04.18.08
Posted in politics, tech at 11:46 pm by mridley
I saw this article in CIO Insight and I thought it was worth reading. The article is an interview with Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I enjoyed the book and I was interested in his thoughts on the subject.
A lot of “CIO type” interviews and articles are long on theory and short on practical reference. This article does include some concrete references to real projects under way. Notably the intelligence community’s answer to Wikipedia, Intellipedia. Also mentioned are Politicopia, a Utah project to create a wiki community where citizens can voice their opinions about pending legislature.
The article mainly discusses theory and a few wiki examples, so I’m not sure that it lives up to it’s “Web 2.0″ claim as many other “Web 2.0″ technologies are ignored. Still, it’s worth skimming. Not so much to learn anything groundbreaking but to get the cognitive juices flowing.
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Posted in life at 8:30 pm by mridley
I have been an avid Firefox user for the past several years. While I do use Firefox every day, I am not a heavy consumer of Firefox extensions. There are thousands of Firefox extensions available but I find that the browser suits my needs in its stock form. I don’t like getting used to having a lot of extensions installed, as when I use someone else’s computer I will be relying on functionality that is not available.
There is one extension that I do use on a regular basis. FireGPG is a Firefox extension that allows for integration with GnuPG. The extension has a number of features, including allowing the selection of web page text and then encrypting it via a right-click context menu.
The killer feature of this extension, however, is its integration with Gmail. The problem with web based email systems is that they are inherently insecure. Regardless of whether or not the HTTP connection is encrypted with SSL, all of the mail content is being stored on a remote server.
Sending encrypted emails to web email services has always been possible, but it’s painful in practice as the encrypted email must be copied out of the web browser and into a local text file and then decrypted. That is not an efficient workflow, and so very few people with web mail accounts actually use encryption.
FireGPG has support for Google’s Gmail. When you have FireGPG installed, the Gmail interface is subtly modified to include options to sign, encrypt, and decrypt emails. When an encrypted or signed email comes in, the software automatically recognizes it and decrypts or verifies the digital signature. The integration is very subtle and over time I forget I have it. Until I’m on another computer and realize I can’t verify digital signatures.
The downside to encrypting web based mail is that the encrypted version is stored on the mail service provider, which makes the web mail’s search functionality unusable. I find that I still don’t send much encrypted email, but the ability to see verified signatures is very handy and does not prevent my mail from being searchable.
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Posted in life at 6:25 am by mridley
Although Dreamhost gets criticized for occasional service outages, I’ve been very happy with the service provided for the price charged. At around $10/month anyone, at least in the developed world, can afford to have a personal publishing and development platform. That’s incredibly powerful!
If I were running a “mission critical” web application, I may not pick Dreamhost as my hosting platform. But in that case I’d be looking at the offerings from Amazon Web Service or Google’s App Engine. They are inherently more scalable for production commercial sites.
Dreamhost offers a lot of features that make my life easier, but one of their newer features I’ve started to take advantage of is Subversion. Dreamhost’s web panel allows users to create Subversion repositories, manage Subversion users, etc. They support webdav access, although I prefer to do my development on their shell using the svn client with a local path to the repository.
Being able to keep my People Keeper application in a Subversion repository at Dreamhost has been very handy. If you’re a Dreamhost customer who does any sort of development and you weren’t aware of this feature, I suggest checking it out. Revision control is critical in any software or web development project, and Subversion is a very popular package.
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04.17.08
Posted in tech at 10:33 pm by mridley
I mentioned my personal wiki the other day. I thought I’d post a quick note about using it as a Document Management System. I’m horrible at keeping on top of documents, electronic and physical. Although I have a filing cabinet, I can never remember where I have filed my mail and other personal papers. I do a fairly good job of keeping my My Documents subdirectory organized on my desktop PC, but that doesn’t help me if I need access to files when I’m not at home.
I have been researching open source Document Management Systems, but it occurred to me that I already have a wiki and with my People Keeper project I’m concerned about further fragmenting my personal data across multiple systems. So I decided to try using my personal wiki as a DMS.
I’d say the project is in “beta” at this point, but so far it seems to work well. The nice thing is that I don’t have to worry about filing documents under one location as it’s searchable and I can link to one document from as many different places as I’d like. The wiki already handles the case of multiple versions, so I don’t have to worry about version control. And it’s very simple to set up.
I’m using MediaWiki which isn’t really intended for storing general purpose documents. It considers everything an image. In truth though, it can handle whatever type of file you give it. I only had to make a few small modifications to the LocalSettings.php file. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in tech at 5:56 am by mridley
I mentioned the other day that I am working on a People Keeper project. I know a lot of people and I am horrible at keeping in touch with all of them. Especially those that live out of the area. I’d like to do a better job. This is true of both my personal and professional connections that I’ve made over the years.
Social networking applications are handy, but what I’d really rather have is a personal “CRM” system. I got the idea from two places. The first was from using Salesforce.com in a professional CRM context. It’s a really slick piece of software, but even though they have a free personal edition it’s not really intended to keep track of your friends and colleagues. The other thing that lead to the idea was reading The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. There is an anecdote in the book about a “connector” person who kept a spreadsheet with notes on all the people he knew. Birthdays, children and spouse names, etc. But a spreadsheet is too limited for my purposes.
In my last few jobs I haven’t done much software development, and I didn’t want my perl skills to go to waste and I wanted to finally make some use of the Mason book I purchased while working at Amazon.
So I have started prototyping out this People Keeper application. At the moment it’s a glorified address book. In fact, it’s not even completely functional at the moment. But once I get a basic functional prototype working, I’d like to put a slick AJAX interface on it and then incorporate other features such as mapping integration to create something of a GIS system for myself, possibly a text to speech VOIP gateway, and various other ideas.
I don’t necessarily expect to release it publicly, although if I actually get it to a polished state I might consider making it multiuser. As I progress on the project I’ll post more updates. Stay tuned.
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04.14.08
Posted in life at 4:36 pm by mridley
I haven’t written anything here lately so I thought I’d post an update. I have been working on a short term contract position for the Federal government. That is coming to a close this week, but next Monday I start a long term position with another Federal contractor. I’m looking forward to it, as it’s an HPUX systems engineering role and I haven’t done my HPUX in a while. I like opportunities that challenge me and require me to learn a lot in a short period of time.
I’ve been working on a fun side project for myself which I’ll probably write more about later. I’m creating what I’d describe as an inverted social network. Basically a way to keep track of all the personal and business connections in my life. But it’s not a social network in the sense that it’s not multi-user. It’s just for me to keep track of people I know, relationships, birthdays, etc. Almost a CRM system for myself. I have never been all that great at business networking and keeping in touch with past colleagues so I’m hoping this will help me create a workflow for myself around that.
I went to the Eastern Shore of Maryland this weekend to hang out with some friends. That was a blast. It’s nice going there off season as you don’t have to deal with the crowds and the traffic and all that. Would have been nice to stay longer, but alas work and life beckons.
I have been rededicating myself to my personal wiki. A few years ago I had a coworker who was telling me that he had a PHP forum on his web site that he used to keep track of interesting technical tidbits. Every time he had to look something up he would make a note of it in his forum. That seemed like a good idea to me, so I set up a bulletin board for myself several years ago. But I realized that a bulletin board was not the most efficient way to keep track of that kind of information in the wiki age, so I quickly migrated over to a wiki. I’ve had this wiki for ages but I’m horrible about actually updating it. Lately I have been trying to do a better job about that. I keep notes on all sorts of things related to my life, work and otherwise. It’s pretty handy.
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