Gadgetopia

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...

I was looking at the back page of a Dell catalog today, and they had a "PowerEdge 600SC Server" for $499. I thought, "Wow, that's cheap for a server." Then I looked closer... The "server" had nothing "server-ly" about it. It was a Pentium 2.4GHz with a 40GB hard-drive and ...

From paper-clip to house, in 14 trades: Remember the red paperclip guy who used his blog to orchestrate the trade of a single red paperclip, and tried to parlay it into a house? Well, he succeeded, after 14 trades. Here's how it went. A single, red paperclip A pen shaped ...

I've been toying with an idea lately, and instead of actually doing it (don't have the time), I'm going to throw it out here for fun. My idea is for an extremely simplistic content management system -- one based on HTML files and a scheduled file system crawl. First, some ...

(Note: this post exists in both written and audio form. They re more or less the same thing, so take your pick. I elaborate a bit more in the audio, since I have a tendency to ramble, but I used the written post as an outline for the audio post, ...

I was reading a little e-book by Seth Godin the other day called "Everyone's an Expert" which turned out to be a big promo for his new venture: Squidoo (it's not live yet -- so there's not much to look at). In this little book (it's quite good), Godin brings ...

I've been putting off posting about The Building of Basecamp because I was trying to get my hands on a picture. Neither Joe nor I thought to bring a camera, and the workshop was the first thing we did in Chicago, before Joe bought a disposable to shoot this ...

There's a class of product that fits into a crappy pricing slot. It's a slot where a purchaser isn't going to make a purchase right away, because they're going to have a lot of questions. But at the same time, individual sales of the product aren't expensive enough for the ...

My company just bought Small Business Server 2003, and a copy of FrontPage 2003 was included, so I've been playing around with it for the last week. Overall, a huge improvement over previous versions of FrontPage (it no longer messes with your stuff...). It includes something that DreamWeaver has had ...

Applications have patterns -- ways of doing things that have stood the test of time. These aren't object modeling patterns, about which books and books have been written, these are...best practices for how to solve a particular type of functional problem. Around my city, you see a certain style of ...

At one point or another, all content management systems (CMS) come down to some kind of datatype. You have to be able to set a field to a string, or an integer, or whatever, and then enforce and manage that piece of data. The idea is that you take these ...

A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective: This is an exhaustive (15-page) review of OS X by a diehard PC user. In the first few paragraphs he explains that he uses and enjoys PCs, but he'll give the Mac a shot. He spent a month with ...

When it comes to content management, custom fields are good -- it's nice to have a place to put things that the developer didn't anticipate. You'd think it would bridge the gap between a "closed" CMS and an "open" CMS (see this post and this post), but it doesn't really. ...

The big limitation of Web apps is that you're at the mercy of the user's browser. It may behave like you want it to, or it may not, but there's no doubt that it limits how complicated and functional a Web app can get. In a browser, remember, your page ...

(Note: the audio for this post is here.) We had a build meeting the other day for a client s site, and we walked through the site map to determine what content types we were going to need to pull this off. In these cases, the first content type you ...

A while back, I mentioned the concept of a "content tree" in regards to content management. I cited this as a "functional pattern" and promised to talk about it more, but I never did. So, here goes -- With every content management system (CMS) I've written, I always get back ...

Here s something I don t see nearly enough in content management systems: subcontent. This is when a content object contains other content objects as children. I don t think I ve ever built a content-managed site where I haven t (1) used this when it was available, or (2) wished for it when it ...

I built a shopping cart system the other day. It seemed at the time to be a ridiculous waste of resources -- I mean, how many shopping carts are out there already? There are probably 500 open-source versions alone. But, I built my own, and for good reasons. Here are ...

I ve talked a lot over the years about content modeling. Open and Closed Content Management is probably the most self-referenced post on this site. Recently I called content modeling one of the Four Disciplines of Content Management. But, lingering behind all the questions about how to model something is a ...

Yesterday, I wanted to buy a stock image from Corbis to use in a Web site I'm developing. It was a standard hi-res image of a man standing in front of a building reading a newspaper. This should have been simple... For those that don't know, Corbis is the largest ...

