Mon, Jul 28, 2003
Santa Maria Steaks at The Hitching Post
#
About a month ago, my friend Justin mentioned a town near Santa
Barbara, California that claimed to have the world's best barbecue.
As I explained a few
weeks ago, I claim to be somewhat of an authority on barbecue, having
eaten it outside of California. To be so near (well, about 250
miles away) yet so ignorant of a place claiming to be the cradle of
barbecue civilization was somewhat of a shock to me. (4N)
I attempted to right that wrong yesterday at
The Hitching Post, a steakhouse in
Casmalia. Casmalia is a former mining town in the Santa Maria Valley,
about 75 miles north of Santa Barbara. (4O)
Santa Maria barbecue has its roots with the Spanish ranchers who
populated the region in the 1850s. To reward los vaqueros after a
successful cattle herd, the ranchers would throw a feast consisting of
top sirloin crusted with garlic salt and pepper and cooked slowly over
a red oak fire, salsa, and pinquitos, a pinkish bean. Both the
beans and the wood are native to Santa Maria. (4P)
See more....
/food |
Posted at 10:26am
Sat, Jul 26, 2003
Clustering in the Margins
#
SebPaquet posits the following theory: "people who pioneer group-forming
practices are those who have a marked interest in something that is
not generally shared by the rest of the population." He cites
evidence from a First Monday paper
entitled, "A social network caught in the Web." (4L)
Said a different way: Niche topics generate greater SharedIntensity?. (4M)
/collaboration/patterns |
Posted at 2:14pm
Introductory Article on Metadata
#
DannyAyers reports a good
introductory
article on various metadata tools, including GeoURL, SMBmeta,
Dublin Core, RDF,
and FOAF. Jason Cook, a high school classmate,
wrote the article. (4K)
/tech |
Posted at 11:46am
William Kent at Extreme Markup 2003
#
For my blog entry on e-mail clients, I had to look up the link for the
Extreme Markup conference. In so
doing, I noticed that
William Kent
will be keynoting this year's conference. (4I)
Bill Kent's book,
Data and
Reality, is awesome. I consider it a must-read for anyone
interested in data modeling. I won't be able to make it to Montreal
for the conference this year, but I'd recommend it for those of you
who can. It's August 4-8 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (4J)
/collaboration |
Posted at 11:32am
Won't Someone Write a Decent E-mail Client?
#
BrianLincoln was
complaining about e-mail clients recently, and he
said that he was willing to pay $1,000 for a good e-mail management
tool. That's a stunning statement, if you think about it. E-mail is
probably more widely used than word processing, and probably ranks
near even with Web browsing. Several companies have devoted large
budgets to building e-mail clients, and there are several open source
initiatives as well. You would think that there would at least be
once decent e-mail client by now. (40)
Despite all of this, I completely agree with Brian. I haven't found
anything that comes close to doing even mostly what I want. (41)
See more....
/tech/email |
Posted at 11:22am
WikiWords Versus External Links
#
Suppose you are writing in a Wiki or WikiWord-enabled blog. Why would
you use a WikiWord instead of an external link? (3T)
For a more concrete scenario, consider a link to
Blue Oxen Associates. You could either
create an external link to http://www.blueoxen.org/, or you could use
the WikiWord BlueOxenAssociates. I see several advantages to the
latter: (3U)
- Easier to remember. Is it blueoxenassociates.com or boa.net? WikiWords are human-friendlier link names. (3V)
- Enter the link once. If your Wiki page includes the appropriate external link, and if that link changes, you only have to update the link once. (3W)
- Annotation. I often create Wiki pages to organizations that contain an external link and the contact information. Having the contact information on the Wiki page saves me from having to search the external site for that information. (3X)
- BackLinks. If you use a WikiWord, you inherit your Wiki's BackLink functionality, which allows you to find other interesting and relevant pages. (3Y)
The primary disadvantage occurs when the Wiki page simply consists of
an external link. In this case, you force the user to click twice
instead of once to get to the relevant information. I believe that
this is offset by the other advantages of WikiWords. (3Z)
/tech/wiki |
Posted at 10:47am
Fri, Jul 25, 2003
Creating Motivation in Asynchronous Environments
#
I'm currently reading Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to
Work, by Gayle Pergamit and Chris Peterson (who's on our
Advisory Board). The book
is about the MGTaylor
DesignShop process. (2K)
Quick aside on MGTaylor: Founded by Matt and Gail Taylor, these folks
have been around for almost 25 years, and are pioneers in facilitating
what they call GroupGenius. I had a chance to work with Gail and Matt
at the recent PlaNetwork Conference, and
came away in awe of their process. (2L)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 8:29am
Thu, Jul 24, 2003
Dijkstra on Thinking Out Loud
#
Sebastian Paquet
reports a
recent
article on Edsger Dijkstra and thinking out loud. Paquet notes that
Dijkstra "gave us an early example of the art of knowledge-oriented
blogging." (3S)
/collaboration/patterns |
