The floodgates have opened… with many of the spam comments coming from false “registered users” of the Blogspot/Blogger system. Therefore, commenting on this blog is now disabled.

What a shame. My apologies to those who have legitimate comments.

>> Update 2/6: Well, I feel foolish. A good friend pointed out that there’s a Blogspot/Blogger feature that requires that people leaving comments type a graphically displayed word to validate that it’s not spam. With luck, that’ll solve the problem. Guess I should have read the fine manual. Commenting is now re-enabled.

Z Trek reached a dubious milestone today. There were more than 50 pieces of blog spam when I checked in this morning.

This blog is set up so that all comments are moderated, and must be approved by yours truly before they can become visible on the site. However, the “leave a comment” link is easily detectable by robots, which are flooding the site with bogus comments. Some of them are simple “This is a great site! For more on this topic, see such-and-such site.” Others are packed with keywords and multiple links for things like mortgages, phishing schemes and pharmaceuticals.

Do spammers really think that people will read and click on those often-nonsensical postings? Maybe, maybe not. But even if nobody ever sees their spam comment, the robot will have succeeded in gaming searching engines, like Google and Yahoo. That’s because the search rankings algorithms for a page take into account the number of other sites that link to that page. If my site links to a spam site, that the spammer’s search engine ranking goes up. Or at least it used to; top search engines have adapted their algorithms and spiders to ignore these type of bogus links.

Fifty. And it was only about 20 a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, it only takes a moment to delete the spam comments using Blogger’s control panel. However, I feel the pain of owners of very heavily trafficked blogs, as the number of spam comments must be overwhelming. No wonder so many of my friends and colleagues have simply turned off commenting.

>> Update 2/4: Literally within 5 minutes of posting the above, its first spam comment showed up. It read (links removed): “Hello! You have a very nice blog. I’m here to share valuable info with you visit my blog ,about Mozilla Firefox web browser.” The post links to a site which has a hacked version of Firefox with spyware installed.

Here comes the new boss — literally, the same as the old boss. Michael Dell, founder of Dell Inc., reclaimed the CEO position, as his longtime #2 guy, Kevin Rollins, left the company. Rollins took over the command chair in 2004, and led Dell Inc. through some tough times.

What does this mean? Well, a couple of years ago, Dell looked like a miracle company. Today, it’s still a top computer provider, but it’s no longer evident that its direct-sales model will drive the company’s growth. Commodity desktops, notebooks and servers, yes, people will buy them, sight unseen, based on the specs and price. Televisions and music players? That’s a different story.

A couple of years ago, Dell was the top PC maker. Today, HP is. Meanwhile, Dell is plagued by concerns about its customer service, after a disastrous experiment with outsourcing and a number of battery recalls. And the SEC has some questions about Dell’s accounting, and NASDAQ isn’t happy.

The most recent numbers weren’t great, and Dell’s stock (as of the time of writing) is at $24.22 per share, down from its 52-week high of $32.24.

The most recent quarterly earnings report, from November 2006, had this statement:

Company Outlook The company said that the actions it has taken to drive improved operating and financial performance long-term with a better balance of liquidity, profitability and growth are starting to take hold. However, in the near term, improvement in growth and profitability may not be linear due to a variety of factors, including the timing of continued investments in Customer Experience, global expansion, and new product introductions, as well as a muted seasonal uplift due to changes in the mix of product and regional profit. In addition, the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2006 included one extra week.

Were all the problems caused by Kevin Rollins? Will Michael Dell (pictured) turn around the beleaguered computer giant? We’ve seen that a shift in CEO can work miracles — see the astonishing reinvention of HP, for example, after Carly Fiorina’s departure and Mark Hurd’s ascension. Dell needs that kind of miracle.

1. Windows Presentation Foundation and Aero user interface. The new GUI is clean and slick, and when run on the right hardware so that it can use its “glass” effects, is much more visually appealing than Aqua, the GUI in Mac OS X 10.4… though, frankly, Aero is not as intuitive to use as Aqua.

2. Windows Communication Foundation. This new messaging subsystem makes it easier for developers to create .NET applications that use Web services. The WCF plumbing takes care of a lot of middleware-dependent issues.

3. Windows Workflow Foundation. This subsystem, which includes a workflow runtime engine, offers tremendous potential for creating complex applications and mashups. To be honest, I’m not sure how useful this will be on the desktop, but it’s an impressive concept and a well-considered implementation.

4. Windows Mail. Outlook Express was tired, and Windows Mail is wired. However, given the every-improving quality of Web-based mail systems, it’s unclear how useful this will be for the average consumer or even office worker.

5. Built-in support for x64. New computers, such as those running Intel’s Core 2 Duo or Xeon processors, or AMD’s Athlon 64 or Opteron processors, can run 64-bit operating systems, and most versions of Windows Vista come with both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels in the box.