Anyone an expert on the WinXP file system?: Phillip Greenspun proposes using the Windows file system as a database for organizing pictures, instead of some complicated structure that depends on other software. I'm thinking of writing a tutorial on how to use the Windows XP file system as a photo ...

Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost two ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: Here's an awfully interesting attempt that succeeds in defining just what a "weblog" is. It's written by Dave Winer, who should know since he founded Userland. "At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying 'I ...

I have the need for a new office router. We only have a couple of people, so a normal home router would be fine, except that we're geeks, so we need more than one external IP. Most home routers don't handle that. You can snag yourself a fancy Cisco PIX, ...

(Audio is also here. Sorry about the quality I was using a different mic this time, and the input levels were all hosed up.) Navigation is often a pain when it comes to content management. Now, don t confuse navigation with information architecture that grand plan of what ...

Back in the 1980s, when I was in high school, the reigning Chevy performance cars were the Camaro and the Corvette. They were almost the same, but worlds apart at the same time. Back then, you could get the Corvette and Camaro with near identical powertrains -- the 350 cid ...

I got to thinking about wikis a little more last night, and I started to wonder where the dividing line between wikis and blogs lay. What makes a wiki a wiki? Wikis have some common characteristics: 1. The ability for anyone to edit any page. 2. The ability to create ...

I spent some time this morning looking at PureEdit. It bills itself as a CMS, which is a classification I don t know that I can agree with completely. For the record, I only watched a couple of screencasts and browsed through some of the code. I don t know if it ...

I've been spending some time working with Smarty lately. This is ostensibly a "templating language" for PHP. But I think it goes beyond that. I assert that Smarty has become a sub-language all by itself. (Update: I thought of a much better name for this: "sand-boxed PHP." That's what Smarty ...

How many of you use Experts Exchange (EE) for tech questions? It's like a big IT discussion board, with the important addition of a points system. When you create a free user account on EE, you get, like, 500 points. You have to "spend" these points to ask questions (they ...

I was in Boston on business a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I did for fun was take the train to Cambridge and walk around the campus of Harvard University. Call me a total dork, but it was amazing to actually be there. (Did you know ...

A while back we talked about the LiveShot.com thing, where an outfit set up a gun with a webcam to let people hunt live game remotely via the Internet. Then last week I read something about a guy who built a similar gadget for about $200-worth of spare parts that ...

The Arizona Republic has a story about a high school physics class that modified a Chevy pickup to not only run on hydrogen, but also to produce its own hydrogen, requiring only sunlight and water. While it's mainly a rough test mule, and can produce enough fuel on its own ...

A friend and I are looking at a bunch of different content management systems for a church Web site. We've been discussing the merits of the various approaches, and looking at some open source offerings like Mambo, Typo3, and eZ publish. During this, I've struck upon a concept that I ...

We didn't post anything about the fingerprint deal? Seriously? We're getting slow. Japanese cryptographer Tsutomu Matsumoto has figured out a way to defeat a fingerprint reader about 80% of the time. "Using his crazy super-cryptographer skills!", you say. No, not really. It's all about the Gummi Bears: First Tsutomu Matsumoto ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, GM flew me out to Detroit this week to take a run at their 2008 lineup. I flew out Tuesday night, and stayed all day Wednesday at their Milford Proving Grounds essentially a 4,000 acre obstacle course for cars (the Proving Grounds ...

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: This post is five years old, but it s important and touches on a point I ve always kind of wondered about what makes a blog? When do you have a blog as opposed to a regular Web site? At Berkman we re studying ...

Power-dressing man leaves trail of destruction: This has got to be a hoax. An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building. Frank Clewer, who was ...

My business mail server got blacklisted the other day. We started getting consistent bounces from a couple of clients that referenced some odd site. A little poking around revealed that our mail server had been inexplicably identified as an open relay and was on a spam blacklist that the clients ...

Making Web 2.0 Work For You, Inside and Out The day started with a keynote from a guy from Human Factors International, which is a somewhat legendary usability firm. His talk was dense, but fascinating, so I ll have to dig through the slides later. It was a discussion about ...

