David Isenberg has laid out (again!) the case for Network Neutrality.

The largest providers of today’s Internet infrastructure are
also the strongest opponents of Network Neutrality. If their
profit stream diminishes, which it must if the Internet is to
remain neutral, stupid and open, then we weaken the
infrastructure for that which we value. This is not a new
thought, see The Paradox of the Best Network
http://netparadox.com. What is new is that the opposition of
the telcos and cablecos has now crystallized in a full-on
assault on the Internet’s neutrality. Their end game is a
corporatized Internet that stifles freedom, democracy and
innovation incidental to reifying the telco-cableco business
model. Ultimately, the vision of the Network Neutrality
movement must encompass more than the circumscription of
certain carrier behaviors; it must be structural.

We must resolve to persist until today’s dinosaurs evolve into
birds. That is, we must face the fact that if the Internet is
to survive as a neutral network, sooner or later we will need
Internet access without carriers as we know them today. So we
need to decide whether we keep the neutral Internet or we keep
today’s carriers, because we won’t be able to have both.

What’s interesting here is that you could substitute “existing health insurance carriers” for “incumbent local carriers” and “affordable, universal health care” for “network neutrality” and it would work in the health care domain. For example, the last paragraph:

We must resolve to persist until today’s dinosaurs evolve into birds. That is, we must face the fact that if affordable, universal health care is to exist as a human right, sooner or later we will need health care without the existing health insurance carriers as we know them today. So we need to decide whether we keep alive the idea of universal health care or we keep today’s existing health insurance carriers, because we won’t be able to have both.

Michael Covington on productivity.

The key principle is that unproductive people feel that they are just as “busy” as productive ones, if not more so. Life is full of things to take up your attention. A productive person knows what not to spend time on. I’ve seen plenty of Ph.D. candidates run aground by keeping themselves too busy with things that aren’t their thesis. Don’t follow TV shows or sports, or try to be too good at trivial things, or handle too much e-mail… Above all, don’t waste time on unimportant things just because they have short deadlines or a fast pace.

It is a short piece, and doesn’t take more than a minute or two to read, but is more valuable than all those seminars and books.

via Jeff Dunteman

Champlain College in Burlington Vermont is offering a Certificate in Non-Profit Management Certificate Training series which meets 2 Fridays per month September through January and has an online component using Moodle. Excerpts from the blurb on their web site:

Offered in Burlington and Manchester, Vermont, this intensive four-month series offers nonprofit leaders and staff the opportunity to gain and refine the essential skills needed to strengthen their organizations and achieve their missions. The program combines the best of face-to-face learning with ongoing discussion with colleagues and faculty via online learning portals.

Workshop Topics

• Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector
• Effective Leadership through Financial Management
• Strategic Planning
• Fundraising
• Marketing
• Human Resources
• Conflict Resolution
• Boards and Governance

Program Details

Class Size: Limited to 24 participants at each location.

Duration: 10 days of face-to-face training
Workshops run from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Registration: $1,250.00

Several casualties have been outlined over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. The most serious from my perspective is that MindManager 7 has been completely broken…and it is unusable. Bit of a bummer. MM is promising an update by September 15th, and is trying to soften the anguish by touting the upcoming version 8. While users have been lamenting the lack of updates for MM compared to the Windows version, few of the enhancements that they have been touting are on my hot list; I just hope they fix version 7 as soon as they can.

This morning I signed up for an upgrade for my two Macs; a 5-user “family pack” for $49.00, which will cost me $25.00 per machine. There is one version for everybody, and two prices, $29.00 for a single copy and the $49.00 for the family pack.

On the Microsoft Windows 7 side it is a crapshoot. Decide between three different versions, plus full or upgrade versions, plus 32 or 64 bit versions, and pay at a minimum what appears to be $79.00 for a single copy for an upgrade. Considering the fiasco of Windows Vista, Microsoft should be paying their customers to install Windows 7, not the other way around.

Both upgrades Mac and Windows appear to offer very little in the way of enhanced functionality as David Coursey says in his blog, “Snow Leopard, More Snore Than Snarl“. PC World also has a comparison of the two upgrades.

Recommendation: Sit Tight. Wait till Christmas.

I’m dipping a toe into programming my Mac… and it looks as if one of the best entry-level ways to do it is to use the scripting tools provided with the OS. They are installed under the Applescript folder which is in the Applications folder.

The script editor is a simple text editor which checks the syntax and runs the script.

