b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Blue Domino and the Weblog Transfer Blues
XCOPY and myFixFilePaths Don't Synch For Me
Traction and Radio are Not Exclusionary
2002 GATF InterTech Awards
Why Shouldn't I Use AMD
My Patent is Bigger Than Your Patent
Inside Views from CIO Summit
Friday, August 2, 2002
August Print Industry Roundup
(Editor's note: this post has been re-titled, edited for clarity, and extended since it was originally posted. The original title "Road Trip" was ambiguous and the content contained some errors -- Ed.)I've been traveling quite a bit this week and haven't had time to post but I have been keeping up with the news. Several interesting things have happened while I was on the road.
National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) reported business in the commercial print sector has hit a five-month low at 45.5. This is the second consecutive decline and the second consecutive sub-50 month. NAPL cautions this is not an indication the industry is going back into recession. NAPL tracks a lot of industry statistics, and I need to check into this because I don't know what they saw that indicated the industry was ever coming out of recession.
ImageX licensed three of their patents to printChannel. This is an interesting move in the overall landscape of printing process patents. I have written about this before and have serious doubts about the viability and enforceability of many of the recently-issued process patents for online printing companies. At best these patents are a stretch. At worst they're outright fraud.
I have reviewed the printChannel offering and met previously with the management team there. It's difficult to believe they would gain anything useful from this license, so the motive is likely defensive -- to avoid wasting vital capital in useless legal wrangling. Virtually all the print e-procurement companies are struggling, and wasteful patent litigation is the last thing any of them they need.
But printChannel's signing with Imagex could establish precedent that there is market value to the patent and allow the company to take its lawsuit business model to larger players. This is something to watch. (Editor's note: Soon after this piece was written printChannel announced they would cease operations and in November 2002 was acquired by Printcafe. In May 2003 ImageX, teetering on its own bankruptcy, was acquired by Kinko's for $15 million -- Ed.)
Kinko's is rebuilding in Dallas. The company continues to rebuild itself in the DFW area after installing a new CEO and shuttering its SoCal HQ. Gary Kusin, the new CEO, came from the office furniture industry. Sue Parks, recently named exec-VP of Ops, came from Gateway Computers and USWest. I'm told there are lots of ads in the DFW papers for programmers, engineers, etc at Kinko's. Should be interesting to see what happens there over the next year. It is not easy to rebuild an entire company in a new city.
Tuesday, July 30, 2002
Blue Domino and the Weblog Transfer Blues
Steve Pilgrim is really struggling with the transfer of his weblog over to a domain hosted by ProHosting.com. I hope he gets it solved, I really like Steve's weblog, but I read some of his testing comments and can see he is really frustrated.I just had a similar experience with BlueDomino.com. BD is a new hosting outfit run by the guys at CoffeeCup Software. It's appealing becasue it is so affordable -- starting at $8.95 per month. Unfortunately, their tech support sucks like a Hoover and they have no interest in supporting Radio users.
I think the problem lies in BD's use of the ProFTPd ftp server. I was never able to get Radio to upstream files to the BD site. Lawrence Lee of Userland was quite helpful, and he was able to get a successful upstream to the site. I never could and neither could another new Radio user who was also testing BD, but using a completely different computer and network.
Despite several attempts by Lawrence Lee of UserLand to gather ftp session data and help me debug the process we were ultimately unsuccessful. Thankfully, I was only trying to upstream a category -- and it was just a test category, at that. No harm done.
But Blue Domino is not a place that Radio users should consider. They made no effort to help or provide any useful information. I'm not even sure they looked into the problem, although I did get a blow-off answer from one off their tech support reps.
What does this have to do with Steve? Well, I was considering trying ProHosting next. I know several people who use ProHosting successfully, and CRM Association (an industry group I work with) has used ProHosting for two years without a hitch. But I am leery now of trying them with Radio.
I guess the point is that, for a reason I can't fathom, Radio may exhibit some issues with certain ftp servers or host systems and we need to be careful where we plan to move Radio-based weblogs. I successfully upstream ftp to Interland and Mindspring, but failed at BlueDomino.
If you're going to move your weblog be sure you start out slow and test the waters with a simple Category upstream first. Check with others to see if they have used that hosting company successfully. If not, see if you can get the host company to give you a test directory for testing before you move your domain. But try to validate your ability to upstream successfully before you commit.
