*michael parekh on IT*

ON COBOL'S 50th BIRTHDAY

KEEPS ON GOING

This piece in the Guardian notes the 50th anniversary of a computer language that still runs much of our business software around the world.  The language of course, is "Cobol", aka

"The "common business-oriented language" that has provided 59-year-old Stuart with a career through to retirement age marks its 50th birthday this year. The day to celebrate is slippery - Cobol didn't just scroll on to a terminal one day and ask the user to hit "Compile" - but 1959 is the year that the language came into being.

And Cobol is still in business. According to David Stephenson, the UK manager for the software provider Micro Focus, "some 70% to 80% of UK plc business transactions are still based on Cobol."

The piece goes on to give a typical use case:

"Mike Madden, development service manager with the catalogue-shopping firm JD Williams, believes so.

Better known for its online stores, such as Simply Be and Fifty Plus, Madden says JD Williams remains highly dependent on Cobol applications. "We have a huge commitment to Cobol," he says. "About 50% of our mainframe systems use it."

Why? "Simple - we haven't found anything faster than Cobol for batch-processing," Madden says. "We use other languages, such as Java, for customer-facing websites, but Cobol is for order processing. The code matches business logic, unlike other languages."

Matching underwear

So, knicker-buying Simply Be customers are greeted by a pretty-in-pink Java interface, but when the order reaches the backroom, charcoal-grey Cobol code takes over the processing grunt work."

The piece goes on to describe how Cobol has continued to thrive behind the scenes, even after the notoriety it received in the public eye around the millennium bug brouhaha almost a decade ago.

Recommended read for geeks everywhere, especially if you had some instruction in the language so very long ago.

ON A THOUGHTFUL TWITTER POST

SECRET SAUCE

My friend Gil Dibner has a great post putting the recent breath-taking success of Twitter in perspective, for both ardent Twitter fans and newbies.  Twitter's success is something I posted on a few days ago.  A couple of highlights from Gil's post:

"It’s become very clear that Twitter is a runaway success. There are lots of reasons for this, but I want to concentrate on the two that I think are the most interesting:

1. Twitter lowered the barriers to UGC effectively to zero. This, in my view, is the underlying reason for the massive adoption. Twitter is not really a medium for consumption. It’s a medium for expression – and its really really easy. What’s more, the fear factor is reduced to almost nothing because even if you say something stupid, it quickly dissolves into the endless stream of tweets and disappears. While its very possible to write brilliant tweets…most tweets are far from brilliant…but who cares? We’re participating. Ever since Geocities made it possible for “regular people” to start expressing themselves on the web, we’ve been witness a trend towards ever easier platforms and formats for online expression. Twitter is quite possibly the ultimate expression of that trend. I’m all for the success of Twitter, but god help us if Twitter lives and the NY Times dies…
2. Twitter demonstrates the power of centralization. Talk as much as you want about openness and distribution, but Twitter is really about centralization. Yes it’s true – users create the content in a distributed fashion using any number of interfaces – but that content has value only because others know where to go to get it. If the Twitter phenomenon wasn’t highly centralized, it would have no brand value, no value as a real time search engine, and no value as a platform for brands or individuals trying to reach an audience."

The whole piece is worth reading.  I'd also recommend bookmarking Gil's site TechTLV, for future reading.

*Image source.

ON THE BEARINGS OF A BOOK

BEYOND THE COVER

Here's something I ran into today that should be of interest to any fan of books, either reading them, and/or buying them to fill up one's bookshelves.  Author Peter Sacks wrote this piece in the Huffington Post a while ago**:

"I received an interesting invitation the other day. It was from Marshal Zeringue. Marshal runs a wonderful website called the Campaign for the American Reader, and he has a blog that he calls the Page 99 Test, which is based on this Ford Madox Ford quote: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Marshal's challenge, if I cared to accept it, was to respond to the Ford quote regarding page 99 of my new book, which he had just learned about in a magazine.

