A little over a month ago, I encouraged my readers–many new from the Day Software (now Adobe) community via the Ignite conference in Berlin–to download and leverage Adobe Enterprise Café.

…the Café is hard at work to integrate the Day community as well. However, you don’t need to wait for that new version of Café; you can install Café today and when the Day community is integrated, you’ll receive that update the next time you launch the Adobe AIR application.

Hopefully you’re already receiving value from Café. If you held out for the Day community integration with Café, that day has arrived.

Presenting Adobe Enterprise Café 1.6!

Update 7/29/2011: Now that the Adobe® Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) has been announced, I recommend that you upgrade to Adobe Enterprise Café 1.8, which features a new ADEP community that is the combination of the previous LiveCycle and Day Communities.

For technical insights on ADEP, please follow the ADEP category and/or ADEP tag herein. Thanks.

Thanks to everyone at Adobe MAX 2010 who came to the session that David Nuescheler, Roy Fielding and I presented. If you weren’t able to attend our session, it’s provided below.

Roy kicked off the discussion by talking about open development and how open development is critical to architecture. David followed Roy by showing how open development principles have been powerfully applied at Day to its products like CQ5, providing live demonstrations to our audience. I wrapped up this discussion by relating WCM and Day content infrastructure (e.g. Sling and CRX) to Adobe’s CEM platform and specifically to LiveCycle RIA. (For more detail on LiveCycle RIA and other aspects of the LiveCycle ES3 release, which is currently under development, please see my previous post.)

In order to keep the conversation going, I’ve uploaded this presentation as follows:

Update 11/5/2010: You can now watch and listen to this MAX session online (i.e. in synchronized fashion).

Update 12/3/2010: Jayan has done a nice job of rounding up LiveCycle-flavored MAX sessions, including this one, here.

Conferences have always been about networking and when you have the privilege to speak at a conference it’s about engaging with your audience, listening to feedback and sharing ideas.

In the next several weeks, I’ve been given the opportunity to speak at two different venues: Adobe's annual MAX conference and Day Software's Ignite conference. This will be my first time speaking at either venue, and I’m really looking forward to the experiences.

So, if you’re in Chicago, Los Angeles or Berlin and want to learn more about Adobe’s focus on customer experience, I encourage you to take advantage of the following opportunities:

1. When Content Meets Applications, October 14, 2010, Day Ignite Chicago 2010
        Come hear how the combination of Adobe and Day will help you realize greater customer experiences through contextually agile content and applications that have been previously managed separately.
        Speakers: Alex Choy, VP of Engineering and Technical Marketing, LiveCycle, & Craig Randall, Principal Scientist, Adobe
2. Realizing Great Customer Experiences with LiveCycle ES Next, October 25, 2010, Adobe MAX 2010 (repeated on 10/27/2010)
        Hear how focusing on user experience can improve the value of the enterprise applications you deliver. Also learn about architectural changes in the next release of Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite as well as new features in servers, client runtimes, and tools that will allow you to build, deploy, and measure excellent customer experiences.
        Speaker: Craig Randall, Principal Scientist, Adobe
3. Strengthening Adobe’s Enterprise Platform with Day Software and Open Development, October 25, 2010, Adobe MAX 2010
        Learn how the combination of Day’s leading web solutions and Adobe’s enterprise portfolio provides a unique opportunity to developers: a unified web content and application delivery platform. By introducing web content management, digital asset management, and social collaboration to Adobe’s product portfolio, the combination offers developers an impressive set of capabilities to create, manage, distribute, and monetize content while delivering the best experience possible. Learn why open development is the cornerstone of Day’s R&D strategy for web content management and how it can help software development organizations design more adaptive systems and leverage the power of virtual communities.
        Speakers: David Nuescheler, CTO, Day Software, Roy Fielding, Chief Scientist, Day Software, & Craig Randall, Principal Scientist, Adobe
4. When Content Meets Applications, November 3, 2010, Day Ignite Berlin 2010
        Come hear how the combination of Adobe and Day will help you realize greater customer experiences through contextually agile content and applications that have been previously managed separately.
        Speakers: Alex Choy, VP of Engineering and Technical Marketing, LiveCycle & Craig Randall, Principal Scientist, Adobe

See you there! Otherwise, check back later for updates online. Cheers.

Update on 10/14/2010: The presentation for #1, above, is now available here.

Update on 10/27/2010: The presentation for #2, above, is now available here.

Update on 10/29/2010: The presentation for #3, above, is now available here.

Update on 11/3/2010: The presentation for #4, above, is now available here.

Update 10/28/2010: Adobe successfully completes its acquisition of Day Software. Day will operate as a new product line within Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit, joining Acrobat, Connect and LiveCycle. Welcome to all my new teammates!

Adobe has just announced a definitive agreement stipulating its intent to acquire Day Software. This acquisition will bolster Adobe’s leadership in Customer Experience Management, bringing Day’s industry-leading Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration applications, better known collectively as CQ, and Web scale content application infrastructure (CRX) together with Adobe’s LiveCycle, Connect and other enterprise software offerings–not to mention Adobe’s Flash Platform and industry-leading tools for creative professionals.

There is plenty to talk about in terms of how deeply aligned this acquisition is architecturally, technically and in terms of shared vision, and I plan to use this space to go into more of these details over time (e.g. synergies between Day’s targeting and optimization and Adobe Omniture‘s capabilities). However, I’m equally excited by the people involved here.

I’m looking forward to shortly being able to call folks like David Nuescheler, Kevin Cochrane and Roy T. Fielding not just industry colleagues but fellow Adobe employees. Welcome to Adobe, Day Software!

For more on Adobe’s approach to superior customer experience, I encourage you to subscribe to experiencedelivers.com and/or follow @AdobeCEM.

Update 7/28/2010: The Web is all a-buzz about this acquisition, and I would say it’s with good reason. Simply put: customer experience wins and therefore customers win, which means that businesses embracing Adobe CEM increase their own profitability.

Since my brief post above, Adobe has posted a press release and FAQ about the acquisition. Rob Tarkoff, SVP and GM of Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit (or DESBU) has also posted his thoughts, offering some key takeaways to consider from this acquisition.

CMS Wire recently picked up the development of CMIS Explorer by Shane Johnson (@shane_dev) at CityTech. CMIS Explorer (download) is a browser application written in Adobe AIR and Flex that uses the RESTful AtomPub binding of the proposed CMIS standard to interact with CMIS-compliant repositories.

Already early access support for CMIS is available from EMC, IBM and Alfresco. Such support makes it possible for applications like CMIS Explorer to be applied to a variety of content repositories in ways not possible before CMIS.

As fellow OASIS CMIS TC member Florent Guillaume from Nuxeo comments, though, CMIS is not yet a formal (fixed) standard. It is under development and somewhat fluid.

When a content repository vendor provides draft support, don’t assume that such support fully conforms to the current draft specification (e.g. v0.5). If you’re an application developer like Shane, you can know conformance exists by first building against what is specified on the OASIS site for CMIS and then pointing your application at desired content repository or repositories.

For example, you can point CMIS Explorer at a Documentum content repository via EMC CMIS support EA2 to search and to see types.

