Weblog by month (August 2006)
Time for a break...
Well I’ve had enough—for a little while at least. No, no, not of you, dear gentle reader, but of the IT world.
For now.
So I’m taking a break. Normal service will be resumed pretty soon. Meanwhile, I am off to spend some time with family and friends, leaving &*"!# Documentum, work, laptops and cellphones well alone. Grrrr.
See you on the other side!
Why on earth is he denying it?
This would have put Prescott way up in my estimation given recent shenanigans. Why deny it?
BBC News: Prescott denies calling Bush ‘crap’.
ARGH!
Sometimes, Scott Adams is just too good. This Dilbert says it all. Too painful for words:
Amen
Jonathan Snook: Aren’t people tired of arguing?
You run across these discussions like “my Mac never crashes” or “IE sucks” and reading through you see mean comments, one after the next. The vast majority simply use personal experience as their measuring stick of current and future expectations but that level of experience is so small as to paint a completely inaccurate picture.
I’m as big an offender in this regard as anyone, but I have to admit, the man has a point. And a mighty good one. Nevertheless, sometimes I find that one really needs a good argument about nothing much. I suppose it’s human nature...
The state of DXL
Mac Guidera recently posted about the state of DXL today, DXL - What is it good for? Mac’s post gives a good summary of where we’re at, and his hopes for the future with people like Dick Annicchiarico at the helm. I would encourage you to head over to Mac’s site and chip in with your thoughts and observations.
What I find interesting is that his post harkens back to some DXL-related buzz that took place almost two years ago. Yikes! Until Mac brought this up, I simply hadn’t realised how long ago we’d been talking about all this. The discussion as shifted focus slightly though: to my mind there are two main “movements” that have brought DXL to the fore once again:
- DXL from things like
?ReadViewEntriesin web applications now that we’re all doing the Ajax thing - DXL as a possible mechanism for skinning Notes applications
The latter point has come up during the recent Nifty Fifty discussions, specifically from Charles Robinson who is looking to put together a DXL-based “UI skinner”. That would be pretty cool. I started out with something like that a while back, but as with many of my bits of code, I didn’t see it through : Simple DXL processing.
Previously...
- Bruce Elgort: Do you DXL?
- Charles Robinson: Side projects in the works
- Ben Poole: The DXL buzz
- Mac Guidera: DXL - What is it good for?
- OpenNTF DXLPeek project
- Ben Poole: Simple DXL processing
- IBM developerWorks: A custom DXL framework for accessing Notes/Domino data
IBM Redbook residencies
IBM have a stack of Redbook residencies coming up this autumn. If you can stretch to doing one, I imagine they make for an invaluable experience, both in terms of your career / development, but also in terms of working with other residents from all over the place. Two sessions have particularly caught my eye (not that I can do anything with these you understand ):
Splendid stuff. The full list is here.
Update: doh! I just noticed that Rocky has posted about the Notes access for SAP residency also. And, yes of course, Volker posted about it too.
Music
Another artist recently re-discovered: Frank Zappa. Lawks, but the man was a frigging genius. And hilarious to boot. Just listening to Tink Walks Amok now... superb instrumental! Now, what else:
Well, I found a site chock-full of legal live music downloads at primuslive.com. So I promptly bought a three-disc set of Primus, live in California from around two years ago. It was ten bucks for no DRM, just nice clean MP3s with a booklet and insert download for any CD you might want to burn.
Now that rocks. And the music is splendid: in addition to a whole shed-load of wondrous Primus, the lads do YYZ and La Villa Strangiato. Got to be happy with that...
Tag clouds with Domino
Good old Ferdy has come up with an excellent article demonstrating how to render content in a Domino database as a so-called “tag cloud”, you know, the sort of thing you see on Flickr et al.
Ferdy’s solution is pretty elegant, using constructs such as a categorised view, some Javascript and CSS. This is something (one of many things) I’ve been meaning to apply thought to for months, so thanks Ferdy!
Ferdy Christant: Domino Tag Clouds.
Today’s news
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that news broke today about the latest foiling of terrorist activity this side of the pond. What no-one seems to be reporting is how chuffing stupid this whole “liquid explosives” line is when it comes to the “security measures” around the disposal of passengers’ stuff.
Why is it stupid?
Read this (warning for those of a nervous disposition: contains swear words!)
