cmurray.org

There, I said it.

Having read both the hype and the dismissals, curiosity got the best of me: I created an account and downloaded the Second Life software. Within minutes I was bumping into virtual poles and falling into virtual rivers.

It seems like a fun game though. And there is certainly some reality to it. I walked up to a woman in the same orientation site as myself, said hello (or rather typed hello into the chat window), and she walked away saying nothing. Just like real life (in Boston, anyway). Fabulous.

But then I read things in places like Forbes magazine that say Second Life is going to burst wide open, like the Internet did no less. It’s going to be the next big thing and there’s lots of investment behind it. IBM uses it for virtual meetings. In fact, I read that you can actually buy real estate in there, islands no less, and create private little worlds. Spending real dollars buying virtual islands, pixels on a file server.

I don’t know. I’m missing something in this discussion, I admit. It seems like forums with cartoons. People are hoping customers will buy things in there? Companies will provide support in there? Damn, I have a hard enough time getting good support from many companies out here. Am I to drop myself (my avatar, rather) into a virtual world and expect something different? Dream on.

I wonder if I’ll get taken to task like David Churbuck did when he said he didn’t like Second Life after admittedly using it for less than ten hours. I used it for about an hour and don’t care for more than that. Seems like a game to me, money or not.

I have added two new categories to my blog in order to capture things I discover during my various development projects, both at home and at work (thus the categories @Home and @Work).

I got this idea from my new friend, Sebastien Wains. Sebastien lives in the Belgian countryside, not 50 clicks from my uncle Miguel. Sebastien maintains a fabulous blog of code and systems tricks discovered in his work as a Systems Administrator. While working on a recent project at home (implementation of a secure IMAPS server on my blog host) I found his site invaluable for all sorts of configuration and installation tips and examples.

So, I am going to begin using this blog as a place to capture those things I find while developing that I don’t want to have to rediscover the next time I need them; a sort of development journal. @Home will focus on all things open-source, like Ubuntu, Apache, VMWare, web and database development. @Work will focus on enterprise content management systems, taxonomy, search, and also on particular vendors like Microsoft, Ektron, and Oracle. Hopefully, others will find this as useful as I have found Sebastien’s site.

No fear: I still will post about things like pygmy elephants and nuns with guns.

Having spent years now working with content management systems like Documentum and open-source tools like Joomla, I’m finally getting around to some Microsoft applications. I’ve written here before about Ektron, which is a fabulous tool built on the .NET 2.0 framework, but now I’m moving on to some of Microsoft’s own offerings.

Lately I have been getting my head deep into MS SharePoint 2007. I have to admit that I am really struggling with this one. Modifying templates and master pages not only seems needlessly difficult, it seems often not to work. I have created sites based on wikis, and then built subsites within them for document management and forums. But these subsites appear not to recognize their parents’ attributes, requiring lots of manual tweaking to pull them together. Equally, the provided templates are inflexible and do not allow for adding the content I would like to add. For example, if I create a wiki site and want to add some ‘web parts’ (components of functionality) I cannot because the template design does not allow it. Equally, I am not allowed to drop the wiki onto some other templates. To make changes like this I need the MS SharePoint Designer, which only runs in WinOffice 2007, which I do not have. These are first impressions and I quickly acknowledge that I am sure I am missing some obvious things.

The funny thing about SharePoint is that it is remarkably like Joomla. They both are module-based, allowing you to build pages by adding components to them. They both also provide similar functionality in that with either you can easily deploy blogs, forums, wikis, image and document libraries, and a whole slew of other popular features. Joomla, to be frank, also can be difficult to configure and redesign.

SharePoint indeed has some great features and offers a lot of promise. But unlike Ektron, which offers much of the same functionality and more, SharePoint seems frustratingly hard to modify and develop. My money is still on Ektron to build the best of breed.

My worst fear is that Microsoft buys Ektron and spoils the whole party. More to come as I proceed.