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Wednesday, June 05, 2002 |
Flexitecture™ Methodology: A Step Ahead. What are Web Services? What do I do with them? What are their proper uses? How can I put this emerging shift in system design to my advantage? What does this mean to my business? How do I reduce costs, increase revenue and possibly gain competitive advantage? Read AGENCY.COM's latest position paper Flexitecture™ Methodology: A Step Ahead -- a practical approach to web services technology today to achieve maximum business advantage tomorrow. [AGENCY.COM : Applied Concepts Lab]
2:18:33 PM 
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BlogBack: Following Up on Previous Threads.
BlogBack: Following Up on Previous Threads
Before I start in on a a whole new series of posts, I thought I'd clear up some older issues. I think there is enough ongoing stuff that I'll probably do this regularly. And, yes, inspired by Slashdot's Slashback (examples).
- That Satellite Job? He (Ray) got it. Started yesterday. I ended up passing on another offsite gig to and I think Andy's getting it. Good for him.
- This Template? I told you I'd move to it. Joe does great work. Later today I'll try and talk about how to permanently archive your template settings so you don't scramble around like I've been doing for the past 2 hours.
- That O'Reilly Book? Chapter 3 went to the Review list earlier today and Chapter 7 is being finished now. Overall it's dramatically improved. Dramatically. Special things go out to Jake, Lawrence and Roger. Additional thanks go to all these people below. Not every change was made but I did look at each and every one. If you find that I didn't get it right, you know the drill -- scott@fuzzygroup.com. (Sorry for not linking to your blogs, that'll come later with the official "Scott Owe's You" page.
- Guy K. Haas
- Frank Steele
- Andy Fragen
- Steve Zellers
- Greg Kucharo
- Mike Cohen
- Rowan Brewer
- Paolo Valdemarin
- Mark Yeager
- Chris Janton
- Andy Sylvester
- Roger Turner
- Lawrence Lee
- Jake Savin
- Dave Winer
- Robert Barksdale
- Russ Lipton
- Eszter Hargittai
- Robert Occhialini
- K. Dadamo
- Philip Wolff
- David Davies
- Buzzy Bruggeman
- Justin Klubnik
- Mike Krus
- Eric Albert
- Jeff Cheney
- Kjartan Mannes
- Simone Bettini
- That Satellite Job Again? I've talked to the head hunter several more times and Amy is just a sweet heart. Ray even confirmed it -- she treated him well and was both honest and decent. For those that haven't used head hunters before, that's rare (IMHO). Recommended. She even mentioned that the tech economy is getting better (i.e. she has more recruiting tasks than she used to a few months ago). And she works from Hawaii. How cool is that?
- My Laptop? In progress. Sigh.
- Wish Lists? First gift arrived yesterday. I know who you are and thank you. A warm and fuzzy glow surrounded me for the entire evening once I got it (UPS just leaves stuff for me, never, ever asks for signature. Weird).
- My Cats? Very helpful in the editing process. Pictures tomorrow probably.
- Have You Backed Up Your Website Lately? We rarely think about this but the headhunter who got Ray the job told me that her company's web site was completely lost when their ISP didn't do the backups they were required to. I helped her get some back from my browser cache, her's and Google but not all that much. If you haven't ever thought about backing up stuff on a hosted box, I recommend it. Here's how I'm going to do it: www.ftpvoyager.com has scheduled FTP (that actually works). I'll just set up a job for this and then use www.secondcopy.com to replicate it to my backup hard drive.
- Do I Ever Leave the House? Rarely it seems.... But I did head for the local Barnes and Noble last night. Ended up driving about 15 miles behind a garbage truck. Sigh. Anyway... I stocked up on Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, 2600 and C Users Journal. I know... Hopeless geek.
[The FuzzyBlog!]
2:14:30 PM
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Questioning "QuestionPoint".
New Service Allows the Public to Pose Reference Questions Without Visiting the Library
"Starting on Monday [yesterday], members of the public will be able to use the World Wide Web to seek answers to reference questions from librarians around the world, including some at college libraries.
The service, called QuestionPoint, will operate through a Web browser and may make some visits to the library unnecessary. The Library of Congress and the Online Computer Library Center, better known as OCLC, developed it.
A patron will gain access to QuestionPoint through his or her local library's Web site. Questions will be routed to local libraries first. If a user's local library isn't open, the question will be sent to an open library elsewhere -- one that has strengths in disciplines that match the nature of the question. A librarian will pick up the question and help the patron find an answer. QuestionPoint offers a reduced subscription price for any library that agrees to help answer its inquiries....
