 Friday, March 18, 2005
New Scientist magazine recently published an article of 13 things that do not make sense. These are 13 things which so dramatically violate the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them that we might find ourselves reconsidering the universe. For example, does cold fusion work? In 1989 an experiment said it did. 200 US Navy experiments later and we’re not sure one way or the other. What about Dark Matter – the stuff that supposedly makes up 90% of the mass of the Universe and is the only thing that prevents galaxies from spinning apart. According to our understanding of physics, it MUST exists, but no probe or telescope has EVER seen a single sign of it, aside from the fact that it MUST exist!
My personal favorite is from the medical field, concerning the placebo effect:
“DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.”
This means we might be able to make real medicine from nothing! Also consider this one:
“Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.”
This means we might make water think that it is some kind of medicine!
Check out the entire article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600
— Matt Ranlett
Remember a while back I talked about what is required to increase your rank in Google? I found this interesting article in Wired Magazine where a Search Engine Optimizer is interviewed. In the article, Greg Boser talks about how his company, WebGuerrilla manipulates Google’s PageRank software – the software responsible for ordering the list of search results.
Per Google, "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"
The gist of the article is this – if you want your site to rank really really high, get lots and lots of people to link to you. Link exchanges DO work, but you need lots of them.
— Matt Ranlett
Michael Hyatt writes a working smart blog with all kinds of helpful time management and productivity tips. I like to read them even if I don’t implement most of them. But this particular tip, with regard to presenting using PowerPoint, is very cool:
“display your slides through the projector as usual while simultaneously viewing the slide on the projector, your upcoming slides, your notes, and a timer—all on your laptop. It took about 60 seconds to setup.”
http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart/2005/01/powerpoints_pre.html#more
— Matt Ranlett
Thursday, March 17, 2005
At the book club meeting tonight there was a short discussion about being a Microsoft MVP. This got me to thinking… do we all know our MVPs? Do we even know what an MVP is? For those of us who don’t know, an MVP is an outstanding member of the technical community. These outstanding people are recognized by Microsoft for their willingness to participate and help other community members. These are the smart people around the world who write the interesting articles, newsgroup postings, and websites that we all read when we need help. *MVPs are not tested for their technical skills, this award recognizes only their community service efforts.
We have a ton of these folks in the Atlanta/Georgia area. I wanted to try to list a few of them out, but this is going to be an incomplete list as this information is not necessarily easy to come by. My apologies in advance for anyone who got left out or mistakenly credited for living in Atlanta. If you know something is off in this list, please comment on this post and I’ll update the main list.
Jim Behning – Small Business Server
Dave Bernard – Visual Foxpro
Tom Bishop – Tablet PC
Dana Coffey - ASP/ASP.Net
Thomas Divine – Windows Embedded
Mark Dunn – Visual Basic.Net
James Hambleton – Windows Embedded
Geoff Hiten – SQL Server
Teo Lachev – SQL Reporting Services
Dennis Rice – Tablet PC
Michael Sanford – Windows Server SDK
Jerold Schulman – Windows 2000
James Shaw – ASP/ASP.NET
Shawn Wildermuth – C#
Paul Wilson – ASP/ASP.NET
— Matt Ranlett
The Atlanta .Net Book Club got together at 5 Seasons Brew pub tonight for the last time. Not the last time that the book club will meet, it’s just that we’re not going back to 5 Seasons. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the place, it is just time we find a new home nearer the other UG meeting locations.
Tonight we doubled our membership when SIX people showed up. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s actually a fantastic start. We made sure that everyone who came had a copy of Dino Esposito’s Introducing ASP.Net 2.0 book and we planned out our schedule of how quickly to read it. We all want to read about half or more of the book by the next meeting. We hope to have some interesting questions and maybe even some sample code to look at. The meeting in May (2 months from now) will be our final discussion of the book and the prep for the next book.
— Matt Ranlett
If you get this before it's too late, we hope to see everyone out at the 5 Seasons brew pub on Roswell Rd (just inside the Perimeter) at 6:30 for the Atlanta .Net Book Club
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Everyone has something to complain about with their various RSS aggregators, so it is a really good thing that there are so many of them out there. Should we add Microsoft to the list?
