Trying to get Dugg

I've recently been experimenting with commenting on Digg postings.

For the uninitiated, Digg is a system where you vote (or digg) Internet pages that you like. For example, if the author if this blog was so-inclined, you might see a "Digg This" button for this post juxtaposed with the number of diggs this post has already received. Each time you Digg a page, the number increases. Having many diggs means your site gets listed on Digg, which generates more traffic for your site and indicates a high level of positive interest.

Digg has a commenting system along the sames lines. You create comments for each Internet page's Digg count. Users then digg comments up or down. A positive rating on a comment means you have more digg-ups than digg-downs. The higher your score, the more people that "digg" your comment.

Digg seems to attract the Internet savvy, and many highly dugg stories relate to

• movies, especially those that might appeal the comic book loving type or have a cult following
• politics, with a strong pro-Obama, anti-Bush agenda
• technology, with constant strife between Apple fanboys, generic Microsoft bashers, and Linux geeks

My experience commenting hasn't been positive. My first comment was dugg down, and the response to comments range from vial to just plain offensive. Subsequent ones followed similar patterns of engendering loathing by Digg readers; it was not uncommon to the word "fuck" in those comments, directed squarely at me. Often, some kind-hearted soles would stick up for me, only to be subjected to further attacks. The Internet is a mean place.

Today, I'm happy to report that Bush (and Cheney) bashing seems to be a sure-fire way to get your comments dugg up. Finally, I have received a positive score on a comment, and even a tongue-in-cheek reply.

I'm really moving up in the world.

Dancing Around The World: Where the Hell Is Matt?

This guy went around the world to... dance. Very cool, interesting and inspiring video.

Blink and you'll miss the dancing in Melbourne at Federation Square.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

How many of these places have you been to?

[via Presentation Zen where you'll find more videos too]

How to Charge Your Chevy Volt

Run the electric car by charging it in the lighter of your Hummer

The End of ColdFusion

The marketing gurus at Adobe have just released an Evangelism Kit for ColdFusion [via Damon Cooper's Blog].

For as long as I've been using ColdFusion (over 3 years), I always heard detractors saying it was a dead or dying product. We never got much help from Adobe (or Macromedia) in justifying ColdFusion; we were forced to speculate on the future of the product, and the number of customers using it. I suspect that Adobe never had the need to justify CF; sales were fine, and so too, most likely, were revenues from the product.

So now I am going to become one of those detractors. Let's just say that this kit hasn't inspired me. On the contrary... I can't but feel that this Evangelism Kit spells the decline of ColdFusion. Here are few things to consider:

• Why now? 10+ years without such an offering. Why create this document now? I suspect that some of the major clients listed are actually migrating away from CF, so better to indicate that these companies are using CF while it is still technically true.
• Where are the exciting new features? I mean, look at the roadmap. Sully features "enhancements". I'm surprised "bug fixes" didn't make it onto that list.
• Open source competition: Blue Dragon, Railo and more
• Leveraging other products and scripting languages as middleware in the RIA stack: Groovy (the boys at Broadchoice, filled with names synonymous with ColdFusion, are using Groovy more and more these days: 9 posts tagged with "Groovy", zero posts tagged with "ColdFusion"), PHP, and Ruby.

I like ColdFusion, so I hope Adobe can keep it alive and keep its developers highly productive, but just when I think Adobe will push to make CF mainstream, I feel they took at least one step backwards, and may not have any more momentum to move forward.

Cloud Computing and Privacy

Will Cloud Computing Violate your Privacy and Security? at Ben Balbo

My friend Ben discusses the implications of cloud computing and privacy. What follows is my rambling on the subject.

"Cloud computing" really means software running on service hosted on a server (or cluster of servers) accessible via the Internet. At least, that is what lay people understand it to mean, and I've grown quite happy in accepting this definition (Ben's definition is more general and correct, though). It does introduce some peculiarities. For example, if I purchase Confluence, for example, as a hosted product, that's cloud computing according my definition. If I buy the server license and install it on my fire-walled server, that's not cloud computing, even if it is accessible via the Internet.

So, given this definition (whether you agree with it or not), their are multiple factors to consider:

• security: is the cloud provider better able to secure data than I would be running my own server and infrastructure?
• reliability: is the cloud service provider able to offer me more reliable uptime than I would otherwise get by managing my own hardware?
• trust: do I trust the cloud service provider more than I would my own staff in not accessing data that they shouldn't?
• functionality: is the hosted service something I just can't get anywhere else?
  

Then, of course, you'd need to weight the risks and relative benefits of all these points.

Just a small anecdote regarding security:

There are companies that refuse to use cloud services, especially those managed by Google. For example, Google Apps is  off-limits as it is considered too risky to host data and communications on a third-party server. Instead, companies keep sensitive information on their local servers. These servers are backed up by amateurs. The passwords are insecure. The users don't understand how to security documents as the systems are not easy to use.

I would argue -- strongly -- that Google's services, in this case, are much more secure.

