Karl Martino

Alfresco Links for February 7th, 2010

2010-02-07T18:46:30Z

Alfresco Webcast: What's New in 3.2?

Alfresco Webcast: WCM Roadmap Webinar - Versions 3.3 and 4.0

Key to Content: Alfresco WCM Roadmap (notes from the presentation)

Philip Kedy at CapTech: Alfresco WCM or DM: What is the best choice for your enterprise portal?

Jeff Potts: Understanding the differences between Alfresco's repository implementations

Recent related event: Thanks to the folks at zivtech for hosting a great Alfresco lunch & learn event on January 27th.

Heard my nephew played his first solo acoustic gig last night

2010-01-31T23:10:11Z

And I heard it was great. I'm honored that he played one of my songs too.

Go Matt :)

When housing homeless people isn't enough

2010-01-31T22:36:13Z

Monica Yant Kinney, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, shares the story of 'Mary' a Pathways to Housing client, and the difficulties she and her neighbors are facing.

Many of the chronically homeless have mental illnesses that, like many disabilities, require them to have special services available to be able to live their lives independently. Where someone with a wheelchair might require a special transportation to get about, a person facing these difficulties might require a technician to visit daily to insure they are taking their medication. Provided the right tools and structure, many do very well.

Kinney's article, and 'Mary''s story, raise hard questions for which there are no easy answers.

My Mom, our family, was thankful for the efforts of Carelink which provided similar services for her. Many deal with the effects of dementia in their loved ones as they age, and for her, the last few years of her life were probably her most lucid and clear with their help.

Everyone deserves a life of dignity.

The secret of achievement is persistence - a 'growth mindset' over a 'fixed mindset'

2010-01-31T22:01:26Z

Wow does this headline sounds like so much self-help crap! But read the stories linked with an open mind. The research is thought provoking and inspiring.

Stanford Psychology professor and author of "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success", Carol Dweck has spent decades researching the question "What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?".

Her research and a body inspired from it has implications for how we raise our children, how we manage employees, how we work to overcome difficulties, how we think of ourselves.

In April 2007 Stanford Magazine wrote up a profile of her titled, "The Effort Effect".

Po Bronson referenced her work in a well-linked NY Magazine piece, "The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids".

That Bronson's piece came out in 2007 and it influenced what I've come to believe about instilling a belief in Emma that she or me isn't 'smart' - but that it's smart to try and try again to figure something out, to learn something by practice and experimentation.

Dweck believes that we tend to have one of two mindsets when it comes to seeing achievement in others and ourselves: a 'fixed' mindset that tells us when we see someone's mastery over something it is from innate talent, or a 'growth' mindset that tells us that person must have worked hard to achieve it.

People who believe others are born with certain talents tend to do worst than those that believe we can grow and change.

In order to believe someone can grow and change, including ourselves, we need to believe that failures have lessons and that if we keep at something, we can improve.

Just keeping that as a core belief can make all the difference in our lives and in how we see others. It calls on us to give ourselves a chance, to give others a chance. To be empathetic, to empower. And to keep on keepin' on. This may sound a bit too 'new agey'. But its more a call to action. Because yes, the world isn't fair, but if we try and try again, we might raise our lives to a better place, and better yet, the lives of those around us.

Recently Po Bronson has co-authored with Ashley Merryman a new book I've been meaning to read that incorporates some of these lessons in parenting.

Science Daily 12/10/2009: First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue

NPR: 12/9/2009: Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain 'Highways'

Nurture Shock: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman: 12/10/09: New Research: $13 Christmas gifts = 13 point gain in kids' IQ

The Atlantic: David Dobbs: December 2009: The Science of Success

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will." | MetaFilter

Can't get it out of my head: A father's yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind

TED.com: Video: "Martin Seligman on positive psychology"

New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: "GETTING OVER IT: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit put the war behind him. Why can't we?"

Finally, quote from Calvin Coolidge I've kept in my wallet for over 10 years:

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

In order to help people you need to not look down on them

2010-01-31T19:57:48Z

Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand."