— Matt Ranlett
Monday, March 14, 2005
Doug gave the announcements and talked to the group about SQL Connections and PASS – upcoming SQL conferences. Lots of jokes, a little bit of complaining about how salesy the last presentation was, and some thanks to our sponsors from Lumigent.
Harvey Parnell from Lumigent gave us a presentation on database auditing – an “essential business practice for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance”. Did you know that SOX compliance requirements within organizations have actually changed from the first year to the second year? In the first year of government regulated auditing, a lot of companies scrambled to meet the requirements. Frequently those requirements just couldn’t be met easily because there aren’t any products on the market which meet the needs. Basically, the Sarbanes-Oxley act dramatically changed financial reporting rules for public companies. In the second year (this year) there is a lot of focus on forcing accuracy of data down to the individual database level through automated tools and manual processes. The goal is to avoid future Enrons and Worldcoms (accounting scandals). As far as databases are concerned, the data contained inside of the financial applications are critical to the public organizations. Auditing attempts to prevent unauthorized access from both external and internal threats from happening, and if they happen they need to be monitored. Basically there are many auditing controls which are either violated or deficient. For example, development staff can run transactions in the production system. This brings to light the need to apply database auditing to all types of data access. That way, if something goes wrong, you know what the data was before the problem, what it is after the problem, and how to prevent the problems in the future. While tonight’s presentation focused on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, there are other legislative requirements for auditing including the HIPAA (medical patient records), Graham Leach Billey Act and Basel II (personal financial records), and other regulations which require data retention for periods of time, such as seven years. After showing us how difficult it really is to monitor a database system as completely as one needs to be monitored, Lumigent’s staff told us how their application, the Entegra Auditing System meets as many of these needs as possible, with more features on the way.
Next Month – Shawn Wildermuth talking about CLR integration between Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) and SQL Server 2005 (Yukon). After several DBA-centric presentations, I personally will be happy to see something which speaks a little more to the concerns of the developers in the audience. Those who have seen Shawn present at the main .Net User Group or the Atlanta Mobility User Group know he is an engaging speaker. Come refresh your understanding of how the CLR integrates with the new Yukon database engine.
— Matt Ranlett
Saturday, March 12, 2005
The date and location are up for the Atlanta Geek Dinner this month. March 24th @ Harps Irish Pub.
Check out details.
Also the organizer Shawn has a post too.
--Brendon Schwartz
Friday, March 11, 2005
In case you haven't heard Chris is going to do something that I am very interested in. It is what most of us developers do, but never really package together. He is going to do something like community server, but using DotNetNuke as the front end. I look forward to it and would love to use it when he gets it up and running.
http://tamasii.com/blog/archive/2005/03/11/48830.aspx
Brendon and I got together with Paul Wilson over some burgers and chicken fingers and chatted with him about what’s been going on in his life. We talked about work, side projects, Paul’s MVP status, and more. I’ve actually been sitting on this material for a week now, so I figured I’d get my act together and write it all down where the rest of the community can read it. So here’s our Tale of Paul Wilson…
We were talking about how we all got started working with computers (Atari and Commodore and whatnot) when we got into how Paul got started working professionally with computers, especially since his education prepared him to be a math teacher. Once Paul decided that he didn’t really want to be a math teacher, he turned to computers. Paul actually got started with Delphi programming, something he, Keith Rome, and I have in common. Gradually his Delphi work became VB work, and he was off and running. His association with .Net applications began while he was working at a company as a regular employee. Paul’s projects at work weren’t really that exciting to him, so he started working on his personal website to learn more about the things that interested him. Now his website is a great tool for him, both as a teaching tool and example. Have a question about how to do something in ASP.Net? Ask Paul and he might send you to part of his website as an example of the solution.
Paul’s received no small amount of praise for his O/R Mapper, but he’s got more that just an O/R Mapper to keep him busy. We talked a bit about what he’s been doing in his “spare” time. Paul’s been working on a UI Mapper, an extension to the MasterPages class, and more. For a onetime fee you can get a lifetime subscription to all the code that comes out of Wilsondotnet.com. Ask Chris Wallace if he thinks the subscription is worthwhile. Paul spent a lot of time impressing on us is firm belief in the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid! This is actually the real reason he started creating his O/R Mapper and UI Mapper – he saw a need for a product and there were no simple products out there to meet his needs. Paul’s main drive is to keep things simple. He’s the first to admit that there might be other products out there that do some of the same things his products do (for example, NHibernate), but his strive the easiest to use. He’s not trying to address the entire market, just the cases where a simple and elegant solution fits. As far as what the future holds, Paul is working on something new, but he’s so early in the process that he didn’t want to talk about it before he proves it a viable concept to himself.
