1) One year ago today, I moved with my family to Silicon Valley from Washington, DC, a city we love and miss very much.

2) Also today, DotNetNuke Corp., the company I co-founded, announced that we have closed on our Series A round of venture funding.

Adjusting to Silicon Valley has had its challenges. Having to drive everywhere after getting around mostly on DC’s Metro was the hardest adjustment. Our friends, DC’s breathtakingly beautiful monuments, abundance of fantastic (and free) museums and overall character of the city are all missed. That my daughters were both born at George Washington University hospital in DC means that my family has an unbreakable bond with the city and we expect to live there again in the future (perhaps when I run for Congress, a dream of mine).

The past year in Mountain View has been a year of discovering California, rekindling old friendships, making new ones, enjoying great weather and the many playgrounds in this area. We are slowly adapting and beginning to enjoy what Silicon Valley has to offer. I’ll be candid, reaching the funding milestone is certainly going to make a difference in terms of quality of life.

All startup entrepreneurs make sacrifices to see their dreams come true. In this business, it’s called “skin in the game.” I can say unequivocally that my co-founders (Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman and Scott Willhite) and I have a lot of skin (and probably additional layers) in this game. Building a company based on a free, Open Source product is challenging, to say the very least. But we had a vision and continued to persist despite the challenges we encountered. Raising growth capital was one of them.

In the summer of 2007, Shaun and I made several trips to Silicon Valley to meet with VC‘s. Everything that followed was textbook venture fundraising. We had many positive meetings but no takers. Our team quickly realized that we were missing three things:

1. Feet on the ground. It is expensive to travel to Silicon Valley every couple of weeks for meetings (Note: Most VC’s that fund Open Source companies are located in Silicon Valley). It is also a huge disadvantage that you cannot meet with an interested investor at short notice. And finally, missing out on the powerful network effect of Silicon Valley is a serious impediment to raising capital here.
    
2. Solid Business Model. While we had achieved tremendous success as the #1 Open Source web project on the Microsoft stack, the business model we articulated to VC’s was not polished enough to merit their serious interest.
    
3. Experienced Advisors and Management. VC’s invest first and foremost in people. Having a solid management team in place is critical for the success of any company, and more so for venture-funded companies. While our team is very strong technically, we did not have the depth and breadth of business experience needed to take the company to the next level. (While DotNetNuke Corp. is the fourth company I have founded/co-founded and the third of my companies to receive investment capital, I still have much to learn.)

We decided to address these three issues as best and as quickly as we could.

Since I had the lead role in the fundraising process and did not have significant constraints on where my family lived, moving here was a no-brainer for me. While it was a major move, I was determined to do what needed to be done to ensure the success and longevity of our business. I did not see any way we could be successful at raising capital without having a local presence in Silicon Valley. Savi, my wife was supportive as ever in this decision. The other co-founders and I agreed on a course of action. I took on the role of CEO with a charge of focusing on raising capital and prepared for the move.

But there were more challenges. Savi was pregnant with our second child due in late October. Gia, our first daughter, was three years old at the time and we had to find a Montessori in Silicon Valley that met the standards for teaching and cultural diversity that we had become accustomed to in DC. Also, since we paid our own health insurance, we could not make the move until after the baby was born, otherwise we would have to assume the full cost of the delivery — totally impossible for us (and most people, I would imagine). We decided to wait until January 2008 to move.

We made a couple of trips to the Bay Area, checked out schools and settled on a Montessori in Mountain View. With that done, it was now time to find housing. We did not find anything suitable during our visits. It was extremely challenging trying to find housing in Silicon Valley that met our requirements remotely from DC. A couple of these requirements greatly restricted our options and I remember checking CraigsList every 20 mins., all day, hoping to find a place we could call home. We were getting very frustrated and then things took a turn for the worse.

On the evening of Sept. 5, I accompanied Savi for a routine pre-natal check-up, while my parents who were visiting from India at the time, watched Gia. The news we got from the doctor was scary. We were told that we had to go straight to the hospital as our baby was going to arrive five weeks ahead of schedule. With a great sense of fear, we got Savi admitted and began a very long night. In the morning, the chief resident told us that the baby was in distress and they had to deliver. Kaamya was born on Sept. 6. I got to hold her for one minute and then she was taken to the NICU (Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit). The next 12 days were a blur. Savi and I took turns keeping her company in the NICU hoping and praying that she would be OK. Our prayers were answered. Today, Kaamya is a healthy, happy and active one-year-old.

After Kaamya’s birth, we were able to move to Silicon Valley a little sooner than planned. Housing was still an issue. On a whim, Savi looked at short-term rentals, and found a place in Mountain View that matched all our criteria, but was only available for 3-6 months. My brother-in-law who lives in San Jose checked out the place, we found it acceptable and signed the lease. We decided that we would move immediately after my Las Vegas trip for Open Force ’07.

Thus, on Nov. 25, 2007, we arrived in Silicon Valley.

I immediately began connecting with and setting-up meetings with people/firms to enable progress on the fundraising front and also to identify and work with business advisors and potential additions to our management team. Larry Augustin, founder of VA Linux and one of the most respected names in the Open Source world, was already our business advisor. He referred me to several exceptional people and firms, one of them being Navin Nagiah. At the time, Navin was CEO of Cignex, a company that specialized in services around Open Source CMS solutions.

I met Navin at a Starbucks in San Jose on Dec. 18, 2007. Almost immediately, Navin saw DotNetNuke’s tremendous potential. I too saw how Navin’s experience in the Open Source Enterprise CMS space would be valuable for DotNetNuke Corp. We started meeting regularly 2-3 evenings a week. Within a couple of months, Navin formally became our business advisor.

Working closely together, and with the support and input of the other co-founders, we developed a solid business model and investor pitch. We were a little slow off the blocks, but with all three of the missing items addressed, we were confident that getting funded was an inevitability. We made rapid progress through the summer culminating in today’s announcement. (I have been working on collecting my thoughts around what we learned in the process and will blog about it in the future.)

I am incredibly gratified to have reached this major milestone. There are many, many people who made it possible, many of them are behind the scenes. To all of them, I am grateful. A special thanks to my family and the families of my co-founders, who stood by us and supported us through thick and thin (mostly thin) as we made it to this point. And thanks to everyone in the DotNetNuke community who have time and again demonstrated support for DotNetNuke Corp. and confidence in our product — DotNetNuke.

This is the first step in a journey. We have a great team and I am looking forward to doing my part in building a very successful and profitable company while making DotNetNuke the platform of choice for .NET-based websites. I am very excited for the future.

Below is a link to Shaun’s keynote from the recent DotNetNuke OpenForce ’08 conference. It will shed some light on where we are and what our vision is for DotNetNuke Corporation.

DotNetNuke-OpenForce-KeyNote.pptx (1.45 MB)

I was moved and inspired by his speech tonight and look forward to doing my part in moving the country forward. As a father of two little girls, I found his future-looking questions most inspiring:

“So tonight, let us ask
ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my
daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what
change will they see? What progress will we have made?”

After eight years of failed leadership, I am very excited and hopeful for the future of this great nation that I love.

“This is our chance to
answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our
people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to
restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the
American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many,
we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with
cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will
respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.”

Here’s an excellent analysis of the speech by Bert Decker:

Transformational Election – Transformational Speech!

In the mid-1980s, NSF decided the time was right to try to link its regional university networks and its supercomputer centers together. This initial effort was called NSFNET. By 1987, participation in the new NSFNET project grew so rapidly that NSF knew it had to expand the capacity of this new network. In November of that year, it awarded a grant to a consortium of IBM, MCI, and a center at the University of Michigan called Merit to create a network or networks–or internet–capable of carrying data at speeds up to 56 kilobits a second. By July 1987, this new system was up and running. The modern Internet was born.

I came to the U.S. on Sept. 3, 1987 from India to begin my Bachelor’s degree at Western Michigan University. I remember logging on to the Merit network that same month from the campus computer lab. Since, at the time, everything about computers was totally new to me (other than the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+, my home computer), I had no idea until today that this was a brand new network and more importantly, the first “network of networks.”

Also, the brutally honest truth is that Posterous is on borrowed time.
If the service does not start innovating rapidly, get huge user
adoption and then create a significant reason for users to stay, it
will soon become irrelevant. Its primary feature — email to blog — is
not enough of a differentiator because technically it is not very
difficult to implement and other blog engines will be quick to offer it
to their users (some already do).

