By Matthew Hile on 7/28/2006 9:25 AM

According to a 2005 Yahoo survey it may not make any difference if people know the answer to this question.

27% of online users consume third-party content on these pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.

So one clear area of focus is how provide folks with the cues that they can use to add this active content to their web browsing experience. Having it built into the browser, as is true for the Live Bookmarks in the current version of Firefox and will be true for the new version of Internet Explorer, will be a great jump up. Having it built into one's email client, as will be found in the new Outlook 2007 will also help.

Another help would be to change the term we use from RSS to feed or subscription. These may help "real users" feel more comfortable with the process and increase their use.

By Matthew Hile on 7/27/2006 6:29 AM

To continue my exploration for a good "real user" description of RSS I turned to Wkiipedia. Their definition includes these statements:

...the news media is utilizing RSS by bypassing traditional news sources. Consumers and journalists are now able to have news constantly fed to them instead of searching for it.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. ...

These highlight a very important advantage of RSS over the more traditional emailed newsletters. An RSS subscription does not require you to give out your email address. Thus you will get no spam.

By Matthew Hile on 7/26/2006 5:18 AM

I work a lot with folks who are able to use a computer for things like email, word processing, and web browsing. More to the point, my work is to create web sites that these sorts of folks can use. One of the technologies I actively promote is Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Invariably, when ever I mention this the first response is "What?" Skeptic's blog Dead2.0 asked a real user, his mother, What is RSS? After a quick Google search her response, "I just don’t have a clue!"

Dave Winer's comment to that post had a really nice description.

When people ask me what RSS is good for, I start with “automated web surfing.” It gets you more news for the time you put into using the Internet. If you don’t want more news then RSS is probably not for you. But if there are subjects (that) you are intensely interested in, and if the people covering the topics also offer the information in RSS form, then your computer (or a web site) can make web surfing a richer and perhaps more productive experience.

So I think that this is a good place to start but I will continue my search for a way to tell/show real users the possibilities and benefits of RSS.

By Matthew Hile on 7/25/2006 5:57 AM

Two articles have caught my attention this week relating to the information we place on the web about ourselves and its impact on our lives. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new article (Volume 52, Issue 47, Page B6) about Juan R.I. Cole a professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history who was denied a job at Yale perhaps for his "strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians" expressed in his blog, Informed Comment.

In Internetweek, Amy DeCarlo had an article which stated that "36 percent (of executive recruiters) have eliminated a candidate from consideration because of information they found online."

Is this new? No, people have always lost job offers based on what they have said and what others have said about them. What is new is that now we put a lot of information about our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs onto the internet, a very public space. Moreover, with sites like the wayback machine, even removing that information from the original site will not remove it from the web.

So what is the take home message? Be authentic - represent the real you in your online presence. Be ready to take the consequences of the real you because you will be judged by that presence. However, at least one advantage of this new state of affairs is that now the information being used is public and not supposition, rumor, and innuendo. With public information the decision making process is more transparent and we can see and understand how others see and understand us.

By Matthew Hile on 7/19/2006 10:48 AM

In attempting to call a web service in DNN I got an error.

"System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type System.Net.WebPermission, System, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 failed.
   at System.Security.CodeAccessSecurityEngine.CheckHelper(PermissionSet grantedSet, PermissionSet deniedSet, CodeAccessPermission demand, PermissionToken permToken)
   at System.Security.CodeAccessSecurityEngine.Check(PermissionToken permToken, CodeAccessPermission demand, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Int32 checkFrames, Int32 unrestrictedOverride)
   at System.Security.CodeAccessSecurityEngine.Check(CodeAccessPermission cap, StackCrawlMark& stackMark)
   at System.Security.CodeAccessPermission.Demand()
   at System.Net.HttpRequestCreator.Create(Uri Uri)
   at System.Net.WebRequest.Create(Uri requestUri, Boolean useUriBase)
   at System.Net.WebRequest.Create(Uri requestUri)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebClientProtocol.GetWebRequest(Uri uri)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.HttpWebClientProtocol.GetWebRequest(Uri uri)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.GetWebRequest(Uri uri)
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)
   at ReferenceManagerInterop.ReferenceManagerProxy.SearchAndReturnIDs(String version, String searchExpression, Int16 databaseCount, String sortKey, Int64 maxRecords, String[] databaseArray, String[]& results_list)
   at ReferenceListing.Display()"

There were a few sources of information about this both in and out of DNN (e.g., Cathal Connlly's post,  this link, or this one). However, none of them seemed to eactly solve my problem. or seemed to fit what my configuration files looked like.

