RasterWeb!

People often cite Microsoft Exchange as one of the pieces of the corporate puzzle that open-source has not yet provided a replacement for. Sure, we’ve got good email servers and clients, but there’s always talk of calendaring and scheduling (stuff I really don’t do, and am not familiar with.)

Another piece that might be missing (and again, I’m no expert in this area, so enlighten me if I’m ignorant) is webcasts. In the geek community we’ve got streaming audio, slides in HTML, IRC, etc. but these are geek technologies, and not fit for business-person consumption.

The requirements for webcasts usually cover Windows/IE, and on the Mac it’s… well, IE5 (in Classic!), Netscape 4? Safari? Or… In my little testing over the past few years I’ve had to resort to using old obscure browsers, making sure Java is all set with these old browsers, and other crazy hoop jumping.

Here’s a (possibly) crazy idea, build a webcasting application utilizing the Mozilla platform. This is one place I think a rich internet client is needed, and the added benefit of being a multi-platform client is a great plus. These webcasts usually involve someone speaking, sometimes via streaming audio, and sometimes you do a conference call. There’s some sort of slides being show, which requires the server to push the change of slides to the client. There’s also (usually) some sort of chat thingy in the browser as well, for questions. It really doesn’t seem like rocket surgery, but there’s enough little pieces to make it non-trivial.

But will people want to install a specialized app just to take part in a webcast? Well, as mentioned I spent more time screwing around installing plugins, Java, and old browsers, that my answer is “yes” I probably would install a specialized client. You wouldn’t believe how many demos I’ve been a part of where people had some weird issue with something not working, and that includes people using Windows/IE.

It seems like all of the companies doing these webcasts built their platforms at a time (years ago) where betting on Windows and IE was a safe thing do to, and if they had extra time they made it work in Netscape 4. Has there been any progress in the last few years?

From what I remember (and as I said, it’s been a while) WebEx seemed to work pretty well out of the ones I tested. I think they might be more open to other platforms besides Windows…

I was reminded of all of this because Scoble mentioned an MSDN webcast. Of course looking at the FAQ for Microsoft Webcasts we see that they support IE, and Netscape 4.x, and mention you might be able to use Netscape 7, but alas, only Windows is welcomed here.

This seems like it creeps into stuff that Jon Udell might talk about…

Anyone else have insight into this? I’m not expecting some open-source project to pop up out of nowhere to solve this, but I think the possibilities of a company doing it right, meaning working on multiple-platforms with a rich client, or at least working with modern-day browsers (again, on multiple-platforms) could happen. If such company did a demo, and it all just “Magically Worked” I’d be quite impressed…

So I’ve been hacking away at PHP for a while now, and I must say it’s a fairly easly language to pick up. In fact, that seems to be the biggest strength of PHP, besides the fact that’s it’s also easy to install and every host out there seems to have done so.

Still the templating-freak in me feels a bit dirty mixing all of that presentational-html with logical-code. It’s like perl cgi’s in 1998 or something… I know, there’s Smarty and other templating systems, and of course some will tell you that PHP is (sort of) a templating system in itself… Still, that cultural thing…

Kellan, in There Has Got To Be A Better Way, has this bit titled The Impenetrable Importance of Culture:

For me the hardest part in working with languages I’m less familiar with (python, and php for example) rather then those I’m more comfortable with (perl or java) is not syntax questions, its culture. For all of Perl’s much vaunted “There is More Then One Way To Do It”, I know the proper way to do things, the proper tool to reach for, and if I don’t I have ways of finding out, largely through internal calculation based on my understanding of the Perl reputation landscape. Its that information which is opaque to me, especially in PHP where the fast number of practioners are novices.

That’s previously summed up my thoughts on PHP, though I’m still quite open to it, and might change my mind…

(I must admin, PHP is hundreds, if not thousands of times better than dealing with ASP or ColdFusion, at least in my book, and again, this is due to a large degree because of the culture surrounding each of them.)

There seems to be this debate going on whether “bloggers” are “journalists” or not.

From Dictionary.com, journalist:

jour·nal·ist

1. One whose occupation is journalism.
2. One who keeps a journal.

Ok, so anyone who “keeps a journal” is a journalist, and if we assume a “weblog” or “blog” is a journal, then we are all journalists.

Some people might be referring to that first bit, “One whose occupation is journalism” though, and that’s fine. Don’t think of yourself as a journalist, think of yourself as a reporter.

Hold on, let’s check on reporter:

re·port·er

1. A writer, investigator, or presenter of news stories.
2. A person who is authorized to write and issue official accounts of judicial or legislative proceedings.

Ok, I think we can cover that first one. Plenty of bloggers have presented news stories, that seems undeniable.

I remember years ago, when I knew somebody who screamed for a band saying they weren’t really a singer, and I told them that was ok, because while they may not have been a “singer” they were definitely a “vocalist” – yeah, I know, if you look those two words up they sort of point to each other in a circular motion, but the point is, if the word in use doesn’t match up to the expectations of the word in people’s eyes, find another word.

In other words, confuse people, and viplos bimcus!

Panic: dynamic SQL (? placeholders) are not supported by the server you are connecting to (Damn you Microsoft!)

The above bit is the message I got when using Perl’s DBD::Sybase module to talk to Microsoft SQL using FreeTDS, whch technically, is a feat all in itself, but anyway, I’m all for database abstraction in applications and code. Jeremy thinks abstraction layers must die, and if I was someone who was an expert in one database, and got to choose to always use that one database, I might agree. Actually he goes on to say:

The author uses an argument I hear all the time: If you use a good abstraction layer, it’ll be easy to move from $this_database to $other_database down the road.

That’s bullshit. It’s never easy.

In any non-trivial database backed application, nobody thinks of switching databases as an easy matter. Thinking that “the conversion will be painless” is a fantasy.

Ok, the use of “non-trivial” makes this true depending on your definition of trivial, but some things might be considered trivial, and still be quite useful. Some systems can easily swap which database they use very easily. I’ve managed to switch things between MySQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL with ease. Now granted, none of these things were enterprise-level, make-or-break application (I’m not at Yahoo!) but they’re important to me and the people who own the data.

Database portability doesn’t have to be a myth. It’s all data, right? Moving it from one system to another should not be a nightmare.

See Also: Database Abstraction Considered Harmful