At first, when Marshal asked me to do this, I read page 99 and thought, "Oops, it's not very sexy." There were a lot of other pages of interesting writing and storytelling that I would have picked to reveal my book's whole. But I discovered that Ford Madox Ford was right in a sense. I looked more closely at 99, and there it was, the genetic code of my book. In fact, I could pick any page at random, and I would be able to find the same strands of DNA that held my book together."

The blog he refers to is interesting to peruse, offering at the very least a quick way to get impression of a book mostly by the author applying the page 99 test to his/her book.

It's not unlike how most of us decide on a book in a book-shop, or how in recent years, we've been able to see sample pages of books digitally on Amazon for a while with it's "Search Inside" feature.

Incidentally, a minor problem comes up trying to apply this test to books on e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.  Since the Kindle's software translates all the "pages" in a book into a location code, so that readers can change the size of the type up or down at will, there are no hard and fast page numbers, and thus no easy way for the reader of a book in one Kindle to cite a "page" number to another.

For that matter, there's no easy way to cite a reference from a Kindle book, a topic that will surely become more important for researchers over time, as this discussion in the Amazon forums indicates*.

But picking on one specific page to judge a book by more than it's cover, is an interesting idea.

P.S. *Suppose a possible solution for this might come with the way to highlight any page in a Kindle book, and have that translated into a page number in the hardware and/or the paperback version of that book, at the touch of a button, all done in software.  The action would be similar to getting definitions for a word in a Kindle book today, but would just give the page numbers in a "real" book, to use in citations.

** Image source.

ON MONSTROUS CHUTZPAH

STRETCHING IT

I've been a customer and fan of Monster Cable products since the 1980s, and so this article by the Wall Street Journal titled "The scariest Monster of  all sues for trademark infringement"  caught my attention:

"When Christina and Patrick Vitagliano dreamed up their Monster Mini Golf franchises -- 18-hole, indoor putting greens straddled by glow-in-the-dark statues of ghouls and gargoyles -- they never imagined that a California maker of high-end audio cables would object.

But Monster Cable Products Inc., which holds more than 70 trademarks on the word monster, challenged the Vitaglianos' trademark applications. It filed a federal lawsuit against their company in California and demanded the Rhode Island couple surrender the name and pay at least $80,000 for the right to use it."

The piece goes on to add:

"Over the years, it has gone after purveyors of monster-branded auto transmissions, slot machines, glue, carpet-cleaning machines and an energy drink, as well as a woman who sells "Junk Food Monster" kids' T-shirts that promote good eating habits.

It sued Monster.com over the job-hunting Web site's name and Walt Disney Co. over products tied to the film "Monsters Inc." It opposed the Boston Red Sox trademark applications for seats and hot dogs named for the Green Monster, the legendary left-field wall in Fenway Park. All in all, Monster Cable says it has fought about 190 monster battles at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and filed around 30 monster lawsuits in federal courts."

The company founder and CEO, Noel Lee, who founded the company in 1979 and carries the title "Head Monster", has been aggressive on this front to say the least:

"To a legal novice, it may seem odd that a common word like monster can be trademarked at all. But in the complex and sometimes murky world of trademark law, common words can be registered, provided they are associated with specific classes of goods. Apple Inc., for example, holds trademarks for the word apple when it's related to computer products, not fruit.

Sometimes, trademarks can obtain a higher order of protection, known as "famous marks." This category is supposed to be reserved for words that have become so entwined with a product and a company -- like the word visa and Visa Inc.'s credit card -- that the trademark owner can argue that no other product may use the word in its name.

David Tognotti, Monster Cable's general manager and an attorney, says the company considers "Monster" a famous mark -- on a par with Barbie dolls or Camel cigarettes. "We're protecting our mark as if it's a famous mark," he said in an interview in Monster Cable's headquarters, where the walls are lined with framed copies of the company's trademarks and patents.

Mr. Tognotti cited a chapter on famous marks in the law book "McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition" by J. Thomas McCarthy, a noted expert in the field.

But in an interview, Prof. McCarthy expressed doubt that Monster Cable possesses a famous mark. He said such determinations are made by courts. Mr. Tognotti acknowledges Monster Cable hasn't obtained such a court ruling."

