The integrity of data is a foundation to the orderly Real Estate market. The Real Estate Transaction Standards (RETS) provides a vendor neutral, secure approach to exchanging listing information between the broker and the MLS. In order to ensure that the goal of maintaining an orderly marketplace is maintained, and to further establish REALTOR® information as the trusted data source, MLS organizations owned and operated by associations of REALTOR® will comply with the RETS standards by June 2009, and keep current with the standard's new versions by implementing new releases of RETS within one year from ratification.
Now I'm going to do the posh thing and quote myself:
There is absolutely no chance RETS 2.0 will be done in fourteen months.
-- Matt Lavallee, RETS Assembly Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 9th, 2007
All I got then was hand-waving and chuckles... Today, I may as well call myself The Nostradamus of RETS (although no one else will).
The ".1" incremental build is to correct some minor errata in the documentation of the specification. This is truly pathetic: RETS 2.0 was started in 2004. How can anything be this slow?
For the sake of argument, let's look at the timelines of some other widely-known specs:
I understand the issues of timeline management and pragmatism, but come on... this isn't rocket surgery.
Here's how I understand our current timeline:
This makes no sense.
]]>Recognizing this, I try to keep an open mind when hiring new staff (which I've been doing tirelessly for the past two months). There are really only a few traits I key-in on:
All of this preamble was a build-up for my soapbox on Professional Development™. It is far too easy for developers to stagnate, and they usually don't know they're a dinosaur until they're being "let go" in favor of newer/younger blood that has three times the depth in current technology and can't find a job. Likewise, I'm there are many companies looking to expand their Lotus Notes & CORBA integration project from 1997 and want to see more "web 2.0" in it. The reality is that those companies are mired in the 10-year-old mentality because they didn't help (or push) their developers into staying current.
At MLSPIN, I've been instituting the best policies I've ever learned working for various software companies, large and small, or heard of through online sources:
The first training session this year was held in January and featured the inimitable Bill Vaughn. Aside from being one of the founding fathers of ODBC and grandfather to ADO, Bill has the most comprehensive knowledge on programming against databases in Microsoft technology that I've ever even heard of. Buy his books, they make you smarter. In a week's time, Bill was able to convey as many nuances to the technology as I've learned in a decade of hands-on work, and I still learned new tricks. He's very personable, doesn't believe in stupid questions, and knows how to mentor. We liked him so much, we've now got him on retainer.
I still haven't decided who to have out for the August-ish session, so if you have any suggestions, drop me a line.
So, that's my pitch. If you are a professional developer, do whatever you need to to stay current, and if your company doesn't support that, leave. If you're a company who doesn't believe in training your resources, send me your developers' resumes.
-Matt
]]>I must be totally off my rocker, because I see this as another sign of how "free" software hurts the developer community. How can anyone stand by the Writers Guild while they fight for residual income (after they've already been paid once) and yet, in the same breath, say that not paying developers for their work makes sense.
I just don't get it.
]]>A good portion of my brainpower this past year has been focused on improving RETS, the Real Estate Transaction Standard(s). It's simply fantastic to be involved in such a high-profile standard with so many great Real Estate technology professionals. My thanks particularly go to the rest of the "core" Schema team: Paul Stusiak, Gina Accawi, Peter Spicer, Michael Wurzer, Gregg Petch, Eric Petersen, Sergio Del Rio, Chris McKeever, Joshua Vosper, and Jaison Freed.
It's also easy to overlook the wizard behind the curtain, but a great debt is due to Mark Lesswing. In a single year, he's transformed a motley crew of interested participants into a gen-u-ine organization. Beyond this, his grasp of the technology proposition to Real Estate is virtually unparalleled. Regardless of his other accomplishments, it's hard not to consider him one of the great RE technology luminaries of this decade.
On a related note, Michael Wurzer (RESO Chairman and President & CEO of FBS) posted an open letter to the mass listing aggregators of the world. Proving the value of the Web 2.0 world, enough responded that some sort of open discussion will take place at Inman's Connect NYC. Mike's certainly shaping up to be a luminary himself.
<technical>
My consequential involvement with RETS is the Query language, dubbed RQLX (although it's a bit of a grandfathered name that lacks significant meaning). Through numerous posts between myself and Sergio Del Rio on the RETS-DEV mailing list, I countered the necessity of a number of staid data archetypes (dictionaries and vocabulary) in RETS 2 that existed largely to resolve the problem of unique particle attribution in RETS 1.x. The reality is that the RETS 2 Schema have evolved into a fairly monolithic namespace, which makes UPA a distinct reality without needing alternate representations of the data set. My only wish is that I could learn ANTLR well enough to (quickly) write a functioning, provable grammar... but I'm getting there.