What finally worked was to edit the web_medium.config file adding "<URI uri="http://bibliography.mimh.edu/cgi-bin/RSSoapServer"/>" in the following section.


<IPermission class="WebPermission" version="1">
    <ConnectAccess>
        <URI uri="$OriginHost$"/>
        <URI uri="http://bibliography.mimh.edu/cgi-bin/RSSoapServer"/>
    </ConnectAccess>
</IPermission>
This gave me the needed access and stopped the errors.

One significant problem with this solution is that you need to have access to the web_mediumtrust.config file. If you have a way to do this without having this access please let me know.

As a side note I also had to add a webServices setting to the web.config file in the format of:

<system.web>
    <webServices>
      <soapExtensionTypes>
        <add type="ReferenceManagerInterop.SoapExtension.SoapClientExtensionInterceptor, ReferenceManagerInterop" priority="1" group="0" />
      </soapExtensionTypes>
    </webServices>
...
 </system.web>

   
     
       
     
   
    ...

By Matthew Hile on 6/6/2006 4:58 AM

I have used Word's document comparison feature to look at the difference between two documents. However, it has always been somewhat confusing and I have never really felt comfortable with it.

In my use of the beta version of Word 2007 I found a very functional and obvious implementation of the document comparison feature that rocks.



Four useful windows are provided. The main center windown contains a document with all of the changes marked for review, accept or reject as desired. The two windows on the right contain the two documents being compared. Finally the left hand window lists all of the changes. Click on a change to see that change location in each of the other windows.

The process provides all of the information needed in a clear and simple display. Great user interface design.

By Matthew Hile on 3/31/2006 3:18 PM

The scenario

• A computer becomes unresponsive in the middle of an operation.
• The three finger solute (Ctr-Alt-Del) does nothing so I use the power switch.
• The computer refuses to boot giving me the blue screen of death before it restarts. It loops through this over and over.
  
• There are some files on the computer that I NEED.

The solution

I boot the computer with a CD copy of Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net/) and relatively easily find the files that were placed on my desktop. Remember that I am a LINUX newbie and really know very little about how to use the OS. Now how to move them?

1. Tried using my gmail account to email them to myself. No luck the files were to big.
2. Rebooted after plugging in a USB Zip drive. Knoppix did not recognize it (or equally likely I did not know how to tell it to recognize it).
3. Rebooted after plugging in a USB thumb drive. Still no luck. It recognized the drive but has it marked as read only.
   
4. Logged onto our email system via its web access and added the files as an attachment which I then mailed to myself. Worked like a charm.
5. Mucked around with the flash drive unmounting it and messing with the permissions until finally it allowed me to write to it.

So that is the Good News part of the story. I was able to get the files I needed without any significant difficulty. Knoppix did a great job of with the disk. In fact when I booted with the XP CD it would not even recognize that the drive had been formatted so at this point I was really impressed.

The rub

Then I got to thinking. My computer is secured with a frequently (to frequently for my tastes) password. Yet all I need to do was to slide in a CD and I had access to my files. Not a very pleasant thought for someone who has been accused of being security obsessed. 

Now I do remember seeing somewhere the option to encrypt my NTFS formatted drive. I’m not sure where that was but it sure did not come up in the last few hours as I reformatted the drive and reinstalled XP with all of it’s SPs. So it is not something that the average user will find (or use).

Today, none of the files on the computer was particularly sensitive. No client information, no financial records, no steamy notes to Allison. But that would not always be the case. This would be Bad News. So now I am on the lookout for a good encryption program that will allow me to easily store some files in an encrypted space so that, in a similar situation, I will not be able to retrieve the files.

