Gadgetopia

Hulu

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:01:27 -0600

Now, I realize that Hulu got lot of crap for being a YouTube ripoff, and I know NBC got a lot of crap for pulling all its stuff off every video sharing site in the world, but…

Hulu is awesome. Seriously. I don’t know how I ended up there today, but I think I’m in love.

Here are all the things I watched today:

Saturday Night Live clips, including this one with Steve Martin that could solve the American financial crisis if everyone just put it into practice.
An episode of 30 Rock that I missed.
An episode of Miami Vice. They have the first two seasons — the first two seasons!! (True story — if Isabella had been a boy, he was gonna be named “Sonny.” I’m not kidding.)
The pilot episode of Stacked, a sitcom with Pamela Anderson that really shouldn’t have been canceled — it was genuinely funny.

In exchange for this, my show stopped every 10 minutes or so for a commercial that lasted all of about 20 seconds. The timeline on the Flash Player even has little dots on it that let you know when it’s going to break. (You can’t skip them — the controls disappear during the ad, and an ad plays if you move the scrub bar past a dot.)

Picture quality was good, ad intrusion was acceptable, content selection was good and — I’m assuming — just going to get better.

As much as I want to join the “Let’s Bash Big Media” party on this one, I’m still looking for a downside.

iTunesU

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:10:38 -0600

Apple - Education - iTunes U: This is the audio version of OpenCourseWare, I suppose. Apple has gotten a bunch of high-end schools to contribute lectures to iTunes, which are available for download, and appear to be free (I didn’t find any with prices attached, at any rate).

iTunes U delivers easy, 24/7 access to educational content from hundreds of top colleges, universities, and educationally focused organizations across the country. And it’s accessible to anyone with a Mac or PC.

I didn’t find anything that jumped out at me as interesting, but there are some great schools represented: MIT, Yale, DePaul, Carnegie Mellon, etc.

Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sat, 10 May 2008 14:45:32 -0600

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody: Clay Shirky gave a heckuva talk at the Web 2.0 Expot about what he calls “the cognitive surplus.” Here’s the theory —

After the industrial revolution, Americans had something new: free time. And we needed to figure out what to do with it. So we started drinking gin and watching TV, instead of thinking and participating.

Television, Shirky argues, has become a huge heat sink that dissipates time that could be spent on constructive pursuits — a “cognitive surplus.” He offers this statistic, which is amazing.

[…] ll of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

[…] And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. […] Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

So, we spend “2,000 Wikipedias” a year watching television. Seriously.

The entire talk is great. The link above goes to the printed transcript. Here’s a link to Zawodny, for the 15-minute video.

The Utlimate Elevator Article

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:43:54 -0600

Up and Then Down: This is a fascinating article about all aspects of elevators. It’s set amid the story of a guy who got stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, but it touches on things like elevator phobias, the social aspects of elevators, and — more interestingly — the logistical aspects of how elevators work.

Elevator logistics, it turns out, have some serious theoretical issues to resolve.

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

Having elevators work well is not a trivial thing:

The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

Even more interesting is the psychology of how humans place themselves in elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.

This makes me remember a really funny SNL skit with David Schwimmer that I thought was subtly brilliant (pictured at top).

Schwimmer was in an elevator, and people kept coming in and standing…oddly. For instance, he stood in the middle when he was by himself, then dutifully moved to the corner when other people got in. But those people didn’t stand in the opposite corner as expected — they stood right next to him in his corner. In another instance, the only other passenger turned around and faced the back of the car. Schwimmer hesitated for a moment, then did the same.

It was fascinating in that it revealed some of the ingrained psychological and social frameworks we deal with daily and don’t even realize. I can’t find a video of it, but here’s a transcript of the skit, which includes the picture from this post.

Why Twitter?

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:52:26 -0600

Video: Twitter in Plain English: This video attempts to explain what value Twitter brings to the world. I will admit that after watching it, I maybe have some understanding about what people see in Twitter.

But I still think it’s creepy. We don’t have to know about everything that happens, all the time.

Like the video says, one of the first things we ask each other is “What are you doing?” Twitter seems to do a fine job of removing the need to ask that question.

And that’s a little sad.

And I refuse to forget

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:45:11 -0600

Filmaka: And I refuse to forget: This movie is worth 3 minutes and 11 seconds of your life.

A Sensory Archiver keeps paperless secrets for the world’s most powerful institutions. Against orders he clings to sensations of his most precious memories - that of the woman he loved.

Wonderfully done. I had to watch it twice before I got it, and I’m still not quite sure I do.

Zebra Striping: Pointless?

