tsJensen.com

Apple, I'm a PC and You're a Hypocrite

Tyler Jensen — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:25:45 GMT

One of the latest Apple ads makes fun of Microsoft for spending more on marketing than on fixing Vista. Time for all you fruit computer junkies to face some cold hard facts:

Let's take our most recent SEC filing quarter for both companies and compare spending on sales, marketing and administration versus research and development and then average that spending per employee.

Microsoft spends about $25,000 per employee on R&D and $43,000 on sales, marketing and administration.
A ratio of 1 to 1.72.

Apple spends about $16,300 per employee on R&D and $51,200 on sales, marketing and administration.
A ratio of 1 to 3.13.

So relatively speaking, Apple spends nearly twice as much on sales, marketing and administration as Microsoft does.

And that's one reason why I'm a PC. You can keep your fruit computer.

What is Enterprise Software Architecture

Tyler Jensen — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:54:07 GMT

I just posted this on a linkedin group to which I belong, but I thought I'd also like to pose the question here.

I'd like to get a discussion started that attempts to define enterprise software architecture. My own definition seems to be evolvoing with every enterprise for whom I've worked. In the abstract, for me, enterprise software architure is the art of putting the pieces of multiple puzzles together into one great work of art.

There are many puzzles to choose from and every enterprise has a unique mix. There are multiple teams with various skillsets and experience. There are multiple business processes sometimes with unique and strange business rules. Technology platforms that differ, communications protocols that won't communicate with one another, languages, frameworks, compilers, IDEs, components, and hardware that vary from team to team and department to department. Ours is the task of taking these disparate and often incongruous pieces and molding them into one coherent masterpiece of technology and human resources to get more done, get it done better, quicker, cheaper and easier. And if we do our jobs well, it may be that no one will notice that we did it at all.

What do you think?

To Outsource Or Not to Outsource, That is the Question

Tyler Jensen — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:56:19 GMT

I just posted the following note on a LinkedIn group I follow in answer to a post about so called "software factories," which is a nice euphemism for overseas developers working for much less than they deserve struggling to meet the unreasonable demands of their bosses. This represents my opinion on the subject:

Never forget that you get what you pay for. Hiring an overseas or even local "software factory" or consultancy to build your software can be problematic at best and a complete waste of time and money at worst.

First, if you cannot communicate, forget about it. Building software is 99% communication and 1% technology. Okay, perhaps I overstate the case. A little. But you cannot overestimate the importance of clear, effective communication.

Second, unless you have the internal people required to manage such a relationship, your project will fail. This means you need project management and technical people in your own organization that you know well and trust. They need to be supremely competent. This is especially true if you plan to hire a firm outside of your own geographical area.

Third, plan for time and budget overages. It is the nature of consulting to promise a low price and quick turnaround and then when you are committed to the project and it is "nearly done," you will be informed that there is much more to do, generally due to legitimate changes in requirements because you did not fully understand what you wanted when the project first began. This is the boon and bane of software development whether internal or external.

Finally, you can have success outsourcing your software development project, but do not make the mistake of thinking that it will save you an enormous amount of time and money, especially for a single application project. It takes time to develop a working relationship with an outside consultantcy, especially one that is half way around the world. If you have multiple projects, long term goals, and a huge budget of time and money, it may in fact be cost effective to have a relationship with a so called "software factory." But if you are a small organization and have one or two projects, you will nearly always be better off hiring a professional locally, usually through one of the many technical recruiting companies, to come into your organization as a contractor to work on-site building exactly what you want as you discover over time what it is you want exactly.

ASP.NET MVC RedirectUrl on Login

Tyler Jensen — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:20:31 GMT

In my first attempt at creating a real applicaiton using the new ASP.NET MVC project template (Codeplex Preview 5), I found that when I clicked a new tab I'd created linked to a specific controller and an action I'd decorated with the [Authorize(Roles = "user")] attribute, the "out of the box" Login action did not redirect me to the that controller/action combo once I had successfully logged in.

Here's my solution to the problem. First, I added a hidden value in the Login.aspx form. Second, I added a parameter to the Login action in the Acount controller (AccountController.cs). Let me know if you've found a better way.

