Lars Pind

I didn’t know about this: Open source content management conference. Looks like a couple of old ArsDigita acquaintances are presenting there, like Karl Goldstein and Justin Ross. Good luck, guys! :) (And thanks to Mohan for pointing me to this)

Okay, so now I’ve started to use Mozilla, and in particular the tabbed browsing feature more heavily.

Now, the problem is that I’ll set up a browser window for the active work I’m doing (the web page, some admin pages for reloading files on the server, etc.), and that’s good. I’ll have another window with my calendar, my time logging, etc.

But then evey once in a while, I’ll accidentally hit Alt-F4, and all of my elaborate setup will be gone. It would be nice if Alt-F4 would just close a single tab, or if it could at least be configured to ask me before closing five tabs with one keystroke …

Oh, well, the perfect browser is still some ways off.

Jeff Davis just passed this link on to me: Fly UI.

I would love to know if Dutch toilet user interface designers (there’s a title for a business card!) tried focus groups with other icons – bees, smiley faces, eye icons, circles, letters? I would love to know what process they used to decide that it should be slightly to the left.

How about faces of politicians, or names of companies?

I just found this excellent explanation of open source software over at the Red Hat web site. Thanks, Red Hat, very nicely put.

The latest version 1.3b of Mozilla actually fixes the Ctrl-Backspace problem I mentioned a few weeks ago. And it implements the Alt+D short-cut for getting to the address bar. Great, I’m back to using Mozilla most of the time now.

Now, the main thing that annoys me, is that it sometimes reuses (read: steals) windows, sometimes opens a new window, even though I believe I’ve told it to not do that. Now that I looked again, I couldn’t find the setting anywhere.

Thanks to Dalager for pointing out that they fixed the first problem.

We’re back from Heidelberg. It was a great experience, got to spend time with Carl, and bumped into Tracy Adams in Frankfurt, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. It’s good to be back now, though, so we can get back to work :)

Check out the photos from the trip.

I posted this on December 30th over at my company site, but I figured there were probably more readers here, so I’d cross-post.

I think it’s a really big deal, because it demonstrates very clearly the willingness of organizations from very different countries, cultures, and businesses to look for common ground and work together.

Here’s the posting:

We’re really happy today. We’ve just gotten the final confirmation that three of our dearest clients have joint forces to fund development of a key piece of infrastructure that they all need.

The clients are Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Heidelberg, and Greenpeace International. The software component is workflow.

Each of these organizatios have a need for software to manage dynamically defined workflows. Greenpeace needs workflow for their online publication process. MIT and Heidelberg for issue handling and software bug tracking, among other things.

Instead of each of them going on and solving their problem on their own, they recognized the potential for synergy, for sharing ideas about what the software should do and how it could be used, and not least, for sharing costs.

This is a pioneering approach to software development, one that’s built on sound economic sense as well as on positive sharing and trust. We’re happy to be part of this, and we’re thrilled about getting to work to fulfill their expectations.

Of course, there was dot-com, .org, .net, .edu, and a bunch of others. Then there was .NET. We’re working with dotLRN, dotWRK, and dotKNW. And now there’s .mac. The .trend is .catching on.

Aaron has some amazing power point slides of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he got from the Chicago Tribune Magazine. Absolutely hilarious.

The Register: Perens, Prentice deliver Open Source books. It’s going to be interesting to see how they develop.

According to Netcraft: .Net finds favour in the Linux community (scroll down):

Last week the Mono project released a new version of their Linux based implementation of the Microsoft .Net development framework. Mono enjoys an almost unique relationship with Microsoft amongst open source projects. Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza and Microsoft executives frequently say complimentary things about each other, with Microsoft presumably taking the view that any thing that helps establish .Net as a common development framework is a fine thing. So far, around 1% of internet sites using ASP.Net are Linux based, but it is early days both for the Mono project and for .Net itself, and both will be hoping to grow very significantly from current levels.

