Recently Adobe announced that they would be offering their software at rental subscription prices and I was excited!   What a great idea!!  But did they do it right?  I don’t think so.. but they are so close!

Lets take Adobe Flash Professional as an example of whats going on, and their likely reasons behind it;  If you purchase the full version it costs $799 and the simple fact of the matter is, most individuals wont want to pay that kind of money for a piece of software.  So really the only purchasers of their code were companies that could easily absorb that cost (or the rare individual like myself that is willing to pay).   At $799 even “honest joe” will pirate the software if he really wants it.

At that price point they have completely alienated the casual user.   More over that price point only serves to encourage the casual user to pirate the software because its not even remotely affordable.  I’m not saying its right to pirate by any stretch, but I am saying that even an honest person can rationalize doing so when the price point is so far out of their reach.   Many would say eight hundred or eight million, it makes no matter so screw it.

More over, most software companies look at each pirated copy of their software as lost revenue, thus as a general rule they resort to raising the price even higher so that the companies that do make the purchase help to recoup costs and offset the fact that the software is pirated so much.. causing a vicious cycle.  Ubisoft is very guilty of this..

So the question becomes, how do you get the casual user?   What is the price point most people are willing to throw at a piece of software?  And in the subscription model;  How much are people willing to spend monthly on something?

Lowering the cost of the software to something the casual user would be able to afford simply isn’t the answer because then suddenly they lose all the money they were getting when companies were purchasing the software.  So even though it sure would be nice to get Adobe Flash Professional for $50.. it wont happen..heh

So the subscription model really does seem like a good option as it allows those who have the money to purchase the full software to do so, and those who want to try the software out or to keep an active subscription to do so without breaking the bank.

But here is where they are missing a huge opportunity that most MMO game creators have already figured out..  Something I like to refer to as the 10% rule or the 90/10 rule (maybe related to the Pareto Principle?).

And that is simply, if you set the monthly subscription rate at the correct price point a vast majority of people wont bother to ever cancel it because it’s beneath their notice.    According to my sources inside, Blizzard has about 10% of their accounts that remain open and paid for, but they are never played simply because the monthly fee is low enough that it’s below the radar of the consumer.

I really do think that the subscription model is the future of software publishing and purchasing, but I really believe Adobe has missed the mark a tad by setting the price point too high.

In my humble opinion Adobe is a few dollars away from a goldmine..  If they were to set the price point for their new subscription model to $15 with a year contract or $25 (at most!) without, most people would never bother to cancel the subscription.   Then maybe they could also offer a $35 rent to own model or even a variable “choose your own rate” rent to own model as I’m sure there are folks who’d want that too..   But the current $49 month to month is just too high as the first month they don’t use it, they’ll notice and cancel it.

Even so I salute you Adobe for bringing your awesome software to the casual users again.. Thanks for that.   Now if you don’t mind I’m gonna go buy Flash Professional.

I have 2 main computers that I use at home (beyond my work laptop, my home server and my firewall proxy box).. One is my super uber game machine, and one is my catch all play around machine. The game machine is a windows box because I don’t have much choice — you want to play games, you use windows. Go Win-tendo!

The play machine was an Ubuntu box until last weekend when a thunderstorm killed it. We have surge protectors on all our machines and a dedicated circuit for this part of the house, but for whatever reason this machine didn’t weather the storm. It was a very old machine and it had been rebuilt many times over so really it was due.

So, I figured it was time to get a new machine. Originally I was going to get a “shuttle” machine which is a small PC but then someone else pointed out that the MacMini’s are perfect for what I am wanting to do..
I was intrigued. Firstly, I wanted to do some iPhone SDK stuff and didn’t have a mac, plus I wanted to get a small machine that wouldn’t be the huge honkin box it was replacing. The mini would be perfect!
I figured what the hell and made the splurge. It was only $600 after tax with my IBM discount so really I couldn’t complain — and let me tell ya, this little machine is great!

I really haven’t ever been a full time mac user, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Most of my mac experience comes from a machine I used for about a year back in 1994.. Quite a different animal, trust me. Leopard is fantastic. It really is very simple and intuitive. Plus now that it’s just a BSD machine it is amazingly simple to get stuff working.

My very first challenge was to get Synergy up and running so I didn’t need a keyboard/mouse attached to the box. Yeah.. that took about 20 minutes. The hard part was figuring out the “launchd” system which I wasn’t used to. But once I got that sorted out, it was cake!

