Archive for October, 2006
Keith Olberman started out as a sportscaster, but has turned into a new Edward Murrow.
Check it out:
We have lived… as people in fear.
And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
October 22nd, 2006
Today: mainly spent watching SuperOffice 6 and IBM iSeries OS 5.4 fail to get on with each other. At least it appears to fail consistently, but only the gods of SQL know why. The SuperOffice diagnostics aren’t detailed enough to make a useful determination of the error. Oh - let’s be honest: problems during the initial dictionary loading are misleading at best. Of course, DB2 doesn’t help by offering such gems as PWS0043 “Unable to use the parameter marker values provided.” and SQL4013 “Access plan has not been built”.
This code was all working last week on AS/400 OS 5.3 - so I’m inclined to waggle a finger in its direction, but it would be helpful if it would tell us something more useful (such as the fact that it’s security model has changed, or that IBM’s decided that iSeries SQL is all lower-case this month, or the fact that the login failed due to the wrong phase of the moon). The bigger problem is that the login failure might be lost reported by DB/2, but not logged anywhere due to some old error handling code deep in the guts of our database handling logic.
Argh - frustrating for everyone.
Tonight: triple Arran whisky and the latest Spooks hot off bittorrent. (Spooks has returned to its roots - the current episode’s embassy hostage situation is a nice echo of the first season’s episode, but this time with more deaths, gunfire, and an extra dash of intrigue and double-cross).
Arran whisky: creamy, vanilla, delicious. Go get some for yourself.
Spooks: delightfully sadistic, violent, delicious. Go watch some now..
October 19th, 2006
Jonathan Grudin discusses blogs and knowledge-management issues we face today. E.mail was in the same situation in 1984 that instant messaging is in today. Blogs and tags along with clever cluster analysis offer some hope of a bottom-up solution to KM issues.
October 18th, 2006
The keynote was academic and based on a false dichotomy between the “second and third wave” of HCI.
The papers are academic and narrowly focused - but they mostly have practical results and some even have metrics to back up their arguments.
The design and industrial reports are more applicable, but don’t have the same rigor as the academic papers.
The organizers have done a great job - most of the talks have gone off without a hitch, and the reception with the Mayor last night was a treat.
October 17th, 2006
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Arguing about how much mobile phone user experience sucks with designers from Sony-Ericsson is fun. Good ux is hard to get right, especially when the user is trying to do several things at once.
October 14th, 2006
SuperOffice makes a nice client.
SuperOffice also makes a set of programming APIs available to its partners. My job is to make sure that the hundreds of functions in the API have a bit of documentation and sensible explanations, so that our partners can figure out how to make SuperOffice do things.
This turns out to be harder than you might expect.
- Some partners are experts who want to know about very complex details in every part of the system.
- Some partners are more interested in joining SuperOffice and other systems together as fast as possible, and don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do it.
- Lastly, we have consultants who just want to add a bit of extra info to SuperOffice without having to do much (if any) programming to get results.
All these audiences need to find something useful in the API documentation, without being confused by what the others need.
To make life more interesting, the technology we provide is accessible in several different ways:
- old-fashioned COM APIs are very popular and by now well understood.
- the old-fashioned COM APIs can be imported into the new .net/C# world.
- SuperOffice have developed a whole suite of new tools for the .net/C# developer, the integration programmer, and the hurried consultant who doesn’t want to program too much.
So I spending a bit of time making sure that we write an explanation once, in one place, and having the results end up in several different places in the documentation as appropriate to the reader. The results are looking great.
October 10th, 2006