It's an old proverb. One worth repeating.

It's cold out - what you can do to help homeless in Philadelphia

2010-01-30T14:05:11Z

Write 1.215.232.1984 on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet or purse.

If you see a homeless person living on the streets in the cold please call that number.

Its Project H.O.M.E.'s Outreach Hotline.

If you happen to be homeless, in need of services, and have access to a phone, call 1.877.222.1984.

It's that simple.

If you have more time or resources, think about volunteering or donating to Project H.O.M.E..

This post inspired by Garret Vreeland's recent link to CNN story "How to help the homeless in the cold".

Database related reads (and videos) for January 25, 2010

2010-01-25T10:24:40Z

Lambda the Ultimate: Why Normalization Failed to Become the Ultimate Guide for Database Designers?

Generation 5:
Putting Freebase in a Star Schema

no:sql(east): video: Justin Sheehy is the CTO of Basho Technologies on Riak and more

ShopTalk Blog: Death to filesystems

Reviewing backups, I find Mom's last words to me

2010-01-25T04:36:46Z

Mom called and left a message 3 days before she died. She said that the latest tests were good. That everything was alright. To say hello to everyone and God bless.

20071024-MomsLastPhonecall2.wav

A lot of folks don't get the chance to say good bye, or their loved ones leave with too much left unsaid. Unshared. Unclosed. I think its that way for all of us. There's no way to share it all all of the time. Life just moves too fast and then its too late.

I think maybe I 'tripped' upon this file because of something Rose shared today. She's missing her Mom especially right now.

I think I'm lucky to have that message. And to have the Mom I had. And to have the family I have in the here and now. I'm the luckiest bastard on the planet. And I know it.

To all those missing their Mom's today - my heart's with you.

Sharing folders between Mac Host and Ubuntu Guest with VirtualBox

2010-01-24T23:35:12Z

ozz314: VirtualBox Shared Folders between Ubuntu Guest and Mac Host

That was easy.

The case for killing 'WCM' (Web Content Management)?

2010-01-23T17:32:59Z

First, a disclaimer. The title refers to the term 'WCM', not the functionality implied by it.

WCM (Web Content Management) as defined by Wikipedia is a system that "allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators."

Sounds simple, but the definition is crazy expansive.

It's so generic it enables a wide field of choices to claim they satisfy the need. Check out this list: Bricolage, Alfresco, Interwoven, ez Publish, Texpatten, MovableType, WordPress, Drupal, Jadu, Vignette, Day, Nuxeo, Radiant, typo, Fatwire, Clickability, Plone, SDL Tridion, ektron, it goes on and on. And the costs! From free to millions of dollars!

Couldn't you consider page creation/site management tools like Dreamweaver in that definition? Sure you could. Many who think they want a CMS, really want one of these or a combination of one of these with a CMS. If you look at Google there are 2,370,000 hits for the combination of Dreamweaver and CMS.

WCM is thought of as a subset of ECM (Enterprise Content Management) concepts. ECM is defined by Wikipedia as "the technologies, strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to an organization and its processes. ECM tools allow the management of an enterprise level organization's information."

Among the list above are a few ECMs that have WCM functionality. Commonly mentioned are Alfresco, Interwoven, Vignette.

ECM is then considered a subset of CMS (Content Management System) concepts. A CMS is defined by Wikipedia as "a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment."

Referring to the above list, many can be called out as CMSes. In fact, all of them consider themselves such.

And then there are frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Grails, and Django. They just beg you to build your own.

With an alphabet soup like the above, no wonder so many get confused. WCM, in particular, is overloaded. So much so that there are some folks in the industry arguing to eliminate the acronym altogether!

Jon Marks says in "WCM is for Losers":

I can already see the news headlines: LONDON, 2009 - SHOCK HORROR! WCM Geek Demands Death of term WCM. But it's true. I'm of the camp that wished the term WCM would cease to exist.

