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Josh, King and I are continuing work on the Pachyderm Authoring Application. We just got a distance collaboration setup going that works really well. We use VNC to share a computer (my TiBook), iChatAV for an open audio channel, and Breeze Live for a shared whiteboard. This is working almost as well as when Josh flew up to Calgary for a week. I think we’ll be able to get much more done this way. And it’s more fun, too…

Pictured here are my trusty TiBook (with shared VNC session for XCode and WOBuilder), the monitor connected to my Power Mac (with iChatAV and Breeze Live Whiteboard), an iMac used for supporting surfingresearch, the iSight camera used for my audio/video feed, my 15-year-old Sony speakers for blasting Josh’s voice down the halls, and my iPod (just sitting there, begging to play some background music). Also, lots of really cute photos of Evan…

I’ve left (early) from the Pachyderm development session. King and Josh kept going, and we’re going to be unbelievably close to a working Pachyderm Presentation Authoring application. The work is shifting to the user interface, so changes will become visible.

We took some photos today, to document the ad-hoc Extreme Programming setup we adopted, and some of the results.

First, we have the “before” picture. The original Pachyderm 1.0 database schema we inherited:

Then, we have the ad-hoc Extreme Programming sessions:

and, the final database schema for Pachyderm 2.0:

The main foundation stuff that’s left is the entering of screen and component data, integration with APOLLO resource management, and the generation of the xml files to be read by the Pachyderm flash templates. I’m guessing King and Josh will have tackled a good chunk of this already. Next, we’ll be able to focus on the authoring UI almost exclusively.

Joshua Archer has been in the Learning Commons this week (up from the CSU Center for Distributed Learning at Sonoma State University. We’re working on the code that will drive Pachyderm 2.0, and it’s been a pretty intense week so far.

I’m feeling a bit out of my league, with King and Josh running with this stuff, and me panting about half a lap behind, struggling to keep up. Just like junior high school gym class all over again

Anyway, we’ve taken over the old computer lab in the Learning Commons, and have set up a pretty effective working area. It’s sort of like Extreme Programming, with 1 computer shared between the three of us, and supporting computers for each. My laptop was hooked up to a projector, and King plugged another monitor into the projector’s VGA out. This gave us 3 displays of the same screen (one about 10 feet wide for easy viewing). King also plugged a second keyboard/mouse combo into a spare USB port in the Powerbook, so he could take over as needed. King also had his Powerbook for searching docs, and Josh had his Thinkpad as well.

I’d always assumed I’d hate Extreme Programming. I thought it would suck, and that the programmers would be tripping over each other. Not the case (maybe just with this group?) - kind of a cool flow situation. Very slick, and amazingly efficient. 6 eyeballs on all of the code at all times.

Tuesday evening, we were still hacking away, but decided we should watch the final game of the World Cup of Hockey (Canada vs. Finland). So, we planned to string a coax cable into the lab to watch it on the projector. Coax cable wasn’t long enough. Doh. So, King hooked up our own QuickTime broadcast of the game from CBC over the LAN to Josh’s Thinkpad, which was then projected to the 10′ shared screen (and Julian tapped the feed as well, from his cube down the hall). Worked great (there’s a photo of this in my Flickr space), until Lawrie’s daughter decided to change the channel to the Muppets with 10 minutes left in the game. Doh.

SubEthaEdit would make some of this multi-screen collaboration possible at a distance (with Josh back at the CDL, and King and myself here in Calgary), but there isn’t the same chemistry involved without everyone in the same room.

The code that’s coming out of these sessions is freaking amazing. King’s mastery of the stuff that shouldn’t be possible, and Josh’s conceptual model of the whole system, are combining to make this some pretty sweet foundation code. The biggest change came last night, when we were winding up a 14-hour session after 9pm. We ended up trimming over half of the tables from the database. What was initially modeled on poster-sized paper produced on a large-format plotter, now fits comfortably (and more legibly) on 2 sheets of letter sized paper.

The other big thing that was developed was the implementation of a document model to represent Pachyderm presentations. We’ll be writing the authoring tools, and they won’t even have to know about databases. They’ll be creating documents, and adding/manipulating the content of these documents. Very very cool stuff.

Anyway, tomorrow’s the last day of this marathon hackathon. I sure hope I can keep up…

The DirectorWeb website is 10 years old! Holy cow. Time flies. I used to spend a LOT of time on this site, using their Direct-L listserv archive/search utility, back when I was doing ~100% Director stuff. Alan did an awesome job on DirectorWeb, so much so that I considered it essential to doing Director development. I still remember many of the regulars (WTHMO - Warren (the Howdy Man Oleshko), Zav, Zac, John Dowdell, Warren The Audi Man (from Integration.qc.ca, IIRC) and many more…) Direct-L searches for “howdy” show that WTHMO must still be active I appear to have been dropped from the online archives, or perhaps more accurately, the archive doesn’t go back far enough to include me

It’s some kind of synchronicity thing, when I first "met" Alan Levine almost 10 years ago via DirectorWeb and Direct-L, and now deal quite a bit with him on Pachyderm, and other things Learning Object. What a long, strange trip it’s been…

Thanks for the update on DirectorWeb, Alan! (although, like yourself, I haven’t seriously touched Director for several years now…)

I listened to the IT Conversations interview with Tim O’Reilly on the way in this morning. Very interesting interview. I love the vision that Tim has for his company - it’s more about capturing knowledge (whatever that means) rather than growing their market. It’s kind of cool to see how taking the right attitude can actually lead to a strong position in the market (how many people buy O’Reilly books vs. the others? I’d bet a LOT).

