life with a little pizzazz
A basic run-through of web design practices. Enjoyed Mark Wyner‘s discussion of some websites and their flaws or successes.
He also mentioned a book series he read growing up in which you finish a chapter and then have a choice of chapters to continue with. Unfortunately I didn’t write the name so will have to check with others. Sounded interesting.
I also had to check out one of the sites he touted, but more about that in a separate posting.
Fisrt session of the day after the morning workshop is with Paul Ingram on Inventrepreneurship. The quote that sums up his philosophy:
Ideas won’t keep. We must do something about them. Alfred North Whitehead
Get those ideas out there and do something with them. Paul, an exuberant and overtly friendly person from this viewer’s perspective, spoke on his patterns for accomplishing projects in a virtual partnership with diverse resources. A basic primer on how to get ideas done. Explore the idea and do it, if it flops or someone steals it that is okay it will probably lead to the next great thing. To-Don’t is his example of a silly idea that is pointless but is leading to the next great idea. Sign-up and make a list of things you’ll never do. I’ve posted my To Don’t.
Started the Web Visions day with a workshop on Improving Interface Design with Garrett Dimon. Garrett presented a clean and well-structured talk on best practices in interface design. He started making sure everyone understood what design is. Pulling from quotes he shared, design is not decoration but the experience crafted. It is how things work.
There was not a lot of discussion in this workshop. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps it was due to “speaking to the choir” syndrome. The information was understood and agreed upon by the audience, so perhaps not a lot of room for questions. No controversial issues.
I hope this doesn’t seem critical, the workshop was successful. There were times during his talk that made me think about issues at work and how we are addressing them. To me this makes it more than successful. I also truly enjoyed the stylistic slides in his presentation and they also contain numerous quotes and places that I want to reflect on further.
Honoring the event I am attending today, I thought I’d share my user experience using TriMet, Portland’s public transportation entity, for travel from home to the Oregon Convention Center.
In short, the bus and MAX train ride were technically flawless. Even the preparations went smooth. Last night I used TriMet’s website to verify my travel plans. After entering my home address, my destination (just entered “Oregon Convention Center,” no address) and the time I needed to arrive by, the website informed me of where and when to catch my bus. It also let me know where to depart the bus and then walk to catch my MAX train. As I said, everything was flawless. Even the times were right on. But, despite this, the experience was mundane and uninspiring.
Then, on my short MAX ride, the coachman alerted us to the presence of a sea lion in the river to our right as we crossed the Steel Bridge. My transportation experience transformed immediately from an impersonal task into a shared experience. People around me morphed from mere indistinguishable shapes to inquisitive and true community partners.
One little action changed my experience.
It is always nice to have 24hour support available online. I’m migrating to a new computer and needed to migrate my PuTTY (an SSH client) configuration. There is no built in way to do it, but you can get the settings out of the registry. Ryan’s Tech Blog has the short list of instructions.
In case it ever goes away, here is a summary:
regedit /ea new.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTYregedit /s new.regRyan, thanks for the support!
In case you are curious about WinSCP migration, visit the docs. A similar process also works for Softerra LDAP Browser.
You can also do a Registry export for Dreamweaver sites which works wonderfully if you have a lot of sites defined. Within Dreamweaver you can only export a single site at a time, but performing a Registry export gives you all the site definitions in one handy file. Simply import on your new computer and you are done.
I’m on my return from Las Vegas to home and stranded at the Phoenix airport overnight. It is now 12:30am and I’ve got a little corner of the airport to myself. I found a little two chair seat hidden between some stairs and elevators near the “rescue area.” It will be my place for the night unless I have an urge to meander.
It’s been a long day, starting with the end of Summit, continued with a delay in Las Vegas and then my overnight stint here. Summit ended today with some minor sessions that I won’t bore you with here. The closing reception included an inspirational hypnotist that let us know that what stands in our way is our own preconceived limitations (which we may not be aware of). He proceeded to lead us through a couple of exercises that he used to pick a handful of people as subjects to hypnotize. It was entertaining but less than fulfilling. I guess I’m a skeptic. In his exercises he was looking for good candidates that he called good ‘visualizers.’ People that can take a suggestion and visualize it as being truth. For example, hold your fingers apart and visualize that each is a magnet attracted to the others. The visualizers will find themselves — after coaxing — with their fingers touching. I’m sure it is just my warped view of the world but I didn’t see these people as ‘visualizers’ but more as people more susceptible to suggestion. I would guess they buy a lot of commercialized products.
