My two most recent contracts have been triggering the reflective urge in me. I’ve been a user of Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal, as has been noted in these electrons before. But I’ve never been entirely satisfied with them.
I can go down a long list of little things that annoy me about each one of them, but the root cause for almost all of it is they’re just too complicated.
Just read in Locus about the death of Algis Budrys. Ruined what was promising to be a perfectly good day.
Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.
Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.
That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.
I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.
I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.
Been spending way too much time with Capistrano recently, and it stops now. It’s quite possibly useful to me in my current projects, but its user-hostility makes it not worth the time.
As I searched and read page after web page, trying to find a pointer to how to use Cap in my environment (svn is on my development machine, not on a server somewhere else) without success, I began getting a feel for the attitude surrounding Cap, and frankly, I didn’t like it much. One article about doing this had several comments to the effect of “this capability is built in to version 2; this article is deprecated.” Of course, not one of them pointed to where I could find out about how to make version 2 use it.
The moment of my departure from Capistrano came when I ran across several exchanges about the (lack of) documentation for version 2. One of the respondents suggested the person looking for information could always read the code. (more…)
Jon Gruber writes, quoting Joe Wilcox (go ahead and read the story, but skip the comments as they devolve quickly into meaninglessness) on Apple sales figures.
The numbers look great, but the context of the initial report, and the lack of context in Gruber’s later spin, remind us of Mark Twain’s famous comment about statistics. (more…)
I’ve tweeted this a bit, but decided it’s time I start a catalog.
Been working an assignment on location at an ASP.Net shop (they’ve teased about it being a full-time gig, but no action on that front; honestly don’t know what I’d do, because the folks there are great to work with even if they do use VS) and so I’ve been having to deal with Visual Studio.
Now, I’d used VS a lot in my previous life as a software developer. What I wasn’t prepared for was:
(Both Joshua Porter and Eric Meyer have been musing on this theme, and it struck a chord here, as well. This should not be construed as a rebuttal to either piece, just some musings their writings have spurred here.)
In the beginning was the individual. If Og wanted something for his cave, he fashioned it himself, from the materials around him. Chair a little uncomfortable? Get out the hammer and chisel away a little more here and there. Sit down. Chisel away a little more. Finally the chair and Og’s bottom made their peace, and happiness reigned.
But Og had friends over, and they complained about his chair. Og didn’t understand this at first. After all, wasn’t the chair really comfortable when he sat in it? Eventually, Og realized his bottom wasn’t universal. Not everyone’s bottom was like his, so chairs built specifically for his bottom wouldn’t be comfortable for everyone else.
(more…)
Was at the Flex show last night over at WCTC. It was very apparent I’ve had my head inside Rails lately. Kevin Hoyt, the Adobe demo guy, did his database access schtick (writing just a few lines of code and — hey, presto! — a fuctioning CRUD db screen appears) and while the rest of the room was going “Oooh” and “Aaah” I was simply thinking “Scaffolding.” Heh.
Seriously, the Flex demo did scaffolding one better by activating sorts on the columns (along with the gee-whizz-bang but of little practical use trick of being able to rearrange the columns on screen) so I can’t say it was just like scaffolding. But it wasn’t a big enough improvement to raise my eyebrows.
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Nothing warms the cockles of an old curmudgeon’s heart as much as things like this.
While I stop now and spend a moment of silence in mourning for the loss of Scoble’s data (which is truly a despicable act, one for which Facebook should be shunned off the web) I can’t help but remember something I learned long ago:
“Never commit to entering a room until you know the way out.”
I stayed away from Facebook for precisely that reason. I could see a way in, but no good way out.
(And to think, I learned that lesson long before politicos ever learned the phrase “exit strategy.”)
Anyone who trusts their data to a corporation without having a second copy of it is a fool. Period. Facebook is just one more example of a group that wants to lock us in their trunk and take us where they want us to go.
And to think, Facebook not only stole Robert’s data (if you think that’s strong, what other term would you use for keeping something away from its legal owner?) but they did this after having the temerity to use his name and likeness in a Saturn ad (without either his knowledge or his permission, and without compensating him for it). I think Scoble should talk to GM about their buying Facebook for him as compensation for that particular act of theft.
OK, Andy so you’re mad about the Opera Lawsuit. I get that. You’re also frustrated with the inability of MS programmers to follow a spec. I get that, too. But this just doesn’t make sense to me.
I just don’t see how it’s a practical idea to exclude from the creation of a standard the very people whose job it will be to implement that standard. I’m sorry, I just don’t see how that can work. Is there another working group at W3C that does that? For example, the XML protocol working group includes Oracle, the HTML group includes Microsoft.
(more…)
Been processing some thoughts about CSS files and workstyles, and I think they’re about to bubble up and out. They’re still a bit inchoate (nice word, that; I learned it from a comic book back in my adolescence, so take that you literature snobs!) but I generally need to type them out in order to clarify them in my own mind, much less communicate them to anyone else.
But I think the pot has been simmering long enough.
Managed to clear most of the table cruft out of 1.5, only the content component to go. That one will be non-trivial but possible, nonetheless. I’ve been wrestling with a view other ideas along the way.
The first is a question born out of frustration: Why do I have to do this? The Joomla developers built in a way to remove tables from some of the pieces, and then created an override capability so someone like me can do the rest without having to hack the core. OK, but since they clearly know this is desirable (this is derived from the fact that most of the pieces have a simple argument on the load call to eliminate the tables) why haven’t they gone whole hog with it, and provided that capability built-in, rather that force me to provide it myself?
