No More ASP.NET

A prolific and highly creative buddy of mine, @UMLGuy, has created what I think is a terrific way to grok the basics (and not so basics) of UML (the Unified Modeling Language). He’s written a COMIC, and it’s pretty good.

Ulterior Motives Lounge is an adventure story with a large cast of characters and several set locations. Oh, and you get to learn some UML, if you’re paying attention. Prior knowledge of computer programming is not necessary since the creator of The Lounge abhors the idea that UML is for programmers and computer people only.

Martin, the creator of "The Lounge" is the author of two books on UML and has taught the subject all over the country for years; including at Microsoft.

Check out the Lounge to laugh and learn.

The guy that invented the T9 input has done it again. T9, you know, thing on your phone that tries to guess what you’re typing? That thing you must use if you were too poor or too taken in by the cute girl at the phone store who “gave” you a phone without a keyboard on it. Well you guys are in luck:

So if you don’t wanna buy a phone with keyboard now you have something that’s even more, um… instinctually adept? … to let you keep using that cheap phone!

If you were waiting for a Microsoft Surface display to show up in stores, like I have, prepare to stop waiting for that and start waiting for something even more jiggy.

The coolest part of the sphere is that it appears to use off the shelf technology (except for the sphere itself, which is probably a clear plastic), making it somewhat inexpensive, and therefore more readily available to me the public.

Over the last 18 months Amazon.com super-duper-smart CEO Jeff Bezos has been pushing AWS, or Amazon Web Services. AWS is part of ‘The Cloud’. The Cloud is is another name for all of the computer programs that run on the Internet, that you can’t see. Just like the Internet used to be called (queue booming voice with echo), The Information SuperHighway, ‘The Cloud’ is a sort of a fluffy name for some specific Internet technologies that would be too boring to describe another way.

AWS lets companies that provide software online, like e-commerce web sites, without having to invest in anticipated growth. That means that, if the web site doesn’t grow, you’re not out thousands in hardware, software, and setup costs. Web software companies love the idea.

So, why is it dangerous? Single point of failure.

The Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack on the U.S. They primary way it does this is to have many points of failure. In other words, if one part of the U.S. is wiped out, the Internet still works.

This is not the case with The Cloud. Only the largest companies can afford to provide the necessary resources to make a scalable web service provider. Right now the big players are Amazon, Google, and, soon, Microsoft. Google’s version of AWS is called Google App Engine.

Google App Engine went down yesterday for nearly an entire day. The whole thing went down… along with every single application running on it. And Google didn’t know why.

This is bad.

Imagine building a business on a Cloud service and it, the entire ONE, goes down along with yours and thousands (or millions) of other websites. The Internet is working fine, but the single point of failure is down… along with a bunch of income generating businesses.

Until there are many (hundreds) of web service providers like AWS on the Internet, The Cloud will remain a dangerous place to bet your business.