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:31:24 -0600

Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?: This article suggests that zebra-striping (alternate row coloring) in tables does nothing to improve usability.

This experiment yielded no evidence that zebra striping consistently improves the accuracy or speed of tasks.

It does, however, make the tables look nicer to most people. Maybe that’s reason enough?

Introducing Alkaline Hydrolysis

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:55:17 -0600

New in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye: Don’t read this before lunch.

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

[…] The coffee-colored liquid has the consistency of motor oil and a strong ammonia smell. But proponents say it is sterile and can, in most cases, be safely poured down the drain, provided the operation has the necessary permits.

I think it would be weird to not exist like that. With burial, you have a body. With cremation you have ashes. With this, you have…nothing. You get turned into liquid then spread throughout the sewer system.

It was like you never existed. There is no physical record of you left.

CCTV Music Video

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:17:51 -0600

Got a band but can’t afford to shoot a video? Use public CCTV cameras and then demand the footage!: This is a great idea. I wonder how long it took them to get all this footage?

Unable to hire a production crew for a standard 1980’s era MTV music video, they performed their music in front of 80 of the 13 million CCTV “security” cameras available in England, including one on a bus.

They then used Britain’s Data Protection Act to request the footage that was shot of them.

If it’s anything like the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S., they could have been waiting for years.

Strong vs. Weak Typing Definitively Explained

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:09:12 -0600

i have some doughts in .net Please clarify me.: Some guy made a weak attempt to get posters on Spolsky’s discussion group to answer a homework question for him. Hilarity ensued.

Strong typing is hitting the keyboard with your fists. Weak typing is hitting it with so little force that the key doesn’t depress enough to activate the keyswitch

[…] Cyclomatic complexity refers to the vast number of washing machine cycle choices available on today’s machines.

Ordering Internet Pizza

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:45:21 -0600

Mamma Mia! Papa John’s raking in the dough online: An entire article on CNN about the apparent explosion of ordering pizza on the Net.

Dominos Pizza Inc., put its own twist on online ordering early this year by introducing a “Pizza Tracker,” which lets customers keep tabs on the progress of their orders. Consumers can find out when their pies are in the oven, when they’re on the way, and even the first name of their delivery person.

Ebert on Blogs

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:18:06 -0600

Roger Ebert’s Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: Roger Ebert has a blog now, which is crazy cool in and of itself. This week he talks about how the old world of fanzines preceded the current crop of blogs and perhaps even the Web itself.

I have always been convinced that the culture of sf fanzines contributed heavily to the formative culture of the early Web, and generated models for web site and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them. Think about it. Science fiction fans in the decades before the internet were already interested in computers, big-time — first with the supercomputers of science fiction myth, and then with the earliest home-built models. Fans tended to be youngish, male, geeky, obsessed with popular culture, and compelled to circulate their ideas. In the reviews and criticism they ran, they slanted heavily toward expertise in narrow pop fields.

Ebert rules.

(Roger Ebert emailed me, not once, but twice. Have I mentioned that recently? Seriously. Twice. Two friggin’ emails.)

Microsoft Pulls Offer for Yahoo

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:43:47 -0600

Microsoft says proxy battle not worth it: And that’s the end of that.

In a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer confirmed that Microsoft was willing to offer $33 a share, but that Yahoo was holding out for at least $37 a share, or $5 billion more than Microsoft was prepared to spend. In the letter, Ballmer also says he is ruling out a direct offer to shareholders.

The Peril of Self-Replicating Hyperlinks

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:27:40 -0600

I built an intranet for a client. One of the functional items is a viewer into an Exchange calendar. We use a handy third-party component to display the contents of an Exchange public folder on a page.

The month and year to be viewed is driven off the querystring. Something like:

/month.aspx?m=11&y=2010

So you can look at any month by writing your own querystring. We check for valid input and everything, but so long as you enter a valid month and year in the querystring, you can (could) look up any logical month in existence, as far ahead or behind as you want.

Each month has helpful “Next” and “Previous” links on it that form the URL for the next or previous month.

Sadly, we’re also indexing the intranet via a Google Mini.

Astute readers will see the problem here…

Two things happened:

The number of pages in the Mini spiked. The client was suddenly hitting their document limit. They only had about 10,000 actual pages of content, but the Mini was claiming it had indexed four or five times that number.
We started to get reports about odd months being returned in search results. Months like “November 2609” for example…

The Mini’s crawler, bless its heart, was dutifully following the “Next” and “Previous” links in the calendar into infinity in either direction. It was, in effect, inventing its own URLs…forever. Every new page in the calendar gave it a new URL it hadn’t seen before. The Mini’s crawler had fallen down the rabbit hole.