They say everyone has a dark side. I found mine a few weeks ago. It turns out that it s only about three inches of pedal travel away. You see, the latest Corvette has massive block of power sitting directly under your right foot. Push it down hard, and a ...

As we mentioned previously, the abandoned Zip Feed Mill, the tallest structure in South Dakota, was scheduled for demolition to make way for a new office building. Today was the day, and a bunch of us, along with one of the local news crews, got together on top of Gadgetopia ...

...or in your PDA, or in your laptop, or in your kids' toys... According to an article in Technology Review, the uber-geeks at MIT are working on turbines the size of a dime, spin at over a million RPM's, and may one day provide power for the gadgets you use. ...

When you're building a big Web app, oftentimes you get to a point when you need to run some asynchronous batch process. You need to do something at, say, 2 a.m. that doesn't involve a request from a browser. I ran into this problem the other day, and I tossed ...

A National Geographic team put together some cool toys that record what it looks like inside a tornado. It's a technological first. A well-placed probe fitted with 7 video cameras 6 with a 60-degree field-of-view designed to achieve a full 360-degree field-of-view, and one pointing upward captures footage ...

When you get neck deep into a content management implementation, you can lose sight of the actual publishing mechanism-- how the content gets from your system to the end user's browser. No matter how sophisticated your CMS is, at some point, a user enters a URL and some content comes ...

Over four years ago, I came up with an idea: a home intranet. I said this: Do you think there would ever be a market for home intranet software? There's so much to keep track of within my own family -- people we know, appointments, lists for every such thing, ...

My office is considering buying a new copier/printer. Have you looked at these things lately? I've been through a half-dozen vendor presentations in the last few days (they talk a long time when the price tag approaches $20K), and I can't believe the functionality available. One vendor dropped off a ...

The other day, I was reading the Wikipedia page on McMansions (via Kottke). It was extremely interesting, and it made a good point: The movement of the "atrium concept" home layout from popularity to ubiquity in modern American architecture stems largely from the "Ten Minute House" theory [...] Most realtors ...

Here s what I want: a CMS that was truly developed from the API out. If an interface comes with it, great. I might use it, I might not. I ve talked about this before. Last year, I said this: When building a new piece of software, you really need to completely ...

Would it be possible to create a computer than didn't have a case? I was tooling around power supplies over at Xoxide, and some of them almost looked like they were external. Is there such a thing as an external power supply? A few weeks ago, I went on a ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...

phpMyAdmin is usually installed quickly, out of acute necessity. You need to do something with your database, and you can't do it via telnet or SSH or anything else, so you download the latest version, FTP it up, and away you go. More often than not, the install is forgotten ...

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

I m more than a bit behind on my reports from the GM Blogger Junket, but I m going to try and catch up here. I ve already written about the Milford Proving Grounds in general, and about the Advanced Driving Techniques course we went through in the morning. Next up: lunch. ...

Gas prices drive Geos from clunkers to chic: Apparently this is the hot car to sell on eBay. The 1996 2-door 3-cylinder Metro Solomon now owns opened on eBay May 7 with a bid of $200. A week later, Solomon won the car auction with a bid of $7,300. In ...

A long time ago, in the wee hours of the morning, I made a post to Gadgetopia entitled Fake Escrow Sites. It was a posting about how crooks use fake escrow sites to cheat people out of money. It was just one or two sentences, and it linked to a ...

White paper: I'm thinking about writing a white paper to help with marketing, and I got to wondering why they were called "white papers." Turns out, the term predates computers by quite a while. The Wikipedia article linked above cites a 1922 example by Winston Churchill. A white paper can ...

Day One was busy The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication We started off with a keynote talk from Dick Costolo, who is the guy who created and sold FeedBurner and now works for Google. He talked about how far syndication has come. If you went to CNN or Gannett even ...

Trends: Stump a consultant - win an iPod: What a great idea for a promotion for a conference. [ ] you ll get to share [a] problem with a team of expert consultants. They ll each have 90 seconds to offer a plausible solution. The person who most successfully stumps all four consultants ...

