being (no)body

m3talink updates for June 25th:

• Sleeper on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Nepal Blanket Vendor on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Brothers! on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• tikka on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Old man in Patan on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Serene Bovine on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Nepal on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Nepal on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Common fonts to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents (Browser safe fonts) - Web design tips & tricks is a list of the standard set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and their Mac substitutes, referred sometimes as “browser safe fonts”. This is the reference I use when making web pages and I expect you will find it useful too.

m3talink updates for June 24th:

• people at pashupatinath temple, kathmandu. on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• sleeping monkey - pashupatinath, kathmandu. on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Cyber Cafe in Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• durbar square, kathmandu. on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• statue - kathmandu. on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Double rainbow over Kathmandu on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Kathmandu wanderings on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Nepal - Kathmandu - 017 - Sadhus at Pashupatinath Temple on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Kathmandu from Kapan on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• devotional on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Boudhanath Stupa, Kathmandu on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Swayambhunath Dreadlock Sadhu on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• Nepal - Kathmandu - 022 - Swoyambhunath (Monkey) Temple on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is
• rickshaw line on durbar square on Flickr - Photo Sharing! is

m3talink updates for June 19th through June 21st:

• WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection | The Marketing Technology Blog is
• Software development productivity and project success rates: Are we attacking the right problem? is an article: practitioners of iterative development have made considerable improvements regarding requirements management and traceability techniques over the past decade. But how do we know we’re managing the right requirements?

The term white paper is one of those phrases I understood from context, but could not clearly define. So I took 30 seconds today and looked it up. Google define wasn’t bad, but I prefer the Wikipedia article.

Here’s the important bit from Wikipedia:

Commercial white papers

More recently, the term white paper has also come to refer to documents that argue non-governmental positions as well. For example, many white papers today espouse the benefits of particular technologies and products. These types of white papers are almost always marketing communications documents and are designed to promote a specific company’s solutions or products as it relates to the issue or topic examined. As a marketing tool, it is important to note that these papers will always highlight information favorable to the company authoring or sponsoring the paper while minimizing any negative aspects related to the company’s involvement with the issue, product or technology. Today the commercial white paper is the most common type of white paper. Such white papers are used to collect leads, establish thought leadership or close sales - this is quite different from the original use of white papers.

The history behind the term is from the British parlimentary system. Once I read about “position papers”, I understood much more - since that’s a Canadian term I’m familiar with. My particular confusion around this term was due to the older, governmental usage and the more common, contemporary commercial usage.

While the commercial genre of the white paper is a bit too persuasive for my tastes, I certainly see the value in providing a high-level, strategic overview of a technical issue, that includes a recommended or endorsed course of action. Here are some articles on how to write a white paper: a simple, quick introduction to writing a white paper and a teaser for a white paper on white papers.

m3talink updates for June 18th:

• Adding a source control plugin to Aptana - Aptana is an article about how to add a source control plugin, such as Subversion or Perforce, to Aptana
• Aptana: Download Aptana IDE + Rails is an environment for building Ruby on Rails applications. It showcases a number of features to make both your Ruby and your Ruby on Rails as productive as possible.
• Aptana: Download is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

m3talink updates for June 14th through June 15th:

• Confluence - Enterprise Wiki Software is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge.
• Dirk Riehle: The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives is is an article about open source software, which has changed the rules of the game, impacting significantly the economic behavior of stakeholders in the software ecosystem.
• bfish.xaedalus.net » Stay in Sync with GCal and Thunderbird. is bringing the desktop email app one step closer to becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft Outlook
• Ajax Simplified | Linux Journal is a simple tutorial on Ajax that I hope will ease the fears of those of you who think Ajax can be intimidating.

m3talink updates for June 12th:

• Elgg: the open source social networking platform is an open source social platform based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the centre of their activities.
• Improving ColdFusion Deployment with Ant is
• The Java Tutorials: Object-Oriented Programming Concepts is an introduction to objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, and packages.
• Raymond Camden’s ColdFusion Blog - Projects is an impressive list of open-source CF project including blogs, wikis and forums

Introducing the new and improved Big Brother Officer Facebook! <grin>

A party outside of Toronto, which was publicized on Facebook, was ended before it got started by the local police. I think this is a great story to be talking about. There seems to be some sense of scary surveillance in the responses I’ve heard. For me, this nicely demonstrates how public Facebook is, hopefully in a way which will help people realize that Facebook is a) a tool design to let people looking for you…find you and b) a public space with virtually no real obstacles to access.

