Until recently, my brother has been living incommunicado in Seattle. My mother called yesterday to tell me that he's back in town. I can't tell you how glad I am she called, or I'd likely be frantically worried about the guy because of today's earthquake. Glad you're home, Chris.
Someone has alerted me to problems viewing this site with IE5 for Windows, specifically problems with scrolling. I'll have to look into it; not sure what it could be. Please bear with me.
Wild Tofu is getting me all psyched for OS X with these screenshots. One more month until it's released and I can hardly wait. I'm really not too sure why I didn't just break down and buy the beta. I should mention that Wild Tofu does some pretty slick things with CSS, so unless you're using a modern browser, it might look kinda weird.
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Opera for the Mac: tomorrow! Oh wait. Opera for the Mac: today! Beta only (or rather, a "technology preview," which is apparently somewhere between alpha and beta), but it's a start. And I gotta say, Mozilla is just getting better and better. I've switched to using it about half the time as my browser of choice. Of course, I still maintain that one of the most exciting things about Mozilla is its possibilities as a platform for development.
Okay, so naturally I went to download Opera right away, and so far I'm pretty impressed. It's fast! It renders HTML and CSS quite well, considering it's such an early version. I played with a Windows version a number of months back, and this is much, much better. I'm especially fond of the "Search Google" box in the toolbar, the scaling tool in the toolbar, and being able to set the default text size by HTML element instead of just setting a general size. Haven't had a lot of time to play with it so far, and probably shouldn't deprive myself of any more sleep to do so (although I will, of course), but it even seems quite stable. I'll have to find some stress tests for it.
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Wow, Phil Zimmerman is leaving Network Associates.
Mozilla 0.8 has been released.
P2P Smuggled in Under Cover of Darkness. Clay Shirky is right on the money.
The other day I mentioned Cocoon. For some reason I failed to say anything about AxKit, an XML-based web framework that uses Perl. Not quite as venerable or as developed as Cocoon, from what I can tell, but an excellent option if you're not a Java programmer.
Out of curiosity and boredom, we turned on an XFL game for a few minutes. "This ain't your granddaddy's football," the announcer shouted.
That's right, I thought. Get rid of that pansy-ass padding and those hard plastic helmets, then you'd have my granddaddy's football.
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Salon.com: Hunting the wild hacker.
One reason free software is able to flourish is that most hackers are able to earn their livelihood relatively easily, with enough leisure time to hack for the public good. The hours that they do spend working for the Man are well enough compensated to allow them to construct the rest of their lives in whatever fashion they might desire. A McDonald's cashier or a taxi driver is not so lucky. Free software is built on the reality that programmers are an elite class of worker, both indispensable and relatively rare. The hacker ethic, then, is a luxury.
That's not really the thrust of the article, but it was an interesting point. I think, though, that I will read The Hacker Ethic.
I've got content management systems and XML on the brain.
This is my problem: how can a secretary who's been assigned the responsibility of managing a department web site do so without having to learn a whole set of new skills? Experience has shown that people who have this forced on them rarely grasp fundamental web concepts, yet are expected to produce and maintain near-professional quality sites. That just ain't gonna happen
Tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive have both helped and hindered. By making HTML page maintenance seem no more difficult than using Microsoft Word, subtle and necessary things like accessible web design and cross-platform compatibility are lost on the average user, who really can't be bothered to learn HTML.
So far, so good. Pretty banal stuff, and I'm sure you're thinking "been there, done that."
Here's the thing. For a while now I've been pondering different ways of managing web site content that would be easily accessible to the average non-technical user (e.g. department secretaries). Systems like Zope are great, but the implementations that I've played with still demand at least some knowledge of markup (like HTML) that is unfortunately not a reasonable skill to expect of non-techie users. Or at the very least, use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver to generate the markup and the cut and paste into web-based forms. I very much want to talk with the HR people at the University of Minnesota to see how their Zope-based project is going, because I'm sure they've found ways to deal with this hurdle.
How about some sort of XML-based system like Cocoon? Cocoon offers some real promise, and actually has me bouncing off the walls with excitement the way I did when I first discovered Zope. I love the idea of storing docs as XML and using XSL et al to transform the XML into the required format, be it XHTML, WML, or even PDF. There are a lot of powerful Java tools to use with XML, and Cocoon leverages them to great advantage. However, we're still stuck with the problem of generating XML docs in the first place, a considerably more complicated endeavor than with HTML. This has been bothering me for some weeks.
