Tag Archives: brainstorm

Projects in private weblogs with WordPress 3.0

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I’m thinking on how I’m going to implement "projects" in my private weblog. Obviously it would be very different from "projects in companies".

I’ve now implemented a minimal scenario. Whenever there is something that needs be in my mind, I just add a tag "issue" and it ends up in the right-hand column. Obviously the internal system is bigger. Whenever something is done I change the tag to "issue-resolved" and it is gone but kept for history purposes. I did not call it todo because I was thinking on splitting it up further and maybe make more status than just "open" and "closed".

This is not handy because when I have multiple blog posts all related to the same thing actually not the single issue should be there but the project name instead.

So hmmmm…… let’s see….

I think in a private households something never is started as "a project". I think mostly various things happen and suddenly those various things turn into something that we can label as a project meaning: it has a certain lifespan.

I think the following happens:

a) there are several "blog_posts" about something e.g. "mycat" with label "mycat" (if luckily labeled that way)
b) then my cat is ill and I need to arrange all kinds of stuff where I want to blog about so I first do one blog post and add a tag "todo"
c) now I have read some papers from SHCN on cremation of Cats and how to decide what is the best and I want to blog about it but I somehow want to keep these things together.

In the ideal world there would be a project "cat" with a lifecycle behind it and  several issues, questions, etc.. in the blogging world these things also include informational posts which is maybe something along the lines of a documentation department or a communication department.

d) so at that moment I define a new custom post-type (new in WordPress 3.0) (I’ve now done quite some code with custom post types, custom fields and custom taxonomies and you can quite some nice stuff with it).

So I now do something "active" and create a new [project] that I name "cat".

The problem now is that I have to back-trace all postings about "cat" and see how they fit in my project because I have convert some of them from build-in post type [blog_post] to e.g. [issue]  or [question]  etc…

So can I convert a build-in post type to a custom-post type? Yes, pretty easily actually. I just change the type. Now to make that work the handiest is if I make a plugin that lets me front-end change the post-type of "postings" to another type. That’s quite some work.

But in the end I have somewhere under edward.de.leau.net/projects an overview of everything I defined as a project and then a list of "items". These items though have a taxonomy behind them. Not THE wordpress taxonomy but a taxonomy of custom post-types. (and after thinking about it I think every post_type needs to have equal entry in the taxonomy as well). I think they are different than things you would run into in e.g. an IT project where you have RFC’s, Defects etc… it will probably be different kinds of types.

This taxonomy is something that I have to think about because this is obviously related to the taxonomy of a household’s processes.

These custom post types then have relations that I also want to represent e.g. one question could have several answers or "add on posts". defining these relations is handy because in the "GUI" they can be used for all kinds of stuff.

The sidebar is handy for a linkage per type or supertype, as a sort of "also see" but then auto generated based on the relations I have defined.

So we have like a chaos state where all kinds of blogposts come in, hundreds, of all kinds of stuff.
Then during an "active stage" some are ordered into "projects" (and more types, I have to think on that more types e.g. "budget")
Because of that "active stage" we empower ourselves to use extra fields, workflows and relations between other custom post types.

The nice thing about this is this is how humans naturally operate: first we collect stamps and whenever we have a lot of stamps we begin to order them. We like to work in that way and that is how the system will support it.

Because every household is roughly the same this taxonomy and its relations should be defined so that not every user has to go through this him or herself.

I hope its not too complex but furthermore a project never stands on itself. A project in a household is I think always related to a contact, a service, etc… and is always tied to a set of requirements. And in a household these are tied to the set of goals the household sets. But by working from the bottom-up it might do the trick to slowly bottom-up via a hierarchical system come to defining the household goals which can then link to household budget posts which then link to the expenses and revenue system of the household.

The interesting thing about blog posts is that they function as the same kind of thing as a "request" in ALM: it can be all kinds of stuff but we tie it later to "an RFC". But it is also broader: blog posts can be added without being part of a project (or … they are always part of a project but the blogger has really no idea that he is actually doing this as in 99.99% of all weblogs around the web).

The household applications in the household framework

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I’ve been thinking a bit more about the household application. Just some small points:

- while there are now life hackers i think the time for hacking is over and we need life architects
- the household architecture should really be the job of experienced architects i think i will convert http://householdframework.org/ to a buddypress site to make it a community, i dont have the money to pay $100 for another server though so if people want to join in to share the costs that would be really cool – mail me

- some basic principles / contexts are:

– owner of own date so disconnected social networks etc..
– scalable from household to company
– it contains 2 parts: one public part and one internal private part which "sync"
– uses best practices and patterns from companies / larger IT frameworks scaled down to household level

The growth from an immature household to a mature household to a company should be encouraged by the system.