However, while basic interoperability seems OK, something prevents actual browsing functionality in CMIS Explorer from working with Documentum. In its com.citytechinc.cmis.Repository.setFolder() method, CMIS Explorer tries to get folder objects from root children via the following condition:
f.object.properties.propertyString.(@name=='BaseType').value == "folder"
However, draft CMIS specification v0.5 does not define a BaseType property, not does the EMC CMIS support EA2 contain this property. As a result, CMIS Explorer cannot find any folder object in root children, which prevents it from being able to browse a Docbase.

To be fair, my colleague, Norrie Quinn, has already pointed out this matter on Shane’s post, and Shane has replied.

My focus here is simply as follows: It’s important for applications to leverage the currently proposed CMIS bindings from OASIS rather than a particular vendor’s implementation of these bindings in order to promote interoperability.

It will be good to see the emergence of CMIS-based applications that go beyond exploration, navigation and portal-style user experiences. Such applications will help to influence the CMIS roadmap beyond version 1.0.

In the meantime, it’s great to see open source efforts like CMIS Explorer take root today. Thanks, Shane.

P.S. It would be good to see a community form around CMIS-based application development (e.g. shine a light on individual efforts, potentially pool interest and resources, solicit ideas and challenges, etc.). If you’re interested in something like, please leave me a comment. In the meantime, I plan to promote community efforts here as best I can. Thanks.

Since reading Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I’ve been looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell‘s next book. Outliers: The Story of Success didn’t disappoint, and I recommend reading it yourself.

As the book’s title suggests, Gladwell’s text is about success and outliers; however, he engages the reader from the get-go by starting with a definition of outlier expressly to follow-up by quickly suggesting a concrete redefinition of what is truly an outlier and what determines success. Gladwell challenges the reader to think in less-conventional terms (e.g. thinking about health in terms of community–beyond just the individual): “…there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.”

Outliers has two parts, focused on opportunity and legacy, respectively. Part one emphasizes “from-ness” (i.e. from where (e.g. birthplace), from when (e.g. time, era, norms), from how (e.g. culture, legacy), etc.). In doing so, part one indicates by one example after another why merely personal explanations of success don’t work.

     Where are you from?

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of the those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play–and by ‘we’ I mean society–in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

Gladwell states, “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” He then goes on to uncover patterns of achievement and underachievement as well as patterns of encouragement and discouragement. He focuses on the work ethic of those who are purposeful, single-minded, intentional–who achieve success by working much, much harder.

• Adversity presenting itself as opportunity
• Developing skills amidst obscurity
• Meaningful – complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work
• “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

For example, the “10,000 hour rule” is discussed (i.e. its typically takes 10K hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise and world-class mastery). The point of the discussion is not to admire those who earn such mastery as much as it is to understand the kinds of obstacles most of us encounter in the pursuit of such commitment. Furthermore, it concerns the creation of (more) equal opportunities for practicing in order to reach greater common potential: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

     Are you regularly practicing what your core profession requires
     (e.g. modeling, design, coding, testing, writing)?

“Success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages.”
“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
     Talent: intellect, “general intelligence,” innate ability
     Opportunity: imagination, savvy, “practical intelligence,” surrounding
     community, family background, demographics, virtues and values
     (e.g. frugality, initiative, sacrifice)

“General intelligence” and “practical intelligence” are orthogonal (i.e. presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other); therefore, keep clear and separate (i.e. don’t confuse one for the other).

Part two, moves from opportunity to legacy and starts by focusing on cultural legacies (e.g. a culture of honor, where reputation is of foremost concern). The focus becomes about teamwork and communication (e.g. “mitigated speech”). For example, understanding cultural legacy as a way to effectively combat mitigation (i.e. developing clearer and more assertive communication where both transmitter and receiver are not a afraid to speak up or to speak straight).

To bring cultural legacy into better focus, Gladwell leverages the Cultural Dimensions work of Geert Hofstede (e.g. IDV – Individualism (i.e. what Gladwell refers to as the individualism-collectivism scale), UAI – Uncertainty Avoidance Index, PDI – Power Distance Index). For example, the United States has the highest IDV score and the fifth-lowest PDI score.

Mitigated speech and high PDI influence communication, especially when the person speaking (transmitter) and the person listening (receiver) have different orientation. In Western cultures, communication tends to be transmitter-oriented (i.e. speaker is responsible to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously). However, in Asian cultures, communication tends to be receiver-oriented (i.e. listener is responsible to make sense of what is being said). For this reason, I believe that communication is both my responsibility and also a two-way discipline (i.e. if you don’t understand something speak up–I’m trying my best to be clear). It’s why I prefer more interactive sessions at conferences, etc.

As a mathematician by training, I was fascinated to learn that, as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. When you compare the fairly transparent Asian number system with the highly irregular number system in English, it starts to become clearer how English-speaking (English-thinking) student accumulate a disadvantage. Stowe Boyd goes into more detail of Gladwell’s treatment of this cultural legacy. (I need to start thinking si instead of four, qi instead of seven, etc. )

Cultural legacy suggests to me that it would be naive to apply an American timeline to the future development of, for example, China. Rice paddies aren’t fields of corn or wheat (i.e. skill-oriented versus mechanically-oriented farming tradition). So why should it take the Chinese the same amount of time to “modernize” as it did take Americans?

You’ve likely heard or seen the business cliché “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Well, Outliers posits that success is not much about ability as it is about attitude. That is, success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness to work hard. Success is more about out-learning than it is about being smarter. School works, but there just isn’t enough of it (e.g. 180 days versus 243 days–American versus Japanese school year). Or said another way, school isn’t the problem as much as summer vacation may be.

In closing:

• “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities–and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
• Success is a gift.
• “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success–the fortunate birth date and the happy accidents of history–with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

P.S. I recently began a major revision of my Books page. You can now more easily see other book reviews I’ve posted herein. Soon you’ll be able to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein). Why? Well, if you’re nearby and you see something of interest, please ask to borrow books of interest. If you’re not (i.e. regardless of your location to me), I’m hoping that opening up my library will help to solicit feedback as to what the especially good reads are (and why). I typically have multiple books queued up to read; so, knowing what should be top-of-list from my readers would be welcome feedback. Cheers…

Update 12/26/2008: Today I was able to get to watching the second part of Charlie Rose’s show on performance where, after interviewing Malcolm Gladwell in the first half, he interviewed the author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin. Mr. Colvin referenced the little known body of scientific work concerning deliberate practice, much like Mr. Gladwell drew upon it in Outliers. I appreciated Mr. Colvin’s belief, based on conversation with this scientific community, that the research frontier here is parenting.

Now that Michael has publicly posted the official news in the Confluence wiki for Omea and in the newsgroups (i.e. coyly here via a three-part post featuring Esperanto and Alice in Wonderland), I want to also draw attention to this important open source event: http://svn.jetbrains.org/omeaopen.

I caught word of this milestone coming via Jeff Loftus. Serge was kind enough to cut Jeff and I in a couple of days early on the SVN link via the Omea multi-user chat room. (Using Miranda to access the MUC was painless).

I see, too, that David and Dmitry have picked up the news.

It took almost ten months since I posted my open letter to the Omea crew, but they have delivered.

Looks like I need to demonstrate “Omea Master” status.

