This men literally changed the World we live in. He had a vision, he failed, but he came back to change everybody’s daily habits. He pushed others to the limit and changed entire industries. Even if I don’t always agree with its company’s decisions, I will always respect its vision, its work and its dedication. Rest in peace Mr. Job.
Here are my collection of Steve’s best quotes that I aggregated over time… I hope it helps you understanding who the men was.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. “ – Steve Jobs
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.†It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?†And whenever the answer has been “No†for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.‖ Steve Jobs
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.†– Steve Jobs
“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.â€Â – Steve Jobs
“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they en up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.†– Steve Jobs
I have never been an open source software advocate. In fact, like most people, I always wondered how companies could find a business advantage in developing open source softwares and how they could make money out of it to grow. It is nice to have open source softwares, but it is hard to imagine how you could justify putting thousands of hours in open source software projects if it is not only by passion.
In this post I will explain what I think is the main factor that put people, businesses and organizations on guard when come the time to think about open source softwares. In fact, I think it has much more to do with our nature: how we naturally are as human being, and much less to do with any real business related factors.
In a follow-up blog post, I will explain how Structured Dynamics embraced open source software, how we developed the company around the concept, and how we are managing the development of our project such that it benefits all our clients along with the company. But first, let’s try to figure out why much people are suspicious regarding open source softwares.
The Fear
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.â€
– Dune, Frank Herbert
Have you ever heard someone telling you:
I found an incredible business idea! I am pretty sure that I am the first one to think about that. I will get some good money down the road!
Then, you naturally asked for more information about this great idea! And then the answer you got was something like:
Hooo! But I can’t tell you, this is really secret right now, at least until everything is ready to go.
Does this sound familiar? I does to me. I hear it often. But, why does people react that way? It is simply by fear: fearing that someone “steal” their ideas, start a company based on them, build projects or services that implemented them, and get rich while you are flipping burgers at McDonald’s.
To me, this is the main reason why people, organizations and businesses are suspicious regarding open source software: because of fear; fear of loosing something they don’t even have.
But the question is: is that rational? From my experience, and my understanding of how things works, I can certainly say that it is not. This way of thinking is not rational because it doesn’t take into account a few things:
The ability of others to do something with your ideas
The ability of others to have the vision you have for your ideas
The willingness of others to spend all their time and energy to make these ideas working
[raw]People tend to do what they want to do, and not what others wantsÂ[/raw]
The same behavior seems to happen with open source projects. When I am explaining to people what we are doing, one of the first reaction is: why your work is open and free? Don’t you fear that someone steal your project and ideas? How can you make money if it is free, people will just run with it for themselves no?
The simple answer to all these question is: no. No we don’t feature that anybody steal our projects and ideas just by cloning them from the source control. We don’t because of the four reasons listed above. We don’t because we trust our vision and our abilities to implement it in our various open source projects. And yes we can sustain the company pretty well with these projects and it is what I will cover in my following blog post.
Conclusion
Non-Open Source softwares are just like when someone has a business idea “for the next big thing” and that doesn’t want to share it with anybody else because he think that someone will take that idea and run with it by himself. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I learned with experience that there is only one person (or organization) that can make such a great idea a relative success: the person (or organization) that lives for that idea. An idea is just an idea, and has nothing great in it, until it gets implemented, until the idea lives by itself, propelled by it most dedicated advocate: its creators and their boundless enthusiasm. Any idea would fail without this… and would worth nothing; it would just be an idea.
About two weeks ago, the WordPress.com team released a wonderful new tool called the Follow Button to all theirs WordPress.com users. This button is floating in the bottom-right corner of a blogs and let readers subscribing, by email, to the blog’s publications. Each time a new blog post is published, they receive an update in their inbox.
The idea is far from new, and may even looks like old-school. However, the implementation they did is simple, really well done and really clever. Also, the wording they used in the tool is perfect (for example, using the word Follow instead of Subscribe).
The only problem is that this wonderful new tool is only available for WordPress.com users! As you may know, this blog is using WordPress, but it is a self-hosted instance. After doing some research, I couldn’t find any plugins or methods to install it on my blog. Also, the email service under this user interface is built into WordPress.com. As last resort, I checked their Jetpack plugin, to see if it got added the Follow Button to it, but apparently they didn’t (it is probably too recent).
So, I was in a dilemma: I wanted this feature for my blog, I didn’t want to migrate everything to WordPress.com, and I didn’t had the time to write a plugin that does exactly this. So what I did is to take a few hours to hack my own Follow Button using what is already existing out there. In fact, I have been quite surprised to see how easy it turned out to be.
