Blog

Proprietary Software CEO shoots self in foot regarding Open Source

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:53:39 +0100

I just saw a tweet from Jeff Potts, Chief Community Officer at Alfresco pointing to an article on CMSWire.com in which the CEO of Univa, Gary Tyreman, claims that proprietary software is safer, less bug free than Open Source Software. In fact, Tyreman goes as far to say:

"I’ve used them [Open Source Software] for personal projects at home, and I’ve even tried them at my own company," he admits. But he qualifies the second half of his sentence by pointing out that it was for an application which wouldn’t affect his company’s top or bottom lines. Besides, he adds, he has since replaced it with an internally written application anyway.

"You certainly can’t use Open Source for something that’s the lifeblood of the company," reiterates Tyreman.

The article follows with several claims that refute this from Jeff Potts and Matt Asay (10gen). Asay, is as bold as to claim:

that nearly every large and mid-size company uses Open Source somewhere (he’s willing to bet on 100% — his bet is based on Gartner’s 2008 finding that Open Source adoption was at 85%) and that its popularity isn’t because it’s free, but because it drives innovation in areas that matter most to Enterprises (Big Data, Cloud, Mobile) and because it is better.

I decided to check out a bit more on Univa to see if they might use Open Source themselves. Being in the 'Big Data' business it's probably a fair bet that their products run on Linux as that is what most clusters these days run. I actually found some far more interesting finds:

Their own website runs on an Open Source web server (Apache) and uses an Open Source templating language (PHP), and uses an Open Source Javascript library (jQuery). I guess so long as their website does not affect his company's top or bottom line then I guess that's OK then.

But it gets even better... Univa's main product offering, Univa Grid Engine, is a commercial derivative of the Open Source GridEngine project (originally from Sun). Now Tyreman can stick by his assertion as to how much they have committed to the code and the quality that his team may (or may not) have added. But the CEO of a company that builds a proprietary offering on an Open Source project as a core for their offering, turning around and rubbishing Open Source? Oh, don't make me laugh.

User Management in Plone - Single Sign-on, Active Directory, etc.

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:46:44 +0100

The week before last I was in Sorrento at the Plone Open Gardens and presented a talk on some work we had been doing at Netsight on doing transparent Single Sign On to Plone using Active Directory (using Kerberos). This was all in response to an intranet we had been working on the week before for the National Health Service here in the UK.

Today I just saw a post from Tony Byrne of Real Story Group on User Management in CMSes. So I thought I'd try and tie the two together and give a real world example of the flexibility of user management in Plone.

I'm often asked at trade shows and the likes "What sets Plone apart from [insert other CMS here]?". Most CMSes do much of the same thing. Some have some areas that are strong that others, or work in different ways around a particular topic. One thing that always seems to come up as a strength of Plone though is it's user management. I've yet to come across another CMS that is quite as flexible and powerful as Plone in the way that it works with managing user permissions, roles and groups.

In fact I wrote about this here on this blog almost exactly four years ago. But it is an important topic and the one thing that Tony's blog post made me think is that it is a area that maybe we take for granted in Plone and don't shout about enough.

Plone's security model is hierarchical. You can define local roles to a user or a group in any folder in the site and that role will apply for that user in any sub-folder on down. This means that you can give Mary from HR the role of 'Editor' in the folder called 'HR Policies' and she will be able to edit anything in that folder and any sub folders. But she won't be able to edit anything in e.g. the 'Marketing Folder' elsewhere in the site.

Not only that but you can assign users to groups and you can assign roles to groups in a particular location in the site e.g. Anyone who is a member of the Marketing group can have the role of Editor in the 'Marketing' folder.

Where the power then really comes is that you can use external sources of information to populate which users are members of which groups. You can also mix and match. Plone breaks down the process not into just the two steps Tony details (Authentication and Authorisation), but a total of 11 different 'facets' of user management. These are all handled by the Pluggable Authentication System in Plone and allow you to use different plugins to handle different aspects. e.g.:

Extracting credentials from the user
Authenticating the user
Storing and managing properties and information about the user
Searching and listing users and groups
Assigning users to groups

This can all be combined together to provide a very flexible system

In the case of the NHS Intranet I mentioned above, we had to create a single intranet with transparent SSO that worked with two separate Active Directory domains. Half the users are in one domain and half in another. This is a common scenario we see when organisations merge, restructure or are acquired.

Using Plone's Pluggable Authentication Service we were able to combine various authentication plugins to provide the best experience for intranet users. It will attempt to transparently log you in using Windows Integrated Authentication if you are on a Windows computer connected to one of the two AD domains. Failing that you can manually type in your AD credentials and it will authenticate them via an LDAP query to the relevant AD server. And as a third option you can be a locally defined user in Plone and have a username and password that is not in AD at all.

I'm not sure how well other systems handle requirements as complex (but quite common) as this, but I know that you can't achieve the same thing in Sharepoint without setting up multiple Sharepoint servers and separate URLs, which adds a lot of complexity, confusion and costs.

Plone Open Garden 2013

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:05:00 +0100

Once again I made the annual pilgrimage I make to the home of amazing food, ice cream, sunshine and amazing people -- The Plone Open Garden in Sorrento. This is now something like the 5th time I think I've headed to Italy for this event. Originally born as the European Plone Symposium it was renamed the Plone Open Garden to reflect the nature of the event. That is the 'Open Space' concept, but taken outside into the beautiful surroundings of the Hotel Mediteranneo just outside Sorrento. This year, Ben Ackland our Projects Director at Netsight also attended, as did my wife and daughter. We did the usual route of flying from Bristol to Rome direct with Easyjet then renting a car and driving from Rome to Sorrento. This time we had another passenger in the form of Mikko Ohtamaa (sans katana) whom we met at the airport and all drove down together. I'm now pretty used to driving in Italy, and once you get used to the fact everyone is out to kill you, and road markings and indicators mean nothing, it is fine.

