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I didn’t take this picture–the embedded watermark makes this obviously a stock photo–but this is pretty much what I saw just feet from my windshield yesterday afternoon while driving East on Route 9. The red-tailed hawk came low out of the bushes, probably due to the weight of the squirrel grasped in his talons, and pulled up just enough to fly over my oncoming vehicle. We then saw him lift and fly into the adjacent woods. My wife and older daughter and I all marvelled at the site … but we had to explain to my daughter that the nice hawk was merely helping his squirrel friend safely across the street because she would have been horrified to know that the squirrel was lunch.

Also courtesy of our friends at Boing Boing.

This picture appears here just because I think it’s funny. Frankly, I think any picture with nuns is funny. (Sorry if that offends anyone, but I do.) It’s so Monty Python. Plus they remind me of the nuns of my catholic school youth, always threatening with their yardsticks, and so manly in their demeanor. Somehow the message of God and spirituality always got mixed up with loaded threats and subordination.

The actual story that accompanies the photo is about the government pushing more faith-based initiatives, without appropriation no less. No so funny.

I hate to post this, however, because it pushes my lovely elephant picture down below the fold. I might have to come up with another post just to display that wonderful animal again.

No, really. And an excellent example of taxonomy … 

It has come to my attention that P. T. Barnum’s Pygmy Elephant is for sale.

Here’s the description from the seller:

This Elephant is in beautiful condition and dates from the mid 1800’s.

The mounted specimen stands approximately 5′3" tall, it’s approximately 7′ in length and approximately 3′ wide.

The elephant is located in Los Angeles, CA.

This is the information we were given when we acquired the specimen. It was once owned by PT Barnum, and it is said to be a pygmy elephant. We can not be certain if it is a baby or a true dwarf elephant.

It died of natural causes. After it’s death Barnum had it sent to Henry Ward of the Natural Science Museum in Rochester, NY where Henry prepared and mounted it for display. After Henry completed the taxidermy the elephant was returned to Barnum.

Courtesy of Boing Boing

As follow up to the discussion on CMS that originated on www.churbuck.com, it seems more and more obvious to me that the gap we speak of is larger than I had originally described. In fact, that gap seems more like a chasm. Google for CMS and you’ll find hundreds of open-source applications, free to download and install on your LAMP server. You’ll also find only a handful of major players like Vignette and Documentum.

The discussion also should include what type of business you are and what you’re looking for your CMS to do. A small graphic design business should be able to get along pretty well with an open-source solution for the standard web features you would expect: home, contact, about us, support, and a catalog of images featuring their finer work. A small publishing company on the other hand will have vastly different needs and requirements, but still may be able to find an open-source app to suit their needs. Neither could hope to afford or support one of the bigger players offerings.

I recently downloaded and installed Joomla, one of the more robust open-source systems, on my server. I was indeed impressed with the interface and the features it boasts. Making it do what I wanted, however, was another issue. Joomla provides an impressive design for building pages using modules and components, as they call them, which the user can manipulate in a variety of ways to tweak the pages. It could indeed be used to develop a web-based store front or a small publishing enterprise. Simply by adding plugins (store transaction, blogs, galleries) and assigning them to pages and placement I can create and modify the site to my liking.

I found Joomla very frustrating though. I installed the dummy template site that comes with the distribution, a site about soccer teams. I wanted to remove the frames in the site, change the background images and colors, and otherwise set up a small publishing site with news and blogs. I was unable to do a lot of this without digging in directly to the css, which is of course far too much to ask a common user. I spent several hours with this, learning how the interface work and making backend changes, and mostly gave up out of frustration and lack of time to devote.

I also installed Drupal. I like this tool. It has great admin support; I can download new modules into a directory, they show up on the admin panel, and then I can configure through the tool. It also was easy to changes themes. I had trouble with things like TinyMCE to provide more text controls, but overall I like this tool for blogging and can see how it might be used for a news site. It is different from Joomla’s more pedestrian interface and certainly requires scripting and css programming support. And with both of these tools, I can see how valuable they can be for creating and distributing content, but neither seems particularly suitable in the niche of a Documentum-type document repository.

I evaluated these two mostly out of curiosity of the state of the open-source CMS. At the end of the day, I personally only need this type of tool for blogging, and for that I always prefer good old WordPress.

One question to ask Documentum or Vignette is whether a market exists for a $25,000 or $10,000 or $5,000 lite version, which could also be attached to installation and support revenue. The absense of such products in their arensal leads me to assume they are not interested in the smaller, volume-based business model.