Practical people. Practical problems. Practical advice.

Posts in category Babble

Around the world

May17
2012 1 Comment Written by ecomware

Our visitors from around the world: Thank you!

Visiting from some place cool? Leave a “Hello, world!”
We, at ecomware, would really appreciate it. =)

List of countries that visit ecomware

 

Tagged , , , , ,

Liferay Themes – ecomware

May09
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

We Ain’t Selling Out!

Yesterday, we got an offer. Our tiny domain has attracted attention because it dominates major keyword phrases for Liferay, the Enterprise open source portal and collaboration software. Even though we’re not officially among the Liferay Service Partners *, developers from around the world know ecomware for its several basic tutorials on structures and themes. Apparently, it occurred to someone that ecomware might be a valuable addition to their online real estate portfolio. But we’re not yet ready for that. We’re happy serving multiple developer (user and small business) communities. We appreciate the people who look to ecomware for tips and tricks, and we thank you for making ecomware a well-respected site around the world!

Not Connected, Just Knowledgeable

* We’re not affiliated with the Liferay gang in any way. We’re just community members. We published our tutorials on the platform before much documentation existed, and for that we were rewarded with plenty of visits from curious Liferay programmers over the last few years.

Posted in Liferay - Tagged , , , ,

Framework Myths

May09
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

The software industry is overrun with truisms and platitudes. Do not repeat yourself, we’re told over and over. (Unless you’re repeating an engineering cliche, of course.) Keep it simple, stupid. Composition over inheritance. Abstract the UI through MVC. And so on.

Most developers know, intuitively, that no framework, architecture, or process is correct for all situations. There are no silver bullets, after all. (Again, a truism.) And most developers know that you cannot design too far into the future, that you shouldn’t refactor too early, and that the 80/20 rule always applies.

But I want to know how it’s possible that so many dramatically different styles of software development can exist within teams full of people all saying the same things? Is it possible, to borrow another cliche, that some of you are doing it wrong?

Several times I have watched small groups of people in meetings repeat exactly the same set of details to each other and derive from those details diametrically opposed conclusions. They see the same set of facts, agree that a similar problem exists, and then come to differing conclusions about how to effect a solution.

I believe some portion of the time, the parties disagree fundamentally about the problem due to differences in deeply held values and beliefs, even though on the surface they agree to a practical definition of the problem.

But I believe in some portion of the time the main difference lies in the beliefs about, and expectations of, the consequences of certain behaviors either contributing to the problem or proposed as solutions.

For example, it should be easy to see how disagreement might arise between two people who hold different values, say between one who’s highest value is wealth and another who’s highest value is happiness. Those two people can coexist, but it would almost always require an understanding of the other’s driving value, and some effort to compromise.

But what about the differences that arise between two people who value wealth, perhaps regarding which behaviors create wealth?

Reasonable people might make the case that perhaps both proposed behaviors might create wealth. Granted. But I propose that what happens much more frequently in that situation is that one of the people is just wrong.

And so it is in software. Some of your ideas about components, generalization, simplicity, silver bullets, and MVC are just wrong. They don’t contribute to pliable software. They don’t contribute to software quality. And they don’t contribute to your company’s profitability.

Posted in Architecture

Browser Statistics

May06
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

Browser rank by visitors Browser stats for visitors over the last 24 hours. This is the Hacker News crowd that responds to articles titled like Pedantic HTML. I didn’t expect to see Chrome at the top of the list. ecomware is most often arrived at by non-US visitors, so I wonder if that has something to do with it.

Browser rank by visitors

Pedantic HTML

May05
2012 2 Comments Written by ecomware

Good qualities of Software Engineers

Software engineers are, stereotypically, opinionated. They tend to enjoy very practical, rule-based systems in general, but they absolutely cannot refrain from sharing their philosophy on anything even tangentially-related to their respective areas of expertise, which is everything.

Software engineers also often get caught up in whatever they’re interested in in any given period, too. Like young people, software engineers latch on to new topics, and then seek out opportunities to share their new knowledge with anyone who will listen without consideration (or even cognizance) that other people may already know all about it. My little brother has something to tell you about tyrannosauruses, and though you (as a software engineer) happen to know all there is to know about all dinosaurs, he will persistently plead with you to accept that what he learned in school from that one, 3-line paragraph post in 48-pt font is all there is to know. Don’t act surprised, you’re not the only one who learns everything from a blog.

Combine these two qualities in any one person and you have a recipe for some seriously awkward interaction. Combine these two qualities in each member of an 80-person development team, and you can … Well, you needn’t wonder too long about why it takes 6 months to get your website built.