Over the years, the attendance figures for this event have risen and fallen, usually depending on the general economy and what other events are going on in the Plone Calendar. E.g. last year, with main Plone Conference in Europe the attendance was lower; this year, with the main conference in Brazil, it was back up to around 60 people. Each year the concept is refined a bit more and this year I think they got it spot on. There were four or five 30-minute scheduled talks each morning from 9:30am downstairs in the conference room. Then everyone headed upstairs to the hotel lobby/bar area or outside to the garden for discussions, followed by lunch. After lunch, the combination of 'Open Space' talks and sprints kicks in to full flow.

Last year I thought things were a little bit too relaxed and it was easy to become un-productive without a clear idea of what was happening when. This year there was a bit less 'Italian Time' ;) and things generally ran to schedule meaning people were able to better plan their days. We had report-outs at 6pm every evening by the pool in which everyone got a chance to talk about what they had been working on that day. As is inevitable when you have such great people together feeding ideas of each other, there were people working well into the early hours of the morning.

Talks

There were twenty talks in total, ranging from project management tools, to new Plone add-ons, to testing. All the talks were great, but my personal highlights:

Collective.local - Thomas Desvenain & PloneSocial - Guido Stevens

What I liked about these two talks is that (by coincidence I think) they were symbiotic. Both of them implemented ideas in Plone by leveraging the existing content types in Plone and building on existing infrastructure. I think that shows the level of maturity Plone has reached. 5 years ago you would be creating new content types to deal with this, but the fact it can be done using existing types and machinery is great. Collective.local is a set of packages that allow the creation of local 'workspaces' in Plone. This is concept I have seen implemented over and over again in Plone. So much so I think it must be some kind of right of passage for a Plone developer to try to implement this. This is by far the best implementation I've seen so far.

Introduction to collective.local.* packages at the Plone Open Garden 2013 from Thomas Desvenain

Guido Stevens was showing off how far Plone Social has come in the past year. I remember sitting down with him in Sorrento a year ago looking at it, and it has come a long way and a lot of the reservations I had last year about performance have been squashed. What I really loved about this talk was the insight and theory that Guido was able to bring to the subject. He has clearly done a lot of research into the topic of social in the enterprise and *why* people would want to use it. He even went as far as proposing what Web 3.0 will look like. A brave guy ;) During the Sprint Guido worked on getting PloneSocial working within the spaces created by collective.local.

PloneSocial Roadmap PLOG2013 from Guido Stevens

Agile values, methods and software. How RedTurtle is moving into this exciting world - Massimo Azzolini

What struck me here was that if you did a search and replace of RedTurtle with Netsight, then this could be our story and experiences with Agile. Massimo talked about how they approach agile and how they have come up with a hybrid approach combining both Scrum and Kanban to solve their needs. He also demonstrated their project management tool called Penelope which had really nice integration with Google Docs for storing and working on project documentation.

Visualising Open Data with Plone - Antonio De Marinis

Antonio works for the European Environment Agency, a big Plone user. They have released a number of great Plone addons out there under the eea.* namespace. Many people know of their faceted searching add-on. This talk was mainly about their work with open data and SPARQL. I've known of SPARQL for many years now; it is a SQL-like query language for data sets. However I never really 'got it'. I didn't quite see the point of it. Until this talk. By being able to do SQL-like joins across datasets from different data sources, you see the power of it. ie. he showed a query that combined city population data from one source with geographical position data from another source to map cities by population on a map. Suddenly I 'got it'. When you start being able to query and combine multiple data sources from different open data sources around the world you can truly start to reveal interesting stats. He also demo'd their visualisation package eea.daviz which enables you to easily visualise this data.

Visualize open data with Plone - eea.daviz PLOG 2013 from Antonio De Marinis

Write the docs - Mikko Ohtamaa

Mikko is known for his no-nonsense presenting style. And this was no exception ;) He talked about the new developer site at http://developer.plone.org. This is the latest version of the Plone Developer Manual he started a few years ago. It now has the ability to be directly edited from within GitHub so you don't even need to check it out to do any work.

He made the ultimatum that anyone who had not committed an update to the developer manual by the end of the next day would be going for a swim in the (rather cold) swimming pool with him. He is a Finn. Do not mess with him.

Writing Functional Tests for Plone using Robot Framework - Asko Soukka

Testing, testing, testing. It always comes up in conference talks. I guess as a community we should be glad we have people like Asko and Rok Garbas who are so passionate about testing. Whilst so many people see it as a tedious process, these are developers that are working hard to make our lives as easy as possible.

The Robot Framework allows tests to be written in a very simple pseudo-english language to do functional tests on a site. It integrates with Sauce Labs to run functional tests (including all the Javascript whizzyness we have today) on multiple browsers remotely. Sauce Labs record the screen of the actual tests and produce videos of the test runs so you can see exactly what is going on...

....then... probably one of the best sprint hacks I've seen in a long time... he extended it to allow you to annotate the screen as the tests were run. This ends up generating informational screencasts for people directly from your tests. How many times have you had to manually create screencasts for clients or developers to illustrate a point or train them on how to do a task? This allows you to write the screencast as a test then just simply run it. You can then guarantee that your documentation screencast is kept up to date with the functional tests. I really look forward to playing with this in the near future. As someone who still drags their heels a bit with testing (especially functional testings) I see it as a way to generate screencasts that as a side effect gives you tests ;)

Generate annotated screenshots with plone.app.robotframework from Asko Soukka

Plone and Single-Sign On - Active Directory and the Holy Grail - Matt Hamilton

I gave a talk on Single Sign-on in Plone and describing the use case of a recent project we completed for the National Health Service in the UK. I demonstrated a package netsight.windowsauthplugin that I first showcased in San Francisco 18 months ago. I finally released it at the Plone Conference in Arnhem and it has had a bit more testing and use in the real world. It was great to show SSO working in a heterogeneous environment with it working on Windows, OSX, Linux and against MIT kerberos servers and Windows Active Directory simultaneously.

