Sometimes you have to read the reviews to really, really appreciate all the uses for a product. This NUCLEAR duct tape at Amazon is just one of those products. Whether you’re sealing cracks in a reactor core or fixing your type 40 Tardis, you’ll just find these product reviews really special…
Jerry Stern is webmaster at PC410.com and Startupware.com.
Written by Jerry Stern
There was a power failure here a few months back. 14 hours with no power, and then there were lights outside my window in the dark, and there was a power company truck with cherry picker, a portable lighting truck, and cable truck, all lined up at the power pole, and working in cold rain at 3am. And then the next morning, a fire on same pole took out the other leg of the 240 volt service, just not the 120-volt service I depend on here. I thought I had my communications reasonably well-diversified; now, I still think so, but I made changes, and will consider more.
There was a time when I had no problem turning off the internet, and replying to emails a week later, if that’s when I got back to my desk after a vacation. That was 15 years ago; the world has gotten considerably faster since then. Now, if my business is offline, I can’t monitor websites–can’t really edit them offline because of all the Content-Management Systems (CMS), can’t get to email, can’t get to voicemail, can’t do much at all.
To protect myself from outages, I have backups and redundancies. My business phone is a traditional land line, sometimes called POTS as an acronym for ‘plain old telephone service’, but my personal phone line is from the local cable company, where it is half the cost, and just having it results in a discount on my internet service, so the net cost is that it reduces my bill by $8 a month to have it. OK, the business line stayed up in the outage; cordless phones failed, but there’s one corded phone on each floor of the house. The personal phone line failed, despite having built-in battery backup and being plugged into an Uninterruptible Power Supply; when the system dies at the pole, there’s nothing to do.
Internet is another matter; when power came back on, the internet and the private phone line stayed down. The cable company was able to reset the phone remotely after I called in on the land line, but Internet was still down, and they scheduled that repair for four-days out. In typical clueless-cable fashion, they neglected to find the regional outage, which was fixed some 12 hours later, but still, I had no internet, and a promised 4-day outage, on a Monday of what was going to be a very busy week.
Backups Chosen
I added a smart phone with a good data plan. That gives me options that don’t rely on any cables coming into my office, either internet or power. It’s not a fix for every problem in an outage, but it’s a start. Next: How to filter spam on a smart phone. (to be continued…)
Here’s the subtitle: Create, Deploy, distribute, Sell, and Market Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You. That’s a strength and a weakness–that subtitle would take several thousand pages to cover properly, and at 546 pages, the book is nowhere near that heavy–this is a good introduction, but hardly all that’s needed. There are five parts:
Part I: Create a Program. Godtland chose Java as a sample language to create a classic ‘Hello, World’ program or Java applet. There are details on where to get tools, source code examples (also downloadable from the book’s website link), and all the steps needed to write a program, but this section is not a programming manual; it’s enough to get started, before looking for more elsewhere. Most programmers looking to sell software online are already programmers, and will just skim these four chapters.
Part II: Deploy a Program. That’s creating a help file, a program icon, wrappers for Java applets, piracy protection (but see below), trial versions, an installer, and testing. That’s 10 chapters, and a lot of information. The Install chapter is a better tutorial on Inno Setup than is easily found online.
Part III: Create a Web Site, Distribute a Program. Covers web site creation, hosting, HTML standards. Four chapters, and again, basically an introduction.
Part IV: Sell a Product. Covers taking check orders, credit cards, PayPal, creating keys, filling orders, adding a shopping cart in Paypal, but doesn’t cover using ecommerce partners other than Paypal.
Part V: Market a Product. Search engines, shareware versus freeware, marketing, and web statistics and logs. The definition of shareware is interesting, taken from an online dictionary, but it’s something out of the 1980’s.
This is a good book for new software publishers. It’s like the notes that a first-time attendee to the Software Industry Conference would make–pages and pages of information that’s hard to find all in one place, and information overload is possible. There’s lots of information, and good coverage on the technical topics. The writing is clear, the code samples are formatted nicely, and opinions are generally labeled as opinions, not as absolutes.
However, there are gaps here. The ‘Piracy Prevention’ section recommends code obfuscation, with no methods for encryption or self-checking a distributed executable file for alteration. Code-signing is mentioned, but dismissed as too expensive. And the legal issues of copyright are just plain wrong–there’s a statement that “Nothing need be registered anywhere” and no mention of how to go about registering a program at www.copyright.gov. The marketing section matches the typical microISV pattern–it’s weak.
All that said, this is a very large topic for a book of any size. The gaps are best filled-in by a membership in the Association of Software Professionals and a trip to the ASP newsgroups and archives, and the book will provide a very good starting point on dozens of topics important for launching a software product online.
Jerry Stern is the editor of ASPects, the ASP’s Coordinator of Anti-Spyware Operations, and is online at www.pc410.com.