So you want to give blogging a go at your company, but you dread the thought of getting sign off on new software, setting everything up, handling permissions issues, etc. What a huge pain, especially when you have no idea if anyone is going to even like the concept. Never ...

Here's a question on blogging practice: what do you do for follow-up posts or updates to an existing post? Do you make a new post? Update the original post? Post a comment? I have examples of all three options so far, and I have yet to figure out which one ...

Google Code Jam 2003 "Do you have exceptional programming skills? Can you make computers perform like silicon puppets with just a few well-expressed commands? Are you at ease when faced with a hard stop and a group of peers evaluating every line of your code? Here�s your opportunity to display ...

Our friends at Jalopnik had themselves a hot Question Of The Day today that dovetails nicely with a recent discussion here at Gadgetopia; Are Hybrids Bunk? Some pretty opinionated opining going on there. Hybrids in general and the Prius in particular are like Macs in a way; they re ...

I ve been doing some reading lately on Design Patterns. I find myself trying to relate the examples to Web applications. One of the interesting ones is the State Pattern. This says that an application is really just a collection of states, or situations the application might find itself in. Some ...

Let me throw out an observation. Your application is worth exponentially more to me if I can write my own user interface for it. No, wait -- that's jumping the gun. Let me back up a bit: Your application is not your user interface. The interface is just a nice, ...

A few weeks ago, I read a good article on paper prototyping over at Jakob Nielsen's site. And then the other day, I wrote a bit about how overall application design and interface was more of an influence on an app's success than the actual code behind it. So, in ...

... to a brand new G5! At work we're looking at installing a new archive server that will run on a shiny new Mac G5 (woohoo!) Since the server closet is getting a little crowded I was thinking that it would work nicely to put the thing in a rack. ...

How about Microsoft Access as a client-side content management tool? After playing around with Radio UserLand and CityDesk, I'm finding more and more utility in a client-side apps. They're responsive, they don't need to be connected (great for laptops or dial-up), and you can do a lot more with a ...

I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like: SitePoint has a brutally accurate post about CMSs and making them run actual Web sites. The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and ...

We recently approved a comment on an entry from a few weeks ago. The post was about how kids who blog are "a pedophile's dream." Well wouldn't you know it we got a comment...from a pedophile. We had a tough time with this one, but in the end ...

The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part I: Joel Spolsky is running a series of articles about the development of FogBugz 4.0. I haven't even read the first installment, but the fourth paragraph contains a hysterically damning description of the RFP process. RFP stands for "Request for Proposal." It's a request ...

Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull: I watched a really good Super Ships that talked about SWATH ships, which stands for "Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull." This is a type of hull that enables ships to operate in heavy seas without really rolling around much. The Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull ...

Aaron Mentele is asking about posting practices for people who blog a lot. But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can't say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception of ...

Today in the sky: Here's another interesting example of a USA Today blog. It's about air travel, of all things. Ben Mutzabaugh posts at least a dozen things a day about airlines. He seems awfully well informed. Now, I'm not interested in the subject, but I'm curious about the evolution ...

What's the difference between a blog post and an "article" or a "story"? By those terms, I mean content that isn't as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes. Blogs are, by definition, transient they're time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples ...

Steganography is very cool. No, it's not a dinosaur &mdash it's a method of sending hidden messages so that no one knows a message has been sent. Well, that's just boring ol' cryptography, you say. No when you encrypt a message and send it, anyone who intercepts the communication ...

Update: After reading this post, read the follow-up here. Let's say I have a meeting on Monday nights during the time that Fox's awesome guilty pleasure, "North Shore," is on. I don't have a VCR anymore, so I can't tape it. And I don't have a Tivo either. What am ...

Pay To Play: Fair Price for Good Community: Josh Clark nails another good post today as he discusses a new communal bike rental program in Paris. For 29 euros a year, you can check out a bike for 30 minutes whenever you need one. He discusses why the city of ...

I was browsing through Google Video last night (that's where the Duron post came from), and I got to thinking that there's so much good stuff in there, but there's a bunch of crap too. And none of it is really organized beyond the general search that comes with it. ...

