Thrift under windows XP

Thrift is nice. It's a decent RPC framework, it's seems quite developer-friendly as long as all the right nuts and bolts are attached in their proper places. This includes having a compiler running on your development system.

For various historical reasons my primary development system is now based on Windows XP, but with daily contributions from OSX and Linux. This means that if I'm to use Thrift, I need a Thrift compiler on XP. This is why I have spent the better part of a day making that happen.

I'm still not certain if i've got everything right, or even if I've gotten enough right for my installation to be really useful, but I do have a running version of the thrift compiler and it seems to be compiling thrift code written by someone else on my project so I have good feeling about this.

Now: What did I have to do in order to get thrift up&running?

• First I took a peek at this page that explains some things that needs to be done. I tried the binaries, but they are useless and obsolete, so next I tried to compile things for myself. I chose the Cygwin option.
• First attempt failed badly, no malloc or free found in (lib/cpp/src/Thrift.cpp), so I added "#include " and that bug disappeared.
• Then I had to move my ant installation to somewhere without a space in its path (that wasn't so hard, I just made a junction (the windows version of hard links) from C:/ to the old installation and put the location in the path). Since paths are hardwired into the makefiles, I had to run ./configure to make this change valid.
• Then many and varied strange things happened. I didn't really catch on to what what was happening until I saw something along the lines of "FIND " (some error message). The clue here was the capitalized FIND. This indicated that it was windows's find-implementation, not cygwin's that was being used by the make scripts. So I had to change all instances of "find" to "/usr/local/find". I guess i could have changed my path instead, but I didn't. You might want to try to change the path before rewriting all the makefiles :-)
• Then tings compiled. The compilation stopped with some error message, I restarted it, the compilation continued and finally terminated successfully.
• I ran "make install" and got myself a thrift.exe installation in /usr/local/bin (cygwin path).

I won't claim that this will work for anyone else, or even to claim very strongly that it has worked for me yet, but this is what I did, and so far it seems to have produced an useful result.

The mind boggles at the fact that this is actually (probably) the simplest way to get a decent RPC mechanism compiled on windows XP in 2010.

The Innovation Antipattern

My good friend Bjørn Borud recently sent a message about somthing he calls the "Innovation antipattern". He may or may not blog about it himself, but I felt that the pattern was too good to remain hidden in one of our semi-internal mailing lists, so here it is:

http://shripriya.com/blog/2010/01/23/how-not-to-do-innovation/

The pattern:

1. Not getting it
2. Doing it -- but still not getting it.
3. Failing, but not understanding why

THE PLEDGE

My good friend and colleague Per John Thorenfeldt just concocted this pledge for telcos that provide services to third-party over the top content providers:

THE PLEDGE

I will never again call a customer a "CONTENT PROVIDER"

I will never again call a customer a "3rd PARTY"

I will never again call a customer an "OVER-THE-TOP PLAYER"

They are CUSTOMERS or potential customers, period!

I will never again speak of innovation THROUGH customers

On occation we have the privilege of innovating WITH them

Our job is to stimulate innovation BY them by offering tools and materials

And hopefully innovating a bit ourselves

(Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Norway License)

8-)

What should we do? Development methodologies. Just a few thoughts.

Every few years I spend some time thinking about development methodologies. This last year I've been very inspired by Bill Buxton's book sketching user experiences. The idea that design is both a specialist task and a collaborative task is one I do subscribe to. Also the very practical tip to keep sketches look like sketches is one I have found useful: When something looks to polished, it is easy to get the wrong kind of feedback. When something looks unfinished it solicits input, and one of the things Buxton shows is how designers use this knowledge to add pencil-drawn lines to computer-drawn models, just to make them look more sketchy (but still very nice :-).

We applied this very idea to a portal design project that started a little under a year ago. It's not in production yet, *cross-fingers* but the first six months got every bit of contribution from the stakeholders that we could wish for. I'm quite willing to give a good chunk of the credit for that to the inspiration from Buxton's book (hmm, perhaps it's time to read that book again).

Today a colleague of mine pointed to the "guimags" website. They promote a way of developing user interfaces using magnetic gui elements on a whiteboard (combined with whiteboard markers). They have even written a book about it called "The Unplugged". I believe this is an intersting addition to a toolkit for interaction design. It's not a substitute for mockup and prototyping tools like Axure, balsamiq or napkee, but it's sure something that lets the number of throwaway prototypes go way up without adding much or anything to total project cost, so that alone means it's probably a neat idea. (Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm getting a free ebook for having blogged about this :-)

Hm, Drucker was a smartie.

http://www.versaggi.net/ecommerce/articles/drucker-inforevolt.htm

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14962/DruckerBeyond-the-Information-Revolution

Twitter was originally intended for SMS

Sort of a followup of my previous post. I browsed for Twitter on Wikipedia and found this little gem: Originally Twitter was inteded to be "a service that used SMS to tell small groups what an individual was doing"

Hehe.

The times they are achanging

Just heard from a friend of mine working in the "mobile content" industry. They are essentially fed up with all the sillyness operators are making them put up with, so they have recently decided that they will simply stop using SMSes for content delivery and instead use Internet protocols, possibly some chat protocol instead.

This is rich: SMS being dropped as a messaging protocol on phones due to operator sillyness. Whoever thought that operators "own" messaging on phones needs to have their expectations adjusted. As my recently deceased friend Erik Naggum said: «If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.»