6. ReadyBoost. This feature uses Flash memory (like in a USB flash drive) as a memory cache. Remember, Flash memory is faster than a rotating disk – and there’s virtually no seek time. This is the one feature that I wish I had on the Mac right now.

7. Built-in support for ink. Forget about the separate Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005… Windows Vista has all the tablet bits built in, and actually goes much farther by supporting new gestures for command-and-control. (One of my pending projects is to install Windows Vista onto my Fujitsu T4010 tablet.)

Two important server-development elements have been finalized this week.

ASP.NET AJAX, which is Microsoft’s tooling to support rich Web applications on its ASP.NET application server, reached 1.0 status on Tuesday. ASP.NET is a well-respected app server, and from what I’ve seen, Microsoft has done an excellent job with its AJAX implementation. See my comments from last October about ASP.NET AJAX.

Also yesterday, the W3C formally released its XQuery 1.0 spec, along with XSLT 2.0. XQuery describes a platform-neutral query language that can work across XML data. While there’s a lot of work to be done with XQuery (see my earlier comments), this is a key milestone on that project.

Where have all the great tech journalists gone? They’ve gone to vendors, every one.

First, last month, InfoWorld’s Jon Udell went to work for Microsoft. See his auto-interview about the new job. He’ll be working as an evangelist on MSDN’s Channel 9. This is a savvy move by Microsoft, and I’m sure it’s good for Jon. It’s a bummer for InfoWorld, of course.

And now, Peter Coffee (pictured), arguably both the tallest and wisest technology pundit in the business, has left eWeek to work for Salesforce.com as director of platform research. Wow. Salesforce shoots, Salesforce scores. Good for Peter; he’ll be fantastic there. eWeek is significantly lessened by his departure.

Larry O’Brien tagged me. Larry, that prankster, is playing Blog Tag, where you dare people to reveal things that most people won’t know. (I traced Larry’s tag back and found this entry on “Storm & Wind” from August 2006. After that, the trail went dark.)

I’m cool. I’m hip. But I also want to stay somewhat on topic; this is a professional blog, not a personal diary. That said, here are things that you may not know about me:

1. One of my first published papers presented a recursive solution to the Tower of Hanoi problem – for the HP-67 programmable calculator. Rather innovative, I still think. Another paper formally presented a “Tiny BASIC” implementation for the HP-41C calculator.

2. The first magazine I worked for, as a staff editor, was called Portable 100, for users of the TRS-80 Model 100 computer (pictured). The first article I wrote for P.100 was a review of a Votrax speech synthesizer. The magazine was so successful that many people referred to the Model 100 computer as a Portable 100.

3. My consulting company, Camden Associates, was launched when I lived in Camden, Maine, more than two decades ago. It was initially a VAR/systems integration/custom programming business called Camden Computer Services.

4. When studying computer science, my favorite course was in compiler design. It was a great class. I also enjoyed taking EE classes, and wished that I could take more.

5. The first personal computer I owned was a TRS-80 Model I, but unfortunately, I couldn’t afford many mods for it. Later I upgraded to a TRS-80 Model III. I never owned a Commodore or an Apple, until acquiring a Fat Mac.

6. I worked my way through college typing term papers and dissertations (I was a wicked good typist) and tutoring. The best money and most gratification was in tutoring non-traditional students who were receiving veteran’s benefits.

7. While Larry is a great puzzle/game solver (see his backgammon comment), I’m not good at it. I’m lousy at backgammon and chess, for example, and can’t solve the Rubik’s Cube – despite Larry’s attempts to teach me the algorithm. My brain just doesn’t work that way.

8. I love doing what I do. But if I had to do something else, I’d become a professional photographer.

Part of the game is that I must tag other people. Okay: Alexa Weber Morales, Bruce Schneier, Esther Schindler, Bernard Golden and Joel Spolsky.

I’ve seen relatively little coverage about yesterday’s approval of the PCI Express 2.0 specification by PCI-SIG, the industry consortium that, well, defines the PCI Express specification.

With the introduction of PCI Express (aka, PCIe) a couple of years ago, server expansion cards got a huge performance boost, with the biggest impact on RAID and other disk controllers, and also on high-speed, low-latency interconnects, like you’d see in high-performance clusters. (PCI Express is found on desktop systems, too, with the biggest payoff in graphics cards. There, PCIe replaced older standards like AGP.)

The beauty of the PCI Express system is that it’s transaction-based. Yes, this makes it considerably more complex than many previous bus designs. In fact, PCIe incorporates a full networking stack. However, that gives it much greater flexibility and scalability.

Each PCI Express interface and peripheral engages in transactions using some number of asynchronous one-bit-wide serial lanes, which are used to aggregate bandwidth. Devices can use links that are between 2 and 32 lanes wide. (That’s in contrast to older buses, which were synchronous and parallel at 16, 32 or 64 bits, and which were therefore hard to sync at faster clock speeds.)