To give a layman description:

1) A man blogs hundreds of things but also a piece about Star Wars because he saw the movie and tags it "star-wars"
2) The man discovers he likes Star Wars and blogs some more about it and tags all of them as "star-wars"
3) The man decides he blogs so much about Star Wars that he sets up a separate section on it (e.g comparable to http://edward.de.leau.net/about/synology or any mini site) with more specific related content like links to forums, own layout, links, whatever
4) The man decides to set up a special blog about it on an own site e.g. starwars.mydown.com
5) The site turns in a community
6) The man adds a shop and starts to earn money
7) The shop begins to grow and integration is needed with his back-office household internal finance system , which means the household finance system should be scalable as well and "grow along with it" so first only for "budget for a household" but be able to grow to a more mature financial system automatically
8) The man decides to start a company around Star Wars and starts making special products e.g. posters for Star Wars, he now has suppliers, customer database etc… So also his previously household addressbook has to be scalable enough to grow to a CRM system, Buyer system, etc…
9) Thing go great and the man has to hire additional resources and he runs multiple projects with multiple issue systems and change management systems and requirements management systems etc… alongside it.

Another use case would be:

1) A man buys the Star Wars movie for $10
2) He writes a blog piece about it with some ads around it
3) The long-tail income from the blogpost generates him $20
4) The back-end financial system should be table to correlate the "buy X" to "earned money with X" where we need a strong taxonomy system that is able to lay relations over multiple systems.

I think the basic thought is that the system will grow any household in a company and guide them along the way. Contrary to focus first hand on "making money" it will just let people do what they like. Just write blog posts / content on any subject and slowly grow along with it. So when a household just needs a simple address book online, it is in there, but when a more complex "addressbook" is needed heading to a mini crm system, that will be scalable. And when a larger CRM system is needed it will also scale to that. It will help a household to generate revenue alongside the goals they choose to be their main goals. It will not focus on "generate the most money" but "generate money if you want up to the point you want and only with things you find fun anyway".

Another principle is that anything is connected with anything. In the example above "Star Wars" starts out as a "tag" in a simple non hierarchical taxonomy system. That taxonomy system however will become more complex. the man sets up /starwars/shop,  /starwars/blog, /starwars/shop/product1, /starwars/supplier/supplier1 etc… It is nice to keep the URL hacking approach and try to stick with this. because in the physical shop we will see /starwars/shop/product1 while internal in his household we will see in the budget and revenue system also /starwars/shop/product1. So will have a complex set of relations between items in the taxonomy, several flat representations but also in some cases an object or a static record/tuple or even later on a complete system around it. It "grows".

Just as IT methodologies have accepted that change and new thoughts happen every minute and form methods around it, the household framework or set of applications are able to adopt to change in relations to each other. They are pretty dynamic. They are no "fixed" household contact / addressbook but are something that can be an addressbook on day 1 but grows to be a CRM system integrated with all other items on day two, sitting in the taxonomy of the household and to the requirements incl. use cases of the more mature household on day 2.

Which means that maybe every "term" in the life of a household is not really a "tag" but it is more complex because it needs to scale. The problem is of course that we have no overall taxonomy system yet.  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy  and besides that we will have to merge the concepts with object oriented thinking. Each item will have an object attached which will probably live in different oo hierarchies and must be flexible enough to be  created on the fly.

(new) WordPress Custom Posts and Taxonomies and custom fields and URL design: I’m lost!

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A lot has already been written about URL/URI design, the new WordPress 3.0 enhance support for Custom Posts and Custom Taxonomies so I leave it to the reader to "Google-Upon" it to find out out more about it.

The new WordPress additions bring WordPress a step closer to a real CMS system. A step closer since it will bring many new WordPress applications enabled by these new options but it also makes it apparent that it is really in the core a system for building weblogs.

In CMS systems very roughly spoken we have something called nodes which is a very generic "thing" often tied to a unique URL. So /animal/goat is the node about a goat.

To be honest I’m currently totally LOST with regards to the architecture behind WordPress with these new custom posts and taxonomies enhancements.

I just take a little outtake on what’s now present:

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So… the core thing I don’t understand:

- why is there the difference made in all these types of content while they could have just become the same thing.

In the example above you can decide to make a custom taxonomy for movies e.g. if you write 100 posts about startrek1 an 100 posts about startrek 2 you could make a term "movie" and a taxonomy "startrek1" and "startrek2" to label your posts with. When you then type /movie/startrek1 you get all posts about startrek1. Sadly when you type /movie you do not get all posts where you used a taxonomy related to that term.

In the example above you can also decide to make a custom post type "movie" you can then write a custom post of type movie called "startrek 1" and the benefit is that with /movie/startrek1 you have unique url to your startrek1 postingS(!) and with /movie you get all your movie posts. Nice for url hacking.

