New York Times Ditches Fees For TimesSelect

This one from the Huffington Post made me laugh:

“Pinch Sulzberger’s attempt to put his prized columnists behind a subscription wall on the theory that they were so much better than free bloggers that people would pay for them–is finally so doomed it’s actually dead, dead, dead, as of midnight tomorrow. … You see, it’s really a success story! It “met expectations.” It’s just that online ad growth was so much higher it was more profitable to not charge readers and thereby get more of them! I mean, who could have foreseen that (except everyone else in the industry)?”

It’s nice that poor illiterate bastards like me can now read a quality new source for free. Long live the Street!

Sen Barack Omaba is only 3 degrees way from you on LinkedIn

As if created to fulfill Malcolm’s The Tipping Point, LinkedIn has become the clear leader of Social Networking for Grownups. Within a user’s LinkedIN network it’s easy to pick out the mavens, connectors and salespeople among your colleagues acting just as Malcolm described in his best selling book. But now, LinkedIN itself has reached it own tipping point with the surprise appearance of Presidential candidate Barack Obama on the network. His is the featured question today on LinkedIn. It’s a nice venue for a Presidential candidate, especially within my network of knowledge worker connections. This is why LinkedIn is so hot right now. It’s social business networking done right. No themed profile pages, no glitter, just “bidness”. I only add business partners and past coworkers to my network. For me, LinkedIN acts as both a auto-updating telephone book and increasingly a place to connect with people for software projects and referrals. One of the “Connectors” on my network is Marcus Ronaldi, he is a man I could spend a year blogging about but let’s just say he knows the people. He knows the people that know the people. It was no surprise that he turned out to be my link to the presidential hopeful. LinkedIN, you’ve tipped.

SugarCRM is not the crown jewel of PHP

I admit that when I first downloaded it and started playing with the open source CRM (Customer Relations Management*) that dared to challenge smug industry leaders like salesforce.com, I was impressed. The application seemed well thought out and was very simple to use for the end users. I was thinking that finally, web devs had built an app a non-tech could easily use. Not just another cool app for their fellow programmers to hack against. I was there in the company boardroom talking about the cost savings of using the fully supported SugarCRM over. Though I cringed a the thought of having to dirty my hands with PHP code again, to me the big win was that we would have our data on our own databases. In case you didn’t know, salesforce.com keeps the data on their servers and you can get it back either as a csv file at various intervals of time or if you are lucky enough to have the enterprise edition, you can get it via a web services call.

So what went wrong? When did the milk turn sour? It begins not so innocently enough when a sales guy asks: Can we make Sugar do X the way that Salesforce does it? From that point , you have no choice but to be sucked back into the PHP family. In the PHP family, you have some great coders and you have some really scary coders. The SugarCRM team seems to have a mix of both. The concept of the MVC pattern is something that is lost on the SugarCRM project. As I dug deeper in the code , the more worried I became. At the time Sugar supported Mysql and Oracle, which covers a pretty big percentage of the servers out there. Does that mean you should have code

that looks like this if(MYSQL) else if(ORACLE) ? Crap like that is littered everywhere. You never realize how far you’ve come till you go back to the old neighborhood. And the neighborhood has gotten worse, kid. PHP is an easy programming language and that is it’s strength as can transform an office worker who was formally on the dead end track into the company programmer and playing golf

with the boss. It’s low barrier of entry is also it’s greatest weakness. People that should not be programming, do. Having said that, there are quite a few excellent programs written in PHP , including the blog I’m using now, Wordpress.