I think Posterous should be thinking about ways in which they can
continue to stay relevant and even attractive to bloggers by doing the
exact opposite of what they are doing right now. Instead of trying to
be a blogging platform, they ought to focus on being an email
publishing utility very much like FaceBook is positioned as a social
utility. The AutoPosting
capabilities available on the service are a great way to start, but
they could be so much more. Instead of just supporting vanilla posts
with title and body and hosting the photos/media here, they should go
all out and implement email to MetaWebLog and other API’s. Being able
to use email to make a complete, detailed post to WordPress, DasBlog
and other blogging engines would be great. Add template, tagging and
categorization and it starts to get really interesting.

And while they are at it, they should do it for not just 10, but 100′s of other services. Basically, email enable every ProgrammableWeb.com API
for which email posting makes sense and that has any kind of traction.
That would be killer and greatly increase the barriers for competition
as users don’t like changing habits unless there is a very good reason.
Imagine “posterous” becoming a verb for “posting something to any web
service using email.” I think this would be a bigger opportunity for
the company and allow it to become truly indispensable compared to
where it is now — a “me too” blogging platform which re-posts to other
services.

Bottom line, forget the blogging and focus on the email.

1) Building Stuff: I love working with tools and making things. My first project was to build a swing set for my daughters. I got lumber from Lowe’s and built one from scratch. My kids love it and it’s great not having to drive down to the playground every day.

My second project is to build earth boxes, five to be precise. Savi wants to grow vegetables and the earth boxes are the perfect solution. It’s labor intensive to build one, but not very difficult. I have completed one and am working on the rest.

2) Baking: I love bread but rarely find bread I like at the store. Solution — bake my own. Savi got me a bread-maker for my birthday and I love it. So far I have baked a loaf of plain, white bread and yesterday, I baked a walnut-raisin loaf. I am not much of a cook and making eggs is the extent of my culinary expertise. But after baking this bread, I am beginning to see why so many people love to cook. It is quite relaxing and to have an end product that family and friends can enjoy is quite rewarding.

3) Mixing: As I have mentioned on this blog before, I am an avid fan of A/V. Until about 2003, one of my favorite things to do was to V.J. parties and weddings for friends. I never did it for money as then it would become work and stop being fun. After moving to DC in 2003, I never did any gigs until last week. Friday (8/8/08), my friends Todd and Diana got married in Napa. My daughter Gia was the flower girl and I had the honor of providing the entertainment for the wedding. Since I did not want to abandon the wife and kids during the reception, I did something novel (for me) — I created a video mix on DVD for the entire evening’s entertainment. Everything from the bride/groom dances to the various dance sets were all on DVD and all I had to do was press Play. I used an 80′s theme and mixed lots of music videos from the decade along with an intro scene from “Back to the Future,” Todd’s favorite movie. I enjoyed making the mix so much, that I am now motivated to create more DVD mixes of my kids photos/videos for family back in India.

4) Software: This item is more about broadening my skills beyond ASP.Net and DotNetNuke. I have been an avid fan of Google AppEngine since the day it went live. Since I had no prior knowledge of Python or Django, I had to come up to speed fast. I attended a few meet-ups at Google and picked-up a copy of Python Power. Between the book and the meet-ups and just tinkering with code, I now have progressed far enough to create fairly advanced apps on AppEngine in Python. I plan on continuing to learn more advanced concepts and focus on developing a single application that will also be the basis of my AppEngine presentation at the DotNetNuke OpenForce / SDN Conference in Amsterdam this October. More about this application in a future post.

5) Teaching: I love to teach kids. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is, it’s just fun to be able to share and help them learn. This summer, I have undertaken to teach my 12-year-old nephew how to program, continuing indefinitely. After researching the topic, I settled on Phrogram as the language to use for instruction. So far, I am quite impressed with everything about the IDE and the language. I setup a virtual machine, put it on a DVD and mailed it to him (he is not allowed to use the Internet other than for class assignments). He was able to install VPC, get the virtual machine up and running and write his first Phrogram. I will have some detailed blog posts about my experience on this in the near future also.

Yes, it’s true that three of the five things require time in front of the computer. But they still represent a shift and have helped me achieve my goals.

Fast-forward to present day and there is a new iWidgets.com site created by someone else. Here’s how eHub describes it:

Create custom widgets for your website or your brand with iWidget.
Using their online wizard, you can easily create widgets that your
website visitors or customers can add to their iGoogle start page,
Facebook profile, or their own blog. Your widget is customizable by
your users so that it fits right in with their design.

It
felt very strange seeing the site…sort of like seeing someone else
wearing your favorite shirt. I spent some time on the site playing with
their tools and was very, very impressed. Great job iWidgets.com team,
wish you much success.

