Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Announcing the Notches Toolbar

  We released the first version of the Notches Toolbar today . From the start, we’ve always felt that reviews need to be delivered contextually and thus have emphasized partnerships over simply aggregating reviews. At the same time, we recognize that partnerships are not always possible for a variety of reasons. To that end, I’m very excited to be able to finally announce the Notches Toolbar , a Firefox 3 extension that enhances your browsing experience by adding reviews to sites that don't have them. Of course, this functionality builds on the Notches platform, so any reviews written on other partners (such as Facebook and Microreviews) will also be visible through the Toolbar (and vice versa). I hope you’ll try it out today and let us know what you think . Posted Sep 05 2008, 07:09 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Startup, Programming, NextNY, Notches

• Is IIS7 on Vista not serving static content?

  If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this is likely the culprit. (You’ll all see the Static Files handler for * being mapped to the DefaultDocumentModule). The answer is to go into the Windows Features dialog and make sure that the Common Http Features are checked off. Hope this helps. Posted Jul 02 2008, 02:10 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Software Development, Vista, Microsoft, .NET, Programming, Knowledge Base

• We are looking to hire good developers

  Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take ownership over an area and really drive it forward. Our core platform is written in C# / .NET, so familiarity there will help – but ultimately we’re looking for smart, ambitious people with a good background in computer science, algorithms, and so on. Our offices are currently in downtown New York City (SoHo). We’re certainly flexible in terms of hours but we do want to spend as much time as possible collaborating in person – in other words, we’re not looking for offshore firms or out-of-town developers right now. You can find a more detailed job description here . If you’re interested or know anyone who might be, please contact us. Posted Jun 12 2008, 01:47 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Software Development, Personal, Web 2.0, C#, .NET, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Programming, Notches

• The Challenges of Scaling Twitter's Follower Model

  I wrote previously that Twitter's architecture is not scalable for real-time messaging . Indeed, the Twitter development team talked about this recently . Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we've tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that's introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. Dare Obasanjo recently looked at the issues and implications and suggested that it's not the technical architecture to blame, but perhaps rather the logical model. If Twitter was simply a micro-content publishing tool with push notifications for SMS and IM then the team wouldn't be faulted for designing it as a Content Management System (CMS). In that case you'd just need three data structures... Posted May 26 2008, 12:57 PM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Rants, Programming, Twitter

• Twitter's problems are the result of architecture, XMPP may be the answer

  The problem with scaling Twitter is not the choice of framework, but the choice of architecture. In other words, abandoning Ruby On Rails probably isn't going to solve all of their problems. At the same time, I'm not sure that decentralization is necessary and comes with its own set of challenges. The real problem is that the polling model of the Twitter API doesn't scale for real-time communications. As it is today, many Twitter clients will poll (by default) every 3-5 minutes to see if there was an update. Not only are they not really participating in real-time, they are generating an enormous number of requests that - even while each payload is small - generate a lot of overhead in aggregate just in checking and responding. As I've suggested in the past , a better solution would be to move the "real-time" API around the Jabber/XMPP client instead of HTTP. The good news is that Twitter already has an IM presence so it's easy enough for third-party clients... Posted May 05 2008, 08:24 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Programming, Twitter

• The Enterprise, The iPhone, and the Role of Silverlight

  With its recent announcement to support ActiveSync on the iPhone , Apple is clearly going after the enterprise user. The problem, as Colin puts it, is that the decisions that consumers make decisions on a radically different set of criteria than organizations . Lack of Exchange support was surely holding back enterprise adoption, so that move was both obvious and inevitable. The fact that they are also supporting remote wipe is a bigger deal than most might realize too - security is a major concern for large enterprises, and for a long time Blackberry was the de facto device in large part because of this. (Windows Mobiles devices weren't allowed at my last job until the Remote Wipe feature was enabled). Fundamentally, I think we're moving to a model where enterprises are going to demand a certain baseline for devices to play in their garden. Features like over-the-air Exchange connectivity, remote wipe, and support for .NET, Java, and Flash are quickly becoming non-negotiable. It... Posted Mar 27 2008, 09:00 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Gadgets, Microsoft, .NET, Enterprise, Apple, Programming

• Creating a better 404

  Jeff Atwood rants about the typical 404 page , saying "the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak." Jeff lays out 5 ways to make the 404 error page better. Drop the 404 Yes, the HTTP response code is 404, but there's absolutely no reason that ever needs to be shown on the actual page. Error codes aren't helpful . A simple explanation of the problem in plain English is all that's required. Any 404 page that has the characters "404" on it, if not already an outright failure, is already well on its way to becoming one. Automatically notify you of the 404. Repeat after me: it is not the user's job to inform you about problems with your website . If you require the user to click a button to notify you about a 404, or if you require the user to fill out a broken link form, you have utterly failed your users... Posted Dec 31 2007, 08:33 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Blogging, Design, Programming, Slashstar

• Congrats to Faisal on his new role on the ADO.NET team

  My good buddy Faisal has moved from MSBuild to ADO.NET . Specifically, he's the Program Manager for LINQ to SQL and the Object Service for Entity Framework. He says you'll hear a lot more from him on these things, but of course if past history is any indication his blogging will be short lived :) Either way, I'm still waiting for him to convince me why I should LINQ instead of SubSonic . The only issue we're really having now with SubSonic is with the JOIN story, and they're supposedly prototyping stuff to address this in the next build. Posted Dec 05 2007, 03:45 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Personal, Microsoft, .NET, Programming

• What exactly is an iPhone application?

  Scoble mentions 3 new iPhone apps today from Newsgator, Bloglines, and Google. It's interesting that companies keep saying they are doing "iPhone development", when really these are nothing more than sites skinned to look more natural on the iPhone. The iPhone is the only mobile phone that gets special versions made for it, which is especially curious to me considering one of its big selling points is the full-featured Safari and a better browsing experience in general. My initial take is that these companies are just trying to ride the coattails of the amazing iPhone marketing. Mashable says "NewsGator hasn’t been so hyped in recent months, and all I ever hear about is Google Reader." Is it just an easy press release when you have nothing else interesting to announce? Or do these special versions really make a difference? (I don't have an iPhone... so isn't an entirely rhetorical question). Posted Jul 24 2007, 10:28 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Rants, Gadgets, Things that amuse me, Marketing, Apple, Programming

• Microsoft Silverlight

  A lot of people are very excited about Silverlight , the technology that was formerly known as WPF/E. Jesse says it will give Flash a real run for its money because of a better video story (emphasis in original). Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. As for DRM support, I don't think that's of any real consequence. Jesse claims "companies that want to stream TV and movies over the web, will not consider any method that doesn't allow for DRM protection", but we're already seeing a trend away from DRM. That said, there are certainly things to get excited about, particularly the prospect of cross-platform CLR support and the ability to develop Flash-like applications with the power of the Visual Studio environment (and not having to learn a new scripting language at that). One thing worth noting is the fact that Flash is... Posted May 25 2007, 02:30 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Microsoft, C#, .NET, Video, Programming, DRM