Now that I must waste much of my time and energy preparing to sue Robert "Okihawk"/:NEOhawk" Hawkins I must conduct discovery determining the many ways to diverted business from his employer, REALinks, LLC, and acted against all stakeholders. One place where his record is told is on REALNEO, and so I am preserving his strings of inputs here.
Rob Hawkins first popped his head into REALNEO in August, 2005, in comments from his home in Japan to posting on "Let's Make NEO Open For Business " and
Shortly thenafter, Rob Hawkins and I agreed he should come back to Cleveland and work for REALinks. LLC - Peter Holmes negotiated details of his joining the firm, which should have included a confidentiality and non-compete agreement, as is standard for hiring a CIO for a tech firm. Here is a sting of comments from the time posted to REALNEO...
Now on board, Rob is posting about his work for REALinks..
Submitted by
robataka on November 16, 2005 - 11:52pm.
I missed it, but apparently on the Lehrer-Mcneil Report, there was a section on increased individual participation in "journalism", or what they called "We Media". A large piece of the report was focused on wiki technology. Of course they mentioned Wikipedia . Apparently, wikipedia has over 2 billion hits per month. "Subscribers" to wikipedia outnumber the subscribers to the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times(and maybe one or two others) combined.
You can listen to the Lehrer-Mcneil Report report(redundant?) here .
One of my frustrations with this RealNEO site is that there is no wiki functionality. I have been using wiki technology for years and they are a really handy collaboration tool. It would be a great tool to flesh out, for example, Keven Cronin's proposal .
Okay, so its my job to make sure NEO has the functionality we want....sigh. Rest assured that we are planning a fairly large upgrade to the site which should add alot of functionality I'd like to see. And if it goes according to plans(does it ever?!), we'll have wiki functionality.
Submitted by
robataka on November 17, 2005 - 12:14am.
In my last post, I mentioned that I want to add wiki functionality to this site. Another thing I think this site should have is trackback functionality. The issue with trackbacks, of course, is spam. I am going to turn trackbacks on and see how it goes. If we get too much spam to handle efficiently, I'll turn it back off.
Submitted by
robataka on November 18, 2005 - 8:06am.
We have setup a developing/staging site with the latest and greatest. As you have noticed over the last couple of weeks, we have changed some of the styling here at realneo, and we are planning more changes. We will be doing some testing prior to upgrading this site, but we have made some progress.
We used a backup of this site and imported into the development site and then upgraded. It didn't go as smoothly as we anticipated, but we now know where the issues are. So when we do upgrade it should cause no, or minimal anyway, disruption to the site.
One of the things I did notice, is that the customized version of Drupal that we are using does not support wiki functionality out of the box. Even the new one. So I'll need to take a closer look at what needs to happen to do add that functionality. Having a dev site makes that much easier to do.
Here we see Rob "getting into the swing of things" - I thought that was his job, for which he was being paid lots of money that could have been paid to someone good:
Submitted by
robataka on December 20, 2005 - 1:55am.
Went out to dinner with my mom and George Mateyo, Chairman of Carnegie Capital Asset Management Company . George apparently handles my mom's financial affairs and had been kind enough to take a look at my resume and
provide some advice as I was planning to move back to Cleveland from Japan. So we thought it would be nice to take him out to dinner, and I actually got a chance to meet him for the first time. Great guy. Funny, intelligent, direct.
We had dinner at La Dolce Vita , which was the first time for me since elementary school (we used to have pizza there when we picked up my brother from his piano lessons at the Cleveland Institute of Music). Of course there is live opera/singing. They announced that the soprano that sings there is having her debut at Carnegie Hall in February-iirc. I am not a huge opera fan, but it was a nice experience.
The atmosphere of Little Italy is great, even though it was real cold tonight. Although we had no problems I get the feeling that parking in Little Italy is a nightmare. Looking forward to spending more time there when it warms up some...when's that? May?
Slowly but surely getting back into the swing of things....
Not that this is necessarily relevant, but the connection is interesting...
Submitted by
robataka on December 20, 2005 - 11:32am.
Sherwin-Williams , the NEO based paint company is also known throughtout the Open Source community as one of the first major companies in the U.S. to rollout Linux for their retail infrastructure. IBM has them listed on their site with one page description of what they have done. Needless to say, IBM was the system integrator and hardware supplier for the deployment of the system.
