Sunday April 25, 2004

Due to some recent changes in my circumstance, I need to be available for SMS messaging across different carriers as well as by phone. The Treo 600 is chock full o' goodness: PalmOS means that it can run Top Gun SSH, it unites my palm address book with my phone (it's all in there) and the color display is excellent. The built-in web browser, Blazer, is good enough (but um, I'm not posting this blog entry from it); there's no built-in GPS but if you know where you are, you can always pull up a map to get you the rest of the way. The built in camera is, um, adequate. I mean, I wouldn't take the kodak-moment family photos with it, you're keepers warrant a real camera but hey, just to get a quick n' dirty photo, it'll work.

One word of caution I've received is that the wrong combination of 3rd party PalmOS apps can break it pretty badly. The recommendation I have is to get an sd/mmc flash card and a backup utility that will backup a full image of the OS and apps. Sounds reasonable; it'd really suck to crash your phone into a state where you'd lose everything. The other thing that is kinduva a let down is the lack of bluetooth. I'd heard that the Treo 610 with bluetooth would be out by April but obviously it's the 25th; we're still waiting. I would really like to synch this puppy up without a USB dongle but life's just unfair sometimes. Anyway, SprintPCS seems committed to not carrying phones with bluetooth capabilities (bastards), so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

I haven't been this excited by a PDA since I used OmniSky on a Palm V a few years back. In retrospect, that was pretty sucky but the high geek factor made it a lot of fun. I think this Treo gonna be fun and useful on a much more enduring basis. ( Apr 25 2004, 08:11:16 PM PDT ) Permalink

Wednesday April 21, 2004

Yes, you need a good software support system and competent IT help but if the users don't see themselves as publishers, if it's not ingrained in their psyche, it's not going to be a part of the core concerns. Dropping a bunch of tools in someone's lap doesn't necessary stoke their enthusiasm to use them. Creating structured content and collaborative creation is human activity that requires a mindset comfortable with the process. The tools are just there to help.

While Why Content Management Fails emphasizes CMS failures as a "people problem", IMO it also has a technical element: CMS developers aren't grokking their customer's requirements. Instead of imposing upon the users This Is How You Shall Work the toolset should be flexible enough to work the way the users want to use them. And Veen backs up my point

To have any chance of success, a content management project must follow the same user-centered design practices as any other project. Task analysis, rapid prototyping, usability testing - all of these methods are crucial to a CMS rollout. It is foolhardy to unveil a mammoth, nine-month project to an unsuspecting user community and expect adoption.

It used to be supposed that with Vignette's and Interwoven's fat market capitalizations in the dot boom daze that the CMS market is done, it's a solved problem. But look around and it's clear that it's still an open issue. The big enterprise vendors with their jumbo price tickets are in trouble. And the market is ripe for a new generation of tools. The writing is on the blog. ( Apr 21 2004, 01:47:51 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday April 18, 2004

I could conceivably take on some other topics ("George Bush", "Iraq", "Lies and the lying liars who tell them" and so forth) but for now, I think I'll just enjoy the approach of summertime. And root for the Giants.

The weblogoscope is programmatically generated; it gave me a good excuse to take a close look at the rss, rdf and atom document data structures as well as mess with some of the stuff on CPAN for handling them. It's pretty funny how similar these structures are and yet how divergent their grammars are. And to top it all off, it seems like the timestamp representations are all over the road; the datelines have different elements representing them (why this isn't standardized on Dublin Core is a mystery to me), different formats and various timezone styles. I guess one of these days I'll research more closely how it got to be this way.

Or maybe that doesn't matter. Regardless, perhaps a weblogoscopic view of the baseball season might help the Giants. Maybe it's just another big distraction. ( Apr 18 2004, 11:03:13 PM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday April 06, 2004

As the jack-of-all-tradesman in LAMP, J2EE and web operations, I'm confident that I will be adding valuable new capabilities to Technorati's business and great things will be upon us. The Technorati team is sharp, inspired and with those added special ingredients of timing and luck, on the cusp of greatness. ( Apr 06 2004, 04:05:45 PM PDT ) Permalink
Comments [2]

Monday April 05, 2004

I'm not a big TV watcher but I really dig HBO's new series, Deadwood, it's such a departure into the heavy metal underbelly of human tendencies and vices, I can't stop watching it.

The dialogue gets a little tiresome with the "f*ck'ing this" and "c#ck s*cker that" every other sentence. Don't get me wrong, I can cuss like a sailor, when inspired to (I have colleagues who can attest to this fact), it just gets a little old having it be such a dominant aspect of the script. I could complain that the ugly people are really damn ugly and the pretty/handsome ones are too much so but overall, I think it's a great show. The cinematic mise en scene of Deadwood is truly awesome: tough, gritty and grueling.

The next thing I'd like to see on Deadwood is a role for Ian Kilminster (AKA Lemmy), it'd be perfect!

Friday April 02, 2004

Discovering that a stone has penetrated the surface of the water has traditional been discovered by scanning the bottom for new debris. What a waste of effort! Publication is an explicit, active event, why is it sufficient to discover its occurance after the fact, passively? These are the days of miracles and wonders indeed, we can tell those who have a registered interest in knowing that a publish even we should be concerned with has happened. Content event listeners will make it happen.

Metadata is your friend, my friend. It will be used to enrich us. ( Apr 02 2004, 05:49:22 PM PST ) Permalink
Comments [1]

Thursday April 01, 2004

These days, there are so many open source content management systems, it's difficult to keep 'em all straight. When I'm evaluating these things, the first thing I look at is how close is the CMS to the content serving? If they're closely bound, then any efforts at scaling one function (say, serving content) has to be considered for it's impact on another (such as, inputting and managing the content). This is why I outright refuse to deal with products such as Vignette. And yet a lot of products seem to follow that same "the appserver is the content repository, serving engine and workflow manager" model that makes Vignette such an awful product.

I understand that Plone is similarly modeled, albeit on top of a Zope app server. A lot of the blogware (such as the one that I'm using now) that masquerade as CMS' also closely couple the data management with the serving of templatized content output.

I say: get with it. It's the 21st century already -- we know better than to mingle our high request rate content with our low request rate administrative interfaces, don't we? The talk I gave at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 2000 is posted online and there are loads of other resources out there. And yet people are still ponying up huge mega-buck deals for Interwoven and Vignette, they're rolling their own one-off solutions, they're making compromises by limited their content to blog-style articles and it's sad. The fact that crap that requires an application server closely bound to the CMS functions to deliver the content are still being developed and deployed tells me that the CMS problem is still a wide open issue. It's my opinion that the there's huge uptapped market there.

If someone wants to hire me to re-write Bricolage in Java so it can be more easily boxed up and sold, I'm available (insert evil grin here). ( Apr 01 2004, 03:23:33 PM PST ) Permalink