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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, November 04, 2002I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to Movable Type. I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.
My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.
For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.
Saturday, October 05, 2002Make Your Existing Perl Apps .NET-compliant: Learn how CPAN Perl modules can be made automatically available to the .NET framework. The technique involves providing small PerlNET mediators between Perl and .NET and knowing when, where, and how to modify. [Sam Gentile: Sams .NET Stuff]
Monday, September 30, 2002
Sunday, September 29, 2002Also, local Pol bit by shark
Thursday, September 26, 2002It's not a denial of service attack; you've been slashdotted! Someone mentioned your low traffic web site on the evening news and suddenly your servers are overwhelmed.
Most ISP contracts cap your traffic, just turn off the faucet after the first n megabytes downloaded.
If I was Cmdr Taco or Hemos or anyone at VA, I would introduce "SlashSurance: Insurance Against the Slashdot Effect". This would be something like this:
- $10 annually for a single notification email sent no more than 1 hour before reference to your url is posted. And, if we detect that you promote this before it goes up on Slashdot then we reserve the right to pull the story (or any future coverage of you).
- $25 annually for a days worth of automatic mirroring to a server of our own
- REQUIRED: Absolutely 0 conflict of interest with the editorial process. Ideally no one on the editorial side should even know who signed up.
- Low key marketing effort
I'm not sure about anyone else but I would have no objection to paying $25 or $10 just for the piece of mind that this would bring me.
While /. might offer this service, it is too little too late for most people.
That's why your ISP should offer this; it is the point of pain.
-
Traffic badge goes on your page ("My HugeHosting DOS Insurance Is Paid Up!")
-
Traffic spikes trigger your ISP to make a mirror of your site and deploy traffic distribution
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The mirror includes text ads; generating revenue without undue bandwidth costs
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Mirrors die off as traffic does
-
Helps ISPs upsell service to you if the new traffic is a trend instead of a spike
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ISPs spread the risk of being slashdotted among their customers. 1-3 orders of magnitude jumps in traffic.
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ISPs spread the most serious of risks (the President mentions your site in a TV speech; your nude pictures surface) among multiple ISPs through a Reinsurance (insuring insurers) program. 5+ order of magnitude jumps.
I think there is real money in this, a dollar a month from every hopeful small business site or weblogger.
Like lotto, it is a tasty bet on your dream of a long shot upside.
[a klog apart] Lists of CMS vendors. I've been collecting lists of CMS vendors for a while, and two new webpages were quietly published on our site... [Column Two] Ideas Are To Talent As Execution Is To Practice.. Poorly grounded, ill-conceived, unlikely, improbable ideas may well be easy to spew. [blog cognosco v 0.1] Avoiding the same mistakes. On the KM-Framework list, Jackie Green asked the following excellent questions in response to the release of my Sixteen steps... [Column Two] Rewarding and recognizing knowledge sharing. This is an interesting article on [Rewards and Recognition in Knowledge Management] from the AQPC. In it the APQC President Carla O'Dell is quoted as saying :"What has been interesting in the 30 years of research is that as you increase extrinsic motivation, you can drive out intrinsic reward. For example, if you give people $20 every time they come to a community of practice event and then stop giving them that, they are going to be upset. Be cautious about attaching extrinsic rewards to behavior you want to persist over time."
Speaking personally I am very much against extrinsic motivation to reward or encourage knowledge sharing. Its like saying 'this is not really part of your job' or worse 'this is a distasteful part of your job' and so we are we going to reward you separately to do it.
This is totally the wrong message to be giving and can only undermine knowledge sharing in the long term. Knowledge sharing is a fundamental and integral part of every knowledge workers job - not so different to breathing! Why the hell should you single out the key essence of a knowledge workers job - to mind what they are really getting paid for and reward them separately for it. It is just plain crazy.
Disincentives need to be removed and knowledge sharing needs evangelizing and supporting. Recognition is also important. But to my mind the prime way forward is to encourage people to talk openly with each other and to think about knowledge sharing for themselves. You may also need to facilitate such conversations.
This is in the hope (yes hope - you cannot mandate it) that they will come to understand that knowledge sharing is actually not only in the organizations interest but also their own.
If intelligent people who are intrinsically motivated to do a good job of work cannot see the value of knowledge sharing then maybe there is really no value in it for them or the organization but I very much doubt that!
Later in the day Sunday: Serendipity! Even [more] on this subject in an item on 'Knowledge sharing and leadership' in Jim McGee's blog. I love the [article] by Alfie Cohn - if you have any lingering doubts about the stupidity of rewarding knowledge sharing then read this article!
Also a number of other good links here on the subject e.g. the work of Hazel Hall. I have an article on Knowledge Sharing that is taking a long time in gestation but I must remember to come back here when I find time again to work on it!