Plone and Single-Sign On - Active Directory and the Holy Grail from Matt Hamilton

State of Plone.com | Launch Strategy - Armin Stross-Radschinski

This is a project that is very close to my heart as I am currently the chair of the Marketing Committee of the Plone Foundation. The redevelopment of plone.com is a project that has been underway for quite some time and concreate results are coming out and we are not far from launch now. Armin detailed the background of the project, the current status and the design concept. We now have the initial HTML mockup design in GitHub and I worked on deploying a new Plone instance for us to put content into. Using Diazo we will be able to integrate the HTML mockup from the designers with the content in the Plone site. Both can be independently worked on which should help with our workflow and help to visualise the content requirements as we go along.

Plone.com talk-sorrento-2013 from acsr industrialdesign

Plone for scientific purposes: the case of WMO Sand and Dust Storm Warning Advisory and Assessment System (SDS-WAS) - Francesco Benincasa

This talk was about the use of Plone in the World Meteorological Organisation's Sand and Dust Storm warning system. It showcased the add-on products they are using and the ones they have created for mapping meteorological data and to communicate with people. What I specifically liked about this talk was that it was from someone who I've not met before in the Plone Community, and whom is generally one of those 'hidden' Plone developers working away within an organisation on Plone. There are many people like this around the globe and I hope he had a welcome introduction to the wider Plone community.

PLOG2013 WMO SDS-WAS Presentation from fbeninca

Open Space & Sprints

After the scheduled morning talks, the afternoon was spent either in Open Space discussions or sprinting on particular topics. I personally was mainly discussing the Plone Marketing effort and what we have to do next along the plan.

I've already covered a number of Sprint items above in the talks section. A full list of the sprint topics and reports can be found on the Coactivate site:

http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plog2013

Food, Food and Food

It's not secret that the Italians like their food. And oh boy, is Sorrento good for food. The Hotel Mediterraneo puts on a lunch buffet each day as an optional extra. Well worth the €10. Breakfast and Dinner were included in the room rates. The weather wasn't quite as warm as previous years and so the lunch was inside in the restaurant most days, but on the last day the temperature came up and the buffet was in its usual place by the pool.

Gorgeous pasta, roasted vegetables, cheese, meat.... mmmmmm. Lashings of local olive oil and plenty of fresh fruit. And the deserts were decadent -- the Rum Baba was probably the highlight of them all. Oh and if you like coffee... this is the place to be.

Sorrento

I hate to say it, but after all these years coming to this event I had still never actually managed to venture beyond the Hotel Mediteranno itself (well apart from two years ago when I stupidly left my bag in the car at the motorway services and it got stolen). So this year I planned to actually get into the city itself to see some of it. I had planned to try and get over to the Island of Capri, but the day I planned to go it was just too windy and I didn't think the cable cars at the top would be running. Maybe next year. So this year I finally dragged myself away from the hotel to hop onto the free shuttle bus into the city. There we found a limitless supply of ice cream stands and shops selling pasta, lemon-based-produce, chocolates, coffee etc. Not a place for those with weak wills. Like me.

Family

One of the great attractions of the Plone Open Garden is it's family-friendly atmosphere. I took my Wife and 2-year old daughter, Sarah with me to the event. Sarah was one of about seven kids there are the event. Whilst it was a bit colder than on previous years we did mange about half an hour one day in the pool at the hotel.

Oh and she ate a LOT of ice cream :) With a free shuttle bus from the hotel going to/from the centre every hour or so it was simple for my wife and Sarah to go for a wander around the city whilst I was at the conference.

The hotel make kids very welcome, and hearing a 2-year old chanting 'Go Plone! Go Plone!' during the sprint report outs was indeed very cute :) She spent most of her time running around with Martin Opstad Reistadbakk (martior)'s daughter or jumping about with Rosario Savarese (Abstract CEO)'s son. Who knows... maybe the next Plone generation in a few years?

So once again, my thanks to the team at Abstract.it for their great work and the staff at Hotel Mediterraneo for their hospitality. And of course, most importantly thanks to the Plone attendees from around the world that came together to make it such a fantastic event.

Reading Roadshow May 2013

Astra Baker — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:25:00 +0000

Due to the success of our Roadshow in Reading at the end of last year we have decided to do it again, in exactly the same location with exactly the same agenda.

Reading worked well for us and our delegates with the venue being conveniently located close to the train station - only two minutes across the road. So we thought why change what's not broken!

Our Roadshow events are aimed at anyone involved in the management or implementation of an Intranet. It is completely free to attend and includes a buffet lunch. As well as that our team of dedicated Developers & Project managers are on hand after the talks to discuss any questions you may have regarding potential upcoming Intranet projects or your existing internal communication systems.

We will also be giving away iPod shuffles to the first ten attendees to arrive on the day.

For more information:

Download our event overview PDF

THE DATE

23rd May 2013

THE PRICE

It's Free

THE VENUE

Reading Museum
The Town Hall
Blagrave Street
Reading
Berkshire
RG1 1QH

HOW TO REGISTER

Secure your place either:

online

10intranetlessons.eventbrite.com

or by email

info@netsight.co.uk

What can Software Learn from A Dresden Doll?

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:15:00 +0000

A few days ago, I saw a tweet from Simon Phipps pointing out a TED talk done last month by Amanda Palmer. In his blog post Simon highlighted the final words of Amanda in her talk on the music industry:

People have been obsessed with the wrong question: "How do we /make/ people pay for music?" What if we start asking "How do we /let/ people pay for music?".

