Gadgetopia

Microsoft’s Not So Secret New Open Source CMS : Very interesting.

Microsoft has a secret, although it’s not completely secret. They are getting ready to offer a new open source content management application code named Orchard.

The project, which will be discussed at next week’s TechEd Europe, is a “new effort to produce free, open source, reusable components and a full-featured CMS application built on these components to produce a variety of different types of web sites.”

Chroma-Hash: A Belated Introduction : An interesting experiment.  As you enter your password, it gets hashed and convert to three colored bars in real-time.  So, you come to know the “colors” of your password, and can tell if you entered it right before you hit enter.

If your password normally is represented as “red, purple, orange”, and after you’ve finished typing you see “pink, green, grey”, you’ll know you mistyped it somewhere along the way. This avoids a potentially long wait for the server to respond with a “failed login” notice.

It’s neat, but I can’t say it’s fixing a huge problem for anyone, I guess.

Developers stealing from developers: an App Store tale : Interesting story that details a situation every knows happens all the time.

A guy writes an iPhone app.  Then he gets a call from someone wanting to ask about his experience with the subcontractor who supposedly wrote the app for him…wait, a minute.  Someone had apparently claimed that they wrote the app and were using that claim to drum up work.

Curious as to just what was going on, Haddad decided to e-mail Trucid pretending to be interested in their services. In the e-mail, he requested information about the company and a list of examples of its work. It wasn’t long before Haddad received an e-mail back from Trucid’s Chief Marketing Officer explaining who the company was, what it did, and its experience on the iPhone platform. Sure enough, ConvertBot was on the list of the 14 apps the company had supposedly developed.

[…] Sadly, this kind of résumé boosting is becoming more common.

I have some experience with this.  In 2000, Joe and I were working at a company that built a Web site for the Minnesota Vikings, which was probably as high-profile a site as any Sioux Falls company had done back in 2000.  I was the lead developer, and there were 3-4 people on the team for it.

Some years later I sat down for a beer with my friendly arch-rival Aaron Mentele from Electric Pulp.  He informed me that lots and lots of people he had interviewed over the last few years had claimed to have written the Vikings Web site.  I thought that was pretty funny, I guess.  Maybe they wrote it and I was stealing their credibility?  I’m such a hack.

Bill Gates sums up Microsoft’s abusive history : This blog post at Opera links to a PDF of an email entered as evidence in Microsoft’s anti-trust trial.  Assuming this is accurate, it neatly supports what everyone has always claimed about Microsoft.

In it, Bill Gates tells the Office group this:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

I really hate stuff like this.  I know that a lot of people look at it on terms of “open-ness,” but this just pisses me off on a competitive basis.  If you can’t win without rigging the contest, then you suck.  Win on your own merits, or don’t play.

Wikipedia : I had no idea this existed.  It’s for either children or non-native English speakers.

Wikipedias are places where people work together to write encyclopedias in different languages. We use simple English words and grammar here. The Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone! That includes children and adults who are learning English.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) : Amazon is offering MySQL in the cloud.

Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period

Joe points out that this is kinda spendy, as they’re really just running MySQL on an EC2 image, just like you’re able to do yourself.

Facebook ‘memorialises’ profiles

Facebook has announced that it will be giving friends and family the option to “memorialise” the profiles of members who have died.

[…] If a user is reported as deceased, Facebook will remove sensitive information such as status updates and contacts.

When reporting a death, users must offer “proof” by submitting either an obituary or news article.

Flags By Colours : Neat little app that analyzes the colors of world flags (pulled from Wikpedia) in real-time, providing pie charts for each and for all of them in aggregate.

Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined. (note: Colours making up less than 1% may not appear)

The most common color in world flags?  White, by a wide margin.

WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal : Interesting.

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software

Blend has a new Web site.  I hope you like it.  It’s running on EPiServer.

Windows 7 is the best operating system on the market : Slate doesn’t mince words:

Get Windows 7 […] Microsoft’s latest release is the best operating system on the market.

Notice they say the “best operating system.”  Not “best version of Windows.”

They have a few complaints, but:

These are only […] inconsequential defects in what’s otherwise a nearly flawless system. Indeed, the new Windows is not only the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. It is arguably the fastest, most intuitive, and most useful consumer desktop OS on the market today.

Google to launch music search service : Interpret this as, “We know nothing, but everyone get excited!!”

Google plans to launch a music service, Wired.com has confirmed with sources familiar with the situation. Next to nothing is known about the service at this point, rumored to be called “Google Music,” “Google Audio,” or “One Box,” although we have confirmed that it will be announced next Wednesday, and that it will link out to two music services: Lala and iLike.

Google will not become a music retailer itself, but will offer enhanced music search with a streaming function — the first of possibly several vertical search offerings.

It would be interesting if they called it “One Box,” as that’s the name of their extensibility architecture for the Google Search Appliance.

Can Java CMS match the PHP ones? : This is a very interesting post from a Java development community.  You can sum it up in this excerpt:

Maybe while the Java world was engaged in talking of high end, super techie stuff, with the words ‘enterprise’, ‘transactions’ and ‘SOA ‘embedded in every sentence, the PHP guys actually went out and created a lot of simple yet very useful software.

Introducing The Dynamic Data Store : EPiServer is shipping a handy new feature in CMS 6 which provides for data storage of…whatever.

[…] storing data in a database using Entity Framework or NHibernate requires you to design and compile a class when developing your application. This works really well when you know the shape or structure of your data at compile time. EPiServer CMS has a few features where the shape or structure of the data isn’t actually known until runtime.

The Dynamic Data Store is very key-value-ish, like Amazon’s SimpleDB or Google’s BigTable.  It gives you a simple place to store variably-shaped data when building your apps, without having to roll new tables or build ORMs.  There are so many times when you just want to store some random piece of data, and the Dynamic Data Store gives you a simple way to do that, and get it back out, strongly-typed, even.

The comments on this blog post are interesting – there are a lot of people expressing reservations that developers will mis-use it, which is understandable.  In everything, it’s all in the execution.  Anything can be mis-used, if you’re careless.

Allan has written a handy example to store ratings of a certain page.  He wrote a simple “Rating” class, which has a property for the page to which it’s applied.  Then he wrote a couple extension methods so you can get this information directly off EPiServer’s core content object.  In the end, he’s built a feature that looks as though it’s built right into EPiServer and has an infrastructure behind it, when really it consists of nothing but a half-dozen methods and perhaps 20 lines of code.

Gilbane Boston 2009 - Content Management Conference: I managed to wrangle a speaking slot at Gilbane Boston on December 1-3.  I’m going to be giving a shortened version of my Chicago talk entitled “Content Types: The Building Blocks of Your Content Model.”