It as been as easy as installing the really good Subscribe2 plugin and to create the UI, from the original Follow Button using some HTML, CSS and JQuery code. After some re-wiring, I ended-up with my own self-hosted Follow Button.
This is what I want to share with you here, in this [raw]Hors Série[/raw] blog post. I am pretty sure that many self-hosted WordPress blogger will want it, so I took an additional hour to write and publish this blog post.
I did two additional “improvements” to the concept:
I changed the icon to put some color in there. Not only to make it less dull, but also to bring a little bit mo attention to it.
I also added a link to my RSS feed. To me, “Follow” is not just about emails, but it is also about other syndication mediums too. However, I kept the email as the first option to keep the spirit of the tool.
Finally, I didn’t want to hack any piece of code in WordPress nor in any other WordPress plugin. The only thing that we will modify is the theme, by adding some code to it. The current implementation could be improved by upgrading Subscriber2 for example, but I didn’t want people to have to do this to enable the Follow Button on their blog.
Step #1: Install Subscribe2
First thing first. The first thing you will have to do is to install the WordPress plugin that will enable your users to subscribe, and to manage their subscriptions, to your blog via emails. We are using the really good Subscribe2 WordPress Plugin that gives these features to your WordPress instance.
Log in to your WordPress blog and visit Plugins->Add New.
Search for Subscribe2, click “Install Now” and then Activate the Plugin
Click the “Settings” admin menu link, and select “Subscribe2”
Configure the options to taste, including the email template and any categories which should be excluded from notification
Click the “Tools” admin menu link, and select “Subscribers”
Manually subscribe people as you see fit
Create a WordPress Page to display the subscription form. When creating the page, you may click the “S2” button on the QuickBar to automatically insert the subscribe2 token. Or, if you prefer, you may manually insert the subscribe2 shortcode or token: [raw][subscribe2][/raw] or the HTML invisible Ensure the token is on a line by itself and that it has a blank line above and below. This token will automatically be replaced by dynamic subscription information and will display all forms and messages as necessary
In the WordPress “Settings” area for Subscribe2 select the page name in the “Appearance” section that of the WordPress page created in step 7
On this blog, I called the page created at step #7: Follow. Once you are done installing the plugin, you can test it by visiting your Follow page and by entering your own email (one that is not attached to any user of your account is preferable) and by checking in your inbox if you receive a subscription notification. If you haven’t, you may want to take a look at this FAQ to debug any possible issue with your outgoing email service.
Step #2: Customize your Follow Page
This next step is optional. Since that the form generated by the Subscribe2 plugin is really minimalist, you may want to customize it a little bit, to change its design and to add some explanation in the page, to help your readers to understand what is going on. Take a look at my own Follow page to see what I did to customize that page.
Step #3: Add the Follow Button code in you theme
The third step is really what will morph the Subscribe2 plugin into the Follow Button. What we are doing here, is just to add the code, in your theme, to display the Follow Button.
The first thing you have to do, is to locate where the footer of the pages is generated in the theme. Open the theme folder of your blog: /../wordpress/wp-content/themes/mytheme/. Then you will have to open a few files to check where the </body> ending HTML tag is generated. The file where that code is generated really depends on how the theme got designed. You can do a search, within all the PHP files in that folder for the string “</body>“. This should give you the answer right away. Once you located that place, you are good to continue with the following instructions.
Important note: It is possible that your Theme doesn’t use jQuery by default. If it is the case, then you have to edit the header.php (or whatever the name of the file where the header of your blog is generated) of your theme, and add the following line in the <head>...</head> section of the page:
[cc lang=’html4strict’ line_numbers=’true’]
[raw][/raw]
[/cc]
If you don’t have jQuery loaded, a JavaScript error will be returned, and the panel will “freeze” in the webpage. Once you make sure that jQuery was loaded, do proceed with this code:
Or subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking on the counter:
[[ADD-YOUR-RSS-FEED-LINK-HERE]]
[/raw]
[/cc]
The only thing you have to do is to copy/paste that code above the </body> tag. Then, do the following three modifications to properly wire it in your blog:
At line #41, replace [[PATH-TO-THE-FAMFAM-ICON]]with the path of the asterisk_orange.png icon, on your blog
At line #211, replace [[PATH-TO-YOUR-FOLLOW-WORDPRESS-PAGE]] by the URL of your Follow page (the one you created when you installed Subscribe2)
At line #228, replace [[ADD-YOUR-RSS-FEED-LINK-HERE]] by the link to your RSS feed
You can get the free asterisk_orange.png icon image from the FamFamFam website. The only thing you have to do, is to download that image, and to put it in the folder you defined for [[PATH-TO-THE-FAMFAM-ICON]]. However, you can use whatever image that you prefer, that may better fit the design of your blog.
