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:

If you use sessions to track logins the session key acts as a password equivalent while the session is active. So if anyone can intercept that session key they can masquerade as the logged in user without knowing their actual password. Hence, sessions time out to improve security by giving only a small window that the session key can be used in.  This of course drives users crazy because they have to login again and again.

Flow|State has an excellent semi-rant about how poor the user experience is when using OpenID – both signing up and logging in. In particularly the question of what happens to all your accounts when your OpenID provider disappears is a particularly good one.

It so happens that I was looking into this just today since I needed a user friendly but secure authentication mechanism. OpenID seemed like a natural choice since I was effectively starting from scratch anyway, why not use a standard? The main problem I had with OpenID didn’t really come through clearly in the Flow|State article though – OpenID requires users to log in twice. The first log in requires them to enter a URI, the second log in requires them to enter their password (or in some cases a username and a password). It’s bad enough that most URIs are much longer than most usernames or even email addresses, but there’s actually a page reload between the URi and the password. When was the last time you saw a webapp display the username and passwords fields on separate pages?

I have to agree with “Jon”, Gruber (John with a h) does have a habit of linking to sites that link to him regardless of how good they are. For instance, this link list entry was a complete waste of time…

I wonder if there’s any limit to it?

I’ve struggled with Lucene before and failed to configure it properly resulting in absolutely horrendous search results so a recent need to implement search functionality wasn’t something I particularly wanted to take on. In fact, I was prepared to do almost anything to avoid delving back into Lucene filters and parsers and tokenizers and “stuff”. This tends to be problematic given that Lucene is the dominate search library – so popular in fact that it’s been ported to other languages.

Alex Iskold has an interesting article “Rethinking ‘Crossing The Casm’” which asks how to maintain the interest of early adopters in the face of such an overwhelming number of new products:

According to Wikipedia in 2006, Tom Byers, Faculty Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program, described “Crossing the Chasm” as “still the bible for entrepreneurial marketing 15 years later.” It is certainly a powerful and proven theory, but it does need to be adjusted. The fact that so many things are thrown into the market changes things. Early adopters are enticed by new things much more often today than 15 years ago. Expanding on how to retain the early adopters would be good thing to do in the next edition.

There’s this myth that’s existed ever since the beginning of OS X – that Cocoa apps are automatically better than any other type of application. They use less RAM, run faster and are just all round better – you can’t dispute it. If you take a lousy carbon app and rewrite it in Cocoa it will become amazing and all it’s problems will be solved.

This is of course, complete and utter bull.

I’ve been setting up a site for my wife and I to help us keep in touch when we move over to the UK next year and to let us share photos with friends and family etc. Of course this leads to the fun of picking a domain name that makes sense for us and is easy to remember. Going through the list of names we thought up, “thesuttons” was the only one that we liked and was available – but only in a few TLDs.

Just as I’m catching up on Amazon’s web services, they introduce another one – this time aimed at payment processing. My first impression though is pretty underwhelming. The one thing that FPS seems to have going for it is that it is extremely flexible. Most processing systems focus on moving a specific amount of money from a credit card to the sellers account. FPS provides options for combining micro-payments, direct debit (and proprietary Amazon funds) as well as recurring payments etc. In other words, FPS provides a ready made billing department rather than just an order processing system.

I’ve done a fair bit more investigation into using EC2 for web hosting and it seems to be something that people do with a fair bit of success. In addition to Geert who commented on my last post and who’s site rifers.org is hosted directly on EC2, there’s also hanzoweb.com and www.gumiyo.com all of which just have their DNS pointing at an EC2 instance.

I still wish Amazon had a preconfigured solution that acted as the web front end and load balancer with a static IP, but it appears that it’s quite feasible to just point your DNS at EC2 and your server seems to stay put.