As I create my studies map, marking links and technologies to know, practice and get some knowledge, I think about what should I do? What should I create as I study this APIs, languages, etc?

And every now and then one thing comes to my mind: contact management. Today it's so hard to maintain accurate and up-to-date information on your contacts that I sense a real lack of an easy-to-use, complete and extensible application.

This is only me? There's someone out there that feel the same?

My first appointments to the final application, the "app should enable":

1. data grabbing from social networks (as many as possible);

2. control over data modified on these social networks and enable the user to decide if the update should or not be applied;

3. a history of applied updates, easily accessible at contact profile;

4. import and export data in various formats, including to cellphones, smartphones, Palms and the likes;

5. desktop offline option, using AIR, GoogleGears, SilverLight, anything.

Well, someone to weight in with ideas or is this kind of application dead on its conception? There's something out there that really does this?

Labels: internet business, opensource, simplicity, usability, user-centric

UPDATE: This web-site will be moved from GrupoW servers to CrystalTech this weekend. Expect some downtime, but not much.

I've left the partnership at GrupoW in December, 2007. So I'm now trying to put everything on my personal life together, as I spent so many time working on the company progress and so little taking care of myself.

One of the things I want to do is to learn the right way to do CFML in ColdFusion 8 (love the simplicity of the name). When working with GrupoW, I had a lot of legacy code from CF5 and CFMX6.1 to deal with - they could be brought to ColdFusion 8 and work, but they would not take advantage of the new features.

So, as I'm flying alone now, while I'm still putting things together on personal level, I'll try to upgrade my CF knowledge to take full advantage of CF8. But then it comes to learn a lot of OOP, which I really didn't get from all this years of development. Like Ben Nadel I'll have to work my way through the OOP world.

And then it all comes to a career change. I'm not sure what I'll do after this "sabbatical break" mixed with vacation, studies and reflection, but I'm sure as hell that I need to learn a lot.

So if you're reading this and can point to some resources for getting OOP the right way and CF8 too, I'll thank you. Please don't recommend blogs in general, as I read a lot - more than 200, majority technical and CF - of then. But pointers to specific blog posts are welcome.

Labels: coldfusion, internal message, oop, simplicity

Since my last text, a lot of talk has gone into the blogs about the open social layer that Google is trying to implement.

As already pointed, this approach tries to rival with Facebook, by leveraging power and option for the developer, who has not to re-write its widget/app for each social network he intends to target.

But Google's proposal has drawbacks, too. I haven't seem any "license agreement" or something like that. To be truly open, the social layer has to allow social networks to join and feel safe about the environment they're joining. What if Google starts to charge then? What if Google starts to charge developers? Like Google's approach in many of their APIs and open initiatives, there's a lack of transparency that makes me feel a little "F. U. D." about sticking to them. Let's wait the official site on this.

Another thing to note is: everybody is taking this Google initiative as a reaction to Facebook "growth and profit", but it's real? I think Google is constantly and consistently advancing in this direction (open social layer and using social data beyond Orkut and other social web-sites/apps) since sometime now.

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I'm long wanting and talking about a social-powered internet, where your network (friends, co-workers, etc) matters. And where you can use they knowledge and data to make your life easier, to get your attention focused on what really matters. From anti-SPAM and anti-VIRUS systems to better search results/page rank, the use of social data can make our on-line life easier than never.

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Bob Sutton (writer of "The No Assrole Rule") talk about Mozilla Foundation and their commercial counterpart, Mozilla Corporation. It's a long but entertaining post about the numbers Mozilla has made. Worth the read but you have to know that actually, too many of this money comes from Google, who pays Mozilla for every search started through Firefox by Google's embedded search box.

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W3C finally has opened an office here in Brazil, aiming to help Brazilian's internet authorities to develop, promote and implement web standards. I sure hope this comes with some law enforcing the use of web-standards at least at government web-sites - or something like that for commercial web-sites.

As I love web opportunities and freedom, I'm also a web-developer since Netscape and iCQ days. The lack of standardization through user agents is a major drawback for the "web-everything" approach we all love so much.