Krz insists that you must:
Blog your resume. This is how a typical resume looks like. My opinion is that it's impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. So a guy says he knows PHP. Does it mean that he's a PHP guru who has written 100k lines of PHP code or that he's just finished "Learn PHP in 15 minutes"? No way to tell. My idea: blog your resume. In addition to a standard resume keep a log of all the stuff you're learning and doing. E.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would to your log a dated entry:
Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module...etc. Maintain focus and balance. We assume that this information will be read at some point in the future by someone who'll want to hire you. Don't put irrelevant information like what you've eaten for breakfast (maintain focus). Also don't post trivia like wrote 5 lines of Perl code to display "Hello world" (maintain balance). It's a win-win situation. Potential employer has a much better chance to assess your skills and experience. You'll have a better chance to showcase your skills and you'll have an edge over resumes that only say "Programming skills: C/C++, PHP". Of course you should start now, the day you're out of work is probably a few years late. Blogs are a good way to maintain this "extended resume". You might use categories (a feature of many blogging systems, e.g. Radio) to integrate this into your blogging flow.
Darned tootin'.
This gets the raw data in.
But it leaves you with editorial work.
The people who read résumés suffer from information overload. And it's getting worse.
Recording your daily/weekly accomplishments is incredibly useful. It helps communicate with your colleagues, customers, and supervisors. If you jot just two or three notes every day, in a year you've created a descriptive collage from hundreds of data points.
Your detailed trail of accomplishments is helpful to HR or a hiring manager only so far as you organize, categorize, connect, and summarize it.
For example, 15 different posts about your Perl scripting among 300 other posts are hidden and diffuse. You can keep the reader from drowning in detail with a one or two line summary, and a link to those 15 experiences (collected and organized and cleaned up).
Tech fix? Maybe livetopics plus Radio categories can help organize this material
Practical fix? Discipline. Review your posts monthly. Summarize and add to your CV.
[aka strategy]
[a klog apart] Radio Wishlist - Audio options..I'd like to see accomodations for audioblogging. A few requests:
On collecting audio attachments.
- Tune my maximum receiving size. Let me set the maximum file size for downloading by channel or time of day. I'm on a
- Harvest during quiet times. Let me prioritize audio attachments lower than other Radio harvesting behavior, so upstreaming and other downloads come first.
- Support download resumption.
- Support alternate formats. mp3, au, ra, wav, QuickTime, etc.
- Support playlists by downloading the list then downloading the mentioned files.
On presenting and playing attachments.
- Show file sizes and play times.
- If a syndicated attachment is over my set limit, let me override and queue it for download.
- Let me play a post's playlist.
- Create a queue of audio posts, so I can listen to all my audio posts at the same time. Perhaps by generating a playlist file and launching it.
- Create a flag that shows if I've listened to an audio post. I can then delete or save flagged posts.
- Let me specify a maximum folder size for all the syndicated audio enclosures.
On composing audio posts.
- When I post, check if the file size or file types are not permitted by Radio. If so, tell me before I post. Without this verification, the post's text may point to a missing attachment.
- Convert sound attachments to file formats and resolution consistent with my preferences and other restrictions (like maximum file size).
- If the file format permits, copy post metadata (title, date, url, author, description) into the sound file itself.
Now where's that microphone...
[a klog apart] Share More, Get More. Knowledge isn't like money, when you give it away you don't have less. [Blunt Force Trauma] On "the fear that someone else will pick up your ideas and work them out before you do. ". One of the objections I often hear to sharing knowledge is the "fear that someone else will pick up on your ideas and work them out before you do. "I have always had a problem with this viewpoint since the emergence of the web because the one thing you can almost guarantee is that someone out there in the world, if not dozens or hundreds of others will have had a similar idea and be working on it.
They may also be brighter than you and more advanced in their thinking than you and have more time to develop the idea. So why not seek them out and collaborate them!
But like all good ideas - even this one is not unique - I have just discovered Phil Wainewright in his Loosely Coupled weblog advocating exactly the same mindset and putting it in a far better way than I might [/SMILE-EMOTICON/$File/smiley.gif?OpenElement)
].
Read the full postig and think about it. We all have ideas that would be better shared than hoarded!
I think this highlights one important aspect of a highly networked world that we are all going to have to get used to. There are very few genuinely original ideas in the world. Someone, somewhere has inevitably already come up with the same idea. By pooling your thoughts with theirs, both of you will likely progress them further than you could have done individually (or maybe someone else watching the exchange will have a new insight that takes the idea further than the pair of you). The more open the network, the more everyone can feed off each other's ideas. The less open it is, the more slowly everyone progresses.So which is better? I think the answer is that, in an extensive open network, the one thing you can be sure of is that someone else already has the same idea as you. If you deny that fact, you relegate yourself to coming in behind them. If you accept it and embrace the network, you have a chance of participating in their success. (I have a feeling this has been said better by someone at Microsoft, but I can't recall the reference just now. Perhaps someone reading this will be able to refresh my memory).
