Author Archives: Karl

News and content based business models online links for thought

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Both sides of the fence represented in the following links:

Tech Crunch: The End of Hand Crafted Content

Daily Patricia Daily Patricia – Dumb Things Media 2.0 Loves To Say

Doc Searls: The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated

Jeff Jarvis: Content farms v. curating farmers

Paul Kedrosky: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail

What is ETL and CMS?

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You’re a programmer with a task to retrieve information from some source, manipulate and message it, and to deploy it somewhere.

Like all things in programming, there is an acronym for that: “ETL”.

ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. The Wikipedia page is pretty thorough in its summary of the topic and reviews many of the typical functions an ETL process needs to take to accomplish its task.

The problem is ETL doesn’t roll off the tongue so easy. The acronym provides a weak set of metaphors for programmers to map familiar concepts to.

Rafe Colburn provides a great mental model to apply when developing ETL scripts and applications. It’s one I follow, but have lacked the words to describe. Go read his post.

Here’s a thought to challenge you if you are a CMS developer, now that you have read the above – are whatever forms you build to enable people to contribute and manage content in a CMS a kind of ETL process? Does the Wikipedia description for “Extract, Transform, and Load” contain functions there that you would expect a CMS to encompass?

And speaking of CMS, Gadgetopia has a terrific article on what a CMS system is. It is difficult to be clarifying in a world where hype and acronyms get thrown about so much (like this very post!) – but the Gadgetopia piece certainly is. It helps outline the functionality you should expect from a CMS implementation.

Emma’s first poem

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My friend Howard Hall is a gifted poet who can coalesce a lot of truth in a few syllables. He’s been featuring among his poems handwritten pieces from others under the tag “secondhand haiku” on his blog (non-breaking space).

Emma has a way with words and stories which is just natural – all children have greater insight into the truth of our existence than we do I think. Over time, we simply forget, or we lose touch with it. I wondered if I could scribble down some sentences of hers, could they could be constructed into a haiku we could send? I had collected a pretty good list of sentences and phrases, but the eureka moment happened when I tried to share with Emma what a poem was. I don’t remember what I said, but when Emma explained it back to me, “When you draw with pictures and draw words, it’s a poem”, it was far better put then I had put it – I felt like I learned something from her. I retrieved “Color with crayons” from her list of sentences and phrases and read it back to her. I told Emma we were going to send it to Howard, that the two sentences were a certain kind of poem. She was pretty excited.

The next challenge was finding a way for her to write it. Emma can’t spell (except for a few words like her name, mommy and daddy) yet of course. She’s just 3 and 3/4 years old! But she can write each letter independently well. Richelle is very talented with visuals and Emma listens to her whenever they work on a project together, so she instructed Emma to write each letter of each word, reading them out as they went. Having her switch markers so that each line could be indicated by color was a smart idea. Emma drew some of her trademark characters (you gotta see the art all over the house!), and we scanned it in and sent it to Howard.

He featured it November 18th!

Emma's First Poem

Howard calls non-breaking space “a digital expression of an analog impulse”.

What better way to describe the core that drives so much of blogging, social networking, twittering, and just reaching out online? I can’t think of one.

Some light reading (and research) on non-functional requirements in Agile/Scrum

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Agile Modeling: Introduction to User Stories

Mike Cohn’s Blog: Non-functional Requirements as User Stories

aqris: Representing non-functional requirements with user stories

wikiwiki: Non Functional Requirements

Agile Coaching: Non-Functional Requirements: are user stories useful?

Artima: Johan Peeters: Dreams and Nightmares

Representing non-functional requirements is tricky. There are two kinds of non-functional requirement as mentioned in the aquis piece: independent, and distributed. When faced with a distributed non-functional requirement, adding it to your ‘definition of done‘ is called for. As you can tell by the links, there seems to be some difference in opinion in handling ‘independent’ non-functional requirements.

If you have pointers, please share in my comments. And thanks for the input in advance.

A solution to software maintenance from long ago?

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Communications of the ACM: You Don’t Know Jack About Software Maintenance:

Software maintenance is not like hardware maintenance, which is the return of the item to its original state. Software maintenance involves moving an item away from its original state. It encompasses all activities associated with the process of changing software. That includes everything associated with “bug fixes,” functional and performance enhancements, providing backward compatibility, updating its algorithm, covering up hardware errors, creating user-interface access methods, and other cosmetic changes.

In software, adding a six-lane automobile expressway to a railroad bridge is considered maintenance–and it would be particularly valuable if you could do it without stopping the train traffic.

Related: Slashdot thread