It's perfectly reasonable for businesses to be aggressive about protecting their assets and business interests.  But this one seems to step over the line a tad, as this one piece of many found on the web indicate.  It might even be considered "Evil" by some estimates. 

Know this won't mean anything to a company with half a billion in revenues but I think I'm holding off buying Monster Cable products for now.

* Image source.

ON TWITTER'S SHORT WAY TO VICTORY

BREVITY MATTERS

Joshua Schachter, has a terrific post up today titled "On URL Shortners":

"URL shortening services have been around for a number of years.

Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen.

But it's 2009 now, and this problem no longer exists.  Instead it's been replaced by the SMS-oriented 140 character constraints of sites like Twitter. (Let's leave aside the fact that any phone that can run a web browser and thus follow links can also run a proper client, and doesn't have to hew to the SMS character limit.)

Since TinyURL, there has been a rapid proliferation of shortening services."

The post goes on to explain the many reasons why this has both short and long-term negative consequences for the web.  There's also a growing discussion on Techmeme, with good responses from folks like Dave Winer, Jason Kottke and others, on other technical issues around this approach and possible technical solutions to address them.

But taking a step back from the technical pros and cons of shortened URLs, one needs to understand the core merits of Twitter's 140-character limit, necessitated by it's initial focus on SMS text services, that then lead to URL shortening become a necessary mainsream evil. (Search Engine Land has a timely review on the rapidly growing field of companies offering this service).

That 140-character limit meant that publishers of content had to learn how to be brief and to the point in their messages, regardless of how much they wanted to express.

Remember that before Twitter, there had been an explosion of mainstream bloggers, where tens of millions worldwide discovered they could publish globally to their heart's content, at large at no great cost to themselves than their time.

The problem was that this meant that hundreds of millions of potential readers had to read all that stuff and try and glean the essence of all these posts. 

This asymmetric reality meant that tons of content would never actually get read.  Readers of course had to spend a ton of time trying to wade through this stuff, and even blog reader software didn't quite help other than just collect the ever-growing clutter.

Twitters 140-character limit meant that there was now forced publishers to think about how they could be short and sweet. 

And made it far easier for tens of millions to consume tweets much faster, scanning dozens at a glance. They could then decide which tweets were worthy of exploring further by clicking on a URL link, whether it was shortened or not.

When the history books are written on this period, we'll likely have a lot more data and analysis on how this 140-character limit really helped Twitter race ahead of so many competitors so fast.

Note that Facebook in it's recent big change to emulate elements of Twitter's feed model, chose to go with a 160-character limit, even though SMS/text messaging has very little to do with how Facebook feeds are consumed.

So whatever Twitter does do address the deficiencies of the shortened URLs, it really shouldn't mess with the 140-character limit. 

* Image source.

ON COMEDY AND NEWS

PROJECT RATINGS

It's April Fool's Day and so time again to take everything we encounter today with an extra grain of salt.  But it's  hard to be impressed by pranks these days when it seems almost everyone we watch on TV is pulling one almost every day.  Steven Colbert of the Comedy Channel highlights one such "prank" by Fox personality Glenn Beck around his project 9/12, in a hilarious bit on his show:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The 10/31 Project
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

It's all good fun, but Glenn Beck may be having the last laugh.  His approach seems to have garnered him strong ratings a scant two months out from his new perch at Fox.

ON THE UNIQUE MIND OF FREEMAN DYSON

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

The New York Times Sunday magazine has a marvelous feature on one of the pre-eminent scientists of our time, 85 year old Freeman Dyson.  A contemporary and peer of so many scientists of our age, Mr. Dyson has recently gained most notoriety for his intellectual opposition to the general consensus on Global Warming. 

Although that bit is interesting, what's really more fascinating is a peek into the mind 0f this remarkable and unique individual.  Here're some excerpts from this must-read feature:

"FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him..."

"Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.

Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart."

