepticism. It also helps that we simply can’t afford the stuff the big vendors sell, but even if we could, there is very little I would actually want to use.

As a solution for something that’s way harder than it should be, Microsoft has released a virtual machine with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 & 7 preinstalled. The target for this is web developers who are looking to test their sites against both of the IE versions. The virtual machine has XP installed and pre-activated with expiration on April 1 2007.

It’s getting really interesting to see what Microsoft is doing with pre-built virtual machines. I hesitate to call these virtual appliances, but I suppose they are. I wonder if now that Windows Vista is released they’ll be a little more willing to allow Windows XP to float for this type of applications. This release certainly sets an interesting precedent and as a Macintosh user, testing in IE is really the only thing I really need Windows for anymore. So far I haven’t seen anyone convert the VHD format release into something that will run under VMWare or Parallels.

Just came across WikiMatrix from this article on TechCrunch. There are a number of interesting things about this site.

1. There are a lot of different Wiki packages available now with a broad range of features.
2. Way too many of them include the word Wiki in their name.
3. They expect the software owners to maintain their own entries.
4. Wikis are exploding if there’s room for a ten person company to support a site that’s little more than a specialized comparison system.

What I want to see is a CRM system based around the Wiki concept. Current CRM systems seem too rigid to me, while current Wikis are a little too loose. It seems there should be room for something in the middle based around the concept of semi-structured data while still maintaining much of the freedom a wiki provides.