Today, after almost four years or mediocre voice quality, I finally decided to ditch my Vonage line. As required by them, I called in to cancel my account.

For 20 mins. straight, despite my increasingly urgent pleas to just cancel my account, the rep kept insisting that I stay for two additional months free and they would have a tech out to my home tomorrow to look at the problem. WTF! I can understand a couple of attempts to keep the customer, but after 20 mins. I could not take it any more and I hung up.

Vonage does not get it…these kind of pushy sales tactics are not going to help their growing decline. It will only make customers more irate and increase negative PR for them. They appear to be totally clueless.

I am going to call them again today and hope I’ll have better luck this time.

To that end, I recently bought Gia, my three-year-old, her first electronics project kit. I researched this quite a bit — I did not want anything overly complex, nor did I want anything too simple. Something that would be fun and get her to think and ask questions. I found the perfect kit — Snap Circuits.

Although their website is horrible and ugly, their product is awesome. I got the SC-100 basic kit. It has about a 100 projects you can do using a battery pack, motor, speaker, music chip, alarm chip, resistors and a few other parts.

So far, we have created mostly projects that make cool sounds. I think Gia’s favorites were the ones where the motor speed can be increased and then shut off causing the flimsy plastic wheel to become airborne. Another one is a water alarm where two wires have to be inserted into a glass of water to cause an alarm to go off.

Overall, I am pleased with Snap Circuits. It is helping me achieve exactly the goal I wanted while giving dad+daughter some fun things to do besides tinker with home brew computers.

In this picture, Gia is trying out a fun, motion-activated “Happy Birthday” tune player project.

1. I love Chai and drink a lot of it (not the Starbucks kind…the regular Indian kind which is way better).

2. I am a digitalmediaholic. I have over 6 terabytes of ripped movies and 100 GB of music.
3. I am a dot com bubble survivor. I founded a venture-funded startup called iWidgets.com that created widgets for web pages. Unfortunately, the technology was six years ahead of its time.
4. My un-Americanized name is Nikunj, pronounced nick-ooonj.
5. I have never had any alcoholic beverage…none.
6. I became a vegetarian in 2001…did it cold turkey (pun intended).
7. I grew up in Bombay and came to the U.S. in 1987 for my undergrad education. Never went back, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago.
8. I enjoy the creative aspects of brand development, especially logo development, tag line creation and messaging.

Computer Hardware:

• AlienWare (Australia) – High-performance computer systems
  http://www.alienwaresystems.com.au/
• Toshiba – Retail information systems
  http://www.toshibatecusa.com/

Manufacturing:

• Lord Corporation – Adhesives/coatings and vibration/shock/motion control
  http://www.lord.com/
• Bosch Hotwater – Water heaters
  http://www.boschhotwater.com/
• ShurTape – Pressure-sensitive tape
  http://www.shurtape.com/

Software:

• CodeGear – Borland Developer Tools Group
  http://www.codegear.com/
• Duet – SAP AG and Microsoft
  http://www.duet.com/
• TMA Resources – Association management software
  http://www.tmaresources.com/

Pharma:

• Sirtris Pharmaceuticals – Biopharmaceuticals
  http://www.sirtrispharma.com/

Travel/Logistics:

• Hertz – Car rental incentive program
  https://www.hertzpartners.com/
• Transperth – Perth public transportation
  http://www.transperth.wa.gov.au/
• AirFare WatchDog (recently spotlighted in PC Mag) – Low airline fares
  http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/
• Allied Van Lines – Moving
  http://www.allied.com/
• American Way – American Airlines magazine
  http://www.americanwaymag.com/

Education:

• Georgia Tech. Enterprise Innovation Institute
  http://innovate.gatech.edu/
• University of Michigan (Flint)
  https://www.umflint.edu/
• Black Hills State University
  http://www.bhsu.edu/
• University of Texas (El Paso)
  http://www.utep.edu/

Financial Services:

• ChoicePay – Online bill payment
  http://www.choicepaycorp.com/
• NYSE Data – NYSE Market Data Services
  http://nysedata.com/

Non-Profits:

• KaBooM! – Helping build playgrounds across America
  http://www.kaboom.org/
• Ulman Cancer Fund – Cancer fund for young adults
  http://www.ulmanfund.org/

Entertainment:

• Soul of the South – Music in Southern United States
  http://www.soulofthesouth.com/
• WildVoice – Online community; end-to-end podcasting service
  http://www.wildvoice.com/

DotNetNuke Factoid

Community

· A community of over 300,000 members

· [link] Within the top 25 Open Source Projects at SourceForge.net (by Page Views)

�

Performance

Scalability

· [link] Web Farm Support

· High Traffic Reference Sites

· [link] DotNetNuke itself handles ~ 15 million pageviews daily

· [link] Georgia Institute of Technology > 10 million pageviews daily

· [link] WildVoice.com > 6 million pageviews daily

· [link] Transperth > 6 million pageviews daily

· [link] National Rugby League > 4 million pageviews daily

· [link] South Australian Central > 4 million pageviews daily

· [link] Vinum Canada ~ 1 million pageviews daily

· [link] University of Texas El Paso ~ 1 million pageviews daily

Security

· Public Registration
Allows the general public to sign up for accounts.

o [link] CAPTCHA
Prevents people from writing programs to create accounts.

· [link] Security Groups
Allows site users to be placed into groups.

o Group Settings

§ Auto Assignment
Automatically assigns new users into the role.

§ Public Role
Allows users to subscribe/unsubscribe into different roles.

§ Private Role
Prevents users from changing their assignmment to a role.

· Page Level Security

o Allows security settings on a page level basis

§ Ability to View Page

§ Ability to Edit Page

· Module Level Security

o Allows security settings to be set on modules placed on pages

§ Ability to View Module

§ Ability to Edit Module

§ (Custom settings available on a per module basis)

Skins

· [link] Over 70 skins listed on Salaro

· [link] Over 500 skins listed on SnowCovered

Modules

· Over 30 Core Modules

o [link] Account LogIn

o [link] [project page] Announcements

o [project page] Blog

o [link] Banner

o [project page] Chat

o [link] [project page] Contacts

o [link] Discussion

o [link] [project page] Documents

o [link] [project page] Events List / Calendar

o [link] [project page] FAQs

o [link] [project page] Feedback

o [project page] Forum

o [project page] Gallery

o [project page] Help

o [link] [project page] IFrame

o [link] Image

o [link] [project page] Links

o [project page] Map

o [project page] Media

o [link] [project page] News Feed (RSS)

o [project page] Reports

o [project page] Repository

o [project page] Store

o [link] [project page] Search

o [link] [project page] Survey

o [link] [project page]Text/HTML

o [link] User Accounts

o [link] [project page] User Defined Table

o [project page] Users Online

o [project page] Wiki

o [link] [project page] XML/XSL

· Community Developed

o [link] Over 100 modules listed on DotNetNuke

o [link] Over 700 modules listed on SnowCovered

Localized

· [link] [project page] DNN Supports multiple languages (currently 25 user submitted language packs)

Books – Five books have been published on DotNetNuke

· [link] Professional DotNetNuke 4: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET 2.0

· [link] Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals

· [link] Beginning DotNetNuke 4.0 Website Creation in C# 2005 with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express: From Novice to Professional

· [link] DotNetNuke For Dummies

· [link] Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0

Magazines / Media

· Microsoft published a 2 part webcast on DNN 4.0 (March 17, 2006)

o [part1] Overview and What’s New

o [part2] Running on ASP.NET 2.0

· Microsoft published a 6 part webcast on DNN (Jan 10 – Jan 31, 2006)

o [part1] Overview and Installation of DotNetNuke

o [part2] Working with Modules in DotNetNuke

o [part3] Programming Your Own DotNetNuke Module Using Visual Basic .NET

o [part4] Using Security Features in DotNetNuke

o [part5] Creating Skins for Your DotNetNuke Portal

o [part6] DotNetNuke Architecture and Wrap-up

· DotNet Developers Journal ran a 4 part series on DNN (Dec 2005 – Feb 2006)

o [part1] An Introduction to the DotNetNuke Application Framework (Nov 2005)

o [part2] Managing an Open Source Project for DotNetNuke (Dec 2005)

o [part3] When Design and Development First Met (Jan 2006)

o [part4] Rapid Module Development for DotNetNuke (Feb 2006)

· [link] CNet published article (July 11, 2005)

· [link] EWeek published article (April18, 2005)

· [link] Visual Studio Magazine published article (Sept 30, 2003)

This display rocks! It is clear, concise and most importantly, real-time (note wireless antenna at top). And the unit itself is compact and not an eye-sore.

