Today Filemaker, Inc. released Bento 3. One of the major new features is database sharing. For details, see the new features page.

I created my freeware application, Shokado Web Sharing for Bento, precisely because of the lack of sharing capabilities in Bento. Now that Bento has sharing, Shokado may be unnecessary. On the other hand, since Bento sharing is limited to 5 computers, each running Bento, some people might still want a read-only, web sharing solution.

Let me know what you think.

Yesterday, President Obama announced that his administration “will pursue a new comprehensive approach to securing America’s digital infrastructure” and that “our digital infrastructure — the networks and computers we depend on every day — will be treated as they should be: as a strategic national asset. Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority. We will ensure that these networks are secure, trustworthy and resilient. We will deter, prevent, detect, and defend against attacks and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage.”

As an IT professional, I applaud this initiative. As a business owner, I am also pleased because my livelihood depends on the Internet infrastructure and the services that it enables – web, e-mail, etc.

However I think we need to go further than this. As the president observed, our digital infrastructure is a “strategic national asset”. Why then do we leave it in the hands of people like AT&T, Sprint and Charter Communications? The ISPs and telecoms have no obligation to anyone to ensure that their networks are working at all. They don’t have to maintain or upgrade their hardware, cabling, switches, routers, etc. except when they feel like it. And there’s very little competitive market pressure to make them improve their existing services, let alone maintain them, since in most metropolitan markets there’s almost no competition.

I propose, for which some will undoubtedly cast me as a socialist patsy, that we nationalize the US Internet infrastructure. The federal government will run fiber to every home and business in the US. Then, it will allow corporations to use the network for a fee. It may event outsource the management of the infrastructure to several corporations under government regulation and oversight. This will provide the following benefits:

1. in the short term, creation of thousands of jobs as we lay the network.
2. we can finally catch up with the rest of the world in terms of broadband penetration and speed.
3. the government will actually be able to secure “America’s digital infrastructure”.
4. there will be strict standards for availability and reliability. Redundancy and failover will be built in to the system.
5. all those companies in the business of providing Internet connectivity and related services, entertainment content (e.g. cable TV) and telecommunication services will be able to use this infrastructure, with a level playing field, and won’t have to concern themselves with the plumbing.
6. Since there will be one national network, consumers will be able to purchase services from any provider. Competition will flourish.

What do you think? Drop me a line

JasperReports (see http://www.jasperforge.org) is an open-source, Java-based reporting platform. I’m here to tell you that it deserves some serious consideration.

At one of my companies, we’ve been looking for a reporting mechanism for our PHP/MySQL application for some time now. Crystal Reports was not an option, since it doesn’t run on our server platform (Mac OS X) and its licensing costs are prohibitively expensive. Plus, we really wanted to stay all open-source.

JasperReports has a front-end report designer, iReport, which is also Java-based and runs nicely on both Windows and Mac. It’s similar to the Crystal client, although much more light weight. iReport creates report files in XML, which are then compiled into a binary format for use by the reporting server. The server itself is a java web application which fills the report from the datasource and creates the output, which can be HTML, XML, CSV, Excel, PDF, ODT or even Flash. There is also a viewer applet which can be embedded in a web page for inline viewing, printing or export.

In order to use the JasperReports framework, because our application is based on PHP, we had to implement the PHP-Java bridge. We chose Tomcat as the Java application server, again because it is lightweight, open and well-supported and runs nicely on the Mac. This all works out quite nicely.

My next personal goal is to figure out how to integrate JasperReports into a .NET environment.

In a laughable display of hubris, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) said in a discussion with Gartner’s annual Symposium ITxpo:

“I think when it comes time to really building platforms; we have a lot of experience. It’s taken us 17 years but people think we finally get it a little bit in the enterprise. Some of the pretenders have no enterprise expertise.”

I’ve been working with Microsoft’s products for more than 17 years and I agree, they do get it, but only just “a little bit”. As for calling the competition “pretenders”, wow! Who does he think he is?

Regarding web applications, and I’m assuming he was taking a jab at Google’s web applications:

“At the end of the day, the actual functionality in the application still matters,” he said. “People don’t want to go backward when it comes to presentation or word processing capabilities.”

I have to disagree. Microsoft has been gratuitously adding features that nobody want or uses to its products ever since Word for Windows came out. I think that many people would like to remove the 80% of useless features and go back to a lightweight, reliable and secure word processor that has the actual feature set they use.

A Minnesota woman named Jammie Thomas was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for allegedly making available some 1,702 songs through the Kazaa network, although only 24 were at issue in the case. This Thursday, a federal jury sided with the RIAA and returned a verdict of $222,000. Yes, $222,000.

The judge told the jury: “The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.” And “…each plaintiff is entitled to a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 per act of infringement…If, however, you find that the defendant’s conduct was willful, then each plaintiff is entitled to a sum of up to $150,000 per act of infringement…”

What this means is that even if you are not intentionally sharing music with others, you can still be fined between $750 and $30,000 per song. If you are intentionally sharing songs, then you can be fined $150,000 per song. From what I have heard, if the RIAA decides to come after you, it is very difficult to prove your innocence.

I was thrilled when Apple opened the iTunes store because it provided a way for us to legally obtain digital music and also provided what I believe is a fare DRM scheme (you can play a song on up to five computers and any portable device). Plus, the pricing seems fair. Now, we also have Napster and Amazon selling MP3 format songs too.

As a software developer, I understand the value of intellectual property. So I’ve always been on the side of the artists. I don’t mind paying for their work. What’s always bothered me was that it took the music “industry” so long to figure this out. Why did we have to wait so long for the iTunes store – an easy way to legally obtain digital music – to come along? I think the “industry” can blame itself for lost revenue from illegally shared music. And the RIAA is being very heavy handed and is probably picking on people who can’t defend themselves. I doubt if they represent the artists who do the real creative work.

Nevertheless, the law is clear on this matter; and I think from a moral standpoint illegally downloading or sharing music is probably equivalent to stealing. Most importantly, artists deserve to be paid for their work. So, it’s time to start paying.

Today IBM made available (via download) Release 8 of Lotus Notes and Domino.

If yoy currently use Notes, you will love the new version. Read more at the Notes home page.

The Mac version is expected to ship in 2008, after Apple has released Leopard.

“Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2007 third quarter ended June 30, 2007. The Company posted revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $4.37 billion and net quarterly profit of $472 million, or $.54 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.9 percent, up from 30.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Apple shipped 1,764,000 Macintosh computers, representing 33 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous company record for quarterly Mac shipments by over 150,000. The Company also sold 9,815,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 21 percent growth over the year-ago quarter.”

Source: Apple

Congratulations, Apple!

Every tech article I’ve read for the last four days has been about the iPhone one way or another. I’m getting really tired of my RSS feeds wbeing clogged with iPhone news, reviews, etc. etc.

Sure, it’s cool and functional, but it’s just a cell phone with a browser! Come on, let’s get real. It’s not going to change the world.

Apple’s much anticipated iPhone will be available for purchase on June 29, 2007. This is according to commercials broadcast on television last night and posted on the company’s web site. (See http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/)

The cell phone/iPod/wireless web browser will set you back $499 or $599, depending on configuration and will be available from AT&T.

With the release of iTunes 7.2, Apple launched “iTunes Plus”, which adds support for new DRM-free songs with high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding. These songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual $0.99. It seems like a reasonable premium.

The thank you is to Steve Jobs and EMI for taking the bold step to make DRM-free music available to those of us who legally download and pay for music and don’t share it with the world. Hopefully the rest of the music industry will see the light soon.

Now we just have to wait for Hollywood to catch on.