the weblog of m.kelley

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site – Although customization is still necessary, this series shows you the tools and techniques to get relatively complicated Web sites up and running quickly using open source tools, including Drupal, MySQL, PHP, Apache, and Eclipse technologies.

IBM showing how to use Drupal as a quick CMS. (mouth agape)

I’m about to write a huge rant about proprietary CMSs and what a huge waste in resources they are. IBM talking about an open source CMS will help a lot of businesses go with this vs. something that costs much much more.

Hospitals now offer high-speed Internet – “To me it was just a no-brainer,” said Albert Pilkington III, chief executive of Fairmont General Hospital in Fairmont, W.Va. “It puts more time in my employees’ hands and it improves the quality of service.”

Fairmont General’s system, which Pilkington expects to be online within 90 days, will include a numeric keypad that can be used for everything from choosing a movie or a video game to ordering items from the gift shop or requesting room temperature changes.

I talked to a companies about this, years ago, when I worked for a small hospital in North Georgia. The companies, at the time, were suggesting we use a WebTV to accomplish this. We balked at the idea and thought about talking to some of the same people hotels use.

In 2000, this was gonna cost us around $800k for our 180-bed facility. It’s good to see that the price has dropped a couple of hundred thousand and it’s even better that they’re using something other than a WebTV.

We wound up setting this idea aside, mainly because our finance people cut our staff from 8 to 3 and our budget from 1.2 million to about $300k. So while we were progressive, we were also severely underfunded.

* sidenote *

We even went so far with this, to have discussed it briefly with I.T. and decided to have a “patientnet” and a “corpnet”.

BetaNews | Sony Debuts Wi-Fi Music, IM Device

I’m looking for something just like this….wish it were cheaper. I’m not connected to personal email or chat while at work and would like something to use during breaks or lunch to keep up with people. I miss having a Blackberry, mainly because of the keyboard. Having IM would help too.

Leaving Microsoft – I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my group might be back on track again, but I didn’t want to sit around doing little to nothing until Vista, Office, and Exchange ship. It’s easier to get funding outside Microsoft than inside at the moment, so I am stepping out and doing my own thing.

While my similar experience was with a much smaller company, It’s terribly frustrating when you’re all gung-ho for a project and then can’t get anything approved. I sat for about 6 to 8 months, waiting on a company to move, until finally I just had to get out before I went insane.

The “big” boss was always wonderful, and even told me that I could do side-work from my office. She just wanted to keep me there. But when you’ve put a lot into your job, sometimes everything isn’t enough.

GetWebKit! A web browser for Windows

Needless to say, I have high hopes for this project. So far, it’s clunky, but it’s running on XP and that’s a start.

VMware Virtualization for Mac OS X

This will be very cool. Parallels has been kicking all kinds of ass, leaving VirtualPC in the dust. Now VMWare is getting into the game. This will be interesting to watch.

Mozilla reaches 15% of browser market – ON ITS Spreadfirefox web site, Mozilla claims that Firefox has acquired about 15 per cent of the global usage share in the nearly 21 months since it was released. It has now passed the 200 million download mark.

I don’t know if I want to completely call “b.s” on this. But from my prospective, I’m seeing the Mozilla-based browsers coming in at about 4-6%. While all of my co-workers use Firefox or Flock, we’re still seeing a 95% saturation rate with IE.

(more…)

I’m not entirely sure if this was a blessing or a curse, but the bit major deadline for my first large project at work has had a suggestion to push the deadline two months later than initially needed.

While the programmers on my team have their stuff together, it’s those programmers who I don’t see on a daily basis or have no access to, that seems to worry me….honestly, it’s not the programs that worry me, it’s the content providers (the text) and my outside vendor.

We could really use the extra time so the vendor fucking up could be a “good thing”™ in the long run. Yes, I said it. I’m a project manager who is very glad his deadline won’t be met…mainly so we can give a better product instead of something who’s QA time was slowly being devowered by project scope.

I think there was a general “phew” about this change of date, mainly it meant that instead of just throwing skin/css changes over existing apps, we could actually take the time to rewrite them and make them a bit snazzier (ajax-ifying them, honestly, instead of using iframes or tables).

It also means that our “killer feature” won’t kill me in how the vendor completely dropped the ball, but instead be something I can be proud of instead of wanting to drive to an office and hit the bottoms of someone’s feet with a bamboo cane until they did what was asked.

Apple – Wireless Mighty Mouse (via Daring Fireball)

I purchased four of the original Mighty Mice when they came out and gave them to two of my best artists as well as keeping one for myself and my boss. The boss and a designer hated them, one artist loved it and I was really digging having an Apple mouse w/ a scroll.

I wound up adding those into p.o’s when we purchased new systems. I just hated that we couldn’t get a wireless mouse w/ a scroll from Apple.

(btw, I’m in a Mac-less house for the first time since ’99 and being on EvD’s Mac has just made me a little Mac-sick)

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet “Ginger” – HBS Working Knowledge

After another pause, Tim moved on to the issue of service, determined to move ahead despite the punches coming at him. Within two sentences, Jobs was on him again. Tim put up his next slide, about the new plant, but again Jobs came at him with a flurry of half-insolent questions. Where are you building a plant? Why are you building a plant? Why are you manufacturing the machine yourselves?

Partly, explained Tim, because giving our code to someone else would be a great risk. Not a good reason, in Jobs’s view, because the code could easily be reverse-engineered. No it couldn’t, said Tim. Could, said Jobs. He added that Tim should be spending money and management time on other things, especially since there was no way he could convince any world-class manufacturing and procurement people to move to New Hampshire, for God’s sake, his tone implying that only slow-witted rubes could bear such a place. Dean lifted an eyebrow.

“We have an adequate staff”, said Tim defensively, but it sounded as weak as the adjective. Tim had lost control of the meeting. That was probably Doerr’s plan all along. Dean sat silently, offering no help or defense as Jobs rampaged through Tim’s presentation.

Let me say that I’m am entirely behind Jobs on this suggest, because he *did* build his own plant, when he started NeXT and it entirely kicked his ass and took his attention away from Management. He used it as a showroom, but arrogance of youth took his attention to flash instead of substance.

I know a lot of people don’t like Jobs for his attitude, but if you read through the article and not the snips on SVN, you’ll see he had a great vision for the Ginger. Listen to Jobs, because he’s thought about most things deeper than you…is the gist of what I’m getting from this article.