Side note: I recently developed some RSS code for Lotus Notes and I'm not aware of any similar code available on the web. Now I could try to hold on to it or sell it but its not core to what I'm about and I do not have the time or inclination at present to do anything more with it. So I've made it available on my site for free download.
In the past few months over 50 people from around the world have downloaded it. Most have left their e-mail addresses and most have subscribed to my knowledge-letter. When I come back to further develop the RSS capability on my site - I will have built up a small network of people whom I can contact and share ideas with. Hopefully getting more out of it than I have put in. But I don't really care - if I had not published the code - it would have rotted on my hard-disk - publishing it means that people get to benefit from it and move the technology forward. In the long run everyone benefits. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
Fixing the Microsoft intranet?. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have written an article on fixing the Microsoft intranet. This is a huge system, with... [Column Two] Collaborative working using an intranet. Many of the dot.com magazines have perished, but Fast Company seems to keep going, though I admit I look at it on the web, rather than pay for a subscription or an individual issue. I was catching up with recent issues this evening, and came across an article in the... [Intranet Focus Blog] Data protection issues. Intranets tend to contain a great deal of personal information, and indeed for many companies the main benefit of having an intranet is to be able to identify employees with specific skills and experience. In Europe there are very strict controls over the way that personal data is handled. This... [Intranet Focus Blog] Convera becomes more visible. I have to admit that over the last couple of years I had largely ignored Convera as an enterprise search engine. The company (formerly Excalibur until its acquistion by Intel last year) seemed to me to be mainly interested in its image retrieval functionality. Recently I visited Convera's UK offices... [Intranet Focus Blog] Search engines for intranets. My Moreover feed picked up an article in Microbanker based on a presentation by Dennis Deacon, Bank One intranet manager, at the International Quality Productivity Center's intranet content management conference in late April in Chicago. The article is headed Good Search Engines Make Good Intranets and the author states that... [Intranet Focus Blog] Atomz CMS selection guide. Reading the July 2002 issue of EContent today I spotted an advertisment by Atmoz, the internet search engine company, for a Content Management Buyer's Kit (CMBK) that the company has developed. I've just been exploring it, and I have to say that quite a bit of thought has gone into... [Intranet Focus Blog] Mobile intranet access forecast. Sorting through some back issues of the FT Telecoms supplements I noticed a chart showing the potential value of the mobile intranet marketplace. I tracked down the report to the website of Telecompetition Inc. As a web site it leaves something to be desired, but there are some interesting downloadable... [Intranet Focus Blog] Small scale KM. David Weinberger presents a range of KM ideas that can be done on a shoestring budget. These include: Using e-mail... [Column Two] Relative Links Script. More UserTalk script tools for generating relative links. [Blunt Force Trauma] Whither blogs?.Where are weblogs going? How will they adapt to the workplace?
1. Blogging platforms are quickly growing smarter.
Blogs are document centric (the post is at the core) so they can evolve toward what you think of as project / process / knowledge management tools. XML, SOAP, databases, and content management services are part of the blogging toolkit. Content syndication and RSS news readers are part of it too.
2. Blogspace is joining the infrastructure.
We can build bridges to existing systems and processes. I can blog a hiring process, integrated with an human capital system. I can annotate a mySAP Engineering Change Order, linking to the transaction and to other materials. I can comment on project progress, tailoring it for different stakeholders. Some of these may happen by year end. http://www.hrxml.org/, http://www.pmxml.org/xml
3. Community tools are improving too.
Social capital is getting easier to observe and measure in blogspace; no reason it shouldn't happen in your enterprise's blogspace. Every week we see new tools that help users identify what's new, what's relevant, who's the expert. We see people forming communities of interest/practice, project teams, spreading memes and tools; evidence that people are reading as much or more than they're writing.
4. Knowledge extraction is coming.
Weblogs leave a trail that can be mined by social network analyzers, text miners, taxonomy and categorizers, and search engines. All of this is work that today's KM systems ask the poster to do at the time of the post. Blogs lower the effort hurdle; they're easier, so they get used. And their trail of time-stamped posts, citations and cross references, traffic logs, and syndication feeds (in XML) mean that other tools can be added when you get to it.
5. Blogs compete with MS Word and email as a writing tool.
The five minute post is no substitute for the five day essay and knowledge interview. But blogs encourage lots of the former and don't prevent the latter.
6. Blogs of other content.
Audio blogs. One-two minute posts. Aggregated, they make a newsradio channel. I heard a prototype this spring where one blogger aggregated the syndicated audio posts of other bloggers.
Video blogs. Documenting processes, quality programs, customer presentations, class projects, slices of life.
CAD blogs. Syndicating components for peer review and comment.