If your engineering team is like mine, it’s geographically distributed. Chances are that English is not everyone’s first language either. (To be clear, if you compare my Russian, Chinese or Indian to “their” English, I’m the one that comes up short!) So, I’ve been trying to determine an automated way to spell check Java-based source code artifacts.

Recently I found a set of open source tools that, when cobbled together, get me close to an ideal result. The answer began with finding a Google Code project called bSpell, which in turn brought in the following supporting cast:

• Ant (build automation) – version 1.7 or later for formalized library (antlib) support
• Checkstyle (coding standard adherence analysis)
• Cobertura (code coverage analysis)
• fant (Ant + Maven‘ishness)
• JUnit (unit testing)
• PMD (static rules analysis)

While Ant and JUnit are like old friends, it was nice to put “faces with names” for these other new acquaintances. For example, FxCop is a staple in my .NET-oriented development for best practice and coding standard rule checking; now I can experiment with the likes of Checkstyle and PMD to (hopefully) get similar results in Java.

To build bSpell, you first have to build fant. To build fant, you need to have Cobertura and PMD installed as Ant “extensions” (i.e. under an “extensions” sub-folder of %ANT_HOME% ${user.home}/.ant). You may want to upgrade the versions of JUnit and Checkstyle packaged with fant, too. You may also have to update other dependency versions referenced in build scripts (e.g. <fant-root>\etc\ant-inc\common.xml’s reference to PMD). A successful build of fant will result in <fant-root>\build\dist\fant-0.1.jar. A successful build of bSpell will result in <bSpell-root>\build\dist\bspell-0.1.jar.

To install bSpell et al into your Ant environment–where Cobertura and PMD are also installed under %ANT_HOME%\ ${user.home}/.ant/extensions–you need to copy your bSpell, fant, JUnit, and Checkstyle JAR files into %ANT_HOME%\lib ${user.home}/.ant/lib.

To incorporate bSpell into your Ant-based build process, create a new target in the appropriate XML build script. I called mine “spellcheck”:

<target name=”spellcheck” description=”Check DFS for proper spelling”>
   <taskdef name=”bspell” classname=”com.google.bspell.ant.BSpellTask” />  
   <bspell>
      <spellconfiguration
         spellCheckConfig=”${basedir}/project-bspell.config“
         format=”console”
         dictionary=”${basedir}/english.jar“
         reservedDict=”${basedir}/project-bspell.reserved“
         registry=”${basedir}/project-bspell.registry“/>
      <!–Spell check the project (e.g. Java, properties, XML, XSD, WSDL, HTML and text content).–>
      <fileset dir=”${basedir}/**” includes=”**/*.*”/>
      …
   </bspell>
</target>

The first thing to note is an incorrect element name is referenced in the example bspell task call in the bSpell home page–it should read spellconfiguration as above, not configuration .

Next, note that there are four file-based inputs to the bspell task as follows:

• project-bspell.config – I simply copied <bspell-root>\etc\spellCheck.config, renamed it within my project, and left its contents untouched. There are a number of settings herein; however, there isn’t any documentation to speak out; so, you have to scour bSpell source code to understand valid ranges and the effects of change.
• english.jar – I simply copied this JAR file from <bspell-root>\etc into my project area as-is to improve project tool source control. Presumably there are non-English dictionaries that can be applied, too; however, I didn’t go looking for them since my needs are English-based.
• project-bspell.reserved – bSpell will use this file to instruct its spell checker to ignore certain words. The baseline file I used, %ANT_HOME%\etc\fant\bspell\reserved.dict, contained two sets of words: one associated with “general” and another associated with “java.” I ended up leaving the Java word list as-is and simply added words to the general list. Given that I didn’t modify my bSpell configuration file (e.g. IGNORE_MIXED_CASE=true and IGNORE_UPPER_CASE=false), I had to specify all-lowercase and all-uppercase values for  acronyms to be ignored. Given the lack of documentation on, for example, the effect of a word addition to the general list versus the Java list, or the ability (or not) to create additional, named word lists, it may be worth scouring the bSpell sources for details.
• project-bspell.registry – bSpell will use the file’s extension to detect which parser should be used. In case of .java, it will load the JavaParser to parse the Java source code (i.e. com.google.bspell.parsers.JavaParser.class within bspell-0.1.jar). Out-of-the-box, bSpell provides one other parser: TxtParser. You associate parsers with file extensions in the registry file. I associated com.google.bspell.parsers.TxtParser with txt, properties, xml, xsd, wsdl, and html. If you specify a file type in your bspell task file sets that isn’t listed in your registry or recognized by default in bSpell (i.e. .java), bSpell throw a java.lang.RuntimeException.

A run of “ant spellcheck” from the command line produced a spell check analysis of over 600 files in under two minutes on an average workstation. So, I can now spell check my Java projects in the time it takes me to grab a fresh soda from the office refrigerator. Nice!

So, what’s missing?

• Well, for starters, bSpell (and fant) are only at version 0.1 (as numerically determined by their committers). Nevertheless, it would be useful to have a ready-to-deploy package for bSpell rather than have to go through a reasonably involved build-then-deploy process, as noted above.
• bSpell needs documentation–not just Javadoc, but user guide style content (e.g. explaining bSpell configuration file values and how they alter tool behavior). There is a bSpell wiki, but it is empty at the time of this post.
• bSpell needs more built-in parsers. While associating com.google.bspell.parsers.TxtParser with txt and properties works, associating TxtParser with xml, xsd, wsdl, and html, leads to extra work in reserved dictionary definition. That’s because TxtParser isn’t designed to ignore language keywords and other common-but-not-true-English constructs in such document types.

Thanks to James Mao & Co. for bSpell. (I see that James and Glen are both committers on Apache CXF, too.) Keep up the good work, guys!

Update 10/8/2007: A colleague of mine kindly reminded me that modifying the actual Ant distribution is the “old” way of doing things, and was replaced by the .lib directory several Ant releases ago. So, I tried to correct my post above to reflect a more appropriate way to achieve the same results. Thanks, Martin.

From: Craig Randall
Sent: 5/30/2007 7:45:19 PM
Newsgroups: jetbrains.omniamea.eap, jetbrains.omea.reader, jetbrains.omea.pro, jetbrains.omea.dev
Subject: When will the source finally become open for Omea?

Omea Team-

Many months ago Jetbrains announced that Omea was going open source. However, to date the source is still entirely closed. There has been very little explanation about the lack of follow-through (timely or otherwise) concerning progress (or challenges) in achieving the publicly announced goal of making Omea an open source project.

When you read through a significant number of posts since the Omea announcement, it’s obvious that the Omea community is loyal. But all loyalty has its limits, and I fear that Jetbrains is pushing this community to the point of writing off the announcement as vaporous. That is really unfortunate and completely unnecessary. From my correspondence separately with you, I know that there is still passion around Omea (i.e. the core dev’s at Jetbrains).

So, what say you? Can you give your long-suffering community a definitive answer about when you will finally make Omea fully open source?

-Craig

It’s also been almost six months since version 2.2 was released. So regardless of the critical environment around open sourcing your product, you need to convince your community that, regardless of open/closed, Omea is alive and well, receiving its due care and feeding one way or another.