Finally, software engineers tend to have a weirdly oppositional stance to the traditional business functions. In a simple P&L, software developers believe they, just like marketing or sales, contribute strictly to the P. And they think they make that happen by telling Sales not to pitch so many new features and not to promise all of those next-quarter delivery estimates. Whenever the deadline, it’s too close. More testing, stability, and generalization: That’s what a business needs to make money, and though you, Sales Guy, brought back a check for what Software Engineering will call false promises, Software Engineering is here to save you from yourself by providing a little counter-balancing push back.

Revenue growth? Software engineering knows all about it. They all read a blog about revenue growth on Hacker News just last week. Trust ‘em. They’ve got you covered.

Coin a phrase: Pedantic HTML

Retort: Have you ever heard of Pedantic HTML?

This refers to any interaction where a presentation-layer developer in an organization 1 asks you if you know something about Semantic HTML, or accessibility, or SEO (as if it’s all H-tags and page titles), or responsive design (as if linear blocks are the solution to any modern marketing problem or have anything to do with the word responsive), or how to hand-code getElementsByClassName
 in dry-erase marker on the white board, or if you can name any of the new elements in HTML 5
(that have been around since 2007), or anything about Tyrannosauruses.

Footnotes

1 It is inevitably true that organizations supporting Pedantic HTML have JSPs that print their DocTypes! no earlier than line 30, include at least 3 body tags in every page, and will use JSON to replace XML in every place XML accomplished the task better.

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter

May03
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

What’s supposed to happen

My Mac Mini has HDMI output, which makes connecting it to my 32″ Sony Bravia pretty easy. I use a 10′ Belkin HDMI cord with no problems. It’s worked well for more than a year. But my employer was kind enough to give us sweet, new MacBook Pros (We got the nice ones), which have the Thunderbolt (Mini DisplayPort) out. So I went looking for a Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter to work with my existing Belkin cord.

I was happy to find this: Belkin Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter – Apple Store (U.S.)

What actually happened

I tried it. The display was detected. It showed up in 1080p. And that lasted about 5 seconds. Then it was intermittent, and sort of flickered every time I moved my wireless mouse. By setting the refresh rate to 24, I noticed marginal improvement. It would only flicker if I moved a window.

What seems to work for now

I read all kinds of reviews about the quality (and differences) between the available cords. I read about the black magic solutions. (Connect one side, reboot, connect the other side; Or put a Thunderbolt peripheral in the middle; Or go from Mini DisplayPort to «something else» to HDMI) The dude at the Apple store said, “Try this”, and then handed me the Kanex Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Cable with Audio Support.

It worked immediately. It’s working now. The reviews are mixed, and I have the sick feeling that the cable won’t last long. But for now, that sick feeling is offset by the pleasure of seeing my 17″ monitor digitally painted across 32″ of Bravia.

Inspect Element with Firefox

Apr28
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

In Firefox, right-click on any web page. Select Inspect Element. Choose HTML. Select 3D. Then drag the image to see the layering of HTML. Awesome. Seriously, try it. Right now: Right-click » Inspect Element » 3D

Firefox Inspect Element

Tagged , , , ,

Eric Savitz (of Forbes) will now write for ecomware

Apr19
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

Today, I woke up, did a little Google searching, and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, a professional writer (and one familiar with technology) has decided to acquire my profile. Thank you, Mr. Savitz, for putting this at the top of your to-do list. As all visitors to ecomware know, I’m a terrible writer. With you on board, I fully expect content quality (and my AdSense revenue) to go up dramatically. Have you read our post soliciting writers for ecomware? I hope you won’t be too offended to collect your $17.50 and free t-shirt like the rest of the staff.

Posted in Business & Marketing - Tagged , , , , ,

SEO Captcha
The social engineering behind Google Search

Apr17
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Digital Marketing

Many people use Google every day to find things–news, technical support, events, tips, research documents, and more. Perhaps even more enticing is the promise of elusive nuggets of market research and competitive intelligence out there waiting to be discovered. With over a trillion URLs in its index, Google is a veritable treasure trove of information. [Google]

And all you have to do is search for it. With more than 12 billion searches being performed each month as of January 2009 (according to comScore), approximately 400 million web searches are performed every day. This means that on average more than 4,500 searches are performed every single second of every day. [Google] Owning approximately 65% of the search market share, Google’s search technology handles more than 2, 900 searches per second. [SEO]

Search has become ubiquitous. According to the Pew Internet Generations 2010 study, search is the number one online activity for all generations after email—87% of U.S. adults online use search engines. [Humanize] But often the best answers lie just beyond the edges of what we know to seek. And software algorithms take us only so far. [Search]

The current Web works well because we as humans are very flexible data processors. Whether the information on a web page is arranged as a table, an outline, or a multipage narrative, we are able to extract the important information and use it to guide further knowledge discovery. However, this heterogeneity of information is indecipherable to machines, and the wide range of representations for data on the Web only compounds the problem. If the diversity of information available on the Web can be encoded by content providers into semantic data structures, any application could access and use the rich array of data we have come to rely on. In this vision, data is seamlessly woven together from disparate sources, and new knowledge is derived from the confluence. This is the vision of the semantic web. [Semantic]

So how does Google bridge the gap between flexible (but determined) information-seeking humans and the limited, data-processing algorithms that do our searching for us? It very subtly asks us do the work, of course!