Step #4: Disable it For Mobile Devices
Some mobile devices may have issues displaying this floating window. Sometimes, the window may be floating in the middle of the device’s screen without folding-back in the bottom of the page. For this reason, you may want to disable (remove) this option if the user is using a mobile device to read your blog. You can easily disable it if the web server detects that a mobile devise is requesting the webpage by adding these two blocks of code.
First, copy and paste this first block of code above the code of the Follow button (before line #1):
[cc lang=’php’ line_numbers=’true’]
[raw]
[/raw]
[/cc]
Then copy and paste this second block of code below the code of the follow button (after line #231):
[cc lang=’php’ line_numbers=’true’]
[raw]
[/raw]
[/cc]
This code come from the Detect Mobile Browser project and is the best mobile device detection code I saw so far. What this code does, is not to include the Follow Button if the device that is requesting the webpage is a mobile device. Otherwise, the Follow Button is added to the HTML page.
Step #5: Test it!
If you are reading this step #5, it means that you finished to create your own, self-hosted, Follow Button!
Congratulation!
But the last thing that remains to be done, is to test it. Once you saved your file with the code above, just refresh any page of your blog. You should see appearing the Follow button on the bottom-right corner of your blog. If you click on it, you should see the form that let your readers subscribing to the system. If you add one of your emails, and click the subscribe button, you should get redirected to the Follow page. Finally you should receive a confirmation email that ask you to confirm your subscription by clicking on a link.
If all these steps properly works, it means that you are done and ready to provide that new functionality to the readers of your blog!
Conclusion
Even if this blog post is few pages long, I hope you found it easy to install and setup. If you have any question regarding this hack, don’t hesitate to ask them down there, in the comments section of this post. I will be happy to answer all of them.
Happy Hacking!
Translations
This blog post as been translated in Federico Bozo in Spanish. Other translations will be added to this section.
If I ask the question: “What added value(s) does the Semantic Web brings on the table?â€. So, what are the benefits that companies and organizations would get from using the Semantic Web? I am pretty sure that after asking this question, I would get answers such as:
You will instantly be able to traverse graphs of relationships
You will be able to infer facts (so create/persist new knowledge) from other existing facts
You will be able to check to make sure that your knowledge base is consistent and satisfiable
You will be able to modify your ontologies/vocabularies/schemas without impacting the description of your instance records or the usability of any software that use it (unlike relation databases)
And so on…
All these answers would be accurate. However, what if these answers would only be a part of the real added value that the Semantic Web brings on the table?
Note: when I refer to the “Semantic Web” on this blog post (and across all my writings), I refer to a set of technologies, techniques and concepts referred as the Semantic Web. So it is not a single thing, but a complete set of things that creates new ways of working with, and manipulating, information.
Strong of about 7 years of research and development of Semantic Web technologies that includes about 3 years of developing the Open Semantic Framework, that the biggest added value that I found from utilizing Semantic Web technologies is only partially related to these answers. In fact the biggest added value for me, as a developer can be resumed in one word:
PRODUCTIVITY
As simple as this. The biggest added value I gained from using and applying Semantic Web related technologies, techniques and concepts is an important increase in development, and data integration productivity.
Such productivity gain as to do with one of Semantic Web’s core attribute:
FLEXIBILITY
This is what I was suggesting in my latest blog post about Volkswagen’s use of the Open Semantic Framework: how Volkswagen uses the Open Semantic Framework to get flexibility that will lead to a gain in productivity to integrate, publish, and re-contextualize their data assets. The few gains that I listed above are part of the reason why the Semantic Web gives you flexibility that leads to an increase in productivity.
Why is this? Ultimately, it’s because of the inherent flexibility of the Semantic Web data model (RDF). This flexibility has been described in many different ways. RDF relies on an adaptive, resilient schema (from Mike Bergman); it enables cooperation without coordination (from David Wood via Kendall Clark); it can be incrementally evolved; changes to one part of a system don’t require re-designs to the rest of the system. These are all dimensions of the same core flexibility of Semantic Web technologies, and it is this flexibility that lets you do things fast with the Semantic Web.
Warning: Productivity is not synonymous with simplicity
However, I would warn people that think that productivity gains are possible because semantic web technologies are simpler to use, manage and implement than other existing technologies.
