Here’s a really simple golden rule for anyone thinking of adding auto update to their products – never ever include any user identifiable information_._ There’s simply no reason you need to know who is checking for updates, you only need to know what version they have. Given the infrastructure of the internet you will wind up getting their IP address, your policy should be that these aren’t stored.

It comes as no surprise to me that the WordPress mob broke this rule with their new auto update – they always seemed shifty to me. Tell me why exactly you need the URL of the blog to determine if a new version is available? Exactly what use to you is blog.ephox.intra going to be? Oh well, I’m already removing all the pointless blog entries they spam the dashboard with and those weird technorati partner parameters so I guess I’ll be asking for updates from wordpress.com or something too….

It’s a common question – what’s the point of social networks? The most common answer is basically none. Most social networks provide yet another way to get in touch and keep in touch with people which is great but lets face it, there are about a billion different ways to communicate and leaving messages on someone’s wall only looks good compared to sending smoke signals. Some people might argue that it lets you map out and visualize your social network but seriously I know who my friends are, why don’t you? The address book has been around a long time and it still works seriously well.

 My open tabs in NetNewsWire have exploded in the last couple of days with really good articles about driving wiki adoption and generally making wiki’s work. First up Making Wikis Work is a pretty good overview of all that is wrong with wikis. It’s odd to think that a technology as young as wikis has legacy cruft but they do.

In particular, WikiWords are no longer required or a good idea, use an editor that makes creating links easy or use a simple shortcut for creating links (the square bracket notation was easy for most people to learn, but you need to provide a completely GUI alternative as well).

I got some really positive feedback on the various community/openness projects that I’ve been spearheading within Ephox from one of our OEMs today. Apparently they’ve discovered our early access program and are already trying out our brand new Express Edit functionality1.  It’s really nice to actually hear from clients that these elements are useful as we haven’t really managed to build up a community, even if we are seeing gradually increasing traffic. For a while now we’ve had potential new employees commenting on Planet Ephox which is great, but we haven’t really heard from clients taking advantage of it, even if we’ve seen some of the indirect effects via analytics and support cases.

Yesterday afternoon Suneth and I took on a research project to see how feasible it was to keep server caches up to date by using XMPP to notify the other servers in the cluster of a change. Imagine a web server with some latency between it and the resources it’s serving (eg: it’s using S3), to speed up performance you’d want to cache the recently used or most commonly used resources locally on the server, but if you need to scale up to a cluster of servers and the resources are being changed, that cache becomes a problem.

When I first joined the company it was tradition that the engineers (and often the CEO, CTO and COO who were in the same country back then) headed down to the Paddo tavern for a pub lunch. Sadly a while back the quality of their roast lunch started to reflect the $4 price tag and we abandoned the concept. With the new renovations to the Paddo and rumors of improved quality we’ve started heading down the street for a roast lunch and a beer again.

I was just thinking to myself this morning how good it is to see Andy really stepping up, taking responsibility and showing great initiative to keep the team moving forward. Turns out the rest of the business agrees – he’s officially acquired the “Senior” title.

Well done Andy!

Mindy McAdams gives advice about how students should test their online page designs, the trouble is the statistics she’s looking at are lying to her.

You can see that although the screen resolutions larger than 1024 x 768 add up to more people (4,512 vs. 3,524), the single most common resolution in use (among people who read this blog, that is) is 1024 x 768. You can also see that the number of people viewing the site at the old standard, 800 x 600, is quite small.

A while back I took Paul Stamatiou (and by proxy, VMWare) to task about their claim that Cocoa makes them so much more efficient. My take was that it was a Cocoa vs Carbon argument and VMWare employees came rushing to explain that it was actually a Cocoa vs Qt argument. Kudos to them for being in touch enough to join the debate, I had to log a support case with Parallels to get their side. Unfortunately, the point stands that users shouldn’t care what framework an application is used in – I certainly had no idea Parallels used Qt.

There’s a constant argument over whether data should be structured or unstructured in content management and knowledge management systems. The key advantage of structured data is that it’s easier to process and manage – the system can manipulate and report on the data far more accurately. The downside is that it’s more difficult and frustrating for users to be limited to the specified structure so less data tends to get captured and it can be more difficult to get adoption.

A while back, Ephox restructured product management to better focus on developing new products and directions. As with most things, it rarely turns out the way you originally plan and we’ve morphed the team into something quite different to what we originally envisioned. It’s always good to adapt roles to best fit people’s talents, but while it’s happening it can make it difficult to know that you’re doing a good job or even the right job. We’ve reached the point now where what people’s roles are stable but involve a lot of “yeah I really should do more of that” kind of comments. Normally that means the things you’re not doing are either outside your comfort zone or outside of your interest – in my case mostly both.

I was so close to having everything working… EC2, S3, automatically pulling down the latest build and deploying it, Tomcat 5.5 with the native APR libraries, SSL support and using iptables to forward ports 80 and 443 directly over to Tomcat. Everything ready to go. Except Tomcat isn’t so keen on starting.

It usually starts, though it can take over half an hour to do so and on a couple of occasions it’s just flat out sat there and done nothing for multiple hours on end. At startup it outputs the log message: