Probably the most commented on experience from Mac OS 9 was the fact that once one application crashed, they were all in trouble; generally, you were in for a complete system reboot. At last OS X came along and solved all that, finally providing protected memory and the ability to force quit one application without affecting the others. People rejoiced as they left their computers running for days on end without needing reboots and uptimes soared.

Two very interesting things I’ve learnt today:

1. Ousted is a real word.
2. Suneth has a blog.

Apparently Andy discovered him within a few hours. By the time I got back to reading feeds this morning both he and Brett had ousted him. Of course, I’ve now added him to Planet Ephox.

Opensource projects tend to have a well-earned reputation for being poorly documented. Originally this was caused by the fact that most of the people who knew the codebase were developers who didn’t have the skills or interest in writing the documentation. With opensource becoming more mainstream and more people getting involved I think that reason, while still having an effect, has become less of a problem. Despite that the quality of opensource documentation hasn’t improved – if anything it seems to be getting worse. More and more projects don’t even have half-decent reference information and just a few scraps of information on where to start.

Where is it? Clearly I’m missing something here. There’s a wiki with some good getting started overview stuff and some other chicken scratching but I’m yet to find an actual reference telling me what’s actually allowed in struts.xml. Shouldn’t that be pointed to in a big neon sign? The struts.xml page on the wiki isn’t exactly comprehensive and while the DTD is listed on the examples page it’s not exactly commented..

Oh and did I mention that wiki’s are a horrible way to write documentation?

Robert Scoble posts about saving Pandora:

…Tom talking about how the business of Internet Radio is under pressure due to coming changes in how the music industry wants Internet Radio stations to pay for the distribution of music (basically the costs will triple, if the proposed changes go into effect). After we talk about the challenges that Pandora’s business faces if the fee changes go through Tom gives me a preview of their new Sprint/mobile service.

Every so often something comes along that completely changes the way I use a computer. My new MacBook Pro has provided one of those: two finger scrolling. The concept is just so simple; to move the mouse you slide one finger across the track pad, to scroll you slide two fingers across the track pad. You can scroll vertically or horizontally so it beats a scroll wheel mouse hands down.

So for the record, if you have a textarea in Safari that is set to display: none; You can’t set it’s content via JavaScript unless you show it first. So:

edCanvas.style.display = "inline";
edCanvas.innerText = body;
edCanvas.style.display = "none";

Really annoying. For those Ephox people using the latest version of our EditLive! WordPress plugin in Safari, that’s where your content went. Pull an update from subversion soon and the issue should be fixed.

I’ve been in our San Mateo office the past week working with the sales and marketing folk which has been great, but also challenging and often frustrating. The challenge is in getting a grip on my new job as product manager, the frustrating from the initial objections we often get from clients as they try and guess what the reaction will be from their users instead of actually finding out. It’s fair enough, that’s all they have to go on but it’s frustrating to have to try and share the experiences that we’ve seen with users giving our software rave reviews. It’s also frustrating to hear negative things about software you’ve written – I always get so attached.

While most of the Ephox folk use EditLive! to edit their blog entries, there are some poor saps who are using a blog hosting service and can’t (we’ve got some interns working on a standalone blog editor with EditLive!, but that’ll take a while yet). This morning Antony learnt the value of a great editor the hard way when he copied and pasted from Microsoft Word into Typepad’s default editor:

Now I understand why so many of our users think our Microsoft Word filtering is so good…

I’ve spent the day doing some work with our Alfresco integration to make it easier to install and a bit more maintainable. Fortunately the Alfresco team were kind enough to point me at their Module Management Tool which while being a bit rough around the edges is really quite cool. Basically, it takes the alfresco.war and a zip file containing the module you want to install and shoves the module into the war file, ready to be deployed. What’s particularly cool is that it actually has version management so it knows if it’s previously installed a module or if the installed module is more recent than the one you’re installing etc.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to make wikis accessible to the common man – in other words, how do we get wikis to spread out of the technical departments and make it not just usable by non-technical people but make them actually want to use it and advocate it. Certainly there’s been a lot of movement in this area and a lot of good progress made, but I suspect there’s a lot more than can be done.

One of the things I’ve often found annoying about Brisbane, and to a degree Australia in general, is you just don’t get enough chance meet ups with interesting geeks. So since I’m over in San Francisco at the moment and Robert Scoble invited everyone and anyone to join Tom Conrad and him on the top floor of the Marriot hotel to watch the fireworks, I figured it was worth the walk.

Turns out that only a few people thought of that particular vantage point so when I got there Tom and Robert had secured the best seats in the house. Conversation was great, both Tom and Robert are very down to earth and easy to get on with. We were saved from getting too geeky by Robert inviting over a couple of girls who hadn’t secured good seats but it was good to see some of the stuff put in perspective and get a non-geeks view on things as well.