Monthly Archives: December 2007

Dude! Where’s My Python?

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or, some thoughts on how Plone can make the first couple of steps less confusing. As Plone makes the transition to “more Pythonic,” more Zope 3-style techniques for installation, add-on product development and deployment, we are gaining tremendous power, flexibility and manageability. These are Good Things.

But, this transition is creating some short-term confusion. We have a few ideas about how Plone developers and documenters can communicate more clearly and consistently, in order to help smooth the curve for new Plone users and integrators.

The big insight: a lot of new users’ initial struggles with Plone and add-on products stem from trouble with making sure they’re using the right Python, and getting products installed to the right Python.

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Windows Live Writer: Really Nice Offline Blogging Software

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Call me crazy, but I just checked out Microsoft’s just-out-of-beta Windows Live Writer offline blogging client, and I gotta tellya, it’s pretty nice.  Score one for the kids in Redmond.

It’s free and Windows-only (of course).  It offers an easy-to-configure, very polished UI for writing and editing blog posts. It handles cut-and-paste from the web and Word with aplomb.  It has a nice little image handling system.  It feels quite polished, at least in the first 30 minutes I spent with it.  It supports all the major blogging products and APIs.

Plone-related question: it would be cool if we could support uploading of images via FTP or via a blogging API from an offline client.  Maybe we can already?

Video From Our Recent Social Networks Event

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Those of you who missed our recent event “Online Social Networks: Can They Power Social Change” missed a good time and a packed house with a ton of energy and enthusiasm.

Fortunately, we got a decent video of our eight 5-minute presentations, which you can watch online at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh3hlU97_wo

Warning: the video’s just under an hour, so grab a chair and get comfy. :-)

Thanks to friend-of-ONE/Northwest Jeff Reifman for loaning us his video camera on short notice, and to Drew Bernard for jumping in as lead cinematographer.  Not quite as challenging a shoot as “Heart of Darkness” but not the easiest environment either.

How Network-Centric Warfare Failed: The Networks are Social, Not Electronic

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Michael Gilbert picks up on an important piece: How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic

A couple of key ‘grafs:

The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory’s many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren’t enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace. … Continue reading →