But some librarians will need more persuasion. Barbara Fister, the librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, was one librarian discussing QuestionPoint on COLLIB. In an interview, she said that QuestionPoint was a product of 'Jeeves envy,' referring to Ask Jeeves, an online search engine. She says librarians and people at OCLC shouldn't try to offer a competitive service, and she predicts that QuestionPoint is going to be 'a major market bomb.'
'It's providing something completely different than what you can get at a reference desk,' she says. "'his sends the message that you can go online and get your reference done and that you don't need a library for that. In a higher-education market, that is so dead wrong. ... I look at the reference desk as a place where teaching happens.' [The Chronicle]
With all due respect to Ms. Fister, this is exactly the kind of "shifted" service that libraries need to be moving towards. How would she feel if banks didn't offer ATMs outside of their physical buildings? Or if Ingram and other suppliers didn't offer online ordering? Or if she couldn't look up an answer in an online database? Those are all services from industries and companies that have shifted their services into their users' worlds to try and reach customers where they are, not where the company thinks they should be. Libraries need to do the same.
Normally I'd be singing the praises at the launch of this system, but I can't because of the name. Why on earth did they pick "QuestionPoint" as the name? Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, now does it? While I'm 100% behind the idea, that name has got to go. So on that point, Ms. Fister and I agree that this service isn't going to work. We just disagree about why.
This gives me the chance to finally quote Andrew K. Pace in a completely unrelated post to the WEB4LIB mailing list in response to a thread about Google Answers versus libraries. Keep in mind that Andrew didn't say the following in regards to QuestionPoint, but I think it's a very valid point:
"If people don't know about answers.google, then they most certainly don't know about VRDs...who do you think will ultimately win this marketing race...hmmmm, I wonder, cuz, you know, 'Virtual Reference' is almost as great a branding as 'Google.' Why do we call it 'virtual' anyway? Aren't the questions, the answers and the people on both ends real? What's more, 'ask a librarian' puts the emphasis on the question, not the answer, where it should be. I propose that we change 'Virtual Reference' and 'Ask a Librarian' to simply 'Real Answers.' That's what we're good at, isn't it?"
I hope QuestionPoint is a huge success, but I don't think they'll get the recognition they need to go mainstream unless they change the name, get a better logo, and start marketing in the non-library media (Time, Newsweek, on Yahoo, on Google itself, etc.). [The Shifted Librarian]
7:11:49 AM
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A superb device for the technical age, the Bare Bones PAD is sure to take the world by storm. I was blown away by this press release:
Text and graphics may be entered using your own handwriting (cursive or printed), or any one of a number of established input conventions (including the time-tested Pittman and Gregg encodings). The PAD also provides for strong content encryption by using a technology code-named "Chicken Scratch", which renders the input unreadable to all except the PAD's rightful owner, without relying on the cumbersome key-and-passphrase systems of existing encryption technologies.
"The PAD is the solution to all of the problems faced by the modern technology user," said Rich Siegel, the founder, president and CEO of Bare Bones Software. "It goes everywhere, does everything, and can be used productively during airplane takeoff and landing, when everyone else has been asked to turn off their portable electronic devices."
Get one today! :-) [The .NET Guy]
7:09:59 AM
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Martin Fowler (who wrote the wonderful book on refactoring) is working on a new book, tentatively titled "Enterprise Application Architecture". You can read pieces of the book online here. I just started diving into it, but it looks like a decent read. What excites me about this is that most enterprise development books (i.e., "Large Scale C++ Software Design") take a heavy-handed, planning-centric approach. The planning-centric approach is, as I've witnessed a lot, a near certain path to "failure by over-design". Fowler advocates an approach that's much lighter on its feet in "Refactoring", so I'm anxious to see how a guru applies his own refactoring advice to enterprise projects. [The .NET Guy]
7:07:00 AM
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I started over with a Linux Kernel boot disk and installed only the packages that I wanted. Took about 3 hours, but I had the Linux system that I needed. With everything running it uses 12MB of RAM. It now runs on a Pentium 90 (yep...Pentium 1) with 32MB of RAM. It is my firewall, DHCP server, and my gateway to the internet. All in under 15MB of RAM. [Justin Rudd's Radio Weblog]
You can probably significantly cut down on the power consumption, noise, and heat if you use some non-hard disk to boot. That could mean a floppy that boots with support for a USB based device, like those cheap Compact Flash readers. Buy yourself a 32 or 64MB CF, a USB reader, and go. (Yes, Linux has support for USB-based hard disks, which is what the CF readers are considered). Just a thought. :) [The .NET Guy]
7:06:30 AM
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CoolNeon. At a party tonight, there was a young woman wearing a tiara made of a thin, glowing, blue wire. I asked where she found it, and learned she had made it out of CoolNeon wire. It's a tungsten coated wire, coated in PVC, which glows when you run power through it. It's neat stuff, and the power requ [More Like This WebLog]
7:00:37 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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