Easy problem to fix, but an embarrassing oversight nonetheless. We now drop the “Next” and “Previous” links at 24 months out in either direction, and we throw a 410 for anything outside those bounds in the past, and a 404 for anything outside those bounds in the future.

I just checked today, and the number of pages in the Mini came down 2,000 yesterday, as it rechecks out-of-bounds URLs and gets back 410s and 404s.

I wonder how many sites on the public Internet have this same problem? I wonder if crawlers have any logic to detect this?

What Makes a Blog?

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:31:53 -0600

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 weblogs, how they’re used, and what they are. Rather than saying “I know it when I see it” I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven.

There’s a lot of technical information about templates and calendars and such, but in my mind, the differences is in perspective and tone, and Winer hits it on the head right here:

The personalities of the writers come through. That is the essential element of weblog writing, and almost all the other elements can be missing, and the rules can be violated, imho, as long as the voice of a person comes through, it’s a weblog.

When people read a weblog, they’re getting the voice of an actual person, not some nameless, faceless organization. That’s really the trick.

Dell is Really Selling Ubuntu Machines

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:07:28 -0600

Last year, on this date, we posted that Dell was going to start selling Ubuntu-powered machines. We said:

Is this the moment desktop Linux proponents have been waiting for all these years?

This story came up in the “On This Day” section in the sidebar this morning, and I got to wondering about it. I had never heard anything else about it, and I thought, “Was that just another stunt press release about the mythical ‘Linux on the Desktop’?”

So, I went looking at Dell’s site, and I’m happy to report, that, sure enough, here are the Dell Ubuntu computers. They have four models — three laptops and one desktop. I went through the configuration process for the high-end XPS laptop, and you can apparently pimp out a Dell Ubuntu machine quite handily.

Nice going, Dell.

Spolsky Eviscerates Windows Live Mesh

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:32:49 -0600

Architecture astronauts take over: This whole thing is great. Spolsky gets downright medieval further down.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It’s a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.

[…] It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

Whatever happened to Groove, anyway? I used to use it.

410 Gone

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:32:08 -0600

HTTP Error 410: Gone: I found this page today when searching for a refresher on the 410 status code. It means “gone.” Forever. Not just “not found” right now, but forever more. Gone, baby.

We should use status code 410 more.

As far as I can tell, it’s the forgotten stepchild of error 404 (Resource not found). Error 410 means Resource gone, as in, a resource used to exist at this location, but now it’s gone. Not only is it gone, but I don’t know (or I don’t want to tell you) where it went. If I knew where it went, and I wanted to tell you, I would use error 301 (Permanent redirect) and any smart client would simply redirect to the new address. But 410 means Resource gone, no forwarding address. Train gone sorry.

Sam Ruby brings up a good point about when it would be a great time to use 410.

[…] you would think that any decent aggregator would respect a 410, wouldn’t you?

I’ve long since removed my scraped feed, and marked it gone.

Despite this, a number of aggregators continue to relentlessly poll for changes.

I had this same problem when I removed the RSS feeds for comments on individual posts:

[…] this brings up the question of how to notify people that I’m doing this. How do you notify RSS users? The solution is pretty simple I guess — I’m going to tack an entry to the top of this XML file that just explains that we’re not maintaining these feeds anymore, rebuild them all one last time, and then leave the files out there long enough for everyone to ping them again.

But when do you pull the files? When I delete these 4,600 XML files, do I redirect requests for them to another feed with a single entry that explains that they’re gone? Are there best practices for this?

Plant a Tree with Dell

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:07:10 -0600

Found today during the configuration process when buying a Dell computer.

Nielsen on Menu Usability

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:51:09 -0600

Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability: Jakob Nielsen, demigod that he is, has just published an interesting alert box about right-aligned menus (something we’re guilty of). He claims they reduce readability.

Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the speed with which users can scan the menu and select their preferred options.

The other two problems are (1) designers using all CAPS, and (2) lack of contrast between the background and letters.

What makes this interesting is that the University of Michigan read his Alertbox and realized they were guilty of all three problems, so they fixed their menu the same day, which caused Nielsen to update this column.

An examination of both screencaps is below the fold, and it’s interesting to look at — I tend to agree that the changed menu is remarkably more readable. And this is not only when actually reading it, but it just beckons to be read more. The “before” menu is something I probably would just gloss over without reading it, where I’d be much more likely to read the “after” menu.

Dell to Continue Selling XP Machines

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:52:44 -0600

Microsoft says XP is definitely dead in June, Dell says it’ll keep installing it: Dell has found a loophole in Vista licensing which it plans to exploit in order to keep selling XP machines.

