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Went to the Vancouver Software Development Meetup on Tuesday night for a presentation about Plone, a content management and workflow framework. I won't be installing it anytime soon on my shared web host (it's outside the capability of my current plan), but it's was definitely worthwhile to see what it does.

OK, and it was cool to win one of the door prizes, Python in a Nutshell.

Now I can follow up on a presentation by Adrian Holovaty at WebDirections North about Django, which is also built on Python, and is also a framework.

In her blog, Molly.com asks "what's a framework?"

Good question. I'm not going to try to give the Wikipedia answer, but I know one when I see it.

Hey, here's one! A blog is a framework. Without programming, I can create a new web page, while updating all of the related pages for monthly indexes and keyword pages, plus the search index. All other frameworks are just extensions of the same idea.

I've been spending a bit of time lately testing out various Linux distributions for an upcoming SmallBizResource article. Since there aren't nearly enough Linux distributions in the world, somebody should write a framework for creating new Linux distributions.

Hmm....

Labels: books, linux, small biz, web design

I recently read (aloud, in an imitation Irish brogue) Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, a parable of scarcity and plenty by Tomie dePaola.

SPOILER ALERT

When Jamie O'Rourke is forced back into the workforce after the injury of his productive spouse Eileen, he despairs of starvation and goes to visit Father O'Malley in the middle of the night to give his confession. But then he comes across a leprechaun making fairy shoes for a livelihood. Jamie shakes down the leprechaun for gold, but the leprechaun claims he's practically broke and instead gives Jamie a magic seed for growing the biggest potato in the world.

The leprechaun is true to his word, and indeed Jamie grows the biggest potato ever. He can't dig it up himself, and so he gets the neighbors to help him dig it up. However, the potato ends up blocking the main road into town, and so Jamie is responsible for moving it. To do so, he lets everyone take as much as they want. But with the abundance, everyone gets sick of eating potatoes. Then, when Jamie mentions that he's retained a seed to plant the next year, all of the villagers pay him to withhold production.

This story has the following morals:

1. If you encounter a defenseless common laborer, threaten to take his nest egg unless he gives you something you can use for sustainable competitive advantage.
   
2. Religious intent is a valid excuse for the behavior described above.
3. To become wealthy, flood the market with a mass-produced version of something that people could otherwise produce themselves, and that they must consume in order to engage in ordinary commerce. This will depress producer prices and result in government intervention favorable to your operations.
   

In short, Tomie dePaola has created a Machiavellian playbook for market domination under the economics of diminishing marginal cost, couched in the language of a childrens' book. Must-reading for MBAs everywhere.

Labels: books

Acquired in preparation for a cross-country flight on JetBlue to a city threatened by snow:

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 edited by Dave Eggers

Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman

The anthology offers an amusing collection of short stories, comics and blog entries well-suited for the time between in-flight interruptions and biological upheavals resulting from the act of hurtling through space in a winged bus. I am looking forward to the Haruki Murakami story ("The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day") along with savoring the 700 hobo names listed in the excerpt from The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman (a.k.a. "...and I'm a PC"), columnist for McSweeney's, which coincidentally is the publisher of Rising Up and Rising Down (7 Volume Set). The paperback version I will bring to the airport is but a pared-down 700-page version of the original, but it still contains Vollmann's Moral Calculus (description from the back cover) "a structured decision-making system designed to help the reader decide when violence is justifiable and when it is not."

On second thought, maybe that's not the best book to bring on an airplane these days.

Labels: books, travel

So I'm sitting here writing an article about web design and trying to tune out this 21st-century version of Melrose Place that Scooter insists on watching called What About Brian?, but I just can't help but to get distracted by the addition of a new milieu to the traditional TV workforce.

The emerging cultural phenomenon of note concerns two of the main characters, and I don't remember their names and so let's call them Droopy and Scruffy, anyway Droopy and Scruffy founded their own video game company and now they work at a bigger video game company.

As far as I can recall, this is the first major network program featuring the creation of video games as a profession. Video games have now entered the television pantheon of aspirational occupations, along with magazine editors, doctors and lawyers. We've come a long way since Ralph Kramden, Fred G. Sanford and Alice Hyatt.

I've never worked at a video-game company, and so I can't say with any certainty whether the portrayal of the industry contains any validity. I'd guess "no." Maybe if Droopy and Scruffy were skinny, pale, neurotic loners with a penchant for quoting from comic books ("no, they're GRAPHIC NOVELS!!!") and a sex life based in Second Life, I'd be more inclined to believe it.

Douglas Coupland's JPod came closer to capturing the vibe of the industry as I imagine it. I don't have the book in front of me, since I read it at a public library in Vancouver in one of those,"Hey, I'm having a Vancouver experience" experiences. But I do recall that the protagonists of JPod were given the task of converting a floundering video game to appeal to 14-year olds by adding skateboards, spraypaint and various other patronizing elements like a talking turtle. Coupland's characters responded by sabotaging the game with Easter eggs that probably wouldn't be approved by management or the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

WAB used a very similar plot device of a game being repurposed with skateboards, but that's where the similarity ends. In WAB, Droopy and Scruffy decided to scrap the skateboard game to pitch their own genius creation, a "Life Sucks" videogame that would have gotten shot down in 10 seconds in the real world by any manager looking for shelf space at WalMart and Target, or hoping to not get sued by Groening Incorporated.

The other problem with WAB's portrayal of the video game industry is that it too closely resembles the television scriptwriting business. Droopy and Scruffy are both "idea guys," who come up with unique characters, situations and ideas, which the sultry boss-siren then gets to decide whether or not to green-light. That's what scriptwriters for formulaic dramas do for a living. As for video-game makers, they live in a different world, bounded by physics models, artificial intelligence, platform choices, licensing rights and content synergy. It's not, "What new idea for a game can we devise?" but rather, "How can I make the reflection on the windshield show the character's death grimace during a grisly collision with an oil tanker in Burnout 9: So What, It's a Rental."

Hey, if I can check out Gamasutra from time to time, so can the writers for a prime-time television show.

Labels: books, television, video games