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Finally, trying to find some answer to a strange bug in ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 - where cfdocument tag generates a PDF without justifying the text - I ran over a blog post by Andrew Powell complaining about the lack of standardization on CFML (the open-source language besides ColdFusion).

I'm with him: there's need to standardization through CFML implementations and that includes Adobe. People at Adobe has to know that we do not buy ColdFusion on the tags but on the surrounds, ie, the administrator interface, the possibility to extend CF power with other applications such as Flex, LifeCycle, Flash, etc.

The standardization do not need to go with ColdFusion being open source, Adobe can implement advanced functionality that will degrade gracefully in others implementations, at least until they can make something more likely what Adobe ColdFusion does.

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Talking about standardization, what is happening at Microsoft? SilverLight? (yeah, I know, old news). Come on! There's Flash out there for so many time, you really believe people will change? You're nuts. And you think we, web-developers, are learning machines of some kind and we do not need to sleep, eat, have sex, etc.

Go with what is already a standard - as everybody does with Windows - and stick with Adobe Flash.

Related Links

W3C opens office in Brazil (in portuguese)

Google open social layer official web-site (still not on-line while I'm writing this one)

Labels: adobe, cfml, choice, coldfusion, google, high-tech, internet business, microsoft, respect, simplicity

UPDATE: TechCrunch reveal that Google will launch their Open Social approach on Thursday. More important, Michael Arrington's post explain better what will be this approach. Right on time!

Today, a co-worker saw my web-site and I felt ashamed about this blog. There's a lot of things to talk about, a lot of insights and readings to share. What a great incentive to come back, not be ashamed of my own employees!

The reality is that work, when done right, gives you the time of your life for (almost) anything you want to do. I have a lot of interests competing for my attention and I'm not a good time-organizer. So, this was to present my excuses about being away for so long and to introduce one of the subjects I want to discuss here.

Although widely discussed, time management and projects management (not work-related only) are still lacking something. Or maybe I have to study harder to understand how can I be more productive. Which is, for what I'm concerned, a great lack of all systems out there: they're not really easy to implement/stick with.

I'm not talking about changing habits - yeah, that's hard. But when you try to read "Getting Things Done" or "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" - for instance - you get stuck in an ocean of "why you have to do this", lame examples of how you can succeed and things like that.

Here I have to say that I do not finished "GTD" (nor the "7 habits"); although I really think it's great, I lost the will to apply the method by the first half of the book. I keep saying to myself "I'll try it again, I have to, it works for so many". But the main point is still there. Theres any stupid-proof method to get things done?

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Another thing that keeps annoying me is how my life isn't organized. Well, call me a librarian or a standard nerd, but I like to have my friends addresses just in one place. If this "one place" is somewhere that I can access through my cellphone, my e-mail app, my web-browser (and my web-mail) and from another devices/platforms, or it's something that will sync with then all, I don't care. I just want a simple way to have my data synchronized between apps, gadjets and even computers. And I'm talking about something as trivial as our "address book".

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All of this comes from some thoughts that are burning my head for a some time:

1. I want to use web-apps. Really! I'm connected almost all time. I develop them since 1996.

2. But when I'm not connected, I want to be able to access my data and use my apps, even in a simpler way.

3. My data is MINE. What the HECK? Let me export it, even if it isn't in a perfect way; let me get ALL MY data when I want to. I have to make backups, I have to access it offline - or maybe I have to change service. Yes, face it, your web app maybe isn't as great as you think - or maybe someone just made something better. Or I was in a bad mood when your server was down. So, give me what is already mine.

4. Besides finding old friends, checking possible future employees (or girlfriends ;) and other personnel-related tasks, social network should evolve to allow you to use your friend's information to decide what is relevant to you. I'll extend this in a post sometime latter this week, but imagine a social-relevant Digg. I'm talking about something like that - what matters to my network matters a lot more to me than what matters to a lot of unknown people. Complicated? I hope not.

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There's some technology - which I'm not already familiarized with - such as Adobe AIR (and MS SilverLight, maybe Prism?), Google Gears and the recently announced efforts of Google to build APIs and leverage the data under its hook to developers. This all will be targeted at this weblog now and then, as well as all web-related technologies, ColdFusion, Java and a lot more.

