Expecting Rain

Jon Udell posted an article a few months ago about data lock-in. I read it and agreed completely with the information shared. Since then, I've released a piece of software that has effectively locked it's data away from the way the users want it.

The software in question is a task management solution that is used in the company I work for. I provided easy, documented api's for getting to the data. Unfortunately, my primary users aren't able to utilize these as they aren't the least bit technically savvy. However, due to my api's, the data isn't truly locked-in. Myself or anyone else interested in perusing the documentation can access it just fine. I have since created some reports using the said api's and have retrieved the data in a manner that is more acceptable to the users.

So while I effectively locked my data in, I didn't technically. Where I really missed the boat was in my planning stage as I neglected to discover the true reports the users need. What is worse is that technically locked-in or not, the main users perceive that it was locked in, and perception may as well be fact as far as they are concerned.

I've added a few new links to my right hand links and blogs sections. Check them out. I'll try to keep it updated with sites I go to often or resources I find particularly useful.

Well, this is old news, but I thought I'd better update my blog about it as well. I'm a very big fan of Jon Udell's writing. I think his topics and entries are well written, well thought out, and relevant to me and my thinking. He used to be employed by InfoWorld, but is switching to Microsoft. While I'm not thrilled by this change, I wish him the best and hope his articles remain true to what he has became.

I'm updating my sidebar on this blog to show his old blog archive as well as this new one.

Here is a link to his new blog: http://blog.jonudell.net/

Wow, it is very difficult to come back from vacation. I've been off for 13 days. The hardest part is filtering through all of my email. I must admit, it was a nice vacation, however, it is good to get into a schedule again.

Every time I set up a new Firefox installation for someone, or myself, I spend the next 15-20 minutes trying to figure out how to change the tab focus settings to allow tab focusing for elements besides form input fields. For some reason, I never can get the correct Google search terms entered to find this. Anyway, if anyone wonders, here is what you do.

1. type in the address about:config in the URL bar of Firefox. This isn't a valid url, but it resolves to the configuration settings for you browser.


2. if your installation doesn't have a setting called accessibility.tabfocus, create one by right clicking and selecting "New" -> "Integer".


3. set the value to the selection that fits your needs.

Possible settings
1 : Text field form controls only
2 : All form controls except text fields
3 : All form controls
4 : Hyperlinks and hyperlinked images
7 : All form controls and hyperlinks

Well, I'm on vacation, and I'm still tied to the computer. I've been working on a small project for a few members of my family. For those interested, the project is a del.icio.us Firefox extension. The purpose of this extension is to provide quick access to your del.icio.us bookmarks seemingly through Firefox natively.

The extension is actually quite easy to develop. del.icio.us gives a very comprehensively documented api to speed up the process. I am using two different methods to access bookmarks from their site.

• del.icio.us api


• del.icio.us json feeds

I'm using a combination of these to prevent my extension of being throttled. Their direct api has an access limit of one request per second or they will begin sending you 503 errors meaning you have been throttled. So, I use their api to gather bundles, and their feeds to request bookmarks for certain tags. The benefits of using their feeds is that I've not had any throttling issues and it is available as raw JSON, the drawbacks are that there is a delay from the time you add a bookmark until it shows up in your feed and it limits you to 100 results.

There are still a lot of features that I need to implement, but overall it is working out nicely and I find quite a bit of use for it.

Our second Ruby project that I spoke of has been progressing quite nicely, here are the stats for this second project.

Line Count Stats

Line count for src......    1796
Line count for proc.....       9
Line count for util.....     256
Line count for unit.....    3095
Line count for web......    7428
Line count for misc.....     198
--------------------------------
Total...................   12782

Started
............................
Finished in 19.257698 seconds.

79 tests, 1669 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

Wow, it has been a very busy month since I've posted last. I've not posting in a long time and I'm going to try to rectify that.

Project Update:
Our Ruby project is going well. So well in fact that we have begun another project using the same framework. I'm very excited.

Today is my last day at work for the year, I'm taking the remainder off and enjoying time with my family. I won't however, stop developing, I've got a little project I'm doing for my family that I'm going to try to wrap up.

Over the weekend I took it upon myself to try creating a Firefox extension. I was lacking for a good idea, so I donated some time to my company and created an extension that would ease the use of one of our internal applications. As such, I can't post it publicly, but I was very impressed with how easy it was to create.

Firefox extensions are basically an xml file to describe the UI (.xul), a couple RDF files to help the installation process, and JavaScript. There are many tutorials on the web you can search for. The one the got me started was found here.

Here is an interesting link about the beta? release of Java 6. I've really been looking forward to this release due to the hype it is getting.

Source: http://headius.blogspot.com/2006/11/java-se-6-passes-final-jcp-approval.html