Last January I shared some thoughts on keeping hosted services up and running 99.9% of the time. eMarketing Websites and portals often do not have the luxury of going down for 3 hours of maintenance (or even 3 minutes), leaving me to often envy the planned maintenance notices I receive from Salesforce when logging in .

As you can see from the daily report below, our monitoring service loves to occasionally tease us with uptime reports hovering at 99.89% uptime.

Some key things we observe and monitor:

• "Downtime" in the report is measured in blocks of 5 minutes, so what may have actually been a 10 second outage gets reported as a 5 minute outage, skewing the actual results.
• Sub-second response time (< 1000 milliseconds), while not contractually in the SLA, is a key metric in determining site performance and customer experience.
• Customers who deploy changes to a staging server first (available in Unlimited Edition) have a much higher likelihood of sustaining 100% uptime day over day.
• Reliance on a good datacenter partner is critical. Our offices are not the most luxurious, but we spare no expense on our datacenter location and services.

Inevitably, some Developers need to apply advanced business and content manipulation rules to web/portal pages that display collections of Salesforce records.

This trick of using Javascript Arrays works very well. The basic components of this pattern are:

• Create a Javascript object that mirrors the Salesforce object and fields to be managed
• Use a Dialogue Script Repeater control to select a collection of records from Salesforce and package them into a client-side Javascript array.
• Render the web page using the Javascript collection of objects.

Very powerful technique. I can foresee the need to extend DScript controls to return results in a format such as JSON, which is already in use in our AJAX library.

You can view a source code example in the Developer Sandbox.

As the Financial Institution's fall one-by-one, I'm drawn to the influence that software is having on Wall Street.

I've long been an admirer of James Goodnight, CEO of business intelligence company SAS, and the SAS culture. The SAS value proposition was originally represented to me several years ago as "We help banks identify risk using data warehouse technology".

So I wondered what role SAS may have had in the mortgage crisis. At it's peak, WAMU, and several other banks were advertising "Mortgage approvals in 10 minutes!" The assumption being that they were using massive data warehouses, like those powered by SAS, to quickly determine whether or not a customer was credit worthy.

But apparently these risk management systems were either skewed to accept unnecessary risk, or they were simply ignored. SAS derives the majority of it's $2B in revenue from Financial Services (yes... that's 2 Billion with a "B"... and they're still a private company) so I was somewhat amused to find this article where Mr Goodnight says:

“It doesn’t really matter what Wall Street wants. They’ve proven they don’t know what they are doing. They’ve made a mess of their own companies.”

“I think we need to get to the point where we don’t worry about what Wall Street thinks all the time because it’s clear Wall Street has not performed at all. Bank after bank has been going under with the exception of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase”

The latest issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal has an article titled "Is Your Next Language COBOL?", where they report that 70% of Merrill Lynch's business runs on COBOL... a 50 year old programming language. Merrill purchased 5,000 seats of Salesforce back in 2005. They've since been acquired by Bank of America.

Last year, Salesforce was betting big on wealth management and selling into the board rooms of financial instutions. I don't think the latest fallout impacts this strategy negatively. If anything, the re-building process on Wall Street will force a critical review of SaaS and on-demand solutions as they build out next generation infrastructure.

One area worth following closely is algorithmic trading. It's estimated that one-third of all stock trades were driven by automatic programs in 2006. By 2010, that figure will likely reach 50%.

You can draw your own conclusions. Were financial institutions ignoring decision support systems? Were their systems outdated? Is automation moving too fast for humans to reliably intervene and prevent financial disasters?

Thankfully, no one is blaming technology for this mess. If anything, there is a universal concession that "this is the future" and we'll need to deal with it.

The Internet has enabled a globalized economy. Whether or not it makes sense to trust a geographic center of influence for financial services in New York is clearly being called into question.

Good web form design consistently accomplishes:

• End User Convenience
• Data Validation

This web-to-contact form in the i-Dialogue Developer's Sandbox looks pretty simple on the surface, but it implements several subtle best practices that often get overlooked.

How to Make Web Forms Convenient

The "First Name" textbox incorporates use of the "HasFocus" attribute to ensure the user does not have to click on the textbox to begin data entry. They simply start typing.

