JAX 2007: Meine Handouts als Downloads...

Auf der grandiosen JAX 2007 in Wiesbaden durfte ich einige Vorträge und Workshops halten:
* Gemeinsam mit Arne Koschel und Gerd Schneider (Software AG): SOA Governance Best (+ Worst) Practices
* Methodische Architekturbewertung
* Gemeinsam mit Achim Baier (itemis): Praxisworkshop Architekturbewertung

Downloads gibt's hier auf meiner Website.

Ordnung 2.0: Weg durch den Info-Dschungel

Im OBJEKTSpektrum (Ausgabe Mai/Juni 2007) habe ich mal beschrieben, wie die Ordnungskonzepte "Ordner" (Folder) und "Etiketten" (Tags) funktionieren und was Sie selbst damit anfangen können...

Netterweise gibts den Artikel auch zum Download als pdf.

Aus dem Abstract:

Wie halten Sie Ordnung in den Dateien und E-Mails auf Ihrem Rechner? Grübeln Sie noch, wohin Sie eine bestimmte Datei speichern sollen, oder ordnen Sie schon in Web-2.0-Manier? Lesen Sie hier den Reality-Check von "Tags-versus-Folders".

Aah - eine Kleinigkeit mögen die Mac-User unter Ihnen vielleicht ausprobieren: Tag-Support mit Quicksilver, beschrieben in Lifehacker, vor langer Zeit :-)

Digitally signed mails considered unreliable

After six month of usage I finally stopped digitally signing my outgoing
E-Mails (I was using a notary-supported Thawte certificate).

What sounds like a bright idea proved to be unreliable in practice: Several large
corporations (I won't name them here) refuse to accept signed mails (a quote: signatures are untrustworthy), some of them even did not notify the sender.

In my humble opinion these corporations have a false sense of security -
signed E-Mails really provide authentication. But: At least four of my clients
refuse to accept signed mails - I constantly had to switch between signed and unsigned mode, what a hassle!

Therefore I return to having "unsigned mail" as my default - sigh...

Why doesn't better technology win? Why has the concept of "ignorance" ever been invented?

SOAX: Our Toolchain for Editing and Writing

Together with Stefan I took the adventure of editing the 750+ pages (german) SOA-Expertenwissen book. It took us nearly 12 month to complete, time enough to gain some (further) experience with the various tools that helped us master this quest (btw: I'll surely talk about several aspects of the books' content in future posts here).
Let us start right at the beginning, some nice day in May 2006: Günther Fuhrmeister motivated both of us to start - and we began with sketching and refining the books' mainline, its goals, motivation and target audience. Call it distributed brainstorming what we did by then - Mindmaps (based on MindManager) provided the needed support for creativity and order. Just in case you don't practice mindmapping: start with it, no kidding!

Ok - we developed the initial structure and many ideas for prospective authors (around 40 by June/July 2006) - but how to organize that many (distributed) contributors? We used the web-only database DabbleDB to get things going: Both editors and the publisher could get a timely overview of the books' progress. It took about 2-3 month to discuss individual contributions with the designated authors, to re-align the structure according to the ongoing discussions with the authors.

When the structure stabilized and we received the first couple of contributions, we set up a subversion repository (remotely accessible) and transfered the contents of our Dabble-database to an outliner document (we editors both use Macs, so OmniOutliner was the first choice here). First little problem here: OmniOutliner documents are stored in directories (not in single files) - subversion sometimes doesn't like that... be prepared for trouble in case of conflicts...

Right - subversion saved our neck several times. Never ever begin a real-world IT project without version control in place. Never. (You DID know that, did you?)

Starting September/October, contributions (and new authors) flooded our desks. All authors stuck to Microsoft Word (tm) for their texts - but diagrams were drawn in a variety of formats (mostly Visio, Powerpoint and OmniGraffle, a few with OpenOffice). No problem here - the publisher could deal with those formats.

Mixing Word-files (doc-format) between Mac and Windows is no problem in just about 94% of all (our) cases. We had more then 50 files to deal with - 3 (three) made real trouble: Hangups and loss-of-formating - on our Macs... can you imagine our disappointment? We called NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice) to the rescue - which managed all problematic files without any disturbance. Changelogs and comments within Word files really helped all stakeholders, although version-management with Word is a nuisance. No way around manually verifying you have the correct document version at hand... which subversion could have done a lot better (merged, detected conflicts) with pure text files.

Then we began setting up the books' website. I initially used RapidWeaver - but we encountered serious problems in committing our website sources (rw3-format). RapidWeaver pretty often crashed upon trying to open updated files - therefore we had to compress them and check-in (commit) the zip-files. Unneccessary burden! We'll switch to the textpattern content management system (I'm still very happy with RapidWeaver for my own website, which I manage on my own... Conclusion: RapidWeaver is not ready for distributed workgroups).

My personal conclusion:

• MindManager and OmniOutliner to structure and manage - yes, again, with pleasure.


• Word (tm) for writing and editing: A compromise, and not a pretty good one: It distracts authors from producing contend, suffers from severe featuritis and (unneccessarily) motivates everybody (myself included!) to care about the most worthless aspect of writing: layout. We all wasted hours with layouting - let publisher care about that (they do it faster and better!).


• Next time I will talk my publisher into some pure textual format (like markdown, textile or some of those evil xml-dialects)... just to refrain myself from that layouting mumbo-jumbo. Markup'ed files can be spell-checked as (least as) good as doc-files, changes between versions can often be resolved by subversionn.


• Ok - once upon a time I tried DITA - which I found to be a straight overdose of markup.


• RapidWeaver: Only for personal sites with one editor.


• If you manage distributed teams and do NOT know skype, look for another job.


• Writing books on a Mac is surely more fun than on other machines, but still a lot of work (oh - you could have guessed that before...).

Further references

A series of posts from Pragmatic Dave on writing books...

Frank Jagla pointed me to Ulysses - which I did not use so far, but it looks promising.