Dell’s going to report a Vista sale to Microsoft, but deliver an XP box with Vista upgrade DVD to customers. (That sound you just heard was a million accountants sighing in appreciation.) The program will be available for Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision, Vostro, and XPS systems (some with a minor fee), and Dell says it’ll keep going as long as Microsoft supports the “downgrade” license option, which could be forever. Looks like June 30 just got a lot less scary for XP fans, no?

GoLive Put out Of Its Misery

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:20:34 -0600

Adobe discontinues GoLive: We here at Blend are devastated by this news. Oh, wait, no we’re not.

Adobe on Monday announced that its venerable visual Web site creation tool GoLive has been discontinued. The company has ceased development and sales of GoLive effective Monday, April 28, 2008.

GTA IV Gushing

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:34:25 -0600

Grand Theft Auto IV Review: Apparently GTA IV is pretty good. This is worth reading at length.

I won’t beat around the bush: Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest game to come out for the Xbox 360 so far. I say that without reservation and without consideration for the planned downloadable content slated for later this year that will hopefully only add to its awesomeness. It is a true evolution for the critically and commercially successful GTA series, not just a “next-gen” polish job of the same old game. But maybe even more importantly, it’s a new high water mark for video-game storytelling in general. This may sound like hyperbole, but it is deserved: GTA IV signals a moment in video-game history where it can no longer be denied that the medium can be as significant of an entertainment vehicle as the best that movies or television have to offer. GTA IV is sublime.

The Family Man and His "Cold Bath of Reality"

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:14:04 -0600

Why I love working with family people: Jeff Mackey over at 37 Signals claims the 20-something with no life is a “crutch” for startups. If you need a bunch of them to survive, your idea sucks.

That’s why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. That’s a good thing!

F1 Gets a Boost

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:25:58 -0600

Formula 1 Racing to Go Hybrid from 2009-2013: This is neat from both a geek perspective and from a competitive perspective.

The biggest difference between KERS and a regular battery-electric hybrid is that KERS stores recovered waste energy in a rotating flywheel. Instead of converting waste energy into electricity and than back into useful energy again with an electric motor, KERS simply transfers the kenetic energy to a ~5kg flywheel in the F1 car’s transmission. The energy stored in the flywheel can then be used by the driver by pushing a “boost” button.

The “boost” button will align F1 with all those racing video games I played in the 80s. Drivers will need to “charge their boost” — I wonder if they’ll get a little progress bar which will grow as they earn boost back. Think of the fun n trailing driver will have coming up behind another driver who is out of boost.

Seriously — this will be an absolute riot on the track.

FM Does Another Round of Financing

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:42:56 -0600

Federated Media’s $50 Million C-Round Confirmed — No Plans to Buy Up Blog Partners: FM raised a bunch of new money, and this TechCrunch article has some good information about how they work behind-the-scenes.

After turning down a $100 million buyout offer, Federated Media Publishing has opted instead to raise $50 million in a C round led by Oak Investment Partners. As was reported two weeks ago, the rumored valuation is $200 million. While the company is not confirming that number, publisher Chas Edwards quips, “We have to be worth at least $101 million.”

[…] In 2007, according to Edwards, Federated Media sold $22 million worth of ads across its network, up from $4 million in 2006. It generally splits the ad revenues with publishers, taking 40 percent for itself.

Uber-Text Pages and the Lack of Inheritance in Content Management

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:04:20 -0600

(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 inevitably define is the ubiquitous “text page.” This is a simple page. Of text. Duh.

Text pages usually consist of a title, a summary (for index pages where you’re listing a bunch of them), and a body of text. Many content management systems support this model explicitly (it’s built-in this way — think of a blogging platform), or you end up modeling your page like this if your system gives you that ability.

But how far do you…push, the text page? There are a lot of opportunities to re-use this content type. How far do you take it?

This particular client also need an “announcement.” We took a long view of it, and determined that their announcements section was really just a group of text pages, reverse-ordered by date. So, we thought, let’s just tack a “date” field on the text page model, and be done with it. If the text page is in an announcements section, we’ll order by that date. If not, we’ll ignore it.

Then, the client needed an “article” content type. Well, what is an article? It’s a text page…with a date…and an author. So, let’s just tack an “author” datatype on the “text page” model, and we’re good…right? We can use it when we need to, and ignore it when we don’t.

Later, the client needed a “newsletter” content type. Turns out, this is just a text page with a PDF file attachment. So, we tacked on a “file” datatype…

Now, in truth, this situation was hypothetical. But you see the idea at work here? How content types are really just derivative of a core content type? The fact is, an awful lot of content types can be defined as:

Title
Summary
Text body

Tack on these datatypes —

Date
Author
File attachment

— and you’ve handled four separate, logical types in our mythical client’s content model: text page, announcement, article, and newsletter.

