ivantohelpyou

Best of...

2007-09-27T17:06:00.001-04:00

I'm no longer updating the "ivantohelpyou" blog, but here are a few things you may find still worth reading:

The afterlife of a blog post
In which a small business-themed article about Rocky Balboa becomes an international sensation.

Underwriting Technology To Blame?
In which I attempt to explain collateralized mortgages by analogy.

The "Vote Your Wallet" Issue of the 2008 Election
Out of every tax dollar collected, the U.S. pays a nickel to holders of foreign debt. What if that turns into a dime, or more?

Announcing a new blog...

2007-08-14T02:04:00.001-04:00

I've spent the last year or so writing about small business and refreshing my IT skills with hands-on experience. Now, it's time for me to get back to my core strength as a writer who not only understands how the banking system and the financial markets work, but also has a few ideas about how they could be improved through the judicious use of technology.

Accordingly, I'm blogging about technology in banking and the capital markets at my new site (and company) Taelyen. It's all big picture, with visions about how innovations in technology can benefit the capital markets and the economy. I welcome your readership and comments.

Visit the Taelyen blog: http://taelyen.com/blog.htm

The breakup

2007-07-27T18:46:00.001-04:00

Yes, I like having a blog. But for the month-and-a-half I've been away, it was also nice to not have to think about what I would say to you each and every day. I didn't have to consider the ramifications of how you would react every time I wrote something. It was nice not worrying whether I might say something one day that would bite me in the rear later.

Who are you, anyway? Let's face it, we don't know each other very well at all. We've been seeing each other for a long time now, and it's just been a one-way conversation. It's like pulling teeth to get anything meaningful out of you readers, isn't it? Frankly, I'm tired of it. OK, maybe I'm not the best listener, and sure, I didn't have comments turned on. But still.

Sure, sometimes I would blabber on about things you may not have had any interest in whatsoever, such as the latest technology stuff or what I saw at the movies. Well, that's what was on my mind, and that's what a blog is for, right? Excuse me if not all of my thoughts are completely profound.

I think we need some time apart. So I'm going to hang out at Facebook for a while and see what happens. Meet some new people, that kind of thing. But let's face it, this blog here, it's done.

I hope we can still be friends.

Greetings from Prague

2007-06-29T13:23:00.001-04:00

Having a wonderful time, learning Czech language, culture, food, customs and more.

Almost completely unplugged for the last three weeks, will continue to be so for the next three. It's an amazing feeling, you bloggers should try it sometime.

Na zdravi!

Stay in touch...

2007-06-06T00:58:00.001-04:00

I'll be checking my SkypeIn messages from Internet café-land.

Read all about my Skype setup in the latest SmallBizResource post, and learn how you can add one of these fancy buttons to your web site:

Get Skype and call me for free.

Have Peripherals, Will Travel

2007-06-06T00:46:00.000-04:00

For at least a couple of weeks now, I've been trying to write an article about online applications that can be used instead of Microsoft Office. But I keep running into the same problem – whenever I have an actual task to do, i.e. one that might be a good candidate for an online application, I instinctively open a Microsoft application and get to work before I realize the missed opportunity.

So now, I'm going to take a drastic step. Today, I'm going to head to the airport and board a plane for London. After a few days there, it's off to the Czech Republic. And I'm not going to bring my laptop. gasp

I'm just going to bring all the peripherals I need for the digital lifestyle using other people's computers:

iPod shuffle
U3 ThinkFree 1GB Smart Drive - Plug it into a Windows PC, and it boots like a CD and then mounts a storage volume. Easy access to Firefox (with your bookmarks), Thunderbird (with your e-mail), Skype (with your account) and ThinkFree Office.
Firewire card and cable. I'll have access to a DV cam.
digital camera and USB cable, plus USB battery charger
ethernet cable, phone cable, phone/power adaptors.

Sure, it's a lot of stuff. But it's all REALLY LIGHT and very replaceable.

Should be easy to write that online-apps article now. Plus, I'll have enough material for a brand new article as well.

Ignite Boston: Comedy Club for Geeks

2007-06-01T05:05:00.000-04:00

Having attended Ignite Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, I was happy to see that my trip to the Bay State coincided with Ignite Boston.

