I’m in Seoul, Korea at the moment, and a few days before I got here they had their biggest dump of snow in 100 years. Needless to say, there is still snow to be found lying about, which is a novel experience for a boy from Sydney (where today, BTW, it was 39 Celcius/102 Farenheit). I’ve been caught a couple of times smiling like an idiot at a pile of snow by folk from the Borland Korea office. I’ve restrained myself so far, but I may just sneak out of the hotel tonight and find a quiet spot to throw a snowball or two.

© 2004, Malcolm Groves

We actually got caught up in this protest in Seoul last week. We came out of Kyobo (Korea’s largest bookstore) and walked straight into a horde of protesting Koreans. The photo makes them look angry, and indeed the people I spoke to in Korea were mostly irate at the opposition’s behaviour, however from what I saw at this protest they were enjoying themselves thoroughly. Bands were playing, vendors were selling food and it seemed like hundreds of people were trying to give us candles in cups (it was bloody cold, so we were very tempted to take them just to warm our hands). Apparently the protest went on for 3 or 4 days, so maybe all protests should be this much fun.

We took a bit of a holiday in Seoul at the end of my trip, so I’m just getting back into it.

Before the holiday, however, we had a half day Delphi 8 for .NET event, with just shy of 700 Delphi developers showing up! I’m going to write something up for BDN with some photos.

Anyway, the Borland Korea staff worked like crazy on the event, and I swanned in to do the opening keynote bit and a C#Builder plug (as well as inflict my grasp of Korean on the audience. Needless to say, they were very polite).

As is usually the way, the one who did the least work got the glory, and I ended up in Korea’s largest IT newspaper the next day, which earned me many brownie points with my Korean Mother-in-law 🙂 However, it has raised the bar, as she expects me on TV next time I’m in Korea, another newspaper clipping just won’t cut it.

Hmmm, do you think I might be losing my hair?

This piece raised some interesting questions for me.

I’m going to try and avoid the obvious response which, as I work for a development tools vendor, you can probably guess.

But I’m wondering at what point do you decide that your tool is doing quite enough thank you very much? I know this will be different for everybody, but why is today’s level of abstraction enough, whereas the level we had 5 years ago was not? Why was it OK for dbExpress to abstract out details of dealing with databases, but it’s not OK for ECO to take that further?

Is the rise of code-focused features (like refactoring, smarter code templates, code intentions, etc) in IDE’s a recognition that giving people more wizards, components and frameworks is not necessarily what they are after? Just give me stuff that lets me bang out code faster?

I was just chatting with someone about this who said that your comfort level is determined by the technologies at which you first become truly proficient. Actually, he qualified this by saying this was the point where you no longer had to spend too many cycles on the details of the framework, language syntax, etc and could focus the majority of your attention on the problem. For example, I used to be a C++ developer, but I really sucked. I jumped ship to Delphi 1, but I don’t think I approached this "proficient" point until around the Delphi 5-ish timeframe. So, this theory says that Delphi 5 should be my comfort level and everything after that just becomes "this bloody tool getting in the way".

Hmm, don’t think I buy that. I’m not sure what I would buy instead, but this doesn’t do it for me. Or is it that you reach a point where it’s just hard work to keep up with the latest doo-hickey and you either put on a suit and tie or grumble about Microsoft taking the fun out of programming.

Well, I’m wearing a suit and tie as I write this, so I’m sure that’s not it 🙂

However, it is an interesting thing for tools vendors to be thinking about. I know I’ve faced this type of response from people while we’ve been out evangelising .NET via C#Builder and Delphi 8. Our industry is pretty much built on raising productivity by lifting the level of abstraction, and I’m not suggesting that should stop. Is it just a case that, as Geoffrey Moore would suggest, eventually market pressure will force the the laggards to adopt the new abstraction or get left behind?

Theories anyone?

Speaking of eBooks, Safari comes close I think. I like that I am subscribing to a library of books, rather than to a specific title. I’m still trying to decide how effective the whole download token thing would work for me, given that the bulk of my programming time these days is in Qantas economy class with no access to the net. 

I also thought O’Reilly were onto an interesting idea with the Visual Studio.NET editions of their Nutshell books. Having the text of these reference books available integrated into HTML Help 2.0 in C#Builder and Delphi 8 appealed to me a lot, however they don’t seem to have expanded this offering beyond a handful of titles.

The Free Beer post below made me think of the whole eBook thing again.

I currently receive a number of magazine subscriptions in electronic format, and I love it. It takes bloody ages for hardcopy magazines to make it all the way to Australia, and I have no problem at all reading PDF versions of magazines on flights, etc. Worst case, I can print out the specific articles and read them in the proverbial.

So why are eBooks so unsatisfying, when magazines in this format rock?

Part of it for me comes back to updates. Magazines are almost meant to be transient (although don’t mention the boxes of Delphi Magazine, DDJ, etc back issues I have in my garage), but books are supposed to be longer lived. As far as I can tell, most eBooks don’t come with updates. The Indy book is one exception, but I wish more eBook publishers would treat them like software. Give me minor updates for free, and charge me (a reduced amount) for major upgrades, or let me subscribe so I get everything for a year.

eBooks give publishers the cost model of software, but they don’t seem very keen to pass on the other benefits to end users.

I’m a bit of a packrat when it comes to email. I constantly receive warnings about exceeding my space allowance on our mail server, and have PST files so large they would kill a brown dog. I just can’t bring myself to delete mails because "you never know when I might need that". I blame my Dad, actually. Over the years he has had to build successively larger sheds to house his collection of stuff that might came in handy one day.

Well, rather than having to deal with the source of the problem, technology has once again allowed me to live in denial. LookOut, from http://www.lookoutsoft.com/, is a free download that adds full text indexing to Outlook, and I’m totally smitten.

Yes, once you install it you’ll have to let it index your folders (make sure you go into Options and check out what it is going to index. It’s default wasn’t quite aggressive enough for my liking), but this can take place in the background. And yes, the indexes will take up a bit of space, but not as much as I expected.

But I guarantee, the first time you enter a search and have it return in less than 2 seconds, having searched every piece of mail you’ve hoarded away for the last few years, you will not care. This is what Outlook Search should have been from the start!