Enter OpenOffice, the open source version of Sun's StarOffice. There's an article on XML.com right now (Adventures with OpenOffice and XML) that gives an overview of how OpenOffice uses XML, essentially as the native file format, and points the way to what this opens up for us. Rockin' good fun. Sun even uses Dublin Core for metadata. It's true that Microsoft has been moving toward using XML for data interchange, but their XML implementations give me the willies (I'm afraid that I can't be more specific about that right now). I'm very much more impressed by what Sun is doing.
Now, of course, remains the much less daunting task of making OpenOffice or StarOffice the default desktop office software. :-)
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Amazon.com took down the review of the Story About Ping to which I pointed not to long ago, but it's preserved at Slashdot.
Another scene from my life with Kiara.
Friends of ours are having a baby, and last night Kiara was reading a pregnancy book to see what was happening with the baby at 5 months or whatever. She turns to me, pointing at the book:
"When I'm pregnant, I want an artist's interpretive rendering instead of an ultrasound. Look at this! It's so much better!"
She had a point.
I've read some about XML digital signatures, but thought: why? Although admittedly I've never had to deal with the low-level operations in digital signatures, using XML to encode the signatures struck me as overkill, the result of some overzealous XML groups at work. Nevertheless, I recently listened to an interview with Joseph Reagle, co-chair of the joint IETF/W3C XML digital signature working group, and have seen the light. I see particular value in dealing with complex documents, only a part of which should be signed because other parts will change. I'm still a bit weak on the value of using XMl for the signatures, so I think that I will follow this to see where it's going.
I'm very curious what will happen with XML encryption.
Redesigned the Midwest CUPA-HR site. I finished the major redesign a couple weeks ago, but was never satisfied with it. I'm comfortable with this one. There's a lot that I wanted to do with it but was held back because I don't know how long I'll be managing this site - and more importantly, who would take it over. That's probably a couple years away, though.
Discovering DHTML in Netscape 6
Mason 1.0 has been released. Mason is a Perl-based HTML templating system. Well, it's more than that. Just check out their site. I haven't decided yet whether this would offer me any advantage over what I'm already doing with PHP.
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I have spent several hours over the past week or so talking with a number of people at work about issues of communication, information flow, and collaboration. It's been strange and extremely exciting, not the least because I haven't been the one bringing these things up. The issues are many, but basically boil down to a lack of lack of communication--especially interdepartmental communication--within our office.
Among the most pervasive and deeply entrenched problems I encounter in government work (although it's by no means limited to government) is a reluctance to share information. The greatest resistance often comes from those whose jobs exist to disseminate information. I cannot tell you how often I have been refused information that should -- by law -- be open to the public. This is deeply troubling behavior. At the same time that we develop technologies to make information more easily available, we instead find ways to use those technologies to erect barriers. This is a common complaint against "e-government" initiatives.
But really, it's not about technology, it's about collaboration. At MnSCU, we struggle with a lack of infrastructure to facilitate effective collaboration, in particular between departments. There are a number of committees, of course, but they tend to be structured in such a way as to limit genuine, honest communication between committee members, much less between committees. I honestly think that people are threatened by sharing information, perhaps in part because of a feeling that it might change their power or status, or perhaps out of simple distrust. I really do not know.
So we're starting to do something about it. Bit by bit, person by person, we're talking with people, finding out what they're doing, finding ways to share what we're doing. We're planning on building some really cool things on the HR web site to facilitate collaboration--not only within our office but across the state. I can tell already that it will be painful for some. But I can also tell that it will be worth it.
Amidst all this, I came across an interesting article on Web Techniques by O'Reilly's Dale Dougherty. He writes about working on a "need to share" rather than a "need to know" basis, and about how Rael Dornfest (one of the heroes in my pantheon) opened their office up to new models of collaboration. Read it.
Dougherty's article got me thinking about instant messaging (in particular, Jabber) and chat. Lo and behold, in that same issue of Web Techniques I came across a chat server written in fewer than 100 lines of Perl! Then yesterday on IBM's DeveloperWorks I found a tutorial on Building a Java Chat Server. I'm really beginning to see value in IM and chat as something other than just for teenagers and AOL. We'll see where it goes.
So I'm curious what you think about all this. There are only two or three of you who read this site, and I value your thoughts. What sort of attitudes toward collaboration and information-sharing have you found in the workplace?
Unable to get Meerkat feed.