You made Omea free (as in free beer); now, please liberate Omea.

Sincerely, your languishing advocate…

Update 3/14/2008: JetBrains has finally released Omea under GPL v2, and the community can participate in its ongoing development (!!). More in a separate post…

Earlier today JetBrains Omea Development Lead, Michael Gerasimov, made it public and official: “After collecting your opinions and having long internal discussions, we have finally decided to move both Omea Reader and Omea Pro into the open source domain.” Michael had alerted me to this excellent news privately before the newsgroup-based announcement, but once again I agreed to wait for JetBrain’s lead.

This is great news for Omea users like me, content management developers and solutions architects like me, and fans of open source…

Here are some more details from this announcement:

• The licensing of this new open source project has yet to be announced (e.g. GNU, Apache, etc.).
• The repository for this project has yet to be announced (e.g. SourceForge, etc.).
• Omea Pro is immediately available free of charge.
• JetBrains will release version 2.2 of Omea Pro and Omea Reader before the product goes open source in the traditional sense.
• JetBrains is going to ensure Visual Studio 2005 readiness before the product goes open source (e.g. project files, potential optimization for .NET 2.0, etc.).
• Source code currently resides in a p4 repository. It will migrate into a Subversion repository before it goes open source.
• The new build scheme will leverage JetBrains TeamCity.

Alas and unfortunately, omea.org is already claimed by Ottawa Musicians and Entertainers Association.

Update 3/15/2008: Although over a year later, Omea is finally open to the community In doing so, JetBrains has released the open source project via SVN off its domain and with a code base requiring .NET 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008–among other components.

Now that Michael Gerasimov, one of the last remaining Omea developers at JetBrains, has gone public on the jetbrains.omea.pro newsgroup with the state of affairs at JetBrains concerning Omea, I can comment here.

While JetBrains may receive more revenue and recognition from its IntelliJ IDEA product (e.g. leading edge refactoring support in a Java IDE), Omea represents a compelling and leading offering in the personal information management space. I certainly hope that Omea continues to thrive long from now in one way or another. Thoughts of an open source Omea project are particularly exciting, but I’d be just as happy for JetBrains to decide to maintain it as a viable commercial offering.

My worst fear is that Omea may simply die–be quietly taken offline and become forgotten…nothing more than archived code, binaries and docs…thoughts of what could have been.

There is certainly software deserving of such a fate, but Omea is not among it. Not by a long shot!

Update 3/15/2008: My fears have been relieved.

“Open source is an experiment in social organization around a distinctive notion of property rights…Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude…The essence of open source is not the software. It is the process by which the software is created.”

The Success of Open Source author and Professor of Political Science at U.C. Berkeley, Steven Weber, brings refreshingly non-technical perspective and insight into the world of open source and its paradigm. He sheds light on the motivation of individuals engaged in open source activity, on how governance–setting parameters for voluntary relationships among autonomous parties–motivates or de-motivates, on political and economic impact where open source is concerned, on voluntary participation and voluntary selection of tasks as an integral part of open source coordination (organization), and on how essential and accidental complexity is addressed.

According to Steven Weber, there are eight principles that capture the essence of what people do in the open source process as follows:

1. Make it interesting and make sure it happens.
2. Scratch an itch. (Understand what conditions individuals find that the benefits of participation exceed the costs.)
3. Minimize how many times you have to reinvent the wheel. (There is no place for NIH!)
4. Solve problems through parallel work processes whenever possible.
5. Leverage the law of large numbers. (For example, consider the effective field testing Linux receives.)
6. Document what you do. (See #s 3-5.)
7. Release early and release often.
8. Talk a lot. (That is, collaborate. No playing it close to the vest!)

Amidst this process, its motivations, etc., The Success of Open Source stuck with me particularly in the following ways:

• Referring to model open source from the perspective of a political scientist: “The purpose of the model is not to represent reality; its purpose is to place in sharp relief particular elements of reality so we can look at the model from different angles, tweak it in various directions, generalize it, and then come back to reality with a deeper understanding of what happens there.” This is a good definition for modeling and those who model.
• Eric Raymond: “Fun is … a sign of peak efficiency. Painful development environments waste labor and creativity; they extract huge hidden costs in time, money, and opportunity.”
• Software code as art (expression); software process as science (reproducible)
• The following progression in the open source narcotic can lead to job offers, VC money, opportunities to work with other greats: ego gratification >> peer recognition >> reputation >> proven worth…
• A growing abundance of computing power and bandwidth cause scarce resources like effort, intelligence and energy to become more valuable and in shorter supply. That in abundance depends upon that in which is not in abundance (i.e. classic supply and demand).
• “Network good” – “The value of a piece of software to any user increases as more people use the software.”
• Forking vs. coordination: “Too much coordination can get you stuck working in old and inefficient architecture.” Nevertheless making a strategic decision to abandon such an architecture can be quite difficult “because it means placing at risk all sorts of sunk costs and existing competitive advantages.”
• Software architecture should drive the organization about it. For example, consider the consequences of Conway’s Law: The structure of the (technical) system mirrors the structure of the organization that developed it. There may be expected, perhaps constrictive, communication paths, but there may also be silos of knowledge.
• While familiar with the concept of flaming (public condemnation), the concept of shunning (refusing to cooperate) was intriguing. I like the Troll Cap application of gentle shunning by 37signals.
• Is your brand (e.g. “Brand You”) a “valuable proxy for a promise of a quality performance?”
• Enabling distributed innovation by empowering people to experiment, creating effective feedback loops, and developing signal intelligence by recognizing legitimate signals–valuable bits of information–amidst noise.
• Exploration of new possibilities vs. exploitation of old certainties–risk of obsolescence if overly focused on refinement and iterative improvement
• Sometimes visionaries must rule the day (over pragmatists)!
• “As information about what users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, individually differentiated, and hard to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable tools.”

I gather from my read that Steven Weber will publish again, and I look forward to his next effort. In the meantime, I look forward to tapping into a greater percentage of human creative motivation amongst my colleagues through the lesson I’ve learned from reading The Success of Open Source.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

“Resolution” is a bit strong; so, I’m going with “intention” instead.

Looking back on 2005, I intend to focus during 2006 on the following subject (in no particular order):

• More reflections on the books I read
• Enterprise content management (ECM) – including email archiving, identity management, basic content services (BCS)
• Open source projects of note
• WinFS – Microsoft’s next-generation integrated storage
• Similarities and differences between .NET and J2EE
• Services and SOA
• Areas of personal expertise and/or passion

I’m sure that I’ll still take some space to share aspects of my life outside work and to describe how my site continues to evolve. However, I intend to tip the balance in favor of professional content. Perhaps in the process I will benefit from more interaction with my readership, but I know what is in my control and what I can only hope to influence.

My intention stated here is motivated in part by my recent read of The Success of Open Source. That is, open source credits its membership based more on creation (evidence of skill) than it does on credential. It’s still always a good idea to have an up-to-date resume and to leverage tools like LinkedIn, but blogging is living and evolving evidence of being “fit for purpose.”