</technical>
As if. As much as my background may have prepared me for this effort, building the new, ground-up version a large-scale MLS is no small feat. Amidst the travails of the past two months, moving 1200 miles and traveling nearly 20000 more for various professional and family events, I've also had to re-align and rebuild a development team for MLSPIN's next great release in 2008. I have two open development positions if anyone's interested (or if you know someone) with ASP.NET and heavy MSSQL skills.
Thanks to Microsoft's [un]timely releases of VS.NET 2008 and, more significantly, LINQ, I also have about two weeks to decide whether we write against the (proven) ASP.NET 2.0 platform or the far more streamlined ASP.NET 3.5 platform. Any insight or feedback is also welcome.
On the corporate side, I can't understate enough how valuable it is to have faith from your leadership: with Kathy Condon (my CEO) and Tony Mastroianni (my CTO) providing such solid backing, I'm confident we're going to release a monumental MLS system and make significant strides in raising the MLS bar. To that end, I also owe a bit of thanks to Michael Wurzer (FlexMLS) and Colby Ackerfield (RealGo), both of whose candor and guidance is deeply appreciated.
Lucas is nearing his first birthday, growing into a character of his own by the day: He's such a great baby. Ben just started Montessori school and continues to amaze us with his intelligence and compassion. Kerry is continuing to acclimate to the geography (New England's a far cry from the Southwest) and a new station in life as a stay-at-home mom. I probably don't tell her enough, but she's held up wonderfully. I couldn't ask for better kids or family, period. Almost all of our Illinois houses are sold and that will be a great relief as we look to buy a house next Spring. It's all coming together, finally!
]]>Whenever I ask our client base what features they'd like to see added to our service, map-based searching (MBS, for short) inevitably takes one of the top three positions. However, when pushed with the 5 Whys, virtually no one can get past "because xyz does it!"
I have closely followed the various online mapping options since they became financially accessible and widely accepted (roughly 3 years ago). However, based on numerous seminars and conversations with end customers -- as well as top people at the mapping vendors -- the reality is that mapping hasn't either A) matured sufficiently for, or, B) proven its value in, our market.
As I've pointed out on in several RE forums, I'm skeptical at best of the merit of broad, location-based searching. I personally believe the value is in context-based geography, such as "maximum distance to x school, y office building, and z office building". The problem is then the processing power (and licensed software) required to provide those results in a sub-second period... not an easy trick when you have to scale to thousands of searches per hour.
At last year's Connect SF, I had the opportunity to discuss at length the issues surrounding MBS with Microsoft's Live (nee Virtual Earth) Maps team. Out of those conversations, Microsoft added off-map drive-time calculation for points (which Google also implemented mere days later). Unfortunately, the reality of having to load several hundred candidate points and perform the calculations against their servers still proved too latent an exercise to be useful.
The average real estate consumer -- the should-be target of these features -- simply does not rank the featureset nearly as relevant as price, bed/bath count, and square footage... especially when beginning their search, which is how most of these tools approach the visitor. In fact, I think most consumers will sacrifice location in return for a house that otherwise meets every need.
This year, we will add interactive mapping to the Favorites feature of our service, only because it will include multi-point route optimization (for planning drive-by tours and showings). To me, this is the extent that the technology has provided value to the consumer.
I would much rather let the big corporate vendors spend millions figuring out what works, then implement those features for a few thousand dollars in a quarter of the time.
]]>Do we rewrite RETS in a new incarnation, or refactor RETS 1.7 to eliminate the (numerous) performance and implementation problems?
Along these lines, Chris McKeever forwarded a classic Joel Spolsky post titled "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" (oddly, there is no Part II) on the dubious merit of scrapping & rewriting any piece of software.
I mostly agree with Joel; however, I have some apprehension because there are examples of (very) successful rewrites: MacOS to Jaguar, Adobe Photoshop, HTML, eBay, MySpace, and so on ... and one purpose in those rewrites resonates with RETS 2.0: a fundamental change in the underlying architecture.
RETS 1.0 specified everything -- implementation, transport, protocol, and data standards. About all it didn't do was include a specialized implementation of TCP.
RETS 2.0 is light fare by comparison -- a data and interface description standard. Most of the plumbing (transport & protocol) that made 1.0 complicated is supplanted by existing Web Services standards: HTTP, XML, authentication, and the atomic transaction have all been written by other, smarter (or at least more directly focused) people.
Pros:
Cons:
Yes, RETS 1.5 & 1.7 can be patched to resolve some of the ambiguity problems (at least the low-hanging fruit). However, how much effort (and vendor buy-in) will go into maintaining three parallel versions of RETS? Why would a vendor who is stuck on 1.5 choose to implement 1.51 instead of 1.7? Why are we giving them an "out" to not update their code?