RoadMap - Sam Ruby's Wiki: This is a consortium of some of the A-list bloggers to standardize what a Web log is. They're trying to distill the basic elements of a blog, and develop a standard to which blogging tools can adhere. While that seems unrealistic in the vast blogging ...

Ups and Downs of Jetpacks: This is a really fantastic article about jetpacks and rocketbelts, that mythical pair of technologies that would finally deliver us into the world of the Jetsons we were promised when we were kids. The article explains a lot of things about the technology that I'd ...

If I can be so bold, here's a tip for my fellow geeks to make your life easier: label your power supplies. When you get a new toy that comes with a power cable that has a converter in (either in the middle or built into the plug) slap a ...

Prompted by Microsoft's generosity, I've started reading e-books, and I think I'm addicted. I read a book last year called "The Social Life of Information" which put forth all sorts of reasons why e-books weren't going to work. I agreed with it then, but after actually trying it, I'm hooked. ...

Q: What do get when you combine a 1965 Mustang and a 1982 Toyota Supra? This guy found the answer to a question nobody was asking by building a low-budget autocross racer from two cars that have almost nothing in common. Building required a lot of plasma cutter work, a ...

I was over at OpenSourceCMS.com today playing around with some content management systems: phpWebSite, Xoops, and PostNuke. They were all quite good, with phpWebSite being the one I enjoyed the most. But I want to articulate something I've had in the back of my mind for a while... "Content management ...

A Year in Pictures: My buddy Rob has shuttered AYearInPictures.com after giving us all...well, a year in pictures. After publishing a picture a day for the last year I think it's time to close the doors and move onto something else. I consider this project to be a huge success. ...

Build a Smarter Search Engine: This is an article from JavaPro magazine about building a Case Based Reasoning (CBR) search engine: "A man walks into a car dealership and tells the salesperson about his perfect car. It would be red, have four doors, a large trunk, 300 horsepower, side airbags, ...

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

I was working on a somewhat complex eZ publish-powered site today, and I acknowledged an important point that makes eZ publish -- in my opinion -- perhaps the greatest CMS ever built -- eZ is built around the concept of a "site access." The way the system looks at it, ...

This is about two years old, but I ran across it on SlashDot today in the midst of the discussion of a guy that strapped a jet engine to a wheelchair (worthy of his own post). What tops that? How about this New Zealander: Unfortunately that small quantity of ice ...

Dial D for Disruption: A good article about Asterisk, the open-source phone system. Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a ...

I've been working with content management for a long time, and there's one thing that's been constant: at some point, a user is going to write and format some text in some kind of control. How good are they going to be at this? Their level of skill here will ...

Last year, we talked about a system that translated network traffic through your speakers so you could hear what was going on. Once you got used to it, you could begin to discover and react to network problems through sound alone. Why not take this a step further and into ...

Here's something I've learned: when faced with a programming project, the worst thing you can do is start coding right away. Programming is not like building a house. When you build a house, a wall goes together a standard way. Match up Tab A with Slot B and you're good ...

I thought this was interesting; Britain has plans to use a network of cameras to automatically track movements of vehicles on most of its major roads. The plan is to position cameras along streets and highways that will be tied to computers that can read license plate numbers from passing ...

A Mac In An Enterprise: This is a good article detailing the travails of one guy trying to use a Mac in a PC-based IT shop. He manages to do okay in the end. "For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running ...

A while back, we discussed content trees, which are a great way to organize content in a CMS. They provide a great view of the entire landscape of content in your system. However, not all CMS users are created equal, and some of them may not need to see "the ...

I was looking through the MonoRail project today, and I found this little nugget: [...] Developers that were introduced to Web development using pure WebForms also lack the basics http protocol concepts required to use MonoRail (or any other web framework for that matter). I've been working with ASP.Net a ...

Last year, I built a nice little Web site for my church pre-school. Go take a look -- it's really well-done, and has served the school well. (Look hard enough, and you might find my wife in there somewhere...) However, one of the problems with the site is that new ...