Whereas the San Francisco event had the atmosphere of a poetry slam, the Boston version resembled an open-mic comedy club, complete with hecklers, an indifferent crowd and a couple of punchline-deficient routines that were almost painful to watch. Although the event had a better social vibe with the appropriate liquid lubricant, when you hold the event at a crowded bar rather than in a conference hall equipped with video monitors, you might expect a bit of discordant activity.

For next time, I'd suggest to the O'Reilly team that they arrange space at one of the local universities, followed by drinks at a nearby pub. And despite my earlier criticism of the Mozes-based voting apparatus, it really did help to set the tone of the San Francisco event, and I missed it this time around.

Anyway, I hope to have something to say for five minutes in the spotlight by the next time I show up at one of these things. Boston, though, that's a tough crowd.

Related blog posts:
Web 2.0 Expo: Poetry Slam for Geeks

The Small Biz Road Warrior Kit

2007-05-31T13:54:00.000-04:00

I'm preparing for a trip to Prague in June and July, to study the Czech language and culture.

Here's a SmallBizResource blog post about how I'm going to stay in touch while I'm abroad.

Link:
The Small Biz Road Warrior Kit

My Microsoft-Free Office Experiment, Part 1

2007-05-29T15:36:00.000-04:00

Here's the latest chapter of my Linux experiments for SmallBizResource.com, in which I try to install something other than Microsoft Office on an old PC. Also, I reveal my reviewer bias towards the Redmond team.

Links:
My Microsoft-Free Office Experiment, Part 1
Disclosure: Open-Source Review Written by Microsoft Partisan

What I know about the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

2007-05-25T04:03:00.000-04:00

A ComputerWorld article (via /.) lists "The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills."

It's a real blast from the past. As a programmer from the early 90s I have experience with almost all of these technologies. The only ones I'm missing are #3 Non-IP networks and #4 cc:Mail.

1. Cobol: Took a course as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. Fortunately, as it was my last semester prior to graduation, I did poorly in the class and was not tempted to make Cobol programming a career.
2. Nonrelational DBMS: For several years, I was an Omnis programmer, using its built-in hierarchical DBMS schema. Then, it became a front-end for Oracle and other DBs, and finally faded into obscurity.
5. ColdFusion: They still teach this at Harvard. In 2005 I took an extension class on web databases and learned ColdFusion development. I'm still doing some work with it, mainly because I believe Adobe's still alive and kicking with Flex/Flash/CS3/etc., not to mention the upcoming version of ColdFusion, codename "Scorpio." Nevertheless, I've tried to cover my bets by installing a few frameworks in PHP and getting familiar with Python and ASP.
6. C programming: Another CMU-era skill. Again I balked at becoming a C programmer, mostly because everything I was interested in doing was so much easier using the aforementioned Omnis.
7. PowerBuilder: Probably the top reason you've never heard of Omnis is because PowerBuilder outflanked, outplayed and outlasted Omnis almost everywhere I cared to look. "Today, PowerBuilder developers are at the very bottom of the list of in-demand application development and platform skills," according to the Computerworld article.
8. Certified NetWare Engineers: Back in 1994-1995 plotting my next move, I wanted the red-hot CNE certification. My company wouldn't pay for it, and neither would I. Instead, I went for an MBA.
9. PC network administrator: Another one of my earlier roles that I'm happy to have relinquished.
10: OS/2: I'm one of the few people in my cohort who's written a REXX script for OS/2. We used an OS/2 environment to host a PCAnywhere server for remote file access to a certain client, and there was a process we wanted to automate using the OS/2 scripting language.

It's a good thing my number-one language is English, which to my knowledge isn't going anywhere for a while. De mo, nen no tame ni, Nihongo mo benkyo-shiyo to omoimasu ga...

The Next Big Thing at Microsoft

2007-05-22T20:41:00.000-04:00

Here's a companion piece to my earlier post (Battle of the Clouds), in which I predict the direction of Microsoft's server business. Hint: it's in the same direction as Amazon's server business.

Link:
The Next Big Thing at Microsoft, posted at SmallBizResource.com

Arrivederci Vancouver

2007-05-19T02:13:00.000-04:00

I've been a regular visitor to the Greater Vancouver area for the past nine months, but next week it'll be time for me to head back East to re-enter the fray. And just when the weather's getting nicer, too.