Yes, RETS 1.7 could be wrapped into a Web Services framework and appear modern at the surface, but that draws all the worst "lipstick on a pig" analogies you've ever heard (or, if you haven't, "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig"). How many hoops will we have to jump through to get it working correctly? Remember that such a solution creates at least three layers of obfuscation to the actual data: three layers of code, potentially from three different vendors, all with bugs or, worse yet, special fixes to the other vendors' bugs (increasing fragility).
Call me old school, but I want one, monolithic, no apologies, no exceptions standard. Make the service contract very explicit, and do not grant compliance certification to anyone who fails for any reason. Write some white papers, get someone to write a book, and have a half-dozen professional data architects go over the spec to make sure we're doing the right thing.
We need to make people (programmers and consumers) want to use it and ask for it by name.
]]>Further:
[...] more and more candidates who can lay down the smack with Java and script can't manipulate memory and discuss deep operating system constructs just-in-time at all. I need you to be able to write a GC, not be in an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with one.
It's that sort of painfully dated thinking that maintains Google's ownership of web innovation while Microsoft struggles to be noteworthy. A talented, creative scripter has absolutely no domain over deep memory management and should never have to think about it: That's why you have talented, deep memory guys in the first place. What's the purpose? Advancement? I'd start looking for other apocalyptic signs if any of the AJAX wizards I know hint at working on some nice kernel code; I would no sooner expect a podiatrist to be studying neurosurgery. While collectively still "programmers", many of us have highly diverged specialties sharing little in common but tools of the trade.
Don't get me wrong -- being familiar with the clockworks required to make your code work is a Good Thing™ and often leads to higher quality code, but it's no substitute for creative thinking and one can argue that the focus gained by an "unencumbered" mind is equally valuable. As a master generalist myself, I tend to see my greatest shortcomings while overthinking problems and overarchitecting solutions -- a problem that doesn't plague those with shallow skills.
Perhaps Mini's viewpoint is a one-man reflection of the great cancer that keeps Microsoft from being great, though it's terribly ironic that it's coming from the guy so passionately trying to instigate change.
]]>Tech people running tech companies well:
Examples of non-tech individuals ruining tech companies:
Exceptions:
Oh, and just to cover Patricia Dunn's curriculum vitae:
Today's little rant was sponsored by the dual appearances by Patty Dunn and Carly Fiorina appearing on 60 Minutes.
Patty lucked her way to the top by being a stickler for rules; ironically being ousted for breaking the rules that we crazy laymen call "laws".
Carly. Ahh, Carly. I honestly think that she was probably a hard worker at Lucent that was over-promoted and, sadly, became addicted to the idolatry that came with her success as a very powerful woman. Her reign at HP was fraught with selfish acts (the yacht thing, hanging her portrait alongside Hewlett & Packard in the lobby, etc.) and generally sounding like a buffoon on financial matters.
Now she's trying to claim that she was the catalyst behind HP's current wave of success. As a long-time HP customer, I just can't see it. She tried to generate success for HP through pure marketing sparkle, making splashy moves that would generate lots of industry buzz, but with little respect for the business or human issues required to actually make those moves work. Like a movie hero, Hurd's the one who came in at the final moments and saved the train from careening off its tracks.
Again, as a customer, I'm a hundredfold happier since Hurd took over: the products have direction, customer service is way up, and prices are (as they should have been all along) on-par with Dell.
]]>Well, it's a new world nowadays (old-timer talk): The DOM is almost universal and JavaScript has grown up... way up. Actually, JS hasn't grown up so much as the platforms (mostly) comply with the ECMA ratification from all those years ago.
Don't get me wrong -- back in the day I loved JavaScript as much as I loved my first new car. It was like Java and C++ without all the hassle, and you could make the web do tricks at a time when it was 99% static (god, do I miss those days). BUT, the aforementioned pain of cross-browser support meant hours and hours and hours of testing, tweaking, implementing tiny code "shims" to get stuff to work right ... it almost wasn't worth it in the end. The original menuing system at Pergo.com (dynamic JavaScript with HTML drop-downs loaded by Vignette that was 6-language friendly) took me weeks to get working properly. In the days before JSON, it was quite the technological feat to have all of those disparate points of navigation play nicely as a huge multi-dimensional array. It worked something like this:
pergo_menu[0] = new Object();
pergo_menu[0].text = "Interior Design"
pergo_menu[0].url = "../b/b1_interiordesign.html"
pergo_menu[0].items = new Array();pergo_menu[0].items[0] = new Object();
pergo_menu[0].items[0].text = "Inspiration"
pergo_menu[0].items[0].url = "../b/b2_inspiregallery.html"pergo_menu[0].items[1] = new Object();
pergo_menu[0].items[1].text = "Q&A designer"
pergo_menu[0].items[1].url = "../b/b7_talktodesigner.html"
That was all the backend guys had to do to update the nav. Not bad, even by today's standards.