Joel on management
Apparently Joel Spolsky is currently on holiday, but he’s put together some interesting posts about management, specifically about managing developers. Part two of his three-part series of posts was released today, and is well worth a read. In it, Joel talks about what he refers to as “Econ 101 management”, the profoundly flawed approach that says financial reward and / or punishment is the best way to provide incentives for your staff:
Suppose you decide to pay a bonus to the developer with the fewest bugs. Now every time a tester tries to report a bug, it becomes a big argument, and usually the developer convinces the tester that it’s not really a bug. Or the tester agrees to report the bug “informally” to the developer before writing it up in the bug tracking system. And now nobody uses the bug tracking system. The bug count goes way down, but the number of bugs stays the same.
Developers are clever this way. Whatever you try to measure, they’ll find a way to maximize, and you’ll never quite get what you want.
[...]
Now that I’ve shot down Command and Control management and Econ 101 management, there’s one more method managers can use to get people moving in the right direction. I call it the Identity method and I’ll talk about it more tomorrow.
- The Econ 101 Management Method (part 2)
- The Command and Control Management Method (part 1)
Have a read and decide which method appeals most to you... Chortle.
DominoWiki 1.1 progress
Version 1.1 is almost done. I’ve released the latest beta to my wiki, but there’s still stuff to do. The multi-lingual capability is complete in terms of coding, and I now have an idea of pretty much all the strings I require. If you fancy a credit on the project by helping out with translation, do let me know! This will entail receiving a “script” of strings in English, which will require translation. I will then place the new language strings into the relevant file in the final template.
Other stuff? Well, the page diff function is pretty much done. I have some fledgeling page promote code—functionality which allows the wiki user to “promote” an older version of a page document so that it becomes the main wiki document—and will release this on the site in the next day or two. Meanwhile, you can compare any version with the current page using the “History” link at the bottom of a page.
A few more bugs, a bit of documentation and testing, and we’re there. I would love to have been able to meet my original deadline (end of July), but alas, real life got in the way
Further thoughts on WWDC so far
Volker posted about the big letdown that was Steve Jobs’ keynote yesterday, as Apple’s WWDC 2006 kicked-off in San Francisco. Of course, the focus was on Leopard, at least what was shown of it. As I stated in comments over at vowe.net, I did miss the “Oh and one other thing...” that makes a great Stevenote. But no matter. The more I peruse the Apple site, the more I like what’s going on.
Take, for example, Dashcode. We all knew it was coming, and sure ’nuff, it’ll be there. It looks splendid, and offers something compelling for casual users wanting to knock up a widget or two. The low barrier to entry immediately had me wishing Macs were more prevalent in corporate environments: if you combine the new intranet protocol with some home-grown widgets on users’ desktops, you have a lot of happy campers. Then of course there’s Time Machine: back-up and restore for the rest of us. I like that.
At work we’re constantly messing with electronic meetings over the intranet, getting presence awareness into applications (especially email), fiddling with screen sharing and presenting during voice conferences: all of this stuff is right there in OS X, and getting better next year—check out the sneak peek of iChat in Leopard.
But what about developers? It is a developer conference after all. Well, after you’ve lusted for a fully-loaded Mac Pro, I would say that Xcode is going to be worth a second, third, and fourth look. In the world of IDEs, Eclipse and a couple of others get all the press—and rightly so. But if you have a Mac, Xcode is really looking like a big playa. The “Xray” timeline for debugging is intriguing (interestingly, Leopard has DTrace kernel integration), and the notification model within the IDE looks to be genuinely useful without being intrusive. Add to that myriad performance gains and things like the “Research Assistant”, and you have a nice package for a developer.
So who do I have to convince to replace Stinky with a Macbook Pro?
Voiceover
If you’re interested, I imagine you’ve already got the gen on the Stevenote at Apple’s World-Wide Developer Conference. You can get the skinny on Volker’s site if you need it. One of the things I was impressed with? Alex.
Eh? Well, check out Apple’s accessibility page in the Leopard Sneak Preview section of their site. Here you can listen to the new voice added to OS X in Leopard. It’s pretty stunning.
Archimedes
Using X-ray fluorescence, specifically, a very Joe 90 device known as the “synchrotron”, scientists in the US have discovered 10th century transcriptions of Archimedes’ work beneath layers of paintings and text set down in subsequent centuries.
Mr Noel describes the palimpsest as “the eighth wonder of the world”.
“You never get three unique palimpsested texts from the ancient world together in one book,” he told the BBC News website. “That’s just completely unheard of.”
BBC news: X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets.
This is really very cool
I have just read this posting over at the Autumn Leaf IT site, in Cape Town. It’s really excellent news for all concerned.
Stan Rogers is coming to Cape Town to join Autumn Leaf. I keep pinching myself saying that, but I guess once he steps out of the plane at Cape Town International, it would all become more real.
Way to go Stan, way to go Autumn Leaf!
Via Ed Brill.
