Quoderat

Link: Introducing HXL hashtags for humanitarian data

In my 16 years working with data standards, I’ve found that standards almost always ask for too much and end up getting little or nothing. If we asked for less, might we get more? Do data standards have to be tightly-managed and dirigiste, or could we learn from the success of hashtags and other simple, collaborative approaches?

The blog post linked above describes the approach we’re taking in the multi-agency Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) initiative to help improve data-sharing during humanitarian crises — please take a look and let us know what you think. You can also visit our HXL Showcase site to see interactive examples of how you can analyse and visualise examples of real humanitarian datasets with HXL tags added (the public-domain source code is available on GitHub).

Update: these instructions no longer work for Android L (Lollipop). For a first pass at installing Gnu Emacs in Lollipop, see this update.

Since I mentioned in a review that I’m using Emacs on my Android Nexus 7 tablet, I’ve received several requests for information about how I set it up. There is a prepackaged Emacs app in the Google Play store, but it does not work as distributed, because it bundles a broken terminal application. The Emacs binary itself is fine, though, and with a bit of manual work, you can install it to run inside a different terminal application (I use Terminal IDE below).

Note: Emacs needs a full-featured PC-style keyboard. I usually run Emacs on my tablet with an external Bluetooth keyboard; if you want to use a soft keyboard, consider installing the Hacker’s Keyboard, which has all of the modifier keys Emacs expects.

Request: Would anyone be willing to rebundle Emacs in an easily-installable form for Terminal IDE, and make this blog posting obsolete?

Installing Emacs for Terminal IDE

1. Install the Terminal IDE app on your Android device.

2. In your Android browser, go to http://emacs.zielm.com/data/ and download the files emacs.lzma, etc.tlzma, and lisp.tlzma, then copy them to your Terminal IDE home directory.

3. Launch a shell in Terminal IDE and run the following commands:

   $ unlzma emacs.lzma
   $ chmod 755 emacs

4. At this point, you should already be able to run emacs by typing

   $ ./emacs

   (though it will fail because it can’t find its etc directory). If you want, just put it somewhere on your executable path, like you would in any Linux installation.

5. Create a directory /sdcard/emacs/ (or make it somewhere different, if you’re willing to set environment variables to tell Emacs to look somewhere else).

6. Copy the downloaded files etc.tlzma and lisp.tlzma to /sdcard/emacs/etc.tar.lzma and /sdcard/emacs/lisp.tar.tzlma

7. Change to the /sdcard/emacs/ directory and run the following commands:

   $ unlzma etc.tar.lzma
   $ tar xvf etc.tar
   $ unlzma lisp.tar.lzma
   $ tar xvf lisp.tar

8. Test that emacs starts up OK now (run from wherever you installed the binary):

   $ ~/emacs

9. If all is well, you can optionally delete the tar files to save space:

   $ rm /sdcard/emacs/etc.tar /sdcard/emacs/lisp.tar

10. Enjoy Emacs in Android! You might consider doing an C-u 0 M-x byte-recompile-directory on /sdcard/emacs/lisp/ (and any other lisp directories) to make sure you’re up to date.

I just noticed that the Evernote app updated itself on my phone, and that got me thinking about how I just don’t use it much. I made a serious effort a year or two ago, in the middle of my last big project, dutifully taking pictures of white boards, making notes during meetings, TODO checklists, etc.; however, I almost never went back and reread the notes, reviewed the snapshots, or worked through the TODO lists, and somehow, the project still chugged along just fine.

The surprising part (for me) is that Evernote is exactly what I would have designed if you’d asked me to design a note-taking/idea-organising app. From my POV, the app did everything right:

• Search works
• You can group notes by subject or by tags
• You can share notes
• The smartphone app works offline and syncs when you’re back online
• It organises media like pictures the same way it organizes text notes
• The UI is simple and uncluttered (at least, it was back when I was using it)

Maybe the problem isn’t Evernote, but the idea of taking notes at meetings. I have piles of old engineering notebooks from past consulting gigs, and I doubt I ever went back and reviewed 0.5% of them after I wrote them.

I guess this is a good lesson for information architecture and tech design. I started with a process that didn’t work for me (paper-based note taking) and assumed that if I added some tech pixie dust to it — web apps, search, tags, smartphone app, etc. — it would suddenly change and become functional. That didn’t happen, because it almost never happens, and it’s not Evernote’s fault.

Today, the US government’s data.gov temporarily went dark, and along with it, what is likely the world’s most important collection of open data sets:

The US government’s data.gov home page on 1 October 2013.

You are welcome to use this as a chance to rail against the juvenile hijinks in the US Congress, but I think there’s a far more important lesson: if you depend on any centralised data source, even one run by the world’s richest and most-powerful government, it can fail and leave you cut off.

I’m working on a large application architecture for an international organisation right now, and am including this disclaimer in the introduction:

1.1. Limitations

Like all technology-related architectural designs, this is a vision of how XXX could work, not a blueprint for how XXX will work — we will change much or all of this architecture during the implementation, some in minor ways, and some in major ways, as we discover more about the problem space, change our priorities, and work around the strengths and limitations of the people and technologies involved. The architecture in this report points the way for the implementation team at the beginning, and captures our initial understanding and goals. The XXX team will endeavour to keep the specification up to date as the actual architecture emerges during implementation.

Further reading

Neal Ford, “Evolutionary architecture and emergent design: Investigating architecture and design.” IBM developerWorks, 24 February 2009.

Martin Fowler, “Who Needs an Architect.” IEEE Software, July/August 2003.

Eric S. Raymond. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Version 3.0, 2000.

If you work anywhere near IT, you’ve probably been confronted with Everett Rogers’ Bell Curve on more than one eager PowerPoint slide deck, explaining how the presenter’s new standard, product, or initiative will move through the five audiences of Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. There’s even a book, Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, about how to move your product from the Early Adopter to the Early Majority (mainstream market) stage. After a (very) small amount of background reading, though, I’m starting to wonder if people are misuing Mr. Rogers’ curve, confusing the ideas of “innovation” and “product.”

You can’t invest in an idea

In 1962, Prof. Rogers, along with two other original collaborators, was studying how new practices spread among farmers in the US Midwest, not how, say, a new model of harvester found its market. In other words, they were studying what people do, not what people buy.

Does it matter? Consider the 1995 Netscape IPO, which started the dot.com bubble. The World Wide Web was a genuine innovation — a new way of doing things (building on existing technology) — and by 1995, it was clear that the Web was going to be important. However, people confused Netscape’s browser (a specific product) with the Web itself (an innovation), and assumed that by investing in the company that made the browser, they were investing in the Web. However, the two were not inseparable — Netscape’s browser tanked, while the idea of the Web grew stronger and stronger. Later, investors would pump up Apple’s and Facebook’s stock in a similar way, assuming that by doing so, they were investing in the innovations of mobile computing and social networking. Apple in particular has been able to deliver revenue to justify some of its stock price, but as it loses more and more of the smartphone and tablet market to Android manufacturers, the difference between innovation (mobile computing) and product (iPhone/iPad) becomes very clear.

Despite all that, most of the time I see people using Rogers’ curve, they’re using it for a specific product, project, or initiative, not for new ideas or practices. Does it make sense in that context, or are we being as lazy and confused as the 1995 Netscape investors? Rogers based his 1962 book on over 500 studies of how ideas spread; it would be interesting to see if there’s similar research to back the claims of over-eager sales VPs and project managers.