In the example above you can also decide to make a custom field "movie" to tie to your e.g. blogpostings. So you write a post about startrek1 and then fill you custom field "movie" with "startrek1". In this case you do not get any url support…

Is there any difference here what you try to achieve from the point of the social graph/urls? Nope.

Reading through the forums you can now e.g. also see questions about comments. When you tie in buddypress you even could say that /movie/startrek1 could involve your forum or group you wanted on that page.

In short: both in the database storage and is the url representation of "objects" and/or "taxonomies" and/or "whatever" I don’t understand which way all of this is heading.

Because in my viewpoint all of this is much simpler when I look at it from the viewpoint of a url (and url hacking). An endpoint of a url is simply a node, whatever on that node is. It "represents" something that could just as well be the "term".

I think that (custom) fields, (custom) posts, (custom) taxonomies are all of the same. If I would be a facebook person I would say that /movie/startrek1 is an endpoint for everything around that movie. What I would want is say /contact/edward.de.leau is the node for "me". and /contact/edward.de.leau/addresses shows then all my addresses. While /address/mystreet_63_amsterdam shows my address and /address/mystreet_63_amsterdam/contacts shows all persons living on that address.

I would expect not only url handling doing this (so everything is clickable) but also the database structure underneath e.g.:

image 

And If I would become even more madder I could even go as far as to say:

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Taxonomies versus Custom Post Types example 1

Suppose you have –whatever- relational database (just pick one) and you want to represent the records as custom-post-types of type <table_name>. No problem. Just loop through the list of tables and add them as custom post types (register_post_type(‘<table name>’,$args);). The fields of the records then become custom fields which you attach to this custom post type via e.g. a nice meta box on the right hand side.

So /wp_term_relationships/record_1 would display the contents of that first record another one would be /wp_posts/recorcd_23

The problem is now how you are going to represent the relations between the tables (hence relational database). What you want to indicate is e.g. that with 1 record within a table there are 3 related records in another table e.g. wp_term_relationship –> wp_posts. A nice thing is that /wp_term_relationships shows all records of that table.

Laying the relation now is more difficult since you can not lay relations out of the box. You have two choices here. Since we have two relations outgoing out of the custom posts types either via custom fields or via a custom taxonomy.

1. via custom fields you would have to code a custom field that does a query on all custom post types of a certain record and then pick the ones that are related. In the gui you then would have to make them links to the correct custom post type object of the related item.

2. via a custom taxonomy you could create a custom taxonomy per record e.g. wp_term_relationship_record_1 and then "tag" the records that are related with this custom taxonomy.

In terms of work it is the same: you have to go to the specific record and then click either the custom field relations or click the custom taxonomy entries.

The advantage of the taxonomy direction is that it becomes a hyperlink and brings you to a record 1 page where it shows all related records. Unfortunately this is not the custom post record 1 page, so you have to code something for every entry to show to custom post on top (or something likewise).

The advantage of the custom fields is that the items will be more or less more easier to select via your own written selection system. The disadvantage is that they will not be clickable in the gui. So you will have to write that link to the custom post type object yourself AND you will have to add a loop on there yourself showing all related records.

So in this example:

/wp_posts/  : shows all records out of the box IF using custom fields otherwise shows nothing if using taxonomy
/wp_posts/record23 : shows the record23 posting but the related records you will have to add yourself (when using custom fields) or visa versa: shows all related records but not the custom post object of record 23 itself (when using custom taxonomy).

I don’t know yet which is the easiest way.

One in-the-middle-solution could be to also "tag" the initial record with the custom taxonomy of the relation and then define that one to be "sticky" so that it appears on top and when coding against it so you know which one is the "from" and which ones are the "to".

Irritating issue 1, the language bar does not work

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image

I don´t know about you but my life consists of a lot of tasks I have to perform, and a lot has to do with computing.

The general problem is that with each task you run into irritations or issues, so that the initial task e.g. writing a document, which would take you half an hour suddenly costs you a full day because of strange things happening in the word processor, OS issues, laptop weird things, connectivity issues, people issues, mail issues and so on. Its not even so much computer oriented but just in general ´things´ come up that needs to be solved first before you can continue. And the higher the pressure the more irritating it is that things come up which have nothing to do with the main task.

Before some nerd calls ´buy a Mac´, this basically is not the direction I want to take this. I worked some time with Macs, within various Linux versions, Unix, various Windows versions and believe me, this pattern is just universal. Its independent of computers. When you have to write a letter, you cant find a pen, when you have a pen, you discover the last stamp was gone, when you want to write the letter you discover that you wrote the address on a paper which you left at a friend and so on and on.

There are so many of these little things each day that I’m almost thinking on starting a side blog especially around these little irritations.

