Monthly Archives: September 2009
XForms Links
From Homeless to Harvard
A perfect lesson in what our acceptance of soundbites can cause
Shelley Powers was outright slandered by taking a sentence out of context from a comment she made: link.
This is part of the game of modern politics and modern media. The lack of apology from those involved is pretty damning, because no one wants to admit they participate in it or are part of the larger problem. A larger problem that is leading all of us to be less informed about the world around us when there is so much media available.
We have a responsibility one another. When you write from a position of trust – don’t abuse it.
When no one can run the software
naked capitalism: Another Lehman Mess: No One Can Run the Software:
I have no idea whether this estimate is still valid, but back in the days when I was working with O’Connor & Associates, the head of technology (and O’Connor had a well run technology operation) said the cost of documenting software (as in having the developers write up what they did in sufficient detail so a third party could maintain the it) was an additional 20%. It was very difficult to get traders to pay for it, ironically not so much for the hard dollar costs, but the fact that IT was resource constrained. The idea that the coders would spend a lot of time on leaving a paper trail, rather than getting to a business center’s urgent need, was a hard sell.
But Lehman illustrates what happens when you do what most places do, and skip documentation.
When walking to school becomes a political act
NYTimes: Why Can’t She Walk to School? :
Certain realities also shape these procedures, such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.
But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.
Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.
When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.
NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997 (and maybe higher than in the last 50 years?)
NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997:
David Johnson, a senior statistician with the Census Bureau, says the increase is clearly linked to jobs.
“Children in nonworking families, children in female-headed households, children in families that receive food stamps, their poverty rate didn’t change much,” Johnson says. “Whereas children in earner households, the poverty was affected a lot. So you see a lot of it tied to the earnings change in 2007, 2008.”
That makes a lot of people nervous. If things were so bad last year, what about now?
“These numbers are grim — grimmer than we expected,” says Robert Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He notes that joblessness continues to rise.
“This creates a very serious concern, that if we already were at just under 40 million Americans in poverty in 2008 — before the biggest increases in unemployment — poverty is going to go much higher than that in 2009 and 2010,” Greenstein says.
In fact, he predicts that it could go higher than it’s been in 50 years.
What is ECM-SOA?
EdLovesJava: ECM-SOA With Agile Attitude:
The first challenge is to think of our tooling as not a custom application, but more as a set of adaptable services, applications and integrations. This requires a change of thought.
Our previous efforts were to drop a monolithic application called a Content Manager into the middle of things, and then propose to change the business process around this application, ostensibly obsoleting the existing applications and ad-hoc processing to customizations within this new application.
During our previous attempt, we underwent a lengthy analysis phase and generated a 500 page requirements document detailing taxonomies, content types, work flows and templates that would solve our content management (web content management) needs. We then spent lots of time and treasure implementing these requirements. In the end, we built some of the requirements taking far longer and far more resources than anticipated, and we found that most the requirements and subsequently most of the customizations we built were wrong. The heroic content managers and brand managers made it work anyway, developing more ad-hoc, complicated and time consuming steps around yet another application that was supposed to help them. This story is not unique.
We must shift our processes as much as our technology. We are focusing on smaller efforts, more agility and more feedback and move away from 500 page requirements documents. To do this successfully, our architecture also needs to be agile and amenable to change. Our architecture must be a framework to grow on: to grow useful services, and to grow and integrate with useful applications. It must follow user demand that learns from using and refining our processes and tools.
Javascript links for September 8, 2009
Ian J Cottee: Rhino on OS X Leopard
peter.michaux.ca: Server-Side JavaScript with Rhino and Jetty
gorilla3d.com: Programming Java With JavaScript
Steve Yegge: Code’s Worst Enemy
John Resig: Bringing the Browser to the Server (hmmm, jQuery on Rhino?)
YouTube: Google I/O 2008: Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript (transcript and slide links):
benne: On-the-fly JavaScript syntax checking in Emacs
Patrick Hunlock: Essential Javascript (nice tutorial)
Wow
I’d be mad too. Someone at the St. Louis Times fix this. Fix it now.