Sherwin-Williams is, as most of you already know, a 25,000 employee company with a retail operation of 2500 stores throughout the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, and 52 manufacturing plants worldwide. The IBM marketing blurb , the system includes 9700 Netvista boxen running Linux in all 2500 retail stores. The POS system will also run linux apparently.
This is a fairly old story in fact. I remember it from a few years ago while I was still in Japan. However, since I didn't know whether folks here at RealNEO were aware of it or not, I thought I would post it. If it is a repeat, my apologies.
Rob Hawkins starting to kiss OneCleveland's Ass?
It is critical the people and organizations of Northeast Ohio become effective working with open source software. This will support moving all our people across the digital divide (Open Source is free) and prepare our workforce to participate in the evolving global Information Technology economy, which is increasingly build with open source.
Whether hosting open source servers or coding in PHP, there is already a growing need for related talent here and, as the supply of talented open source professionals grows, more people and organizations will become aware of the opportunity offered by open source and demand for such professionals will increase.
To get the ball rolling, we need to distribute Linux to students and teach them how to use it and related applications (OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.). We need to develop more informal and formal training and classes in these matters in secondary, graduate and non-traditional learning environments. And those of us working in the IT space here need to lead by example.
I believe the result will be a more sophisticated, desirable, valuable workforce and lower cost public and private economies that will attract and retain people, organizations, enterprises and business, which will lead to NEO being a world center of IT
Here is some of the Rob stealing IP process... being paid by REALinks for this insight building - what an ass!
Submitted by
robataka on December 22, 2005 - 5:43pm.
Well, that title is a bit misleading perhaps. I have been looking at the foaf thingie in the edit form for a user's
account. What this thing does, basically, is to grab the information from your profile, and your buddy list and create a
foaf file out of it. The first question is what, exactly, is a foaf file?
I have been only vaguely aware of FOAF(Friend Of A Friend) having seen it around before but have never really looked at it closely.
From the FOAF Project page:
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
Okay, that's easy enough to understand. So the next question is what good is it? For what is it used?
Again, the FOAF Project page to the rescue. There is a link labeled FAQ on the site, which in reality is a link to aIBM's site and an article by
Edd Dumbill . Here is what Edd says about the potential
of FOAF:
FOAF has the potential to become an important tool in managing communities.
In addition to providing simple directory services, you could use information from FOAF in many ways. For example:
- Augment e-mail filtering by prioritizing mails from trusted colleagues
- Provide assistance to new entrants in a community
- Locate people with interests similar to yours
The concept of FOAF becomes very interesting when thinking in context of "social networking". For a while, "social networks" were all the rage. But they were closed systems, that in order to join required an "invitation" to somebody already subscribed to that network. The development of an /xml/rdf vocabulary that is open and free allows you do implement similar concepts but under your control and not limited to any specific "social network". The article is well worth the read if you are interested in this type of thing.
However, being a wide reader of various blogs, and having implemented Wordpress for some
acquaintances, I am also aware of XFN, or XHTML Friends Network . From that page:
XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their <a href> tags, e.g.:
<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">...
There is a little more detailed introduction here . So what are the differences? Not
really sure, but there is a page on the XFN site just on that topic: http://gmpg.org/xfn/and/foaf .
And here is a short critique of XFN over at O'Reilly Network .
I should note that RealNEO supports FOAF, but not as far as I can tell XFN. So perhaps its not worth worrying about.
Submitted by
robataka on December 23, 2005 - 11:48am.
Norm,
Your comment suggests many thing in that very short comment.
To make the assumption, that seems to be indicated, that you were asking if
I saw LDAP as the final "solution". The short answer is maybe, maybe not.
XFN and FOAF are attempting to address one problem area where as LDAP is
addressing another. LDAP, which stands for Light Directory Access Protocol
is basically just that, a directory service in a client-server architecture.
So LDAP says who is Norm Roulet (he is a member of realneo with this email, title, etc).
XFN and FOAF, however, while they also contain those elements, rather focus on
describing the relationship between people, e.g. Norm of Realneo is a friend of
robataka of realneo. LDAP is much more static, basically due to the fact that it
is an implementation of X.500 directory protocol. The end user has very little control
over the content. XFN and FOAF, on the other hand, are almost exclusively (under ideal
circumstances) under the control of the end-user. For example, the XFN site says this:
Note that while values such as friend are defined to be symmetric, this does not require that links between blogs be of the same types. Here, Adam feels Brad is a friend, but Brad has classified Adam as an acquaintance.