The current mini issue right now is that my language bar is disappearing behind my start bar (see above), which means I cannot switch my laptop to the laptop keyboard. Even when I go to control panel and check the key combination which should do the trick it well…. does not.

So here I am trying to figure out where the key is for ±“;: ah! this one ":", and of course when you then try to Google you find the gazillion noobs who wonder what a language bar is at all and how to enable or disable it, but pretty much no conclusive hits on especially this problem: it works but it does not react, even to the key combinations.

So…then  you have the choice between spending investigation time in this problem or losing about the same amount of time finding the correct keys. The first option would solve this permanently so I have to do this else I go crazy, the second option is the way to go because I don’t want to spend time on it now but it means a constant swearing while doing it.

Do you recognize this=;:±Òp^_&!"#$%&_()”?  ah… ?

some people I found with the same issue±`=:

http://www.techtalkz.com/windows-security/150672-language-bar-does-not-respond.html (unfortunately no replies)

(the amazing thing is that my post appears as #2 on Google about 5 minutes after I pressed send, which makes it a sort of meta irritating feedback loop to look for a solution and then finding myself talking to me about the problem…) (however, technically seen It stares me in the face how well Google actually works, it really shows up2date content directly, I have an instantly great respect wow in the face feeling for the architects there. It works for me like this: 5 seconds to think wow, then the thought what if a customer came to me asking for this functionality. Then a spinoff of threads which makes me branch off to different directions instead of focusing first on this issue. So hmm… what if a customer, and I mean a LARGE customer, came to me and wanted this. It would cost quite some money, but he probably would have the budget. It would require a lot of hosting-storage facilities, very fast network access, agreements with telcos, smart software, probably some innovative distributed computing things, probably some smart distributed database system, some new revenue stream ideas that are not already out there i mean there are zillions of things to do besides selling keywords and ads, a lot of marketing effort and probably a year or two to set the thing in place for a beta. I think people would also like to take a picture with their camera and then get feedback. E.g. I make a picture of my problem with the language bar and immediately get the solution, however for now back to the issue…)

Every Spartan had 20 slaves on average

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imageimage At the Height of its Power, Sparta, in 400 BC, had 25.000 citizens and 500.000 slaves. I wonder if that relation (1:20) a) can also be applied to other organizations and b) if it is recursive e.g. if from the 25.000 citizens only 1190 really had the power.

E.g. that on the world ( 6.7 billion) only 6,706,993,000/21 = 319 million are really at the top of the pyramid and from that 319 million only 15 million are really influencing the decisions and only 723356 people are at the real top and from that top about 35.000 people are globally the top of the top. (affluence has about 20.000 members).

I don’t want to be a slave.

Backup and operations of your PC or Laptop

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After I lost 2 months of mail of Outlook I started thinking on the root causes of the problem on why I didn’t push the button to backup and it brought me to a wider problem/gap in the household IT landscape.

Within most enterprises there is a complete large department “operations”, they operate according to process frameworks like ITIL and they use advanced software to govern the installed software base, backups, security and much much more.

Of course one household is much too small for such an overkill on tooling and processes but still what we can learn is that apparently there is a gap between total chaos and full control since a household still is faced with doing these backups and having to do a restore once in a while and in need of operational information.

The reason that most households live in chaos around backups, security and operations of their “IT environment” is that the knowledge is not out there. It’s simply for some strange reason not on the Internet. Households are left totally on their own.

If you Google or surf the Internet for software you will find a gazillion websites which will show you the FUNCTIONAL description of software and how cool it is to use it. E.g. most all sites on http://populair.eu/software. but for MANAGING your software you have to go out and try to gather stuff from forums, discussions lists, faqs, and so on.

Let’s take “firefox” for example: you will find a gazillion websites and weblogs on what kind of cool things you can do with Firefox. When you look for backups you will need to actively go and look for a product specific for Firefox (e.g. the profiles information on the wikipedia help pages) which will do “backups” (e.g. a well known extension/add-on). However when you want a backup solution for your household you do not want to install for all the dozens of pieces of software seperate backups tools. Since you do not want to run or even spend the time and energy to find backup products for all you single pieces of software. You want something simple, just 1 backup tool that finds you stuff and can also handle disaster recovery and recovery of older version of your installed base.

Furthermore knowledge on what to backup is scattered or sometimes not even out there. E.g. what do you actually need to backup from Firefox? (profiles directories, profile.ini, more?) or from Total Commander (ini files, key, extensions)  or from Active Sync? or from Google Earth? or from Outlook? It will take you a long time investigating each product or even sandboxing each product and go out hunting for registry keys, configuration files, data on so on.