XML envelope blogs. Drag and drop an event, syndicated from someone's blog, to your Microsoft Outlook or Project. Drag an RFP from a blog to your CRM system.
7. Secure blogs.
Create private spaces, a la Groove, but using your weblog tool. Authenticate some users, be public with others. I do this to a limited degree now, with private categories shared with engineering partners.
8. Mobile blogging.
I've seen people posting from AOL IM, phones, pagers, Palms, RIMs, and 80211'd notebooks. When you have an experience worth sharing, a snapshot of that Kodak moment, you want to blog it then and there. Watch blogging capabilities migrate to the tools you carry.
One last prediction.
In the tradition of Coke machines with web sites, I expect my 2006 Camry to come with a blog.
[aka klogs]
[a klog apart] A knowledge management site and vendor directory.. Not updated since April, but a pretty long list. the CBEL >> Reference >> Knowledge Management page is chock full of goodness. Thanks to University of Maryland alum Rohini Batra for the link. [a klog apart] Gwen Harlow, graphic artist..I went to a blog meetup last night. Met Gwen Harlow, an accomplished web and print graphic artist, blogger, and code maven. Why am I not gonna point to her blogs? Gwen wants to keep her personal life apart from her professional contacts.
As a freelance artist, Gwen is always looking for work. 
Her portfolio site shows a great track record designing web sites, print, web banners, and logos. Gwen's résumé is first thing on her main navbar. I don't know Gwen's mother and didn't ask, but would Gwen want her family to know about her risque print ads for a lingerie store?
I picked the most exotic thing from her portfolio, out of context. Her whole collection shows a wide variety of clients, treatments, and media. Her portfolio design makes it easy to see the context.
Weblogs are bad at this. When was the last time you read six months's of anyone's postings? This depends on why you're at the weblog and how it helps you.
- If you're there to hire someone, you look at a few recent posts (2-5 screenfuls), for interesting or relevant categories, a résumé/portfolio, and the overall site structure. From this you hope to get an impression of how this person fits your team, project, org.
- If you're a clergyman checking in on members of your parish, you're listening for the blogger's tone, for what is on their mind, for how you might help them and how they might help the parish.
- If you're a family member, you're non-invasively checking in on your loved ones.
Weblogs can be confessional, a daily diary, an unfettered spew of consciousness. Lives and blogs are freely filled with sex, drugs, politics, food, religion, race, health, rumor, kvetching: everything you're told to leave out of the office (in professional America, anyway). When they are, it messes with the whole idea of communicating on purpose.
That means ignoring your varied audiences and stakeholder when you choose:
- a writing style,
- make editorial and information architecture,
- choose a look and feel, and
- self-censor.
Whether you do it formally or not, you craft personas for your family, children, church, romantic connections, the strangers of blogspace, connections outside your firm, subordinates, peers, and superiors within the firm. Very few posts are appropriate for all audiences. How do you keep them straight without going nuts?
I've met bloggers who post pseudonymously to keep their worlds apart.
You have several choices:
1. Shut up.
Self-censorship. Don't say what might come back to harm you.
Rory Perry on Candor and Blogging:
Howard Bashman disagrees with Hugh Hewitt's statement that "candor is the first requirement of successful blogging." I'm stuck in the middle on this. As a consitutional officer and appointed Clerk of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, my ability to opine on legal issues is more restricted than, say, Howard's, or Ernie's or Denise's. Obviously, it may be problematic for me, in my role as a public servant, to use blogspace to engage in a "web duel [that] makes light sabers look tame," as Hugh Hewitt puts it.
So candor, for a public information blogger, is of a different stripe than a private blogger. Before I launched this blog in March of this year, I decided that candor in the public context relates to the free and public delivery of legal information, because law is free. So I have refrained from weighing in on issues like the election of judges, choosing instead to report facts and perspectives related to law, technology and the courts, all of which falls within the scope of my public duties. Might not help my traffic, but you won't read any savage commentary here.
This is a delicate balance at times, and perhaps exlains the dearth of bloggers in the public judicial sphere.
According to Andrew Bayer, lawyers aren't the only ones with these problems.
The second thing that jumped out at me was a section at the end, talking about a high schooler who had started a blog, got his 25 or so readers, and was happy - until his mother found his blog, and read about the illicit activities (drinking, drugs, partying) that he documented in his blog. Said high schooler is now worried that he's going to have to self-censor in his blog.
This is something that causes problems for me, too ... not so much in terms of personal dirt that could come back at me (while there are a few things I've done in my life that I don't want certain people to be able to find about, I have absolutely no desire to share those things with, well, anybody, so I'm safe. heh) but more in terms of bitching about work. I work for a Major Tech Corporation, as you can tell from a mention here or there in the blog, and by the email address whenever I post a comment. (I really need to start using alternate email addresses rather than my work one - someday I *am* going to leave and getting all my mail forwarded around will be hell. anyway...) I've got some problems with the way this corporation operates - not in an Enron/WorldCom sense, but I don't like our CEO very much and I don't like how upper management treats us employees. I'd like to blog about it - it's something that's really bothering me that I need to get off my chest, and it's information that I think should be out in the public eye, though not so critical that mainstream media would care.