So you can see that as they stand today, while they are related, they are addressing different problem areas.
But I also think your comment hints at some other things which need to be fleshed out. In particular,
the keywords being "our", "opportunity", "regional", and "social networking". Each of these are
critical to define. Without definining these, the discussion of technology is really irrelevant other
than personal interest.
Here are the questions we need to answer:
Who is "we" to which "our" refers?
What is the opportunity? Or rather, what is the problem we are trying to solve?
How does regionalism affect the solution and/or the problem? Regionalism as opposed to what?
How does "social networking" address the problem?
By the end of December, I had secured the business of providing OneCleveland with development services for the Voices and Choices portal, which I spec'ed in Drupal, and we hired Karen Kilroy to theme, based on Move On, with the support of Michael Lehto of the Cleveland Institute of Art, who we had paid as an intern over the previous school term and who we paid extra over his Winter semester break for focused development supporting Voices and Choices - the some of the planning is captured below:
What are the sites out there that implement good principles of design? Are they usable and interesting? Are they stimulating and beautiful? Are they innovative? Why do they work?
What sites out there are unimaginative or unusable (or both) and why?
This forum is intended to generate a discussion on DESIGN for the RealNEO community. Jot down sites that you like or don't like and try to explain why you feel this way about them. We can all stand to be better educated about what makes up a good design, and looking at examples is a good way to hone this kind of perception.
As an opening salvo, I'll throw out the following links:
- http://www.ourtype.be/
This page is a good example of thinking outside the box. It's a commercial site for selling font packages. Implementation is all Flash. There's only a limited set of things in the menu, but you can scroll into other menu areas. For each menu item selected, a highly usable, customizable and visually fantastic display pops up on the right. Really a great site.
- http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/
This is the commercial site for Macromedia's Studio 8 product. Not particularly stunning or sexy, but simple and clear. Color palette is severe but consistent with the product, which works well. Tabs within the page help break up the amount of information, another simple but great idea. Embedded video can be started on demand for a demo.
This page is clean and simple: I know exactly what to do when I'm there.
- http://www.redbullcreativitycontest.be/
Another example of thinking outside the box: literally. Here's a site where the total usable field lies outside the visible window. Users can navigate the field by scrolling with the mouse. Navigation is laid down on the field along with other items. Fun stuff is laid around that the user can interact with, like picking up and moving the objects, even constructing the battery-powered flying machine. A lot of schnick-schnack in this site, but very interesting.
Planning for the future together:
Submitted by
More Better on November 8, 2005 - 11:37am.
Post thoughts on improving the Media (TV/publication/internet) in NEO
Rob didn't post again after December 31, 2005, which was a betrayal of REALinks, LLC in and of itself. Just to keep things real, and protect this fun posting in case Rob deletes it, here's the most interesting insight into the mind of the Okihawk...
Jean Luc Picard?!
Submitted by
robataka on December 8, 2005 - 8:52am.
Saw a link to a personality test over at Japundit , which matches you to a science fiction character. I normally don't do these things, but being a science fiction fan, I figured what the heck, let's give it a whirl.
hmmmm. here are my results.
I'll say it again...hmmmmm.
Click on the pic to take your test.
( categories: )
|
Nice, quick and pretty interesting survey - I'm not into sci-fi but I like this analysis... looks like 100,000s have taken the survey around the world. So, I'm some guy from Babylon 5 named John Sheridan... who are you ? |
I started on a mac, you know the one with no hard drives, and you had to swap out the floppies. I moved to windows in the 90s since I wanted compatibility with work.
I have tried a whole bunch of linux distributions and about 2 years ago settled on Gentoo. Although I must admin, Kubuntu is kind of catching my fancy lately. I installed it on my daughter's pc(we have no windows machines in the house), and I gotta admit that binary updates have their attraction for me recently. Particularly apt-get.
I originally ran a japanese site along the lines of news4neighbors but in Japanese. I was using squishdot, a take off of slash for zope. I eventually burned out doing the site after about three years. I have been on Zope/CMF/Plone since about 2000/2001 frame. I have tried out a bunch of different systems(slash, phpnuke, etc), but have never tried drupal.
I recently found REALNEO. Being from Cleveland originally, it was nice to see. I will hopefully be participating more from here on out. よã‚?ã?—ã??ï¼?