Category Archives: Rants

Rants, Social

So, where are you from?

I hail from the southern most town (no, I didn’t write it and I wonder why there’s nothing about the imense drug problems there) of Norway called Mandal. It’s a tiny little place internationally speaking with its ca. 14.000 inhabitants. Like many other people growing up in tiny places I moved out as soon as I could. That was 13 years ago. Much has happened since then and I currently find myself living in Cologne, Germany.

For those of you who may not know, Mandal is a coastal town, surrounded by beaches, small islands and the ocean. Growing up and living a five minutes walk from the coastline, I fell in love with the ocean at an early age. (For those of you who may not know, Cologne is like 200 Km from the (Dutch) coast). I do travel back to Mandal once a year to see family and friends, but from time to time I find myself missing the beaches, the islands and the ocean – even just the smell of it all.

As I find myself going through the images I shot of the coastline visiting Mandal last Christmas, the thought occurs to me that you too may have left somewhere. That you too may be missing some aspects of what you left behind. I thought I’d share what I’m missing by posting the images on flickr and invite you to have a look.

I would be thrilled to know what you’re missing by sharing your story – perhaps even with links to images – in the comments!

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Lessons Learned, Rants, Software

Licensed to ill?

I get to do cool things with Plone. Sometimes I even get to do it together with cool friends. On one such occasion we are using a very capable PDF generator called PDFlib to generate print quality PDFs through Plone. The actual version we are using is PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) version 6. PDFlib is license based. More precisely it costs money for PPS licenses. Fair enough. In the course of our project (iconic brand customer to be publicized at later stage) we discovered that we needed more production servers to balance the load, so more servers were ordered.

What we then learned is that the PDFlib PPS v6 does not exactly play nice with new dual core based servers; PPS v6 treats each core as one separate CPU, each requiring a separate license. That is to say the licensing costs per CPU per server has now doubled. The standard price of a single PPS license is € 1350,- (ca USD 1852,-) . In the meantime the current version of PDFlib has matured to 7 which requires only one license per server, albeit a more expensive one.

As PPS v6 is already running in a mission critical system, upgrading to v7 is not an option at this time. All the servers in our new data center have at least dual core Xeon CPUs, adding to the dilemma. I called PDFlib Germany thinking they would be sensible, having changed the licensing for the better with v7. No dice.

No retroactive license change for v6. No flexible migration deals. No nothing.

I could either upgrade all existing servers to the more expensive single server license v7 (and additional licenses for each new server) or buy a single v6 license for each and every core. I would not mind paying something for a single server license upgrade for v6, but the limited options provided by PDFlib at the moment are just plain stupid in my opinion; I have the choice between the plague or cholera.

Update: We are currently considering throwing out PDFlib and using Reportlab instead. Reportlab is lacking some features, but the added development needed to reportlab is possibly outweighed by the senseless PDFlib license costs. Further more, it would be cool to be able to add functionality to reportlab and release it back to the open source community!

Do you think this is a lame clever business decision by PDFlib? Let them know. Do you think I’m wrong? Let me know. Have you ever been left hanging from changes to hardware and/or licensing? I’d love to hear about your predicament and how you dealt with it.

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Rants

RSS problems and other minor disturbances in the force

First up, I’m back. Secondly, as you may have noticed there are problems subscribing to this blog using RSS. That suxx0rz. Period. This is due to fuddy duddy godaddy not playing nice with the source of this free hosting thing, so I’m moving away from this crappy free solution on to a pay plan. I needed to get rid of that awful leech header banner advertisement thingy, anyway. It’s lame. ETA this week.

OMG LOOK RANDOM LOLKATZ lifted from http://icanhascheezburger.com

Image lifted from http://icanhascheezburger.com/ who quote the source as submitted by: jeff f. n frendz at penn state altoona’s resTECH department (da peeps readin’ ur mailz, lol, thx!)

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Rants, Software, Usability

Do you know where you’re going?

UPDATE 2013: Problem (mostly) solved today. Multiple rounds of shortening still tend to garble the original url address.

To be able to post links (URLs) to pages on the Internet in their updates on twitter and Jaiku, people are using additional services like urlTea and tinyurl to help reduce the numbers of characters to transmit the address, but leaving it functional. Those services take a potentially long address like ‘https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ index.html’ and truncate it to ‘http://tinyurl.com/2b2kg9’, leaving more characters to write a personal message to go with the link with. However, any identity or clue as to where that address may lead has now been removed. (Not to mention the additional burden the use of those additional services places on the poor user. I’ll leave that discussion for later posts.)

I’ve illustrated how this looks when using the web interface of twitter below:
Screenshot of twitter.com

Notice that there are no clues in that address as to what to expect when you click on it. The clever twitterer might suggest that if you’ve been following Chris Pirillo for a little while you’d expect the link to be leading to one of his web casts on his site, but then again there is no information in that address to tell you at a glance what to expect. You can’t know if it’s linking to the story you already read two weeks ago, if it’s self promotion if it’s linking to a site you know and trust – it could even link to an address that would get you in trouble at work.

Enter ‘The Gulf of Evaluation’:

“Does the system provide a physical representation that can be directly perceived and that is directly interpretable in terms of the intention and expectations of the person?The Gulf of Evaluation reflects the amount of effort that the person must exert to interpret the physical state of the system and to determine how well the expectations and intentions have been met. The gulf is small when the system provides information its state in a form that is easy to get, is easy to interpret, and matches the way the person thinks about the system.” – Donald Norman in ‘The Design of Everyday Things‘, Doubleday 1990.

I’ll argue that the gulf of evaluation is light years wide in the case in question. I’d like to have some transparency please. Show me a proper address!

Another solution would be to develop a plug in for e.g. Firefox that would identify addresses from services like tinyurl and urlTEA, look them up and show the complete address in the status bar below left and as a tool tip when hovering with the pointer over the link. I’ve illustrated how this may look below:
Screenshot of twitter.com

Here’s a another perspective on URL shortenings from Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com

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