There was one important UX choice that puzzled me at first. The display is sorted by Route # versus arrival time or destination. I pondered this for a bit and the decision does make sense. If the display were sorted in descending order by arrival time, you would have scan down the list to find when your tram or bus would be arriving. This way, you can quickly skip the Route #’s you are not interested in and quickly find the time your tram will arrive.

This made me think about the sorting choices in Windows Explorer. When you are in Details view and sort columns, no matter which column you choose, there is an implicit primary sort by type (i.e. folder or file) before the selected sort is performed. I faithfully reproduced this functionality in my

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I greet widgets with a mixture of emotions. In 1999, when I created my venture-funded startup, my world-changing idea was to bring the web to people in the form of mini-applications that provided identical functionality with a web browser, a mobile device or a telephone. Not only that, the mini-apps had collaboration built-in so you could decide who could view/edit your data etc.

Yes, the mini-applications were called “widgets” and my startup was iWidgets, Inc. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t ready for widgets at the time and I didn’t know as much about running a startup then as I do today, and so iWidgets joined thousands of other dot bombs when I turned the lights out in early 2001.

But seeing all the buzz about widgets today gives me a good feeling — I had the right world-changing idea, just at the wrong time and perhaps a little flawed in the execution. I felt nostalgic enough to go digging through the archive DVD’s to pull up some promos we had created. Here are four of them, each focused a specific target market.

Janet |  Hannah |  Johnsons |  Rob

I went against my geek instincts and ended-up getting an eMachines computer. I always viewed eMachines as complete garbage, but it appears that since Gateway bought them, the quality has improved significantly. Here are the specifications of the machine I purchased…nothing phenomenal, but not a wimpy machine either.

I neglected to check the floor model of the machine thoroughly at the store and only after unpacking it as home did I realize that some bean counter at eMachines had decided to save a few pennies by not attaching the composite and S-video connectors on the video card. The card supports them…it just has empty spaces where the connectors should appear. Arrgh…why do companies do that…penny wise and pound foolish. Well, I pretty much could not have the BES without being able to output to the TV, so this was a problem. I saw this as an opportunity in disguise. I wasn’t too happy with the video performance of the ATI Xpress 200, so I ended up getting an ATI Radeon X700 Pro PCI-Express video card on eBay. I like its performance much better and it has every kind of output I would need, including DVI. Nice.

I have grown to really dislike new computers because I have to deal with uninstalling all the garbage software that comes pre-installed. Come on folks, seriously…enough of the free AOL hours and gazillion anti-spyware utilities and photo editors already. Just put a hardware switch on the box OK…two settings…(1) GEEK and (2) CLUELESS. Set the default to (2). If I choose (1), just put the barebones OS and then leave my computer alone. Anyway, where was I…so after messing with the hardware and seeing all the junk that came on the drive, I decided that there was only one way in which I could keep my sanity. Yes, I booted with the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 CD, blew away all the partitioned and installed the OS from scratch. Much better. BTW, if you are going to use Media Center Edition, use 2005…everything prior is crap.

After spending a few hours tweaking and tuning things, I finally had the system ready to go. So I ripped out all the electronic components from my entertainment center and dropped in the media PC. I hooked up my WinTV USB2 external TV tuner with DVR support (integrates seamlessly with Media Center Edition). I added the RF receiver for the SnapStream FireFly remote I purchased (Amazon…overnight). This is a sweet piece of hardware. Not only does it control all the MCE features without line of sight (thanks to RF), but it also has a cool mouse emulation mode. Not something I’ll use all the time, but nice for the occasional mouse click. What I really like about it is that all the button macros are configurable by editing an XML file. Very well-engineered hardware, intuitive software and extremely usable. Finally, I added two receivers for the Dynex Wireless Keyboard and Optical Mouse. Why two receivers you ask? Well, as I mentioned in my original BES post…the Berchet keyboard overlays a standard keyboard. It basically straps on with some velcro bands. Not the best situation and I hope to someday cleanly attach it to a keyboard, but for the moment, that’s what I have. Now, I figured it would be a big pain to attach/detach the overlay each time I wanted to use the regular keyboard, so I added a second keyboard and mouse (I don’t use the mouse with the receiver on which the Berchet keyboard runs). Now, I have the best of both worlds…keyboard for baby and keyboard for daddy. When the baby is using the keyboard and messes up, I can co-pilot and fix things on-the-fly.