I hope it'll be fun for us all and I'm really glad to come back here. Let's see if I can stick with this.

Related Links

Adobe AIR
MS SilverLight
Prism
Google Gears

Opening the social graph

Original article by SixAppart people

Radar's Nat Torkington thoughts on how Google can beat Facebook via the open social graph

Again in O'Reylli Radar, David Recordon talk about WebSummit announcements related to the open social graph

Labels: adobe, coldfusion, google, high-tech, internet business, mashups, microsoft, simplicity, usability, user-centric

I'm a freaky about data, statistics and other issues like that. So IBGE (Brazilian's Geographic and Statistics Institute) was always a web-site that I watched for. They released an awesome new service: statistical data over maps, with links and all the stuff needed. You can reach the "countries" page here and the Brazilian states data here.

And then the "first" "commercial" quantum computer has been launched - lots of talk but no real use right now. It's a great attempt and proof-of-concept, but articles points to scientists saying it could not scale very well. I'm really wandering about what could happen to security systems - hell, with everything - if quantum computers really become useful. It's a topic to watch for, sure.

And soon will be more meaningful articles here, just a few days...
Related links for "Quick notes: IBGE and quantum computer"

BoingBoing mini-article

Science & Technology at Scientific American

INFO Online - Quantum computer working right now (in Portuguese)

INFO Online - Understanding quantum computing (in Portuguese)

Wired News - The father of quantum computing - interview with David Deutsch

Labels: high-tech, mashups, scifi-tech, security, simplicity, user-centric

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about the redesign of Happy Cog Studios web-site. This lead me through a really long line of thought.

As I pointed at previous post, design is important and ColdFusion being a programming language attached - since Macromedia's days - to the design world is a great thing.

That being said, I see ColdFusion development being fragmented these days. Some people argue for more programmatic, Object Oriented recurses. Some jumps to the boat to fight for more easy-to-use solutions. There's no consensus at the community.

To me is far more important to implement things quickly and easily - that meaning more webapps with less time - to make great systems and more money. As an entrepreneur, I'm interested in tools, tags and features for that. We have a handful of ideas but no time to implement all of them, even using CF, which we believe to be a RAD.

To accomplish that, Adobe should focus on two things:

• A great IDE to allow developers to do MORE with LESS. I have to say I'm not using Dreamweaver, Eclipse nor Flex tools and I don't know the state of these softwares. But first key concept to focus on is IDE. Period.
• To map the most common tasks and create really easy ways to implement then. CF price is high and I can bet we never used some of the most advanced features it delivers. We just haven't need of then.

I'm not saying that Adobe should forget all the great and advanced features. It has to be there and we like to know that, if we need, they'll be available without the need to spent more money. But the main focus should be RAD solutions, and the "Flex+ColdFusion" package seems to me as a sign that Adobe really understand things this way.

As a side note, Happy Cog new design is amazing. I wanted to do THAT with this web-site but, as you can see... I'm in lack of design skills to do so. =)

Labels: adobe, coldfusion, entrepeneur, flex, ide, rad, simplicity, work

There's a (hoax) history about the spatial run at the Cold War times, telling that while the US spent millions of dollars to develop a pen to use in space, the Russians just get... pencil.

Although it's a hoax, it's a good history. Something similar happens with CAPTCHA systems these days. They're somewhat hard to implement and a bad choice for people that wants to have some interaction with their readers.

BUT, in the link above from the Hackszine.com, there's another - simple&smart - solution. Just to put a false e-mail field (hidden by some CSS code or just a hidden field at all) and, if it comes filled, then you know a robot tried to post it.

It has some flaws, of course. Bot-code could be adapted; if you use CSS or Javascript to hide the field it would display in browsers that don't support these features, etc. But it's, again, simple and smart enough for most of the common situations. And sure it's simpler to the user, who hasn't to prove he's a human being - the work comes back to the bot programmer, who has to implement "intelligence" in it's bot.

Links related to "Just get the pencil"

Spatial program: Soviet vs. American - who was the best? (in Portuguese)

Space pen (and its related rumours) in Wikipedia

Labels: captcha, simplicity, usability