We’re in the information business

Stijn Debrouwere – We’re in the information business:

"The goal is to make our content management system like a miniature world in a snowglobe. Not just a system that publishes text, but a system that talks like we do: it knows that an interview implies one or more interviewees.

[…] An issue is more than just a number: it has a date of publication, a cover image, a chief editor, it might revolve around a special theme, it has a circulation, it has one or more cover stories. Don’t think too soon that something is just a number or merely a line of text.

[…] We need domain-specific ways of indicating, err, marking up a text. We need to start creating our own little Markdown-like languages for journalism.

[…] A well-architected news website leads to content that will keep on providing value, rather than leaving stories to wither away when their immediate news value has faded. Structured content is the stuff that makes a website malleable."

(Via Jayson Lorenzen.)

Dear IT Guy, Can You Actually Use the Tool You’re Creating?

Steve Radick at Enterprise 2.0 – Dear IT Guy, Can You Actually Use the Tool You’re Creating?:

"You gain trust and respect because they know that you’re dealing with the same issues they are.  You’re struggling to access the site on your phone too.  You’re not getting the alerts you signed up for either.  You’re not able to embed videos correctly.  You go through what they go through."

(Via Naresh Sarwan at Digital Asset Management News.)

Why project managers should care about development

Andrew Stellman at O'Reilly Broadcast – Why project managers should care about development:

"I've spent a lot of time over the years training project managers, and one thing I've heard from many of them is that a good project manager can manage anything. In other words, a project manager doesn't need to know anything about software development in order to manage a programming project. He just needs to know about project management, and those skills will allow him to make sure the project comes out on time, on scope, and on budget, with sufficient quality.

This, to me, is seriously flawed thinking, and borderline insane. […] How would he even be able to judge whether or not the project is going well?"

Some more comments...

James Gosling on Oracle – Some more comments...:

"It's not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of "good" is really twisted:

 Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.

Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse."

On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column

Michael Hunger – On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column:

"As a child I hated these one-rowers as they were not useful in building stuff. But here and now they seemed a perfect fit. Small enough and in the right sizes. I chose a time partitioning of a quarter of an hour. So I can use the lengths 1,2,3,4 to build 15,30,45 and 60 minutes worth of time in a row representing an hour.

[…] One last thing I have been thinking about is getting these daily columns recorded automatically. So using your webcam or phone camera, you just hold the “day” in front of it. After taking the picture it is processed."

(Via Nat Torkington on O'Reilly Radar.)

What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?

Adriaan Bloem at CMS Watch – What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?:

"But unfortunately, quite a few of Autonomy's other customers weren't quite prepared for it, and ended up unhappy with what they bought. Of course, it's tempting to blame the vendor's marketing and salesforce for this; but that's a bit like accusing a tiger of hunting deer. You can't really blame them for trying."

How to Become a JavaScript Badass

Aaron Newton – How to Become a JavaScript Badass:

"Release some of your own code. […] I almost consider it a red flag to see a resume without a url to github or something similar.

[…] If you blog constantly about what you are doing, what you are studying, you’ll find that people come to you with work to be done expecting that you are awesome because, well, you’re explaining all this stuff to them. I can’t stress the value of this enough, though it is very time consuming.

[…] There is nothing more awesome than having a job that pays you to learn."

(Via Ajaxian)

Geeks at work

Michael Lopp interviewed by Mac Slocum at O'Reilly Radar – Geeks at work:

"Leadership is really interesting to folks, inspiring people and being strategic. But those first two, organization and communication, sometimes turn into power trips for a lot of managers. They use information as a weapon. That is a huge violation to the geek ethic, where you're supposed to be transparent and knowable and systematized. This is where I think managers get bad reputations, hiding information or doling it out as he or she sees fit."

Adobe Drive 2

"The Adobe Drive 2 Connect UI is an easy-to-use interface that allows users to connect to a Digital Asset Management (DAM) server. Once you are connected, Adobe Drive 2 offers simple, intuitive access to remote assets through the platform file browsers, platform dialogs such as Open and Save, Adobe Bridge, and directly from the menus and UIs of Adobe Drive-integrated Creative Suite applications, which include: Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe Illustrator®, Adobe InDesign®, and Adobe Bridge."

