My profile URL [profiles.google.com/kominetz] now redirects to plus.google.com/{ugly-long-id}. I’m not sure I like the implication of this, because I use my profile for OpenID, and I’d like to use it as a homepage that links to everything so I can just tell people “go there, and you’ll find me anywhere I am on the Internet.” That URL going away would make me rather unhappy.

Buzz is still a tab there, but it seems totally disconnected from Google+. It might be good to have some separation between Buzz and Posts because they post/notification frequency on Buzz can be pretty high on a Google Reader catch-up day, but Buzz feels too disconnected–and somewhat redundant. Also, oddly, there’s no RSS feed on the Buzz, tab but there is on the Posts tab. I don’t pay attention to things on the web that don’t have feeds.

Finally, I just noticed that the would-have-been convenient “Send an Email” button on my profiles/plus page only works if I’m signed into another Google account. That’s probably a spam avoidance tactic, but it’s still a let-down since I was hoping to use it as my About/Contact page that doesn’t expose my email address.

Reposted manually from Google+ since it can’t do that …

I’ve been clamoring for something better than the mouse for more than a decade. My ideal interface would unite action with result to eliminate the perceptual disconnect between moving my hand in one place and seeing the result in another. The iPhone was the first thing in all that time to feel like a real breakthrough along those lines, and I think there’s much personal computer interfaces can learn from touch on phones and tablets. That doesn’t mean copy them verbatim and proclaim previous paradigms completely invalid.

The second half of Erick Schonfeld’s TechCrunch article on Windows 8 [Windows 8 Is Gorgeous, But Is It More Than Just A Shell?] claims the mouse is dead. I beg to differ. Touch interfaces like this have their uses, but they also have limitations because they are content consumption oriented.  It’s not that we’re living in a post-mouse era: we’re living in a post-one-size-fits-all era, i.e., the Windows Everywhere Era.  Touch interfaces will not obliterate mice and trackpads for the following reasons.

IMPRECISION: The finger is an imprecise pointing device when pixels matter.  Although I don’t have fat fingers, it’s rather difficult for me to finger a single pixel on a good monitor with 100 pixels per inch–let alone the Retina Display’s 326 PPI. You can select an image that way, but you can’t draw one.  It’s not just being more precise; pointing devices can transform imprecise hand movements into a variety of precision levels on screen. I love mice that let me dial up the resolution for fine work or dial it down when flailing around in a game.

OBSTRUCTION: With touch interfaces, fingers block sight of a substantial number of pixels during touch activities, interfering with the realization of a realtime respond-where-you-act interface like touch. That’s not an issue when tapping a built-big tile to select something but it’s a big problem for precision movement or tracking.

INEFFICIENCY: Sometimes editing text requires switching between mouse and keyboard despite a keyboard jockey’s mastery of keyboard shortcuts. Current pointing devices live within the same range of motion as the keyboard so it’s a small, less disruptive gesture. Now imagine reaching from keyboard to the screen to drag-select or reposition a cursor; the gods of time-and-motion studies will not be pleased. Maybe laptops would fare better than desktops with Windows 8, but it also might add to the ergonomic train wreck they’ve become.

SMUDGINESS: People touching monitors is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’m a little more smudge tolerant with my iPhone, but I can’t imagine what my monitor would look like after just one working lunch on Windows 8. Just thinking about this makes me want to rush into the bathroom and wash my hands.

Touch technologies have existed for decades, and I think that the iPhone APIs ushered in this new era, not the hardware. Apple created a toolset to help developers deal with the strengths and weaknesses of touch that also provided a consistent experience for users across applications. Mac OS X Lion appears to learn from touch interfaces, not emulate them. Apple realizes that they need operating systems that match the devices they run on, perhaps a wisdom only earned by making both software and hardware. Microsoft should think very carefully about repeating their habitual strategic blunder of trying to make a one-size-fits-all Windows.

However, I’ve been coming around to V.’s way of thinking about ads in new media lately. I don’t mind as much because ads are at least loosely targeted to the topic-specific sites I frequent; sometimes I’m even grateful when I encounter something previously unknown and personally applicable.  That happens more when I’m willing to make Google privy to my electronic life or tell Hulu when ads are relevant. Old media pushes me further away while new media draws me into its less-adflated, more-relevant open arms.