So that is it - basically your good news – bad news sort of story.

By Matthew Hile on 3/15/2006 8:41 AM

I love Wikis - those supremely easy to create web pages that allow anyone to easily create, format, and save information. I use them extensively to document programming projects in a way that is both richly linked and searchable.

Now just imagine what might happen if you combined wikis with the currently hot approach of giving web pages the sort of interactive features one expects from desktop applications, know as AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML). Well The other day I stumbled across a web page/application created by Jeremy Ruston. Jeremy imagined the combination in a way that I would not have. He created an entire wiki system in a single HTML file! This takes Marshal McLuhan's notion that the media is the message to a whole new plane.

The page/application, TiddlyWiki, is a fully functional full featured wiki that has all of its code, and all of its content in one single HTML file. This means that to have a wiki you do not need any of the accouterments of the traditional systems - No database, No web server. All that you need is one file and a standard web browser. Firefox is preferred but evidently IE also works (Opera is not recommended).

So what could you do with such a system? You could create a traditional wiki web site. While that is neat, any wiki application could do that, TiddlyWiki with its one file approach lends itself to use in places where the more traditional wikis would not fit.

• Create a log of all of the changes on individual computers
• Create a personal "how to" manual on a thumb drive that would be available to you on any computer.
• Keep a personal blog
• Write reviews (e.g., movies, music, TV shows, restaurants)

The cost of entry is so low both in terms of money (free) and effort (use the 'Save Page as' option on your browser to get your own TiddlyWiki page/application), that you can afford to spend a few minutes to give it a try and see how you might use it.

--- UPDATE ---

If, after saving the TiddlyWiki's file (empty.html) on you computer, you find that IE gives you the message that it can not save your changes you will need to open the file in a text editor (e.g., notepad, EditPad) and save it with a new name. Some times, when it is saved on your computer, IE still thinks that it is in the internet zone and will not allow saving. An alternative to this method is also available.

By Matthew Hile on 3/9/2006 5:56 AM

On the average day, how often do you copy something from one location/application and paste it into a different location/application?

For my part the copy (ctrl-insert for we left handers or ctrl-c for the others) paste (shift-insert or ctrl-v) key combination have moved to the level of unconscious behavior. My fingers just do what I want. Have information you need in a few Excel cells - cut and paste it into word. Have a table returned from a SQL query in Access or SQL-Server - cut and paste it into an Outlook email message.

Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, Groove, and now CTO at Microsoft got to thinking about the power inherent in copying/pasting structured data from one application into another. His question - Why not do the same thing on the web? In a blog post called Wiring the Web Ozzie answers that question with a flourish describing and demonstrating a new clipboard called Live clipboard. The samples demonstrate the ability to copy and paste structured data (think contact information and calendar events) from

• one place on a web page to another
• one web site to another
• a web site to a Windows application
• a Windows application to a web site

Even more importantly he demonstrates how this technology allows users to create mash-ups from various locations to make new information available.

This approach is cross browser compatible using JavaScript, CSS, and XML to work its magic. Most interestingly, and perhaps importantly, Microsoft has licensed this under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License so that others can freely use and build upon this innovative work. But don't stop with my work, check it out.

licensed under the Creative Commons */
/* Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

 

By Matthew Hile on 3/3/2006 1:39 PM

I spend a lot of time on software testing. I test others' work as well as my own. I track problems using FogBUGZ and work pretty obsessively on these tasks (just ask those that work for me).

But how much testing is enough. I just read an article in eWeek by Darryl Taft (Microsoft preps 'Sparkle' kin, eWeek 23(6), 6-Feb-06, p. 14) that reported that "the current Visual Studio 2005 test covers more than 10 million tests, with 9,000 servers in the lab, and a full test pass takes 21 days."

All of that and I am sure users still found problems when they tried to use it. So the answer to my question, How much testing is enough? - There ain't no such thing as enough. You just end when you are worn out.