OneMind

Back in the halcyon days of expert systems, one of the reasons a lot of us consultants and commentators found Texas Instruments’ technologies to be so interesting was that they actually used their own tools in-house. There are a huge number of advantages to that, not the least of which is that technologies that are relied on by their developers are more often than not maintained and enhanced more frequently and in more useful ways than those that aren’t.

That’s just one more reason to love NOLOH, the exciting new Web app development environment and SuperFramework I’ve been using for the past 16 or so months. These guys build their own sites (apps) using NOLOH. And they add their own components to their kit bag using NOLOH “nodules” as well. As a result, they find and fix more bugs more rapidly than virtually all of the other frameworks I’ve checked out.

Latest example: some time in the next couple of days, the NOLOH Dev Zone will feature a new video tutorial on how to create a non-trivial app that is integrated into the NOLOH Dev Zone (and elsewhere in that app). Their Comment System — which is a neatly hierarchical comment management component a la Huffington Post — was written in less than 50 lines of code. The video tutorial actually walks you through how it was done. In the process, they also manage to show off some nifty features of NOLOH. Including how, in two lines of code, you can make any object fade into view on the screen. Sweetness.

All of this without a single line of HTML or JavaScript.

Get into their beta program now before their available slots fill up. Tell ‘em I sent you.

GOP Presidential candidate John McCain has been going around touting the idea of repealing the law against offshore drilling as a way of helping America’s energy crisis and relieving our dependence on foreign oil.

In response to critics who say offshore drilling isn’t environmentally sound policy, Bush III says that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, “little or no spillage took place” proving that offshore drilling’s newer technologies make concerns a thing of the past.

Hold on there, buster. As Salon.com reports, 174 spills totaling about 3/4 million gallons of crude were reported during those two storms. Now that’s not a huge amount of oil, to be sure, but any inadvertent spillage (can there be “advertent” spillage?) is too much weighed against the loss of wildlife, damage to beaches and waterfront homes, etc.

Lest you think, however, that I believe McCain is just as useless as the man he would follow into the White House, I think his idea of a $300 million prize for the developer of the battery technology that would led to the manufacture and sale of all-electric vehicles is a darned good one. Sure, it has some holes and the question of how you pay for it has to be answered, but that’s true of both candidates’ plans pre-election. The idea shows McCain is capable of having a good and at least seemingly original idea about major issues.

One of the sharpest wits in American history, George Carlin, has died at 71 of heart trouble. He and Shelly Berman were my two favorite comics and I’m a big fan of comedians and comedy.

“Coincidentally” this morning’s email brought me a reminder of one of his best lines. Commenting on Martha Stewart’s legal problems:

‘Boy, I feel a lot safer now that she’s behind bars. O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her off to jail.’

One of the things about getting older is you watch a lot of your friends — and people like Carlin who only *seemed* like a friend — move on to what’s next. I’m not sad for them, but I *am* sad for me.

Give ‘em Hell, George.

During the past 16 or so months, a great many of my friends and colleagues have been asking me what I’ve been up to. I’ve had to be vague about details because I’ve been working with a brand-new Web application development platform that has been under wraps until now.

Beginning Monday, you can not only get a look at this extraordinary framework, you can begin using it as NOLOH officially launches its public beta program to serious developers. Insider Tip: If you pop into that site any time now, you may find that you’ll get into the beta game early. They’re going to severely limit the number of betas they allow before they close it down, so you want to jump on the bandwagon as soon as you can.

NOLOH is unlike any other Web app framework on the planet. Believe me, I’ve looked at all of them as I’ve searched for a tool that met my complex and demanding set of design requirements. NOLOH (an acronym for Not One Line Of HTML) is fully object-oriented from the inside out and the bottom up, Written in PHP, NOLOH has so many features that just listing them would take up a lot more space than I want to devote to this pre-announcement today.

The key features that drew me to NOLOH and caused me to bet my company on an unreleased proprietary framework long before it was finalized for public use include:

1. Cross-Platform Transparency. NOLOH is absolutely the first-ever app framework I’ve seen that fulfills the original Java Lie of write once, run anywhere. Apps you build with NOLOH run on all major platforms in all major browsers and you never have to give the issue a second thought.
2. AJAX for Free. Other app frameworks I considered supported the AJAX-style UI magic like animations, fades, expand/collapse, and other tricks that make the UI smooth and seamless. NOLOH builds all of this and more into every single component in the environment. No JavaScript files to include, no separate code to write.
3. Outside-World Friendly. Unlike virtually every other framework I evaluated, NOLOH creates apps that are search-engine friendly and bookmarkable. It also supports the browser more completely, including the proper functioning of the browser’s Back button that throws most other apps done in other frameworks for a serious loss.
4. Single-Language Programming. No HTML, no JavaScript, no XML, unless you really want or need them. NOLOH supports the use of these last-generation languages and tools, but you can do all of your app development in a superset of PHP that is not taxing even to a fairly junior PHP developer.