A friend and I were talking tonight about the perils of setting up a Web community to compliment a real-world community. For instance, a community Web site for your church, or for your neighborhood -- so a group people that would interact with each other both online and off. (And ...

According to a BBC.co.uk article, scientists are working on ways to make teleconferencing more real by using animated robotic avatars of the speakers that mimic the movements of the person at the other end of the line. They use claymation as an example of how it might work, and hope ...

The problem with the etch-a-sketch? Other than a city skyline it's tough to make much of anything, unless you are a practiced master with the dials. Some students at Cornell are correcting that little kink: This nostalgic toy is recognized by many generations and we decided to put a new ...

Lately, I've struck upon a new benchmark for usability: the extent to which the interface disappears. Let me explain -- My wife drives a Honda Odyssey minivan. This is the Swiss Army Knife of minivans. It's set-up perfectly, to the point where I've often said, "If you need to find ...

A Windows user spends a week with a Mac: This is from last year, but it's a good essay about transitioning from Windows to Mac. It seems balanced, and it reinforces my overall feeling: six of one, half dozen of the other. I think Macs are pretty, but I doubt ...

The Development Abstraction Layer: There's a big quote here, but it's worth reading, as it the entire article. This is why I want to work at Fog Creek. A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 ...

When Blobjects Rule the Earth: This is a really interesting concept, buried under a long-winded, rambling speech. This speech was delivered by Bruce Sterling at a conference in late 2004. In it, he reveals the concepts of a "Spime," which is a thing that carries a history with it. You ...

Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel recently tackled the legend of exploding CDs. The legend goes that flawed CDs that are spun to 30,000+ r.p.m. in 50+X CD-ROM drives have a tendency to explode. Well, turns out that the legend is somewhat true. The guys from Mythbusters were able to get ...

When was your a-ha! moment about the Internet? Think back to the early days: can you remember a moment when you thought: Whoa, this thing may really take off? I was pondering this the other day, and I can remember three moments from the mid-nineties that made me sit up ...

How Motherboards Are Made: A Gigabyte Factory Tour: PC Stats went to a motherboard factory in Taiwan and took pictures. A lot of pictures. [...] producing and testing a single motherboard involves a mind-boggling host of automated machines, people and processes; so we'd like to detail the whole assembly line ...

A Lexicon for Document Analysis: Here s an analysis that s long overdue just what do you call all the theoretical pieces of content management? What we call a class in eZ publish is a SmartForm in Ektron is a content type in Drupal is a table in a relational database. ...

Persistent URL Home Page: I stumbled across this today. I'm not sure if this is a relic of the Web's past, or if this is still an active project. "A PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the ...

In the days before OS X, if you had trouble with a hard drive, you could simply stick a utility disk in the CD drive & boot into a working Finder, fix the problem, plus a whole lot more, just booted from the CD. With OS X, you can still ...

This weekend, I was struggling with a .Net / XML / XSLT problem. I'm not a big .Net guy, but I've been working with it for the last few months on a big project for Blend. Brian, from MyHomepoint has been a huge help as I've gotten my feet wet ...

Who's A Rat - Largest Online Database of Informants and Agents: I'm fascinated at the legal implications of a site like this. Who's A Rat is a database driven website designed to assist attorneys and criminal defendants with few resources. The purpose of this website is for individuals and attorneys ...

Well, maybe not that far. Yet. The FAA on Wednesday licensed the first private rocket, and has given the green light for a real sub-orbital space flight. Burt Rutan and his California-based Scaled Composites have built SpaceShipOne, a funny looking rocket-powered plane that Burt hopes will usher in "a renaissance ...

PDF-A: A New Digital Preservation Format: There's a new movement to persuade Adobe to freeze a subset of the PDF format and guarantee its integrity for a certain number of years so that archivists can ensure people can access the content in the future. "Despite its advantages, PDF itself is ...

Cops smell rodent at `rat'-outing Web site: Here's a story about "Who's a Rat," the Web site that "outs" government informats. The backstory: "It's something that's been needed for a long time. I'm trying to level the playing field," said Bucci, 31, who is fighting marijuana dealing charges that landed ...

