Another meeting with the coach

Met A again for the first time since the middle of December. We spent most of the time discussing the content of the thesis as it is now (haven't uploaded it to anywhere yet). I have to clear up my Research Question and send it to her by next monday.

Here are some personal notes on what must be done with each chapter:

Define the Research Question. What are you investigating? More academic references (find on portal.acm.com, IEEE)! Use the articles reviewed already.

Specialize in an aspect. People, human, social, business, technical, community. Choose one. Red thread.

Chapter 1
Present the problem early on. Small outline.

Move how-to to the end of the chapter. Make it correspond with the current TOC.

Introduce more along the generel context of information systems. Top down approaching WCMS. Context of study. Research Question (everything depends on this). The rise of the Internet (use inf5210 sources here). Describe more business, KM and CM. Information infrastructure and software. Link between CM and KM. Use eLearning for this purpose (eLearning produces the need for WCMS). Knowledge portals.

Too business-like on page 5. Do not use "you" (oops) "my" or "I". If you are going to use the business perspective, you must explain more about it.

Chapter 2
Again, start with a top down approach.

When introducing invented frameworks and architecture, say what you have invented. Try to find existing sources first. Draw an architecture model. Make models!

Levels. Use XHTML (surf the hype). Explain what the MVC is. Reference something.

Discuss integration problems.

Don't use 'quicker'. Be academic, follow the style. You are not a system developer. You are a researcher. Link this better with Open Source.

Try not to convince the reader too much. Be objective. Present the hybrid open-proprietary software properly. A pyramid which many are trying to use. Diagram.

Fix the "cannot" thingies which OpenOffice messed up. Done.

Move the cases in 2.3 to the introduction.

What is workflow? Define. Do not repeat the requirements when comparing the solutions. Make a diagram of requirements. Define them once and re-use.

Chapter 3
What is the point of presenting the Case on page 15? Purpose? It is not well linked to anything. Take it away?

Magnolia's fulfilment of the search requirement. The reader is not impressed by the fact that it is made with the help of open source tools. Explain the improved functionality.

Chapter 4
The two last cases. Too personal. Use them as research input, reduce them to a few lines, advantages and disadvantages. Explain the need for standardization better.

Goes a bit too technical in the end.

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

The academical approach

Oops, seems I to published this post prematurely by hitting some Blogger keyboard shortcut. I've been sitting for some minutes trying to figure out how to approach the JavaZone talk mentioned in my previous blog-post. Note that I have already submitted an abstract to the comittee, and that I won't publish the abstract here in the blog. Now of course the abstract is pretty detailed on what the talk is going to be about, but I've still got some elbow room on how to "implement" the talk. I will use this blog as a tool to get my aim right on how to present the talk, what examples to include, what the slides should look like, and how to make it most straightforward and understandable for the audience. Now in lack of having done any presentations at a larger conference before, I'm gonna dig into what I learned at the University, which wasn't very much, but they did teach me how to write a research paper, a skill which I will adapt into creating my talk: The one

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config-zsh.git -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o