Category Archives: Tech

Lotus Connections

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Whew, Lotusphere is pretty big, bigger than I expected. Seeing 6000+ people in one room makes you realize that 6000 is a lot of people. I’m having a great time here so far and we are getting pretty good feedback from customers.

… wait, let me step back a second. I have been working on Activities for Lotus the past year and a half. That started with Activities Explorer, then moved on to having an Activities web interface, and now we’re in Lotus Connections (formerly Ventura). It has been very exciting to work on Social Software, I can finally tell my friends that I’m hip and work on cool social networking software (instead of just some longer description about enterprise collaboration).

After a few small snafus on our part, it seems like Lotusphere attendees are starting to log in and try out our free test of Lotus Connections. Hopefully the word will spread and will get more exposure — we’re really hoping to get feedback that we can work into our product!

Some related links:

Blogging from Lotusphere

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I guess its time to get back into blogging, and being down in Orlando for Lotusphere is a great time to do so. I arrived in Sunday and did the typical staff busy work. I had a pretty normal day except for the 48oz steak at dinner last night :). Time to listen to the Opening General Session speech – I think there are going to be some pretty cool announcements!

Who knew that Neil Armstrong was a funny guy?

Art.. and a bit of software

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Art is “the documentation of a thousand interesting decisions”.

Signs of Art from Rands in Repose… you’ll have to read this (at least the beginning) to get context of what I’m talking about… or you could miss these small letters and get confused… your choice


Now I don’t agree that this is the precise definition of art (fortunately I gave up thinking there was any such thing as a precise definition of anything a while back), but I do like its approach. And I think it brings up some notions of Art that don’t come with all those dusty textbook definitions from my Art theory class. I’ve certainly heard things about capturing/substance and difficulty/size/complexity but decisions — that is a new vantage point.

I like the notion of the decision making of/on/about Artwork because if you have ever been in the process of seriously trying to create — it seems like its all you are doing. Creating a mark of such shape, texture or bracketing your shot to attempt to get the exact exposure you want or decrescendoing till the note falls from your lips or designing your software abstraction in such an elegant and comprehensive fashion (well to start at least. we all know that abstractions are leaky and spherical).

The problem with decisions is that the term feels so rigid. Even the most non-organic of us still don’t think in black and white despite the fact our minds make us think that we do. You could never take a piece of Artwork and create a flow-chart from it. If you could, well… you are super-anal or its no where near a piece of art (moving to lowercase due to laziness). The decisions you make — while very intensive — are more often subtle (sometimes unknowingly subtle) or spontaneous and intuitive. Calculated decision making certainly takes place in artwork. “I like that wash, but I need to balance it.” … “How can I support the weight of that?” …”I need to use higher-speed film/this rated flash for this light.” … But, if you are you trying to create solely formulaicly* you will have a very difficult time (psst.. your subconscious is actually smarter than you think, let it have a bit more control every once and a while).

Does this mean that software is too black and white to be artistic? No way! I’ve already talked closely to this topic a bit before when I compared software to literature (word or sxw). In fact I think software is extremely artistic. Writing software is like having to elegantly dance a story around various constraints (hardware, language, requirements, OS, dependencies…). Sometimes you have to tip-toe, sometimes leap, but it all must be smoothly interconnected and yet still be recognized as part of a whole.

Where I disagree with Rand(s?) is his critical eye of modern art. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of it either (most of the time), but it does have its place in the art world. One part of art is the progression of itself. Post Moderns built off the Moderns built off the Abstractionists built off the Cubists built off the Impressionists built off the Romantics… I really am no art buff (believe me, I just looked at Wikipedia to make sure that what I just said isn’t too glaringly wrong), but I feel that part of the point of modern art is that it is so different that you have a difficult time placing it as art. Artists need to explore, need to push the boundaries, and also need to cross the line. If there wasn’t anyone saying something isn’t art, then how can it be art?

I help rationalize this because I do not think that there is anything that completely un-artful (yes double negatives can sometimes make more sense then their counterpart). So art to me is more of a spectrum to me than a classification. And more so, things can be more artistic to some than others. This has to be true since so much of the importance is the experience you have with the work. A piece can only be boring if everyone had the same response! Then all you would have to do is read a review to tell you what that response is.

Whew.. why don’t you go forth and break some new boundies then?