XCOPY and myFixFilePaths Don't Synch For Me
I'm getting ready for a long stint of travel and thought it would be nice to have Radio with me on the road. I use the Mail-to-Weblog feature, but it really isn't what I want when traveling. So tonight I experimented with using XCOPY to transfer Radio to my laptop.In a recent post on Radio Supports XCOPY Deployment and Synching I used a piece from Jon Udell's weblog on how to use XCOPY to synchronize Radio on multiple computers. I thought this was pretty useful but thought it would likely need Andy Fragen's myFixFilePathsAndAddresses script.
Tonight I tried both. I've been using XCOPY (actually XXCOPY) to backup my Radio folder to another drive, but I haven't tried to run Radio from there. Tonight I XXCOPY'd the Radio folder over to my laptop, then started it up and ran the file paths script.
The XCOPY and the script both ran as expected, but Radio didn't work corectly afterwards -- I had some errors when I tried to change a couple of Prefs settings.
I didn't spend much time on it yet. I may spend more another day. Tomorrow I have 15 hours of road time ahead of me and I don't feel up to the challenge.
Monday, July 29, 2002
Traction and Radio are Not Exclusionary
Paul Kulchenko of toolbox makes some good additions to my quick-and-dirty overview Traction vs. Radio - A Personal View. I like the idea of news2email and mail_to_category, but I can't get the script noted in Paul's post to work. Anyone who's actually installed the mail_to_category script feel free to chime in.
I'm running community server behind the firewall and for some business users it's very important to be connected via email. Although, there are some [Radio] tools like news2email and the ability to mail to category that allow you to do that.
And also:
[...]I'm all in favor of bottom-up approach, but it seems like the most practical approach is somewhere inbetween: company will benefit from using both, top-down and bottom-up systems, they just have to be well-connected. [toolbox]
Also, John Robb chimed in via e-mail to point out that Traction and Radio are quite complementary -- Radio being a great tool to get users over the start-up hurdle and get them contributing; Traction as a higher-end solution for a small core of knowledge architects to use in gathering together all the company's disparate knowledge sources.
2002 GATF InterTech Awards
Perusing this list of technology winners for the graphic arts industry really points out the level of stagnation that has set in across the industry. It also shows the relative misplacement of focus on rather simple, user-level advancements such as PDFTansit as opposed to developments that can really change the fundamental production models of the industry.Adobe is a great company and has done more in the graphic arts space than anyone. Their PostScript, and then PDF, technologies have literally revolutionized the entire industry. But to choose PDFTransit as the top technical achievement in 2002 is like granting Schering Pharmaceuticals an achievement award for their remake of Claritin into Clarinex -- it is a change from existing products, but not much of one.
Eleven Technologies Honored with a 2002 GATF InterTech Technology Award [WhatTheyThink]
Why Shouldn't I Use AMD
I'm thinking of building a new desktop computer -- although I really like my present setup, I guess 733mHz is getting a little long in the tooth. But I really don't want to spend a lot of money. It looks like an AMD processor and AMD-compatible mobo from Gigabyte or Asus or someone could be had for 15-20 percent under comparable Intel parts. Is there any good reason I should not use AMD?I don't presently do any 3D modeling or gaming. If I do so in the future it will be quite limited, I suspect. But I might do a little video editing if I get an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 video card.
Comments welcome.
Prices are falling at AMD. Vendor cuts Athlon, Duron price in bid to stay with Intel [InfoWorld: Top News]
My Patent is Bigger Than Your Patent
More patent silliness from two companies we all know and love.Adobe, Macromedia settle patent suits. CNET Jul 29 2002 4:20PM ET [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Inside Views from CIO Summit
Phil Windley's trip report from the Western CIO Summit provides some great insight into how our government officials are thinking and acting on the issues of Homeland Security and IT. Everyone should read it.Windley is to be congratulated. I'll say this, if the CIO of every state were as open as Windley and made his views public we'd all know one hell of a lot more about what is going on in our bureaucracy and we'd be a hell of lot less at the mercy of our conniving politicians.
I think I'll move to Utah...
Second Day at Western CIO Summit.Here is my trip report from my second day at the Western CIO Summit sponsored by Western Information Technology Council. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]
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