Posted at 11:34pm
Grass Roots Peer Review
#
We had a Bay Area gathering of the Blue Oxen
Associates Collaboration Collaboratory
at Applewood's Pizza in Menlo Park, California. Nine of us showed up,
and we had a great time
mixing
and chatting. (3P)
At one point in the evening, BrianLincoln told JonCheyer his idea of
GrassRootsPeerReview?. They talked for a bit, and then Jon drew me
into the conversation. Before we knew it, we were all discussing the
idea, (3Q)
Eventually, we started exploring a possible experiment that the
collaboratory could perform. I posted a
synopsis of that discussion on the tools-yak@collab list. (3R)
/collaboration |
Posted at 11:28pm
Sat, Jul 19, 2003
A Unit Test Success Story
#
I spent the past few days closing out
PurpleWiki bugs in
preparation for our impending v0.9 release. And once again, unit
tests saved my butt. (3I)
Automated unit tests are like programming with a net. You invest a
little bit of time up-front writing the test, and then you save a ton
of time later. Most importantly, unit tests give you confidence to
experiment. You can dramatically refactor your code without worrying
about unknowingly breaking something. (3J)
I've used unit tests on a number of small projects, and have been
pleased, but not overwhelmed with the results. However, my
experiences with unit tests and PurpleWiki have been extremely
gratifying. Our unit tests have consistently caught bugs that might
otherwise have stayed hidden for months, even years. (3K)
See more....
/tech/programming |
Posted at 4:23pm
CSS Stylesheets for EEK Speaks
#
I got an e-mail from Steve Iman, who had downloaded my
blosxom flavours
files for this blog. He said that it took him a while before he
realized he needed my CSS
stylesheet to make the flavour files work. (3E)
I didn't include any CSS files in the package, because they are
publicly available from my web site. However, you will definitely
need them if you want to play with my flavour files. Here are the
direct links: (3F)
/tech/blosxom |
Posted at 3:40pm
Fri, Jul 18, 2003
Heavenly Brisket at Flint's
#
This blog is supposed to be a work journal, and it is. But the
temptation to write about other things is strong, and I am weak. I am
especially weak for good barbecue. (38)
In the summer of 1997, my then-boss, Jon Erickson, took me to Rickey's
Pit in Kansas City, supposedly one of Bill Clinton's favorite meat
joints. To this day, I have not had better smoked catfish. At the
end of that trip, I almost missed my plane back to California in order
to sample the succulent offerings at the Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle. (39)
I've had decent barbecue in the Bay Area, but nothing that matched my
Missouri/Kansas? experience. (The closest was at Big Nate's in San
Francisco, but having former NBA great Nate Thurmond take my order
might have affected my judgement.) Until yesterday. (3A)
See more....
/food |
Posted at 4:16pm
David Perkins on Organizational Intelligence
#
David Perkins, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, just published a new book on
organizational intelligence: King Arthur's Round Table: How
Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations (John Wiley &
Sons, 2003). See Harvard Gazette's
review of the book and of Perkins's work. (37)
/collaboration |
Posted at 2:07pm
E-mail as a Synchronous Collaboration Tool
#
I just got back from dinner with a friend in Berkeley. (Wow! Details
about my life! Not just more boring thoughts about collaboration!
Whoops, spoke to soon. Here it comes.) I spent most of the car ride
back thinking about Leaping the Abyss and the inherent
advantages that synchronous collaboration has over asynchronous
collaboration. (2T)
I then started thinking about my own experience with asynchronous
collaboration, and also my observations of various open source
communities. I realized something important: E-mail is technically an
asynchronous collaborative tool (different time, different place), but
it can also be used synchronously (same time, even same place). Some
of my best experiences working with people over e-mail have occurred
when we were all online at the same time, and we were responding
almost in real-time to messages. One of us would receive an e-mail,
do some work in response, and send out another e-mail. Momentum would
build, and a chain reaction ensued. (2U)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 1:16am
Thu, Jul 17, 2003
Stable URLs in Blosxom
#
One of the problems with blosxom is that it
does not implement truly stable URLs. (Of course, one could argue
that no URLs on the Web are truly stable, but that's a topic for
another day.) (2D)
Bloxom uses the filesystem for data storage and categories. This is one of its
distinguishing features. It makes it easy to set up and install, it
makes it easy to edit entries (use the editor of your choice, or build
your own Web entry system, like
wikieditish), and you can easily preprocess entries either statically
or dynamically. My blosxom_purple plugin takes advantage of this
latter fact, as do many other plugins. (2E)
Its dependence on the filesystem also has its drawbacks. It's hard to
keep the date of each entry stable, because blosxom uses the
timestamp of the file for the date. If you modify the file at all,
the date changes.