This does not stand on itself. Households are left on their own when it comes down to “a way to manage all those zillions of passwords”, “a way to manage licenses and keys”, “a way to govern security”, “finding out yourself how to create a how network”, “creating a central software repository”, “finding out what to backup”, “finding out how to and what to restore”. Everyone is doing the same thing for themselves over and over again and shared at the coffee machine in individual bits and pieces. For the less computer minded people: they call up their “technical friend/nephew/collegeau) to help them with operational aspects.

So I have started with some basic ideas on the governance on this. I make an “application directory” (to distinquish it from the /program files directory for practical needs) and an “data dir”, which should contain the bulk of stuff to backup. I also began giving out id’s to the things that are installed in most cases and to describe against those numbers, where the installation software is located (e.g. firefox but also each extension and theme and plugin) and how backup and recovery is handled. I also started writing a batch file which works according to these numbers so I can see what it backups (in some cases a merge/sync is needed instead of a backup). Against those same numbers I have added chapters in our wiki.

In time I will put this information under an “operational” chapter on the household framework (http://www.householdframework.org). It’s really missing out there.

spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution

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I stumbled upon a posting of Luciano who quoted Einstein:

Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.

This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it.

Where after he gives 10 tips to do precisely that.

I gave the following comment on that:

I dont agree with Einstein (love saying that). It’s basically the example on how NOT to approach a problem.

IT Projects massively failed and fail because of this way thinking: spending a lot of time defining the problem and then a short amount of time solving it. It’s a waterfall way of approaching complex problems. Which is pretty old fashioned.

RUP (wikipedia) and Agile methods (wikipedia) brought a new paradigma: iterative loops: so definitely not spending a lot of time in definition/analysis phase but going through loops of iteration with constant change because not many people can think up a complete solution in front. Normal people change their mind every day and get more insights every day.

Thus you solve the problem in parallel to defining the problem.

Vague idea on my once-to-be addressbook

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image

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1. full text seach
2. multiple toolbars e.g. Contacts A-Z, Households A-Z, Companies A-Z, telephone list, birthday calender, user-editable
4. Tree with free editable categories e.g. families, companies,
social networks : functions as folders for contacts
5. list of contacts, represented in different styles, drag-and-droppable to the tree structure
6. attributes of contacts sortable on anything
7. contacts data: integration with mail, phone, photo album, todo list, agenda, etc…

In summary:

- provides relations between contacts
- provides relations between groups
- can handle contacts in multiple groups
- groups have properties as well e.g. households have addresses, anniversaries, etc… (not yet correct in the picture), the tree
should contain everything including the contacts. actually the tree and the green blocks list are the same objects

Four Chords, 36 Songs

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image

A while ago I ended up at Musipedia, which lets you search for songs based on piano playing (and cords and drawing and singing…). When I “sat behind the piano” and started to play it brought up songs with basically whatever melody I (non musician) played starting from the middle-ages.

It entered my mind that it is not even remotely possible anymore to find any original song, whatever you play (here), even the craziest combinations, bring up existing songs!

I think that if you do find an original song it will be worth a lot money but I think they have already crossed the possibility out of existence by creating this tunes database.

Bright ideas come to us at night, not in office hours

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from couriermail:

EARLY to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise, so goes the old proverb. But it seems the advice holds little truth.

Research now suggests that if you want to be the wisest, you really need to stay up – well, until 10.04pm at least.

This is supposedly the best time for a eureka moment, according to research.

And around a quarter of us feel we formulate our most cunning plans when we are burning the midnight oil, a survey of 1426 adults found.
By contrast, despite what many managers may believe, daytime in the office is not conducive to blue-sky thinking.

The afternoon, when most people are at work, is when an overwhelming 98 per cent of those polled say they feel most "uninspired".
The creativity drought just gets worse over the nine-to-five working day, hitting rock bottom at 4.33pm.
When asked about methods they use to get their creative juices flowing, 44 per cent said they took a shower.
Unfortunately for mankind, even when we do get a stroke of genius, more than half of our ideas are lost for ever.
When inspiration strikes, 58 per cent of us fail to write the idea down immediately and forget it, according to the poll conducted by hotel chain Crowne Plaza. Women were better than men at jotting down their best ideas for posterity.
A third of over-35s chose to scribble the thought on the back of their hand, perhaps having learnt from experience how forgetful they are.

The findings echo an Italian study in 2006 that found those who stay up late have the most original ideas.