* probably not a word, but I like it nonetheless

The little things…

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I’ve come to realize that in user interfaces (whether digital or physical) its often the subtleties that make most of the difference. The best of these are details which you use without realizing or without prior knowledge. Simple examples are right clicking on an object to see what you can “do” with it or using page up/down in some application (like a photo app) without taking the time to think “I wonder if page up will move to the previous picture” — it’s when you try something and then realize (afterward) that you did it by native reflex, without thought at all.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with getting excited about stumbling on seamlessly intuitive UI features. You are prone to get frustrated when those things “that should just work” don’t work. :)

Today’s example of that is clicking a link while visiting a web page. Its not every time you click a link, but those times when you realize “oh crap, I didn’t want to click on that… now I have to rush really quickly to try and hit the stop button before the next page loads (and man is that stop button small)”. What I tried today is clicking on the link again after realizing I didn’t want to go to that page. I think my mind tried this since there are many hide/open ui patterns in many of the new AJAX websites. My mind must have jumped and tried out that same pattern in this (different) situation, but alas — it doesn’t work.

So this is where I say “Why not?”

And now this is the point where I realize my intention of just mentioning a tiny ui feature is blown out of proportion by me doing all of this extraneous explanation.

So yea, its a small thing but at least I think it would be useful.

So while I’m on this topic another small ui gesture I’d love to have is feed readers (news aggregators/whatever name is in vogue now) that display the length of a post alongside the title. Maybe it’s a number of paragraphs, maybe it’s a small icon to represent the long posts, maybe it’s some representative color gradient. All it has to do is give me some blurry impression whether the post is “more longish” or “more shortish”. That could makes broswing/flipping though feeds much, much easier. If its a feed that I’m only semi interested in then I can just skip over the long ones. (I guess I’m the kind of person that feels guilty stopping reading something halfway through). Ever since my feed reader has gone out of control (I spent much of today trying to work on this) I’ve had to start breezing though all the “possibly less interesting” entries instead of reading everything (in addition to dropping the blogs I just never got around to).

The reason I’m making such a deal about these simple touches is that I really do think they make quite a large difference when amortized over the long term. (oh yea, and also if enough people hear about it and become interested they might get the motivation to write feature requests for me) :)

Oh.. just one more thing. Will rememberthemilk please show the number of tasks along/inside each tab? Pretty please?

The Semantic Web…

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Very interesting stuff. Since I’m too lazy to extensively respond, I’ll try to make this quick.
Lol, nevermind. This short comment on Elias’s blog grew in to quite a long trackback.

As a guy who caught onto the Semantic Web “hype” after people started to frown upon hearing the word, it bothers me how differently everyone defines the Semantic Web. Honestly, to me the Semantic Web has no direct baring to the RDF format. Although I think that having much more data published/presented/serviced in RDF will (greatly) help the promise of the Semantic Web become a reality, RDF does not have to be the enabling factor.

You could ask if I’m talking about RDF syntax (RDF/XML, N3, etc) or about the nature of RDF as a directed graph of relations between resources. I’d answer good question :). But really, I’m mostly saying that the syntax doesn’t matter… I don’t think I know enough to say whether the Semantic Web could come around with a drastically different knowledge model, but ya know maybe it could.

So what exactly do I think the Semantic Web means? I’m going to have a hard time pinning it down, but I’ll try my best. To me the Semantic Web is all about taking the “next step” for the web. The web has gone through many of these “steps” such as moving from static pages to dynamic ones and the growth of web services. Both of these things took time to happen (and I’m sure the technologies to do them were around way before they became mainstream), but they were big improvements in the functionality and range of possibilities that the web could offer previously.

I’m hoping that this “nest step” will help bring together all the wonderful knowledge and services that the web offers. Some of you will go, “Oh you are talking integration BS like a marking person or something.” And maybe someone would say, “You already can integrate websites and services now. Just break out your <insert favorite language> do some SOAP/XML/REST/screen scraping and you’re done!”

To both I would say guilty as charged. For the first, I think that you need to give more credit to the marketing guys. Its true that marketing types and hypes can get ahead of themselves, but really people want things integrated. They want things to JUST WORK! Why should the user have to understand two different formats, two different applications, two different whatevers to actually get one thing done!? Integration is all about making things more intuitive and seamless for the user.

For the second, yea you are right. Developers can relatively simply do those things to bring together disparate information and services on the web. But that’s the problem, you (most of the time) need to be a developer. Is that good enough? No. Imagine a world where everyday users can pull together web info which would currently require a developer to do. Ya know that really sweet website/webservice that put craigslist stuff on a Google Map? (Well if you don’t know, its quite freaking awesome) Anyways, it took some coder with some very bright ideas and swank javascript skills to pull that off. What if a normal user could do this easily by just browsing craigslist and google maps and just ask the browser to “connect” the data from both?

Yes that kind of functionality is pretty far off, but that is what the Semantic Web is all about. If you think that I’m wacky to think of the “browser” doing this, well then go and play with Haystack and checkout what a Semantic Web browser could be like. Haystack is still very much a work in progress (at least since I was last involved a year ago) but the “browser paradigm” it is pushing could possibly enable that functionality in the future.