So far everything just works. It reminds me of Ubuntu in that way.. I really have to wonder how Windows is still around.. And you’re reading the blog of a LONG TIME windows user.. I mean I went from Amiga to Windows 3.1.. I continued to use Windows NT long after it was popular to do so, and then used Win2k pro well beyond when XP was the standard..

I can honestly say that at this point, I’ll never go Vista. Why would I?! XP does everything I need for games, and for anything else I’ll use linux or now Mac. So far I’m very happy with the MacMini.

I do have one complaint about the hardware: it comes with Wifi and frankly, it’s not very good. The mac mini wifi seems to drop it’s connection or atleast work intermittently at best, even when the receiver is less than 3 feet away. I was pretty underwhelmed by that one aspect of the device.. Other than that its great!

And I do have one complaint about the software: the home and end key don’t work the way I think they should and no amount of remapping or fixing seems to make them work like they do on the PC. It’s annoying.

I would highly recommend it.

My old server was FedoraCore2.. *shudder* I wasn’t given a choice there.. it was core2 or nothing. And since it was out of date pretty much the day I was given it, it was doomed to be hacked at some point. I knew that going into it.. Eh what can ya do.

Well, it happened. Sometime last week someone rooted the box. They did a pretty thorough job of it too, though the more I looked at it the more I thought it was a script kiddie instead of someone that’s actually clever..

They went through and added a program that listened on port 50030 for some sort of command before it went out and did it’s misdeeds.. Then went through the trouble of replacing every tool that you would normally use to detect these things with their own custom version which hid the running process..

That’s not even the sneaky part.. they also went through and set the attrib of those files to make them undeletable even by root. Annoying.

So instead of trying to save the box, and undo the fuckery that they had installed. I just wiped it. I installed a much later version of the OS and all new stuff.. restored the database, and all things are now happy.

It was a good learning experience and interesting for the most part. It really went a long way to point out that I’m a software engineer, not a server admin. And it really seems like the more you are one, the less you are the other.. I’m trying to learn this stuff, but its a lot of magic to me at this point. I mean there is so much to know, I don’t see how anyone could know it all.

Add to the fact that the internet is by it very nature a warzone and this server/hacker thing is an eternal arms race and I begin to think, why the hell bother? I want a server is the obvious answer..

As always I don’t blame the hacker .. its a game really.. I wish I knew how they got in, not so I could hack other boxes but so I could make it safe on mine — this is something I’ll likely never learn.

So this is what I did once I got a fresh install on the box — I put this here for me so I can do it quickly and easily next time;

less /etc/inittab — make sure we are in rc level 3, if not change it and reboot

chkconfig –list | grep 3:on — Shows run level of services managed through init.d make sure everything is on you want on, and off that you don’t want.

Only do this if you want sendmail off, which you likely wont want because PHP needs it.

chkconfig –level 3 sendmail off — turn off sendmail so it doesn’t start on boot and annoy me constantly
service sendmail stop — turn off sendmail (smtp port 25 is now closed)

cd /etc/cron.daily — turn off the annoying logwatch email spam which is again an annoyance.

netstat -pan | grep LIST — Show a list of all open ports/listeners
nmap localhost — does the same thing, make sure they don’t conflict

useradd [newuser]
passwd [newuser]

visudo — Add [newuser] to the sudoers list
log out as root and relog in as [newuser]

sudo yum install vim — install VIM because I prefer it as my remote editor
sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config — set PermitRootLogin to no so that root can’t SSH into the box

sudo yum list all > ~/rpm-avail.txt — get a list of everything installable, its easier to get a grep on the file

sudo yum -y install httpd php mysql mysql-server php-mysql — Install traditional LAMP setup

sudo /sbin/service mysqld start — Start up mysqld
sudo /sbin/service httpd start — Start up apache

sudo /sbin/chkconfig –level 3 mysqld on — Make sure mysqld starts on reboot
sudo /sbin/chkconfig –level 3 httpd on — Make sure apache starts on reboot

We don’t want people hitting our MySQL from out side so we need to make sure its only listening to the internal port.. Not sure why this isn’t the default setting.

sudo vim /etc/my.cnf — Add “bind-address=127.0.0.1″ to the [mysqld] block
mysqladmin -u root password ‘new-password’

We want to keep people from using our apache as a proxy, so;
sudo vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Comment out LoadModule proxy_{anything} and restart apache
Change the AllowOverride None to AllowOverride ALL in the root directory (this lets .htaccess changes work)

Now create the various databases and restore those bad boys using the database user/passwords appropriate for those.