(Plugins like
entries_index fix this problem.) Multiple categories are possible
via symbolic links, but this is hackish at best. And worst of all, it
prevents you from having truly stable URLs. (2F)
See more....
/tech/blosxom |
Posted at 1:03pm
LaughingMeme
#
One of my pet peeves/interests is e-mail: patterns of e-mail usage,
ways to improve the tool, how e-mail fits into the collaborative tools
world. We're using SmartList at
Blue Oxen Associates. It's very hackable,
but it's also very user-unfriendly. For archiving e-mail, we're using
MHonArc and mharc. I'd like to eventually replace all three tools with something
better. (27)
Some series of random events got me thinking about syndicating our
archives as RSS, a topic that's
come up before. I did a quick Google search and discovered
Kellan Elliott-McCrea's recent
posting on this topic. (28)
Reviewing his blog, LaughingMeme, was an
absolute joy. There's lots of good stuff there on tools, and he's
hacked his site in interesting ways as well. For example, he's
implemented a "Similar
Entries" feature on his blog using
a Latent Semantic
Indexing Perl module. Definitely a blog to watch. (29)
Some mailing list archiving tools mentioned on LaughingMeme: (2A)
/tech/email |
Posted at 12:28pm
Wed, Jul 16, 2003
Moneyball
#
I had many reasons for reading Michael Lewis's latest book,
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The book is about
baseball, which I love, and more specifically, about the
Oakland A's recent run of success.
I've been living in the Bay Area for about seven years now, and have
adopted the A's as my American League team. (Becoming a
Giants' fan was not an option,
as I remain loyal to my hometown Dodgers.) The book also talks a lot about Paul DePodesta?, a fellow
alumnus who graduated one year before me. (1K)
After finishing the book, I discovered another reason for reading
Moneyball: It offers insight that's relevant to my interest in
understanding collaboration and a compelling case study of one
particular community. (1L)
See more....
/books |
Posted at 2:43pm
Whining In Private
#
In the process of writing Blue Oxen
Associate's first research report,
"An Introduction to Open
Source Communities" (BOA-00007), I wanted to describe a pattern I had
observed in the SquirrelMail community.
The problem was, I could not figure out what to call it. I came up
with something thoroughly inadequate, included it in the first draft,
and subsequently removed it after
Chris Dent rightfully
criticized it. (U)
A few days later, in a fit of silliness, I thought of a name:
WhineInPrivate?. SquirrelMail?'s core team was well-versed at whining
in private, and for some reason, I thought that it was useful,
important behavior that needed to be highlighted and discussed.
Unfortunately, I still could not articulate why, and thus, it never
made it into the report. (V)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 1:12pm
Wed, Jul 09, 2003
Why Am I Blogging?
#
I've followed the blogging community for over a year now, but had no
desire to participate until recently. I didn't think the world needed
to know what I had for dinner on Tuesday, or the latest hijinx
involving my neighbor's cat. (F)
Two events changed my mind about starting a blog: The launch of
Blue Oxen Associates, and constant
badgering from my Blue Oxen Associates' cofounder,
Chris Dent. (G)
Our goal at Blue Oxen Associates is to understand and improve all
aspects of collaboration. In this context, it's important for us to
understand why blogging is important and where it fits into the
collaboration universe. More importantly, we believe strongly in
learning by doing. Studying the community along would only take us so
far. To really understand blogging, we would have to blog ourselves. (H)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 1:43am
Blosxom Installed!
#
Welcome to my blog, courtesy of Rael
Dornfest's blosxom 2.0rc5. After examining
the available blog tools and following the
blosxom mailing list for some
time, I finally decided to bite the bullet and install blosxom.
Configuration and customization took a few days of mucking around,
most of which consisted of experimenting with look-and-feel and
determining which plugins I wanted to install. I found Eric
Costello's site on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) invaluable in helping
me hack together the look-and-feel I wanted in a mostly
standards-compliant fashion. The resulting
flavour files are
available for your perusal. (1)
See more....
/tech/blosxom |
Posted at 1:42am