Dynamic Tools for Dynamic Languages: After reading the "Programmers are Idiots" essay that Joe posted last week, I got to thinking about my situation. Am I actually a programmer? I came to the conclusion that no, I'm not I'm a scripter. I work predominantly on the Web, and while ...

Someone (I don't know who), said "Half of intelligence is knowing the answer. The other half is knowing where to find the answer." In today's world, we all know how to find the answer. But has that made us less inclined to know the answer from memory? Google has just ...

mozile: index: I installed this, and at first glance, it looks as cool as it sounds. "Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. ...

I find myself in a constant struggle between accepting Movable Type for what it is, and working to extend it. There are a few cases where I want to do interesting things with entries, but I don t want to hack into Ben s Perl code. I solved this problem by inserting ...

Net Perceptions returns cash to shareholders: Failed dotcoms aren't new, but this one is a little different. They realized they were doomed, and they're actually going to hand some of their money back to the stockholders before they go under. "In a statement, the company said existing shareholders will receive ...

So we ordered a Mac Mini last month. Then, last week, we get a box from "ACI," which we astutely reversed engineered to "Apple Computer Inc." The excitement built as we opened the box and pulled away the paper packing material...and then pulled away some more...and some more...and some more. ...

Microsoft Research is working on a couple of interesting projects. First, there's the SenseCam, a little doodad that's sort of a digital camera and sensor package. You wear it, and it records, well, everything. SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into ...

Bill Gates recently went on a tour of colleges to encourage students to major in computer science. Apparently the number of declared computer science majors is declining, and Bill wants to shore up the numbers. I got to thinking about this, and I wonder if the plethora of really high-level ...

I spent some time over the weeked with two major open source content management systems. I'm not going to mention names, since I don't want to start a flame war, but they're both very popular, have big communities behind them, and there's a good chance you've heard of them. They're ...

Here's something I've learned over the years: when modeling data to build a database, be very careful what fields you decide to include. Don't throw in extraneous fields just because "someone might want to store that piece of information someday, and it's no big deal to include it..." It is ...

Making A Better Open Source CMS, by Jeffrey Veen: This is a great article -- a rant, really -- about how much the author thinks the open-source CMS offerings just plain suck. He laments about a lot of things I agree with. The real goldmine, however, are the comments. There ...

ASP.Net on a Roll: O'Reilly indicates that ASP 2.0 is the hot technology these days. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of ...

Here's an idea for a good service: a database of products, and some way to match them up with their chief competitors. I was looking for a certain type of product today. I found an example of one, and I wanted to find others. But how do you do that? ...

Well, I finally installed Ubuntu at home the other night. I had seen it and played with it before, but I figured it was time to live with it for a while, given all the hype. Here are some thoughts -- Installation was rock-simple. I burned the ISO to a ...

Microsoft talks Longhorn, XNA, and Xbox 2: Microsoft's Dean Lester expresses an interesting concept here. He envisions kind of a "certification authority" for hardware. I think it's a good idea, so long as everyone agrees on the authority that maintains the definitions. According to Lester, the plan is to simplify ...

Coast Guard plagued by breakdowns: The fleet of the Coast Guard is falling apart, it seems. In fiscal 2004, the engines on the Coast Guard's 95 HH-65 helicopters suffered power losses at a rate of 329 per 100,000 flight hours, up from 63 per 100,000 flight hours in fiscal 2003. ...

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism: Here s an article about what are being called Single Site Browsers (SSBs), or little standalone browsers that let you browse and interact with a single Web app in a desktop app-ish environment. Surf to Gmail, for instance, choose “Convert ...

EditPlus Text Editor, HTML Editor, Programmers Editor for Windows - Welcome!: A while back, Cory Doctorow had a little love-in for BBEdit, apparently the greatest text editor for Macs ever made. Well, after mentioning it a number of times over the years, it's time I did the same for the ...

I got this in my Lockergnome Windows Daily RSS feed. I can't figure out the author or how to attribute this, so I'll just re-print it (there's a copyright-friendly strategy, eh?). This is a great point. We get so wrapped up in the virtual world that we forget the value ...