After I fiddled with this for awhile, I actually went out and bought a book (!), AppleScript 1-2-3 A self-paced guide to learning AppleScript by Sal Soghoian an Bill Cheeseman. Amazon link here. It is useful and interesting to read reviews of the book, and other Applescript books, because you can gain a certain amount of insight about the AppleScript language itself. Not all of it is rosy commentary. For example, here is an excerpt from another review of an O’Reilly Applescript book…the book actually sounds quite good, however, with a publication date of 2006 it is a couple revisions back:

Apple has long pushed AppleScript as an easy-to-learn, English-like way of automating repetitive tasks on a Mac. Alas, I and many, many others have discovered from painful experience that AppleScript is hugely difficult to approach — its learning curve never seems to flatten out. Even after writing thousands of lines of code in several programs that (eventually) worked, I still feel I’m groping in the dark every time I try something new. I’ve read other books on AppleScript, looking for one that would open the magic door and reveal the simple, friendly AppleScript that’s supposed to exist.
Matt Neuburg has given us the first AppleScript book that tells the deep truth: AppleScript is a quirky, inconsistent programming language that is not only hard to learn, but hard to learn for fundamental, structural reasons. Neuburg exposes the unavoidable difficulties that are built into AppleScript’s design, and then shows us practical techniques for accomodating to them and using them.

Ok. Nevertheless, I’ve plowed on roughly halfway through the book. One of the other features of the scripting tool is the “dictionary”… this is essentially an object browser which allows you to look at all of the objects, events and commands of an application. If the developer wants to create an API for the application, they can expose objects, events and commands of the app. Here is an example of the dictionary chooser…I’m going to take a look at the Mac Mail application.

When I select Mail, I get the object browser. Commands that are unique to the Mail application appear when you select the Mail “suite” of commands. Here you can clearly see that if you want to check for mail, you can use the command as shown in the window. This suggests the following script:

This simple script will launch the mail program if it isn’t already active, and check for new mail.

More AppleScript tools

One tool suggested in the AppleScript 1-2-3 book is an enhanced Applescript editor called Script Debugger 4.5. This includes a debugger, and a greatly enhanced dictionary explorer. Very nicely done. It sells for $199. (There is a time-limited demo available, as well as number of free tools on their website.) You can install it on both a laptop and a desktop, as long as only one license is in use at one time. This really seems to take the sting out Applescripting. I admit I haven’t gotten very far in my travels yet… I’ve got a maximum script length of about 40 lines so far. Still I’m not entirely sure what all the book reviewers were making such a fuss about.

Other than simple dialog boxes for a single variable, you can’t create much of an interface in AppleScript. For more complex interfaces, with the usual Apple buttons, windows, and menus, you can use the AppleScript Studio, which grafts AppleScript capability on to the standard “Cocoa” Apple interface using the Interface Builder and XCode tools. Thats a whole other can of worms.

The open source OpenOffice looks like an attractive alternative to Microsoft Office. But when you are collaborating with Microsoft Office users, can you keep up? According to this review, the answer is absolutely not.

I could go on quoting examples, but suffice to say that OpenOffice.org 3.1’s interoperability features were wholly inadequate. When the application thought it could successfully render an object, it often mangled it beyond recognition. When it became confused by, for example, an unfamiliar chart type or an unsupported configuration parameter, it simply discarded the extraneous data. It’s the kind of half-baked file format compatibility that keeps IT personnel awake at night.

Bottom line: OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability. It severely mangled our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files, and no amount of new features or targeted performance improvements could overcome this critical deficiency. Factor in OpenOffice’s other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it’s easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne.

“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.” Glen Prickett senior vice president of Conservation International quoted in Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat.

Delicious Monster has developed a personal inventory program that works with bar codes. You can inventory your books and CDs using the iMac’s camera.

The Lean Startup, blog and workshops, has a ton of information about using a lean engineering methodology for product development.

Apple has released version 4 of the Safari web browser. Two nice features are a cover-flow interface which works like the Finder or iTunes to flip through the browser history, and a sort of marquee that shows a customizable set of pages based on pages most frequently visited. Lifehacker has a work-around to allow you to add pages of your own choosing.

I like the update. It crashes every so often, though.

Interesting take on libraries from Don Lancaster:

Many of the fundamental premises of what a
library once was now border on the ludicrous…

• That information is scarce.
• That info is only available at a special place.
• That only one copy of info is available.
• That a specialist is needed for info loan.
• That info is only available during restricted hours.
• That control freaks should be in charge of anything ever.

If libraries are to survive, they will have to totally rethink
what they are and what services they are going to offer
to which people in what manner.

He expands this in a full discussion of soon-to-be obsolete technologies.

Still I actually bought a book yesterday. In a store. (!)

But what I really want is one of these.