So I came home from a MarkLogic event at The Palomar–ready to blog about some things they get that EMC is just starting to grasp–to find a new comment on an old post about the iPhone Clock app.  It was an ad (no surprise) but it was perfectly relevant to the post and even got me into iTunes to download the app (big surprise).  A few more things like this might even get cynical me to stop cringing whenever I see “please moderate” in my inbox.

The reward for that relevance is an extra plug.  I haven’t tried the app yet since there’s nothing to time at the moment, but I encourage you to take a look:

So, please do check out http://www.elapsedapp.com – you’ll find it to be a significant upgrade from the default Clock app. Oh, one last thing… its FREE!

I’ve fantasized for years about replacing dm_sysobject with something light weight and implementing things like folder location and versioning as interfaces applied to that type as needed. Pie might not have had hair pulling to do if dm_folder wasn’t bringing along all of dm_sysobject’s baggage.  It’s another example of the junk DNA rife through Documentum’s API and schema.

Documentum did add lightweight objects a few years ago, but they fell far short of my fantasy.  They turned out to be a hack to deal with bulk object creation instead of a fundamental refactoring of the object schema. I wasn’t surprised; implementing something like my fantasy would be an upgrade/compatibility nightmare; every single sysobject would have to be folded, spindled, and mutilated in the process. Just the database part of that upgrade could take days on big docbases, and those upgrades could fail in spectacular ways noticeable only long after the fact. Oh well.

It’s a lesson to inform the creators of new systems like Documentum. Of course there are scaling problems at the database level if those interface abstractions result in lots of separate tables and joins at the concrete level assuming a relational database infrastructure. I think that’s still a safe assumption since object databases haven’t gotten that much better and NoSQL databases don’t seem to be a good fit to this problem space on first blush. I wonder: Did Alfresco learn any of these lessons? Maybe I’ll go take a look under its hood and see.

Related:

• The Cake Folder is a Lie
• DFC has Junk (DNA) in the Trunk

Other languages have always had separate commands to display strings with or without newlines at the end.  Embedding escape codes like \n or using Perl’s smarts around concatenating and contextualizing work fine, so a separate command isn’t necessary like in some of those other languages with print and println or write and writeln.  ”So why now?” I asked.

Some of the semi-glib responses to my follow-up touched on the venerated trait of laziness among Perl programmers and joking about doing more with less (i.e., two less characters from print to say). I say semi-glib because both of these comments hold kernels of truth about Perl that originally drew me to the language and explain my continued frustration with the “newer” languages that I now have to call bread and butter.

Perl has always been a programming language for the lazy, proud, and impatient.  From personal experience, I’m more likely to use print with a “\n” than without, so that little extra work spread out over the thousands and thousands of print “…” does add up. There is some sense in having a command whose default mode includes a linefeed.

Perl has also always been a language about packing–functionally and semantically. That’s earned it a reputation of being hackish or too clever for itself, but anything taken to an extreme can be bad.  My experience supports the perlish idea that less code written is less code to debug or relearn later.  Some languages, especially those fond of methods on literal strings instead of operators, provide flexibility at the cost of verbosity and ugliness.  The idea of packing more capability into two less characters is very, very Perl.

There’s talk of trying to reinvigorate the Perl base and recover some of the mindshare (and subsequent marketshare) that Perl’s lost over the last decade.  I don’t think say will convince legions of .Net or Java programmers to switch, but I’ll definitely use it my next script.

From the Perldocs on say:

• say FILEHANDLE LIST
• say LIST
• say

Just like print, but implicitly appends a newline. say LIST is simply an abbreviation for { local $\ ="\n"; print LIST } .

This keyword is available only when the “say” feature is enabled: see feature.

Here are my thoughts on Brilliant Leap’s latest post about EMC dropping Web Content Manager [Brilliant Leap: Na na na na, Hey hey-ey Goodbye].

I remember when Documentum turned its back on their Big Pharma customers to chase the web content management dream during the tech bubble. So now they’re backing away from WCM after dropping DSM? Hmm. Then there’s EMC’s “we’re not worthy” submissive stance regarding Sharepoint. Hmm.

Will users five years from now actually know what Documentum is? EMC will have to wage a “Documentum Inside” campaign like Intel’s to keep any kind of mind share with customers. They still have Captiva, but does anybody really want to be *known* for scanning, the lowest form of document management?