Sounds great: Based on CMIS and AtomPub. Replaces WebDAV, i.e. lets you mount a DAM as a network drive through HTTP. Available for both CS4 and CS5 on Mac OS X and Windows.

It's Prerelease 1, so no wonder it sounds quite unfinished – CMS Connector for Adobe Drive 2.0: Technical Note [PDF]: "XMP metadata cannot be viewed, edited or searched using Adobe Bridge CS5. Thumbnails and preview icons are not available in Adobe Bridge CS5. […] Paging of search results is not supported by Adobe Drive. […] The CMIS Connector cannot connect to a server using secure HTTP (HTTPS)."

I'm looking forward to playing with it…

Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything

Kevin Kelly at Wired – Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything:

"On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

[…] Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features."

(Via Signal vs. Noise)

Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing?

Jason Cohen – Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing?:

"In a big software project do you tackle the high-risk, ill-defined stuff first, or do you postpone that to the end? Obviously you address the unpredictable stuff first — most of the project risk is due to the unknown, so the earlier you can sort out uncertainty the more time you have to deal with the consequences.

I'm making the same argument, except the "high-risk unknown" is "everything that's not code." Your code will be good enough; it's the other stuff that will probably sink your ship — unable to find customers or unable to convince the target audience they should open their wallets."

Document Asset Management?

Alan Pelz-Sharpe at CMS Watch – Document Asset Management?:

"I would like to see us all think more clearly about what is worth managing, and more clearly delineating between junk and stuff that actually has business value. In a broad sense, all information management activities be they related to web, e-mail, records, or documents should at heart be "Digital Asset Management" activities."

Pretty Good Semantics

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Paul Graham – The Acceleration of Addictiveness:

"One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

[…] Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world."

The Top Idea in Your Mind

Paul Graham – The Top Idea in Your Mind:

"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

[…] I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish."

The Amazingness of Instant

Scott Adams – The Amazingness of Instant:

"I've discovered that 90% of its usefulness comes from the fact that it's speedy. Yesterday a fox walked by the window, and I was the only witness. Someone asked what type it was, and I was able to point to a picture on the iPad in less than 30 seconds. Some version of that situation happens continuously. Life comes at us in sub-minute chunks, especially in the kitchen. That's a lot of iPad opportunities."

HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash

Gartner RAS Core Research Note at Adobe.com – HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash [PDF]:

"The root causes for a suboptimal user experience consist of lack of appropriate process and governance, and lack of a genuine commitment to a quality user experience. Such a commitment would lead organizations to adopt a user-centered, usability-oriented development process. Rather than taking these steps, we see a lot of projects that are “stakeholder-driven” (i.e., driven by internal politics). […] Most enterprises don’t seem to care enough about the user experience to change their habits (in terms of processes that are developer-driven, vendor-driven and stakeholder-driven, rather than user-driven)."

(Via Mike Slinn at InsideRIA.)

Forget the Defaults

Tim Bray – Forget the Defaults:

"Seriously. I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years, and I’ve taken care never to learn the operator precedence rules in any of them. It’s easy to get them wrong and get bitten and why should I require that people reading my code learn those stupid rules."

Finishability

Phil Gyford – Finishability:

"But those old-fashioned constraints of printing can also be a benefit. There’s something satisfying, predictable and achievable about a more-or-less fixed amount of stuff to read appearing on a regular schedule.

For example, when faced with most news websites one of the reasons I don’t spend much time reading them is because I know I can never finish, no matter how much I read. So, once I’ve read the front page headlines and realised the world hasn’t ended, why read much more? I’ll never finish it all anyway."

(Via Derek Powazek and Today's Guardian.)

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

Clay Shirky at WSJ.com – Does the Internet Make You Smarter?:

"We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects."

(Via Tim Bray.)