I don't blog about it because I'm afraid of it ending up getting me in trouble ... there've been a few bloggers who've lost their jobs because of blogging ... I have no desire to be one. Blogging, unlike much of the rest of the Internet, isn't about anonymity, and that can make things more complicated.
2. Narrowcast.
Try to avoid leakage between your worlds. Create channels of content in separate web spaces. Each space makes it convenient for a reader to stay with the kind of content you intend for them. Channeling microcontent means your barbershop chorus friends don't find your political rants one click away from your writeup of the last SPEBSQSA convention. You make it harder for folks in one world to wander into your other worlds.
3. Wear masks.
Assume a name, a style, and a persona for each of your publics. Pseudonymity on top of narrowcasting. This may work for some things but not for all. Curious or dedicated prying eyes often see through these.
4. Live with it.
If you have little or nothing to lose, you can say:
- "If they can't take a joke, they can leave."
- "If they object to my posts, they can always fire me."
- "If they fired me, I shouldn't have been working there anyway."
- "I don't care if my insurance company knows I have disease X"
- "I want my friends and colleagues to know all about me, good or bad."
This is the simplest, easiest, riskiest approach.
We want more options. Secure, controlled access may give us a few more or strengthen one or two these. But blogging in public is a public act. It takes new awareness and skills to raise these blurry fences.
Thanks, Gwen, for reminding me.
[aka Bloggers for Hire]
[a klog apart] Roland's Natural Klog Progression..I spoke of four klogging roles last week: catalyst, coach, armorer, practice leader. Matt Mower advocates the the role of "Intranet Editor:"
Much as the users of a Wiki should occasionally re-factor pages that are becoming "busy" I think that a good intranet editor should be grooming the klogs in their organization and drawing together useful strangs to form part (or all) of the static intranet.
Roland Tanglao builds on this:
I think a natural progression for knowledge is:
- blog breaking news
- harvest it periodically (say weekly) into an FAQ and/or other knowledge base type of documents
- Put the link into a a directory that supports transclusion like Manila style directories.
K-Log => (FAQ or other knowlegebase article) => directory.
K-Logs need to be periodically (at least once a month) harvested for content that should go into an FAQ or other knowledgebase document and links that that should go into a directory. This is the job of a K-Log editor :-)! I have been trying to do this with VanEats but after a klog gets to a certain size, it really needs to have some time set aside for it.
Practice Leader is probably the closest to a dedicated multi-author editor. Summarizing work in a field, showing the aggregate progress and useful threads. Structuring knowledge into FAQs or other KM systems may be a natural progression, especially as klogging tools and KM tools build bridges.
Entropy, bad.
Fighting entropy, expensive, slow.
Self-review is a powerful tool for learning. Going over my own posts for the past week, month, and quarter has shown patterns I missed, ideas I was skirting but never wrote outright. It reinforced brief social connections, blogs to which I linked to and people with whom I briefly corresponded. It takes concentrated time and effort. It helps me to print out all the pages on my blog for that period; something about shuffling through paper.
Folks are trying hard to automate this work. Summarizers. Cluster analysis. Text to Structure converters. Taxonomy systems.
But the expert author of the original content is often the best judge of relevance.
[a klog apart] Just before the blogging inflection point....MSNBC via Scripting News via Roland Tanglao:
490, 000 blogs and a new blog every 40 seconds! Wow!
But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see.
Two thousand new blogs every day is a a grave responsibility and public trust. We are at a tricky stage in a product category's life cycle. The average user's skill level falls as the accellerating newbie influx makes the population grow younger. Now is the:
- Time for blog usability.
- Time for localization.
- Time to work out every big and noticeable bug.
- Time for measurement and watching the unintended ways people use your tools.
- Time to wrap dangerous code in GUI so tinkering is only on purpose and out of accidental reach.
This is for all the vendors in this space. The folks who make Radio, Blogger, and the other great tools. And the bold tweakers who make those products better. We have the juice, let's put it in a clean glass with a little parasol.
[aka Blue Sky Radio]
[a klog apart] Do Something Productive, Or Have A Meeting About It. I've long held that you can either be productive or have a meeting, but you can't do both. [Blunt Force Trauma] Radio Wishlist - Date / Time Formatting Options..Bryce thinks globally, posts locally:
Radio's date / time macros need to be configurable. For starters, the timestamps in my posts should be configurable to include the timezone and GMT offset. The Internet audience is global, it's natural to expect that many of my readers will be in another timezone and not be aware of which timezone my content was created in.