An optimist would claim that they’re focusing on core technologies, and we’ll see long-needed improvements at the server and in the data model. A pessimist would argue this is another sign of EMC parasitizing Documentum. Think “zombie wasp” from the RadioLab episode on Parasites.

I am not exactly known for being an optimist, but this may be good news for alternatives like Drupal and Alfresco as businesses starting reaching for a can of Raid.

At home, I only use Windows on my gaming machine. XP after all these years is running (mostly) smoothly and quickly. The newest game I’m running said yesterday that Win7 is not officially supported despite the developer having a very close relationship with Microsoft. Games are particularly sensitive to change, especially in graphics drivers, audio drivers, and memory management. There’s no benefit under Win7 with any of the games I play (e.g., no DirectX 10 games), only risk.

My current client is still on Windows XP. While I expect they will move to Windows 7 eventually, it won’t be anytime soon: The upgrade inertia of a company with tens of thousands of computers, many of which don’t have the horsepower to make Win7 a good experience, is a frightening thing to behold. Especially if you make your living by selling shrink-wrapped upgrades to companies like them.

Win7 is in a bind; Vista’s problems weren’t entirely technical and may reflect the mature nature of the computer market more than mistakes made at the software level. People upgrade Windows when they buy new computers, not to get new features. The economic downturn means fewer computer sales. Some analysts think Win7 will drive more hardware sales,but that’s a cart-before-the-horse argument to me.

People use applications, not hardware or operating systems. Until those applications require new hardware or Win7, people won’t upgrade. It’s cost without benefit. Microsoft is trying to include useful software with Win7, something they (sometimes unfairly) get into trouble for, but people with Windows right now already have 3rd party software for those things. While I’ve come to doubt that people are rational actors in the economic sense, the cost/benefit equation is just too obvious here, especially when money is tight.

On my Mac, I upgrade more frequently because Apple provides functional improvements to applications I use in daily life as well as new/cool stuff.  There are more applications shipped with the OS that I use regularly, so I am more interested in what an OS upgrade includes. It also helps that Mac OS X upgrades are more frequent and lower impact. Although I’ve wanted to do a clean install, I haven’t *had* to do one and therefore haven’t done it.

27 inches of Sexy

The most likely thing to get me to buy Win7 right now is if I get one of the new iMacs to act as both gaming and desktop computer. 27 inches, video in, and nice horsepower in the CPU/GPU on the high end have me interested. And it’s lickably sexy. My gaming rig is a few years old (another reason I’m hesitant to push it to Win7 even though I have a Gig of memory XP can’t address) but a new iMac would have plenty of cycles to spare for Win7.

Microsoft sticking to a release date is nice to see, but it’s not without risk. My final hesitation (on almost any 1.0 product) is how rushed it was to get out the door on time. How far into the future is SP1 going to be?

For no real benefit, Win7 would only bring me risk and cost, so I don’t do Windows upgrades–for now.

Google Docs Adds Shared Folders — Mashable.com

Mashable claims that Google’s new shared folders work just like they should. I beg to differ. Google doesn’t really have folders under the hood, just like some other document management system I used to talk about. Things get tricky when a document can be in more than one place. Google’s full of smart people, so I decided to hope for the best and kick the tires: Create a few folders, create a few documents, and then permission and move things around to see what happens.

The first no-big-surprise was Google Docs has trouble with state. Web applications are still inferior to stand-alone clients (or operating systems) when managing state. Most of the time a refresh would solve the inconsistencies around location or permissions, but sometimes a logout/login was needed. State issues aside, let’s look at the behavior.

Google walks a tightrope with its “folders” because they really aren’t folders; they’re tags. The behavior you get depends on the context: If you’re in a folder, you get the “move” menu item which works as advertised; something is in one place, then it’s in another–or nowhere since documents don’t have to be in folders. Use the folders menu item and you get the “tag” behavior because you’re directly selecting zero or more items from a taxonomy of tags that happen to have folder icons next to them.

Hacking around, I discovered that Google’s “how it should work” is a most permissive model; it seems to just gather the list of every sharing option on the shared folders. This isn’t horrible; however, the metaphorical mismatch it creates will undoubtedly cross the line into “too permissive”. Most people will assume that the permissions on the “last” folder they put something into will determine the permissions. To Google’s credit, they display a permissions summary next to each document. Maybe that’s good enough to prevent mistakes. And maybe everybody reads EULAs before clicking “I agree”, too.

