fun

I must admit, I've always been skeptical about portlets (or whatever else you happen to be calling the same notion in your technology). I've never seen a website where I found them useful. I do not use, or ever intend to use, iGoogle, because I never go to their homepage - my browser allows me to search from the toolbar. As a matter of fact, the only two cases where widgets make any sense, that I know of, are OS-X Dashboard and Facebook. I have not bothered to customize even those, much, to be honest, though.

To my great delight, most website owners quickly figured that the "usability" myth of morphing their websites into a pile of "widgets" was nothing more than a mirage. They quickly kicked the know-it-all-can-sell-any-bullshit "consultants" that suggested it out of the door - where they belong.

Unfortunately, it seems like Orange of France Telecom "did not get the memo". Somebody over there managed to "portletize" the homepage (!) of the corporate website. Now, it's one thing to let users customize their own profile pages, but to turn corporate homepage into a Lego™ toy is just a whole new level of a case of an arrested development.

:big sigh:

Geeks among us often wonder what a website is built with. Is it a Java/J2EE home-cooked mess? Is it a .Net nightmare? Or is it a common CMS installation styled to the extent of not being recognizable (i.e. not being ugly, anymore :) )?

Most 5-minute drupal installations will respond to requests like http://example.com/user/ and http://example.com/admin/ and you will see familiar Drupal interface: either the ugly tabs, or the Garland itself.

More paranoid (or careful?) admins may have the default URIs disguised for public eyes. If we are doing analysis using an automated tool (somebody?) it's better to have an alternative method since other CMS's may respond to the same URIs and automated tools don't have eyes to see the ugly tabs.

What may help in a complex analysis of a site is looking at its HTML source. If in the header you see URIs like "/misc/drupal.js" you know this site is running Drupal! If the website admin had enabled javascript aggregation, though, you won't see anything like that and will have to hunt for "/sites/default/files/js" pattern.

Also, please note that Drupal does not load drupal.js if no other javascript is requested from code, so you may not see any of those on the home page. It's the best to look at the "Add Comment" pages, since those usually have some Javascript.

Happy hunting! :)

The intro/description from IBM's new Project Zero caught my eye right away: "We're building an agile development environment leveraging scripting runtimes such as Groovy and PHP, and optimized for producing REST-style services, integration, mash-ups, and rich Web interfaces. This is the community development site for IBM WebSphere sMash, offering users a chance to interact with the development team as we build this new product".

Generally, I don't believe in software frameworks that do not emerge off of a successful real-life project and are built "in-theory", around a vague idea. This attitude of mine is backed by facts: Spring came out of a real project, so did Hibernate, Erlang was heavily used at Siemens... even Drupal was initially built for a college website Dries was putting together. Nothing ever came out of just wanting to create a software framework and thinking you have enough experience ("more than others" is usually the feeling). At least, I know no real good examples.

But besides that, WebSphere and "agile"? :) If you ever had to work with WebSphere, you will understand and will have to forgive my natural sarcasm.

P.S. Nice domain, though. I wonder how much they got that for.

Nice and funny "analysis" of the Internet community on CreateDebate

Just how addicted to Apple are you?

Apparently, I am 94% addicted.

Not really a surprise to anybody who knows me :)

In college, our civil engineering professor opened his first class with an anecdote. According to the story, a bunch of engineers were planning trail paths at a newly built campus in city X. There was a large set of lawns on campus. Instead of building sophisticated simulation models to find optimal trails, the engineers did not pave trails for the first couple months. During these months people walked on certain paths on the lawns enough to cut natural trails through the grass. Eventually, the engineers simply paved those trails. The story concludes that the paths turned out to actually be the optimal trails.

In the modern Web 2.0 world we would inevitably call this story a blazing example of the "wisdom of crowds". Back then, however, James Surowiecki had not yet written his famous essay, so the story was told to us as simply a great example of a common-sense approach.

Since I was one of the roughly 1 million fanatics, that against all rational arguments, bought iPhone early, I became eligible for the $100 Apple credit. I got it back today from Apple website (look in the footer). It took me about 40 seconds.

Now the big question is - what to buy with it, since I already own like half of anything at the Apple store? :)

The subject of real.com is a broad one. You can talk about it for hours, touching the matters of outdated technology and lousy business model or falsely admiring their desperate attempts of come-back, but then - is it worth it? I find it much more amusing to bust their balls for petty archaic spellings, like this one:

"On-line" for God's sake? Real, how 90s, of you :)

As employees all over the country keep getting fired over their MySpace profiles, one man is trying to get "hired" as nothing less than the President of the United States of America. That's right, Dennis Kucinich, has a professionally designed MySpace profile with all the bells and whistles that, typically, only music bands or TV shows get.

Mr. Kucinich currently has 10,280 friends, which falls short of John McCain's 20,173. With all fairness, these numbers are very impressive for a 60 and 70 years old men on MySpace. Yet, both of them get beaten hands down by Hillary Clinton's two MySpace profiles one with 35,370 friends and another with 41,873. If you ever doubted Hillary's charms, now you know!

Profiles of Kucinich and McCain seem to be part of their official campaigns, but senator Clinton's profiles are clearly just fan pages.

Last but not least, a shocking result from Barack Obama - with 161,728 "friends" he beats even U2 at 136,270.

You probably know that CeBIT is going full force, right now. As you would expect from a leading IT and telecom trade fair, loads of new interesting solutions were presented. However, one stands out, right away. Not so much with its features but rather by price - $1,500 for a keyboard? And it's not even platinum-plated or carrying proud tag of some insanely famous designer.

Optimus Maximus is a creation of Russian web/industrial design company Art. Lebedev Studio. Each key on this keyboard is an OLED screen that can be programmed to display any character. So, effectively, the keyboard is fully customizable. Cool, but... it ends up costing more than any keyboard you have ever seen. According to some reports, it also "features" a constant high-pitch noise from all the OLED goodness, but we have not tried it so - maybe not.

In any case, even with the supposedly breakthrough approach to designing keyboards, the first reaction when you look at the price tag is inevitably in line with one of the comments to the wired.com blog post: "These Commie douches must be out of their arrogant minds. $1500 for a keyboard? Yeah, right, how about - GET REAL?". However, if you give it a second thought you may appreciate the marketing genius behind the price. Seriously, if not the scandalous price tag, what else would make this gadget appear on the front-page of the wired.com coverage of CeBIT and be a highlight of the show?

Well, maybe the "commie douches" are not so stupid, after all and they've learned a thing or two about Shock Advertising from their Western brothers? Maybe... We'll see how this one goes and if the keyboard will capture any real market. In my humble opinion, unless they significantly drop the price very soon, they will prove right the wired.com commenter.