My bank froze my ATM card today. Their scanners picked up unusual activity on it, so they froze it. I’ve been with this bank for decades, and have been quite happy with their service and with the people there. But decades of good will was nearly wiped out by a single ill-considered decision.
This was the second time they did this to me. The first time cost me an opportunity to buy some really good chess items for nickels on the dollar.
There’s a customer service lesson to be learned, here. Their aim was good. They were trying to protect me from thievery, an aim I am 100% in accordance with. But, in the final analysis, they relied on their technology, not their people. A simple call to me (I was home that day) would have alerted me to the potential problems, and I could have allayed their fears and not been inconvenienced at all. In fact, I would have appreciated their alertness on my behalf, and had my already-good feeling for this bank reinforced. It was, in short, an opportunity to increase their hold over my business.
I’ve got some questions for you. Let me first set the stage:
I have new idea for a node type. I’m going to create one that will embed javascript-replayable chess games in a block on a page. Data entry will require uploading two files generated from another application. Both of those files will be slightly modified., and one of them will be parsed into component information chunks.
How do you even begin to write that for Drupal? Note, I already have written php code that can take the files being input and create the chuncks I need. But they are two files, not one, and Drupal only lets you store one blob per node, as far as I can tell. (more…)
I’ve long been a fan of Steven Covey’s work. I’ll admit to being disappointed when he sold out to Franklin, now FranklinCovey, as the “First Things First” system he’d been detailing was a better approach. Still I understood the economics of it.
I’ve been a user of Franklin (now FranklinCovey) planners for almost a decade, now, but the end has arrived. My annual visits to the store have been more like pilgrimages, where in addition to the latest page packets I picked up some motivation to continue. But no longer.
Been using Macromedia products, a lot. Started out with Freehand (BM, Before Macromedia, version 3 to be precise). Kept going to 10, then decided to go whole hog and went to Studio MX.
One of the things I liked was MM’s “two-machine” license. I could have it on desktop and latop, without muss or fuss. Great.
It says here that Google is killing the economics of content, in the main because it makes it profitable to build a site with nothing buts ads. The disconnect for me is that the writer sounds as if that’s something new and different, something we haven’t had before, something that Google has recently enabled.
Truth is, though, that particular publishing model has been around for decades at least, if not centuries. Every community has those community shopper gazettes (our is called the Bargain Express, the one where I grew up was called the Shopping News) that contain nothing but ads (the non-advertising content—usually well under 10%—being so fluffy you never notice its presence). And beyond that, there are hundreds of industry publications whose sole reason for existence is to print press releases and give you a number to circle to ask for more information about a product.
There are lots of things that worry me about Google, but this isn’t one of them.
I’ve been noticing a sharp upturn in comment spam including bizarre references to gmail servers, such as www2-2.gmail.com and I can’t figure out what’s up.
The comments are archetypical spam comments, but the message, instead of containing links to products, contains several similar links to gmail servers. I generally still shoot on sight, but I’m curious what the purpose is. If any of you have been leaving comments like that, take the time to explain why, please?
Since i throw rocks without hesitation, I should be equally quick to acknowledge progress.
Drupal 4.7 includes a new module installation bit, which is a very big step forward from the previous version. It’s actually friendy, something I’ve not run across very often before. Since I’ve compared Drupal and Joomla before on this blog, it’s only fair I do it again.
Add new module to Drupal:
Add new module to Joomla:
The two procedures are similar in complexity. Though Joomla doesn’t require you to copy the files up there first, it does require you to fill out a form with the file to upload. Joomla’s still seems subjectively easier because you do it all from within the web site’s interface, but the difference is hardly significant.
Now if only Drupal had a “remove” function that would clean up after the installation. The tables the module requires are still left in the db. If the module installer is well written, that won’t be a problem, but Drupal leaves the install code up to the module writer, rather than having every install follow a standard procedure. Makes for a high risk of variability in the installation of modules.
Nonetheless, it’s a distinct step forward for Drupal. Well done.
I’ve been having intermittent email outages at a client site that I’ve been trying for months to diagnose. Finally managed to get my hands on enough information to do so, and I find the problem is spamcop.
The client has a lot of field people, who have yahoo email accounts. The web hosting service the client’s domain is on subscribes to spamcop. And among the million or so email yahoo emailers is a spammer.
So, spamcop blacklists one of the Yahoo email servers, effectively shutting down communication between my client and the field people. Server blacklisting is effective when aimed at an organization, but in the case of Yahoo, or Google, or any one of the large concentation email servers out there, it fails. It punishes thousands, even millions, of people because of the misdeeds of one, hardly an efficient measure.
Yes, I’m familiar with the contention that this sort of “death penalty” is meant to be sure hosts police their customers. But it’s hogwash, pure and simple. If we start with the assumption that a company can predict with 99.999% accuracy whether a potential customer is a spammer (completely bogus, I’d expect a number far less than 90% to be more likely) that still means that one customer in 100,000 will get misdiagnosed. Which is still enough to keep a server like Yahoo or Google blacklisted forever.
Remember, the spammer doesn’t care if the server gets blackisted; he just moves on to another server. It’s only the poor suckers who have built a contact list based on that email address that get burned. It’s like nuking Kabul to get bin Laden; you kill lots of innocent bystanders while the real target slips away, laughing.
Yes, spam is a problem. But so is this. Yes, if they hang ‘em all, they’ll get the guilty. But before you applaud, think: that means they’re going to hang you, too.
The new machine has been purchased. Since I’m a bit anal about starting fresh with each new computer, it’ll take me a couple of days to have it up and functional.
If you’re curious, the “starting fresh” bit is more than simple habit, it actually accomplishes two very useful things for me:
Yes, it moos.
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