Jonathan Bond-Caron - Ideas & Experiments - Business

AJAX in the enterprise - Beware

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:37:31 -0400

It's great to see the progression to AJAX in the enterprise but I am getting utterly frustrated at how large corporate websites are failing to use and deploy AJAX properly.

I recently tried to create an account for a new American Express card at:
https://www99.americanexpress.com/myca/usermgt/us/action?request_type=un_Register

I was initially happy to see a nice clean interface. I enter the 4-digit ID, then go on to enter the credit card number. When I finish entering the credit card number, the mouse cursor jumps back to the 4-digit ID (that I already entered!!). Nice try here but not very helpful.

The real problems start with the broken registration. The registration page has some interesting focus() tricks which makes a description popup above the focused form field. This is "ok" although the popup/overlay blocks the next form field so you have to hit 'tab' every time. This gets quite annoying.

The critical problem obviously is when I click 'submit' to submit my information. The form does nothing and I *see no error*. Wonderful right? Well I hit the 'back' button and I am now "logged in" at:

https://home.americanexpress.com/home/mt_personal_cm.shtml

I find myself in the "My account" page but if I click any links it brings me back to the login screen.

I convinced myself this was an issue with FireFox and tried IE7. I get the same problems. After more registration failures, I finally get a wonderful page:
"For your security, your account has been temporarily locked out of the system."

What a load of %$&$%? !! AJAX is a very rough technology that requires experts and proper testing, I don't know who American Express subcontracted or the project manager(s) involved but fire who you have to.

For a large corporation, and especially a credit card institution (where rigorous security and testing policies should be met), this just looks very very bad. This is not the first time I go though this, the same mess a month ago at
http://www.dhl.ca/ca/

Mac "for geeks who want to look cool"?

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:04:00 -0400

After recently viewing a Mac TV add:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR2ONmS56DE&feature=related

My fiancee turned to me and said "ca m'énerve un peu" (french for "it's starting to be annoying"). Although I'm a fan of Mac ads, the message this time seemed to be over the top and downright annoying.

Mac suddenly became for me "try to look cool and annoying" rather then "be cool". I'm not a Mac owner but have been thinking of buying one for a new laptop, at this time I need a little more then the "Mac fashion" message which is really wearing out on me.

So here's the options:

Microsoft: Builds very simple products but not so "stable" (agreed Mac). Experienced this just yesterday by "upgrading to XP Sp3" and then powerpoint 2007 was amazingly slow among other issues. Downgrading to SP2 fixed the problem(s).

Mac: Builds products with a "fashion" twist, very stable (based on freebsd). The problem with a Mac for me is their 'message', can their products be used for productivity / business / everyday use in my case?

Google: Well no OS but builds very simple products that just work. Their message, "google". What their brand represents is simplicity, open, easy to use, no fuss, no marketing, it just works, rock solid!

If someone is listening, can you please just build an OS that easy to use for everyday use and *that works*, and please shove your marketing down the !?%$È?&$*.

Hopefully Microsoft can fix their mess, or innovation with browsers (Google Chrome?) can pave the way for to a new era of computing.

Working from home?

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:48:50 -0400

Since I work from home 80% of my time and the rest is reserved for meetings with clients (1 day). I found this article very interesting:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9112621

It warns CEO's or managers to consider 6 questions to answer when considering telework:

Overall it's an excellent summary! If you're thinking about offering telecommuting plans or asking your boss to work from home, you'll enjoy the read.

In my field (software development), I see more and more businesses offering telecommuting plans to their tech employees here in Montreal. Why? Their technicians call me from home! Most of the time, they offer 1 day (which turns out to be friday).
That seems to fit with:

"Still, he won't allow anyone to telework 100% of the time, except in rare circumstances, because he wants to keep informal communications flowing. "That's the kind of relationship I think we'll see more and more of," says Cromwell. "Not somebody telecommuting 100% of the time, but rather creating situations where someone will work from home one or two days a week."

And I couldn't agree more, when building a corporate culture, you want your employees to "need" to come to the office. Offering them a day or 2 to work from home should be seen as a bonus where they can reserve time for tasks they 'know' they can get done from home.

More then 2 days per week, hire a subcontractor, not an employee.

If you're a small team of professionals (2-5) like my company (Goldeneye Solutions) - it's a different issue in the early stage where telecommuting 80% saves time & resources.

It's also very important to use proper tools to collaborate,

All that said, I'll definitely keep the points in article in mind as I hire more employees.
It would be interesting to see how medium or large companies in Montreal are coping with telework?

Distributed Cache - Velocity

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Bond-Caron) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:07:00 -0400

I always enjoy reading Microsoft tech announcements simply because they just seem to "nail" business requirements and building the proper solutions / technology.

The quote the announcement: "Distributed cache is becoming the key application platform component for providing scalability and high availability. In-memory caching has been traditionally used primarily for meeting the high performance requirements of applications. By fusing caches on multiple nodes into a single unified cache however, the distributed caches offer not only high performance, but also scale."

Microsoft released a first CTP (technology preview) of their distributed caching technology called Velocity:

From the readme: "Velocity" distributed cache is provided in the form of a cache cluster, simplifying your application code by managing the complexities of load balancing behind the scenes. When you use "Velocity," you can retrieve data by using keys or other identifiers, called tags. "Velocity" supports optimistic and pessimistic concurrency models and a variety of cache configurations.

For those familiar with memcache (open-source), it's the same type of solution. Velocity however seems to be a much more enterprise ready package with advanced caching features.

It's further interesting that Velocity uses ports: 22233 (data) and 22234 (monitor cluster nodes), looks like we're going to need a distributed caching 'RFC' and protocol some time soon.

The full announcement is here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/velocity/archive/2008/06/02/introducing-project-codename-velocity.aspx