Restore the files to their correct places and make sure the virtual host information is correct in httpd.conf

Also, change the logrotate.conf to rotate the httpd logs daily instead of weekly.. otherwise they get biggish..

aaaannd.. GO!

I eventually splurged and purchased a Commodore 64 and was off to the races. I suddenly went from having 3.5k of programmable space to nearly 39k of programmable space!! WOW! That’s programming space for days! It was a lot of fun learning to write on the C=64. I could make that computer do anything. To this day I think I knew more about the C=64 than I have ever known about any computer. I literally could make that machine do anything, and did at every turn.

After a while the C=64 got old and I eventually really splurged and purchased an Amiga 500. I didn’t do nearly as much programming on this machine as I did on the C=64, and I think that’s mainly because I was suddenly thrust into a very foreign environment and didn’t fully recover. My programming skills slipped a lot while I owned the Amiga. I did do a lot of basic programming, but nothing on the level of what I did on the C=64 or Vic-20.

While I owned the Amiga’s I was more interested in 3D graphics and thus started my love affair with NewTek’s Lightwave 3D, but that’s a story for another article.

I still owned my Amiga 500 (and then an Amiga 1200) until I went to Korea, thanks to the US Army, in 1993. Up to that point I had resisted getting an IBM / IBM Compatible PC like all my friends, in favor of the Amiga system. The Army pretty much changed that.. While in Korea I worked with many IBM compatible machines as well as various other OS machines of every kind. That experience pushed me to purchase my first IBM machine. It was a 486DX 100 machine. And of course, with my extensive programming background, what was the first thing I wanted to do? well.. play games of course.. but the second thing was learn to program it..

I immediately started shopping around for a language that I could use to make the computer sing. And I tried them all. I was very dissatisfied with the majority of them.. And yet again with my desire to program fading (due to lack of an inspiring language) my skills faded as well. .. back to playing games.

In 1995 I was stationed in Washington and I was bored. The job satisfaction there was the pits so I needed something to do in my spare time that would take my mind of the dull drudgery that I had enlisted for. I went to the computer store one day bound and determined to find a programming language that would be powerful and yet functional and good in every way. I was feeling somewhat anti-Microsoft at the time so visual basic 3.0 was not something I wanted to use. Plus I didn’t like that you had to have runtime libraries in order to run their tokenized code. (Not even true compiled code..sheesh)

As I strolled through CompUSA I found a copy of Delphi 1.0 on the shelf between Visual Basic (Microsoft) and C++ (Microsoft). Delphi, a programming language developed by Borland is a descendant of Turbo Pascal but with a new visual wrapper. Basically it’s Borland’s answer to Microsoft’s Visual Basic, It’s Visual Pascal. I was intrigued enough to purchase it on the spot without even doing any research. And it was one of the best splurge purchases I have ever made. I’m very happy with it.

So that’s the basic story of how I cam to be a Delphi programmer. And I have tried other software packages.. I have programming environments for C++, C#, Delphi.. etc.. I have books on just about every language you care to mention.. but I always find myself coming back to Delphi.

At this point, when it comes to standard applications, I will always use Delphi. There is just no reason for me to use anything else. Delphi excels at rapidly creating desktop programs.

I’m also trying to learn C++ so that I may take an even more serious step into the world of programming. I want to create games, and that’s typically not something one does in Delphi. While it is possible in Delphi, it really wasn’t intended for that use.

At this point in my life it has been a while since I have done any kind of work with Delphi or any other compiled languages, the majority of the programming work I do is in the realm of web languages.

However, a new project has emerged that is right up my ally and promises to be fun and exciting. And it comes with the added bonus of introducing me to a completely new language. LISP! Now.. Lisp is not a new language by any stretch of the meaning, but its new to me. I know virtually nothing about lisp, and from what I have seen of it, it’s not like any other language I have every used. But it should be good. Wish me luck on that, I’ll post more about it when I get somewhere.. (or if you never hear from me on the subject again then you know the outcome)

Web Programming

Most “real” programmers frown or scoff at web developers calling themselves programmers. Let’s face it, anyone can create a webpage. Add to that, the fact that there are quite a few WYSIWYG editors for web development, and the number of people who call themselves “web programmers” can sky rocket.

But that’s not me. I’m a paid and professional web developer. I’m also a web programmer in that I don’t just design and implement static web pages, but rather create rich dynamic sites with robust back end infrastructures. I do more than just crop/cut up photoshop files and create an html file.