Jon Marks concludes by saying:

But sadly, my prediction it isn't going to happen. I'm just going to have to keep thinking of a WCMS as a tightly coupled hybrid of a content management system and a delivery framework. On the plus side, I'll continue to make money out of poor customers that think a "WCM migration/replacement" doesn't involve a complete site rewrite as they're throwing the delivery baby out with the content bath water. Losers.

Deep within the comments on Jon Mark's post, NPR's Daniel Jacobson added:

In my posts about COPE, I tried to make a distinction between tools that capture content in a presentation-agnostic way and those that capture them for one (or more) specific presentation. I call the latter WPT (web-publishing tool), although Peter Monk's Presentation Management System is in some ways a better term in that it is broader, covering systems that don't just apply to the web.

For me, however, the future of the content management systems (CMS, or whatever acronym you want to give it) is in their ability to capture the content in a clean, presentation-independent way. Then, as Pie states, the content should be retrievable through a series of API's, enabling the content to be distributed to any other platform. If available through an API in a truly portable, presentation-agnostic way, the system can then service any presentation layer.

Alfresco's consulting lead for North America, Peter Monks, shares on his blog how difficult this is and looks for a new terminology in "The Case for Killing 'WCM'":

To start undoing the 15 years of mind share that the term "WCM" has enjoyed, it's time to start thinking about new terminology that better describes these two functional categories. For several years I've been throwing around the terms "Content Production System" (CPS) and "Presentation Management System" (PMS), and in their COPE strategy NPR uses the terms "Content Management System" (CMS) and "Web Publishing Tool" (WPT).

Daniel Jacobson and Peter Monks are onto something. Jacobson wrote a piece for Programmable Web ("COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere") I've linked to previously. The section "Build CMS, not WPT" makes some important distinctions:

COPE is the key difference between content management systems and web publishing tools, although these terms are often used interchangeably in our industry. The goal of any CMS should be to gather enough information to present the content on any platform, in any presentation, at any time. WPT's capture content with the primary purpose of publishing web pages. As a result, they tend to manage the content in ways focused on delivering it to the web. Plug-ins are often available for distribution to other platforms, but applying tools on top of the native functions to manipulate the content for alternate destinations makes the system inherently unscalable. That is, for each new platform, WPT's will need a new plug-in to tailor the presentation markup to that platform. CMS's, on the other hand, store the content cleanly, enabling the presentation layers to worry about how to display the content not on how to transform the markup embedded within it.

True CMS's are really just content capturing tools that are completely agnostic as to how or where the content will be viewed, whether it is a web page, mobile app, TV or radio display, etc. Additionally, platforms that don't yet exist are able to be served by a true CMS in ways that WPT's may not be able to (even with plug-ins).

COPE is an ecosystem and strategy. It is not an uber-CMS. Many of the vendors above claim their systems can provide you this almost-mythical beast. Indeed, many of them can, but it calls back to the point Jon Marks was making and a common mistake many trip into.

De-couple, break it down into separate systems systems (Presentation, API/Mashup/Data, and CMS) as Daniel Jacobson and Peter Monks suggest, and you gain much in flexibility. The trade off is flexibility's evil twin - complexity. You have to be able to accept some complexity for the gains you draw in flexibility.

Lets take a look at a diagram Jacobson provided on NPR's COPE:

Look at where the 'CMS' is in what NPR calls its Content Management Pipeline (what I call an ecosystem). Look at where the Presentation Layer is. Notice what feeds it. The API Layer capable of delivering content from multiple sources, including what the CMS feeds into, the Data Management Layer.

Take another look. This is an inkblot test.

Some see a diagram like this and see the whole thing as CMS or WCM. When these say 'Content Management System' or 'Web Content Management System' they are thinking of a *singular* application that performs all of the duties of all of the layers detailed in the diagram. In NPR's case, this diagram shows the 'Content Management System' is part of a tier on the backend - where content is consumed, stored, maintained for reuse. It's goals are as Jacobson points out. The CMS's role constrained to a set of responsibilities and in order to do them it must integrate into a larger set of cooperating systems.