The shame here is that Google really broke ground with ideas like conversations in GMail. Seeing your replies in the thread of a conversation is obviously the right thing to do; segregating part of the conversation to the Sent “folder” is a broken model that requires people to quote the entire previous conversation with each response. Horrible! Google’s always on the verge of freeing people from the tyranny of folders but never fully commits to a pure tag and search approach, so they won’t be overthrowing The Folder Hierarchy with this feature.

    Happy Birthday Chuck! You’ve given us so much!

Last night’s Philadelphia XML Users Group was a pleasant mix of the old and the new: Jim Caine of Jaquette Consulting revisited an earlier talk on content reuse that touched on DITA and Documentum among other things.

Named for today’s birthday boy, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a simple XML application (in the xml sense) that models information around authoring units like topics and references instead of publishing like documents and books.  It’s meant to be extensible (in the OO sense) rather than definitive.  Somehow DITA never crossed my path until a few months ago, but it represents another step towards the Grail of structured authoring/publishing that I worked on 15 years ago.

Jim’s project involved moving an insurance institute’s learning resources into a single repository and allowing them to create a variety of products (real books, eLearning, flash cards, etc.) from the same content.  The project started last year; Jim first presented on the project back then and gave the group a look at how practice deviated from theory.  He did some really smart things to facilitate reuse like referencing XML wrappers for external entities like images. This allows reuse of data and the metadata.  Kudos to WordPress for a similar albeit not XML approach to images and galleries. I’ll post a link to his presentation when it hits the web.

Turns out that authoring structured content is still the hard part.  The original plan involved a Word plug-in to allow authors to create valid structured content at the very beginning.  This good idea hit some bumps because of vendor support issues and was the hardest conceptual change to make in the whole process.  Authors used to writing a single document now wrote up to a dozen separate learning objects, a subtype of topic.  Deja vu all over again.

A very few actors in the content creation process have a very lively editorial cycle.  We’re talking major rewrites, not “you missed a comma here” kinds of things.   This wasn’t a problem back on RDMS: We dealt more with multiple authors and a review process than the more traditional author/editor interaction going on here.  Even in legal review and approval, I’m used to all actors being subject matter experts, often getting more experty the further along in the lifecycle you go.  Not so in this case–and publishing in general I’d guess.

Here comes more deja-vu-all-over-again:  The plugin couldn’t handle the actors’ heavy dependence on Word collaboration features like Track Changes.  It’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security by an oh-so-pretty model for the final product of the authoring process. That Emerald City architectural view of content hides all the information and processing necessary to get to that end.  This particular problem has sparked some heavy flirtation between authoring, wikis, and DITA happening in my head, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Jim’s use of XML Applications (in the Documentum sense) worked well with DITA’s topics and maps.  No big surprise there, but the marriage of DITA maps and Documentum virtual documents came with the usual toilet-seat-down relationship problems, especially because of webtop’s weak handling of virtual documents.  A post-editorial staff using XMetaL bears the brunt of the bickering, so authors are  left to worry about intellectual property, not scaffolding, as it should be.

Most of my work lately has centered on document dumping grounds.  Records management, eDiscovery, and transactional content management don’t concern themselves with the processes of actually making content.  It was great to see what’s happening on the other side again, and I’ve been stupid for not attending this group sooner.  Such is the life of a freelance.

One special note: The Users Group had brownies for Valentine’s Day.  Mmm, tasty!  I suggested that publicizing food at meetings might be some great marketing.  It might also require a bigger conference room for several reasons!

FINRA is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. We oversee nearly 5,000 brokerage firms, 172,000 branch offices and 665,000 registered securities representatives. Our chief role is to protect investors by maintaining the fairness of the U.S. capital markets. — finra.org Homepage

This is good news to me, just like Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu’s appointment to head the Energy Department.  Shapiro promises to be a tough enforcer, something sorely lacking these last eight years.  I’d happily authorize her to use water boarding and extraordinary rendition on these billionaire market fundamentalists whose financial terrorism has left the entire world in chaos.

This may also be good news for FINRA.  I sincerely hope there’s a broader role  for them in the post-market-fundamentalism finance ecology, regulating a broader range of investments and having a bigger stick by forwarding cases to a more aggressive SEC.  They should also get some of the funds being flung around to expand their capabilities.  That’s a better investment than dropping $25 billion on Bank of America, no questions asked.