ARTS & FARCES internet

Learning new systems is never easy. The hardest part is learning to think like the people who designed the new system, because even when they try to think like us, the users, they really can’t. The best systems designers engage human factors experts to serve as an advocate for users, but it’s almost impossible for the human factors folks not to drink the designer’s kool-aid and start thinking like the systems designer. All systems are designed to please those who designed them. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

UserLand‘s Frontier and Manila (Manila is part of Frontier) is the content management system to which ARTS & FARCES internet has migrated from Zope. I’ve been trying to get my head around Frontier and Manila, off and on for the last month or so, and intensely for the last week or so. Zope is an open source web application server that’s available at no charge; Frontier/Manila is a closed-source content management system with an integrated web server, from a small developer, that costs $900 per year.

Frontier better meets my needs, and that’s why I switched. It’s also representative of the tragedy of open source.

One of the new “features” of Windows XP is that it apparently no longer supports the AppleTalk protocol. In previous “professional” versions of the Windows operating system, it was possible to install support for the protocol, but no longer. For most users this isn’t a large problem, but for certain users of Apple printers that are no longer supported, it’s a big issue indeed.

One of the main reasons I purchased an Apple LaserWriter 16/600 several years ago was because it supported a wide variety of connectivity options: AppleTalk, Windows, NetWare, and TCP/IP. Like most users, I wanted my workgroup printer to be free-standing and accessible over our internal network by Mac, Windows, and *nix clients.

For the Macs, this has never been a problem. Plug ‘em in and go. For the Windows users, it wasn’t much of a problem at all with Windows NT and 2000. Just install the AppleTalk protocol, reject the option of “capturing” the port, and go. Since we’ve only ever used *nix for server applications, printing was never an issue.

Dave Winer was quick to take me to task for leaving the small commercial developers out of the pickin’ cotton for Bill piece. He even drew us a picture a month ago. His point is that media coverage about the software industry invariably break down to Microsoft v. open source. What about the little guys, like Dave’s company, UserLand?

Well, he’s right, of course. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about small software developers. I use a lot of their software. I’d be dead in the water without Dantz Retrospect, Opera, SmartFTP, and a bunch of others. Even after nearly two years of using Windows, I still miss a lot of great software on the Mac, most specifically BBEdit.

Great software comes from small developers. Programs I live in every day—Photoshop, Visio, FrameMaker, and Microsoft Word—all came from small developers initially. In fact, I’d venture that all really great software came from small teams or individuals. Remember ThinkTank and MORE? Those were Winer products. How about FactFinder and the original FileMaker? How about WriteNow?

Quick—what do good business and good writing have in common? Great storytelling. Success in business depends on how well you tell your company’s story to your customers. Similarly, successful writing rotates around compelling storytelling. We currently have two—count ‘em, two—pretty good business novelists in Po Bronson and Michael Lewis. Both writers are more than adequate business writers, but more importantly they’re both good storytellers.

Lewis’ current release, Next: The Future Just Happened, is probably his best work to date and documents how and why the Internet went boom with no adult supervision. Forget about the dot-com bursting bubble; innovation continues, as it always will. Lewis can’t be bothered with something as mundane as market bubbles. He finds it much more interesting to tell the stories of how outsiders have managed to create a completely new communications medium right under the rest of our noses.

If you work on the Web, sooner or later you brush up against Information Technology (IT) professionals. Maybe you even are one, or like me, play one when necessary to make the mortgage. All industries invent new words to describe their processes—buzzwords—but for some reason, the IT world has never met a buzzword it doesn’t like. You know, words like “dot-com” (a company doing business on the Internet, usually funded with venture capital), “drill down” (delving deeper into a body of information), and “Generation D” (the digital generation; the first not defined by age).

Usually buzzwords are used to make the speaker appear more knowledgeable by making concepts that should be clear and easily comprehended as fuzzy and incomprehensible as possible. Sometimes they’re used to tart up a relatively mundane concept, almost always for marketing purposes.

Lately, buzzwords have been morphed into second, and sometimes even third, alternate definitions. For example, consider “bandwidth.” Traditionally it’s been used to define the rate of electronic information flow. Now it’s used to describe personal resources like time (“do you have enough personal bandwidth available to take on another project this year?).