I love Amanda Palmer, I think her music is fantastic, and I love the energy and off-the-wall-ness of it. Watching her hobble around the streets of [blah] with her band playing the Ukelele and singing in a phone-box is awesome. She was once playing a gig with her band The Dresden Dolls in Oakland, whilst I was just down the road in San Francisco and I didn't realise until it was over… which was gutting.

Amanda has done a number of experiments with regards to economic models for her music. In short, she talks about *trust*. Rather than try to demand people pay for your art, trust them to pay you for it instead.

I'm currently on my way to the massive CeBIT expo in Hannover to man the Plone stand at the CMS Gardens area. This is a sub-expo of Open Source Content Management systems all in one place. There will b a number of individuals from the Plone community coming together to promote Plone at the event.

What has Amanda Palmer's talk on the music industry got to do with Open Source software?

One of things Amanda talks about is letting her fans and community support her. She decided to give her music away freely and to encourage copying and distribution of her music. She was amazed to see what a response she got and how many people backed her ventures.

Sound familiar? Yes, it sounds a bit like Open Source software. Open Source software in it's purest community-driven sense. Not the openwash-type thing where a company decides to release an 'open source' version of their product as a loss leader.

Even within Open Source Software things have been changing. New tools and new ways of connecting with people have been a catalyst for new ways to connecting with developers and customers. Github, the social coding platform has enabled the lowest bar of entry we have ever seen.

Going beyond that Gittip, the service that allows you to /tip/ developers small sums of cash for the work they are doing. Someone fixes a bug in your code? Maybe tip them. Some developers have been moving to this model as an experiment in working full time. Rather than be a part of one particular company or contract to one particular client, they are using tools like Gittip and Chipin to crowd sourcing the funding of developing features for software directly. Within the Plone community we have people like Rok Garbas, Lennart Regebro, Nejc Zupan, Nathan Van Gheem and others who have come forward at points to ask for people to directly support the development work they are doing.

As Amanda says in her talk: "It's kinda counterintuitive for a lot of artists, they don't want to ask for things. It is not easy. It is not easy to ask. A lot of artists have a problem with this. Asking makes you vulnerable". I think many of the developers I've mentioned could be considered artists. Artists in the code they produce and the work they do. Many people do not appreciate the creativity involved in software development. Taking this further, a peer of mine when I was studying Computer Science at the University of Bristol, Chris Parsons went on to be a part of a whole movement called 'Software Craftmanship'.

All of this takes trust. WIthout trust none of this works. You have to be able to trust that the work will be done, and you have to trust that there are people there to pay for it.

Amanda talks of stage diving, and stripping naked and being drawn on by fans. Now, I'm not suggesting developers go that far ;) That said… in the early days of the Plone community there was an annual event in the Austrian Alps called the Snow Sprint. 30-odd developers locked away in a log cabin at the top of a mountain coding away, drinking beer and sitting in the sauna. I think once you've sat naked in a Sauna with someone and dived out to roll in the snow to cool off… you can probably trust them with code.

But it does highlight the importance of connecting with people and building those connections.

That is why I'm sat on a plane right now, heading to an Expo to meet up with a number of Plone developers whom I must see three or four times a year somewhere in the world. Building those connections, and trust. Not just within our community, but also to meet new people and to talk to them about Plone and to extend that trust further.

Amanda talked about people being confused by 'no hard sticker price'. The concept of you paying what you think something is worth to you. People see it as a risk. In her mind it is not a risk, but an expression of trust.

But music is a very personal thing. How does that translate into the enterprise? Can we make the same leaps that Amanda Palmer is making in the music world in our world of software?

Python / Plone Developer Wanted

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:30:00 +0100

Netsight are looking for a new full-time developer. Based in Berkeley Square, Clifton, we are one of Bristol's longest running web design and development firms. This is a great opportunity for the right candidate to build a successful career in software and web development, and work with a great local company. Find out more about us here.

We are looking for developers with experience in Python, or who are enthusiastic to learn what has become one of the fastest growing programming languages. Ideally you would have demonstrable experience in web development and the processes involved in building web sites in a commercial environment.

About 90% of our work involves Plone, an Open Source Content Management system, and whilst we don't expect you to have direct experience in Plone we want someone willing to get their hands dirty and learn what we believe is the best system out there for web publishing. We are actively involved in the wider Plone community and there is an opportunity for travel for various events — this week we are off to the Netherlands for a week at the annual Plone Conference. We mostly develop on top of Plone, but also do a bit of Pyramid work and some relational database work too (MySQL and PostgreSQL).

We are looking for someone who likes to solve problems and who is happy to look things up for themselves. You're likely to be working in small teams, so you'll need to be happy asking colleagues for help when you need it or want to bounce ideas off someone.

We are a pretty relaxed company and have an informal, open-plan office, and we enjoy a dram of whisky on a Friday afternoon. That said, we need people who can manage their time effectively and take responsibility for the work they are doing.

We work with organisations and businesses from a wide variety of sectors, so there is quite a lot of variety to the projects that we take on. Whilst we aim to build re-usable, modular systems, every client is different and so each project includes requirements analysis and client liason, in which the whole team is involved.

Requirements:

At least 2 years experience in commercial web development.
Knowledge of Python
Experience of some kind of server-side web publishing system.
Good communication skills – this role will quickly become client facing to at least some degree, as you clarify requirements and report progress to members of the clients' organisations. You will also need the ability to work well in small, closely-knit teams (typically of 2 to 4 people) and effectively argue your case when needed.
The ability to not freak out due to lack of braces in a language (counselling available).

What’s in it for you?