Night owls came up with the most creative thoughts – perhaps because they are more likely to be unconventional and bohemian than early birds – according to the research by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

There is probably so much complicated truth behind this that I hope they study this further. It is well known that our greatest geniuses, e.g. the last Homo Universalis, Rene Descartes, never rose early and always worked through the night. There is something more behind this. Probably much more. Some theories:

  • I think that it has also todo with “zen”. At night, all work is done, all is quiet and a person can analyze, build thoughts on thoughts and run a chain of thoughts without being stopped or distracted.
  • It might have todo with flow and becoming into the “flow” (I have the audio book of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi)
  • I think it has also todo with subconscious processes: putting someone physically next to someone else degrades performance of brain-jobs. (However it will improve things for physical compiled knowledge e.g. bicycling). Whoever invented open offices didn’t understand anything about humans. Companies who place their resources in one open space typically are dumping the remote possibility of new bright ideas or good solid plans, unless these employees work throughout the night without physical beings around them.
  • To fully utilize brainpower of humans you need to put them in a place without any physical presence of other human beings, that happens at night.

Maybe some of you have noticed this at work. When you are working from home you typically generate a large amount of work in “thinking up stuff” like plannings or architectures or creative concepts. You have limitless brainpower at such stages. When you are sitting in a space with other physical human being present, no matter if everyone is quiet, it will take you much longer to progress on real creative thinking to solve puzzle pieces. Chances are you will never find that brilliant solution or concept.

However, although we live in an information society, the social pressure to be present from 07.00 to 16.00 is simply there, somehow reducing or limiting the possibilities of whatever you are working on and making it very production like and very un-entrepeneur like. I realize however that probably the largest crowd likes to be a 07.00-16.00 production-like person. Make planning, do task, fail or succeed, deliver, next planning.

Certainly you have come up with some brilliant ideas in your lifetime, which are not the ones you think yourself as brilliant but the ones which others find brilliant. I think we need to classify these moments and find out if we can mimic the circumstances, but, possibly, also the attributes of that person at that moment in time. We could possibly make some improvements on “improvement thinking”.

Online Facturen decentraal opslaan

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Veel diensten bieden de mogelijkheid om online facturen te bekijken: eneco, ziggo, kpn, t-mobile, visa en noem het maar op. Vanwege diverse redenen (scheelt bomen, scheelt enorme kosten) geven steeds meer bedrijven die mogelijkheid.

Omdat het aantal verschillende websites om in te loggen om die te verkrijgen steeds groter wordt incl. bijbehorende wachtwoorden wil ik die facturen in mijn eigen huishouden beschikbaar hebben, automatisch en liefst in text formaat zodat ik ze automatisch kan koppelen met mijn financieel systeem.

Ik denk dat dit een van de drivers wordt voor de huishouden server. Ik denk dat huishoudens over 10 jaar allemaal een interne server hebben waarmee ze op allerlei manieren interacteren met de buitenwereld en een van de modulen is de facturatie.

Veel huishoudens zijn al een eind met die interne server. Als je de forums volgt rondom NAS-sen zie je een veelvoud van applicaties, meest gebruikt zijn interne wikis, eigen email server, meda streamer, interne weblogs, webmail en exchange achtige applicaties e.d. Je hoort het ook wel bij de koffie automaat. Maar er zijn honderden meer best wel grappige ideeen.

Dat is natuurlijk niet iets wat op zichzelf staat, dat gaat een richting op waar zodadelijk bedrijven oplossingen voor gaan aanbieden.

Veel van die functionaliteit speelt zich nog af in het hobby gebied zoals eigenlijk altijd met nieuwe software. De toekomstige markt is echter enorm aantrekkelijk. Denk ook aan directe integratie met alle suppliers/diensten.

Specifiek rondom facturen zie je nu dat eigenlijk geen enkel bedrijf nog de mogelijkheid biedt om via programmatische weg die facturen binnen te halen. Dat zou heel eenvoudig kunnen met een webservice (we leven ten slotte in het web2.0 tijdperk). Qua technische implementatie een weekje maar waarschijnlijk een half jaar om dat met alle toeters en bellen (project, architectuur, legal, communicatie) daadwerkelijk te doen.

Dus, omdat ik dat nu al wil (ik loop graag op de troepen vooruit), moet ik een workaround verzinnen. Ook die is niet zo moeilijk. Met wget kan ik eenvoudig een website scrapen. Ik kan dus via wget ook de authenticatie op de site van de supplier nadoen en dan de seperate facturen binnen halen, jammer genoeg soms in PDF vorm.  (p.s. support freedom).

Maar om dat een beetje te standaardizeren wil ik eigenlijk per supplier, dus bijvoorbeeld “eneco” ergens die “nagemaakte webservice” documenteren zodat andere mensen die kunnen gebruiken, maar ook, als eneco eens zijn site aanpast dat ik niet zelf elke keer mijn code hoef te updaten maar dat dat op een centrale plek gebeurd.

Dat is een van de todo zaken op http://householdframework.org (zodra ik er tijd voor heb).

There is room for a new weblog system

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I think there is room for a new weblog system when that system would provide full front-end editing. Meaning inline editing of posts and creating of new postings. E.g. a little bit of a crossing between tiddlywiki and wordpress.

