Weblog by month (February 2007)
Wikipatterns
I’m a little late to the party, and Julian has already posted about this, but in case you missed it, Atlassian have launched a toolbox for encouraging the uptake of wikis in organisations at wikipatterns.com. Good idea, and something I was mindful of when discussing wikis in the enterprise with a fellow delegate at the Lotusphere Comes To You session I attended on Friday.
Wiki adoption is a tricky business: we use a large enterprise wiki in our organisation, and overall a lot of people have “gone for it”. However, there’s a lot of talk about confusing navigation, strange wiki mark-up (certainly before we got a WYSIWYG editor in there), and so on. The thing that has struck me most is that a lot of people seem to want to use wikis as definitive reference-sites-come-document repositories. And we really suffer with the Empty pages anti-pattern.
Of course, this “all wiki, all the time” approach is our own fault: sites like Wikipedia do nothing to disabuse the casual browser that this is how wikis should be used. The “living document” paradigm is my take on successful use of a wiki. The additional bells and whistles can be really useful (not to mention cool), but at heart, a wiki for me is a simple (simple!) note pad that allows for inter-linking without any effort.
Planet Of The Apes?
Uh-oh:
BBC news: Chimpanzees ‘hunt using spears’.
Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.
I tell you, it’s only a matter of time before, you know …
Update
It’s been crazy-busy in the world of Poole. Lots of late nights and early mornings. I’m not complaining though, as most of the late nights have been late nights coding. Huzzah!
Burning the midnight oil in front of an IDE takes me back to the good old days of 2000 / 2001. Back then, I wasn’t running a Domino website, let alone a weblog. I wasn’t a manager, and I could just concentrate on learning my craft. I’d delivered a few hefty projects with userbases ranging between 10 and 7,500, but in 2000 I started work on a global project—the reach was a lot further!—and I got to spend some time working in Dallas. The project was real bleeding edge Notes development for the time, using the new-fangled Notes 5 client (shudder). There were oodles of hacks, righteous or otherwise, just to get the thing to work. I lost count of the number of bugs I came across, and I think some even got reported to Lotus. Ooof!
I digress. What’s been going on? Well, the day job is taking up pretty much all my time, but I’ve still spent some hours hacking on DominoWiki. I have also started to comment any complex Lotusscript code so that it works with Mikkel Heisterberg’s project, LotusScript.doc. I played with LotusScript.doc a little while ago, but now I’m using it in anger. It rocks! Think javadoc for your Lotusscript. Very nice for developer documentation and the like.
As usual, OpenLog has been an inestimably useful tool. I’m running it with a “verbose” logging set-up whilst I develop and debug an application at work. Using OpenLog I can see where the back-end code I wrote for a Domino-based CMS is tripping up—before the users are aware there’s a problem. Really useful stuff. I’m looking forward to version 1.5!
The week started off well: on Tuesday evening I met up with Warren, the lovely Kitty, Matt White, Mike Smith and Julian Woodward. Later that night I helped sort out the ILUG wiki which Mr. Mooney is hosting (not registered for the Irish User Group event yet? Why not?)
Now we come to the end of the week, and tomorrow should finish it off nicely: I am attending Lotusphere comes to you in Threadneedle Street. Rumour has it that amongst others, the Buchan will be on the loose. The morning is being hosted by Darren Adams too, so should be a good ’un!
The secret is out
The secret is out, the ILUG 2007 website is live! Nice work to all involved:
Oh how I wish I could attend. Sadly, Mrs. P. has chosen that bank holiday weekend, and the days immediately before it, to go on a girly holiday to Spain—leaving yours truly in charge of the brood. “But Ben,” I hear you say, “When do you get to go on holiday?”. Hmph. So far, 2007 really hasn’t been my year. Still, I have my Mac!
Hello, I’m Linux
Oh lordy, but this made me laugh. Partly I guess because I remember the original post that went around the web like wildfire, of Jay Maynard, the Linux gentleman in his self-made Tron outfit. Awesome. Anyway, here it is: PC, Mac, and now Linux. Enjoy!
Source: the charmingly-named Achtüng Fuhrerchan.
Admins! Developers!
Lend me your ears! Well, OK, lend Bruce & Julian your ears: a new Taking Notes podcast is out, episode 53 with Thomas Gumz to be precise. And it is a corker. This is where the Taking Notes guys got to dive a little deeper. They cover the genesis of the separate Notes Administrator client in the version 4 days, the birth of the Domino Domain Monitor, how the web administrator client came about, and the technical challenges therein (Ajax before it was Ajax!), plus a whole load more about using Domino as an Eclipse update service, and so on and so forth.
This is really interesting stuff, for both administrators and developers alike. The guys also mention Andy Broyles recent exposition of some of the technical brilliance displayed in developing the DDM. If you haven’t already, you should read that after you’ve listened to Thomas.
Apple vs. Apple is no more
I was hoping that this would happen, and now it has come to pass: Apple (Inc.) have settled all differences with Apple (Corps.) over the former’s ever-growing interests in the world of music.
Mr Jobs said: “We love the Beatles, and it has been painful being at odds with them over these trademarks.
“It feels great to resolve this in a positive manner, and in a way that should remove the potential of further disagreements in the future.”
BBC news: Deal ends Beatles’ Apple battle.
Scrivener
Whilst everyone and their uncle gets excited by the sheer green-screen retro simplicity of WriteRoom, personally I really like the look of Scrivener (which can do the green-screen thing too, funnily enough). It’s a nifty-looking text processing application: the corkboard metaphor for notes and ideas really appeals to the way I write. I currently have random snippets of text here, there and everywhere—on both Kinky and Stinky. Certainly worth checking-out I think:
Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Guilty pleasures
When Strummin’ With The Devil came out, I groaned inwardly. Van Halen was such a big part of my growing up, I couldn’t bear the thought of the band’s music being put to novelty use. I am glad to say I am wrong. Whilst I cringed at the initial video release of David Lee Roth singing Jump bluegrass-style, I can honestly say I don’t mind that version now. However, he does Jamie’s Cryin’ much better .
Amazon link: Strummin’ with the Devil: The Southern Side of Van Halen
Now, The John Cowan Band’s version of Runnin’ With The Devil is a different matter. Wow. Goodness, Eruption even gets an airing, bluegrass acoustic style!
Open your mind (and ears) and you might be really surprised. I know I was.