Anyway, on with the day. After lunch with a co-worker at the House of the Blues — which again was not playing the blues — I headed to the airport. The flight started to load and then they stopped after hearing that Phoenix was shut down due to weather. The people that got loaded sat for 45 minutes on the plane until the rest of us got loaded after Phoenix gave a green light. Unfortunately, on the way to the runway Phoenix closed again and we sat on the tarmac for an hour.
This led, as you can imagine, to everyone missing their connecting flights in Phoenix. Initially we were naive enough to think our connecting flights would be delayed as well but this was hopeful thinking. Once in Phoenix we were led to a line to wait another hour for new flight info. I actually never made it through this line, a woman finally came around with a phone number to use which led to my new flight at 7:30am the next morning. (This is better than the large group of Anchorage bound people that were being initially being told they could get home next Wednesday — it is spring break.) We were also told that no hotel rooms are available — not sure how true this is but it is spring training time here as well.
I finally got to eat some dinner around midnight. Thankfully there is a Paradise Bakery that is open 24hours here. They were quite popular.
So now I wait afraid to sleep in case I don’t wake up in time for my flight. See you soon.
My flight leaves at 7:30am
Only one more day to go now. Today was not as rewarding as yesterday but many good contacts were made and relationships maintained. I skipped out of early sessions to meet with the Luminis ActionLine Manager. We had a good discussion on a number of topics regarding where we are going and where Luminis IV is going. He feels we’ve made the right decision to go with Sun Solaris but still felt that it was an unfortunate circumstance. Asked about choices between Linux and Solaris, there was indication that Solaris is the right choice — at least for now.
High Availability/Scalability Session
Pretty basic session covering the topic at a very high level without much of any detail. Only thing really taken away was yet another recommendation to push SSL onto the load balancer. It would be good to get the slides to see architecture graphics.
Dynamic Portal Content with LCMS (reference: mySIAST)
Only went to this to be sure I attended one LCMS session and to see how they were taking care of an issue we also face: numerous content publishers for singular channels. It looks like their solution works well for them but with Luminis IV here they may not have taken the same path.
We don’t even use LCMS but this was a chance to see alternative uses without having to attend a basic LCMS session. The technique of interest is their practice of pulling data directly from the LCMS db via LCMS query tag using dql. They recommend the SunGard HE template developer course for LCMS.
Luminis Parallel Deployment at Pima Community College
Summit 2008
Peyman and Jason to do presentation on our Sun Solaris installation. We’ll be a very early school in a few areas:
A discussion on our experience would be of much interest.
Another busy day at Summit. Highlights were the opening of the Luminis Developers Lounge, a chance to sit with the Luminis Product Manager and the social event focused on the non-credit shopping cart functionality still in the design stage.
The Luminis Developers Lounge consumed most of my time last year in Orlando and promises to do the same this year. A good venue to share projects, successes and suffering. Once again we got to talk a little about the AJAX work others are doing to add functionality such as drag-and-drop channels. All cool but I don’t think anyone is at a point where they could go to production. There also isn’t any consistency in how people are moving forward with this investigation but this work will most likely influence the future of Luminis.
The discussion with the Luminis Product Manager was a nice chance to talk about the SunGard HE philosophy moving forward and to touch on long-term and short-term direction. As usual, many concerns returned to a suggestion to contact SunGard HE Services for a quote. This is valid input and will be taken into consideration.
The shopping cart study for non-credit students looks at this point to be on target. The SunGard HE staff seem to have done a good job collecting requirements from a representative sampling of institutions and seems open to including us as an early adopter to help move the effort forward.
Monday at 4pm is the first session I attended. This was originally to be held at 9:30am but was unfortunately reschedule for 4pm (to unfortunately conflict with other sessions of interest.) It was presented by the Luminis product manager with whom I will meet separately with Tuesday morning.
I did not expect any groundbreaking information in the session and was not disappointed. A general overview of Luminis and its use at a few colleges. There are now over 600 Luminis clients around the world. Here are the colleges highlighted:
Luminis Platform IV Overview
Pretty basic overview of IV and mention of workshops, training bay (SLC) and CBT updates to support it. Here was the Product Manager’s highlights of new features which I may expand on with my own set (if I have time):
Beyond — through Banner 8 (next couple years)
Beyond — post Banner 8
Nothing unexpected but good to catch up with the Product Manager and arrange a follow-on meeting as we prepare to implement Luminis IV on our new Sun Solaris environment for Fall 2007.