It is certainly not the case, and I don’t think it will ever be. Semantic Web technologies, techniques and concepts are not easy to understand, and have a big learning curve. This is partly true because these techniques, technologies and concepts are relatively new in the field of the computer sciences, and because they are not fully understood, defined, implemented and used.
I can now talk about this project that uses some pieces of the framework that we have been developing for more than 3 years now.
The Objective
Volkswagen’s main objective behind the development of the next version of their Web platform started by improving their online search engine, but as William Greenly mentioned, it quickly became a strategic decision:
“So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.â€
The objective is to create a platform that gives them the flexibility to leverage all the data assets they own. This flexibility will help them to leverage the data assests they have to improve not only their search engine, but also to contextualize it in different parts of their websites, partner’s websites or to promote, and publish that same information on different communication channels or devices.
The Flexibility
What is a flexible platform in that context? A flexible platform is one that can integrate any kind of information sources. Such information sources in the context of Volkswagen can be a series of relational dataset schemas spread around the World, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, old plain text technical documents about past model of cars, semi-structured documents such as webpages, etc.
A flexible platform is also one that minimally impact (if at all) the data consumers if the data structure changes in the system. This is really important since the World we live in constantly changes. This means that things constantly change and we have to reflect these changes in the data we own and maintain. This is why this point is so important, because we want to minimize the impact of the data structure changes that will happen all the time.
Having the flexibility to constantly adapt your data, while minimally impacting the data consumers of the system, enables you to make quick decision to adapt your strategy in a highly competitive World. This flexibility gives you a clear business advantage.
A flexible platform is also one that let you publish your data the way you want, in the format that is needed. Such a flexible platform has to give you access to an interface that give you access to all the functionalities of the platform without having to care about what happens under the hood.
A flexible system is one that can communicate your information on any kind of communication channels, and to any devices that have access to the Web.
Under the Hood
That next generation platform that Volkswagen is currently developing is partly based on a few of the main pieces of the Open Semantic Framework. These pieces help them to reach their goal by helping them giving the flexibility their platform needs.
The first step they gone thru was to create their Volkswagen Vehicles Ontology that is used to describe all the entities they want to index into their platform. The Web Ontology Language (OWL), along with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is what gives them the complete flexibility on how they can integrate all the pieces of information they want, in a canonical format.
Then they choose to use structWSF (the structured data web services framework). This piece gives them the flexibility to get a series of web interfaces (web service endpoints) to create, update, manage and query their data. This web service layer enables them to do anything they want with their data, from anywhere on the Web. This is possible because all the functionalities of the framework are exposed as web service endpoints. StructWSF also gives them the possibility to communicate their data in multiple different formats. This makes it the perfect flexible system to feed their information in different contexts, in different communication channels or on different devices.
At Volkswagen, structWSF is used to populate, and keep in sync, their Solr and Triple Store instances. It gives them the time to care about the more important aspects of their platform, and to care about how the data should be synced between the various specialized data management systems.
By using structWSF to manage their data, they are able to reach some objectives to make their platform as flexible as possible:
To be able to minimize the impact of data changes to the data consumers
Because structWSF uses OWL & RDF to describe all the data it index
To be able to manipulate their data from anywhere
Because all the functionalities of structWSF are exposed as web service endpoints
To be able to communicate the information in different contexts, communication channels and devices
Because structWSF has, in its core, is designed to transform all the data it indexes in any other kind of format
The Next Step
One of their longer term goal and objective is to analyze their unstructured and semi-structured textual documents to extract some structure out of them, and to index them into their semantic platform. To do this, they are looking at using Scones, which is the structWSF semantic tagger web service endpoint. Scones will use some subject reference structures such as UMBEL to semantically tag the textual document. Once the document as been processed by Scones, and indexed in structWSF, it can now be re-published in different contexts based on the reference concepts that have been tagged to it. This gives them the flexibility to leverage non-structured sources of data and to re-purpose it in different ways by publishing it in different context and in different systems.
This second system will enable them to leverage the investment they made in the past, by writing all these textual documents, and to re-purpose, and re-contextualizing, them in all kind of different contexts.
Conclusion
I think that TribalDDB and Volkswagen make the good decision for their future. Taking the business decision to develop and maintain a completely new kind of information system is not an easy decision to take. I am not saying that they made the good choice to use our pieces of the stack. The decision goes far beyond this. Such a Semantic Platform challenges everything in an organization: the people that takes the decisions, the people that create and manage the data, the people that develop the system, the people that maintain that system, the consumers of the system, the customers, the partners, etc. This is a big decision; whatever the technology stack you plan to use. I congratulate them for the decision they took.
I strongly believe that this was the right decision to take considering the future opportunities they are creating to themselves.