So where are we now? I don’t think I really know very well, but interesting things are happening with RSS/ATOM, RDF, things like Haystack, and all the talk about REST web services. I’m sure that there are many many more cool things pushing in the Semantic Web direction that I don’t know about, but hey — I haven’t been thinking about this stuff for a while (so gimme a break :) ).

Whew, I hope that some of this made sense.

A little chat about music

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This is a slightly different post than normal. Below is an IM converstation that I had with my generic and unknown friend other. I thought it was an interesting converstation that shows some of my perspective on music sharing and also shows how much of an uptight and jerk friend I can be :/ .. oh well.

Also, I didn’t even try to fix misspellings and grammatical errors… Rereading what you quickly typed on IM makes you feel dumb.

<other>: hey
<other>: another question
TimmFin: lol
TimmFin: whats up?
<other>: I wanted to check the umm….legalness of a certain downloading program
<other>: :-D
<other>: it’s called mytunes redux
<other>: people ahve said to me that it’s not illegal
TimmFin: it have a site?
<other>: umm..hold on lemme check
TimmFin: (legality btw :))
<other>: lol
<other>: minimalverbosity.com
<other>: no www
<other>: http://minimalverbosity.com/
<other>: u still there?
TimmFin: yers
TimmFin: yes
<other>: k
TimmFin: so the thing that this application allows is the sharing of music files on the hard drives of other on your network (in your case this is other students)..
<other>: yes
TimmFin: apple’s itunes kind of already lets you do this, but it don’t let you download the file from the other student. it just lets you play it remotely and not copy it onto your machine
<other>: okay..
TimmFin: but this app will allow you to grabother student’s music files, so the application itself it not illegal…. but
<other>: but?
TimmFin: no matter how you get a hold of a copyrighted song, if you didn’t pay for it and you keep a copy for your own use (not just a one time test or something) you are technically stealing the song
<other>: but can they catch me?
<other>: like…the government?…orwhoever?
TimmFin: well… almost anything is possible on the internet so the answer to “can” is yes
<other>: I got scared cause my internet started acting all screwy today….
TimmFin: I’d rather prefer not to discuss the whole “can I get away with it” thing, since you probably won’t like what I have to say
<other>: well…
<other>: am I going to get in trouble?
<other>: is this whymy internet is being weird?
TimmFin: I’m sure the two things are totally unrelated
<other>: really?
TimmFin: but as for “am I going to get in trouble” .. again, I’d rather prefer not to discuss the whole “can I get away with it” thing, since you probably won’t like what I have to say
TimmFin: you are having network problems.. if someone was hacking your system to see what files you had you probably wouldn’t even notice
<other>: what do you ahve to say?
TimmFin: sure you want to ask?

… small tangent …

<other>: but..honestly….can you answer me something…objectively
TimmFin: I don’t want to encourage you to download copyrighted material, seeing if someone is hacking your machine is another story..
TimmFin: whats the question?
<other>: should I take the software off my compture?
<other>: computer
TimmFin: well you are not asking an objective question (that question is totally based on personal opinion)..
<other>: no…
<other>: because if they’re going to come nad slap handcuffs on me tomorrow..then I want it off
<other>: lol
TimmFin: … but if you can get away with it and forget about the possible legal consequences its ok..
<other>: huh?
<other>: I’m not asking if it’s right
<other>: I’m asking if I’m going to get in trouble
TimmFin: yes you are
<other>: yes I am what?
<other>: am I going to get in trouble? could I possiblyget in trouble?
TimmFin: well anyone who ever does anything illegal could possibly get it trouble
TimmFin: as in if I went 1 mph over the speedlimit I could get a ticket
<other>: Tim
<other>: ….
TimmFin: then ask a more specific question :)
<other>: am I goign to get in trouble?
TimmFin: now you are asking me to predict the future
<other>: Tim….
TimmFin: .. lol
<other>: please
<other>: you know what I”m asking
TimmFin: .. yes I know, you want me to make you feel safe and tell you that its ok for you to steal music
<other>: yes
TimmFin: (I warned you :))
<other>: ut oh..what’s that supposed to mean?
TimmFin: I warned you that I might say something you don’t like and or want to hear
<other>: k
<other>: go ahead
TimmFin: no I think I’ve already made my point, I’m in no lecture mood today
<other>: okay..well..that’s good..but you stilldidn’t answer my question..you just reworded it
TimmFin: ok, well I’ll honestly refuse to answer the question then
<other>: :-(
<other>: fine
TimmFin: my reasoning to answer the question are motivated by ethics and yours by consequence.. I don’t want to force my opinion on you, so I’m just not going to answer.
<other>: :-(
<other>: that’s all I have to say about that:-(