Via ongoing, a delicious rant about the concept of “Groupware” and why it always, always sucks. Nay, why it must suck.

“Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from ‘unchecked’ to ‘checked’, and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review. Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you’d want to talk to, anyway.”

and this…

” If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. ”

Oh, and Tim’s take hits a mark, also…

“Chat and wikis are not exactly what the collaborative-future visionaries of past years had in mind. But they seem to hit an awfully-big 80/20 point..”

Tattoo We

I forgot to post shots of the tattoos. Here they are.

Peek

Originally uploaded by Jack Baty.

One more of my favorite subject.

I met up with my very old, very good friend Wayne tonight, whom I haven’t seen in almost 3 years. He knows I’m a scotch lover and every year would buy me a good bottle on or near my birthday. He made up for missing a year or two tonight and bought me not one, but two glasses of Macallan 30-year-old. Oh dear lord, I’ve been spoiled! I might be able to afford one glass a month, but now I’ve got something to save my pennies for. Those of you who haven’t climbed the learning curve of single-malt scotch should really think about it. Not many things on earth feel that good in a man’s mouth. Not many at all.

Another Luminous Landscape article, this time extolling the virtues of always using RAW format when shooting digital. I don’t have the talent or card space for it, but I shoot RAW anyway. I like having the unprocessed “negative” to fall back on–just in case I should accidently capture something great, but botch the camera settings.

“The JPEG shooter and the RAW shooter both capture RAW data. The JPEG shooter uses the camera as their RAW converter (developer) and is willing to give up the potential to do a better development in the future. The RAW shooter, saves the RAW data (and maybe a camera developed JPEG as well) so that the potential of the image can be maximized by using his or her RAW converter of choice. Or by developing a critical image on several RAW converters to find which one produces the best rendition of a particular image…”

We all know and love the Apache web server, but if you’re like me you never even consider alternatives because there’s really nothing else out there, right? (IIS is not considered an alternative, BTW.) There’s been some noise recently about lighttpd. Reading through the documentation has peaked my interest. FastCGI built-in (which wasn’t even a consideration until this whole Ruby on Rails thing cropped up), simple virtual hosting, and easy to grok URL rewriting engine, plus the other usual suspects. What’s nice is that looks to be small, fast and very scalable. I don’t have a real-world use for it yet, but it certainly looks like one to watch.

I’ve had opportunity recently to help spec and design a rather complex web service API. The choices are usually SOAP, XML-RPC or REST. REST has always been my favorite. Why? It’s just so damn simple to write apps against it. When I’ve got to create a web service client it’s always disappointing to find that the only interface is SOAP. While SOAP has a few advantages, they seem academic and mostly unnecessary for my purposes, so I politely nod and keep on walkin’.

In a recent O’Reilly interview, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of the all-knowing, all-powerful Flickr, says this about their API…

“On the strictly practical side, I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don’t know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others–I don’t even know how many there are–are built on the REST API. It’s just so easy to develop that way; I think it’s foolish to do anything else.”

Seems I’m not alone.

I never use a UV filter on any lens, even the absurdly expensive ones. Especially on the absurdly expensive ones. With so much attention paid to the fine art of lens design and construction, it just can’t be a good thing to toss some cheapo filter in front of it. This Luminous Landscape article agrees, and goes into more detail - with examples.

Open and honest communication is always a good idea. When it comes to software development, Jason says…

And then there are the cases when people want software to step in with a solution instead of just politely explaining the situation to their clients. They want new features, modified features, obscure feature exceptions when all that is required is a simple conversation with their client to explain the way something works. It puzzles me.

Sometimes, it puzzles me too.

This shopping cart implementation from Panic is interesting. Drag and drop stuff in and out. Nothing fancy. Standard stuff (html/javascript) only. Neat.