Paul shared a great story with us about what he feels lead directly to his being awarded the MVP distinction by Microsoft. It all began with that company he was working at where he first started using .Net technologies. That company was in the process of closing its doors, but it had several projects it was required to keep running for a long period of time. So Paul was in the maintenance phase of the project life cycle and he was able to spend time looking at the next technologies he might use. This is when he started working on his website. He was a frequent visitor of the brand new (at the time) ASP.Net forums where he was looking for solutions to his own problems. He started answering questions other people posted as he learned more and more. Because he was able to invest a lot of time in his website, ASP.Net in general, and the ASP.Net forums, his ranking as a top poster was stratospheric. This got him noticed by the powers that be over at MS and he was awarded the Most Valuable Professional award by the Microsoft MVP team. The funny thing about the award is that Paul feels it casts him as “Mr ASP.Net” when he has expertise in other areas as well. Fighting this exact type-casting is one of the things that eventually lead to the Wilson O/R Mapper – he wanted to prove that he could do stuff in other areas. That incredible job eventually with all the extra time ended; you can’t be paid to do nothing forever. Now that Paul’s working full time again, he doesn’t spend as much time on the message boards as he used to. He does visit when he gets the chance, and he is a very active local blogger.
So now we all know where to find Paul online if we need to ask him questions – the ASP.Net forums and his own blog. The next question we had for him was where does Paul Wilson go for help when he needs it. Paul told us that he does occasionally look in some newsgroups and websites, more often some reference books, and he told us that he stands on the shoulders of much smarter people than himself. He didn’t mention any names (to protect the innocent) but he told us that if he brought some of his brightest friends to chat with us, we’d all feel quite stupid in comparison. Brendon and I both felt Paul was being a bit modest, but we accepted the story that where Paul is smart, some of his friends might be brilliant.
We wrapped up our conversation with a quick talk about the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys’ mission. Paul’s been a strong online presence for quite a while now, but we don’t get to see him in person all that often. With the exception of the upcoming Code Camp, Paul doesn’t have any plans to present at any of the User Group meetings. So we asked him what we could do to draw him out of his house and into the community a bit more. While he wouldn’t actually commit to anything, Paul told us that he was very appreciative of our efforts to publish the user groups’ calendars and keep him informed of who’s coming to speak at which events. He mentioned that he might be enticed into coming out to hear some of our future presenters.
Well, that’s about all that I have for this Tale from the Trenches. Stay tuned – the next episode should show up in about two weeks.
— Matt Ranlett
Thursday, March 10, 2005
The speaker list is finally up on our site. Sorry it took so long to get it there. We have the tracks and speakers up and we will make them all easy to get to by this weekend. For the time being check out the tabs we have if you want to know who is speaking or what the presentations are.
Speaker List
Presentation List
We still have a lot of work to do, but I thought you would rather have the content as soon as possible.
--Brendon Schwartz
A P R E S S . C O M | Books for Professionals, by Professionals ...
Suggestions for Writing Apress Book Reviews
Apress encourages user group members to write book reviews that are comfortable and fun to write. We realize that time may be limited for working professionals, so we appreciate any thoughtful and constructive reviews of our books.
We suggest posting book reviews wherever relevant: Amazon, Slashdot, your blog, your buddy's blog, Barnes and Noble, JavaRanch, or your user group's site—just to name a few.
Whenever possible, a review should mention chapter features, describing one or several chapters at a time. Additional topics might include:
- How will this book help you with your work (or hobbies)?
- What sets it apart from other books you've read?
- Would you recommend it? To whom?
- What was your favorite chapter or section?