Here's the code for the form:


          <
          form
          method
          ="post"
          action
          ="<%=
Html.AttributeEncode(Url.Action("
          Login
          "))
%>"
          >
          <
          div
          >
          <
          table
          >
          <
          tr
          >
          <
          td
          > Username: </td><td><%=
Html.TextBox("username") %></td></tr><tr><td> Password: </td><td><%=
Html.Password("password") %></td></tr><tr><td></td><td><inputtype="checkbox"name="rememberMe"value="true"/> Remember
me? </td></tr><tr><!--
Added to handle the returnUrl --><td><%=
Html.Hidden("returnUrl", ViewData["ReturnUrl"].ToString()) %></td><td><inputtype="submit"value="Login"/></td></tr></table></div></form>

Here's the code for the Login action:


          public ActionResult Login(string username, string password, bool?
rememberMe, string returnUrl) { ViewData["Title"]
= "Login"; string url = (string.IsNullOrEmpty(returnUrl)
? Request.QueryString["ReturnUrl"] ?? string.Empty
: returnUrl) .Trim('/'); ViewData["ReturnUrl"]
= url; // Non-POST requests should just display the Login form if (Request.HttpMethod
!= "POST") { return View(); } //
Basic parameter validation List<string> errors
= new List<string>(); if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(username))
{ errors.Add("You must specify a username."); } if (errors.Count
== 0) { // Attempt to loginbool loginSuccessful
= Provider.ValidateUser(username, password); if (loginSuccessful)
{ FormsAuth.SetAuthCookie(username, rememberMe ?? false); if (url
!= null && url.Length > 0) return RedirectToAction("Index",
url); elsereturn RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
} else { errors.Add("The username or password
provided is incorrect."); } } // If we got this far, something
failed, redisplay form ViewData["errors"] = errors;
ViewData["username"] = username; return View();
}

Taking a Comment Holiday to Escape the Spammers

Tyler Jensen — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:29:40 GMT

I upgraded to the latest version of dasBlog a few days ago and inadvertently allowed comments without requiring approval. A spambot comment got through and while I quickly turned on the "require approval" feature, it was too late. Since then I've been bombarded with stupid link spam comments. I even deleted the one post that seemed to be the bot target and created a new post with the same content.

No luck. After many similar spam comments today being posted to the most recent post on my blog, I'm giving up. I'm taking a comment holiday. It won't bother anyone really because I don't get many real comments. I'll enable the comment functionality some day in the future.

Meantime, if you have a comment, feel free to email me and I'll post it as an addendum to the relevant post.

Live Writer Source Code Format Plugin

Tyler Jensen — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:22:07 GMT

I've just installed the plugin blogged about by Mike Ormond and here's an example of it's output taken from code in the Atrax project I've just published to Codeplex.


          namespace Atrax.Library { [DataContract,
Serializable] publicclass QueryResult
{ /// <summary>/// The original
query sent by the client./// </summary> [DataMember] public Query
Query { get; set; } /// <summary>///
Status code sent back to query client's callback url.///
</summary> [DataMember] publicstring StatusCode
{ get; set; } /// <summary>/// Status
description sent back to query client's callback url.///
</summary> [DataMember] publicstring StatusDescription
{ get; set; } /// <summary>/// The
XML schema for the result XML./// </summary> [DataMember] publicstring ResultSchema
{ get; set; } /// <summary>/// The
result produced by the query processor, usually XML.///
</summary> [DataMember] publicstring Result
{ get; set; } } }

Testing Windows Live Writer with dasBlog

Tyler Jensen — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:05:55 GMT

I've run into a little snag with my blog. I installed (rather copied) the latest release of dasblog to my bin (and other directories) and ended up not being able to edit or post new blog entries because of some installation (probably some config) issue with FreeTextBox. So while I figure out the problem or wait for someone else to solve it, I decided to try Windows Live Writer.

Here's the FreeTextBox and the text it displays now when attempting to edit or add a post:

I've tried the web.config change, including the one suggested by Scott Hanselman regarding the dependent assembly as follows:

<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name="FreeTextBox" publicKeyToken="5962a4e684a48b87" culture="neutral"/>
<bindingRedirect oldVersion="3.0.5000.0-3.0.5000.6" newVersion="3.1.6.34851"/>
</dependentAssembly>

Well, time to publish this to see what it looks like.

