I come from a family of teachers and despite running for the technological hills myself, still wound up marrying a teacher, so I’m surprisingly familiar with schools, teaching and technology in schools. It also helps that I’ve had a couple of jobs running IT in schools and I’ve always kept an interest in how technology is being used to aid teaching.

It should come as no surprise then that I was quite interested in Mark Ahlness’ post about a new WYSIWYG editor being added to the blog software his third grade students have been using. Now firstly, it’s cool that third graders are blogging – it gives them an interesting place to practice writing and by being interesting and novel, hopefully develops an interest in writing. After all, behind most learning there’s fun and passion.

There’s already a lot of stuff written on the internet about how GoDaddy SSL certificates aren’t recognized by Mac but are by Windows, all of it pointing to “a configuration problem”. I’m not sure how we got such special treatment but none of the instructions I’ve seen work in our particular case.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the problem is that on Mac OS X connecting to the site displays a dialog saying that the certificate could not be validated for an unknown reason. Thanks a heap for that OS X… On Windows it works just fine. The problem turns out to be that the server isn’t configured to provide the full issuing certificate chain all the way back to the root SSL certificate (which is in OS X’s set of trusted roots by default). All around the internet you’ll get instructions saying to make sure that the SSLCertificateChainFile is set to point at gd_bundle.crt (available from GoDaddy’s repository). This doesn’t work with our certificate, not sure why.

From Brett, our engineering manager extraordinaire:

With Ephox’s recent sales growth we are expanding the R&D team and are currently looking for two outstanding Java developers to join the team in our Brisbane office.

We develop in both Swing and J2EE using agile techniques and have a set of values based on the XP values. We have a fun workplace and are looking for the right people to join us.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants a fulfilling and rewarding position that takes their careers to the next level.

At the risk of becoming a link blog, anyone thinking about social software should go and read Dare Obasanjo’s latest post: Participation as Social Capital: The Fundamental Flaw of Social News Sites. I think the most telling part for me was:

Although turning participation in your online community into a game complete with points and a high score table is a good tactic to gain an initial set of active users, it does not lead to a healthy or diverse community in the long run. Digg and Slashdot both eventually learned this and have attempted to fix it in their own ways. The trouble with starting a new social site is always in bootstrapping. How do you get enough people using the site to start making the social aspects actually pay off? Ranking users is basically the default answer because it works so well with even a few users – it’s easy to get to the top and you feel just as special about getting there so you hang around and try and stay there so it helps to build the initial users of the site.

I’ve had this article by Seth Gottlieb open for a while now but quite frankly don’t have much I could add except to say go read it. The idea that content is more than just data because of how real people perceive and work with it leads to a huge difference in how you design user interfaces for content management systems. A content management system should be more than just a web interface to some great big database, it shouldn’t make users think the way the database is laid out, it should let them focus on the content and the true messages that it conveys.

For the first few years that I worked at Ephox there was a regularly recurring problem: how to let our clients know exactly what’s changed between versions. We were good at showing off the new features but never had an accurate list of which bugs were fixed and every so often a client would ask for that. It seems simple enough – just keep a changelog – but there were some challenges.

Around the time of the iPhone’s initial release, I wrote:

It’s this popularity of Java in the mobile phone world that makes the lack of Java on the iPhone seem so odd to me. I can understand Apple wanting to have complete control over the iPhone interface, and I’ll concede that most of the existing games for mobile phones probably wouldn’t translate very well to the keypadless iPhone, but it will be interesting to see if Apple can satisfy the great desire for cool little mobile games that today’s teenagers, a key market segment for the iPhone, without leveraging the existing knowledge mobile games developers have in Java. Turns out I was completely wrong. Teenagers don’t give a damn about those gimmicky little games on their mobile phones, they just use them because they’re there. The iPhone’s coolness factor and the built in iPod is all that matters. Even wandering around Australia (where iPhone’s aren’t yet available) with my iPhone, lots of people asked about browsing the web, the iPod etc but not a single person asked about games (and yes, I do know quite a few teenagers who were doing the asking but still nothing about games).

Doug’s discovered a way to improve the effectiveness of simian to avoid adding more duplication to a code base:

The solution is very simple. The simian-report is a an xml file, so I wrote a SAX2 DefaultHandler that was able to parse the number of duplications at the different threshold levels. Putting this into a trivial ant task then gave us a task to help make things no worse even at levels below what the simian-check was doing! Within the first week, the new legacy-check was breaking the build (where the simian-check would never have) and focusing the teams attention on how to make things better. The solution is simple and really cool. I have no doubt that it will have a big impact on the amount of duplication and the overall quality of our code. The trouble is, Simian’s normal reporting is really, really lousy and Doug’s extra check highlights just how useless Simian is at telling you where the duplication is instead of just detecting that there is duplication.

There are a lot of articles around the place giving generally good advice on how to be a better blogger and get noticed. Alastair Rankine highlights one of the key problems with slavishly following this advice – you become boring:

I was initially attracted to Atwood’s blog for its relatively simple premise and smart delivery. With startling regularity over an extended time he managed to deliver bite-sized morsels relating to the stated domain of programming and human factors. He writes well and generally illustrates his point in a clear and easy to digest style. It’s quite engaging.

Back as far as Raskin’s The Humane Interface, and quite possibly before, modes in user interfaces have been frowned upon. Despite that, huge amounts of software ships with a simple mode and an advanced mode. The theory being that when users get started they use the simple mode which makes the simple tasks they want to do really straight forward. Later when they want to do more than the basics, they’ll be more familiar with the software and thus be able to handle the advanced mode.

David Welton described a frustration he had with FireFox’s spell checker which piqued my interest:

I write most of my email (in gmail) and submit most web site content in English, however, a significant portion is also done in Italian. I leave the spell checker in English, because Italian is, in general, quite easy to spell, so that even as a native speaker, a helping hand is occasionally welcome. However, it isn’t as if I write Italian perfectly either, so the help there would be nice as well. I find it quite annoying to go change the language in the spell checker option each time, especially when, as an example, I’m responding to email and do 2 in English, one in Italian, another in English, and so on. On the face of it, identifying what language an author is using looks a lot like a natural language processing problem and thus requires a PhD and many years of research to tackle. Looking a little closer though, you begin to realize that the problem domain is dramatically reduced in this case:

Kevin Gamble pointed me towards the Sun Wiki Publisher for publishing documents to MediaWiki servers straight from OpenOffice/StarOffice. The key problem with these types of integrations is that wiki markup simply can’t handle anywhere near the same level of expressiveness as even HTML, let alone a word processor document. Hence the description mentions:

All important text attributes such as headings, hyperlinks, lists and simple tables are supported. Even images are supported as long as they have already been uploaded to the wiki site. An automatic upload of images is currently not supported.