<dlog:TextBox id='FirstNameTxt' FieldName='FirstName' HasFocus="true" />

Tab orders are logically defined so that the end user can progress through the web form without need for selecting each textbox (while a TabOrder attribute is available, default behavior is to simply progress through the form fields top-to-bottom).

Finally, the DScript button control sets the "IsDefault" attribute to "true" to ensure that if the Enter key is hit, the form will automatically submit the form on behalf of clicking the button.

<dlog:Button id='SubmitBtn' Text='Contact Us' IsDefault="true" />

Data Validation

There's a new Wiki article on Page Validation that describes both client-side and server-side validation techniques using Dialogue Script.

Client-side validation is sufficient for most marketing web forms, but portal applications typically must take extra precaution and also validate data entry on the server.

Dialogue Script supports the full array of ASP.NET Data validation controls. Our demo web to lead form uses the RequiredFieldValidator control to prevent the web form from being submitted with an empty Email value.

<asp:RequiredFieldValidator 
        id="valEmailRequired" 
        ControlToValidate="EmailTxt" 
        Display="dynamic">* Email Required
</asp:RequiredFieldValidator>

The RegularExpressionValidator control may be used to validate that the email address is well formed (such as requiring "@" and "." symbols in the address).

<asp:RegularExpressionValidator
        id="regEmail"
        ControlToValidate="EmailTxt"
        Text="(Invalid email)"
        ValidationExpression="\w+([-+.']\w+)*@\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*" />    

Another side benefit of applying validation to web forms is the prevention of SPAM, which is caused by automated bots that roam the Internet hoping to share links of various V1@gra sites on unsuspecting Blogs.

I pre-ordered a G1 phone today. Looks like it'll be available about 1 week before Dreamforce '08. I looked at the open source API today too....hmmm... the juices are beginning to flow.... I love the potential of this platform.

An updated version of the Silicon Forest Universe poster is now available.

894 technology companies are showcased on the Silicon Forest Universe 2.0, a joint project of Virginia Tech University and Portland State University’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies.
 
The poster is a result of research conducted last fall by Dr. Heike Mayer of Virginia Tech's National Capital Region Urban Affairs and Planning Program. Dr. Mayer’s research examined and visualized high-tech firms in the Willamette Valley region, using data gathered from an online survey of technology firms.

In contrast to the 2003 version, the new poster shows not only existing firms, but also firms that have ceased operations. It highlights the genealogy of 894 companies, venture capital firms, and other support organizations. The new poster was designed by Stuart Armstrong.

“Portland’s Silicon Forest has grown and matured. Numerous firms emerged as spinoffs from Tektronix and Intel and the poster illustrates the evolution of the Forest. The updated poster shows that there are fewer startups from Tektronix and from Intel. It seems that these firms started the emergence of Portland as a high-tech region but that they are not the economic engines anymore,” said Mayer, who has similar projects focusing on Boise, Phoenix, Kansas City and Washington’s Puget Sound region.

The poster is 24 x 36 and available for $15, including shipping and handling. To order a copy, please click here.

(Note: Cubic Compass is located in quadrant L13; a direct descendant of the Corillian cluster with a gravitational orbit around the Tektronix center of influence)

Microsoft is embracing Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign and just going with the "PC" stereotype. The message? "It's cool to not be cool" (hey... I've been saying that for years!  )

The guy in the opening scene is an actual Microsoft engineer that resembles John Hodgman from the Mac commercials.

We're only 45 days away from Dreamforce and the launch of our new platform, code named "Fibonacci".

Some exciting new features we'll be demonstrating:

• "Get It Now" provisioning
• Python script language integration
• Built-in User Experience best practices
• On-demand script sharing with other i-Dialogue Developers

Why code name "Fibonacci"? Perhaps because the new features enable exponential growth? Because good web design makes consistent use of the Golden Ratio? (I don't know really... our previous release was named "Caprica" and you'd have to be a BSG fan to understand that ).

Stop by booth #311 at Dreamforce to check it out!

• DOS had the Black Screen of Death
• Windows had the Blue Screen of Death
• Vista has a Purple Screen of Death

Office 2.0 and Software-As-a-Service users now have the Google Chrome "Aw, Snap!" screen-of-death.