Phil Collins

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In my ongoing quest :) I concluded that I also need “nodes”. If I write about an artist e.g. Phil Collins I want to link to a specific node. If I specify on a centralized social network or on a decentralized social network that Phil Collins is included in my list of favorite artists (e.g. on profiles) I need some “node” to refer to.

Under that node I can e.g. link-back to external Phil Collins nodes e.g. the Jango Phil Collins page (or Last.FM etc…) I can also dump everything related specifically to Phil Collins.

That some node will then used within my household in a later stage to link to in my personal mp3 player. Within my personal mp3 player I will have a link back to that node, causing full integration. I will also link it from e.g. my cd collection or my wishlist or my tasklist or my reviews etc… it will function both as mashup and as a term page. I don’t need to put general information on there since that is already in wikipedia and on the thousands of artist pages. I would however put e.g. my top 10 favorite songs of Phil Collins on there since that is personal data which belongs in my personal domain.

I don’t need to include every artist on earth but only the artists of which I like.

So I have to type the node. If I would type it as a namespace like thing music.artist it would be somehow be hierarchical and would conflict possibly with later namespaces that may conflict. e.g. book.artist.

So maybe just the term “artist-node” is enough which I can apply in WordPress by applying a new category. Probably the slug /category/ is also not really correct. maybe it should be uhm….  /brainnode/ or something like that, I have to think that through. Hmm… why not “/has/” or “/his/”. so edward.de.leau.net/has/brainstorm or /his/brainstorm or /has/artist or /his/artist.

Obviously the same nodes will be created for e..g companies with which our household has contracts e.g. ziggo, essent or kpn which again have a direct relationship with our internal budgettting application.

These nodes may have specific or generic functionality/services in the future depending on their type don’t know yet. But it would be logical if music.artist OR “artist-node” e.g. has a default music player while that is not necessary on the ziggo-mode. So it would be a real object like thing. So “the object” “ziggo”  in our household contains information on ziggo and links and specific functionality as well as the “object” phil-collins which would contain its own information but is of yet another type. Within a weblog it could represent itself in the form of a blogposting with the type “music-artist”  but within my music collection tool it would represent itself by showing me all my cds of phil collins.

Independent of the representation the “object”, phil collins is a “thing” somewhere floating in this household and thus should either be the same object or something highly linked because I don’ t want to have double information. I don’t want write the list of cds of phil collins I have on my weblog and do the same thing again in my music tool. I want to ask the object to reveal itself in a certain environment (I think).

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Geld en tijd problem zijn slechts afgeleide aspecten van je huishouden framework

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Ik las hier een stuk waar ik qua visie totaal in verschil.

Verbetering bereik je niet door vager te worden maar juist door alles SMART te stellen. Dat kan prima bij huishoudens en zeker op gebieden als geld en tijd die je spendeert.

Huishoudens (ook die van 1) zijn niet anders dan bedrijven op dit vlak. Elke euro die je uitgeeft kan gekoppeld worden aan een budget post. Maar dat is slechts een tabel. Elke budget post is gekoppeld aan een DOEL stelling van een huishouden
en en elke doelstelling is gekoppeld aan DRIVERS. Iets als "ik wil lol maken", "doel: heb hobby", "EIS: heb hobby muziek" wat leidt to bepaalde ACTIVITEITEN. Een ervan kan zijn "koop nieuwe cd genesis" (met daarin een aantal STAPPEN),
een van die stappen is de daadwerkelijke koop van het ding oftewel door jezelf (todo item als view op de complete lijst van activiteiten) oftewel op naam van iemand anders (wishlist item als view op de complete lijst van activiteiten). Een review schrijven op je blog over die cd kan ook prima als activititeit hierin passen. Zo kun je alle elementen in je leven hier rondom traceren naar basis doelstellingen, sterker nog je kunt aspecten als geld optimaliseren hierin meenemen en aanhouden tegen die doelstellingen en op basis daarvan gaan optimalizeren en keuze maken tussen producten, leverancieers of je doelstellingen bijstellen.