Many reviewers enjoy sharing what worked (or didn't work so well) for them in our books. And review length is up to the writer—we typically see reviews that range from a paragraph to a few pages. Here are a few examples:
If you want to challenge yourself, take a look at some examples of Slashdot reviews:
If you're limited on time, follow the example of some Amazon customer reviews:
Here are some fine examples of reviews posted on user group sites:
And here are some blogs that feature book reviews:
— Matt Ranlett
Brendan Tompkins just posted a blog about random number generation within .Net. I felt it was topical since we just saw Keith Rome do some random number generation in his AppCenter Test demo for the C# User Group.
Brendan’s post starts off with, “If you want a true random number generator, you will want to look beyond System.Random, to the RNGCryptoServiceProvider in the .NET Framework”.
— Matt Ranlett
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
The VB group is one of the only groups which is not meeting in the Microsoft offices. They get together in the New Horizons training center off of LaVista Road. Tonight’s meeting had a smaller group than usual. I’m assuming everyone is as busy as I am recently at work and just can’t spare the time. I know that we’re not talking about a lack of advertising – Brendon and I have been getting up in front of every single user group announcing all the upcoming meetings for the month. But I’m not discouraged by low turnout – quite the opposite. Every group has been experiencing record-breaking turnout recently.
Tonight’s meeting had three speakers scheduled but only two managed to turn out. And of the two that turned out, only one really had a presentation ready for display. That completely disorganized, unprepared presenter was me! But that’s a different story for a different day.
I was signed up to talk about the FileSystemObject how it differs from the System.IO namespace. The gist of my presentation was this – the FileSystemObject is actually part of the Windows Scripting Host. This is useful because it means that you can use the FileSystemObject outside of .Net applications. I showed an example of a VBScript file and a JavaScript program, both using the FileSystemObject to work with disks, directories, and files. The System.IO namespace offers more power and flexibility than the FSO does. For example, with the System.IO namespace you can get the extension of a file with the .GetExtension method. With the FSO you’ll have to search the file name string for the ‘.’ I didn’t have time to get a proper VB.Net sample project ready for everyone to see, so Jim came to my rescue. He had an application he uses to read in some bizarre custom format text files. He showed us how he could do the job with the FSO, a System.IO StreamReader, and a System.IO FileStream. We didn’t have a good way to measure performance, but the general feeling of the group is that the System.IO namespace would be faster than the FSO. If for no other reason, the FSO seems to require a COM Interop layer. For those of you who might be interested in how to use the FileSystemObject in JavaScript or VBScript, check out DevGuru.com – they have the entire object model of both scripting languages and more. Also, you should take a look at the Scriptomatic.
Brendon was the second speaker, presenting an interesting technique he found on the web to add custom properties to an enumeration. For example, he was able to create an enumeration of integers which had associated descriptions. This could be really valuable in cases like binary bit masking or error codes. With this technique you can have a meaningful description associated with otherwise bizarre enumeration values. I don’t have any links for examples of Brendon’s code yet, but he’ll be putting them up on the VB.Net site soon enough.
After the meeting we made our traditional pilgrimage to Chili’s for some food, drink, and talk.
— Matt Ranlett
Williem Odendaal posted some helpful Google tips a while ago. I thought I’d share them with you.
- After the search phrase, type site:microsoft.com. This will return only results from the microsoft.com domain.
- To find out what a word means, type define insane. With define being the keyword and insane the word I'm unsure of.
- To do conversions, type 12 pounds in kilograms. Very nice. Obviously this works for a lot of other conversions as well.
- And I just read about this this morning - to search for a word and all it's synonyms, use the tilde key. For example - ~food ~facts.
— Matt Ranlett
As an avid fan of mobile computing and a big believer that this is the direction computing is heading as far as consumer computer devices are concerned, I thought I’d share this blog entry from JKontheRun
Pocket PC Magazine- The Bright Future of Mobile Computing
Bibhu Choudhary and Suvarna Singh have written an article in Pocket PC Magazine that gives a good look at the future of mobile computing. The article concentrates on new technology that is either just appearing presently or on the horizon and they provide a thorough overview of the mobile technology we should be seeing in our devices down the road. The authors cover everything from tiny hard drives to flexible displays and how they will impact devices of the future. The article is a must read for anyone interested in what might be coming at us in our soon to be gadgets.
— Matt Ranlett
I have tried out about a dozen different blog readers and I currently like my Jetbrains Omea Reader the best. However, that doesn’t mean that I think it’s perfect. I just sent them this detailed list of feature requests:
“I LOVE Omea Reader and am considering purchasing Omea Pro to put my e-mail into the same application.
