Technology - 10. page

That bastion of free trade economics and British pithy humor has an article about corporate blogging: Face Value. It focuses on Scoble and Microsoft, but also mentions other bloggers, including Jonathan Schwarz.

There’s defintely a fine line between blogging and revealing company secrets. Mark Jen certainly found that out. The quick, informal, personal nature of blogging, combined with its worldwide reach and googles cache, mean that it poses a new challenge to corporations who want to be ‘on message’.

It also exposes a new risk for employees and contractors. I blog about all kinds of technologies, including some that I’m paid to use. At what point does the knowledge I gain from a client’s project become mine, so that I can post about it? Or does it ever? (Obviously, trade secrets are off limits, but if I discover a better way to use Spring or a solution for a common struts exception, where’s the line?) Those required NDAs can be quite chilling to freedom of expression and I have at least one friend who has essentially stopped blogging due to the precarious nature of his work.

I just discovered database links in Oracle. This is a very cool feature which essentially allows you to (nearly) transparently pull data from one Oracle database to another. Combined with a view, you can have a read only copy of production data, real time, without giving a user access to the production database directly.

Along with the above link, section 29 of the Database Administrator’s Guide, Managing a Distributed Database, is useful. But I think you need an OTN account to view that link.

ITConversations is a great resource for audio conversations about technology. Doug Kaye, the owner/manager/executive assistant of IT Conversations, started a wiki conversation last month about that constant bugbear of all websites with free content: funding. Now, when you use 4.2 terrabytes a month of bandwidth, that problem is more intense than average; the conversation is still a worthwhile read for anyone trying to monetize their weblog or open content source.

Like many folks, I’ve grown to depend on instant messaging (IM–it’s also a verb, to IM is to ‘instant message’), in the workplace. It’s a fantastic technology, but two years ago, I turned up my nose at it. (Of course, 5 years ago, in a similar manner, I turned up my nose at a cell phone, and now I wouldn’t be caught dead without it, so perhaps I’m not the best prognosticator.) What can it possibly offer that email can’t? I’m going to examine it from the perspective of a software developer, since that’s what I know; from that perspective, there are two main benefits IM offers that email doesn’t, timeliness and presence:

I didn’t think it was possible, but email can be too formal at times. When you have a question that needs to be answered right away or it becomes superfluous, IM is perfect. If it’s a question about consistency of API or an area that you know the recipient knows much better than you, sometimes 30 seconds of their time can be worth 15 minutes of yours. Of course, there’s a judgment call to be made; if you’re constantly IMing questions about the API of java.lang.String, you risk breaking up the answerer’s flow. However, used in moderation, it can greatly increase the communication between team members, especially when it’s a distributed team.

Presence is also a huge benefit of most IM software. This means that you have a list of ‘buddies’ that the IM software monitors for you. When each signs on or signs off, you’re made aware of that fact. This means that you can tell whether it’s worthwhile calling someone with a deeper question, or if you should just compose an email. The technical details of presence are being codified at the IETF and I foresee this becoming more and more useful, because it’s a non intrusive way for folks to manage their availability. It fulfills some of the same functions as a ‘door closed/door opened’ policy in an office, extending worldwide.

I use Yahoo IM because it fits my needs. Russell Beattie has recently written an overview of the main competitors and their clients, but technical geegaws like integration with music really don’t matter all that much to me. Much more important are:

1. Does everyone I need to talk to have an account? How easy is it for them to get an account?

2. Does it have message archiving? How searchable are such archives?

3. How stable is the client?

That’s about all I considered. I guess I let my contrarian streak speak too–I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, so I shyed away from Windows Messenger. There are some nice additional features, however. The ability to have a chat session, so that you can IM to more than one person at once, a la IRC, is nice. Grouping your buddies is great–each company I’ve consulted/contracted for has their own group in my IM client. I just discovered these instructions to put presence information on a web page. Combined with Maven and its intranet, or just put on any intranet page, this could be a useful tool for developers.

(I just read the Terms of Service for Yahoo, and I didn’t see any prohibitions on commercial use of Yahoo Messenger; however, there are a couple of interesting clauses that anyone using it should be aware of. In section 3, I found out that Yahoo can terminate your account if your information is not kept up to date (not really enforceable, eh?). And in section 16, “[y]ou agree not to access the Service by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Yahoo! for use in accessing the Service.” I wonder if that prohibits Trillian?)

One issue I have with the Yahoo client is the way status works. Presence is not a binary concept (there/not there); rather, it is broken down into various statuses–(not there/available/busy/out to lunch…). What I find myself doing is being very conscientious about changing my status from available to unavailable. However, I rarely remember to change back, which degrades the usefulness of the presence information. (If you have to ping someone over IM to see if they’re actually there, it means you might as well not have status information at all.) I spent some time browsing the preferences of Yahoo’s client, as well as googling, but didn’t find any way to have the client pop up a message the first time I IM someone when my status is not available.

IM is very useful, and I can’t imagine working without it now. I don’t know what I’m going to do when Yahoo starts charging for it.

I’ve tried to avoid self-referential blogging, if only becuase I’m not huge into navel staring. But, I just ran across an interesting blog: Wendyopolis, which is apparently associated with a Canadian magazine. Now, according to google, blogs are defined as:

“A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominently.”

(From the Glossary of Internet Terms)

However, I’d argue that there are several fundamental characteristics of a blog:

1. Date oriented format–“most recent additions featured most prominently.”
2. Informal, or less formal, writing style.
3. Personal voice–a reader can associate a blog with a person or persons.
4. Syndicatability–the author(s) provide RSS or Atom feeds. The feeds may be crippled in some way, but they are available.
5. Permalinks–postings are always available via an unchanging URL.

I can’t really think of any other salient characteristics. But the reason for this post is that Wendyopolis, which looks to be a very interesting weblog, doesn’t have #4. In some ways, that’s the most important feature, because it allows me to pull content of interest to one location, rather than visit sites.

I’ve written about this before, so I won’t beat a dead horse. Suffice it to say that, while Wendyopolis may speak to me right now, the chances of me ever visiting that blog ever again are nil, because of the lack of syndication. Sad, really.

I remember the first time I looked at Simple DocBook. I have always enjoyed compiling my writing–I wrote my senior thesis using LaTeX. When I found DocBook, I was hooked–it was easier to use and understand than any of the TeX derivatives, and the Simplified grammar had just what I needed for technical documentation. I used it to write my JAAS article.

But, I remember it being a huge hassle to set up. You had to download openjade, compile it on some systems, set up some environment variables, point to certain configuration files and in general do quite a bit of fiddling. I grew so exasperated that I didn’t even setup the XML to PDF conversion, just the XML to HTML.

Well, I went back a few weeks ago, and found things had improved greatly. With the help of this document explaining how to set DocBook up on Windows (updated 12/2/2006 to fix a broken link) I was able to generate PDF and HTML files quickly. In fact, with the DocBook XSL transformations and the power of FOP, turning a Simplified DocBook article into a snazzy looking PDF file is as simple as this (stolen from here):


java -cp "C:\Programs\java\fop.jar; \
C:\Programs\java\batik.jar;C:\Programs\java\jimi-1.0.jar; \
C:\Programs\java\xalan.jar; C:\Programs\java\xerces.jar; \
C:\Programs\java\logkit-1.0b4.jar;C:\Programs\java\avalon-framework-4.0.jar" \org.apache.fop.apps.Fop -xsl \ "C:\user\default\xml\stylesheets\docbook-xsl-1.45\fo\docbook.xsl" \ -xml test.xml -pdf test.pdf


Wrap that up in a shell script, and you have a javac for dcuments.