The PCI Express 2.0 spec doubles the data rate from 2.5GT/s (that’s 2.5 billion transactions per second) to 5.0GT/s. Each lane’s performance jumps from 2.5Mb/s to 5.0Mb/s.

That extra bandwidth opens up great possibilities. Think of what it can mean when linking CPUs and GPUs, for example. It also raises the ceiling for low-latency interconnect performance for clusters.

According to PCI-SIG, the PCI Express 2.0 spec adds additional features: device drivers can dynamically control link speed, for example. The bus also supports devices that consume higher power.

As servers and desktops get faster (think about two quad-core processors in a desktop, or four quad-core in a typical server) the bottleneck isn’t the processor or the peripheral. It’s the bus. PCI Express 2.0 is a solid step forward.

Before 2006, only one company – IBM – managed to gain more than 2000 U.S. patents in a single year. But in 2006, five companies broke that barrier: IBM with 3651 patents, Samsung with 2453, Canon with 2378, Matsushita at 2273, and Hewlett-Packard at 2113.

That’s a huge amount of patent activity. In fact, according to IFI Patent Intelligence, my source for all these numbers, there were 173,772 U.S. patents issued in all of 2006, a record amount that was 20.8 percent higher than in 2005.

To quote from IFI’s analysis,

“2006 panned out as a banner year in terms of the number of individual patents granted and leads us to believe that the USPTO is making headway in addressing its backlog of patent applications,” said Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Patent Intelligence.

“Although the number of patents being granted is not the only gauge of technological advancement, the relative increase in number of patents being generated indicates a growing emphasis on the value of intellectual property.”

The USPTO is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Some other big patent winners in 2006: Intel, at 1962, Microsoft, at 1463, and Sun Microsystems, at 776. You can see the same list I’m looking at the IFI site.

When you factor in the power of patent cross-licensing, patents are an incredibly potent weapon. Patents not only help a company gain market share, but also help them successfully defend that market share against competitors – particularly upstarts. Big competitors share their patents. Smaller competitors don’t have the IP to play that game, so they either have to pay through the nose, or stay out of the game. Novell, in its lopsided IP licensing deal with Microsoft, may be a casualty of the IP wars: it was simply out-gunned.

Threads are breaking out of the server into the desktop and notebook computer – and even in servers, the advent of dual-core and quad-core processors is drastically changing the landscape for applications. To put it bluntly, applications need to be designed, coded and tested to run optimally in a multithreaded environment – not just to get the best possible performance or throughput, but also to ensure that applications will run correctly when there are four, eight or even 16 cores in the machine.

The problem is that most developers, and development teams, don’t think about threading on the desktop. Even when it comes to servers, which have long supported multiprocessing, a lot of the thinking is that “the operating system will handle it,” or “my libraries will handle it,” or “my runtime will handle it.” Well, no. Most of the time, if the architect, coder or tester doesn’t put in the time, you won’t see the results.

When I talk to companies like AMD or Intel, that’s the frustration I hear all the time: Threading is still in the earliest stages of adoption among developers. That’s true on the desktop and the server. That’s true of ISVs and enterprise developers. That’s true for those building libraries and runtimes, and for those building complete applications.

But how to measure how far a company, a development team or a developer is in regard to threading? During lunch this week with James Reinders, director of marketing and business for Intel’s Software Developer Products Group (that is, the compiler folks), I suggested a Threading Maturity Model (ThMM), as analogous to things like the Capability Maturity Model, or the SOA Maturity Model. James liked the idea, and I’m presenting it here for comment. As far as I know, this is an original concept.

Note that companies would likely be at different stages in the Threading Maturity Model for server applications versus for desktop applications.

The Threading Maturity Model (ThMM)

5. Adoption. All developers trained to use threading. Threading is addressed at the design, requirements, and architectural states of development, in addition to coding and testing. Broad incorporation of threading tools into the toolchain. Newly adopted code, such as libraries and components, must demonstrate support for threading. Funded efforts to eliminate all non-threaded libraries and runtimes. All threaded applications are tested against platforms with different cores/processors to identify runtime issues. Formal source-code validation techniques are used to identify potential failures.

4. Utilization. A few developers receive formal training on programming using threads, and how to avoid hazard such as deadlocks and race conditions. Threading considered a programming issue, not a design, requirements or architectural issue. Use of threading encouraged, but not mandated, except in performance-intensive routines. Some libraries and runtimes required to support threading. Specific tools to test threaded code are purchased and used from time to time. Some, but not all, threaded applications are tested against platforms with different cores/processors to identify runtime issues. No formal validation of threaded code for correctness.