Starting salary in the region of £30,000 (depending on experience).
Laptop and mobile phone.
Conference attendance allowance.
A relaxed working environment.
Share options as you progress (and associated dividends).

Please send your CV to careers@netsight.co.uk

Plone Conference - How to convince my boss I should go?

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:53:31 +0100

In just over 3 weeks time, Plone Conference 2012 will take part in Arnhem, Netherlands. The Plone Conference is an annual event that takes place in a different city each year and brings together the best and the brightest of the Plone community for training, talks, and sprints.

Whilst I know a large number of developers and people directly involved in the Plone community will be there, I also know that a large number of end users, and those working in larger companies, NGOs and educational institutions might not be able to make it due to budget concerns.

So this is really just a post to try and give those working in such establishments some more information to try and persuade their bosses to let them attend. I know that budgets are being cut and that often training and conferences is one of the first areas that gets hit. However attending the Plone Conference is one of the most valuable things you can do as a someone who uses or develops Plone for their organisation.

Whether you are a designer, programmer, content author, sysadmin or integrator using Plone there is something for you are the Plone Conference. This year there are over 60 talks in 4 parallel tracks over 3 days. There are also Lightning Talks (short 3-5 minute fast paced talks, giving quick insights into various projects and tools) as well as a number of Open Space sessions. Open Space sessions are slots in the schedule with no pre-scheduled talk in them. They are filled by delegates proposing talks at the event.

You will learn more in 3 days of a Plone Conference than you will in an entire year reading books and mailing lists. There is also an additional 2 days before the main conference with classroom-based training on topics such as Mastering Plone and Administering your Plone Box.

One thing that is very useful at the Plone Conference is a chance to talk to other Plone users and developers in the same sector as you. How have other universities tackled the challenges you have? How have other NGOs built Plone sites on a shoestring budget? How do other corporates administer their Plone servers? Whether in a talk, or a hallway conversation or over a drink in the evening there is plenty of opportunities to chat to others and learn from them.

Unlike many industry conferences, the Plone Conference is not just a showcase of successful glitzy projects. It is a chance to find out what works and what doesn't in reality. It is a chance to learn from those actually working with Plone on a daily basis. It is a chance to find out what is coming up in the future of Plone -- and to have a hand in shaping that future too.

This year the Plone Conference is happening in Arnhem, Netherlands. Only one hour from Amsterdam Schipol Airport by a direct train connection from the airport to Arnhem. Amsterdam Schipol is one of the easiest airports to reach worldwide from pretty much any starting point on the globe. And as for the conference costs themselves, as with previous years, this is one of the least expensive conferences to attend, at only €325 for the 3 days (and the after-conference sprints for 2 days if you want to join in them). And for accommodation, you can either book a hotel, or join the Plone Boat! This is a floating hotel boat what will be moored near the conference venue and exclusively for Plone Conference attendees.

So, go and have a chat with your boss. Tell them that this is a once in a year chance to further your experience, knowledge and confidence in Plone. You will come back more productive and more effective at your job. So what are you waiting for... go have a chat with them now.

Oh, and don't forget (although maybe downplay this bit to your boss) the awesome Plone conference dinner and party in the middle!

I'll see you in Arnhem in 3 weeks time ;)

All information about the event is on the Plone Conference website.

The next '10 Intranet lessons' event to happen in Reading

Astra Baker — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:05:00 +0100

We are pleased to announce that Netsight is hosting another Roadshow event '10 lessons learned from building successful corporate intranets and portals'. This event will be held in Reading at The Town Hall and Museum, a two minute walk from the Reading train station and main bus stops, on Thursday 25^th October.

We are anticipating another great show directly aimed at professionals that are involved in the management of a corporate intranet or portal or those who are involved in the implementation of one.

This will be another free, half day event with a buffet lunch and open discussion at the end.

Also, we will be giving away iPod shuffles to the first ten attendees through the door on the day.

For more information:

Download our event overview PDF

THE DATE

25th October 2012

THE PRICE

It's Free

THE VENUE

Reading Museum
The Town Hall
Blagrave Street
Reading
Berkshire
RG1 1QH

HOW TO REGISTER

Secure your place either:

online

10intranetlessons.eventbrite.com

or by email

info@netsight.co.uk

A Brief Bit of History

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:15:00 +0100

The University of Bristol have recently done a campaign to highlight the success of the University's alumni after they graduated. As part of this they commissioned a number of short videos with a number of alumni. Both myself and about half of the Netsight staff (including the other two directors, Chris and Ben) are alumni of the University of Bristol Computer Science department.

So I thought I'd share with you the video they produced which gives you a little insight into the company and how it started twelve years ago.

Enjoy!

About Netsight from Matt Hamilton on Vimeo.

Working Against the Grain

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:45:00 +0100

With any tool there is a natural fit for that tool. We've all seen this in all manner of parts of our lives. Using a butter knife to unscrew the back of a kids toy to add new batteries, using a shoe as a hammer... I'm sure we could all name some. This is not to say that there are not tools that have a wide variety of uses, but one has to be aware of what the limitations of the tool are and make a judgement as to whether they are the best tool for the job. Often this can come down to a number of factors: price, suitability, availability, training are but a few. If I am in need of cutting a small piece of wood and I have a Swiss Army Knife in my pocket then I might use that to do the job, even if it is not as suited to the task as the tenon saw I have in the garage. It is just handy. I'd love to have a pillar drill in my garage but I can't really justify the cost and space for one, so I'll use a corded hand drill... OK so it won't be as convenient or as quick, but it is what I have to hand. If on the other hand I was going to be building a large piece of furniture or making a number of items then I might deem it worthwhile to go and invest in a pillar drill, or table saw, or whatever tool it is that would make my life easier and the job quicker, more accurate and probably safer.

