by gregoryheller | Mar 3, 2006 | Uncategorized
<p><a href="http://www.civicactions.com/node/274">Last night I went to see the Eugene Jarecki documentary "Why We Fight" about America's propensity towards militarization and war. The film was disturbing. People will say it is “over the top†or slander it as “left wing liberal media propagandaâ€Â. Those people will continue to ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with a government that spends three quarters of a trillion dollars ($750,000,000,000) on its military each year. Which is more than on all other discretionary spending put together. When we put this into the context of the disaster in the Gulf Coast region, or the failings of our public schools, or the cuts to higher education funding, housing assistance, job training, health care…. well it just makes me want to throw up.</a></p> <p>click on it to read the whole...
by gregoryheller | Mar 3, 2006 | Uncategorized
<p>It has been a while since i have blogged over here. Things are great in seattle. I made a trip back to new york about a week or so ago (i guess two weeks now) and i'll be back in Ny in early April.</p> <p>I have been blogging more frequently over at <a href="http://www.civicactions.com/gregoryheller/blog">CivicActions</a></p> <p>I'll try to give some more attention to this blog in the coming weeks, but I am not making any promises, so if you're watching my feed here, you should also whatch my feed over at civicactions for <a href="http://www.civicactions.com/node/274">posts like...
by gregoryheller | Mar 3, 2006 | Uncategorized
I have been thinking about how i would improve Mozilla Thunderbird and calendar since before the GooToDo demonstration at BarcampNYC, but that really got my ideas swirling. Just yesterday, Hope and I were talking about email and productivity and the 800 messages in her inbox. So I started thinking a bit more about what I want from my email client and calendar tool. Email: I want to be able to tag (think del.icio.us, flickr, web2.0) my incoming email. I don’t want to have to move it into folders, and then remember where i put it it. I just want to tag it with the relevant keywords, and then be able to easily filter and search based on tags. I’d also like to be able to tag my outgoing email so that I could search through it too, and maybe my friends and colleagues also using the tagging feature would be able to use my tags and add their own. I would like to be able to set a “due dateâ€? for incoming emails, this could be just a way to reorder incoming emails to push off things i don’t need to deal with today, but make sure that they don’t just get burrieed under the constant stream of messages, rather resurface in 3 days when i need to deal with it by. Or, it could involve turning the email into a “to doâ€? item in my calendar (see below). Calendaring and Email: Most of my calendar events, and even many of my todos start out as email. I would love to be able to press a button a turn...
by gregoryheller | Mar 3, 2006 | Uncategorized
Why We Fight Last night I went to see the Eugene Jarecki documentary “Why We Fight” about America’s propensity towards militarization and war. The film was disturbing. People will say it is “over the topâ€? or slander it as “left wing liberal media propagandaâ€?. Those people will continue to ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with a government that spends three quarters of a trillion dollars ($750,000,000,000) on its military each year. Which is more than on all other discretionary spending put together. When we put this into the context of the disaster in the Gulf Coast region, or the failings of our public schools, or the cuts to higher education funding, housing assistance, job training, health care…. well it just makes me want to throw up. Jarecki asks the question over and over again of the people interviewed for the documentary, and most people have answers different from each other. Regular people, civilians tend to answer, “Freedom… I guess.â€? Some will add, “I’m not really sure.â€? The policy folks like Richard Perle and William Kristol say things like, “Well, it is a different world. We have to fight, we have to spend on our military, there is no other option.â€? Well, they wrote the game plan, and all they called for was increased military spending, outsourcing and military contracting, and there are only contracts, and spending if there is war, so we need to have war. Kristol said something like “We were calling for elements of the Bush Doctrine before it was the Bush Doctrine.â€? And he was proud. I am getting sick just thinking...
by gregoryheller | Mar 2, 2006 | Uncategorized
(read in booming announcer voice) “Good evening ladies and gentlement. Tonight, for your blood thirsty viewing pleasure, we have a death match of epic proportions! in one corner, hailing from the Pacific North West, ONE/Northwest’s Jon Stahl! In the other corner from Saaaaaaan Fraaaaaanciiiiisssscoooooo…. CivicSpaceLab’s ZAAAAAACKKKKKK ROSEN!!!!” I am totally kidding here (well, kidding on the square perhaps). There is a blog debate simmering between Jon and Zack about web services, application stacks, API integration vs native integration. It’s pretty interesting. On the one hand Zack thinks more folks should be building applications using the Drupal as their framework and foundation. On the other, Jon thinks that folks should “loosely join” their applications through APIs. Both of them make really good points. As part of a firm that has worked to integrate various applications, from a deployer’s perspective, I would side with Zack. It would be much easier if all good web applications were tightly integrated with Drupal. From the larger “ecology” view, it would be great if a diverse group of applications could be built and supported in a truly “CMS” agnostic fashion and grafted into various CMS tools through APIs. I am not sure that there is one right answer here. (Except maybe that open standards and APIs will rule the day!) Anyone out there developing a web tool of some sort should really look very closely at the existing tools, and application frameworks before they go off building their own application, or framework. I know that we looked at one tool that was built to be versatile, and we evaluated the time it would take to...
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