A few change requests:
Newspaper view - I like the ease of use of the newspaper view but I prefer the way the newspaper view works in the Onfolio tool. (almost but not quite enough to
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Highlight which blog entry I'm reading in the newspaper view (draw a box around it).
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When I hit the space bar move to the next blog entry.
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When I'm reading a blog entry, mark it as read. I am annoyed that I have to mark a blog entry as read manually after I've looked through them in the newspaper view.
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Give me the ability to flag items in the newspaper view.
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Give me the ability to read Recent and Unread categories in a newspaper view. I don't understand why that doesn't work now.
Comments - comments are what make blogging such a powerful tool and I like the ability to download comments by clicking a button.
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I'd also like to have a global option to ALWAYS download comments.
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If the comment is posted via RSS I should be able to get new comments on old posts (and be notified that that post has changed) without having to check manually. I'd like an old blog post with a new comment to be highlighted as changed in some way (maybe just marked as unread)
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I'd like to be able to read the comments in the newspaper view
Plugin request - I like the idea of the post to confluence plug in. But I use a different tool to write my blog posts and I'd like to see Omea send the post to it. I use BlogJet to write my posts offline and post at my leisure. Can we add a "Post to BlogJet" button to the UI so I can have a BlogJet format document created for me with the contents of the particular bit of information I'm reading in it (and a trackback link).”
With this nit-picky a list of requests, you ought to be able to see that it’s a pretty complete tool. Check it out for yourself. It’s free if you download it before the end of this month.
— Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/custom/blogs/index.html
BIG problem - no RSS feeds. To me, that makes this totally useless. Plus they turn off comments after 5:00pm. I guess they don't want to queue up comments for review. I can't imagine they're currently getting lots of comments on a site that doesn't allow syndication.
AccessAtlanta.com also promises RSS feeds, but they don't seem to be working. Oh well - no local news in my RSS reader
-- Matt Ranlett
If you don’t mind reading the books online there are some free EBooks from APress up on their site.
A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0
Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop
Writing Perl Modules for CPAN
Programming VB .NET: A Guide For Experienced Programmers
COM and .NET Interoperability
http://www.apress.com/free/index.html
--Brendon Schwartz
Do you ever get irritated that some sites require registration to show you free content? Take the New York Times for example. Why require me to register for free stuff? So you can have my e-mail address and spam me with junk I don't want to hear about. What if I only want to read one article? Very irritating. I'll usually abandon my attempts to read that article as soon as I'm required to register for it.
- A coworker showed me this site this morning and it's fantastic.
- Go to http://www.bugmenot.com.
- Drag the bookmarklet link onto your links bar.
- Visit a random website that requires a free account to be created so that they can spam you to hell.
- Click on the bookmarklet link you added to your links bar.
- A page pops up with a login and password.
- If the first one doesn’t work try the next one.
-- Matt Ranlett
I love BlogJet. I don’t care that it has the ability to connect to 2 million kinds of blogging engines, I only care that it makes it easier for me to connect to mine. I like the offline editing of my posts. I used to write such long stuff online that my session would time out and I’d lose my post if I forgot to CTRL+A + CTRL+C the contents.
For a while there I was frustrated with BlogJet because I couldn’t figure out how to get it to FTP my images up to the blog for me. Turns out that Michael Earls gave me the right advice when I was complaining about it to him, “play with the slashes”. I found what I messed up:
Chris Wallace also offered to give me the solution. I’d already solved it by the time he offered, but I’m only getting around to posting it now. Sorry for the delayed reaction.
— Matt Ranlett
I work in a company where the same product has been around since before I started 4 years ago. We just keep refining and adding functionality to our product. These years of work have resulted in a much better product than we had originally, but we've been butting our heads against a problem with seemingly no good solution:
How do you manage the documentation for a product where dozens of different people are adding features to the same product?
- We've tried keeping one central document but Microsoft Word isn't very good about sharing the file and letting 20 people edit it at the same time. VSS tends to want to check out to one person at a time and merging the doc changes in don't seem to work because VSS treats the file as a binary object.