So where am I going with this? Other than venting my current desire to go to a hardware tool shop? There was a blog post a couple of days ago on Plone vs. Wordpress by a guy called Paul Kaiser from a company called WPMU. In his post he basically attempts to discourage people from using Plone and instead use Wordpress. There are a number of great comments on the blog post from people in the Plone community pointing out the inaccuracies and flaws in his post. In particular, Karl Horek posted a response on his own blog entitled "Confirmation Bias in Software Comparisons". I love Karl's posts as he comes from a background in Ecology and Biology and has some great insights into software from an evolutionary perspective. One thing that most of the comments and Karl's post all seem to be saying is "Use the right tool for the job". I too have commented on Paul's blog post from my experience of both Plone and (to a much lesser extent) Wordpress.

One of the areas both Netsight as a company and the Plone community as a whole have grown, evolved and matured over the 10+ years of its existence is working out what Plone is and isn't a good fit for. Yes, Plone is a very flexible tool and yes you can use it for a variety of content management scenarios. Yes you can use it for a public website or for a company intranet. Yes you can use it for a 1-person business site or for a 100,000 user site. However over the years Plone has been working out its niche. As has Netsight as a company. Some people say that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What I'm trying to say is that if you need nails hammering in then come to us as we are damn good with hammers. We are not too bad with drills and saws too, but hammers are where we really shine. If you want a screw driving then we'll point you towards someone who is better at screwdrivers. If you really ask us to we'll bang a screw in with a hammer, but we'd much rather (for both our sakes) you used the right tool for the job. Why? Well in 2 years time when you want to remove that screw that we hammered in then you might have a hard time getting the screwdriver to mate with the mangled screwhead. That might not be obvious at the time, but it WILL happen at some point in the future.

So enough with the tool analogies, lets bring this back to something more specific. Let me tell you a story of a customer of ours. I won't name them as they have a relationship to maintain with other suppliers. A couple of years before they came to us they had a website developed for them on top of Wordpress. The site was a site for their business selling information. You had an account with them and could go to their website and search for a company and get back information on that company. The way the site was developed each company record was an article in Wordpress. This might have seemed a reasonable thing at the start of the project, the developers could just use a tool they knew and re/(ab)use the blog functionality to build an information database. As further and further requirements came about the developers struggled to implement them on top of Wordpress. The client got frustrated and looked for someone else to re-build them something more fit for purpose and found us.

We started to build their site on top of Pyramid, a Python framework that shares a lot of the same underlying technologies as Plone. Partway through the development the client came to us asking us to speed up development. The reasoning? They discovered that the original Wordpress site had RSS syndication still enabled. So whilst the developers had protected a number of custom PHP pages they had developed with logins, the original RSS feed pages still existed and allowed a nice machine readable access to ALL of their content. All of the content that their business was based on. All of the content that they employed dozens of staff to research and collate. Google had found this and indexed the entire lot. If you typed their name into google and the company name you wanted you got the data back without having to subscribe. Ironically this offered a much better search mechanism than what they actually had in Wordpress to start with!

We had architected the new Pyramid based site with sound foundations and proper information architecture right from the start. There was one and only one way to access the company data from the database, and that path was protected with security and subscription assertions. Once you had passed that code path and the system was satisfied that you had access rights to that data then you could do what you wanted with it, display it as HTML, XML, PDF etc. We also had unit tests to test the security, and use Jenkins the continuous integration testing system to run the tests every time code was checked in. This way we could be confident in both the functionality and the security of the code over time and that no regressions were being introduced.

Now you could have built that system securely on top of Wordpress to start with and maybe you can blame the developers of not knowing what they were doing with their implementation. Perhaps more experienced developers would have done a better job. But the fact remains they would have been fighting against the natural tendencies of the software. They would have been working against the grain. And all of you who have slipped and injured themselves when using the wrong tool for the job know what that is like.

Now where is my screwdriver.... I have some paint tins to open....

EDIT: Oh, and if you want a really good overview of what sort of things the Plone community think Plone is best suited for and how it compares to other products and where it is going, check out the Plone Roadmap.

A Concentration on UX Throughout

Mike Rhodes — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:10:00 +0100

User experience (UX) is often spoken of in terms of the look and feel of visual elements: the layout of a navigation or the arrangement of fields on a form. A UI-layer thing.

It’s comforting to believe this: you’ve a specialist on your team who can deal with the “UX stuff”. This is a delusion. One person isn’t capable of covering all your bases because UX is defined by virtually every facet of your product, from design through implementation. While the UXer on your team can oversee things to an extent, it’s hard for them to retrofit good UX if it’s not baked in from the start.

For example, the main screen of One to Watch, an iPhone app I developed, is a listing of the films you’ve selected to watch. This is the primary screen of the application in many ways, in particular as the first you see each time you open the application. Visually it’s a simple screen. I’ll be the first to confess I took much of the UI directly from the music app. An incredible amount of work went into making the user experience of this screen perfect, very little directly to do with how it looks.

Most of the effort was into perfecting how it feels in use. And for a screen like this, how it feels is mostly defined by the code behind it.

One aspect of this is pure performance. iOS contains an image widget which is able to resize and crop an film’s poster into the square, as required by the visual layout of the table view used for the listing. Easy then — just drop an image into the table view cell template and be done with it. Apart from you’re not. Asking the iPhone — even the 4S — to resize an image as a users scrolls gives a terrible user experience. Laggy, jumpy and painful.

Even for a free app, this is unacceptable. It’s indicative of a half-assed job. So I spent the time to make it silky. There’s a lot more code than I expected there to be behind that, including a small, incomplete framework to managed cached images along with various named sizes and crops. Was it worth it? For sure.

So we’re all doing UX — throughout the stack. Get used to it, and build like you mean it.

