mind the content

Ok, after some experiments and with my friend Albert I think I nailed the whole HDR thing down. I take under exposed (exposure: -2.0) picture, store it in RAW format and then create 9 exposures (from -2.0 to 2.0) out of it. Merging those into one is the hardest part because I have to play with rather nonintuitive parameters of the algorithm, but the result is worth it. It might not be the best HDR images I’ve seen, and they might look a little bit artificial, but still the result is better than I expected. Check it out!

That’s the first time I took photos of dancing people. I didn’t before because it always was too dark for my old camera. Even now with a Nikon D80 and a f/2 fast lens I had problems and the pictures are not TAC sharp nor the white balance is perfect (hence many b&w images). Still I am happy with those, especially that I made them with fixed 35mm lens. Have a look

I have attended the Day’s tech summit. I have seen new, shiny and sexy stuff, heard nice words, promises and what’s the most important – the date: 15th November 2008. That’s when new and long awaited version of Day’s Content Management System (or maybe rather Content Management Platform) will become generally available.

When David Nüscheler (Day’s CTO) was talking about how great the new Communiqué is going to be, clients were overjoyed, most of the partners were watching closely with their breaths bated and we (Cognifide) were asking difficult questions. The answers we got were both humble and promising. Good thing is that we heard Day accepting that the current version (CQ 4.2) has it’s problems, is not that well documented and so on. Even better news is that they try to do something about it – e.g. they hired much more people to document and support it.

What’s worrying is the general approach to solving complex CQ 4.2 problems. “We admit it didn’t work well, that’s why we dropped that”, “It’s no longer a problem in CQ 5″ – that’s what we’ve heard for like half of our questions. It’s not like we’ve been shown a solution to our problems. It was rather a statement that the new system is completely different from the old one and a promise that it works the way we expect it to.

While I appreciate the courage to introduce deep changes when they’re needed, I will remain sceptical until I see them working in the real life. I am afraid that the marketing machine will make clients (and as a final outcome my bosses) even more enthusiastic about CQ and I will have to face an unknown enemy once again but with more pressure from their side. I am pretty sure that the new platform is not as shiny and sexy when it comes to developing it as how it is presented by it’s authors (and as people paying money might believe). With the completely new approach I expect completely new bugs. For sure, all Content Bus related problems passed on, are no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their Maker. And that is not because Day nailed all of them and somehow magically fixed them, but that it just dropped the Content Bus idea altogether. I don’t know how will I replace this layer of abstraction – problematic, but still logical – in my day-to-day development. Will it be another month or two of fighting to make basic things work before I stop cursing Day’s developers every morning?

You might ask why am I so negative about it. Why can’t it be that The Basel Company has finally found the perfect design and Communiqué will just work from now on. Well, the first thing that hit me on the conference was the CQ 5 pilot project – the City of Zürich site. Once again I’ve seen HTML, CSS, JavaScript and plain Java code mixed in one file (sic!), once again I’ve seen untested (despite the new promoted testing framework) project that “will be tested in the later phase”. That’s a bad signal for me as a quality-driven developer. Haven’t they learn anything? Don’t they focus on delivery instead of just implementation?

The second thing is an increased share of a open-source software in the system. Again, while I have nothing against open source, I just can’t see Day solving my day-to-day problems that just by accident lay in the code they don’t control and probably have only a little influence on. It works very slow with Jackrabbit (that CRX – Day’s flag ship that CQ is based on) despite Day having major share in it. How will it work this time? Is the problem their or mine? I wish I knew the answer.

But still I will remain an CQ enthusiast for now. I don’t know any other platform for writing CMSs that would make developing advanced systems possible while providing consistent and not-so-bad end user (author’s) interface. Also I’ve found my way with CQ 4.2 (not to mention project I delivered in 3.5), I know how to walk on the minefield set by CQ architects and still deliver something with measurable quality. If clients want, if my company requests I will solve the CQ 5 QA puzzle and will learn (once again) how to deliver projects in it. That is what I believe and I will until I get my hands on it and find out which promises were fulfilled. Until then I can just dream about CQ 5.1 and continue to do ugly hacks in CQ 4.2.

See you at Day’s Summit this November!
Jan

People are asking me why am I so stubborn to have my own website. I should behave as a normal IT guy, keep my photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube and friends on Facebook. This way I won’t have to work too much and my ‘creativeness’ will be easily accessible.

But I refuse! Even if Web 2.0 is a good world to live in I feel slightly limited by it’s walls as well as feel queasy because of it’s homogenised nature. I don’t want to be a drop in the running river of content. It’s not the placement of the content or the community around it that matters here, but the content itself. Therefore I am putting it on the banks of the Internet on purpose - here it can stand slightly above the Web 2.0 sea level, here it belongs.

Happy Children’s Day,
Jan