I’m still reading Michael Dell’s book, and it occurred to me that in many ways what we’re engaged in is the same direct model Dell is pursuing, only for software development. It’s like a build-to-order software product shop. We only develop the things that our customers need and pay us to build, and thus we can take the guesswork out of software development, and avoid technology-driven development, where you build things and then hope customers will buy it. We cannot and do not want to force anything onto our customers, they have complete freedom to choose what software, or even what pieces of the software, they want. Here’s a quote to illustrate the point:

I like to think of the creation of the computer industry as a fable. In the beginning, there were a bunch of brilliant scientists working in laboratories and garages to build an incredible device called a computer, which could do lots of things, from numeric computation to word processing. They worked tirelessly for many years, defining and refining the prototype until finally they had something they were ready to show to the world. Since there was nothing like it, they figured it was worth millions of dollars at least, and customers would feel lucky to actually own one.

We all know how that fable ends.

As oversimplified as it may sound, the course of events depicted in my little fable is what created a technology-oriented industry driven more by the love of scientific invention than by the needs of its customers. That attitude, which was pretty pervasive in the early days, caught on to become a kind of collective habit—and, well, before you knew it, the habit became ingrained in the fundamental structure of the industry. Customers played little, if any, role in the creation of the industry’s early products. Computer developers invented great new software and hardware because they could, and the customers who needed technology paid the going rate, whether or not the features reall satisfied their needs.

It was a lose-lose proposition. Much of the technology that was created was never purchased. And customers hungry for technology were forced to order from a fixed menu of items, whether they liked it or not, in addition to assuming the high costs associated with funding all sorts of creations.

Well, that’s still to a large extent the case in the software industry when vendors get too powerful. And this is exactly what’s about to change. We are and want to be part of this.

Halloween VIII: Doing the Damage-Control Dance now up.

Sudhian Media: Microsoft’s Worst Enemy

I must admit that I usually use IE. I really like both Mozilla and Opera a lot, I think they’re probably about 99.9% right. But it’s their integration with the rest of Windows that destroys the pleasure for me.

Take Mozilla. All other Windows programs consider dashes, slashes, and other punctuation to separate words. So when you hit Ctrl-Backspace to delete backwards word-by-word, Windows and IE will consider “word-by-word” to have five parts: “word”, “”, “by”, “”, “word”. Mozilla is different from any other Windows program, because they decided to reimplement the basic text input widgets instead of using Windows built-in. Hit Ctrl-Backspace once, and all of “word-by-word” is gone. Bam! It’s especially annoying in the address bar, because URLs usually don’t have any spaces at all, so Ctrl-Backspace will delete the entire URL. There’s nothing in between deleting the whole URL and one character at a time. Sigh. I always wondered how come the developers of something like Mozilla either don’t notice or don’t care. I always notice, and I always care.

Then there’s window handling, which is something that both Opera and Mozilla do poorly, and which is enough for me to not want to use them. Regardless of the “open links in new window” setting, I can’t get Mozilla 1.1 to reliably always open links in a new window, instead of reusing a randomly picked one of my open browser windows. The thing is, with more and more applications running in browsers, I’ll have a handful of permanently open browser windows: My calendar, and my time logging application, to name just a few. And IE has a feature that, when you hit Ctrl-N to open a new window, it starts out by showing the same page that you came from. Turns out, in 90% of the cases, this is what I want. I use it as a backup, as a short-cut, or to explore multiple paths from wherever I am. Mozilla can’t be configured to have this behavior, it offers home page, blank page, or the last page for which you typed the URL or something useless like that. Bummer. Would be super-easy to implement.

While we’re at it, it annoys me that Opera insists on having all windows live within the master browser window, which de facto makes it impossible to have multiple different window sizes at once. My calendar window needs to be pretty big, because I’m using the month view. My time logger window and various other windows I want to be tall and slim, because that makes it easier to read, etc. Opera won’t let me do this.

Anyway, this was just a long rant to say how it’s the totally minor, trivial things that make Opera and Mozilla so painful for me to use in practice. IE has pain points as well, such as crashing, and how it handles cookies, but most of the time, these are easier to live with because the basic usability is in place.

Just found a link to Wulff + Morgenthaler in Hans Henrik’s New Year’s salutation. Funny stuff.

Happy New Year, everybody.