Just wanted to say "Arrivederci" to all of the great people I've met in the blogging, web design and software development communities here in Vancouver. You've got a great thing going here, and I'm glad I was able to get a taste. I'll be back, and will try to time my visits around the fun stuff.

Ambitious travel schedule planned.... Do keep reading, and stay in touch!

Battle of the Clouds

2007-05-17T14:43:00.000-04:00

Eric Gales from Microsoft Canada spoke yesterday to the BCTIA and the IAMCP. During the Q&A, I asked him what the Microsoft answer would be to EC2. He coolly mentioned that they're building out huge server farms which aren't all meant for Hotmail users.

Let's flash back to the Vancouver PHP conference in February, where I asked Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr whether the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) could run Windows server instances.

Explanation of EC2

(You can skip to the next section if you already know what EC2 does)

You see, organizations need servers. Servers to serve up web pages, e-mail, video, you name it. The hard part is figuring out how many servers you require. In the old world, the safe bet has been to buy at least one server more than your expected peak capacity.

Think of a supermarket with 12 lanes at the checkout. Most times, only a few lanes are open. But the supermarket still has to own 12 cash registers, and maintain 12 conveyor belts and 12 inventory racks of chewing gum and gossip rags at each lane. If it's a high-traffic day and all of the lanes are backed up, the market doesn't have any options left but to keep things moving.

With "elastic" computing, it's much different. First, you figure out what kind of server you need, and then configure one of each. You save the "image" of each kind of server, and then just spawn instances as needed.

To continue the supermarket analogy, "elastic" checkout would mean that the market could add as many lanes as was necessary to get people through as quickly as possible, to meet whatever quality of service they wanted to meet. The market could have a separate lane for each customer. And then, after that person was finished, the lane would simply disappear.

On the Internet, this concept can be used to manage anything where the server is the bottleneck: serving up video, 3-D, data, you name it. With elasticity, small players can swing for the fences with new applications, with the knowledge that their ideas will scale globally using the cloud.

The Amazon/Microsoft Question

So back to my question: Can you put a Windows server on Amazon EC2? Sure, answered Jeff, and people have done it. However, the Microsoft server licenses weren't built for the cloud. When you buy a license for, say, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, you can install it on any processor you like. And if you want to put it on a virtual processor in the cloud, that's fine too. But if you want to create an image of SBS2003 and spawn multiple instances at will, you're out of bounds.

OK, if you can't put Microsoft servers in the cloud, what can you put in the cloud? The answer: Linux servers. The default Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) is a Linux server, which you're welcome to modify or replace with your own Linux instance, using whatever distribution you please.

How long do you think Microsoft will let open-source stand as the default option for cloud computing?

Get ready for the battle of the clouds.

Disclosure: I'm a member of the IAMCP doing business with Microsoft partners and customers. I'm also an Amazon affiliate.

Adobe CS3 Demo Notes

2007-05-16T18:43:00.000-04:00

Here are my reactions to the Adobe Creative Suite 3 tour, as posted on SmallBizResource.

Link:
Adobe CS3: Rise of the Multimedia Machines

Adobe CS3 Demo Day

2007-05-16T02:59:00.000-04:00

I attended a full-day demo of Adobe Creative Suite 3 today. Details to follow.

Just a couple of quick observations for now:

The program opened with a video montage of ordinary users talking about the promise of the Adobe-Macromedia merger.

Said one euphoric spokesperson,"Take the best of this one, the best of that one... when that happens, it only gets better for the consumer."

That's a novel theory. If true, this would completely upend economic theory, not to mention antitrust law. Someone should tell DaimlerChrysler.

Yes, CS3 will do much more than what was possible before using Adobe CS2 plus Macromedia Studio 8. It'll have tighter integration and greater functionality, and put common features under one roof. But what happened to the benefits of competition? Wouldn't it be better for web designers in the long run if there was true diversity in the world of content production tools?

One of the key benefits of the integrated suite is that the programs do a great job talking to one another. But wouldn't it be nice if the file formats were standardized as XML so that files from Photoshop, Illustrator or Flash could be consumed by any application that needed to do so?

Nah, probably won't happen.

Exodus Damage

2007-05-15T02:18:00.000-04:00

September 11th on your mind?

Forget the movies, and listen to this John Vanderslice song Exodus Damage (free MP3) from the album "Pixel Revolt." It's a message from one doomsdayer to another, with an amazing arrangement and a fatalistic worldview. Plus, you'll never think of Dance Dance Revolution the same way again.

