Open Source Echoes

I found this interesting over at CMS Watch ("Web Content Management Marketplace Circa 2005" by Tony Byrne, 2005 Jan 11). CMS Watch publishes a review of all current content management systems at what is probably a steal for the data (starting at over US$800). They noted that more and more vendors had taken notice of non-Microsoft browsers:

Some suppliers are responding. In the last version of this article, I highlighted how some CMS vendors were developing native Mac interfaces. Similarly, some others (like PaperThin) are using FireFox extensions to develop custom interfaces for that browser. Nearly all the major vendors we cover have retired or are replacing IE-specific DHTML. [emphasis mine]

Microsoft fears Firefox not because Mozilla has claimed a big chunk of the home desktops, especially outside North America. No, it fears Mozilla because for the first time in years, vendors have replaced their IE-only interfaces, designed in that dreadful IE-specific way, with more standards-compliant ones. This move frightens Microsoft and justly so: will the Word hegemony also fall to a standard such as XML? Already we are seeing corporations no longer upgrading their installations of MS-Office. Microsoft’s latest add campaigns seem to be directed at companies that still use Office 97. Something put out almost a decade ago. Ten years! Keep an eye on what MS plans for IE with v. 7, now in development.

This lists the latest email scam we’ve seen. It’s almost funny because it’s so awful.

Good day,

How are you and your family, hope all is well? I pray God bless you and your family.I am Sans Frontieres, Director Paris-based charity Medecins in collaboration with Asia Tsunami Victims. I am writing to you inrespect of the charity donation campaign, were there was an over estimated amount of 22 million euro from the total sum of 105 million euro collected by MSF from its 19 branches across the globe donated by individual, NGO, and Government. MSF wants to redirect unspent money to other crises such as those in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Darfur region of Sudan, or to AIDS sufferers around the world. Tsunami donors who do not support those causes can have their money back.

Please check the weblink for more infomation [link not given]

I am seeking for your full co-orperation, trustwarden companion to create an account with your own name and act as one of those that have donated fund to the organisation and would want their fund reimbursed back to them since the fund as not been spend, so that this over estimated fund will be transfer into this account.

All document, including the certificate that was issue to those who have donated to tsunami victims will be sent to you. The DOCUMENTS of this over estimated fund has being put under control and it is 100% risk free and do not entertain any fear or doubt in this transfer. Inregards to the agreement, your per centage will be 35% of the total over estimated fund and 55% for me while the remaining 10% will be set aside for any expences that might be incure during the cause of the processing of this transfer. If there is any way you find consistences, interest and willingness to help in the transfering of the fund, please reply to my personal email: sans_front@3xl.net for more information.

Best Regards,

Sans Frontieres Director,

Paris-Base Charity Medicines Home.

I liked the use of of "San Frontieres", which is of course the name of a wonderful charity, Doctors Without Borders. "Sans Frontieres"="Without Borders" for the non-francophones. Too bad we can’t simply hack this guy’s servers.

One of my clients wanted a new website. I wanted to play around a bit, and this client’s a nonprofit (meaning it’s "pay me and then I write a check for the same amount to you" type of gig) so I decided to put in a content management system for them to see how the PHP batch works. Jim and I are beginning to use Plone for a group in Canada but this nonprofit didn’t have access to the Apache instance, effectively ruling out Plone. Besides, Plone has a rather long learning curve, not the least of which involves learning the Zope ZMI. I decided to play with some of the PHP-based CMSs, which I’d never done before.

Nuke is probably everyone’s first stop. I generally liked it and it’s support from the user community. But many complained that Nuke brought entire servers to their knees in consuming CPU. Since they’re on a shared server, that’s out.

PostNuke didn’t look that much better on resources, but I didn’t really give it a chance. I’ll probably go back to it sooner or later to check it out in more depth. Dragonfly CMS looked okay, but it lacked some of the features that they were looking for. Plus it had too much of a teen hacker feel: I didn’t want to have to spend a massive amount of time creating a template from scratch in a system I hadn’t used before. I hoped to repurpose some existing GPL templates and release any updates I made. Plus, Dragonfly is really designed for photo galleries. Not surprising considering it’s parentage.

Xaraya looked like the best choice. It has a small user base but seems to have a decent enterprise-level development community. They obviously cared about doing this right. The authorization and authentication elements were there, curiously named AuthoSSO, a name that Jim gave the SSO hack Echo Software created for a large Swiss investment bank several years back. Unfortunately, Xaraya had one other massive drawback: it was impossibly slow. At least on the client’s server, it dragged impressively. I put up phpBB and Dragonfly to see if they had the same issue: they didn’t. So much for Xaraya for the moment.

I stumbled upon the CMS Matrix, which lists the various pros and cons of the many, many CMS out there in the world. Because they were nonprofit, and since Jim and I are OSS pushers, I looked for an open-source project that had a user-friendly environment that they would be able to manage after I had left. No good putting together a system that they could not later change: it had to have a decent interface that they could understand with a small amount of classroom on our part. It didn’t have to be terribly powerful but easy to use, which is why we didn’t go with Plone in the first place.

In CMS matrix, I stumbled upon Mambo. Mambo has big, old MSN-style friendly icons, a smooth interface, LAMPS and decent speed. The biggest complaint seemed to come from younger hackers who said it was too user friendly and not powerful. Since what teen hackers hate, middle-age users love, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

In general, I’m impressed. The learning curve was long but nothing out of the ordinary. I’ll be using Mambo along with some templates customized from Ben Brown which fit the organization’s needs.

What I’m not impressed by with almost any of these CMS is the lack of knowledge about document structure and how CSS implements it. Perhaps there are lots of people still supporting old 4.x browsers. I know that NS 7.1 is the best you can do on Mac OS 9, but I think I’m the only person still running it. Proper document structure simplifies a lot of things. All of these CMS have an overabundance of use of tables for positioning, much of it built into the slots or blocks that the modules supply to the templates.

I’ve got a couple of things to do with Mambo yet, including CSS-ing the templates I’m using. I’ll release them back. There’s also an idea of creating a HOWTO for groups wanting to put up a CMS-based site. The technical problems are trivial compared to the design issues.

Over on my other blog, "Requisite Readings", I’ve started a thread on software development organization, using Elliott Jaques’s findings on Real Boss and Felt Fair Pay. This originally appeared there. I’m reposting it here at OSE to get a different response set.

I’d like to begin a discussion about requisite organization of software development groups. Gordon has raised this issue, which I have been meaning to write on but have avoided for some time. I invite both he and JMMJ to comment from the developmers’ perspective.

A Hierarchy of the Flat Organization

One of the very interesting things about working with developers is how quickly they establish pecking orders based on ability. Big Insurance Group (BIG), an old client of mine, had some amazing people whom everyone could identify. "You should talk to Mary X and Raja Y," they would tell me. "They really know their stuff." Others at the same level as Raja or Mary would get a nod towards their status within the organization chart but only as an afterthought. "Oh, and you may want to also see Tim Z and Yolanda A," they would say, almost as if they had to mention them but I wouldn’t get much out of the discussion.

I have been fascinated by how accurate this pecking order always seemed to be. My judgments from working with them would normally line up with the recommendations. And the developers would normally try to pick their "real boss", the other software geek whom they had to take real orders from. Others could be their manager (and at BIG, developers directly report to three or more of them) but only certain other software folks could provide them with direction.
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From today’s Slashdot: Morse Code Faster Than SMS:

"Engadget is reporting that Morse Code is actually faster than text messaging. According to the article, 93 year old Gordon Hill transmitted a message faster than 13 year old Brittany Devlin, despite Devlin’s ‘liberal use of texting slang’.

This looks like an interesting application to put on your cell phone.  Of course, you’d have to learn morse code, but what Echo Boomer couldn’t pick it up in about a month?

ACM’s Queue magazine has an interesting editorial to lead off their special focus on databases. In "I am an abstraction level", editor Edward Grossman makes the point that creating abstraction layers to handling the difficult bits is the essence of programming.

It’s a good question. Grossman doesn’t necessarily answer it, but it’s really the question of every knowledge worker: for whom am I simplifying the world?

"A Taxing Situation"

Why you need to worry if you are a telecommuter to a New York company. Make sure your contracts spell out that you are at home for your employer’s convenience and not your own.  An example would be that you have to support 24-7 and therefore it is best to do that from home.

I live in one state and often work in another. My state has lower taxes. I’d love to figure out a way to just pay taxes to my home state.

Internet News reports on a Gartner report that says that the problems with Linux moving forward are process-based and not technological:

These are real problems, even if they are perceptions by IT departments rather than reality.

OSS licenses and property ownership issues are coming under control, from latest discussions. Besides some consolidation that’s occurring, Sun has is even offerring indemnification against intellectual property lawsuits, a major hurdle for  corporate  leaders. For all Richard’s bitching and moaning over the past few years, the problem of licensing is a major hurdle to corporations. Information may want to be free but boards will be damned if it’s their information that goes liberated. Not that we’re going to see a resurgence from Sun. They will more likely fade like Silicon Graphics, a once proud technological leader now a distant memory. Oh how Jim and I loved our SPARC2 Enterprise desktop machines!

Top-Consultant’s Consulting Times has an interesting piece on consulting and open source, arguing that consultancies need to embrace OSS consulting. It quotes Mark Taylor, executive director of the Open Source Consortium:

InformIT has released a chapter ("Installing New Zope Packages") from Zope 3 Developer’s Handbook. We don’t use Zope partly because the learning curve was too steep to do what we wanted. But it has a lot of power to do almost everything. Stephan Richter covers installing a Wiki package which is useful. Convenient these demo chapters.