It actually offends me a little that I am straddled with the same “title” as those others who know virtually nothing. I have taken to calling my self a software engineer simply to avoid the stigma.

I consider myself to be an expert, or at the least highly skilled, in the creation of rich web applications and the use of Ajax, PHP, XHTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM and I’m fairly good at PERL.

I have worked for many large and small companies as a back end and front end developer. Due to contractual agreements I wont list all of them here, but here are a few of the more recent ones that I can list:

• C3 Communications – I was the highest ranking web monkey in the shop. (a shop of one)
• Austin Independent School District – I did everything here, from ordering the machines to writing the code.
• The Austin American Statesman – One of a handful of web monkies, but the only on site PHP developer.
• Hoovers Online – A D&B company that maintained a staff of 8 to 10 full time PHP developers that wrote the functionality of every aspect of the site. This was an awesome place to work – alas it was a short contract.
• BuildForge Inc. – An up and coming company that provides a tool used by many major programming shops around the world, I am one of 2 full time PHP5 developers. We do nothing but hard core OOP-PHP5 and we got to build it from the ground up – really a dream project.
• IBM – Buildforge was purchased by IBM, after which I became the Sr. UI Developer for the Build Forge project at IBM – making me an IBM Software Engineer. There are now 3 fully time PHP developers working around me and its awesome.

Plus whatever other stuff you can find on this website. I enjoy creating functionality that I need and making it available to the masses where possible.

Programming is a fun hobby and can be very rewarding, but you have to kind of be brain damaged to like it at any serious level.

Why can’t people discussing intelligent software solutions from different paradigms agree to disagree on this point.. and move the hell on?!

It drives me insane that you always have these hard core zealots that spout about how their OS is the best and that Microsoft sucks. You should use Linux cause it is better than Microsoft.. No no.. You should use a Mac because a “Wintel” machine sucks.. No the Amiga was the best! (I miss my Amiga).. etc etc.

I hate it.. Everyone hates Microsoft..

Do a search for “windows sucks” on Google and see what you get.. Good luck sifting through it all.. Everyone of them hard core Microsoft fans.. All of them are completely unbiased I’m sure..

Firstly.. ALL OSes are crap. None of them have got it right. They all have problems. It bothers me though that any time I have any kind of problem with my computer, which may or may not be completely unrelated to the OS, some sycophant from another flavor of “craptacular” will chime in and tell me that the problem is due to the OS I’m using, and that specifically Microsoft sucks.. if I just switched to {enter other shitty os name here} all my woe’s would be solved.

Ya know what there sport, if that were true don’t ya think it would have happened already? I’m pretty sure I don’t need you to tell me which way the wind blows. If your OS was so much better, I bet I would have noticed by now..

I use Linux, everyday.. No thanks – it doesn’t fit the bill, I don’t like it.. and I find it largely a pain in the ass..

I’ve seen and used a Mac.. No thanks – it doesn’t do what I need. Again, good for some things, but doesn’t do everything I want.. Etc..

No no.. that’s not enough.. They must convert me!

Even now some asshat is reading this just waiting for the end so they can dive off into their pre-scripted rant about how if I just tried their OS it would be better.. OR, even more infuriating, about how I just don’t understand and I must be some drooling sub-par computer half-wit who barely knows how to flip the I/O button to make the flashy lights go..

Clearly since I like Microsoft or in my case because I tolerate it, I must be one of those sad pathetic people who don’t know better. Pity me – For I am lame.

Here’s the 411 people..

I don’t “like” Microsoft or Windows. I use it. I use it because it’s all I got. At best, I tolerate it. And when something stupid goes wrong for no reason what so ever, I have same psychopathic desire to kill small animals just like everyone else.. It’s what I got.. So I use it.

Linux has stupid, crappy and jacked-up issues with it, just like the Mac.. just like Windows.. Get over yourself.

But to keep it simple for you people, I can sum it all up to ONE reason. I have ONE reason why I use Microsoft over any other OS – One reason that NO OTHER OS can beat; GAMES.

That’s it. I believe I have won that argument. You lose.

The games that I play, I can only play on a windows machine.

Dos, Linux, BSD, AIX, Mac, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeoS, CP/M, CLI, LCARS. Whatever operating system you choose.. they don’t have the games..

None of them do.

Stop telling me that my OS sucks.. Thanks.. I got it.. Shut the fuck up..

My OS may suck, but I got the games baby..

And until your OS, whatever it may be, has those same games.. It’s with windows I’ll stay. Suck or not.