So the BES is more or less operational with this hardware. Of course, I still have to deal with the display issue since I have this wonderful, hi-resolution output going to my crappy analog TV, but it’s OK for the moment. I am still having to fix the occassional glitch, so I’m not sure that the hardware is quite there yet, but I iam ready to tweak the software. In my next BES blog, I’ll tell you more about the software setup.

It’s all coming together quite nicely and baby is taking to the system quite well as you can see here (will work much better once I can get her to stop sucking on her fingers when using the system) —

Hmmm…maybe one size smaller…

Many people, most male, and mostly from Jamaica, West Africa and Spain, congregate here with all manner of percussion instruments. The gathering is not formally organized and everyone is welcome. Each person just joins in with his/her instrument and makes some amazing music. It is quite a spectacle to see 20-30 people playing all manner of drums and the crowd enjoying/dancing to the most infectious beats.

As I sat and listened to the beats today, I found myself thinking about software. Weird, yes, but that is my passion and I inevitably draw parallels. In the drummer group, there is no leader and people join and drop out at random. As new people join, there is a clear dissonance, but gradually, they sync up, beat for beat until it is so perfect that you cannot help but look for the conductor.

I think about the similarities this has with designing a user interface. I am not very good at software engineering, but I do put quite a bit of effort into the user interface of my software. Creating the U.I. almost always starts off with dissonance. Even with planning and preparation, the initial result is seldom pleasing. It takes several iterations and many days, sometimes weeks, before everything starts feeling harmonious. It’s like the drummers…you can’t instantly sync up…it takes time.

Although I have no scientific data to back this up, I think that successful software has an underlying rhythm. Elements work together in harmony so they become invisible and actions have a natural flow. This is the signature of intuitive software.

When Microsoft unleashed ASP.Net on the world, it helped us take a giant step forward, but in the U.I. area, I think it was two steps back. ASP.Net has single-handedly resulted in the propagation of some of the most dissonant and horrible web user interfaces the web had witnessed. And this is not the first time Microsoft has done it. When Microsoft gave us VB, the same thing happened. By making it easy to create a U.I. by dragging controls around on a page, Microsoft unfortunately created the U.I. equivalent of a cancer. I cringe every time I see controls grouped willy nilly and adorned with superfluous fonts, lines, colors, bevels…you name it. This stuff eats away at app usabililty.

With ASP.Net, my pet peeve is the “auto-postback.” Whoever put that into ASP.Net should be drawn and quartered. And developers who use it deserve the same. For instance, few things are more horrible in a U.I. than to have a page postback when the user makes a selection of a dropdown item to populate or reveal additional form items. Extreme dissonance! This should be done client-side, and not server-side. If there is a lot of data, use XMLHttp. There is no excuse for postbacks that occur without a user click action on an actionable user interface element (i.e. button, icon, hyperlink etc.).

When I evaluate web software, I look at the usability first and the capability second. My rationale is that if it is not usable, who cares what it can do. If I see that the app is an ASP.Net app, I have a litmus test. If I go make a dropdown, radio button or check-box selection and the page posts back, I am done evaluating. As far as I am concerned, the app is unusable. That said, my favorite portal DotNetNuke abounds with instances of this. So although by my definition it is unusable, I continue to use it for two reasons: (1) it has a lot of other positives, and more importantly (2) being on the core team, I am empowered to change this, but haven’t, so I consider this my own fault.

Anyway, I work around it by never using any of the built-in DNN modules other than the registration (which I hope to change some day, because the postbacks on it drive me nuts). With version 3.x, my worst fears were realized. Now, DNN settings pages sport collapsible sections that — you got it — post back, to expose more fields. Arrrrgggghhhhhhh!!!!! I would like to fix it but my biggest fear about fixing some very obvious problems with the DNN U.I. is that I am afraid to break some functionality in the process. DNN has so many moving, interdependent parts that this is actually quite easy to do. I know I should get over this unjustified fear and fix things. Someday soon I will work up the courage to do it, until then I will present mini-fixes through my blog as I have been doing and live with the dissonance.

OK, I get it. An HTML table was never intended to be used for pixel-perfect design layouts. For that matter, HTML was never intended to be used for pixel-perfect design layouts, period.

But, I have tried to go with the flow. The design gurus say, don’t use tables…use CSS. But from a productivity standpoint, that stinks. I have spent countless hours trying to get CSS-based