There are people who want 24-hour times, as discussed here and here.
Months ago, Ingo Rammer pointed out the issues of using Radio to publish an English-language web site from a German version of Windows.
Ideally, Radio would default to using the regional settings as specified by the OS. I don't mean "It's German windows, we'll use German day names." Windows has a "Regional and Language options" control panel that lets the user specify any language and use any format, and there are APIs to handle the dirty work (presumably Mac OS has something similar). Radio should respect those exact settings, and provide an easy way to override them.
TZ offsets are an acknowledgement of the global nature of the Internet. Most Internet RFCs require either offsets or that GMT be used whenever time data is exchanged.
Blogs are chronological, so let's get time presentation right.
Follow up:
I'd also like to see better support for calendaring.
-
Radio is unfriendly to non-Julian calendars. Almost hostile to Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish calendars. They are used by a quarter of the world's population. Blogging will difuse into non-Eurogenetic cultures; Radio will lead only if it covers localization basics.
-
Refactor the Radio calendar navigation design. Start with a blank white board and brainstorm representations of the blog flow.
-
How can we zoom more than previous/next month? It's August and I want to go back 12 months, I have go through 11 wasted months.
-
Allow navigation over an empty month.
-
Correct the calendar navigation when archive files changed.
-
Eliminate the screen waste of days where nothing is posted.
-
How can we show some days more attractive than others? (More visits? More in-links? More content, more words?)
-
Option to archive by post instead of by day.
-
Support the vCal/iCal and related specs.
-
Allow the simple entry and presentation of events.
-
Enable syndication and aggregation of events, perhaps wrapped in RSS.
-
Support importing many events by watching a folder or on command. Great to import events from Microsoft Project or Outlook, each into their own post.
-
Have a separate set of attributes for event start and end dates/times associated with a post.
-
Allow for sorting of a category by event date, not post date. This should be a category rendering preference. Bonus points: category home page can be set to show only future events. So updates flow across my home page as I write them but the "Coming Events" category orders them by event date.
-
Make sure this works with the MultiAuthor weblog. Collective calendaring.
-
Support drag and drop of vCal objects to and from a post.
-
Tool to maintain ComingEvents.opml.
[aka Blue Sky Radio]
[a klog apart] Usability for documentation. Vesa Purho has written an article on usability heuristics for documentation to complement the many lists of heuristics for web... [Column Two] Academic klogging as a factor in hiring..Graham Leuschke wonders how to make his blogging count in his coming job search. I know Leuscke from his blogging but never knew he was a mathematician (although that makes perfect sense). He has a curriculum vitae (CV), a commutative algebra site, and his weblog.
How do I, or more importantly, a hiring/promotion committee, determine its scholarly value? And how do I best explain that value to people who may not previously have considered its existence?
He cites Steven D. Krause's Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites:
"Given the high value that most institutions put on scholarship that appears in refereed journals or in books produced by well-respected presses, how are innovative, intellectually valuable, well-researched, self-published Web sites to be counted in the processes of promotion, merit, tenure, review, and recognition?"
Weblogs are just coming on the radar. Ask around, you'll hear them treated as "alternate media" projects, like demo reels, home brew projects, performance art.
One factor in candidate evaluation: comparability of materials. I can compare Mary's CV with Bob's CV, compare essays, dissertations, theses, interviews, transcripts, references. How do you compare weblogs? Or include one person's weblog when the other person doesn't have one?
The nature of blogging makes comparison and assessment harder. It isn't organized. At least not in a way that helps. How does your blog help someone quickly answer:
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What does this person know? How much? How well?
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How has this person been growing professionally?
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What can this person do? Do for me?
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Who does this person connect with in the profession?
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How well does this person communicate in writiing? Good enough to get published in peer review journals? In respected industry rags?
In usability terms, this is a different persona than the one usually consuming your blog. This persona's purpose is crisp (answer the above questions), noise sensitive (don't waste my time, answer the question).
Navigation and abstraction are vital. Do you expect the evaluator to wade through your 3000 posts to find the 10 most relevant? If you don't already, please:
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categorize your posts
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use titles
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create a master index of posts
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start using a spell checker if you need it
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write short abstracts linking to your many posts on key topics.
People enter your home page, then read your last dozen posts or so; ten minutes' worth. Good luck if you've been posting drivel, personal, or controversial stuff (like that never happens!)
Back to Graham's CV.
It is one web page, organized, easy to scan, read and print, lots of white space.
You'd know better than I: would potential employers or colleagues want to read your "Finite Cohen-Macaulay Type" dissertation or your undergraduate thesis on "Profinite Groups and Galois Cohomology"? No links there. Not listed with your research papers.
Math always poses a problem with the web. MathML isn't ubiquitous so most professional mathematics publications wind up in Acrobat, PostScript, and dvi. Makes it harder to read on the web and difficult for Google and other search engines to find.