It’s fair to say that Peter Gabriel‘s Up CD artwork inspired my brother to create my current theme imagery. I grabbed the link colors from his latter two-disc Hit release. Appropriately, the teal is from the second “Miss” (or not-yet-visited) CD; the magenta is from the first “Hit” (visited) CD. Like I said in my previous post, WordPress upgrades are so dead-simple that they yield time for other things.

WordPress 2.0 was released this week; so I upgraded my site to it from 1.5.2. The steps provided for a 1.5.x upgrade were straightforward and accurate, allowing me some extra time to update my theme imagery–thanks again to my brother.

[Via Bill McCoy] I’ve been thinking about the increasingly fluid nature of content for some time. Jeff Jarvis published an essay that is aligned with this report and my thoughts, too. Recommended.

I see a strong parallels forming between message pipelines in services and content streams in document formats. For example, the presence of special SOAP headers can lead to particular routing and processing behaviors just like the presence of special manifests in meta-formats like OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications and Microsoft Open Office XML Formats. I hope to post on this in the future.

“Eclipse is an open source project and one of our goals is to practice completely transparent development. The rationale is simple; if you don’t know where the project is going you cannot help out or provide feedback.” -Erich Gamma (foreword to Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2e
, the subject of my post here) Even if your development process is slightly translucent, Erich’s rationale applies. If your development process is opaque, ask why and demand an answer.

Values bring purpose to practices. Practices are evidence of values. Principles bridge the gap between values (universal) and practices (intensely situated).

Extreme programming (XP) values communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect. These values are effective when applied together, not in isolation.

Mr. Beck’s four criteria used to evaluate the simplicity of a design:

1. Appropriateness for the intended audience
2. Communicative
3. Factored
4. Minimal

Feedback is the value I focused on the most during my read of Kent Beck’s text. I see the need for better heartbeat recognition, pulse taking and continual health assessments in some of the projects I lead. Establishing the right frequency and depth of project heartbeats can lead to a proper balance between process and reflection. Without periodic and regular project “physicals” it can be difficult to ascertain whether project/participant health is improving or declining. Project assessment need not be arduous or mysterious, but it does require discipline and commitment.

I was also impressed by Mr. Beck’s focus on flow. Insist on a high degree of continuous flow and quickly resolve all flow disruptions. Daily builds are not enough! Software should function correctly on a (verified) daily basis, at a minimum (i.e. always be deployable). Integration environments are critical to project flow. Metrics can lead to awareness. Awareness can lead to change and the development of practices to institutionalize change.

Here are just a few of the statements made by Kent Beck that made a particularly strong impression:

• “If you’re having trouble succeeding, fail.”
• “A concern for quality is no excuse for inaction.” The goal is to make the quality of software development good enough that there is no need for downstream QA. This means that everyone in the project is responsible for quality without exception.
• “Without daily attention to design, the cost of changes does skyrocket.”
• “Keep the design investment in proportion to the needs of the system so far.”
• On the role of Product Managers: “In XP, product managers write stories, pick themes and stories in the quarterly [release] cycle, pick stories in the [bi-]weekly [iteration] cycle, and answer questions as implementation uncovers under-specified areas of stories.”
• On the role of Architects: “Architects on an XP team look for and execute large-scale refactorings, write system-level tests that stress the architecture, and implement stories.”
• “There is so much waste in software development. The waste is rooted more in what we believe and feel than in what we do. Becoming aware of and addressing those beliefs and feelings takes time and experience.”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Over this past weekend Sun’s president and COO, Jonathan Swartz, blogged about the value in volume. It appears that his post was a prelude to today’s announcement by Google and Sun (AP) and confirmation of speculation yesterday (ref. [1], [2], [3] – “creating more pipes to get at information”, [4], etc.).

Setting aside some of the hyperbole and bias that have sprung forth today, today’s press release does make me wonder if the tail will soon wag the dog. Have services reached their tipping point? Are they now leading applications and not the other way around?

I’m reminded of an email I sent over three years ago (!) on 7/3/2002 to my GM at the time about software-as-a-service and service-oriented architecture, or SOA:

Do you visit Starbucks regularly? How about the movie theater? Sporting events?

Imagine if these vendors told you that you had to pony up a year or more’s worth of mocha/latte purchase, movie or game tickets (plus concessions) before you could enter the premises; however, if you did so, you’d be able to enter regularly thereafter without additional cost. But please be advised, if you bought the matinee package, you could only see matinees; if you purchased tall lattes, venti mochas or Frappuccino® are out of the question. Would you still pay your money to Starbucks, etc?

Some folks might, under these terms, but Microsoft and others are betting that more enterprises are more inclined to pay for what they need (or even what they don’t), if they pay smaller amounts for more discrete, value-added services. The days of Microsoft being able to annually charge its customers $400~500 for the next Office application suite upgrade are drawing to a close. Office .NET is a realization of this by Microsoft.

Consider the modern phone with its support for caller ID, call waiting, etc.

[Telcos allow their] customers to choose to pay-as-you-use or to pay a flat monthly rate for unlimited usage of such features. The customer has the phone, but the phone company has the centralized service. The phone is only as good as its service.

Microsoft, for example, is positioning Windows in all its various forms (PC, PDA, XBox, WebTV [now Media Center and IPTV] and soon the Tablet PC) as the software equivalent of the modern phone—fully capable of hosting rich services from multiple enterprises. .NET is akin to phone lines—tying together desktops with servers, delivering software services on demand just like your local utilities. Microsoft talks about “software as a service.” The computing platform (e.g. PC) will be defined by the services it supports and presents.

“Office .NET” isn’t on the plan of record with Microsoft today. Office 2003 may have begun the conversation by Microsoft as the de facto information work front-end to software services, but this is not the same as true utility computing.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to today’s news.

Brian Jones presented the new and improved (default) XML formats coming in Office “12.” There were a couple of slides where the font was too small–simply because there was so much information being conveyed in a small amount of real estate. Other than that, and perhaps a couple of demo glitches, Brian gave a nice presentation.

Here are my notes:

• XML is default format in “12″ (not new information).
• The new XML formats are actually a Zip “package” of compressed XML documents or “parts” along with relationships and other bits. (Aside: this sure does smell like OpenOffice and the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications under development.).
• Unlike their binary (legacy) counterparts, the XML formats are compressed. Current storage measurements show around a 50+% savings (e.g. .docx vs. .doc).
• There will be patches available to patch down-level Office apps for new XML format support. This is critical if the new formats are to be adopted more rapidly and pervasively. ISVs must know that they’re not investing entirely in the future with no regard for the present enterprise landscape.
• The openness of the XML formats means that any compression library, any XML parser, on any system (e.g. Linux) may be employed.
• The current bits (not made available at PDC) make a binary format copy due to schema volatility (i.e. style undergoing work in fluid fashion) for the XML formats; this will change in final release (or before), of course.
• The ordering of parts in a package is still in flux (e.g. important parts up front, etc.). Of course, this begs the question, what makes a part important and who decides the definition (e.g. Microsoft, an ISV and/or our customers)?
• It was good to hear confirmation of Office “12″ and XPS (“Metro“) interop (e.g. unified rationale for Zip employment).
• Word “12″ format is similar to Word 2003 format; Excel “12″ format is a significant revision; Excel 2003 was not a full fidelity format (e.g. not everything was saved to XML); and PPT “12″ is a brand new format.
• The “Open Packaging Conventions” need to be studied, understood and followed (e.g. not adhering to these rules will result in data loss; e.g. a part with no reference flagged as corrupt and dropped in next save).
• There is custom-defined XML schema support in O12–reference schemas provide formatting while custom schemas provide meaning, both to the same content.
• I see these new XML formats as the new public, open API for OLE Structured Storage, which was previously only widely available via COM and Office binary formats. This transition is huge!
• The new formats should make solutions development much cleaner (e.g. InfoPath-Word integration, custom XML/XSL and Word XML, metadata exchange acrosss different stores and systems, including offline scenarios, etc.).
• The slide entitled “Sample Solution Scenarios” is particularly interesting when considering potential applications to add value to the new XML formats in Office “12″ (e.g. criteria/validation scans–inbound and outbound, inject/remove agents, taxonomy/ontology formation/refinement agents, etc.). Knowing that the packaged result is open and extensible (e.g. the VSTO manifest where Office “12″ is concerned will just be another part in the package) should prove to be a powerful development opportunity.
• You should expect to see a ton of samples (based on significant feedback from 2003 release)–i.e. not just docs that state what, but samples that state how and why.

