Friday, April 04, 2003

Source: Incessant Ramblings (Technology Entries); 4/4/2003; 1:29:02 PM. Tips for debugging IE-hosted assemblies. Here's an article with some excellent tips on debugging .NET assemblies that are hosted in IE. Many of these tips are also relevant for HREF-deployed apps that are launched via IE but not necessarily embedded in the browser: Hosting .NET Assemblies in... [Incessant Ramblings (Technology Entries)] 1:33:52 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Keith's Weblog; 4/4/2003; 9:19:12 AM RSS reader jubilation!!. I think I've finally found it. An RSS reader I like!! What a relief! Via Bill Kearny's weblog at Syndic8.com, check out NewsDesk. I've installed it, and I'm switching to it right now! Great features: Freaking categories! Thank you! With drag and drop even! It works and is fast Imports and exports every format you need, OCS and OPML Searching - oh man! When you search, it filters all your feeds based on your search terms, and when you click on a feed it only shows you those items that match the search term. It has an inline browser like Syndirella. In fact, it's based on .NET too. It's got a three-paned interface like you'd expect. However, it works like I always thought an RSS aggregator should work. If you click on the feed name itself on the left, in the right two panes it shows the list of posts on top, and in the bottom pane it immediately shows a summary of all posts for that feed. Then if you click on a feed in the top list it shows that individual post. It integrates heavily with NewsIsFree. Not something I need, but it's nice. You can drag a url to it to add a feed. It has lots of features like that - it even supports the click-a-button-on-a-web-page-and-have-it-invoke-your-rss-reader feature like AmphetaDesk and Radio have. It has lots of system tray features. Again, not something I need, but it seems to work really well. It comes with an RSS to e-mail thing that can e-mail you new headlines! Freaking awesome, but I haven't tried it yet. It's fast! I don't expect to have any of the horrible memory problems that I've consistently had with Syndirella. It's just really really awesome. Now for some nit-picky things. Comes with an icky default background color. It's like a puke brown/olive color (See, this is how small my issues are) But you can change it easily. I'd like a modification of the summary of all posts for the feed feature I mentioned above. I'd like it to at least have an option to show only the unread posts for that feed, rather than all of them. I'd like to have unread posts show up in bold, rather than just have an "unread" marker next to a post (which also happens to be a few pixels too close to the text of the post title for my comfort). When you first import a feed (from an OPML file, for instance), the "Get New Headlines" option is greyed out for that feed for some reason. I don't know if that's also the case when you add a new feed, in addition to when you import it. It takes a restart of the program to fix that. See how minor my problems are? I'm very pleased. I'll update this if I run into any problems, but for now, I'm very happy. Watch for my Blogroll to be updated directly with the feeds from my OPML file, now that I use an aggregator that has categories. Also make sure you check out John Abbe's great and comprehensive list of RSS readers. Ok, one crash, while I was dragging stuff around into different categories. Though, it caught the exception and didn't seem to have a problem continuing. I reloaded my feed list just in case... update: yeah, it always crashes if you drag feeds around, and let your mouse hover over another feed so that it loads the contents of the feed into the right panes. But it's always able to recover from the exceptions. I'll have to e-mail the author... Hey, and it doesn't leave crap bogus referrers! [Keith's Weblog] 10:15:50 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

My comments to Robert on his weblog about his post below: Robert - Wow! "...100,000 new programmers a year..." that would be great news. I have been lurking on your weblog for quite a while now. I am always very impressed with your views and commentary. I am currently working through a .NET book also called "Developing Web Applications with MS Visual Basic.NET and MS Visual C#. NET". I have not seen the book from Mickey Williams. Is it a Web Application book? Where did you come up with the 100,000 figure? What kinds of skills do you believe these new style "programmers" will need. I am currently one of the many unemployed Web Application developers trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps to get back into the workforce again. I am trying to stay in the IT field because I really enjoy it but the lack of available jobs is really a problem. I will let you get back to your studying and good luck. Source: The Scobleizer Weblog; 4/4/2003; 8:47:18 AM I'm gonna be quieter than usual cause I'm working through some programming books and trying to get to a place where I can have a discussion about first steps of being a programmer. Even though beating up on John Dvorak and being called a Microsoft shill is more fun. One thing that's motivating me: I believe the industry needs 100,000 new programmers a year to fill the programming needs that exist. Unfortunately, these programmers probably won't call themselves programmers. They'll be people building internal weblogs (or, the more politically-correct term "knowledge management systems") and then hooking them up to various things inside their corporations. We're already seeing this happen. I have an RSS Aggregator inside Outlook. Why not have SAP spit out an RSS feed so that all of NEC's employees and managers could track daily sales, backorders, RMAs, and other things? But, who will program that for us? I can't get money to hire programmers. We don't have an internal programming staff that I can use (if we do, they are too busy to pay attention to something like weblogs, which aren't yet on the corporate radar screen). So, I gotta do it myself. I'm not sure it's possible. SAP doesn't really have a nice API/object model that I can get to from .NET. Although they just loaded a new one on my system, so maybe it does now. I sure don't have the skills to parse SAP's data, and put it into RSS files. Not yet, anyway. But, that's my goal. Be able to learn enough to take data out of one app, put it into RSS format, and spit it over to my Web server that's running on my desktop. I'll let you know how it goes. As far as being Microsoft's shill? Heh, I can think of worse things to shill. Microsoft makes a product (actually several) that 200 million people use (and based on my customer research, many of them use Microsoft products for eight to 12 hours a day -- I know I use Windows 14 hours a day, and Outlook