I like Graham's description of his research, list of people who do things like I do and the Mathematics Genealogy Project. But they are not near his CV.
Do you have an objective for your next gig? Even if not on the CV itself, it is handy to have it written up in your cluster of career pages.
Nothing on the leuschke home page, log home page or About G that (a) clearly indicates your availability and (b) points where to find out more about you.
Let Graham know if you have more suggestions, especially if you work in academia.
[aka Bloggers for Hire]
[a klog apart] Klogging Roles.. I forsee several klogging roles.- Catalyst. Alpha blogger. Someone who klogs well, leads by example, provokes and inspires others to join a klogging community. If you've used Blogtree, naming your inspirations, you know what I mean.
- Coach. The person who helps newbies, builds internal FAQs, nurtures laggards, acknowledges great posts. Soft skills, communication and social skills, are not evenly distributed. The coach helps everyone join and get better. Chief metablogger.
- Armorer. Works with IT to develop configs, scripts, integration with enterprise apps and messaging services. Power macros. Engaging templates. Technologist and architect.
- Practice leader. Informal leaders of subcultures in larger organizations. The one in legal who drives the whole department to start klogging. The rep in the Cincinatti sales office who gets her colleagues to start customer-specific blogs. Watch for lists of like-minded colleagues. They may also connect to like-minded communities at suppliers, customers, and the wild blogosphere.
Mix and match.
Recruit for excellence in one or more.
Hire ringers if your community is large enough.
One other point: I beleive (without hard numbers) that blogging and klogging can improve your personal marketability. I'm exploring this at Bloggers for Hire. Suggestions welcome.
[aka klogs]
[a klog apart] What is the future of the staffing business?.Duane Roberts asked
"Which way is the staffing market going? What does your crystal ball foresee?
There are two parts to this: cyclical recovery and structural shift.
You're catching the cyclical recovery.
The pain hit in the Bay Area first and hardest. Assuming nothing else changes, expect recovery to come here first and stronger. The queue of IT work comes from pent-up pressure on internal project queues, new business starts.
Then there's structural change:
Has anything fundamental changed over the last 12-24 months in terms of how hiring/buying decisions are made? What kinds of talent to fill first? What to outsource vs. fill in-house? Are there effective substitutes for local talent? Let me fumble with these a little bit.
Consumer behavior:
DICE.com, which had 500 thousand contractor listings in its hey-dey is down to 31 thousand. In the last two years, Monster and HotJobs/Yahoo have become more contractor-friendly while thousands of niche job boards popped up, dominating the left-handed BeOS sysadmin labor pool. TMP Monster knows the recovery is at hand, and they want contract ad dollars as much as perm dollars. One of their strategies is going direct to the cost-conscious hiring manager, substituting their putatively cheap advertising for a staffing firm's services.
Are the same people doing the hiring?
I don't know: you'll know before I will. My sense is that HR and procurement are trying to get their people out of the hiring conversation, pushing the work of selection to line managers.
Who's first to be hired?
That's hard. What serious work has been put off for too long? Plumbing and infrastructure (Security? Sysadmins? Telecom? Desktop OS upgrades?). How about those customer requests that wound up in the IT in basket, and that can hurt or help pending sales? I'm betting on ordinary priorities.
Perm vs. temp vs. outsource?
Budgets are iffy. You know the drill: until you are confident in your headcount, you fill IT projects with contractors or outsource the work. Look for foreign outsourcing when cost tops urgency or novelty.
Substitutes?
What tools or methods improve productivity so much, you don't need as many people to do the job? Not many jumped out in the last two years. Many web projects that were 2-3 person years a few years' ago are now turn-key. You can get a content management system for a thousand bucks from UserLand; it competes against systems costing 50-100 times as much including staff, and have it up and running in one day. How about a smart portal for your intranet or for each of your customers? Fast, cheap, and good from iCommunity.com. Complex apps like these are becoming commodities as they mature.
You can develop sales strategies for non-cyclical trends too.
The retirement of the baby boom (over the next ten years) can lead to contracting retirees back to their employers and new knowledge management efforts. California's budget shortfall (the next three years) will result in some stupid headcount cuts without removing the work; see some of this outsourced. The resurgence of defense and intelligence spending (the next ten years) will bid up demand for IT and other engineering supporting those efforts.
How will staffing firms respond to the upswing?
One wild guess.
Headhunters and staffing companies will behave more like talent agents.
- Drivers:
- Bigger share of business from high payrate workers
- Cost of recruiting high payrate workers driven down if you can place them more than once
- Notes:
- At the biggest and best staffing companies, a temp works for 10 weeks, about 1 percent of their career. Wouldn't it be nice if you could represent them for 10 percent? Other strategies try to boost the average bill rate, cut operational costs, or reach new markets. This strategy says: serve the worker better and create returns on relationship.
