Chris fired me this post by Mike Arrington a week or so ago.

“I routinely declare email bankruptcy and simply delete my entire inbox. But even so, I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Plus another 721 in my Facebook inbox. and about thirty skype message windows open with unanswered messages. It goes without saying, of course, that my cell phone voicemail box is also full (I like the fact that new messages can’t be left there, so I have little incentive to clear it out).”

Mark Hurst referenced this post in a recent email as well and makes some great points about the psychology of email overload.

“One benefit of declaring email bankruptcy, I think, is the ‘proof’ that you’re plugged in and important. Surely if you have so much email that you can’t manage it, lots of people are asking for your time and attention! Work must be a constant adrenaline rush! Wow!”

We certainly need to be aware that some people actually derive feelings of importance from being utterly overloaded by email. Hopefully they are on the fringe and most of us are ready to get a hell of a lot more productive when it comes to inboxes. Mark makes a key point about how Arrington is dealing with this issue:

“But consider the outcome of this strategy. Arrington effectively has no email, since he’s liable to delete anything he receives without reading it first; and he has no voice mail, since he leaves his voice mail box in the full state. Here is a leader of Silicon Valley who is no longer able to use technology. Strange.”

Mark thens makes the point that throwing more technology may not be the solution:

“I agree that *some* new technology is needed, but it’s probably not a snazzy thing that Silicon Valley geeks would drool over. Whatever it is, Arrington really wants it”

While I agree for the most part, Mark does refer people to his technology by pointing them to gootodo which strikes me as contradictory. With our focus at brainpark, we view all this as symptoms that we hope bp will tackle and at least help with. As always, the solution may not be had by focusing entirely on the symptoms. We talk a lot about the promises that technology has failed miserably at. This includes effective communication, less duplication of work, etc all aimed at allowing you move up the heirarchy and do something fun or hang out with your family.

I average less than one conference a year so I’m no expert. Basically I can’t stand most of them. I did, however, attend Neil’s Business of Software conference in San Jose last year and decided half way through it that I wouldn’t miss the next one, if there was another. Well there is, and this year Joel Spolsky is helping Neil organize it and it’s being held in Boston. The lineup is already impressive including Joel, Seth Godin, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, and Jason Fried.

I’ve already purchased my ticket as last year’s attendees got early dibs. The rumour is that the remaining tickets will be publicly available soon so get on the mailing list and seriously consider making the trip.

The other conference is an easy commute to Mesh in Toronto. I missed last year’s due to client meeting conflicts but I was at the first. I found it to be less technical and more marketing focused but regardless it’s a chance to meet and hang out with people in our own backyard.

Writing javascript is right up there on my list of things I enjoy with smashing my face on large bits on concrete and listening to Ben’s mom sing. Based on the lovely demo’s I recently saw at DemoCampGuelph (shameless plug, April 9th, why won’t you be there…) I tried out extjs and yui for brainpark.

There was no real differentiator for what we needed on brainpark. They would both accomplish what we need to do today. I started with extjs and had that up and running in no time. Upon further inspection I gave yui a cursory test drive and was equally impressed. For the time being, yui has won out. The difference maker? Licensing. All things equal, I’ll run for a bsd license over some dodgy commercial one I don’t even understand.

Does that mean I won’t pay for software or will only use open source? No way. If, at any point, it becomes clear that extjs will save us developer time over yui then we’ll assess the license and go from there. Absolute minimum, yui comes with a community filled with yahoo’s developers and a license that effectively says “Take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.” That’s an active community I have faith in and I’ll take that anyday over a commercial community staffed primarily, or entirely, with developers paid for by licensing revenue.

This is good, link from Mark Hurst.

In honour of the day, we’re having stew and guiness of course.

Cripes I have to celebrate today. Not doing so would be like Mark not taking Canada Day off.

Back to not doing what you know is right, I’ve managed to drift back into email hell. My intent is to gain back control which means I’ll be working my way back to checking email twice a day and once (maybe) over the weekends. That means that your best way to reach me, if you need immediate responses, is this little device we call the teleeefun.