There are a lot more. You’ll hear about more and more in coming days and weeks.

If, like me, your primary interest or role is building Rich Internet Apps that run in any modern browser, you just can’t do any better than NOLOH. And you can get started right away. Sign up for their beta program right now. You’ll get a hosted sandbox space on their server, great support, decent and always-growing documentation, and a feeling of power and efficiency in your daily work you probably haven’t experienced in a long, long time.

NOLOH is the brainchild of Asher Snyder. He and Philip Ross co-developed the NOLOH kernel. Philip Goetz, a long-time software entrepreneur and manager, herded the cats while Clay Gordon has taken on the role of evangelist, at least officially. He’ll get lots of help from me.

I’m going to be blogging a lot more about NOLOH. In fact, I’ve created a new category for it here but for some ridiculous reason Drupal isn’t recognizing the category except for me when I’m logged in.

I’m disappointed that Sen. Barack Obama, my choice for the next President of the United States, decided to allow himself to be bullied into a decision to become the first presidential candidate in more than 30 years to decline public financing for his campaign. I understand his rationale. In his position, I might well have made the same decision.

Still, this feels like a giant step backward on the credibility line for American politics. Particularly since John McCain has agreed to accept public financing, giving him the appearance of taking the high moral ground on this issue. Now, we all know that one of the primary reasons Obama felt he had to make this decision was that the Republicans have mastered the art of hiding behind the filthy undergarments of the 527 crowds. Epitomized by the Swift Boat Veterans of the Kerry slander, these groups are ugly, unconscionable, unprincipled, unrepresentative and have access to unlimited funds. They are a result of a stupid loophole that renders the public financing law all but impotent. If Obama agrees to limit his spending to the $84.1 million allowed by campaign finance law, then he gets outspent by millions of dollars from these unscrupulous 527 groups.

Obama makes some good points about his decision and about the ways in which his campaign is sufficiently different from traditional campaigns in terms of fund-raising that it amounts to a publicly financed campaign. But this kind of subtlety is lost on a voting public with very low tolerance for messages that take longer than 30 seconds to present and 7 seconds to process. Nuanced messaging — long the bane of Democratic Party politics — just doesn’t work well with a citizenry used to IM and MTV and YouTube.

I wish he and his team had given a bit more thought to the best way to do this. Perhaps he could have said, “I won’t spend more than $84.1 million plus whatever the 527s backing McCain spend,” for example. There may be reasons that wouldn’t work; I’m no expert. I just think that the freshness of the Obama campaign’s approach starte smelling a little like a sweaty sock today. Hopefully it won’t last long.

Along with something in excess of 10 million other people, I downloaded the newly released Firefox 3 last night on my OS X box. (I’ll upgrade my Windows XP installation down the road.)

I was immediately struck by how much more comfortable FF3 felt than FF2 ever has. At first, I couldn’t figure out why. Then I noticed the buttons and other UI elements are Aqua-fied so that the browser now has a much more Mac-like feel. That is very cool and for some reason, it tickles me.

FF3 does seem faster and I do like the new intelligent browsing from what I’ve seen so far. The location box has been turned into a search object so that as I start typing a URL I’m not only seeing a list of URLs that start with those characters, but also recently visited pages that match the criteria. For example, if I type “mai”, FF3 brings up my gmail link. Over time, this will probably change the way I browse, though it may cause problems for site owners whose users may not be as readily able to identify them from ever-complexifying lists.

Overall, first impression is very good.

Wow. Shocking and sad news today. Tim Russert of NBC News, the long-time host of Meet the Press, collapsed and died at work today. He was 58.

I never met him. I didn’t always like his work but I always admired it.

He was five years younger than me.

That’s sad and scary and more other things than I really have time or ability to sort out.

Wow.

My buddy Asher Snyder pointed me at TileStack today. This is a site that lets you upload your old HyperCard stacks and turn them into Web applications. They also have an editing environment for creating new Web apps and widgets using the old HyperCard paradigm and HyperTalk scripting language.