CMS Smackdown! - BathCamp #32

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 17:20:00 +0100

TL;DR: A bar brawl. Seven CMSs in the ring. Plone gave them a good kicking. Interesting to learn form other CMSs. My talk on Plone is here.

Wednesday evening I attended the "CMS Smackdown!" at BathCamp. BathCamp is a regular event happening every month in Bath and is generally a fairly informal event with a few presentations around a particular topic and then adjourning to the nearby pub for further chat.

This month was something a bit different. The CMS Smackdown! The rules were pretty simple. Each speaker had 10 minutes to talk about the 5 things they love about their CMS and 5 things they hate about their CMS. There were seven CMSs represented:

WordPress
Drupal
Expression Engine
Plone
~~PyroCMS~~ (edit: wasn't represented in the end, see comments below)
Perch
Umbraco
Defacto

And as you might have guessed I was there weighing in for Plone. I've done a more in-depth two-CMS battle before which was organised by CMS Connected and pitted Plone against Hippo. Whilst that was a hour and a half boxing match with set rounds, this was more like a bar brawl. But boy, was it fun :) There was a great spirit there with people willing to take shots at each system received in good nature and with a decent amount of sparring.

Most of the CMSs I'd heard of, but PyroCMS, Perch and Defacto were new ones to me.

A few notes on what was said about the other CMSs and some thoughts on how these compare to Plone:

What was actually very interesting, and very refreshing, was the honesty of the speakers when talking about the things they hate about the CMS. One that particularly struck me was the slide with a diagram of the Drupal learning curve I'm glad to see that the Z-shaped learning curve of Zope 2 is not alone.

The Drupal speaker was happy to say that whilst Drupal is great as a base CMS you really need to use it as just that, a base, and build an actual user interface on top of it in most cases. And that the code is "weird". There is something called the "Drupal Way" and that way is different to the rest of the PHP world. So just because you might be experienced in Wordpress development or Expression Engine, you won't necessarily feel at home in the Drupal codebase. This is something that Zope and Plone suffered from in the early days with comments of it being 'un-Pythonic'. At the time this was mainly due to it having to blaze its own trail as there was no python-way at the time. Since then, however, Plone has moved to use more common methods and tools that the rest of the Python world use. Plone is much more 'Pythonic' nowadays.

One of the big plusses mentioned about Drupal (and in fact most speakers said this about their CMS, me included) was the community was a big advantage.The Drupal speaker mentioned that with support of the Drupal community "you can overcome anything".

Wordpress was touted as having a "blindingly obvious" user interface. I think this is a very true point, but I think that really only holds true when you are basing your site on being a blog. The Wordpress speakers tried to convince us that Wordpress is general CMS tool nowadays… but I have to say I'm not convinced. Just because it can be used for general CMS tasks I don't think it is necessarily suited for that role in all cases. One downside mentioned by the speakers is that Wordpress will inevitably crash and blow up if you install too many random plug-ins. Their advice is stick to the well known and tested ones (or make sure you test them yourself first properly). Continual updates every week are a problem, but there is a tool called Manage WP that can roll out changes to multiple sites in one go. Sounds like it is good in theory, but I have to say I wonder how well it will cope when you have all those different plug-ins and themes in place.

Perch is a very small CMS intended for 5-10 page sites. It is termed an 'inside out' CMS in that it is intended for use where you already have a static site and want to just allow some areas to be edited. They were very honest in that the intention is to be a small, simple, cheap CMS and not trying to compete with big systems. They have found their niche and are sticking with it. As the speaker said "Otherwise we'd end up with another Wordpress, and who want's that?".

Umbraco is a .NET based CMS. It has switched a lot of underlying technologies in the latest version. This means whilst the code is better ( MVC vs ASP.NET) and no longer carries around the giant .NET viewstate cookie, the new version is lacking some features of the older version at the moment. On the plus side was mentioned good separation of concerns (content, markup, code) and a clean UI. On the downside stability was cited as a problem and a recommendation to wait for a couple of point releases before upgrading to a major release.

Expression Engine is another PHP CMS, based on the CodeIgniter framework. The main plus side cited was that unlike many CMSs that deal with 'pages' Expression Engine has 'custom fields' at the core so good for multichannel support. Not much of a revelation compared to Plone as that is what we are used to in Plone. Other pluses are that it makes no assumptions on the theming of the site and so good for designers. On the downside there is no initial theme so you pretty much have to develop a theme for every site, and that there is not yet much best practise that has evolved. So taking on an EE site developed by a different developer is likely to be problematic as everyone does things differently. This is an area that I think Plone is very strong in nowadays. It has taken a while to get there and we were in a similar position 5 years ago, but now there is a much more defined 'good' way to do things.

Defacto is a CMS developed by Bristol-based Nomensa. Their main goal is to design a CMS 'for humans'. They very much come from the UX angle and (rightly) say many CMSs are just simply not built for the average user to use. They focus on 'task based' flows so that someone can complete a task linearly without having to jump all over the CMS to achieve what they want to do. It is written on top of Django. They had a few quite nice features, clearly aimed at authors, such as a thumbnail list of templates (2 column, 3 column, image at top, etc) you could use for a page. Similar approaches have been taken by some Plone add-ons such as, IIRC, PloneArticle. I think it is a very noble goal to try and split the developer and user side of things so much, but I feel that inevitably you are going to hit grey areas in-between… areas where you get 'power users' who want to change the layout beyond what they can via prescribed layouts. That said, it did make me think about Plone and appreciate that you can author a piece of content and publish it all in one place too. Something I had taken for granted and didn't realise was a problem with other CMSs. And as they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, with the image editing pop-up from Defacto looking like it was copied from Plone. Again, apparently being able to set the size and alignment of images when editing content is rare in CMSs.