and IE at least nine of those). If defending a company that's made that much change to the world earns me a label of "shill" then I'll wear that label proudly. [The Scobleizer Weblog] 9:49:28 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Marc's Voice; 4/4/2003; 8:47:31 AM. Matt Webb is in da house. Slices of the ongoing conversation on social software.... Sylloge on five devices of social software: "By me, it is software that people use to interact with other people, employing some combination of the following five devices: Identity; Presence; Relationships; Conversations; Groups". (And a follow up, add reputation and sharing to the list?) Ross Mayfield's four social networking models: Explicit, physical, conversational and private (he gives examples). See also Marc Canter's followup: what happens after people form these networks? Piles of links for thinking: Seb's OpenMind on social software and, with more narrative, the Meatball Wiki social software discussion. Try and ground all of this; try and explain social software to someone who has a background in evolutionary psychology/ dynamics of group decisions, and it's very hard (as discovered a few nights ago). What's the objective? So I'll ramble: There's no single defining feature of social software, no common thread. But some attributes which may or may not be shared: software which uses as data social relationships/properties; software which acts as an intermediary in social activity (conversation, decision making, wearing the same band's tshirt, clapping); software which uses human nature in the design process; software that has moved from providing an environment to providing an environment and tools, or more. . . There's so much to learn! Look at philosophy, human behaviour, psychology, biology: extract commonalities of human nature. How do people work with distance? People prefer big effects to have big causes. How do people respond to pointing, clapping, shouting, unexpected people chipping in? Look at how people work in cities: those are the best examples of things-for-a-purpose with massive, group feedback loops. And how people sit round tables in pubs. "You're looking to reconstruct the whole social world. That's a big job," was the response from the other night. Well yes and no. A cut down version -- but for that we have to know which are the important bits. We need a Fitt's Law for social software. Like: When there are twelve people who mostly haven't met talking in text, the chance of a groupwide flame war is 50%, so the button to respond person-to-person (over IM) needs to be a maximum of twice the cognitive distance as the button to respond to the group. For example. So then: Experimental social software continue (FOAF springs to mind, weblogs too). Derive rules of thumb. People who are good at being theoretical, try and find paradigms. Learn about human nature - the kind of human nature which is important here, emotional response curves maybe - groups dynamics and so on. Model, break down. Put in the implicit design laws into the requirements document, things that aren't usually thought about: people need to be able to share their address books with this application because X, people need to taskswitch to this other app because Y. The purpose of this app is to do Z therefore there needs to be capability to 1, 2 and 3. And not just proximate: is socialising in group software just as important as the Meeting Request button? Use cases, examples, models, falsification, experiment, theory, talking, above all: learning. [Interconnected] Yes Matt does ramble on a bit, but you gotta respect somebody who puts so many shades of brown on his site.  Everyone is trying to grok this stuff - on their own terms.  Me - I'm a tool guy. [Marc's Voice] 9:27:12 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Marc's Voice; 4/4/2003; 8:47:32 AM More rambling from Matt, but GOOD rambling.... More social software rambling:Social.... More social software rambling: Social software acknowledges that in the real world people like to work in groups of more than two, so this person-to-person versus person-to-unbounded_group in email is missing a step. (It's because there's an abstraction, or breakpoint at the sendee/receiver. The email address is just a pointer.) And therefore Apple's Mail. It would be better if it appeared closer to the email itself. Or maybe, closer to your focus of reading title="From a summary of The Tipping Point, the magic number of 150.">This is already happening.) It's different from this kind of science because the models title="Folk Psychology is the evolved, commonsense theory of mind.">folk psychology, a proper theory of folk physics, a proper theory of how people classify/understand. And not from the perspective of normal science, which is to say: "When these people have folk X, what is the real X they're thinking of?" But rather: "What are the evolved attributes of folk X, so we can design for them?" I like it when people say "I'm a tool guy". That means we (equals me. I'm a paradigm person myself) can take what they do, extract the attributes that made it successful, and reuse elsewhere. Some people can just create social software without thinking about it, like some people are great interior designers, or great orators, great at articulating themselves. Leaving these qualities in the hands of the people who were born with them isn't enough: that's why we teach people how to structure an argument, how to make use of rhetoric, why people go on courses for presentation skills ("What do I do with my hands?"). This is why we have Fung Shui: Folk interior design. Democratising aesthetic sofa positioning. Social software is pre Fung Shui, pre folk anything. It's hard to slice and dice even, which is a characteristic of things that haven't been shaped and paradigmised. And it's hard because the term Social Software applies to all of: the social software that people make the process of understanding what it is about social software that makes it tick thinking about social software and making rules, finding commonalities And this is all without even defining what Social Software even means! We can't. It's like putting plumbing, engineering and fluid dynamics in the same box. But that's what electricity was like, what steam power was like early on, so there's hope. No conclusion. [Interconnected] [Marc's Voice] 8:56:35 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Keith's Weblog; 4/4/2003; 8:47:36 AM http://www.colormatch.dk/. http://www.colormatch.dk/ This utility will help you select a matching 6-color palette for your website. Define a single color that you like. Matching colors will be calculated. Click a color in the palette to promote it to the primary color. doesn't work in Mozilla... [Keith's Weblog] 8:53:04 AM    trackback []     Articulate []