Update: Check out this remix of the song.

Discovered via KEXP's absolutely essential Song of the Day.

Support musicians! Save Net Radio! Call or write your Congressional representative in support of The Internet Radio Equality Act (pdf).

The Unspoken 9/11 Approach

2007-05-15T01:47:00.000-04:00

Caryn James, film critic for The New York Times, points out a string of allusions to September 11th in recent films. Aside from the reenactment films ("World Trade Center," "United 93"), in "25th Hour," "Civic Duty," "Shooter," "Breach" and "Reign Over Me," James detects "an unspoken 9/11 approach, referring to the events without using the actual words," she writes.

Does the approach preclude commercial success?

It must be more than a coincidence that none of them, not even commercial movies like “Breach” and “Shooter,” were big hits. Works that take an unspoken approach to 9/11 assume that no one needs to be reminded of what happened; that ignores the possibility that maybe no one wants to.

Maybe the filmmakers have been willing to sacrifice some measure of commercial potential in order to express themselves on the topic. Or maybe the scripts as originally written were defanged and neutered during the production process, turning the films' messages into dim shadows of what they might have been. Great scripts may have became merely competent movies.

But if you wrap the unspoken 9/11 approach in the existing mythology of a popular comic book character, box-office records are still within the realm of possibility.

Link:
No One Says ‘9/11.’ No One Needs To. (NYTimes)

Earlier posts:
Spider-Man 3 and September 11th
Columnist Detects 9/11 Connection in Spider-Man 3

From the archives:
Review of "25th Hour" for Bank Systems & Technology, May 2003 issue

Columnist Detects 9/11 Connection in Spider-Man 3

2007-05-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

Huffington Post blogger Steve Rosenbaum writes:

Now, maybe its just me, or maybe its the fact that I was close enough to the attacks to have it burned into my brain -- but as the Sandman attacks the city, and knocks a huge construction crane off it's base -- i found myself stunned. Images of a New York skyscraper with a gash in its side, with people hanging on for dear life... then slowly sliding out of the buildings now crippled facade. The dreadful slow-motion fall of one of the film's damsels in distress. Of courses, in the movie, Spiderman swings in at the last minute and breaks her fall -- a fairy tale ending. But in real life, there was no such superhero. And for New York, images of burning buildings and falling bodies are far too real to be left to the realm of entertainment.

He concludes by advocating greater sensitivity by Hollywood filmmakers on images that inadvertently mirror 9/11.

I also noted the 9/11 imagery and the Marvel Comics treatment of 9/11 in its 2001 comics, and outlined a disturbing allegorical reading of the film that would suggest the imagery is far from inadvertent.

Peeling bananas

2007-05-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Seth Godin writes that "it's a lot easier to peel a banana if you start from the 'wrong' end."

I try it, and he's right!

Scooter was unimpressed and even a bit concerned:

"What, were you having trouble peeling bananas?"

Super Happy (Grow-Op) Dev House

2007-05-12T02:30:00.000-04:00

I've commandered Boris Mann's office to write this at the Super Happy Grow-Op Dev House (an idea born in San Francisco Super Happy Dev House) here at Bryght Headquarters in Vancouver. I know it's Boris's office because his Northern Voice badge is on the table, as is a post-it note that says, "BORIS, YOU ARE THE SEXIEST DRUPAL BITCH EVER! - JOHN BOLLWITT." We'll get to Boris later in the post.

I found out about the event by bumping into Luke Closs from Socialtext on the plane back from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The basic idea of the SH(GO)DH, scheduled from 1pm to 1am today (a Friday), was to invite the hacker elite of Vancouver to a single space to work on stuff together, while scarfing down a few pizzas and a keg of beer. And wouldn't you know it, people were actually working on stuff.

I showed up at the event with my laptop, but figured that the best way to do something productive was to keep the laptop holstered and take out the pen and paper to do some old-fashioned reporting.

The Bryght offices in Vancouver's Gastown feature a long workbench-style desk where about 24 people at a time can plug in. On the other side of the open-plan office, there's the NowPublic offices, with a similar arrangement. Along the wall, there are a few private offices, including the one I commandeered to do my writing. I'm so past open-plan workspaces. Unless there's a nice paycheck with benefits attached to it.