The topic of motorized bicycles has come up on these pages before (here & here), and all along I ve been wanting to do more than just talk about it. Last fall I took the plunge and committed cash toward that end, and bought myself a kit. And it s finally ready! ...

Caravel Content Management: Caravel is a content management system with the somewhat odd implementation of storing everything in LDAP, rather than a traditional SQL database. I don't know of any other system that does this. This project was open-sourced from a system used to power 2,000 Mennonite churches. See the ...

8 reasons to check out a Tablet PC: Solid article about why you should buy a Tablet PC. "Some companies prohibit or discourage people from using notebook PCs in meetings. Why? Because the laptop screen creates a barrier of sorts between the user and the speaker. You lose eye contact ...

Hertz Rent-a-Shelby is back: Soon, you'll be able to rent a really fast Mustang from Hertz, just like in the 60s. [...] Hertz customers will again get the chance to rent a Shelby. This time, 500 black-and-gold Shelby GT350s will have 325-horsepower engines and high-performance suspension. A standard Mustang GT ...

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like, can ...

Sokkit - Install Apache and PHP on Windows: A while back, we mentioned FoxServ as a great way to get Apache, MySQL, and PHP (AMP) running on Windows. It was really nothing more than an installer that got all those pieces working together for you, but this was still a ...

Here s a request for all software developers building software that does batch processing: PDFMoto, Movable Type any program that re-publishes as a single event. Include functionality to allow me to call an arbitrary script before and after the batch process. There are a lot of things I may want ...

Here's a high correlation: computer geeks and role-playing and war game players. If you're a programming or hardware geek, there's a good chance you've played Dungeons and Dragons, Axis and Allies, or Magic: The Gathering. There's no scientific basis for this it's all empirical but I know the ...

Here's another pattern of content management: content objects have "views." This means that content objects have several predefined ways of being viewed across your system. For example, here are (the) two big ones using an "article" as an example. Individual The view of a single contect object -- how your ...

If you've read this blog, you may have picked up on the fact that I'm a bit of an open-source advocate. I far prefer to use open-source solutions wherever possible. By and large, open-source doesn't get enough credit. I've run Linux and KDE as my primary work environment on my ...

There's a new book out "War Footing" with some scary things to say about what could happen if the bad guys got their hands on a nuke and detonated it high above US soil. Looking at the promo website for the book makes you wonder if the whole ...

Over the years, I've learned a big secret about building information-focused Web sites. This big secret is the single most important thing you can do for your Web site. It is the absolute make-or-break characteristic of successful Web sites. Without this, you really don't have much. With it, it doesn't ...

Teen sued by Apple gains legal help: This is good news, because I think everyone deserves good representation and I love a legal soap opera. A lawyer specializing in freedom of speech and the Internet said Wednesday he will defend free of charge a 19-year-old publisher of a Web site ...

I'm just wrapping up a bigger-than-average, commercial content management install. One of the things this system promotes -- as do many -- is image management. Sure enough, the system has a library in which the users can store images. They can browse the library to insert images using the WYSIWYG ...

(Warning: this entire post is related to a sponsor's link on this site. And to find this you'll need to click on the sponsor's link. But it's kind of worth it.) Hitachi ads started appearing on the site today. Something about the "Innovator 3000," which sounds a lot like "Andre ...

Detroit to New York in the Ford GT: This is perhaps the prototypical "dream assignment" for a writer: The people at Ford Motor Co. asked me to do them a little favor. They needed someone to drive a Ford GT -- America's Ferrari, the Motown Millenium Falcon -- from the ...

Kite-Assisted Cargo Ship Successfully Completes Maiden Voyage: We discussed the idea of a kite-assisted ship a few years ago here. Well, a ship has actually made a trans-Atlantic voyage assisted by one of these kites, and the results were wicked good. During its time at sea, the kite-assisted ship traveled ...

Meme: You hear the word 'meme" a lot these days, referring to stuff that gets passed around via email, usually. (Apparently it rhymes with "theme," not "them" like I thought.) Well, there's a lot more to it, and this page is an interesting read. Did you know the term was ...