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Friday, May 02 2008
I can get behind this:
…that was then, and this is now. There are quite a number of really good CMS systems (both open source and proprietary – I’d say there are a good solid dozen) that have large user bases, many developers and vendors who implement them, and their are lots of new modules and functionality being added every day. There is absolutely no way that one single web development shop can provide a CMS solution that is better in quality or functionality than what is available out there right now.
more here.
Tags: content management ~ software
Your victory dance is a sign of failure
Friday, November 02 2007
Every now and then, having wrestled with some particularly annoying problem and won, I do a victory dance, in the manner of Snoopy.
Having figured out a trivial but time-consuming problem with Alfresco configuration files, I was in mid-cavort when colleague Christine pointed out that in a better world, there would be no victory dance, because things would Just Work.
This is true. If your software makes me do a victory dance, it’s bad.
Tags: software ~ usabilityThe most depressingly true thing I read today
Tuesday, October 30 2007
This post from Reginald Braithwaite sums up everything I always suspected was wrong with software project management. (It also has cautionary observations about startups that aren’t quite so universal).
…We have a really simple way of completing successful software projects: we put successful people on them. But we have a broken way of thinking about it: we don’t like to think of the people as being special, we think that what the people do is successful.
And by that logic, we can take anyone, have them do the same things as successful people, and our projects will succeed.
In a manager’s mind, the measure of whether information is good or not is, Does it measure whether people are doing the same things that successful people have done on projects I’ve been told were successful?
This is not the same thing as measuring whether the project is on its way to success at all. This measures the outward appearance of a project. Things that can be measured easily are rarely the most significant things. Behaviours that can be “gamed,” like how many hours a team is working, will be gamed.
And as above, even if a manger knows better, does her manager know better? If not, good information will be difficult to sell and she will be under a lot of pressure to serve Lemon Pie.
Off balance sheet transactions
There’s another important reason that projects have bad information: the best information is off balance sheet. That’s an expression meaning something a businessperson sweeps under the rug. Try Googling Off Balance Sheet Transaction. It’s never pretty.
In essence, project plans and reports never include the most important information about the likelihood of project success. Never. (I mean never in the same sense that Joel Spolsky means “nobody,” as in “fewer than 10,000,000 project plans”)…
Tags: software ~ management ~ linky
Thursday, October 11 2007
My colleague Christine just emitted this gem:
“Layers of cake are better than layers of abstraction.”
Indeed.
Tags: software ~ programmingThursday, September 27 2007
I have whipped up a script that imports all the content from vital.org.nz into burble.
I wasn’t really planning on migrating that site over. Burble was meant to be a platform for some other things I’m cooking up, not a replacement for Blosxom. I just wanted to feel confident that burble would work well with a reasonable volume of entries and comments — and it does. Well enough that I’m wondering if maybe I shouldn’t go the whole hog and run everything on burble. That’d be kind of cool.
I’ve also fixed a little problem with Etags.
This is what my to-do list looks like for Burble:
Write query to retrieve posts by tag
refactor sql methods in model to do substitution and avoid SQL injection properly (see http://initd.org/pub/software/pysqlite/doc/usage-guide.html#executing-sql-statements )
Write template and handler for posts by tag
OpenQuestions
ComponentisedTemplates
Write query to retrieve posts by date
Write template and handler for posts by date
Refactor response so we can redirect
Write comment functionality:
– get sessions working
– design CommentProcessFlow
– design CommentDataAttributes
– write CommentAndCommentDAO
– merge CommentController and SingleEntryController (GET and POST)
– write CommentFormTemplate
– investigate turning forms into Entries.
– implement CommentProcessFlow
– implement AntiSpam
– retrieve comment count for entries
– hyperlink comment author names
– make anchors for comments
– we shouldn’t allow comments on nonexistent ids
– clean up session after comment post.
EtagManagementAsADecorator?
ArchiveCalendarWidget
TagCloudWidget
AdminAuthenticationDecorator
AdminConsole
BlogRollWidget
Tags should be able to have spaces
RecentCommentWidget
NonBlogPages
RSSFeed
implement TitleController
SetupOnTextdrive
Move methods out of model.EntryDAO into services
ImportOldContent from vital.org.nz
CachingStrategy
You can see there isn’t much left to do.
Tags: burble ~ softwareTuesday, September 25 2007
This story is both amazing and unsurprising.
…TVNZ said it had found “voting irregularities” in the ballots cast by members of the public.
Voting had closed for the competition, but during the routine check of the emailed ballots, it was found some had come from invalid email addresses, or without the authorisation of the owners of the email addresses.As a result, TVNZ had to invalidate the vote, and start again with a fresh system.
It’s amazing that TVNZ would go with a simple vote via email. Someone in the organisation must know that you cannot, over the normal internet infrastructure, rely on an email being from its ostensible sender. Don’t they get spam at TVNZ?
It’s unsurprising that people would game such a wide-open system, when the prize is worthwhile.
Details of the false emails have been referred to the police.
If I were accused of vote fraud in this competition, my first defence would be that no one could be expected to take such a stupid system seriously.
Now, how would I do it? Set up a website that sends a message to the user asking them to confirm their vote by pointing their web browser at a URL with a unique code. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Far, far harder to defraud, and surely cheaper and less annoying to users than rejigging the competition and engaging someone to set up a txt-based service.
Tags: email ~ tvnz ~ bad design ~ softwareRendered at 2010-08-01 22:32:51