SEO, search engine optimization, is literally the practice of investing time and effort into the packaging of information to make it more accessible through search algorithms. Humans who prepare content (like this article) are incentivized to seek out the 1 or 2 words most people might use to find it. And then to add markup language (with semantic attributes) that helps build “certainty” within the algorithm that the content is relevant to the searchers intent. SEOs, we’re not just optimizing our sites, we’re Google’s minions!

Don’t underestimate the marketing that has gone into making this practice popular. Google is no stranger to social engineering techniques that use human labor to optimize information for computers. reCAPTCHA is a mechanism that authenticates users for actions like blog commenting and other web interactions, but what it also does, very subtly, is ask users to read and type word pairs that Google cannot decipher using software. With each reCAPTCHA entered, one more word of a digital volume is translated from print to binary representation.

Bibliography
[Google]
Google Power Search by Stephan Spencer. Copyright 2011 Stephan Spencer, 978-1-449-31156-8

[Humanize]
Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World by Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant. Copyright 2012 Que Publishing, 978-0-7897-4112-7

[Search]
Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender. Copyright 2010 Peter Morville and Jeff Callender, 978-0-596-80227-1

[Semantic]
Programming the Semantic Web by Toby Segaran, Colin Evans, and Jamie Taylor. Copyright 2009 Toby Segaran, Colin Evans, and Jamie Taylor, 978-0-596-15381-6

[SEO]
The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola. Copyright 2010 Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie Stricchiola, 978-0-596-51886-8

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Traditional media is great, but get your important information at the source.

Mar15
2012 Leave a Comment Written by ecomware

The economy, research and personal productivity.

The economy is big business today. Today’s news is rife with fragments of research and speculative forecasts, and so it has been for several years. The average American has been affected by the recessionary climate, and has good reason to be on the lookout for any information about what to expect next. (Some are still trying to figure out what happened.) And businesses aren’t much different.

Whether you’re an individual trying to find a job and manage house payments, or part of an industry-leading business trying to maintain market dominance, you’re likely aware that our country’s future economic fortune–or lack of it–is routinely fore told. What you may not be aware of, though, is where the data for those prognostications come from. Or that what separates most individuals from their business-savvy counterparts is how to access these data (and sometimes how to interpret them).

Marketing managers may have custom-ordered market research at their fingertips. Senior leaders often have first-hand knowledge of their customers’ fluctuating demands. But most of us normal people get our economic insight through consumer sources, like newspapers–off- and on-line–and news-focused television. Does that seem right? We’re making decisions about short-selling our homes, relocating our families, and retirement investing using data that has been plucked from its source and wrapped in editorial opinion.

Please, just the facts, ma’am.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We all have access to the core data, though most of us don’t realize it. For example, most of us are aware of the Federal Reserve. It is referred to constantly by consumer news as a source of economic information, and because it wields the power to affect the entire economy. Yet, few people actually read the source of the Fed’s opinion: The Monetary Report to Congress.

Crude oil imports and exports is another common topic. Many people never realize our dependence on the Middle East for oil is less than our dependence on Canada. Canada is the largest exporter of crude oil to the US by far. You can find out for yourself at the source: US Energy Information Administration.

Or how about something like Obama care? The Congressional Budget Office makes its estimates of spending for certain initiatives available to the public through its website: Congressional Budget Office.

You can even find market research data if you know what you’re looking for. Our previous post lists several documents that were produced by Forrester, a company known for its research on marketing and technology.

No one has time to read all that

You may think all of the data you would be interested in would be too much for any single person to read. You’re wrong. You may read dozens of editorial reports that each reference the same Monetary Report to Congress over the six months of the document’s life. You can read the 50 or so pages of the actual Monetary Report to Congress while enjoying a few lunches. And you’ll be wiser than your contemporaries at the water cooler. Documents like these contain information you base many of your life decisions on–why get that information second-hand? If you’re not convinced, consider that many successful people claim to eschew consumer media in favor of higher-concentrated, factual sources about topics that impact their major life and business decisions.

This habit applies to any area of study, whether it’s the economy, technology, your health, or a hobby. Get to the source as quickly and as often as you can, and leave the second-hand information for everyone else.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
← Older Entries