Receiving Peer Feedback (En Masse)

I just received my marks for both my syndicate paper and presentation for the "Managing People for High Performance" class at Melbourne Business School. Both of these marks were based partially on peer feedback, and in slightly different ways. [The peer feedback for the paper hasn't yet been received, so I'll talk about the presentation and update this posting later.]

The presentation, worth only a small amount of my total grade, was given to the entire class and the mark was based 50% on feedback from my classmates and 50% from the lecturer. Our final mark was 7.4 (out of 10): 7.2 from the professor and 7.6 from the rest of the class. Included in the document containing these marks were four pages of quantitative feedback from my peers, not all of it positive.

I'm still reflecting on these comments, and while many were positive, there was a general consensus that I relied too heavily on reading the slides (which were behind be, being projected) instead of making eye contact with audience. This is certainly good and constructive feedback; I will definitely watch out for this next time (note: I had forgotten my notes on my desk when I went to up to present, so I'll be sure not to do that in the future). There was one comment in the listing that struck me as both offensive and complementary. It said:

First speaker (Scott) was very distracting. Spoke very quickly and did not make eye contact with the audience as they had their back turned reading the slides. Second speaker articulated the information clearly and engaged the audience.

I find the use of the term "distracting" particularly puzzling, and I'm left wondering if the first sentence relates to the second, or is something reflecting an aversion to my general speaking style and personality?  However, I think most speakers would like to described as distracting when the presenting; what exactly was that person distracted from? The focus of this person's attention should have been on me, and I certainly won't apologize if something I did was a distraction from, say, Facebook (a favourite of students during a boring presentation).

[As you can probably tell, I did get a bit defensive at this point, but I will definitely take this criticism on board for next time.]

As a member of the class, I too was required to provide feedback on the presentations as well. I have to say that despite my defensive tirade above, I was even more harsh on my fellow classmates, perhaps having higher expectations or because I was simply grumpy. I'm concerned that my low scores will start to affect other presentation scores. I hope that the professor scales people's scoring, because everyone will have a different baseline of how to score. For example, I often gave a 4 for a very slightly below average performance, my hope is that they would receive a 70 - 75 for their presentation, based on my expectation that the average mark would be 75 - 80. Certainly, I did not want or even believe that they should fail!

I have to say that receiving feedback from classmates was extremely helpful, and it is very hard to be in denial about relying on the slides when dozens of fellow classmates -- bright, friendly, and intelligent people -- all say the same thing.

I'll leave you with one of my favourite videos on the subject (we made some of the same mistakes):

Language, Framework or Platform

When I try to talk to people about a technology they are not familiar with, I often try to make comparisons to something they are already using. The generally involves drawing parallels between ColdFusion and Ruby on Rails on the one hand with Java and .Net on the other. I frequently find myself explaining some of the differences between what is a programming language, what is a development framework, and what is platform that the application runs on.

The last one, the platform, is one that I find the most difficult to articulate. Generally, you know you're using a platform when you are relying on something inherit in the operating system or you have installed something. The platform determines where your application can run and what artifacts of the host system you have at your disposal. Examples of platforms are:

• Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - runs on any computer with the JRE installed. Includes Mac OS X without additional installation.
• .NET - runs on any computer with the .NET framework installed. Windows only.
• Ajax - Browsers which support XML HTTP requests and Javascript
• Flash - Browsers which have Flash plug-in installed, or the standalone Flash player

The language is, at its simplest form, just a compiler which generates something executable from code. The compilation of a language targets a platform, or is evaluated by the platform at run-time. Depending on the targeting or which platform is doing the evaluation, the application will have access to resources and services native to the platform. Examples of languages:

• Java
• C#
• Javascript
• Actionscript
• Ruby

What's interesting about these languages is that, perhaps with exception of C#, they can be executed on various platforms:

• Java: Java Runtime Environment or .NET (via J#)
• Javascript: in a browser, .NET (via JScript), and Java (via Rhino)
• Actionscript: in a flash player, AIR application, or in ColdFusion (via the little-used server-side ActionScript -- and yes! this makes ColdFusion a platform)
• Ruby - using a standard Unix environment, JRuby, and IronRuby

Finally, there are the frameworks. Frameworks generally may target a platform or a language, depending on the nature of the framework. A framework exists to organize code in a systematic way, but may be bound to features present in the underlying platform. Often the confusion with something like Rails, ColdFusion or Flex is that they are not understood as frameworks, but as programming languages. This is simply not true; they are frameworks, tightly bound either to their underlying language, platform, or both. For example, Rails for another language such as Java simply isn't possible: Rails relies on very specific language features of Ruby simply not available to Java programmers. However, some frameworks are indeed portable across languages. Spring, with its IoC container concept and API to access it is indeed used across multiple platforms and languages: ColdFusion, .NET, and Java.

In summary, although the distinction between languages, frameworks and platforms isn't necessarily complex, it is important to keep in mind the distinction when exploring new technologies.