cmurray.org

This is a very interesting (and for me, thought-provoking) post on David Churbuck’s site titled, Content Management — the next wave.

Documentum — long a staple in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries, but equally at home in the engineering environment I supported at Lucent — is an expensive application developed on a complex architecture. Our requirements for it at Lucent were simple: check documents in, check them out, provide a level of revision control, manage group and user priveledges, support a document repository across several divisions spanning the globe. Most of the content was in the format of Word, Excel, Visio, and some AutoCad. The web interface (customized by us because the Documentum implementation was so poor) provided simple navigation down the organizational tree and search to find documents. Once the requested documents were found, the user had the option of clicking to download the source file or poorly auto-generated HTML or PDF versions. When checking in documents, the files themselves are stored on the Unix file system, while the paths of the documents are inserted to the database.

I have on my LAMP server here at home a simple, open-source, web-based CMS called MyDMS. I downloaded and installed this a couple years ago, and with few customizations, use it for all my legal and financial documents, schoolwork, and storing billing and patient information for my wife (yes, it is an extremely hardened server). As with Documentum, the files are uploaded to the file system while their paths are stored in the MySQL database. This system provides me much of the same functionality found in Documentum, but at a cost only of my time to configure and cutomize it. (I also have installed on this server both Drupal and Joomla, just so I can get under the hood and try them out. I find neither without merit, but also difficult to customize and not particularly intuitive — thank god for the Mark Cahills of the world.)

The difficulty to which David alludes is at the presentation layer. Again, for Documentum in the engineering house, an organizational tree and a decent search usually got them what they needed. But supporting large, stylized publishing sites, like those spawned of IDG, is far more complicated. True enough, you can use something as simple as WordPress to gather and publish textual information. But to take that content and templatize it along with other dynamic and static content as well as revenue producing modules is a huge challenge. The value in these larger systems comes from their ability to use templates for gathering and presenting a wide array of content across a site in a consistent and functional manner, while also allowing producers to override them and customize pages. Search engines such as iPhrase then can provide a contextual component, delivering additonal, related content based on what the user has chosen to view. This level of complexity and functionality is not available, to my knowledge, in current open-source offerings.

But I agree that there appears no true middle ground. If my wife were to start a new practice with several other physicians, the open-source model would not provide the level of security and compliance with regulations, such as HIPPA. And equally, a Documentum or Vignette installation would fall well out of the financial scope. And I believe the open-source community will one day bridge this gap and provide truly scalable solutions across many business and financial models. And that’s what I love about open-source; their passion and their inability to resist a good challenge.

This is some seriously funny shit. You know all those obnoxious motivational posters hanging on the walls of corporate America? The ones that tell you to reach for your dreams and to follow your heart and to be a team player? Yeah right! Here’s what they really mean … The videos are hysterical … and they offer podcasts as well … This is some wonderfully demented stuff … and really well done too … the kind of stuff Saturday Night Live wishes they could do.

“For the better part of a decade, Despair, Inc. has been engaged in a fierce battle in the marketplace of ideas with the multi-billion dollar motivation industry. In 1998, Despair introduced the world to a darkly insightful line of motivation posters parodies known simply as Demotivators®. In April 2005, Despair co-founder Dr. E.L. Kersten unveiled his landmark management book, “The Art of Demotivation”- a work quickly praised by Financial Times Management Columnist Lucy Kellaway as “the most daring, funny and subversive management book ever written”. With the introduction of video podcasts, Despair opens a new front in the war on motivation- while simultaneously offering a tantalizing glimpse at life inside the company itself. “

Couple of really good sites on AJAX:

Mastering AJAX, Part I: Introduction to AJAX, Brett McLaughlin

AJAX: A New Approach To Web Applications, Jesse James Garrett

The second article here, written by the guy who coined the phrase AJAX, is an excellent explanation and overview of what AJAX is and why it is so powerful and popular. The first article is authored by one of those great minds at O’Reilly, and is a much more in depth examination of how AJAX works, with good code examples for implementation.

Lots more to write on the subject … but for now, we have guests and I need to start cooking breakfast.