So last week I was back "home" in New Hampshire for a long weekend of R&R and some great quality time with my three younger brothers. One friend of my brothers, Lokesh Dhakar, had long had web dreams, and I'd heard through the grapevine (brother #2) that he'd gotten a job offer from Google.
Me: "Hold the phone... Google? Lokesh? Google?"
Brother: "Yeah, he invented some kinda new popup thing that everyone in the world wants."
Me: "Uh, okay." (brother is not web-savvy)
In the night of formal brotherly carousing, friends from near and far gathered at a local tavern, including Lokesh.
Me: "Hey, Lokesh, what's up?" (we've always been friendly, although I used to be the cool web guy... now the shoe's on the other foot)
Lokesh: "Hey, Matt! Good to see you."
Me: "What's this about you inventing popups?"
Lokesh: "Well, that's not really it. I made this thing that pops up on pages and makes it really easy for anyone to implement. I got calls from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and a bunch of others. That's how I got my current job."
Me: "Uhh, popups?"
Lokesh: "Well, it just made them easy. Check out my website and Lightbox and you'll see."
To me, Easy Popups != Google job. There had to be something more.
Indeed there was.
Lightbox leverages the prototype library, script.aculo.us, and a whole lotta DOMmin'. The result is a really, really, mindlessly easy way to add a pretty "see larger image" link on a web page.
About two hours later, I was incorporating the concept into our web service's dev system. I've long done "pop-in" dialogs with IFRAMEs and a PNG shadow, but the effect of a pseudo-modal, smooth interactive element is a thousand times better.
So now I've been JavaScripting for two straight days, loving and hating it all over again. The remaining burning question:
WHY ISN'T THERE A REAL JAVASCRIPT EDITOR YET?
Seriously. The language is there, the platforms are there, but for the love of king and country I still can't debug it without silly elements named "tracediv" and a whole bunch of nodeValue calls.
Debugging in IE is still a joke, even with the developer toolbar (please stop overriding CTRL+R, thank you). That being said, I still haven't loaded the Venkman JavaScript Debugger... That's for tomorrow.
]]>http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?4,30183,45753#msg...
In Summary:
Question: "Our plan is create an application that will just connect to MySQL Server running on a different machine using Database Connections like MyODBC 3.5 [... do I need] to buy a License from you (MySQL AB) for using MySQL Server?"
Answer: "A good option for you may be becoming a MySQL Certified partner, at the basic level this is just USD 595/yr. See [solutions.mysql.com] for details.
Under the partnership, you can get an optional (but free) non-GPL license for any of the MySQL client libraries, for distribution linked with your closed source product."
Case closed.
-Matt
]]>I found out last week that JJ went on to build a company that got bought by a bigger company that gave him an environment to create a product named... Windows Live Writer.
He's that good.
PS- Some props are also due to Nick Bradbury, who created HomeSite, the most usable, adaptable HTML editor available on Windows (I qualify that so that you Emacs zealots don't freak. :)). He probably also makes the "most wanked" list, since he probably sold Bradbury Software to Macromedia for a million, only to see them sell millions of dollars in HomeSite and then get bought by Adobe. Hopefully he had some options, but I doubt it.
]]>Are free software programmers systematically eliminating their own futures?
Unfortunately, most of the responses fell into one of three camps:
This does sadly characterize the tribal state in which we software developers exist. Everyone else vs. Windows, Everyone else vs. PHP/Perl/Ruby, .NET vs. Java, the list goes on, with the exact same line drawn in the sand: you're either with us and love software, or against us and love money.
One point that I have a hard time making clear is that I am not anti-OSS, per se. MySQL and PostgreSQL have forced Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM to release free (albeit limited) versions of their fantastic database software. Overall, that is a net benefit to the world and a direct result of OSS. However, beyond that, I start running short of "longterm good" examples.
Here's my thesis statement:
As more developers produce marketable software foundations without pay, fewer developers will be needed by the general marketplace to produce commercial software.
It's a grim thought, if you deeply consider the repercussions. I liken the whole situation to the "Global Thermonuclear War" scenario -- everybody loses while trying to dethrone someone else.
My pessimistic view:
I desperately want someone to say it ain't so, but most of the contrary responses are like these:
And my responses:
The absolute worst example of OSS success is MySQL: They (MySQL AB) sell the work of all those unpaid contributors to big companies and make millions for themselves. That's a fiefdom, not a community.
Anyway, I don't really have an end, here, because I'm still without an answer. All I can say is that I hope the global thermonuclear war scenario doesn't play out until I'm financially secured and don't have to care.
]]>Now Borat is on its way and making waves of its own. First, it will premiere simultaneously on MySpace and real movie theaters. Second, the President of Kazakhstan is on tour in the US, trying to disprove the movie's impression of his country.
Sacha is clearly an unrecognized genius.
]]>