Brian advises that we stay tuned to his blog. Later this week (perhaps as early as tomorrow), Microsoft will release the current (preview) reference schemas for Office “12,” at which point Brian promises to blog in more detail about this development canvas.

9/14/2005 update: Brian posts information to download the preview schemas.

Tags: PDC05

Within the past month, I finished reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Now I can follow-up my previous post on this book.

For expediency’s sake, here are my take-aways in rougher, list-oriented form:

• Capitalism – unequal wealth; communism – equal poverty
• RSS/Atom (feeds), blogs, tags – open, standard formats … but not open enough (e.g. annotations) … potential for integration with open, standard document-based metadata (e.g. XMP) … what I’m currently calling “fluid content dynamics” – more closely reflects the very nature of content–what do I really want to do?–capture thoughts and ideas … what is a .doc? why be forced to or choose to use Word? is the value Word provides worthy of my usage/loyalty/goals? what is the price of overkill over adequacy?
• “Standards don’t eliminate innovation, they just allow you to focus it. They allow you to focus on where the real value lies, which is usually everything you can add above and around the standard.” -Joel Cawley (e.g. e.g. VoIP – voice is free; surrounding service add value)
• “Software is not gold, it is lettuce–it is a perishable good.” -Brian Behlendorf
• “This emerging era [open-sourcing] is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius.” -Irving Wladawsky-Berger
• Blogging as open-source intelligence gathering/dissemination
• Don’t confuse a competitive race to the top for a competitive race to the bottom (e.g. China’s global economic strategy, “ECM lite” (Gartner’s “Basic Content Services”), etc.).
• Get flat or be flattened!
• Align ILM/ECM/CM/DM to its flatteners (i.e. blogs, wikis, feeds, tag clouds, etc.). Re-engineer yourself, your workgroup, your company and your culture (think BIG!) accordingly.
• Are you transparent or translucent? I’m only the latter if I have no effective means to handle feedback.
• The Triple Convergence – new players, new playing field, new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration
• The state of being “legacy free” and the past’s drag on the present
• The Great Sorting Out – understand when friction is to be kept, modified or eliminated (e.g. legitimate barriers to entry, etc.)
• Value creation today is horizontal, not vertical–connect and collaborate, not command and control
• Power of perspective and anticipating its effects (e.g. the empowerment of those benefiting the most profoundly from flattening)
• Power of being able to assign or take action instead of asking for information because the information is already known
• IP ownership – CC mark on blogs, living wills and trusts (e.g. include “my bits”)
• Knowledge work and services (idea-based goods), not just (physical) goods, are tradeable.
• Wants today become needs tomorrow.
• “Sure, there is fear, and that fear is good because that stimulates a willingness to change and explore and find more things to do better.” -Vivek Paul
• “You have to constantly upgrade your skills.” – mediocre was never an option, but now mediocrity has been permanently kicked out of the proverbial closet (thank goodness!)
• Know how to “learn how to learn”
• Laws -> Markets -> Innovation (i.e. why I’ve been reading books on the judicial system in America and blogging about it)
• Running a marathon involves different musculature, breathing capacity and mental toughness than running a sprint
• “In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears–and that is our problem.” -Thomas Friedman
• Strive for the top but have a plan that accounts for arrival
• “Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or urgency. No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.” -Lou Gerstner
• “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” -Paul Romer
• Versatilist (Gartner) – not specialist and not generalist
• Values > Value; Values chains > Value chains
• Liberating technology that enslaves
• “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein
• “…in a flat world so many of the inputs and tools of collaboration are becoming commodities available to everyone. They are all out there for anyone to grasp. There is one thing, though, that has not and can never be commoditized–and that is imagination.”

In reply to Erik’s comment, a very sensible reason for a corporation or company to pursue outsourcing is when it must do so to effectively engage critical knowledge workers. The talent pool is global; it’s not local. I want the best candidates to be employees. I prefer to work locally and draw from my communities; however, I can see when this may not always be possible. Thomas Friedman makes the point of saying that today natural talent trumps geography.

Some of the complaint I hear to outsourcing tends to be focused on cost rather than talent. I see an emerging rationale swinging more toward talent. This is why it’s extremely critical that our educational system catch up and surpass corporate knowledge worker requirements. If we don’t educate the best and the brightest, someone else will. If we can’t attract and retain local talent, then we’ll be forced to “go remote.” (Assuming that a corporation wants to be a global leader in the marketplace.)

A cost-based competitive advantage implies a volume-based corporate economy. Knowledge work and its enabling technologies and products are not yet entirely volume commodities. To become such implies that something else–not based on cost/volume–has taken its place. Whatever this is will likely be what future talent is attracted to.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Ever since Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path published the article coining the AJAX acronym (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), my Technorati watchlist feed for ajax has out posted my watchlist feed for smart client by a minimum multiplier of almost four (i.e. nearly four AJAX hits for each hit on smart clients with a current total of 2326 AJAX posts to a current total of 514 smart client posts). A nearly 4:1 ratio does make some wonder and others react (see Atlas references below).