What is really interesting is the the local constabulary thought of using Facebook. However, once I look at the numbers, I see that maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Given the recent ban on Facebook by the City of Toronto for city employees, I was wondering if there would be a chilling effect on use of FB by government. I’m glad to see there hasn’t been such. The CoT ban seems absurd to me; I don’t see how FB is different from a phone: both are useful communication tools and both need policy in place to govern their use in the workplace. Most confusing to me is that politicians retain access…but the proles of government are locked out.

If I went to Mayor David Miller and offered to create a social network website that would connect half a million people in Toronto, giving his constituents tools to collaborate, communicate and organize, I could ask any price. And even if I could deliver on the feature set…who would use it? Facebook is free and has a very impressive uptake. That the City of Toronto only sees wasted time and not a tool to connect with the communities they are mandated to serve illustrates a disappointing gap in the City’s understanding of their job and the world they live in. This is substantially compounded by the fact the the City of Toronto is following the lead of the Province of Ontario and the Federal Government.

While I’m not looking for Gov 2.0, I do think the banning of Facebook shows that they’ve yet again missed the cluetrain.

Over the weekend I had a message in Outlook trapped in the outbox. I forgot I had configured OL to use the campus SMTP server, which blocks port 25 at the perimeter. The weekend was almost over before I even notice the error (it was a busy weekend with a kitchen reno…)

Now, I fixed this problem on my Ubuntu laptop. However, it is currently in the office, and I am at home, trying to get mail to work again. However, armed with my trusty Google, I found the solution. This time, I found it in a unofficial mirror of the Dreamhost knowledge-base. (Dreamhost is an awesome host - I highly recommend them.) Anyways, it turns out that SMTP, initially a mail transfer protocol, has a port just for mail submission: 587. This is cool beans.

And mail is all fixed. It means I’m using my commercial ISP for all my mail submission, but hey - at least it will always work. I have yet to find a mail client that can handle more than one SMTP server. Maybe I’m missing a technical challenge, but I don’t understand why a client can’t be set up with multiple SMTP servers which it just round robins until it finds one that works. This problem just doesn’t exist with webmail…Yet Another Reason People Love Webmail.

Anyways - if you use a mail client, and need to deal with no access to port 25, just specify port 587 and you’re golden.

m3talink updates for June 11th:

• CFUnited 2007 Blog: Agile ColdFusion is John Paul Ashenfelter - Agile ColdFusion - Delivering better apps in less time
• OpenXCF - Open eXchange for ColdFusion is hoping to create a vibrant Open Source community for ColdFusion developers to create and share code using the SourceForge.net infrastructure.
• Welcome to cfcUnit.org is the main site for cfcUnit, a full-fledged framework for unit testing ColdFusion code. It is part of the xUnit family of unit tests, and is based on the API of the JUnit framework for Java.
• m a c h - i i @ c o r f i e l d . o r g is Sean Corfield’s MachII site
• Mach-II.com is web-application framework focused on easing software development and maintenance.
• ColdFusion Unit Testing is an article about bringing unit testing to CFMX
• SeeFusion :: ColdFusion Server Monitoring is a utility for monitoring and troubleshooting ColdFusion application servers. SeeFusion gives you the ability to “see” how your ColdFusion servers are processing requests in real time.
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen | Smashing Magazine is 83 free Wordpress Themes you probably haven’t seen yet. All themes offer quality, elegance and a user-friendly interface
• JumpBox: » Trac/Subversion Development JumpBox is a virtual appliance that bundles a server based application along with all of its dependancies (database, operating system, libraries and management interface) into a single pre-configured unit.
• Trebuchet - Pathfinders is is DIY kit for a mini wooden trebuchet.