Mark Roseman's Blog

Too Many Choices Aren't Good.

Recurring theme for programming types. In the Tcl community, this tends to come up with respect to object orientation. The main reason it hasn't been added is that nobody agrees with what the right way is, and therefore people think its better that dozens of solutions proliferate, so people can choose what they like best. Bogus, but anyway. An example discussion of this is the recent OO poll page at the Tcler's wiki. The counterpoint is usually languages like Python with one good OO built in. I think for Tcl the costs of doing it the way it has been done are obvious.

Here's another perspective on choice. In this case its from the Python community. They suffer from a proliferation of choices in the web development framework space, and that article really spells out the costs to Python in that regard. The counterpoint there is Ruby with its dominant Ruby on Rails framework. Some additional responses from the Rails author (good blog btw) are also available. Read the comments on both of those, which really give a sense of how deeply entrenched the whole more-choices mindset is among many programmers.

Upcoming Apple Stuff.

Rumor mill has OS X Tiger out very very shortly, as well as some incremental bumps to a few different Mac models, also in the near future. I'm thinking it's probably about time to upgrade, likely to a 20" iMac when those get bumped. Can still keep the laptop running Panther for testing and for portability (nice working on the back deck again this week!). But with the larger screen I may hide the monitors on my other machines here (which are not frequently used) and just VNC in to them, freeing up some more desk space.

User Testimonials.

Spent a bit of time the last couple of days going through the last few months of emails (and then getting permission from people) to update the CF/PF testimonials page. It's always nice to get unsolicited positive comments from customers and other users. Now I know what to go read next time I get one of the other kind of emails...

ActiveMeter.

Raymond asked me to have a look at ActiveMeter, which is a free, web-based website visitor tracker that he's been working on. I'm probably not the best to look at it, as I tend to under-utilize the log data that I already have. Part of this is I think related to tools, so hey, worth a shot.

When I do look at my sites more closely, I tend to rely on my own server logs, so haven't used any of these trackers before (insert an invisible thing into your pages that hits their server). I didn't actually try it on one of my sites, but saw the process, and played with the reports pulled out of the demo (Ted's weblog). But the overall approach looked reasonable. And its definitely nice to have the real time update. I thought the reports were very professional looking.

The emphasis is on visitor tracking over lower-level stuff, which makes sense. You'd find the ability to do similar analysis in some of the better-than-free-crap desktop software packages. I don't know if there are other free or web-based tools that are more visitor oriented. There's more that can be done with the visitor-oriented stuff, but its a good start. Things like aggregate as well as individual data would be helpful (top paths through the system, top entry pages, etc.). Similarly, being able to be alerted on interesting events (changes in trends etc.) is a useful direction it looks to be going towards, but its not really there yet.

One suggestion had to do with data presentation. With the amount of data on the screen, its hard to get much of an overview of anything (e.g. the 'visitor path' or 'recent pageload' reports can't show much data). To me, this would limit their usefulness. I can't even imagine using it on for example the main CourseForum web site (on the order of 10,000 unique visitors per month). If there's ways to present that in a more compact way, condensing data where appropriate, moving it into rollovers, etc.) that would allow more to be on the screen, and make it easier to spot interesting things. I think there's some not too difficult things that could be done that would greatly improve what's there now.

Longer term, and with considerably more effort, there's probably some very cool things that could be done to make this a much more dynamic, fluid dashboard, giving you a great real-time view into what's happening on your site right now. Definite potential.

I'm not sure exactly who the desired target audience is; for me its not compelling enough to use. But I'm also probably the type that if I'm going to take this seriously that I'd be looking at a more expensive desktop product like ClickTracks (~$500), not a free, web-based tool. Again, I don't know the alternatives well, but ActiveMeter strikes me as likely being a definite step up from what a lot of people are using now. Not sure if its delivering enough value for the time you'd have to put into monitoring it, but I think its getting there.

Homewood Health Centre.

Pauline's just finishing up the paperwork after verbally accepting a position at Homewood, a world-class psychiatric hospital in Guelph. She'll be working on their acute care unit, starting in June. While not an exact fit for the type of practice she wants, its well within her range of interests. Plus, its an amazingly well managed place, with very good staff, people there are generally very happy, and the compensation package, though somewhat unconventional for medicine, is entirely reasonable. Other nice thing too is that it's only a 30-40 minute drive door-to-door, so there's no pressure to move.

The folks at Hamilton (who thought it was a sure thing that she was going to go back and work at their cancer centre) are of course completely pissed, but it serves them right. The fact that someone else they assumed would stay there (and who they told everyone was going to be there, and who they put in a similarly lame effort to recruit) ended up accepting a position at Homewood the next day I'm sure helped matters there. Life's too short.

Five Surprises from Tcl.

Nice article on DevSource (a Microsoft developer resource site) from Cameron and Jeff talking about some of Tcl's strengths: async event-driven networking, Unicode, deployment via Starkits, VFS, and more.

Entrepreneurship U.

Good article from Canadian Business about UW's MBET program, and also a lamer-sounding one from McMaster.

ProjectForum updates.

Next CourseForum and ProjectForum versions are coming along well, probably about a week away from the point where I can start releasing a feature-complete version on a private basis, with public versions later.

Lots of stuff actually in this one: more explicit support for wiki categories, a way to generate a S5 slideshow from a page (though there's still a few things that need to be worked out before I'm sure I can actually include this), a web-based theme editor, a bunch of changes to help etc. for new users, and a broad restructuring of the admin screens, to make them more consistent with each other.

The last is just painful because so many of the automated tests assumed the existing weird and inconsistent behavior, so need to be updated. But, been putting this off for long enough now.

Self-employment on the rise.

Article talks about how particularly young people are increasingly turned off by corrupt private sector outfits, with a resulting increase in self-employment, as well as opportunities for government and NGO's.

Extreme Usability.

Neat... pair programming, but between an engineer and a usability person.