After some recent restructuring of my business (I'm now 100% owner of Pragmapool) and ongoing problems with the server that this and my other sites sit on, I'm migrating all of my sites over to Mosso. I'll probably go into why I chose them and why I'm willing to recommend them even before I've moved all of my sites over at a later date. What's relevant for today is that one more than one of those domains, the email is actually more important than the site on that domain.

With several accounts that average 2000-3000+ spam messages a day, dealing with the email on the new server didn't exactly appeal to me. Having heard about how some plenty smart people enjoyed the switch over to outsourcing their email to Google, I figured I'd give it a shot.

The thing about Gmail (and Yahoo mail and Hotmail) is that lots of large companies actually block them. When you do the contract development gig like I do, that can get in the way of actually doing your job. None of those companies block any of my domain names.

So, I followed all of the instructions for changing the MX DNS entries to point things over, set up the email accounts and was able to send and receive email. However, even when setting up webmail.example.com, the browser still gets forwarded to Google's domain.

Fortunately, Google recently added IMAP access. When you combine that IMAP access with a copy of Squirrelmail installed directly on the domain, you can use any of:

• The GMail interface that many know and love
• IMAP access using Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.
• Squirrelmail access

This weekend, I was doing a bunch of digging into how to use some of the open source ORM (Object Relational Mapping) packages out there. That process of technical research follows a pretty predictable pattern:

• do a few Google searches
• open the best results into a bunch of tabs
• read the info
• come up with a few, more detailed questions
• repeat

As that loop progresses, the questions I end up asking Google get more and more specific. By the time I've been digging for an hour or 2, the bulk of the results are starting to come from forums, mailing lists and other discussions of the technology in question.

That's when one of my pet peeves rears its head. You put a fairly detailed question into Google, get a page from a forum where someone asked your EXACT question (including most of the nuance for your specific needs) and, after a few people saying they don't know how or aren't sure, the original questioner pops back in and says, "Nevermind, I figured it out".

And that's it. Nothing else.

Particularly gnarly questions yield more than one such incident. Even worse, there are often 5 or 6 people just as frustrated, asking this person exactly HOW they figured it out. 

To me, this is an online etiquette and/or karma thing. If you go asking other people to explain how to do something, and you figure it out on your own, telling them "Nevermind" is just the first step. It is now your responsibility to explain back to the forum/mailing list/etc. what you did to figure it out. 

Sure, your solution might not work for everyone who will stumble across the discussion, but it's a whole lot better than being mocked by someone saying they *have* the answer, but haven't shared it.

Photo: Dan Zen

I make a swing past a bunch of sites like Freshmeat, C Sharp Source, CodeProject, Codeplex and Sourceforge
every week or 2, looking for new and updated C# (and PHP, etc) projects and libraries that are up to interesting stuff.

One article on CodeProject today caught my eye. The article is entitled: Generate Complete Web 2.0 Applications in Minutes. That sentiment is all over the software development industry. The Microsoft Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 launch last week showed the attitude at several different points.

Basically, it boils down to excitement at the ability to quickly build "applications" with little more than a wizard. That exact sentiment was expressed to me multiple times at a consulting company I worked with for a while. The person in question believed that if we just used one of these magical tools, our projects would go from a couple of hundred hours down to a single day.

The problem with this whole approach to software development is not that the tools themselves aren't great or that they promise something they don't deliver. It's that they're asking a question that doesn't matter in the context it's getting asked.

That's because neither I nor any software developer that I know is collecting a paycheck or getting an invoice paid for "building applications". At least, that's not what the payment is in exchange for in economic terms. Rather, I am getting paid for *solving problems*.

And, the thing about getting paid to solve problems and magic tools that make some kinds of problems easier to solve this year than last year (which is what most of these tools actually do) is that that just changes the problems that people pay for.

When tools that do easy CRUD generation or data entry applications show up in the marketplace, that doesn't mean that software developers magically get to use those tools to only work 2 hours a week and then coast for the rest. It just changes the kinds of problems that earn developers money.

I love this chain of progress. That's because it lets me solve ever-increasingly difficult problems with the same effort. That's very cool. However, it doesn't promise easy street and it bothers me when that's what's implied by this whole attitude.

There are a lot of common patterns in data that appear over and over again. When we can recognize patterns in our reality and match them to these known and documented patterns, we can much better understand what's actually going on and

Anyone who has sat through an intro to economics course even at the high school level has spent their fair share of time drawing and looking at supply/demand curves.

