samedi 1 novembre 2003

Standard Forms Yes, there was an article here earlier today. I'm in a debate with someone about the ideas expressed here. I want to see whether my ideas hold water in the debate, and then do a "Revisited" here. Should be fun. :^) 12:55:11 PM   comment []

Seven Marathons, Seven Continents, Seven Days? Are you kidding me? Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a 59 year-old British adventurer, is one race away from pulling this off. And get this: five months after a double heart bypass operation. Next time I look down at my belly and think, "Too big, but too busy to fix it", I'll contemplate this quote from Sir Ranulph about his run partner: "Mike got really, really sick yesterday. He was urinating blood and had diarrhea." Uhh, ok, got me beat on that one, Sir Ranulph. Well, looks like I'm going for a run today, how bout you folks in Zopeland? Show these guys a little love on their last leg of the try. 11:21:52 AM   comment []

Open Source: The Whole Product This article by Bernard Golden is the first I've seen that publicly tackles the relationship of open source to whole product management. I mentioned this article as a "must-read" in my "Future of Plone" talk at PloneCon. Word got back to Bernard, who sent me a note saying he's considering a book on the topic. Awesome! A book on this topic is, IMO, badly needed. Open source has a disdain for traditional ideas regarding product management and marketing, which reflect (IMO) a misunderstanding of the subject. And this disdain does a disservice to potential customers and users, thus also limiting the adoption. Ohh, the times I have wished I could bring open source developers along on a sales call, to see how differently the other 99% of the world thinks. Maybe Bernard is looking for a contributor. :^) I find this topic fascinating. 10:41:16 AM   comment []

Go Plone Go! A new month has passed and that means checking the stats for plone.org. All I can say is: "Wow!" Looks like a 30-40% increase in two months. In October, plone.org broke the 5M hit mark. If the same increase happens in November, then it's possible that plone.org will surpass zope.org in traffic. Of course this is speculation, since zope.org stopped collecting web traffic stats earlier this year. Grrrrr. 10:29:34 AM   comment []

Misc Browser UI Stuff Shane has been working on CompositePage, a "new way to assemble pages for the World Wide Web". Hey Shane, could you put up a demo somewhere, so folks can easily evaluate it? I've been talking with Shane for years about these ideas, and he's been doing prototypes and releases for quite a while. Thus, even if those of you have your expectations raised, you'll still be impressed. Nearly everything Shane touches seems to have this effect. I also have been doing more browser stuff of late. For Epoz, we finally released an alpha of the "NG" version. One interesting feature of the new Epoz is that you can open it directly from the filesystem, with no Zope involved (all hail Page Templates!). Philipp put up a demo on his static site to show this (requires, obviously, IE or Moz). I've also been chatting up ways to improve the UI and the consulting process by decoupling the UI and app server. I gave a talk at PloneCon on this topic. While most of the value of the talk was in the demos, the slides still lay down the basic markers for these ideas. I'm increasingly interested in the meme of "framework-proofing", which means doing everything humanly possible to avoid creating new architectures, which force others to learn new architectures. Previously discussed here, with a recap by Jon Udell. As a note, Jon also has been talking up new UI ideas based on XML. Twingle is another project I worked on for a while. The goal of Twingle was to create a common OSCOM project that improved network authoring for secretaries. Well, not much to report on this. My various projects (as shown at PloneCon) on XML+XSLT and browser editors have been paving the way for a return to Twingle. I've also been tangentially involved in Mozile, which is the baddest browser editor project around, where bad means good. Finally, I've talked with the Bitflux guys about collaborating more on Twingle and Bitflux. Looks like improving the browser authoring experience will be part of an OSCOM sprint in Zurich early next year. Despite the work put into Epoz, I'll confess that my interest isn't editors. I'm much more interested in improving the usability of navigation. Godefroid and I worked on an XML-based tree for Zope 3 in Rotterdam 10 months ago. Since then I've written many similar navigation widgets using browser-side XML. Godefroid chided me for using cut-and-paste every time I started a new project, so I thought I'd finally write the Last Tree. At least the last for me. Thus, one more small project, mostly as part of other project: LibreTree. I started a draft of a proposal along with a very early prototype (requires Moz, at the moment). It's true that these techniques currently only work with IE and Moz, thus, only cover around 95% of the market share. :^) I believe, based on insider talks, that Opera and Safari have a chance of adding the features needed to support these techniques. 10:22:24 AM   comment []

Shane Hathaway Edition As mentioned in his post at ZopeZen, Shane pointed out that I'm a lazy goat and need to write more in my weblog! Well, he's right, so today's flurry of activity is dedicated to Shane, who does more useful stuff in an hour than I do in a year. Tomorrow's flurry of inactivity, where I resume my silence, is dedicated of course to me. :^) 9:28:53 AM   comment []