Anyway, I walked up and down the workbench, asking people what on earth they were doing here. After all, there was a keg of beer and a few hot dogs upstairs, and so it had to be something pretty compelling to get people to work at a communal social event.

Here's what I found:

A developer building a GUI test harness using Flapjax. Remind me to Google "test harness."
Luke figured out a way to store information from unit testing on a wiki. Every time I talk to Luke, he's figured out a way to put something new on a wiki. Luke loves wikis, let's face it.
Chris Simmons refactoring a UI.

Now, in my day-to-day existence, someone refactoring an UI would get a nod of fake comprehension. But today, I just had to ask, "what's refactoring?" And I'm glad I did. I got a good lesson on the concept of extreme programming.

It's a three-stage process: RED-GREEN-REFACTOR.
1) RED - Write unit tests. This is basically a list of the things that a program has to do before it's complete.
2) GREEN - Write a program that passes the unit tests.
3) REFACTOR - Rewrite the program using better programming practices.

We kept talking, and I learned something else. There's a programming language called Haskell, a "functional" programming language that basically takes a mathematical proof and turns it into a line of computer code with a minimum of fuss. For someone like Chris with a math background, that's good stuff. For me, I'd need to hack through an entire page of code to accomplish the same thing.
Roland Tanglao from Bryght was trying to put a Python compiler on his Nokia N93, which would let him hack a way to get the camera to do something that it originally wasn't built to do. We'll call it "Snakes on a Phone."
A French blogger and web designer demonstrated how he develops web sites. Not with Dreamweaver or anything like that. He relies on a Firefox plug-in called Firebug, a Mac program called TextMate, and that's it. We also talked politics given the recent election of Sarkozy.
People taking pictures of each other for the inevitable Flickr stream.
A blogger encouraging Vancouverites to spend locally.
A developer studying at SFU was helping the above blogger to build a Drupal site. He's also involved in the "Google Summer of Code," with the intention of writing a Drupal module to allow people who run Drupal sites to get a sense of which Drupal modules are burning up the most bandwidth and processing time through the use of automated test cases. Very meta. We also talked about Plone, which he said requires a lot of overhead. Then, I asked about the difference between Ruby and Python. He said that Ruby on Rails was popular because for many developers, it was their first framework. But that doesn't mean it's the best. However, it also has more "scaffolding" to minimizes code during initial development. Django, which is based on Python, and which I mentioned in a previous post, can do a lot of the same stuff, but it's still prior to the 1.0 release and it needs a bit more scaffolding. (Don't you wish you were there?)
I went upstairs for some more beer, and ran into Mack Hardy and Boris Mann (whose office I am currently pilfering) working the grill. Mack (from affinitybridge.com) talked about OG2List, a Drupal plug-in which clones the functionality of Yahoo! Groups. We then talked about the desirability of running your group on your own site, rather than on a commercial site like Yahoo! that's going to spam your membership, place ads in-between messages, and who knows what else they have buried in those terms of service. And then I had a long talk with Boris, who preached the Drupal gospel like I've never heard it before. He has a nice office but not a lot of good stuff to pilfer, as it turns out, short of his car keys.
I met a coterie of Vancouver's finest bloggers, including Retrocactus, Miss604 and John Bollwitt. We talked about the benefits of blogging. For instance, do you put yourself out there in a blog, knowing that potential employers might read it? Well, in Miss604's case, she was hired as a result of her skill as a blogger. Bottom line: You have to be yourself, and if someone doesn't get it, you probably don't want to work there. Then, we talked about how the traditional formula for public speaking ("Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em) translates perfectly to blogging. You can do one post before you're going to do something, one post about what you did, and then another one later to say, "hey, look what I wrote." Three-for-one.
I spoke with someone from the Committee for Open Source Technology and Applications Research at Simon Fraser, about applications that allow people to work on the same document (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet document) at the same time. We also talked about the state-of-the-art online apps, and he said that they're not yet good enough to replace your desktop apps. That'll make my next article for SmallBizResource a little easier.
Dustin Sacks hooked me up with his Risk-like board game, Lux, which is going to be an AWESOME timewaster. We talked about the good old days of Risk on the Mac, including the challenge of beating a whole world of neutral players, or any of my high school friends who were foolish enough to challenge my global dominance.
Ifky from Freegeek, wearing her radioactive-chartreuse safety glasses, gave me the full Freegeek reuse pitch. They take your old computers and either redeploy them in the field, or take them apart in an environmentally-friendly manner. And if you contribute 24 hours of work to the organization, they'll give you a free Pentium 3-era computer! Whether you're a potential contributor of your time or your old computers, check them out! And if there's no Freegeek near you, start your own!

