Recently, a colleague of mine pointed out a blog that provides some tips related to the installation of IBM Connections. I cannot personally vouch for the efficacy of the material there, but it looks comprehensive, well-written, and well-illustrated. It’s created by Lotus Community members Paul Mooney and Gabriella Davis, who’ve been sharing what they learn, and it’s called Connections 101.net. Check it out!
Today, I had to install the Java plugin for 64bit Firefox on CentOS 6.4. The procedure wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t exactly straight-forward either. So, I’m recording what worked for when I have to do it again. Hopefully, you might find it useful too. This is not a descriptive tutorial; it’s just quick notes, so you may have to do a little reading between the lines. Continue Reading…
It’s that time again! IBM just recently released Cumulative Fix 05 for IBM Web Content Manager version 8.0.0.1. You can update your software using the IBM Installation Manager. It seems that IBM has been releasing cumulative fixes rather consistently now about once a month, so you might consider planning for monthly system updates. At minimum, you should at least plan for quarterly updates.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
In my previous post in the IA Files, we took a look at definitions – those things you typically find in dictionaries or, perhaps more commonly today, when you type ‘define word‘ in a Google search.
A definition states the meaning of a concept and distinguishes it from all others, thus preserving the logical order of a concept’s hierarchical interdependence. 1
Such a hierarchy can be expressed in a model that Information Architects like to call a taxonomy. Taxonomies are quintessential to information architecture and very well worth a pause for deeper reflection. So, before we go flingin’ the term around like we know what we’re doing, let’s take that pause now…
Notes:
- Rand, Ayn. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: Expanded Second Edition
, ‘Definitions’, page 40. ↩
So, I just stumbled onto this butt-ugly JavaDoc page, which reminds me of the early nineties and I have to say, it gave me a strange, warm-fuzzy kind of feeling. The last time I saw a JavaDoc like this, applets were actually cool. Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise comes to mind. Michael Jackson is still alive (perhaps also still cool). Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is the shiznit. Internet Explorer wasn’t even born yet (the good old days). This is what they call nostalgia. Look at this beautiful monstrosity…
With Servlet 3.0, it’s now possible to define your servlet using annotations instead of XML in the web deployment descriptor (web.xml). This can simplify maintenance and deployments because it keeps the servlet definition inline with the servlet’s actual code – everything’s conveniently found and managed together in one file. For those of you ready to start evolving into Java EE 6, here’s the essential information you need to know.
A lot of the things we’ve learned about software development have just been sort of ‘absorbed’ over time by reference to other examples. We assume that what we’re doing is right or that there’s not much more to know about one thing or another. To guard against such dangerous assumptions, I have this ‘back to basics’ thing I like to practice. Instead of assuming that I know, I assume that there is much I don’t know, which is usually always true. So, I go back to the basics. The language basics of Java, for example. Original specifications for things like HTTP Status Codes and what-not.
Ian Devlin, a member of the HTML5 Doctor team, a curator at the HTML5 Gallery, and inventor of HTML5 Bones recently confirmed the value of this practice with a very nice review and summary of the good old anchor tag (the a element in HTML). Think you know it? Check out Ian’s post about the a element in HTML; you might be surprised.
You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today’s information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.
My colleague, José (Pepe) Martínez, just posted a very interesting solution for embedding videos inline to WCM content items. To summarize the problem, he wrote:
Authors can be a little or a lot scared of writing HTML code, and inserting videos into a web page can usually be challenging for a non tech-savy author. On top of that, the variety of files and formats can make it hard for the developers and admins to simplify this process to the author.
His solution to this problem was clever. Authors upload a media file and then create a good old fashioned HTML hyperlink to it inside their content at the spot where they want the video embedded. They set the target attribute of the link to ‘video’. Then with a little jQuery and JavaScript wizardry, all links with that target are transformed into the appropriate HTML for an embedded video at runtime. It even can switch the rendering template used depending on the browser type.
If you want to see how it’s done, read Implement an easy way for authors to insert videos in WCM 6 and above in the Base22 Knowledge Wiki.
Thanks for sharing, Pepe; very cool.
