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

A Thank You to Sesame Street

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The Muppet Newsflash: Sesame Street Celebrates 40th Anniversary with Two New History Books

Old clips of Elmo with Kermit on YouTube helped me expose Emma to the Muppets a few years ago. Now Muppets are part of the Sesame Street universe for her, as it was me and Richelle when we were growing up. Here are two great ones:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Kermit Reports News On Elmo’s Idea:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Kermit And Elmo Discuss Happy And Sad:

Gotta love Cookie Monster:

YouTube: Sesame Street & The Origin of Om nom nom nom:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Cookie Monster Sings C is for Cookie:

Or Ernie:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Ernie and his Rubber Duckie:

I could post a million videos but you’re better off just visiting the Sesame Street channel on YouTube

And as Emma knows, Kermit’s my personal favorite. Its great that we can watch the old Muppet movies with her and she loves them is so much fun.

YouTube: Muppet Movie – The Rainbow Connection:

Lately on YouTube, the Muppets Studio has been posting new videos, this one is genius!

YouTube: The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody:

And one last one, not to show to kids, but too funny not share:

YouTube: The Song of the Count – Lemon Demon Version:

I wonder, now that the Muppets and Sesame Street are owned and operated so separately, will there ever be a moment in any future movie like the wedding chapel in Muppets Take Manhattan? When Emma saw Big Bird and crew in the pews, she yelled with surprise and joy.

I think we used Sesame Street as a guide for what constituted ‘good’ children’s television for us. The Backyardigans, Jack’s Big Music Show, The Wonder Pets, Blue’s Clues (did you know Blue’s Clues was created by former Sesame Street writers?), Dora and Diego, all are in its spirit. No Baby Einstein, and nothing that had more quick shot cuts than Sesame Street for example, Yo Gaba Gaba. Good songwriting, flow, encouragement of imagination and *thinking*. That’s what we were looking for in children’s television. And I think we can say thanks to Sesame Street for that.

Related Articles:

NPR.org: Lessons Of ‘Sesame Street’: Letters, Numbers And TV

NPR.org: 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’

NYTimes: Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40

NationalPost: 101 Muppets of Sesame Street

Links related to the changing economy for November 24th, 2009

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Douglas Ruskoff: Video Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.: We are at a crossroads. Right now we have the ability to optimize our systems, our technologies, and our currency to humans, rather than optimizing humans to them.

Metafilter discussion of previous: “The Plague of Free.”

Awful Marketing: St. Louis Newspaper Has Web Commenter Fired: In this new information age, newspapers are having a hard time hanging on to their old business models, and are struggling to hold on to readership and monetize their on-line content. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obviously not run into this issue, or they wouldn’t be shooting themselves in the foot by getting people fired when they post to the paper’s online comment boards.

HavardBusinss.org: The Digital Economy’s Coming Subprime Crisis: Uh oh: it’s the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore.

Anil Dash: The Web in Danger: We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say “nobody saw this coming”.

Susan Ohanian: It’s the Poverty, Stupid, Not Pre-K Skills: If our corporate-politicos would look at the November 2009 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, they would see that half of American children receive food stamps, which means they live in food insecure homes, and studies show that Adults who grew up in poverty are more likely to have impaired physical and mental growth, lower academic achievement, and to remain impoverished.

Joe Bageant: Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers: At heart, it’s a predatory society. So damned mean we no longer even notice its inherent cruelty. A strongman’s democracy in which bodily appearance has become political, and the only allowable vice is self-righteousness.

Philly.com: USDA: Hunger rises in U.S.: Referring to the increasing numbers of children who suffered the most from hunger, Philadelphia hunger expert Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University public-health professor, said: “This is a catastrophe. This is not a blip. This recession will be in the bodies of our children.”

Time: The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell

Newsweek: Partying Like It’s 1999: Think the U.S. economy has come a long way? Think again.