How have job seekers changed? The burnt and shellshocked are still tender. Watch them pick security over ambition in their next job. It will be different for others...
Many workers will reclaim power they thought lost in the 2001-2003 recession.
Watch who reads "Get a Raise in 7 Days" instead of "The Perfect Interview." We don't have one labor market, we have thousands. Some have structural shortages. We are short of nurses, policemen, soldiers, molecular engineers, and others in industries where long term demand is growing while (maybe because) baby boomers are retiring. These folks will assert power in the hiring relationship, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups.
I am so completely and totally full of it, your vicious critique is both welcome and anticipated. 
[aka staffing]
[a klog apart] Smarter content management. Victor Lombardi discussing taking web publishing to the next level, and creating a smarter content management system. This is built... [Column Two] More on URLRun. Not only did Chris Sells send me a thank you for posting about UrlRun, he also let me know of another great utility.UrlRunAddIn is an Outlook (not Outlook Express) add-in that allows you to highlight a URL in a plain text message and then select "UrlRun" from the right-click content menu to launch the URL! You get the same benefits as UrlRun all wrapped up in a nice add-in! [Wrinkled Paper]
A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications [Slashdot] Getting Started with C#, Part 2. In this final installment from Learning C#, we'll break down your first C# program by examining the details that went into creating it. [O'Reilly Network Articles] Introduction to OOP in VB.NET. With VB.NET, Visual Basic is, for the first time, an object-oriented language. Why did Microsoft makes the switch to OOP? Why is OOP superior? And why is it so hard to learn, even for experienced procedural programmers? [O'Reilly Network Articles] Change your Windows XP product licensing key [ActiveWin.com Headlines] openbrick. OpenBrick (via slashdot)This is pretty much the machine I said I wanted [2002.08.25], but it's a little more expensive than I had hoped. It's small, no moving parts, and can use CF for storage, but with a weak 300MHz "geode" it seems overpriced at 390 Euro [storever.com]. Stripping the TV/S-video and audio could lower the price a bit, and they seem pretty superfluous given the potential applications for something this under-powered. Get it down under $200 and I'll be interested.
Cramming seven of these into a 1U rack [openchassis] sounds pretty attractive at first, until you realize that you could get a lot more bang for your buck with more mainstream Intel/AMD blades, even if they aren't quite as dense on a CPU/rack basis.
And in the height of irony, the OpenBrick uses some off-the-wall graphics that currently is only supported by a non-free XF86 driver.
See also: [BOX-3410] [EBS 1563P] (no pricing info on either). [gammatron (phase ii)]
Weblogs and Fair Use? [Slashdot: Ask Slashdot] Should Open Source Content Management Interoperate? [Slashdot] Dealing w/ Draconian Severance Contracts? [Slashdot: Ask Slashdot] Getting Started with C#, Part 1. Find out how to write your first C# program in this book excerpt from Learning C#. This is the first of two excerpts on getting started with C#. [O'Reilly Network Articles] Extra Security in BSD [OpenBSD Journal] led tailpipe. Stainless Steel LED Tailpipe TipGet your rice on!
[gammatron (phase ii)] lorem ipsum generator. Lorem Ipsum Generator (via haddock)Generate N characters of "Lorem Ipsum Dolor..." on demand. Cute, I suppose, but what's the point when you can just the entire passage is directly below?
[gammatron (phase ii)] fake ap. Fake APGPL code to generate thousands of fake 802.11b access points with a single Prism-based WiFi card.
[gammatron (phase ii)] minefinder. MineFinder (via rre)Surreal database of common landmines for PalmOS devices. $16.
[gammatron (phase ii)] Managing an IP address change. There is more to it than /etc/rc.conf [The FreeBSD Diary] Microsoft's IIS6 lockdown [ActiveWin.com Headlines] C# Object Serialization. In object-oriented programming, you sometimes need to persist the state of an object into a file and then retrieve it later. The .NET Framework's object serialization technique makes this easy. Budi Kurniawan explains and demonstrates the underlying technology with a simple vector-based drawing application. [O'Reilly Network Articles] Which Table, Which Column?. Jonathan Gennick, O'Reilly editor and author of Transact-SQL Cookbook, writes about why you should always use table aliases in SQL. [O'Reilly Network Python DevCenter] Advanced PF Log Managing. Jacek Artymaik shows us how to implement a Perl script that reads pf logs from the pflog fifo pipe, archives logs on the monitoring firewall, and sends them to another fifo pipe so that log analysis software can pick them up for analysis. [O'Reilly Network Python DevCenter] super drive dock firewire. Super Drive Dock Turn any parallel ATA drive into a bus-powered firewire drive. I guess you could just leave the bare drive laying out on your desk. $159.95. [gammatron (phase ii)]