too RAD for me
is that there is this huge class of problems people are solving that are all "the need to build a database-driven website".
http://blog.ianbicking.org/theres-so-much-more-than-rails.html
People do want to build database driven websites.
People do want to have RAD tools to help them.
But php, or Rails, or Python or J2EE, will not help, no clever web framework will prevent someone who knows nada about database design screwing it up and delivering somethig terrible.
I just spent 2 days cleaning up a php application, that had as its worst crime (and it is a long rap sheet that has earned it a death sentence, delayed for now) that each time one adds a customer, one creates a new set of three tables, copying over data from the original. Yup - each new customer is not an INSERT operation but CREATE TABLE.
This is the worst idea I have come across, but frequently I have patched up other badly thought out schema (or is it schemata?) and, strangely enough although php is usually a partner in crime, python has been caught at the scene too.
My take - do not worry overly about the framework, worry about the programmer.
Of course *I* need to decide on a framework too....
OK - interesting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat
I can stuff extra information into a rel. link or a class attribute and AOL browsers can read it (http://www.lawver.net/archive/2006/01/17/h13_announcing_i_am_alpha.php).
What I asked for a while ago was a way to link to a racist site purporting to be a schools site on Martin Luther King, but mark the link as "I disagree" or "racist crap". The semantic web was the obvious way, and microformats strike me as a good (nearly) right now approach. THe sort of approach that the purity of SGML could not offer but HTML did.
Reports, Presentations and having it easy
Procrastination. Thats what I would be doing right now if I was not wasting time on this blog.
However would I procrastinate as well as SUN employees who not so long ago were banned from using powerpoint as it just wasted time.
The thing is it is not having presentations that wastes time, its the amount of time it takes to write the presentation. And thats down to WHYSIWYG.
Powerpoint presentations are fundamentally boring. All the ones I see are linear, usually clip art, occassionally using a graph. And they take ages to write because you spend so long tweaking.
So I want a simpler approach, I want to avoid a presentation where I can, but if I must, I want it to take me no more time than a marker pen and a whiteboard.
tools:
1. docutils and reStrunctured text.
This is great
- I can write plain text like this which will be transformed into a bullet point
.. image: pics.jpg (will become a dropped in image)
this will be a title
-----------------
So I already produce web pages, reports and documents like this (through the useful docutils, although understanding the code has defeated my paultry attempts to read it).
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/latex.html also delves into this, showing how to chunk out latex / pdf docs from plain text, using any amount of latex stylesheeting.
However making a word-like document is not the ultimate goal. I want to throw in presentations. And not boring slides
2. Graphics
My lowest level graphing production is to avoid excel wizards. I think something along the lines of plotutils with python is my thing. open in the window next to me I can produce a graph to just drop in when I need it. Probably
3. Diagrams
The difference between graphs and diagrams is probably one Edward Tufte would get upset about but i know what i mean. But making a diagram is torture. One flowchart - bang one hour gone. I have no idea why but any diagram, in visio, draw or heaven help me word, just becomes boring boxes and arrows and takes for ever. So why not use a wacom tablet and some draw package? I'll look around
4. SVG animation
Now the future of presentations must lie in animation, and especially animation of gra[hical data
I'll let you know how I get on creating my ideal report making environement
There is probably business in writing animated presentations for investment banks overnight btw.
More on TV 2.0
Hmm, I was it appears ahead of the game for once.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060105.htmlis discussing pretty much the same stuff I was - granularistion of tv advertising (at least parts of what i was talking about. I cannot remember right now)
so TV 2.0 - I am still convinced that knowing what I watch will be as vlauable to selecting adverts for me to watch will be compared to knowing what i search for is for google.
so here goes on the tv 2.0 mechanisms:
1. Its (for me and the advertiser) a lot easier if i watch all my programs over broadband.
2. I am willing to pay not to watch adverts. But I am still going to not pay for the whole thing.
3. The whole thing costs about £10 pmth (the cost of the BBC and frankly I could survive just watching/listening/surfing the Beeb)
4. I might be persuaded to buy a tv that can block "sit-thru" adverts, but has a decoder similar to teletext/closed caption so that you can send me an advert in words that is directly targetted to people who watch shows on monkey world (
www.monkeyworld.co.uk) and newsnight.
You just throw out a lot of teletext lines (similar to the spare 10% on DB radio) and hope the advert for my demographic is in there. Adverts I am not forced to sit-thru, but adverts appear at the bottom of the screen such as "see more about chimpanzees on www.monkey-world.co.uk"
5. You can find out what I watch because the decoder captures this and squirts it back when I am reminded to connect it up to the phone line (SKy actually has this as a requirement for use but who knows the real take up)
6. As I said it is easier to run this over broadband, but the idea of giving people broadband and pcs just to control thier viewing smacks of pie-in-the-sky google cubes or Xboxes. When sony bets the company on such boxes, and they shut off the analogue spectrum, I will beleive it. For now closed caption is the best option I can think of.
7. I suspect it will become harder to do "aspiration advertising" such as making one bland box of a car seem more desirable than another, but frankly that strikes me as a good thing. AdWords works becasue it cuts down to the very basics "you want to click to my web site because I am offering you this product with these features in 12 words or less". Advertising that has to think? Sounds good.
Anyway, i am still very much in the keep talking till I work out what I mean mode. I do like the idea of TV 2.0. With broadband TV this is simple and I suspect inevtiable (homechoice will be one of the first beneficiaries I guess). But for the majority of us stiffs, a line of teletext at the bottom might work as adwords does now.
maybe
