Category Archives: Friends, Family, Life

On the Church Crisis – two questions

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Oh my… I asked Kathy Shaidle blogger extraordinare of relapsedcatholic.com two questions and she’s linked to me.

I am confused, saddened and angry by all of this. Bottom line – the people responsible should be in jail. And a policy should be in place to make sure nothing like this ever occurs again.

That raises two basic questions:

1. If people went straight to the police and not the Church – wouldn’t there never be a chance for coverup?

2. If the church simply deferred people to the police to report the crime – and it *is* a crime – wouldn’t there never be a chance for coverup?

This is a criminal matter. These are horrific crimes. Don’t those two questions cut to the core? They are bugging me. Maybe I am oversimplifing.

Update I’m definately oversimplfying. I apologize. Please read my comments for alice-d’s post.

Fighting from the outside, fighting from the inside

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Just a little thing on perspective. It is almost always easier to fight something from the outside then it is from the inside.

Sometimes people get characterized in negative light because they appear to outsiders that they are just going thru the motions, but in reality, sometimes much more is going on that meets the eye. Sometimes, that person is someone that cares so much, that they want to make a difference from the toughest place to be – on the inside. Because they know so much is at stake. Because they care and believe.

F.B.I. Agent Coleen Rowley is just such a person. She didn’t run to newspapers on Sept. 12th and blurted to the world what she felt was wrong. No – she fights from the inside. That’s courage to me.

I watched her testimony the other day and I couldn’t help but think of her as a person with tons of honor. It’s a word that’s rarely used anymore. She has it in spades.

Going to be buying our first house

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A really big deal as far as I’m concerned. I haven’t lived in a family owned house since I was five years old. It was difficult to overcome many internal impulses not to go forward. Impulses I’m sure that are embedded in me from my background growing up.

But here we go 🙂 Just signed the first series of papers last night. What a weird thought…. owning a house!

A little about Cofax and what I do for a living

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I’m one of the lead developers (one of three architects) of Knight Ridder Digital’s Cofax content management system.

Cofax, from it’s humble origins in Philadelphia, became one of the major toolsets Knight Ridder used for content management, spreading in usage to over twenty newspapers by March of 2001.

Due to a lack of resources in both finances and personnel, we employed an open source methodology to assist in it’s development. We had zero budget, and and just five developers when we started way back in 1999 and right from the start open source seemed the way to go.

This was done so very successfully, with the current version in CVS being a stable, satisfactory (award winning even) tool for those that used it. Newspapers were excited with the power it gave them to cover the news, designers were happy with the freedom it gave them, and administrators were happy with it’s ease of maintenance and deployment. In fact, there is a consulting company that is actually making money deploying Cofax sites in France. You can too. It’s open source.

In February of this year Knight Ridder Digital migrated to a new system called the SDP. It uses Cofax in it’s core, but also incorporates a number of proprietary technologies developed to meet specific needs.

So in a sense, you can say that Knight Ridder is still using Cofax, but in another sense, it’s using something much more extensive and powerful. Developed to meet a bigger set of requirements and built by a much larger tech team in which I was a member, but unlike Cofax, am not an architect.

I’d love to discuss the SDP with you but my feeling is I should refrain from doing so since it is internal company business. I have kept from talking about it in the past and will continue doing the same. Just understand that it is Cofax deep in it’s core, but utilizing a huge array of new technologies to meet new business needs. It’s implementation is vastly different from Cofax’s as well. Keep that in mind.

I am still the lead maintainer of Cofax and now, finally, have permission to talk about it and discuss it here at my home page and am happy to do so. It’s story is one I think you will find interesting and it incorporates technologies which you will find familiar, but it’s in the combination of those technologies that makes it unique.

I’m hoping along the way to recruit some help with maintaining the project. Within the core Cofax product lies an outstanding CMS if I say so myself.