And that's my report.

Spider-Man 3 and September 11th

2007-05-11T03:54:00.001-04:00

Everyone cries in Spider-Man 3. The good guys, the bad guys, the bad guys with good intentions, you name it. Scooter remarked, "this movie was weepier than Beaches."

And I shed a tear as well.

It was during an early scene, with student/model/daughter-of-the-police-chief Gwen Stacy falling out of a skyscraper. The scene evoked the memory etched into the cerebral cortex of every New Yorker, that of 9/11. People jumping to their deaths from the burning towers. No superheroes catching people on the way down, just ordinary heroes on the way up to rescue ordinary people.

As documented on the comics page at The Authentic History Center, in the December 2001 edition of The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel imagined how Spider-Man would have reacted at the scene of the attack. Spider-Man surveys the burning wreckage, thinking: "Some things are beyond words. Beyond comprehension. Beyond forgiveness."

However, in the 2007 film, the act of forgiveness drives the entire narrative. The traditional dichotomy between superhero and supervillain was swept aside in favor of a simple test: Do you forgive? Take away the costumes and the fancy graphics, and you have a medieval morality play.

Most morality plays have a protagonist who represents either humanity as a whole (Everyman) or an entire social class (as in Magnificence). Antagonists and supporting characters are not individuals per se, but rather personifications of abstract virtues or vices, especially the Seven deadly sins.
Morality plays were typically written in the vernacular, so as to be more accessible to the common people who watched them. Most can be performed in under ninety minutes. (That was before computer graphics -I.)
-Wikipedia

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

In the end, most of the main characters have a good cry, forgive one another and hug it out.

Spider-Man fights the aggrieved Sandman, a shifting pile of sand impervious to brute force, able to regroup even after grievous injury, and able to transform from an amorphous shape to a hammering attacker at will.

I've seen this movie before, and it's on CNN every night.

Peter's wealthy childhood friend Harry Osborn is gregarious, openhearted and loyal when he forgets himself, but turns into a brooding, melancholy, reclusive, misanthropic goblin when driven by his obligations to his deceased father. Spider-Man was able to convince Harry to abandon his father's stern dictates, embrace the doctrine of forgiveness, and sacrifice everything for his friends during the climactic battle against the combined forces of sand and darkness. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but is Osborn a Jewish name? Aren't the Jewish people supposed to play a big role in the eschatalogical narrative of the Left Behind crowd? I almost expected that director Sam Raimi would give Willem Dafoe a long beard and two stone tablets. My semite-senses are tingling, big-time.

As for darkness, Peter Parker's rival in the black spidey-suit refuses to forgive and perishes in flames, an Inquisitorial auto da fé. Embrace forgiveness or die.

How does it all end?

Only through forgiveness and confession does Spider-Man come to terms with the Sandman, who leaves on his own accord with mutual understanding.

In the closing shot of the climactic battle scene, from one of the upper floors of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, the camera faces south towards the Empire State Building and then zooms to the early-morning sky where once stood two tall towers.

In the Marvel Universe, nothing's beyond forgiveness anymore, except those who will not forgive.

[Update1: Edited for clarity]

Frameworks, frameworks.

2007-05-10T03:18:00.000-04:00

Went to the Vancouver Software Development Meetup on Tuesday night for a presentation about Plone, a content management and workflow framework. I won't be installing it anytime soon on my shared web host (it's outside the capability of my current plan), but it's was definitely worthwhile to see what it does.

OK, and it was cool to win one of the door prizes, Python in a Nutshell.

Now I can follow up on a presentation by Adrian Holovaty at WebDirections North about Django, which is also built on Python, and is also a framework.

In her blog, Molly.com asks "what's a framework?"

Good question. I'm not going to try to give the Wikipedia answer, but I know one when I see it.

Hey, here's one! A blog is a framework. Without programming, I can create a new web page, while updating all of the related pages for monthly indexes and keyword pages, plus the search index. All other frameworks are just extensions of the same idea.