So, the question is, did we take this too far? Or is what we have planned here an elegant solution to modeling this content?

In the end, it depends. It depends on a lot of your content management system’s functionality external to content modeling. Dividing these four logical types into multiple actual types is often valuable for more than just content modeling — many systems will drive things like templating and permissions by content type. And what happens when you need to add a property to your Announcements, but not your Articles? So having everything as some uber-text page can lead to other issues.

In the end, it comes down to repetition vs. elegance. While duplicating your core set of properties on every content type is a pain, you avoid some tricky issues. Conversely, pushing the envelope with a single content type is elegant, but you can paint yourself into a corner pretty quickly.

But, my point here is that we shouldn’t have to do this. And here’s why —

Very few content management systems are using the object-oriented concept of inheritance these days. Inheritance says that Class B is a superset of Class A — it includes all of Class A’s functionality, and then some more. So if I happen to change Class A, Class B will change too.

In this case, I would model a “Page” object with these properties:

Title
Menu Title (for implicitly menued systems)
Summary
Body
META keywords
META description

Then, would extend this base “Page” object into the “Announcement” object by adding a “date.” I would extend that into an “Article” object by adding an “author,” and into the “Newsletter” object by adding a “file.”

Then, say I want to geo-locate everything someday. I just add a “location” attribute to the base object, and everything extends from that.

Very few content management systems allow this. I’ve seen it in exactly two systems, both heavy of document management — Alfresco and Documentum. It’s elegant, it’s precise, and it’s powerful, which should be obvious since it’s been a core tenet of object-oriented programming for years.

Sadly, implementing this kind of system is complicated, and usually computationally expensive. Documentum, for example, maintained a database table for every level of inheritance, and did one-to-one joins all the way down the inheritance tree to return a big database row for an object. (But, on the other hand, this is built-in to Postgres, so WTH?)

Even if a system didn’t let you do traditional inheritance, N-levels deep, it would be handy if you had a “base object” from which you could derive your types from. Meaning, you could alter a base object to include things like the title, summary, text, etc., then each type would be adding properties to this base type. You couldn’t go more than the one level deep, but it would still solve a number of problems.

If your CMS has a strong content tree, you could fake inheritance a bit. You could create a base content type, then add subcontent to “flavor” it. Your base type would have the core properites, and you could add subcontent underneath it to hold other information specific to the pseudo-class you need that particular object to act like. This is hack-ish, but it might work well in some cases, and it fits the model of “Custom Field Sets” we discussed several years ago.

In the end, content type inheritance is the holy grail of content modeling, and you don’t see it that often, which is too bad. It would be a huge asset to any CMS that implemented it. eZ publish claims that it’s on the roadmap, but I’ve yet to see anyone put a date on it.

Freedom

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:46:58 -0600

Freedom, OS X Networking Freedom Software: Is this really what we’ve been reduced to?

Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.

Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll be more productive. Not rebooting is why we bought Apple computers in the first place. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.

The Incredible Shrinking Computer Book Section

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:46:32 -0600

Let me ask you for your opinion here: do you think that the computer book sections at your local book store are shrinking?

Five years ago, the local Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls had a majestic computer book section. I don’t know the official names for these things, but it was at least two rows, filled on either side — four or five shelves long.

Then things started shrinking. A whole row-side disappeared one day, replaced by science books. Then a year or so later, another row side vanished, replaced by philosophy books. Today, the computer book section at my Barnes and Noble is half the size it was five years ago — one row-side, perhaps four vertical units long, and maybe three on the other side.

This weekend, I’ve been in Kansas City for a soccer tournament. The KC metro area is almost two million people, comprised of about 50 cities. Compare this to the Sioux Falls metro of just over 200,000 people.

I’ve been in two Barnes and Nobles here. Both were at least double the size of the Sioux Falls store. One was an urban-style store in The Plaza comprised of four stories — more vertical than horizontal. Both impressive.

Total computer book shelves in either of them: four. Seriously — one side of a small row in each case.

Why is this?

Not Just Spicy, Zesty Too!

editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:22:41 -0600

Yesterday I needed to know when Daylight Savings Time started and I hit the first link Google gave me.

The default (you can switch) presentation is via something called SpicyNodes.

SpicyNodes is a zesty way to explore information on the Web. We’ve taken sophisticated radial mapping technology and made it easy to use – for both you and your visitors.

Hey, it’s pre-beta.