As you can see by the date of this post versus the date of the catalytic article (2/18)–let alone the release of applications incorporating AJAX–I missed the blogging heyday by a fair number of days and weeks. This was intentional, since I’m not terribly concerned with technology for technology’s sake nor with the latest development fad. (Having been in the business 15 years, I’ve seen enough of these come and go.) Rather I wanted to wait long enough to gather a clearer sense of the benefits and cost of incorporating AJAX into enterprise applications–what is gained, what is lost, what requires extra work to maintain, etc. So, without further ado…

Bibliography of Lessons Learned (Educated Opinions)

• Very dynamic web interfaces
• BOF learnings
• Considered harmful (i.e. some constructive criticism (when frameworks go bad – more)
• IP issues
• Prohibitive cost of development
• Similarities to and differences from smart clients
• The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry (more and again)
• Wisdom regarding usage
• Markets abhor a vacuum – the truth of the post title alone made me smile
• Accessibility concerns (here, too)
• Perspective (forest vs. trees) (more)
• “You wouldn’t use a brand new screwdriver to drive a nail.”
• Notes from a conference session with Ajaxian (more)
• JavaScript callback API consequences
• The Ajax Reality Distortion Field (from Laszlo’s gutsy CTO)
• Sun Blueprints (e.g. integration with JavaServer Faces
• Some history along with some code (Struts-related)
• Excluded users
• Promise or hype?
• Not page-based or window-based but new
• Progressive enhancement (i.e. what to do when client lacks support)
• One way to justify the cost of development (i.e. compare user experience with and without support)
• As a privacy solution
• Common mistakes to avoid (more) – commentary
• Current limitations
• Reconsidered (follow-up; reaction)
• About user experience
• Quality of user experience (reactions, negative and positive
• Takeaways
• Interface design
• Usability design patterns
• Patterns

The following applications incorporate AJAX principles, for example, to achieve richer user experience:

• GMail
• Google Suggest
• Google Maps
• Antarctica Systems Visual Net
• Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA)
• Flickr
• Netflix
• WP-Touched WordPress plug-in

The following frameworks incorporate AJAX to increase developer productivity:

• Ruby on Rails (introduction)
• Dojo Toolkit
• Prototype
• Simpe AJAX Code Kit (SACK)
• Simple AJAX Toolkit (SAJAX)
• Echo2
• AJAX.NET Library
• Microsoft Atlas (more, more, more)

Most of the following tend to be categorized under technologies that enable Rich Internet Applications, a term coined by Macromedia (soon to be Adobe): Flash (relationship), Flex, and OpenLaszlo (Laszlo Systems’ take on RIA). DHTML should also be mentioned along with XUL, XAML, and SVG.

Keep up with the Jones’ via these tag clouds (but I’m signing off at this point): del.icio.us, Furl, and Technorati.

Prior to today, subscribers to my RSS 2.0-based comments feed may have encountered breakage due to the presence of » character entities. Googling for a solution led me to Kaf’s WordPress plugin, Entity2NCR. (It looks like Kaf is a fairly prolific plugin author.) This plugin, once I dealt with my initial activation hickup–thanks again to Kaf, did the trick. Handy!

Update 5/14/2005: Per Kaf’s own advice, I’ve removed Entity2NCR, since I’ve just completed my upgrade from WP 1.5 to WP 1.5.1.

After visiting the “Using Themes” page in the WP Codex and downloading the Placid theme, it became clear that to derive a new theme from an existing theme–in my case Kubrick–involves changing the comment header inside style.css. And with such a vibrate WP community that likes to give back (e.g. a Photoshop template for Kubrick), it really can’t be any easier to personalize a WP site.

So far, I’ve found the WordPress support forums (and Google) to be helpful in getting me up and running past a default WP installation. After my previous post, I discovered that the default URLs were not to my liking; so, I decided to email Ryan Boren directly with my questions. How a software’s major contributors respond to questions–newbie or advanced–tell me a great deal about the software itself (e.g. is there a pride and a passion underneath the bits and bytes). Ryan did not disappoint and even hung in there with a few follow-up replies. (Thanks, Ryan!) His timely and helpful replies cement my decision to join the WP family of users.

It turns out that I simply needed to turn on permalink support and define how I want my permalinks to behave.

Of course, I ran into a few gotchas, but Ryan pointed me in the right direction. I ended up having to create my own .htaccess file, copy and paste the permalink code from the WP admin console into this file and upload it to my site. Windows Explorer on Windows XP wouldn’t allow me to create a file with this name–complaining that my file must have a file name. So, I simpy created a new .txt file then used a Command Prompt window and the RENAME command to arrive at .htaccess.

Once the permalinks were working I ran into self-defeating index.htm files in my previous archives folder structure. So, to allow WP to process my permalinks effectively, I moved all my pre-WP content into my b4wp folder. Also, I still noticed a few odd “feed:” prefixes in my feed links so I modified the sidebar.php and footer.php theme pages to correct that.

Eventually I plan to create my own WP theme and post it for others to consider for their own use–give a bit back to the community. But I really appreciate how easy the transition to WP has been for me because it allows to return to the most important activity to me her: new posts and comments.

Installing this software really doesn’t take much more than five minutes. It’s fair to say that some of the time it took me to complete the installation was spent in disbelief that it couldn’t be as simple as I was being led to believe. It is!

I recently secured a new domain (i.e. craigrandall.net) and am working to establish a true blogging infrastructure upon it. (I’ve narrowed my choice down to Movable Type or WordPress. Every time I think that going with MT is a no-brainer, something pulls at me to look deeper into WP. So, I’m going to spend time during the rest of my current (much needed) vacation to better understand the reasons why each package was built, what goals each package is trying to solve, and where each package sees itself in the next 12-18 months (i.e. its strategy and roadmap).)

While I’ve certainly learned a lot through hand-crafting this site for more than a year now, it’s time for me to defer plumbing to someone else’s code and focus more on content creation. And because content is more important to me than plumbing, I will continue to post in traditional form here until all of my posts are being managed by a blogging engine.

Certainly, if you have thoughts on MT or WP, or another contender for that matter, please let me know. I’m all for learning from the experience of others.

As far as my MSN Space and my Wallop area go, I’m using these mostly as comparative laboratories and not as my primary content publication venues. All posts of any real consequence will be made here at craigrandall.net.

A few people commented to me that my previous color scheme was a bit hard to read; so, I hope that you find the new palette to be an improvement.

More importantly, I finally found the time to produce an RSS 2.0 feed for my blog. (It’s only been a year without one.)

OK, I realize that some of you (e.g. in my family) are thinking about saying bless you or gesundheit after reading an RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, but this means that I can simply state this fact to my family and friends and each person can decide for his or herself if it matters. If it does matter to you, having a feed means that you can now subscribe to my site using a feed reader. When I post something new, your reader will recognize this for you and deliver the new content straight to your eyeballs.

Need a reader? Here’s what I recommend that you do:

• Visit JetBrains web site and fill out a free Omea Reader license form (no later than 3/31/2005 if free is important to you) .
• Download the latest released version of Omea Reader installer to, for example, your local desktop.
• Install Omea Reader and enter the license key JetBrains sent your email address you specified on the form provides here.
• Launch Omea Reader and choose Tools | Subscribe to Feed… from its menu system.
• In the first field at the top, enter the following link after the provided http:// prefix: craigrandall.net/feed/ (i.e. the whole link should look like http://craigrandall.net/feed/).
• Click Next.
• Keep the default feed title I’ve set (a musing) or change it to whatever you prefer.
• Click Next and finish the subscription.
• Omea Reader should then grab the contents of my feed, which you can subsequently read.

I hope that you find my new feed valuable.

Update 3/21/2005: changed my feed link to reference my current WP-based feed rather than my hand-crafted feed at the time this post was originally published.

Update 12/22/2005: Omea Reader is free indefinitely. Simply use the key provided on its download page. You can also import my OPML file into Omea Reader (or any other OPML-aware feed reader) to get started (i.e. File | Import Feed Subscriptions…).

This week I saw the above abbreviation for positives and negatives used in a presentation; so I thought I’d make a blog entry title from it for recall’s sake.