The consultants are in town. They arrive en mass every couple weeks; they rarely call and rather choose to send complicated and confusing PowerPoints and Visios. They disembark their colorful little car. Outwardly they are self-effacing and want only to please you, the client. Inwardly, they believe we are bumpkins, nothing more than a patch on a man’s ass, an open money conduit.

Their demeaor changes greatly when you start to pull unecessary and time-consuming tasks off their project plan. They become aggitated, short, agressive … pissy in a word. I admit that I enjoy too much when they begin to turn on each other out of frustration.

Soon, however, they cram themselves back into their little car and drive off. And shortly thereafter, another little car pulls up.

Here's a cool short film of the great Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his Quintet of the Hot Club of France performing J'Attenndrai ("I Will Wait" – download video, 12 meg, Quicktime file) A newsreel-style announcer introduces the band as they lounge around a room, smoking and playing cards while a young Django and Stephane Grappelli lightly jam. Then it goes into a full blown performance of the Quintet. This is the first time I've ever seen Django play, after loving his music for 30 years. You can get a good view of Django's fret hand, which had two damaged fingers from a fire he suffered when he was eighteen. Despite his permanent hand injury, Django went on to be one of the main innovators of using the guitar as a melody instrument, along with Charlie Christian, Lonnie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Video via Djangobooks. More Django from the WFMU Realaudio archives here.

This is Courtesy of WFMU's Beware of the Blog, a site like Boing Boing for its wonderful oddness.

I honestly don’t know what made me think of this today (perhaps the utter calamity surrounding the Veep), but one of my very favorite books ever is The Public Burning, by Robert Coover. It is a brilliant book written in 1977 about Nixon, the Rosenbergs, J. Edgar Hoover, and a whole cast of very unsavoury characters (some still in office today). It is a bizarre, fictitious account of Nixon’s rise to power–with hysterical passages of Nixon talking to himself in his own head–and his role in the executions of Julias and Ethel Rosenberg. It is about more than that also … its a scathing view of America and its values … but the really amazing things are the trips through Nixon’s head and his discussions with Uncle Sam (I picture him looking like a drunken Slim Pinkins) while playing golf out at Burning Bush.

John’s Wife also is a great book by Coover. He is so adept at getting into character’s heads, and not just in the sense of a writer’s artifice, but he creates complex people who truly seem real and sadly believable, largely through listening inside their own thoughts. The story takes place in a small town, recounting events through several people’s, often conflicting memories, and is driven largely through a stream of concious narrative that is drawn from the thoughts of the characters.

It’s a very little known secret .. but I’ll share here. I wrote a novel years ago. Several in fact. They’re in boxes in the attic, along with a couple dozen short stories.

Years ago, after leaving the Conservatory in Boston, I got a gig in the library at MIT. I was not happy, in fact was feeling rather aimless and not sure what to do, and was looking for any reason to get out of town. An old friend called me one day from Bisbee, AZ. He was an aimless wanderer himself, but on a totally different order than myself. He told me was down there, hanging around this old cooper mining town (he was actually looking for his long lost father, hadn’t seen him in 15 years). He invited me to come … and he did not have to twist my arm. I quit my job, packed my things in storage, and spent the next year an absolute derelict in the bars of Bisbee and the border towns in Mexico.

I had brought my old manual Smith-Corona with me and wrote long crazy letters to my brother back East. Great rambling narratives of the characters in the town (Gene the Queen, Pills Richard, Black Widow), pages and pages of ridiculous madness and lawlessness. (It may be worth mentioning that this was a time when I was deep into reading anything and everything Kerouac wrote.) When I returned East, my brother told me how much he loved all those letters. I asked if I could have them, told him I was thinking of maybe trying to write a book about the adventure. He told me he was sorry … he really did love them …. but it had never occurred to him to keep them. They were all gone.