It’s amazing how some deadlines and the need to be aggressively productive can quickly expose email for what it is, a massive waste of time. The point being I’m not doing this to be a recluse prick, although I can’t say that’s a ‘negative’ side effect, but instead to get better and more intentional at what I decide I need to do.

Of late I seem to find myself ranting about the return of desktop applications. It certainly wasn’t intentional. Maybe I’m just bored of building applications for such a mess of a medium known as the web. In any case I’m excited about desktop applications which seems so 1980’s of me.

Moving applications to the web browser certainly fixed some things, however, it broke a bunch as well. First, let’s dispense with the notion of the web browser being web-based and traditional client applications being non-web-based. Upon closer inspection it seems that web browsers themselves exhibit most, or all, of the attributes of a traditional application. My point is, every trad application can access and do things ‘in the cloud’ so they’re web based.

A good example is the trad application I’m using to write this very entry. Drivel is a Gnome client “for working with online journals”. I no longer write web posts in a web browser. I was sick of losing posts by accidentally closing a browser, not being able to write or edit while offline like being on a plane among other annoyances. I now enjoy the rich features of a trad application, save posts locally etc, as well as being able to post directly ‘to the cloud’. As well, I use drivel to post to multiple blog applications which gives me a consistent writing experience regardless of the blog software I choose to run the blog on.

Further complicating this issue is that two giants are on either side of this. Microsoft owns the desktop, google owns the ‘cloud’. My 2 cents is that google will do everything they can to get you and your applications on the web as they don’t own your OS. The more you take off your desktop and put entirely on the cloud then the more of you they have.

Mozilla’s prism is now trying to help you “split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop”. I’m only getting more confused. Mozilla claims that the problem with trad apps versus web apps fixed was that they had slow installation, a verbose update process, and they didn’t have ‘data in the cloud’.

We’re already mentioned that the ‘data in the cloud’ no longer differentiates. So that leaves us with install and update. I believe I’m biased in that I’m an ubuntu user and therefore have access to synaptic. That means I’ve installed virtually every application by typing one line in bash or using the synaptic client. Once an application is installed I forget about it for the most part and synaptic handles all updates for me.

“Synaptic maintains a database of packages on your system in order to keep track of installed software. This list is checked against the software repositories to inform you of new packages or updates. Synaptic checks for new software packages when you launch Synaptic.”

This means I no longer suffer from a cumbersome install or update process for trad apps. Should we not just take the synaptic path and fix the real problem, making trad apps dirt simple to install and keep up to date? Cripes, I’m starting to feel old..

I hate to admit it but I do like these pic’s

The date is set for the next DemoCamp in Guelph. If you can attend then put your name on the list here. If you’d like to demo then contact me asap.

If you work in anyway with software and live within driving distance then you have no excuse. People demo’ing at these events are finding great people to hire, getting funding, improving their designs, all while drinking free beer. Ok maybe there’s more of the latter than anything else but who cares.

Caveat, I’ve never built and distributed a multi-os python application. I was asked recently if a python application would naturally be multi-os. Here’s my modified for public consumption answer.

It depends. Until I’ve done it, I don’t know. I believe it’s relatively painless to do it though. Python itself comes ‘out of the box’ with every major OS except windows so that’s a good start. As well, if you build your client application using dabo which is built on top of wxPython which is built on top of wxWidgets then you’re in great shape. Not to mention your apps look native to all Os’s which is handy.

“Dabo applications are known to run on all flavors of Windows, all recent flavors of Linux, and Macintosh OS X 10.2 or higher. Because Dabo is currently built on top of *wxPython*, which is built on top of wxWidgets, it probably runs elsewhere, too. It also suffers from the same display limitations on some platforms (most notably OS X), but these should improve as the underlying toolkits improve.

You can develop Dabo applications on all three supported platforms, and you can run your Dabo applications on all three supported platforms. Flexibility is a really good thing.”

There’s also pyGTK which promises your applications will be “truly multiplatform and they’re able to run, unmodified, on Linux, Windows, MacOS X and other platforms.” I believe that choosing between pyGTK and wxWidgets starts to get into questions of mobile device delivery etc. In terms of major OS’s I think you’re covered completely with either.