There is much in the piece about his views on Global warming, and the reactions from many of his critics.  It's all very interesting stuff...but what I found particularly charming is this conversation towards the end with his wife Imme of 51 years, who is convinced that Al Gore is on the right track:

"...one evening last month they sat down in a living room filled with Imme’s running trophies and photographs of their children to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” again. There was a print of Einstein above the television. And then there was Al Gore below him, telling of the late Roger Revelle, a Harvard scientist who first alerted the undergraduate Gore to how severe the climate’s problems would become. Gore warned of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the vanishing glaciers of Peru and “off the charts” carbon levels in the air. “The so-called skeptics” say this “seems perfectly O.K.,” Gore said, and Imme looked at her husband. She is even slighter than he is, a pretty wood sprite in running shoes. “How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.

“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.

“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”

“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.

“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”

That's an example of his famous inter-disciplinary thinking...looking beyond the science and the whole picture, as much as one possibly can. 
Recommend this piece regardless of which side of the climate debate you find yourself.

ON TRYING TO BE PRICELESS

FREAK AND FUNK

Visa keeps making headway in making TV commercials with broad appeal, as this latest "Super-Freak" ad illustrates:

Not quite the "Priceless" campaign by MasterCard, but not bad.  My favorite Priceless ad still is this "Back to School" ad from a year ago, played to "We Want the Funk":

Still don't get tired of watching that one.  Did you notice the Visa ad ends with the word "Funky"? Priceless.

ON FINANCIAL McCARTHYISM (Part II)

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

This letter titled "Dear AIG, I Quit", written by a senior executive at the AIG Financial Products Group at the center of the current national Bonus controversy, should be a must-read for anyone with an opinion either way on this issue.  As he explains, Mr. Jake DeSantis did not have anything to do with the products that ultimately caused the downfall of AIG.  Here are some salient excerpts:

"It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P.

Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down."

Mr. DeSantis goes on to add:

"I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut. "

It's one thing for an outsider like me to talk about how our politician and the media are encouraging what amounts to Financial McCarthyism around this issue, and quite another to read the opinion on all this from someone in the middle of all this, through no fault of their own.
What's particularly poignant is the way he goes on to describe his decision process regarding the compensation these he and his peers were due for hard work done in good faith:

"You’ve now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings. As you can imagine, there has been a tremendous amount of serious thought and heated discussion about how we should respond to this breach of trust.

As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.’s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you.

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear.
Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press."

He goes on to describe how he's donating what''ll be left of his bonus to people affected by the global downturn.
In yesterday's post, I described what was going on in the context of getting AIG employees to "return" their bonuses as "Reputational Waterboarding". 
It's clear from the comments by folks like Mr. DeSantis and others that are sure to follow, that we'll look back at this period in our history and feel the same national shame over how we're treating what's left of AIG and the financial industry at large (aka "Wall Street"), as we now do over our treatment of U.S. citizens of Japanese origin interned in camps during World War II, and the lives of thousands of Americans carelessly trampled during the McCarthy hysteria in the Fifties. 
This one hasn't been going that long and the collateral damage is not as bad as it could be. 

So it's not too late for us to all calm down a little bit, take a deep breath, and think some more about our misdirected rage. 

Oh, and let's not rush to cancel those AIG policies, unless of course we get a better deal.

Update:  Fred Wilson also had a post on this matter yesterday that's worth read, especially the comments from his readers on either side of this issue.

ON THE EFFICACY OF AFRICA AID

AID ADDICTION

One of the best things I've read in recent days is this piece by author and economist Dambisa Moyo in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, titled "Why Foreign Aid is hurting Africa".  Whether one agrees or disagrees with the premise of her piece (and her book, Dead Aid), she makes some arresting points:

"Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time -- millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.

Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower.

The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It's increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster."

She doesn't stop there:

"Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population -- over 350 million people -- live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.

Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. In order to keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of African education and health care. Well-meaning calls to cancel debt mean little when the cancellation is met with the fresh infusion of aid, and the vicious cycle starts up once again."

The whole piece is worth reading, again, regardless of whether one agrees with her views on this or not.  I just ordered her book, and look forward to adding it to my reading list.