Negatives:

• Indications are that a significant number of citizens won’t exercise their civic duty to vote. 11/2/2004 update: I’m thrilled to say that, although 30~40% of our citizenry is still a lot of people, voter turnout for this election was at a record high!
• Convenient software doesn’t necessarily mean that said software fully protects your privacy. That being said–and I’m not saying that any of the following programs are intentionally malicious–I want to deeply analyze privacy concerns regarding the desktop search engine space–as well as footprint, performance, reliability, etc.:
• Google Desktop (in beta currently) – eWeek’s Larry Seltzer may have saved me some analysis effort here; so may have Scott Hanselman here and also Phil Haack here
• Copernic Desktop Search – Phil Haack provides some perspective on this (vs. GD) here
• X1 Desktop Search – Jim Blizzard casts his vote for X1 here (Chris Sells agrees)
• (Forthcoming) MSN Personal Search (i.e. next major release of Microsoft’s acquired Lookout technology, which is supposed to address indexing performance among other things)
• Chad Dickerson asks a question that’s been on my mind recently: Is the continuing drive to deliver enterprise apps through the browser ultimately a path to trouble?
• Thanks to picking up a copy of the May 31, 2004 Wine Spectator while on vacation, I know more than I ever wanted to know about coffee: When grown, processed and brewed properly, coffee can be as complex as a first-growth Bordeaux. Coffee has 1500 flavor components–three times more than wine.
• Not enough time in a day to live, work and blog–so the blog has suffered

Positives:

• The California Secretary of State predicts 73% voter turnout; if you’re part of the remaining 27%, how about getting with the program and vote your conscience?
• Daniel Silva continues to deliver one good read after another – I appear to be going backward through his series of spy novels focused on the Gabriel Allon character (aka Sword). After reading A Death in Venice I read The Confessor and most recently finished The English Assassin. So, the first book in the four-book series (thus far), The Kill Artist, is next on my list. As I read Silva, my Latin continues to improve ; for example: ignorantia affectata (cultivated ignorance) – a willful lack of knowledge designed to protect one from harm, and uomo di fiducia (man of trust) – uomini di fiducia (men of trust)
• The FxCop team released version 1.312 of this valuable, free tool. In less than ten minutes including the time to update my FxCop installation from 1.30, I was able to re-run FxCop against a collection of C# projects and be told a number of ways to make them even more robust. Talk about productivity–this is great! As the knowledge base of expert Microsoft .NET Framework usage grows, so grows the power of FxCop. If you’re not using it today in your .NET development, you really should consider doing so.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

It’s true that OPML makes your feed subscription list portable–similar to taking your cell phone with you to another provider. However, anyone using a feed reader knows that there is much more valuable metadata that doesn’t readily move from one reader to another (e.g. annotations, flags, etc.). The fact that I had a significant number of flagged posts for subsequent action (e.g. review in more detail, blog about, etc.) in RSS Bandit was holding me back from leaving the feed reader and using Omea Reader exclusively to read feeds. That is, until RSS Bandit (build 1.2.0.117) decided to drop most of my flagged items. Although more than a bit frustrating–I have to recreate my flagged list!–perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. Unfortunately it wasn’t the first time RSS Bandit lost metadata, but it will be the last time…for awhile anyway, until Wolverine is released and I give it a spin.

The following features in Omea Reader (current build 325) have won me over:

• My previous list, plus:
• One-click flagging of items, although I would appreciate support for multiple flags (e.g. different colors like Outlook 2003 and/or different label like RSS Bandit – Follow Up, Review, Reply, Read, Forward, Complete, Clear)
• One-click annotation of items
• Column configuration support
• Category assignment support
• “Views and Categories” view side-by-side with “Feeds” view

So, I’m giving up the following features found in RSS Bandit as I move over to Omea Reader.

• Tabbed browsing experience that doesn’t obscure feed details (Tools | Options… | Web Browser tab) – HIGH
• Ability to define default maximum item age (e.g. a day, a week, a month, a quarter, a year, unlimited, etc.) – MEDIUM/HIGH
• Ability to change font face, size, color, etc., which is useful on a higher resolution screen – MEDIUM
• Remote, shared storage support (i.e. ability to support UNC, FTP, WebDAV site across client instances (e.g. home reader and work reader)) – MEDIUM
• Extensible search support (i.e. allow plug-ins for Google, Feedster, etc.) (Tools | Options… | Web Search tab) – MEDIUM
• Ability to apply a custom stylesheet (XSLT) to the reading pane (Tools | Options… | Feed Items tab) – LOW

The Open links in a new browser window option that Omea Reader provides is almost worse than no option since it literally launches the default browser for the selected link, which means the loss of context in Omea Reader. Just support tabbed browsing within Omea Reader!! This feature is important enough that I’m not completely sold on ditching RSS Bandit; it’s a significant productivity loss.

Update (10/4/2004): Omea Reader 1.0 (build 333) is released. Get your free license today.

I’ve been involved in the Omea beta for awhile and was interested to see JetBrain’s announcement concerning a new product, Omea Reader: Omea Reader is a light version of Omea, which includes the news, RSS and Web bookmark functionality. It does not include support for email (Outlook integration), files and tasks. Omea Reader also includes the full range of search and information management functionality of Omea. As a limited time offer valid until January 1, 2005, you can get a permanent license key for Omea Reader for free, just by filling a simple registration form. After that time, Reader may remain free, or may become a commercial product (with a much smaller price than the full version of Omea).

JetBrains is the maker of the popular and powerful Java IDE, IntelliJ; so I know them to be a maker of quality, feature-rich software. (I’ve also talked about their C# refactoring add-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003, ReSharper, here in the past.)

Originally called OmniaMea, Omea Reader software went feature complete on 5/8/2004, and is now received bug fixes, performance enhancements and UI polish) and was interested to see JetBrain’s announcement concerning a new product, Omea Reader (heritage).

Before I start in on the coolness of Omea Reader, I do still plan to keep tabs on RSS Bandit’s continued development (e.g. Wolverine) even if Omea Reader becomes my feed reader of choice. Dare, Torsten and now Phil are all developers I’ve come to respect, especially Dare. RSS Bandit remains open source with a commercial quality mindset that should serve it extremely well. There is more to a great application than just great UI. RSS Bandit’s footprint on disk and in memory over the long haul is impressive, not by accident but through concerted and sustained effort. In summary, RSS Bandit’s incumbency within my toolbox is easily justified.

Having said that, my “second-first” impression of Omea Reader is extremely positive. (My “first-first” impression was build 315, which crashed on me shortly after I imported my OPML and tried a random user action. The current (beta) build (317) hasn’t failed me, yet.) It’s the little things, too, mostly user experience and UI related that are the most intriguing and smoothing (i.e. compared to minor nits I’ve been tolerating in RSS Bandit):

• Remembers the state of my feed tree (e.g. what nodes I’ve expanded)
• Always present on the Taskbar by default
• More responsive UI overall
• Combination of RSS/Atom-based content with newsgroup, contact and favorite/bookmark content under a single, reasonably intuitive UI

Next I need to really explore the full functionality of this application then go back to contrast it with RSS Bandit. What’s the same, what is different, what is missing, etc.?? Then I want to compare overall footprint of the software, the data it consumes and supplies, the memory/resource consumption profile, etc. Stay tuned…