(And second post with some edits.)

Atrax Keyword Extraction Algorithm

Tyler Jensen — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:12:27 GMT

Two and a half years ago I wrote an implementation in C# of an algorithm published in 2003 in a short academic paper by Yutaka Matsuo and Mitsuru Ishizuka in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools. Of course, the algorithm is not a perfect implementation of the algorithm published in the "Keyword Extraction from a Single Document using Word Co-occurrence Statistical Information" paper. I made a number of decisions to make the algorithm as effective as possible while keeping it as fast as I could.

The code was written for Provo Labs, my employer at the time. I've recently obtained written permission from Provo Labs to release this code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. You can get the code in the Atrax.Html project, a part of the entire Atrax project which I've just released, at http://www.codeplex.com/atrax. Here's the core of the code.

string[] terms =newstring[termsG.Count];
termsG.Values.CopyTo(terms, 0); //gives terms array where last term is the MAX g in G
foreach (string w in terms)
{
    decimal sumZ = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < terms.Length - 1; i++) //do calcs for all but MAX
    {
        string g = terms[i];
        if (w != g) //skip where on the diagonal
        {
            int nw = termNw[w];
            decimal Pg = termPg[g];
            decimal D = nw * Pg;
            if (D != 0.0m)
            {
                decimal Fwg = termFwg[w][terms[i]];
                decimal T = Fwg - D;
                decimal Z = (T * T) / D;
                sumZ += Z;
            }
        }
    }
    termsX2[w] = sumZ;
}

SortedDictionary<decimal, string> sortedX2 =new SortedDictionary<decimal, string>();
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, decimal> pair in termsX2)
{
    decimal x2 = pair.Value;
    while (sortedX2.ContainsKey(x2))
    {
        x2 = x2 - 0.00001m;
    }
    sortedX2.Add(x2, pair.Key);
}

//now get simple array of values as lowest to highest X2 terms
string[] x2Terms =newstring[sortedX2.Count];
sortedX2.Values.CopyTo(x2Terms, 0);

I have not spent much time on this algorithm in the past two years and would like to find others with similar interests to help me improve and perfect it. If you have an interest in this kind of research, please join me at the Atrax project page on Codeplex.

Vista Defrag Woefully Inadequate - Enter O&O Defrag

Tyler Jensen — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:43:01 GMT

Being rather new to Vista this week, I was sorely disappointed to see the severely dumbed down defrag utility in Vista. A pathetic effort. Really! So after a few highly scientific Google searches, I settled on O&O Defrag and could not be happier.

Here's the lame, incredibly useless UI in Vista's Disk Defragmenter. Note, if you are going to use some other defragmenter on a schedule, which I would recommend, be sure to disable the regularly scheduled Vista defragmenter by unchecking the box. One way of getting there is to go to the Control Panel and then Performance Information and Tools and then Advanced Tools.

And here is only part of the incredibly useful O&O Defrag UI, a shot taken as it defrags my drives:

Of course there are other suitable defrag tools such as DiskKeeper and others. Perhaps Microsoft wanted the Vista tool to cater only to the basic, uninformed user. If so, they certainly left the market wide open to the more sophisticated tools vendors such as O&O.

From XP Pro to Vista Ultimate x64

Tyler Jensen — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:54:01 GMT

I finally took the plunge. Now I get to use 4GB out of 4GB except that the bare minimum I seem to be able to get Vista x64 down to is a 1.2GB footprint. And that's after hours and hours of experimentation and disabling some visual enhancements, though I feel no loss there and am experiencing a significantly reduced sense of loss.

Now I'm happy to be able to test on x64 virtual images using VMWare's Workstation, I'm afraid I may need to buy four 2GB sticks of RAM now. Despite the fact that the additional memory is available now, the larger footprint nearly wipes out the gain.

And that's without running any significant applications, except IE, which is quite a memory hog. I guess the old 640K upper limit days are over.

Yes, RAM is cheap. A quick check on Newegg.com and I found 8GB (4 x 2GB DDR2 800) for $174. I can't even buy three tanks of gas for my SUV for that.