You might not need a system as comprehensive as NPR's but you won't know until you answer a few questions: "Where is it you want your business to go?", "What is the Content Strategy?", and importantly, "Show me how you do things now." and "Let's figure out a better way of getting this done.". Starting from the simplest thing that can possibly work and allowing for evolution towards your end goal is always the way. For example, you could start with a *combined* Data Layer, API Layer, and Filtering Layer (what I call a "3 Box Content Management Ecosystem" below), and then decompose that into separate systems down the line. If you do have answers to these questions, and they resemble what NPR's are, Jacobson has provided a great high level view of what this looks like. He deserves thanks for sharing it.

A friend at work passed along a great link, Blend Interactive's "Thoughts on Content Management & Information Architecture". I've linked to Gadgetopia.com, the official blog of Blend Interactive before, but this index is, as he suggests, "quite possibly the best single source of CMS-related questions, insights, etc. that I've ever found." Bookmark it. Their "What Makes a Content Management System"? piece provides you with the best checklist of functionality to consider when looking at CMSes.

And lastly:

Sometimes I think I want to publish a series that describes the various layouts that define CMS systems in really, really simple terms because of the confusion. Here's a first pass:

The '2 Box Content Management System' - Presentation and content maintenance functionality using same software, with shared storage. (Wordpress, Drupal)

The '3 Box Content Management Ecosystem' - Presentation running its own software, content maintenance running its own software, with shared storage. (MovableType, Wordpress and Drupal, ez Publish, Bricolage, Alfresco in some implementations)

The '4 Box Content Management Ecosystem' - Presentation running its own software, content maintenance running its own software, a data tier for presentation, a data tier for content storage. (Alfresco in some implementations)

The '5 Box Content Management Ecosystem' - Presentation running its own software, API/Mashup running its own software, data tier for presentation, content maintenance running its own software, a data tier for content storage. (Alfresco in some implementations, NPR's COPE content pipeline).

And so on. Someday I might get around to it. The terminology soup is so oppressive and obscuring.

Alfresco REST API links

2010-01-23T17:17:57Z

Trying to find one reference that links to the entire Alfresco REST API? The following pages are all on the AlfrescoWiki, but its a bit hard to navigate. Note that the 3.1 REST API page does not include the items mentioned in the 3.0 REST API page, or the Deployment REST API page, the 3.0 REST API page and so on. You need *all* these pages, plus others listed below, for a complete picture (I think):

3.1 REST API
Deployment REST API
3.0 REST API
Repository RESTful API Reference
2.1 REST API
2.0 RESTful API
OpenSearch
REST Design Guidelines
CMIS RESTful API Reference

Worth repeating: Conan O'Brien's goodbye message

2010-01-23T16:54:26Z

All I ask is one thing. And this is... I'm asking this in particular of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record its my least favorite quality. It doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you're kind, amazing things will happen. I'm telling you - Amazing things will happen. I'm telling you. It's just true.

Gawker: CoCo's Last Dance: "Hardest Thing I Have Ever Had to Do"

A few recent thought provokers on living the linked life

2010-01-23T14:31:44Z

Bruce Schneier: Privacy in the Age of Persistence: We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

Nick Bilton: NYTimes: 'Controlled Serendipity' Liberates the Web: We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

Anil Dash: CNN: Don't let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town: There's no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We've just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.

Roger Ebert who is living with what his fight against thyroid cancer has dealt him and how the Internet helps him connect: Nil by mouth: So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, "Remember that time?" I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it's sad. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now. (bonus link read his piece on making out.

You could have been killed

2010-01-19T00:57:39Z

"People were told to read it, memorize it, and destroy it because if they were caught with it, they could be killed." - Joe Wos on the dangers of possessing a copy of "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story", a comic book, in the 1960s.

You can read the comic, originally published 1956 online. It still has a message that resonates.

You can read the background on the comic book from Tom Christopher.

Check out the Metafilter Thread and links from Bleeding Cool.

There is a Space Battleship Yamato LIVE ACTION TRAILER!

2010-01-18T23:40:19Z

YouTube: "Space Battleship Yamato Live Action Film Trailer":