Back in the day when HyperCard was the rage in the world of Apple, Bob Perez and I had lunch one day. (Bob was the first HyoerCard evangelist and a great human being.) He asked me what I thought might happen if Apple stuck a TCP/IP stack inside HyperCard so people could share stacks over a LAN. We kicked it around a bit but the project never got any traction inside Apple. If they’d have done that, they’d have been the foundation for the World Wide Web and all of that would have happened sooner.

You just never know.

I wonder how many of the old HyperCarders are going to show up at TileStack before it’s over. XCMD Guru Frederic Rinaldi is apparently already there and I’m sure Danny Goodman won’t be far behind if he isn’t already there incognito.

Insanely weirdly wonderful.

I just finished listening to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s concession/endorsement speech (which I recorded for viewing at a more comfortable hour for me). She delivered the goods for Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, but she wrapped the goods in newspaper rather than shiny paper and silky ribbons.

The meat of her message was clear, powerful and even inspirational. She almost adopted some of Obama’s preacher-like rhythm as she cited reason after reason why “we must elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States.” Her endorsement was ringing, indeed. A few moments before she used Obama’s phrase, I said to myself, “I wonder if she’ll be tuned-in enough to say ‘Yes We Can’?” And she did. Masterful work.

The bread in that sandwich, however, was a little stale and ordinary. Before and after that 6-7 minute stretch of her speech, however, she seemed to me to be trying very hard to signal subtly that should Obama falter or should he lose the upcoming election, she’s ready, willing, able and even eager to take up the mantle and once again take a run at becoming this nation’s first woman President.

I don’t hold that against her. She’s earned that. But I did think this talk could and should have been more about endorsing Obama and less about defining herself and her message and her place in history. By my rough reckoning, her endorsement was about 1/3 of the talk’s content. It should have been closer to 2/3 or 3/4. I thought her ending was a little downbeat and a little reflective and not nearly forward-thinking enough. In fact, the ending was surprisingly weak given the power of what preceded it.

Still, all in all, she did what she should have done and needed to do for her party and her country and that will ultimately stand her in good stead.

In baseball terms, she didn’t hit a home run but she did crush a pretty solid stand-up triple.

Yesterday, a client’s site stopped working. It took a while for us to figure out what happened, but it turned out to be a decision by Dreamhost, my hosting service for the past three or so years, to install a PHP security upgrade to version 5.2.6. That upgrade — perfectly properly installed — broke the way my application’s license for some underlying technology was expected to be referenced. Pretty obtuse stuff, at least for me.

Now I’ve used Dreamhost long enough to be pretty comfortable finding my way around but the recommended solution to this problem was to recompile PHP to change the way my app looked for the license file. WTF? I don’t want to compile code; that’s why I use a managed hosting service. And that’s when Dreamhost’s absolutely abysmal tech support jumped up and bit me. (More below.)

I asked one of my colleagues, who’s also a developer on the code base and an expert on systems stuff, what I should do. He suggested changing hosting services. That seemed a little drastic but I was in a place where my client was rapidly losing confidence in me. So while he went off to see if he could figure out an easier way to solve the problem at DH, I went to the new service he recommended, Bluehost.

Wow. The difference in support is night and day. Dreamhost’s “support” consists of posting an email from a Web form and waiting to hear from someone. No phone number. No chat. You can ask that they call you with resolution but frankly that’s never worked once for me. So I posted the note and went off to look at Bluehost.

Bluehost has a toll-free number staffed 24/7. They also have an online chat support system that seems to be up most if not all of the time. I asked five questions about Bluehost — including how to solve the problem we were facing at Dreamhost — and got immediate answers, twice on the phone and three times via chat. Holy crap. Actual support by real people who seemed to understand my questions and know the answers. Unheard of.

In less time than it took Dreamhost to give me their unacceptable compile-your-own-PHP response, I had signed up for Bluehost, established my client’s domain there, transferred all the files, and had things 80% working. We’d have had it all done by that time but we didn’t take time to discover that Bluehost had built-in support for the licensing technology we were using.

My system administrator took a look at Bluehost for me. He started out skeptical. At $6.95/mo. (for a 24-month program), he sort of wondered out loud how good it could be. Then he spent about 30 minutes exploring it and announced he was moving his personal sites over to it as soon as he could get the time.

Between Bluehost and Yugma, I’m starting to have my faith in the service aspect of our business restored!