I've been spending a bit of time lately testing out various Linux distributions for an upcoming SmallBizResource article. Since there aren't nearly enough Linux distributions in the world, somebody should write a framework for creating new Linux distributions.

Hmm....

Blog needs work

2007-05-07T04:43:00.000-04:00

I'm really happy to have a daily outlet for writing in public. But I also recognize that the ivantohelpyou blog isn't the ultimate destination in blogdom. After a few months of blogging and regularly reading blogs, I'm starting to think that the best ones are those written by people who have jobs outside of the technology or publishing industries.

For instance, soldiers in Iraq have great blogs, and while we're at war, every American with an account at Google Reader should subscribe to at least one, such as The Sandbox at Slate.

Miss Snark, literary agent (which is a publishing job but I'll give her props anyway), recommends Clublife, a blog written by a bouncer.

And after you've had a run-in with a bouncer, maybe you need a nurse blog from the blogroll at code blog. Or try searching for firefighter blogs, police officer blogs (very big in the U.K. it seems) or blogs by anyone who's not sitting behind a desk. Bike messenger, even.

It has become so easy to insulate ourselves from anything but the news and media we choose to consume, surrounding ourselves with perspectives reflecting our own. As we rely less upon the mainstream media, we can no longer blame them for doing an imperfect job in defining and filtering our relationship with the world around us. If we replace the editorial voice of major newspapers with the self-selected voices of the people most similar to ourselves, we're bound to miss out on something important. That would be a shame, especially since blogs have given us an unprecedented opportunity to understand one another.

So, go out there and subscribe to the blogs of good storytellers, no matter what they do or where they do it.

Japanese Refresher

2007-05-05T16:23:00.001-04:00

Last week, I picked up Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text by Giles Murray.

It's a very clever idea: take public-domain works written in Japanese from Aozora, run them through Jim Breen's Japanese-English dictionary server, create an impeccable translation, and hire an actor to perform a reading for digital audio. Package the collection and sell as an easy-to-carry paperback – no need to carry word lists or dictionaries (paper or electronic). Just take along the book and an MP3 player with the spoken word.

At the Cornell FALCON program, we were taught that reading actual texts was by far the best way to learn the written language. Flashcards may be useful for passing tests, but it's hard to sustain interest in a pile of flashcards.

Nevertheless, I recently discovered japanese-kanji.com, and decided to get a sense of how much I know after about 10 years of having the Japanese language as a sporadic hobby, and eight years after FALCON.

The chart at right shows my results, with the characters (in traditional order) along the x-axis, and the comprehension level on the y-axis.

Note that each character has two readings: "on" (from the Chinese root) and "kun" (native Japanese pronounciation).

Despite atrophy from lack of use, I have a solid grasp on the first 400 kanji or so, although there are some for which I don't know the relatively obscure on/kun readings. For the next two hundred kanji, I know most of them well. After that? Not so good. While I know many of the more difficult characters in context from reading actual texts, I wasn't so good at picking them out of a lineup.

I'm not going to radically change approaches at this point, but it's good to have a method to periodically benchmark my progress.

Melancholy Elephants

2007-05-04T19:37:00.001-04:00

As a student of the literature, culture and language of Japan, I humbly request that any readers of this blog who are citizens of Japan sign the Aozora petition, which seeks to block the proposed extension of the term of copyright protection from 50 to 70 years.

Personally, I'd like to read some more contemporary works in my lifetime, and their availability in digital form makes it feasible for me to use automated translation programs to aid in my studies. Keeping contemporary works from the mid-1950s onwards in paper-only form raises the barrier to comprehension by requiring hands-on, line-by-line translation at a higher level than I currently possess. The availability of a modern corpus of Japanese literature in digital form would do more to promote the Japanese language abroad than any other initiative I can imagine.

Furthermore, retaining the upper limit of a 50-year copyright in Japan may also spur creativity and innovation by Japanese artists that could demonstrate to U.S. policymakers the benefit of moving away from the ill-considered concept of perpetual copyright.

As a U.S. citizen, I will do my part to support candidates and officeholders who recognize the value of allowing cultural artifacts to enter the public domain for free, unfettered use.

And for a story about what may happen if we take copyright to the extreme, read Melancholy Elephants (1983) by Spider Robinson, freely available at the author's web site.