Daarnaast zijn er standaard processen (bij bedrijven BPM), bijvoorbeeld aankoop proces. Als je die uitschrijft volledig voor je huishoudens en mooi in modellen toont dan kun je ze gaan categorizeren, en pas dan zie je opeens de gaps of dingen die veel en veel meer tijd kosten en pas dan kun je doelstellingen maken. Micro voorbeeld: je moet noteren dat je comment spam op je blog hebt, het huishouden use case / proces is : ga naar blog, select comment, delete comment o.i.d. Je gaat meten hoe veel tijd dit kost en komt erachter dat dit veel meer tijd kost dan in je doelstelling die je hieraan gerelateeerd hebt. Je gaat dan op zoek naar een oplossing maar definieert deze eerst: "minder dan 1 uur per week besteden aan oplossen comment spam.". Je gaat dan oplossingen definieeren en selecteert "Akismet". Je schrijft dan op hoelang je bezig bent met operationele zaken rondom Akismet (installeren, updaten, bijhouden e.d.) want dat zijn zaken die je in de rol "functionele administratie van tools" doet (ook handig die volledige lijst van rollen) en je schrijft op hoe de zaken zouden moeten zijn:
automatisch alle comments weg, en dan de uitzonderingen oftewel terugzetten, verwijderen. Je weet dan hoeveel tijd "akismet" totaal kost en vergelijkt dit met je eerste doelstelling. De tijd je hieraan besteed neem je op in je huishouden processen lijst dus inclusief beheer en gebruikers taken.

Slecht voorbeeld omdat 1) het IT iets betreft en 2) te micro is maar je kunt het bij elke seconde die je spendeert doen incl. slapen, sex, eten, tandenpoetsen, biertje drinken. Daar moet je veel beter over nadenken. Waarom neem ik dat biertje,
wat doe ik allemaal precies, hoeveel tijd kost me dit, hoeveel geld kost me dit (relateren naar doelstellingen). Hoeveel geld had ik nou willen spenderen aan doelstelling "socialize", wat is de driver rondom "socialize" en is die belangrijker
dan de een andere driver OF doel en dan niet precierer in de vorm dat je dit in  een word document noteert maar preciezer in de zin dat je elke atomaire eenheid classificeert en een record maakt in een database met relaties naar elke andere atomaire eenheid die hieraan gerelateerd is.

Het probleem is dat huishoudens nog niet de tools hebben die bedrijven hebben. Ze hebben ook nog niet de awareness bereikt dat door diezelfde structurering te gebruiken en daadwerkelijk processen op papier te zetten en te relateren aan kpi’s, metrics, doelstellingen, drivers, huishouden use cases en stappen e.d. ze niet alleen walgelijk veel tijd maar ook vooral geld in de toekomst gaat besparen.

Zolang die tools er nog niet zijn kunnen huishoudens dit niet doen omdat je dit soort zaken niet met Excel, Word een Mindmap of een Weblog kunt doen, daar heb je specifieke tools voor nodig. Omdat die tools er niet zijn kan de perceptie hier rondom nog niet worden bijgesteld en bestaan er nog lifecoaches, budgetcoaches, zijn er families met onoplosbare geldproblemen of mensen met onoplosbare tijdproblemen, verder bestaan een grote set van lifehacks bij de gratie van het feit dat een dergelijk huishouden framework er nog niet is. Een bepaalde vlek verwijderen is namelijk een standaard proces dat je automatisch uit het framework zou kunnen plukken. Binnen dat proces zijn de specifieke assets gespecificeerd en in meer specifieke bijgevoegde attachments kun je een selectie maken rondom producten met hierbij opgenomen geld en tijd voor elk product. De vraag wordt dan niet hoe je die vlek gaat verwijderen maar hoeveel geld en tijd je daarvoor over hebt m.a.w. wat is je specifieke doelstelling rondom dat  soort vlekken.

Tot het moment dat die tools er zijn blijft het gewoon chaos en vaagheid. Maar het is eigenlijk niet te voorkomen dat die tooling er komt. Je krijgt een volledig inzicht in elke seconde die je spendeert en elke euro, je weet ook waarom en je
weet dat je het er mee eens bent. Als je het er niet mee eens bent dan kun je gaan optimalizeren om minder tijd ergens mee bezig te zijn. Juist omdat die processen dan in een database/modellen staan kunnen 3rd parties oplossingen gaan aanbieden. Je koopt bijvoorbeeld een plant bij  het tuin centrum vanwege een bepaalde doelstellingen van te voren heb
je de kosten daarvan, de operationale kosten (in geld en tijd) al kunnen analyzeren en kunnen vergelijken met alle andere mogelijkheden. Die plantgegevens en data komen in je huishouden asset systeem. Het beheerproces rondom  die plant met tijd en wat je moet doen komt in je huishouden processen. (allemaal automatisch).

Tot die tijd zouden we eigenlijk ons moeten voorbereiden door zaken meer specifieker te maken als voorbereiding op de uiteindelijk migratie naar die set van tools.

Wat onze mening is over die toekomst en of dat goed voelt op slecht is weer een heel ander punt, dat heeft met bovenstaande weinig te maken. Bovenstaande gaat over het “wat” niet “hoe” dat framework binnen komt rollen.

Eds links for 2008-11-21: Why do people watch television

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Why do people watch television
Contains some interesting terms but i think most is in the wrong direction this is however what is interesting "whereas media can be forced on some people rather than freely chosen." thats probably true.