3. Hotspots. Developers are largely self-taught about threading. Threading used to address known performance trouble spots within applications by applying simple techniques, such as OpenMP, to optimize loops on a desktop application, or the use of thread pools to manage user connections on a server application. Results measured with code profilers and casual benchmarks. Use of threading is allowed, but not particularly encouraged or required. Minimal testing of applications against platforms with different cores/processors to identify runtime issues.

2. Experimentation. Some developers have studied threading, such as by reading articles, but are not trained. Simple tests of threading conducted with trivial or ad-hoc projects; some tests will appear to indicate failure, because the tests weren’t properly designed or executed. Some allocation of enthusiast team members’ time is channeled into exploring threading, often as a “skunkworks” project. Some understanding of the different threading models. Minimal incorporation of threading into production code. No testing of applications against platforms with different cores/processors to identify runtime issues.

1. Awareness. General awareness of the potential benefits of threading desktop or server applications, but unsure of the specific benefits of different techniques for threading. Threading not incorporated into the development process. Developers trust that compilers, libraries and runtimes are handling threading automatically. No serious consideration of threading as a way to solve performance problems. No testing of applications against platforms with different cores/processors to identify runtime issues.

0. Unawareness. They don’t know and they don’t care: Developers, architects and managers are either unaware of the existence of threading, or don’t believe that it applies to their software development practices. Completely trusts that the operating system handles everything automatically when more cores or processors are added. Nobody is following technical discussions regarding threading.

(My thanks to James Reinders for his enthusiastic response, and to my colleague Andrew Binstock, who reviewed an early version of the model. Andrew offered ways to make it more generally applicable to both desktop and server development, and suggested adding ThMM stage 0.)

This is my 100th blog entry on Z Trek. Profound, ain’t it?

Apple’s decision to change its name from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. reinforced my nascent feelings about the company, and by extension, IDG’s independent conference for the Macintosh industry. Apple and Macworld Expo aren’t about computers any more. They’re all about consumer electronics.

Sure, in the Macworld North Hall there were a few enterprise exhibitors. Behind the main Apple pavilion in the South Hall (which was mainly showing off the iPhone) there were a handful of software development tools companies. However, they were lost in the maze of iPhones, Apple TVs, and iPod cases. Macworld is a consumer event, and Apple has declared itself a consumer electronics company.

I wouldn’t go to Nokiaworld to see their new phones, so why should I go to a conference to see the Apple iPhone? I’ll wait and see it in my local cell-phone store.

I wouldn’t go to TiVoworld to see their latest digital video recorder, so why should I go to a conference to see the Apple TV device? I’ll wait and see it in Best Buy.

Sure, there was some eye candy for people like me — you know, the ones who care more about computers than music players. Apple did demonstrate some neat features of “Leopard,” the next version of Mac OS X. But those were basically the same bits that Apple’s been showing for the past few months.

Apple’s announcement that two billion songs have been downloaded from its iTunes Store is impressive. But that’s not a reason to attend a conference. Neither is the opportunity to view yet another “I’m a Mac” advertisement.

One can only see so many MacBook carrying cases, iPod skins and people drooling about the iPhone to realize that Macworld has become simply irrelevant. I’m a big Apple customer myself: I’m typing this on an iMac, I carry a PowerBook, both are connected to an Airport WiFi hub, and there’s an iPod hooked into my car stereo. But there’s nothing for me at Macworld.

Jon Bosak informed me this morning that UBL 2.0 has been approved as an OASIS standard. UBL, or Universal Business Language, is designed to provide a consist way for businesses to share common documents using XML; that is, documents like invoices, purchase orders, catalog updates, transportation manifests, things like that. UBL is an alternative to business groups creating ad-hoc schemas for documents that are truly universal to all businesses. Why reinvent the wheel — or the billing form?

While UBL 1.0 made a good start, and laid some fundamental groundwork, the scope of its work was pretty limited to order processing. Version 2.0 adds 23 new document types of the previous version of the XML spec. Those include catalog requests and updates; forwarding instructions, packing lists, bills of ladings and waybills; credit and debit notes, freight invoices, payment reminders; account statements and remittance advice notes.

Sexy? Heck no. But efforts like UBL (you can download the spec here) are essential to helping businesses conduct business online, and can significantly help reduce software development time. There’s also a SOA perspective here: the UBL document and schemas can be used both internally and externally, and can serve as the foundation for a company’s internal workings as well.

Andrew Binstock pointed me to this CNet article, regarding the forthcoming introduction of terabyte hard drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Too bad they didn’t ship in December. My, that burger tastes good.

Hitachi GST, by the way, is IBM’s old storage division, which Hitachi bought in 2003 and absorbed into their own storage group. I visited the IBM hard-disk plant in San Jose about a decade ago. It had very impressive displays of old washing-machine-sized 5MB hard drives in its museum.