I spent the next few months typing, stream of consciousness, trying to recapture what went on down there. The result was a short novel called Bucky’s Breakfast, a reference to opening time and fare at one of the more down-trodden watering holes in town. While not an utter failure, it is mine and it does capture a period in my life (like all the writing I did in that vacumn back then; my little rent-controlled place in Cambridge, my refuge, and my spider’s den for luring unsuspecting young women … good times). The book is about 160 pages, and is followed by another of about 70 pages detailing when I left Bisbee to spend a year in New York City as a marble and tile setter for the Local 10 Marble Setters union in Queens. I helped to build the Health and Racquet Club down on Wall Street and that big creepy mansion for the Moonies up in Tarrytown.

As I write this, I recall one other truly great and little known author. Gilbert Sorrentino is writer who brilliantly captures and builds characters who, while sometimes entirely insane and bizzare, are also completely believable, especially if you have spent anytime in the music or art businesses. Mulligan Stew (which reminds me in a way of Nabokov’s Pale Fire) is a book about an author who gets lost inside his own narrative, the characters coming to life and ruining his book. And what makes his work so wonderful is the worlds he builds around his characters; he’ll mention one man’s favorite songs, creating a fabulous list of made-up song titles. Many of his books are like this, even bringing characters along from one book to another. The one that to me stands apart was Red, the Fiend, a gruellingly detailed book about an physically and verbally abused child, who himself grows up to be physically and verbally abusive to others. And again, the brilliance of Sorrentino, his worlds and his characters, make it one of those books you finish in a day.

This is Mia and me at the Shartner Farm. This was a nice day picking apples from the trees and pumpkins from the patch.

This also is a test using Qumana Beta 3 … which allows me to load a picture into my text, and then upload that image when I upload the post. It also appears to let me edit the post after the fact. I’m liking it more and more.

It’s just like when I got this great music creating software. I got it installed, configured my keyboards to play nice with the computer, played with all the options and modules and effects … spent lots of time learning my way around. But then had nothing to play … no music to record.

I hope I can find something to write about now that I have this wonderful little offline editor.

Lots of hype .. and lots of snow … and still, a lovely storm. Also was a nice day to stay home with the family. I hate to admit it, but we spent the day taking down Christmas decorations .. even the tree! Between school and work and all sorts of other obligations, these chores kept getting put off weekend after weekend. So, we got everything packed and back to the attic … then I went out and snowblowered the drive and walks.

Because of my new role at work (in addition to the new environment at my new company), I feel like I am coming into so many intriguing new things … things many of my colleagues have been aware for a long time.

Once such example is Bloglines. Because we have been very focused on syndication and the use of XML for delivery, I felt like I should be using some tools to help get a better understanding of what we are talking about. I downloaded and tried a couple newsreaders, and aside from their bulky interfaces, I did not like having yet another single-purpose app to deal with. A colleague of mine mentioned Bloglines to me. It’s a web-based interface, freely available for the cost of your email address. I signed up and added some feeds (NYT, BusinessWeek, BBC, Guardian, BoingBoing, Salon, and my own blog just to how that might work). I now use this as my main source of information on a daily basis, having my browser fire it up each time I boot. Wonderful service. Gets me jazzed about the stuff we do at work.

I have struggled for years to find ways of keeping myself and my work organized. Usually, I rely on my memory. But lately work and my personal life require more juggling and coordination. I have tried programs such as MS Project (utter misery … I like when other people use it and give me dates for which I can bust their balls), and little devices such as palm pilots. I also have tried several web-based open source tools. But I never found one I could stick with and use on a daily basis. My most successful attempts at organization always are notebooks written in my scribbly hand.I recently stumbled upon Microsoft’s OneNote. I like the way I can organize high-level areas, such as Projects or Operations … and then get more specific, such as Drupal Rollout or Lyris Implementation. It is the first tool I have tried and felt comfortable enough with to build my life and business around.

You can create folders and tabs for hierarchical organization, and then pages within those categories for your content. You can draw, paste in images, create boxes for content and move them around. It also integrates well with other MS products, like Word and Outlook, which makes sending my notes and minutes from meetings extremely easy.

The program can be downloaded and evaluated for 60 days; to buy it costs $99US. Because I am a student at UPhoenix, however, I was able to get the CD (sans documentation) for $29US. Still, I would have paid the full price just to keep using this wonderful little app.