September 30, 2005
Programming Came Up Just The Other Day With My Kid
"KPL stands for Kid’s Programming Language. KPL makes it easy for kids to learn computer programming. KPL makes it fun, too, by making it especially easy to program computer games, with cool graphics and sound.
That's the opening for the Kid's intro to KPL. Here's something for us bigger kids.
Put Your Blogging Tool and RSS News Aggregator In Your Pocket
Desktop Pipeline | Take It All With You: Two 'Smart' USB Drives: This little hard drives folks carry around on their keychains and pockets (AKA thumb drives or dongles around these parts) are getting smarter. These new ones allow you to carry your data AND the programs (tools) you manipulate them with...plug in to any USB computer and you can work like you do you your home computer.
Imagine being able to take your favorite weblogging or writing software with you and being able to use it to publish from any machine you can find...Radio Userland, or OPML Editor, or NetNewswire, or MS Word. Or running an update of your RSS News Aggregator...Radio Userland, NetNewswire, etc....and then sticking it in your pocket to read wherever the next computer kiosk or friends home computer presents itself. Truly portable and transportable reporting. I think of also being able to plug this thing into a smart phone / networked PDA to enable extremely portable, fully networked access for the programs running on these drives.
Put a blogging, podcasting, aggregator app on these and I'll try one out...the U3 sounds especially appealing at 30 bucks to try out a 256 MB version....I'd probably start with the $100 1GB just to make it really usable as just a regular old dumb portable USB hard drive.
September 29, 2005
Rollyo Own Search Engine
Rollyo, an interesting little tool for building a personal search engine, letting you limit your web search just to the sites that you know and browse, came across my desk via TechCrunch today. My first thought was to be able to include a search on the http://AboutEA.com site that only includes the site itself and sites applicable to enterprise architecture and business process analysis.
The tool is still just coming together, with no way yet to stick it in the site navigation yet, but you can see the results of my first forray by checking out the Vince Outlaw Rollyo Profile and clicking on the Biz Process Sites link on the right under Vince's Searchrolls.
Some other ideas for this include adding all of my Flickr contacts photo pages and all of the Jazz Sites that currently search for news.
I haven't quite got my head around where this will fit in with the RSS feeds I subscribe to, but this seems like more of a search for reference material as opposed to news.
September 26, 2005
Web Forms vs. Web Apps
Forms vs. Applications (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
"...On balance, though, many user tasks are sufficiently complex that usability is enhanced when you abandon the old forms metaphor and give users the support of an interactive UI."
It will be interesting to see how business process management and the connected flow of work between entities will impact this view of a web-application. It seems like things are moving in the direction where as a workflow is more end-to-end, then the tasks for each stakeholder in the workflow become more consise and dialog-box / web-form / portal-channel like...you are providing the information needed to move the workflow along, which seems to indicate more web-form-like instead of a full-blown application GUI.
Shooting Into The Sun Does This For Me!
Crave privacy? New tech knocks out digital cameras | CNET News.com: Something senses a digital camera in action (wow!) and then shines a light their way to blur out the picture. I usually just shoot into the sun if I want a blurry picture!
Keep The New Stuff at the Top!
The Power of Default Values (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox), regarding usage of search result pages,
"...we can conclude that there is a strong bias in favor of clicking the top link, though not so strong that link quality is irrelevant. "
Keep the stuff you really want users to click on up top!
September 25, 2005
1st Annual Ocean Beach Jazz Festival Today!
The Inaugural Ocean Beach Jazz Festival is set for today, Sunday, September 25, 2005 from Noon to Sunset in Ocean Beach, California and we'll be posting pictures and live audioblog commentary to a special installment of the The Jazz Live Weblog all day!! Ticket information is available at http://OBJazzFest.org!!
I'll leave the badge in place so you can see any new OBJazzFest pictures we toss up on Flickr.
www.flickr.com
|
September 20, 2005
Mac Safari and Flickr Not Playing Well Together
I'm not sure why this is happening, but my Mac Safari web browser is aborting on my http://Flickr.com pages. Which is kind of frustrating, since I was just posting some more trip details over at http://VinceOutlaw.com, fired up Flickr to get a picture to include in the post, and totally lost everything I had written...damn!
I have a feeling it has something to do with the the Flash applications that Flickr uses, since my web page has the Flickr Zeitgeist badge on it, but Safari also chokes when I go to Flickr and try to use the Organize page, which is a really big Flash app. It doesn't have any problem with the DHTML magic for deailing with individual pictures, so I'm kind of at a loss.
This also illustrates the sorry state of trying to edit weblogs right within the browser...there's no real method for that tried and true maxim, "Save Often", when you are typing into a web form. Looks like I'll have to get back to trying one of the weblogging tools like NetNewsWire, which allows saving and such.
Off to try again...
September 12, 2005
Slowing Goings for EA at DOD
GAO: Defense Dept. slow on enterprise architecture progress - Computerworld
"...the Defense Department hasn't incorporated previous GAO recommendations, including the establishment of an effective governance structure, the development of program plans that spell out measurable goals and outcomes, the creation of an effective configuration management system, the development of a well-defined architecture that describes current business and technology environments, or a transition plan."
September 07, 2005
Bottom's Up to New Dashboards!
From Ted Kemp's piece Business Intelligence Pipeline | Blog | Dashboarding From The Bottom Up
"As dashboards spread to more and more folks throughout the organization, one prominent business performance management executive has some advice for companies taking on new dashboard deployments: Start from the bottom, and work your way up."
I would tend to say that you should at least tie some of the metrics and measures at lower level dashboards to some higher part of the process, just so folks at the bottom understand the context of what they are looking at.
Thinking a little about this advice, it will be interesting to see if process owners and sponsors in the process-enabled enterprise will be willing to have dashboards produced for the underlings first!