Similarly, if you've ever gathered statistics on nearly anything, you've seen a bell curve.  For those who have been following the book The Long Tail and the subsequent media frenzy, power law curves are likely very familiar.

It's that very media frenzy that can be described by a graph that I'm fond of and tend to see in lots of places. It's called the hype cycle and describes how lots of things, technology in particular, go through a pattern of enthusiasm, disappointment and maturation.

What's wonderful about this curve is that once you know about it and start looking for it, it shows up all over and really puts lots of breathless technical press into perspective.

Basically, the idea of the curve is this:

1. Someone invents new technology. (Hey, here's this thing called XML)
2. Some people start using it and telling everyone how great it is. (Look what you can use XML for)
3. People start buying into the hype and looking to use the new technology EVERYWHERE they can. (XML cures cancer)
4. Some of those places are deeply inappropriate and those who didn't recognize that end up disappointed. (Umm, no it doesn't cure cancer)
5. Backlash that leaves people rejecting even valid uses.
6. Things settle down and the technology lands in its permanent niche.

The trick is that when you realize that a given technology or product is on this track, it's much easier to avoid getting caught up in it.

All of that is to explain why, when I was reading this article at Techcrunch that I laughed out loud when the graph loaded. The article is about a technology was hyped heavily last year and the article talks about whether it's demise is happening or not. However, what I found funny was that the graph was fairly close to the hype cycle.

And, for the record, I see many things in today's tech world that are teetering on the edge of falling into the trough of disillusionment at this point. Among them is that I've seen a new outcropping of backlash articles on Twitter, Lifehacking, etc. These are pretty much right on track and predictable.

Nothing to see here.

Ten years ago, I left college and sat down, completing a slowdown that began 4 or so years earlier. When I left high school, I transitioned from doing chores every day and working on the farm to going to college. I stayed relatively active, riding my bike to class year 'round and doing IT support on campus, which required walking all over.

However, when I graduated from college, my situation effectively purged all of the physical activity I was getting all along. Because I'd always just gotten my exercise doing things I already had to do, I didn't pay attention to the fact that The Great Sitting Down necessitated changing my eating or replacing the activity.

As many of you know, I did lose about 50 pounds a couple of years ago by addressing the diet and climbing the stairs at my project site. Alas, again, when 28 flights of stairs were no longer between me and my desk, that loss stopped and I've spent the last couple of years pretty much stuck in the same general ballpark.

While I've messed with a couple of things on the dietary front, I hadn't really done much to acknowledge the physical activity side of things.

Knowing this needed to change, a few months ago, I did like so many others and signed up for a gym, went twice and then kept paying the bill, but little else. Once I'd paid for 3 months and never set foot in the place, I decided that something needed to change.

Clearly, economics says that the best way to ensure that I actually do this thing that I consciously want to do is to leverage incentives or disincentives. I'd heard about a site where you could take out a contract on yourself where money would be sent to a charity you disagree with if you don't follow through (stickK.com). I gave it a look and even got about half way through signing up before abandoning that idea.

The big problem is that even though the goals are weekly, you have to give them the total cost of failure up front. So, you could say that failing to exercise this week would cost you $10, but if you wanted to commit to a year, you'd have to give them the whole $520 off your card up front.

While that is a perfectly valid way to do it, I shied away at that point.

When I sat back to consider the situation, I remembered a study that I had read about the amount of effort people will go to to avoid something so simple as doors closing on a computer screen. That mirrored what I've seen watching other people play video games. Even simple games where you have to keep things going can lead people to get REALLY concerned when nothing more than a few pixels are going to "fall" or break through a wall, etc.

That same principle is what is at work in Jerry Seinfeld's "don't break the chain" productivity method. Given the effects that just losing that incrementing number of completed days, I wondered what would happen for me if nothing more than that number WAS the thing I'd lose by not going to the gym.

So, revived something I've done for lots of other stuff with a 30 Day Challenge. I'd go to the gym every day for 30 days. Period. The challenge wouldn't be over until 30 days in a row were touched by a visit to the gym. Of course, the first few days are often easy and then, hopefully, the cumulative effect of the incrementing number would kick in.

I'm not bundling any sort of goal to lose weight. I'm not bundling any specific gym routine; stepping in the door counts. And, I'm now 12 days in. Twice, so far, I've had a "reason" to miss, but went out of my way to do it anyway, something I've never done with previous attempts at physical activity.

In other words, it's working.