The big paradigm shift is also pretty cool… PCs and their OS become less important, as applications really do move into a more decentralized space (he uses Google as an example of a pervasive network app). What he didn’t mention is that the decreased focus on the PC and its OS means that people will become more able to select their tools based on need, and not by some 95% market share domination by a single OS vendor…

It also struck me that the simple fact of my listening to a freely distributed interview, published to the web as an .mp3 file, played by my iPod while taking the bus into work might be a bit of a paradigm shift as well. On-demand content, MeTV, that kind of thing…

Why would I post about this? It was triggered by the fact that I saved the GMail Invitation entry into software/google/gmail…

I’m sure this is going to be linked all over the place, but it’s a very interesting read. It’s a reposting by David Gristwood, of an original article by Jim McCarthy (a manager on the MS Visual C++ team).

Particularly interesting and useful, it delves into the topic of “slippage”, but treats it as a necessary and good part of the process. Slippage becomes a transition from the unknown to the less unknown - as you know more, the timeline and estimates become more refined and realistic, often leading to slippage.

Perhaps the most important point is the first one: Don’t know what you don’t know. If you don’t know something, state that, and come up with a plan to fill the gap. Incorrectly assuming knowledge, or worse - faking it - will lead to disaster.

UPDATE: Just came across a link to The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming - more good stuff. Even comes with a handy downloadable (if butt ugly) stone tablet for printing.

I think I’ve been risking breaking Commandment #9: Don’t be “the guy in the room” - going to have to work harder to prevent that.

Michelle made a good point in an email. I’d overlooked the value of collaboration at a distance, because I really take it for granted now. I’ve been working with folks over the ‘net for years, but much more intensely over the past year.

The Learning Object Syndication with RSS presentation(s) (here and here) wouldn’t have been possible without iChatAV, wikis, and weblogs.

And the Pachyderm install would have cost a few orders of magnitude more without these tools (well, we really only used iChatAV/Trillian). The cost of travel between Calgary and California would have been waaaay too high, since it would have meant a few trips to get it running.

Looking into techniques to allow us to decentralize user management in cross-institutional (and non-institutional) software, such as APOLLO.

Here are some links I’ve come across on the topic:

• Towards Federated Identity Management - Andre Durand
• Federated identity, PingID and standards cartels - Dan Farber
• Federated Identity Face-Off - Interview by Stuart J. Johnston and Dan Ruby
• SourceID Wiki - open source identity management
• Topology of Federation - Ping Identity Corporation
• What’s Federated Identity Management? - eWeek Magazine
• Novell Explains Federated Identity - NetworkWorldFusion Magazine
• Primer: Federated Identity Management - Baseline Magazine
• Liberty Alliance

Many of these articles look like corporate shovelware “Read about how smart we are - give us money” but maybe there’s some good stuff in there, too.

This is stuff waaaay outside my normal realm of things, so I’ll be doing some reading/thinking about this stuff, and how it might affect CAREO/APOLLO.

The goal is to be able to do something like this scenario:

Back when I was building the “theme engine” for CAREO, everything began to look like themable stuff. I kept saying “Hey, that’s not hard - we can just implement that as a theme in CAREO!”

Everything from a version of the Learning Commons website, to SciQ, to a bunch of other projects, were mocked up (and some even implemented) as themed components in CAREO.

Worked pretty well, and was an awesome test of the flexibility of the theme engine.

The main drawback was that all edits had to go through a rather cryptic process of defining content in (perfectly valid) XML, crunching the content through an app that ran some XSLT wizardry, and stored the results in a database.

That kinda killed any productive workflow. All edits had a single point of waiting, and it was hard to use regular tools to manage content (couldn’t use DreamWeaver much, as it barfed on XML, or worse yet, added invalid stuff). Contribute wouldn’t work with the custom workflow… Etc…

We’re going through iterative cycles on a few projects, and lo and behold, SciQ is becoming largely static pages (except the stuff that deals directly with learning objects - that is still generated by CAREO) - likewise for the LC website.

The moral of the story is, when you’ve built a pretty fancy hammer, and everything is looking like pretty fancy nails, take a good step back and think about what’s really going on. Odds are, you’ve got more than just nails to deal with.

Great quote from Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev listserv (found via a pointer from Tim Bray - thanks, Tim!):

The current version of the-software-that-runs-CAREO has suffered pretty severely from this spaghetti syndrome. We’re planning the next version, which is a complete rewrite, to be much more modular. Using smaller bits of functionality, hopefully nothing reaches the spaghetti critical mass.

Of course, parallels could be drawn along the lines of Linux (monolithic macrokernel) vs. Darwin (microkernel), but I’m not going to go there at the moment…

UPDATE: I just re-read the excerpted quote, and this quasi-random thought popped into my skull…. Spaghetti wants to be written. Just like the One Ring wants to be found. Only vigilance can prevent it.

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