Geoff Perlman – Page 6 – Xojo Programming Blog

California Renews the Fight for Net Neutrality

California Renews the Fight for Net Neutrality

Published October 4, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

Last year the Federal Communications Administration (FCC) voted to rollback the Net Neutrality law passed during the Obama administration. I’ve written about this previously. I think I’m on safe ground when I say that most people would agree that laws designed to keep the Internet on a level playing field make sense given that most US citizens don’t have much if any choice when it comes to Internet access. That’s why states have taken the matter into their own hands.

California recently passed its own Net Neutrality law. This is a big deal because Internet providers cannot realistically apply one set of standards to traffic in California and a different set everywhere else. California is big enough that it can effectively influence legislation on a national level. It did this in 1966 when the state established the first tailpipe emissions standards, which resulted in all cars sold throughout the US having catalytic convertors. When California passes a law affecting companies that do business across the United States, it can change how those companies operate in all states.

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Net Neutrality is dead, long live Net Neutrality!

Net Neutrality is dead, long live Net Neutrality!

Published June 13, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

Earlier this week, the FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality officially when into effect. What does this mean? It means that the rules that were put into place to prevent ISPs from abusing their power are gone. You might be wondering what power they actually have? I’ve already written about this before but in summary, most people only have a single option for internet service. That means that for them, there is no competition. Their ISP has them by the proverbial short hairs and there’s no other place most of us can go for Internet access. Net Neutrality at least prevented those ISPs from really abusing their monopoly. That’s now gone.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, you’re not going to see your Internet service suddenly slow to a crawl or block specific sites. It will be more of a steady decline. It’s like having terminal cancer. It won’t kill you tomorrow but it will eventually.

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Predicting the Future: Communication & Xojo’s Roadmap

Published May 4, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

If you spend enough time trying to predict the future, you learn that the more variables there are, the more difficult it becomes to determine a future. Take the weather for example. It’s not hard to predict tomorrow’s weather because there’s not much that will change over the next 12 hours or so. Try to predict the weather 7 days from now, 7 months or worse, 7 years from now, and your results will begin to vary dramatically.

This is certainly the case when it comes to writing apps. The bigger any one particular feature is, the more variables there are that affect it and thus the more difficult it becomes to predict how long it will take to finish. You don’t have to work in the software business very long to figure this out. Like most people in the software industry, we’ve been trying (with varying degrees of accuracy) to do this not just for our own internal planning but because we know you want, and need, to know as well.

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Unlock the all in one, low-code, cross-platform solution

Unlock the all in one, low-code, cross-platform solution

Published March 15, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

Like his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.

Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.

That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech, none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.

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We’ve Done This Before: A Net Neutrality Solution

We’ve Done This Before: A Net Neutrality Solution

Published January 30, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

As I’ve written before, the FCC’s claim that rolling back Net Neutrality will result in more competition (which presumably will be better for consumers) is flawed because of the cost of the last mile. What that means, in summary, is that over the last 30 years various cable and telecom companies have bared the cost of laying all the cable/wire necessary to bring internet service to most of the homes and businesses in US cities. They did this because city governments were more than willing to trade the enormous cost of creating a citywide network for the provider having (in most cases) an effective monopoly on providing internet access.

This isn’t the first time a service or utility has evolved in this manner in the United States. The railroads, the telegraph and later telephone service were all networks that were developed in much the same way.

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Avoiding False-Positive Virus Detection in Windows Apps

Published January 29, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

Viruses continue to be a big problem on Windows. As a result, anti-virus software can be a bit over-zealous about detecting what it believes to be apps that have viruses embedded within them. We have had reports over the years that apps made with Xojo are sometimes falsely identified as being infected with a virus. This sometimes occurs because the 32-bit Xojo compiler puts executable code in a location where the anti-virus software doesn’t expect to find it. We’ve seen this occur even when users are debugging apps from the IDE. Fortunately in that case, there’s a fairly easy solution.

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THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Poor Interface Design and its Potentially Dangerous Impact

THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Poor Interface Design and its Potentially Dangerous Impact

Published January 16, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

As most of you know, this past Saturday morning, the people of Hawaii got a shocking notification on their smartphones warning of a incoming ballistic missile and that this warning was not a drill. I can only imagine the fear that raced through the minds of more than a million people. This warning, as well all now know, turned out to be a false alarm accidentally set off by a state employee who was attempting to perform an internal test.

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The Last Mile: Why Net Neutrality is a Must

The Last Mile: Why Net Neutrality is a Must

Published December 1, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

During the Obama administration, internet service providers (ISPs) were reclassified as Telecommunication Service Providers. This meant that they would be treated like phone companies, as common carriers with all the regulation that implies. Prior to this they were classified as Information Providers which clearly made no sense since ISPs provide the network, not the actual content. Most importantly, Net Neutrality prevents ISPs from providing paid fast lanes which would allow companies to pay ISPs to make traffic to their site faster than traffic to other sites.

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Get Better Dates with the New Xojo Framework

Published November 4, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

Time zones can cause confusion even for super villains. But the Xojo framework has got you covered, whether you are out to do good or evil.

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The 64-bit Xojo IDE

Published October 17, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

Back in 1998 when we shipped version 1 of what is now Xojo, it was a 32-bit application and has been ever since. Depending on the operating system, that meant the Xojo IDE itself had at most 4GB of RAM available to it. That would seem like more than enough for any project. However, we have some users that have really big projects. One project I know of has over 1500 project items!

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Author: Geoff Perlman