The Ashdar Partners Blog

Over the last few years, I've spent more time following business issues in the IT industry than I had when I was younger. Perhaps it's just another mark of getting older. Over the holidays, a news item caught my eye: SugarSync has stopped giving away free storage . It's the hallmark of any new technology or developing area of business: Someone comes up with something new.  Many other players pile into the new space. Some time passes Players that can't make money (or generate the growth numbers they want) leave the new field and the space consolidates. The consolidation can go down to just a few companies. Those companies do not always include the one that created the space. We have seen this with cars (in the first part of the 20th century, there were hundreds of small manufacturers in the US alone. now there are only two behemoths that are headquartered here and a few dozen firms based overseas). Other technologies (radio, television, ISPs, RDBMs, hard d...

It's been a long time since I've done anything interesting with the blog, and it seems a little stale. With some prompting from Blogger's "Buzz" blog , I'm hooking this blog up to a Google+ account. This is a bit of a brave new world for me, since I've confined myself to LinkedIn, Twitter and a few other sites.  At the least, I hope that this will help comments on the blog be more dynamic and that a few more people might find these posts. Perhaps we can get a few more conversations going as well.

I recently found an IBM Model M keyboard at my local Goodwill store. There is rarely any computer hardware in there worth having, so this was quite a surprise. As far as I can tell, this Model M has never been used even though it was made in 1993. It came in what appears to be the original box, with a styrofoam insert. The coiled, un-stretched cable still has plastic wrap on it. There is no visible wear on the keys. There are no finger grease stains. It is a virgin, IBM-branded, Lexmark-manufactured beige beauty. Even the box doesn't look 20 years old. The model M was built before USB was a thing, so it has a PS/2 port. My main rig has a "legacy free" motherboard, so it doesn't have PS/2 ports. It only has USB ports. The keyboard I have been using lately is from long-gone Micron computer. I bought a computer from Micron in the 1990s and the only remaining evidence of that is that keyboard. (Micron was a popular computer vendor at that time, though there isn't muc...

So, at about 1 am this morning, I found out that Google is shutting down it's widely-used Reader application. I read four different takes on it (I think I saw it on BGR first) and only then headed off to Reddit. (It's all over the Internet now. Apparently, other writers recovered from the shock more quickly than I did.)   Ironically, I found out that Google was smothering Reader while using Reader.    This is particularly frustrating to me. I use Reader more than any other single thing. Reader channels probably 95% of my Internet interaction. I use it for a few hours every day. I use it at my desk. I use it during commercial breaks on TV. I use it when my wife falls asleep on the TV couch and when I can't sleep. I use it while waiting on line at McDonald's. I use it on commuter trains and on long car trips. It's a constant companion, I've spent more time with it than any pet and nearly any human. If my phone is charged and I'm not doing someth...

As I do some posting on another site, I've been running the   BGR live stream of the Sony Playstation 4 launch   on my second monitor and I've got something to say. I'm not a "gamer". I stopped playing games back in 1999 when I found that I had lost yet another weekend to Quake and Tomb Raider. I spent innumerable hours playing Quake, TR, Doom (and many others -- the late 1990s were kind of slow for me, socially speaking) on my Micron Pentium II. Before that, Falcon 3.0 (and Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D) on my Northgate 386/33. In medieval times, Ultima on my Mac Plus and Adventure on my Atari 2600 occupied my time. I was never all that good, but the games absorbed my brain in a way that TV never did. I had to stop playing games because I didn't do much else in 1999, besides go to work.   Since then, I have watched developments in game hardware and software from the sidelines. I do have some observations about the situation with the forthcoming PS...

I did a fair amount of work with Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day, writing spreadsheets for other people. (I was paid and everything. Amazing.)   Tracking down errors in those spreadsheets was always a pain in the neck. Time has marched on, mercilessly. 1-2-3, Symphony, Jazz, Improv and even Quattro are just historical footnotes now. I haven't built a serious spreadsheet for anyone since 1991. I do use Excel, more as a "user" and not as a developer. I've never really dug into any of it's debugging features. For my own purposes, I use the relatively anemic Google Spreadsheet because it's good enough 90% of the time and I always have a browser window open.   I've often wondered (a nice word for "daydreamed") how people debug complex spreadsheets. Spreadsheet power users, while they can spell SDLC and know their way around a VLOOKUP(), do not strike me as the types who have backgrounds in TDD.   Apparently, I am not the only person who won...

While at University in the eighties, I didn't learn much in the way of useful software development tactics or strategies. It was just a question of fulfilling the homework requirements and getting past the exams. I was an EE student and not a ComSci major, after all. When I started my first job out of college, which was as much about programming as it was engineering, I was introduced to version control in the form of the PolyTron Version Control System, or PVCS. At that time, I worked in a two-person coding group. PVCS kept us from stepping on each other's work and allowed us to track our changes, using nothing more than the legendary MS-DOS command line.   When I moved on to my second job, the coding environment was more complex and chaotic. I was surprised that the version control strategy consisted of occasionally pkzipping the source files. The product itself was somewhat confused. I've worked on many projects since then, and it always seems that the better-run p...