- We've tried having people write design documents that show the new features but the problem here is that we end up with one out of date functional document and 300 out of date design documents. People write the design document as they think things WILL be and then write the code as things HAVE to be. The two are not always the same. But deadlines being what they are, the design document doesn't get updated and becomes useless. Also, when Person A writes a design and code for something then Person B makes a change for a different feature in that same code, Person A's document is now out of date because the changes are detailed in Person B's document.
- We've tried to force people to accept the "living document" model - where if a document dealing with your area of functionality exits you should be changing that document. Only create new documents as a last resort. The problem here is that we don't currently have a good framework of documentation covering all the areas of the code. We have a single document that covers everything and hundreds of sub-documents dealing with new features, not specific areas of code functionality. For example, if I want to add the ability to sell an non-inventory decrementing item I'll write a document about how to do that. Then the next person comes along and wants to write about refunds for tax-free items. My document didn't deal with Sales and Refunds so the next person will write a document about their specific feature. These "delta" documents talk about how the new release has changed from the original Functional Specification (the 1 big umbrella document) but they're generally useless
- How do you relay this information to the customer? You need something a customer can refer to for configuration and troubleshooting. We need something internally for the same reasons.
We're a small company and we don't have the budget to implement a massively expensive product to help us manage this problem. So I came up with an idea that I pitched to the management team (to lukewarm reception). I proposed we implement a wiki internally. A wiki is basically a website that allows anyone who views it to easily change it ("wiki" means quick or fast in Hawaiian). The best example is the world's largest wiki - the Wikipedia, with over a million articles. The beauty of a wiki for document management is that anyone who wants to can easily create marked up, cross linked documents with very little effort. If I put my functional spec document into the wiki as a page, whenever I find a word I want to expand on (like Item Sales or Item Refunds) I can simply add a link and have a new page for my new information created automatically. Since the effort to create entirely new documents suddenly becomes less than the effort to simply expand on an existing one, the document management process will slowly solve itself.
I picked FlexWiki for several reasons. 1) - it's free. 2) - it's based in .Net. and 3) - it's markup syntax is really easy to use. I slapped together a random sample of what it would look like and presented it to two of the managers. They both liked the flexibility but both are worried about the lack of structure. The other problem is that a wiki isn't very presentable to clients. I picked FlexWiki because it supports user authentication for making modifications, but that still doesn't help us print up a fancy deliverable. The other problem is that the lack of structure is great for adding content as you see fit but not necessarily condusive to easily understandable document structure.
A coworker was looking at this same problem and came up with an alternate solution. He felt that some forums would be the way to go. He chose the free Snitz forums. Structure is very rigid and easily understandable. Just like a wiki, anyone (with access) can add to a forum topic. The problem I have with the forums is that it does even less than a wiki does as far as creating documentation of a product. Forums are great for trouble shooting (which is where my coworker started his forums - documenting our troubleshooting guide) but suck as far as readable documentation goes.
I personally prefer the wiki. Look at the Wikipedia - a little effort can turn something small into a tremendous resource. Forums have their place too, but especially where documentation is concerned, I don't think they fit the bill.
I know that I am not the only person working for a company that has struggled with this same issue. Anyone have any advice or thoughts?
-- Matt Ranlett
Check out the farewell editorial from Richard Grimes from Dr Dobbs Journal. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Mr. Grimes, he has written some excellent columns over the last three years as a contributor to the DDJ and he'll be missed.
While you're wandering around in the DDJ site, be sure to check out the columns written by Dino Esposito on ASP.Net. I wanted to bring up Dino Esposito because he's the author of the Introducing ASP.Net 2.0 book that the Atlanta .Net Book Club will be following for the next three meetings. Speaking of the book club, I wanted to announce the time and location of the next meeting. We will meet on March 17th (Thursday) at 6:30pm at the 5 Seasons brew pub. They have wireless internet access and great beer. Show up and you might be luck enough to receive one of the three copies we've received (courtesy of Doug Turnure) for free.
-- Matt Ranlett
I wrote a post asking if anyone had any comment requests and got a comment from Kevin. Well, it wasn’t really a request for comment ideas but Kevin took it as such and asked me to speak about something he and I had talked about on the phone a while back.
Is it OK to use someone else’s wireless access to the internet if you have the ability to do so? This applies to all kinds of situations, but the basic theory here is that you live near someone who has not s |