I've put up a slidecast of the talk I did on Plone. One of the main things I wanted to show off with Plone was Diazo, and by doing a live demo in which with just a single Diazo rule I was able to theme the local Plone site I had on my laptop with the live bathcamp.org website running elsewhere. To put the screencast together I took some static screenshots of what I did to put in there. I hopefully will put up a short screencast to show it actually in action.

Another key aspect I wanted to bring up is buildout as I feel it really is something that is quite uniquely powerful in Plone. None of the other CMSs at the smackdown appear to have anything remotely similar in terms of a mechanism for managing the deployment and versioning of the development of sites.

Rather than type more about it, here is the screencast of the Plone talk:

BathCamp #32 - CMS Smackdown! - Plone

Just to round up to say it was a great event. I was pleasantly surprised at the honesty of the participants and the openness of their answers to the questions. It would be interesting to see how a similar event would work if you had the more 'enterprise' proprietary offerings such as Ektron, Terminal 4, Kentico, Sharepoint etc.

Thanks to Mike Ellis for organising it!

Plone Open Garden 2012 - Sorrento

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:55:00 +0100

Once again this year I attended the Plone Open Garden event in Sorrento, Italy. This is an event I look forward to during the year as it gives a chance to really take a step back and chat with people about what is going on in the world of Plone. This year the event went fully to an unconference style and there were no pre-scheduled talks. The number of attendees was smaller this year than in previous years, but that just served to give the event a more intimate feel and a bit more like a sprint than a conference.

We had the use of an indoor meeting room which we used for when we wanted to show or present things on a projector, but otherwise most of the discussions took place outside in the sunshine at the pool terrace.

The thing I like most about this event is the chance to sit down outside in the evening and chat to other Plonistas about the future of Plone and find out more about their businesses and how things are going. It is great to compare issues that affect us all but may be slightly different in each country, e.g. public sector rules on accessibility or procurement. This gives us a chance to try and work out where common things can be shared between businesses instead of us all going our own way on it.

Of course, the food, the sunshine, the scenery and the general Italian hospitality are big draws to the event. In Italy family is a very important thing and you can tell this with the attitude to kids compared to in the UK. In Italy a child running about and making noise playing is celebrated rather than frowned upon...

...so in a slight fit of madness I brought my wife and 16 month old daughter along on the trip too. This was my daughter's first time on a plane and whilst things were not entirely to plan everything did in the end work out great. They both went off to explore the sights of Pompeii, Sorrento and the Amalfi coast whilst the rest of us were busy working.

My main, personal, goal for going to PLOG was to work on the upcoming plone.com site. This is a site to be aimed at the decision makers and end users looking at Plone rather than the developers (which plone.org is aimed at). This project has had a bit of a delay getting off the ground, so I was determined to get some specific tasks done at the event.

The first task was to work on a 'feature list' for Plone. As crazy as it sounds this is something that we don't really have for Plone. If you go to Plone.org at the moment there is a list of new features in Plone 4 versus the previous version of Plone, but there is no one list of 'What is Plone?' for a decision maker. There has been various things to tackle this in the past such as the Plone Brochure that we produced at Netsight, the Top Twenty Questions About Plone ref cards produced by Six Feet Up and the German Plone Brochure produced by DZUG. But we don't have this in a single concise customer facing website.

If you ask a dozen people 'What is Plone?' you are likely to get a dozen different answers due to the fact that Plone is a very flexible system and used in so many different settings. Another effort going on at the moment and just released for public consumption is the new Plone Roadmap. Plone has always had a roadmap of sorts before but never anything quite as great as this. The Roadmap Team have done a spectacular job in creating this (and special mention to Martin Aspeli, Jon Stahl and Mark Corum who did the lion's share of the work). One of the great things with this roadmap is it attempts to focus the scope of the Plone development going forward by framing it in a context of specifically what Plone is and isn't suited for.

On the second day of the event I presented the Roadmap to the attendees and explain its purpose and to walk through the contents of it. Standing on the shoulders of others I managed to find (about 5 minutes before my talk) that Massimo Azzolini had presented the roadmap a couple of weeks earlier at World Plone Day in Bologne. His presentation is well worth a look if you want an Italian translation of the roadmap or simply want a good inspiration on how the roadmap could be presented at future events.

We started off at PLOG by brainstorming a complete list of features we could think of that Plone has. Now this on it's own is not worth much, but gives a very good starting point as to what we want to put down as the top twenty features for Plone. We did this old-skool with a big flip chart and people called out things. The great thing with this was there were so many obvious features that often, as those working within Plone itself, we completely forget. e.g. the fact you can just copy and paste a piece of content in Plone or a whole folder of items is pretty cool and something that is simply not present in many CMSes. This resulted in a list of 80 points. The next step which is currently underway is to sort through them, pick a top twenty and expand upon those points as to the benefit of that feature to the intended audience.

The second item I was working on there is a showcase list of Plone sites. Sure we have the sites listed on Plone.org but that is a very very big list of over 2200 sites and it can be hard to find the exceptional ones in there to showcase. We also want to capture some more information, e.g. What was it about Plone that made this site a success. Also to capture featured technologies used, which may be either Plone add-ons or may be 3rd party systems used in conjunction with Plone. I managed to get a starter list of 16 sites from mainly around Europe (since it was mainly Europeans at the event). The amazing thing for me was that whilst I think I know of a lot of good showcase Plone sites in the world, about three quarters of these sites I had never even heard of. Did you know that the main tourism site for the Emilia Romagna region in Italy uses Plone as does the city of Ferrara? Or that the USAID Resource Management Portal uses Plone to help its missions, staff and partners coordinate in field operations across time and distance? Or that Our Africa uses Plone to let children across Africa film their lives and countries the way they see them.

The list needs further information to fill in the blanks and I need to get in contact with some more people outside Europe to get a good spread of sites.

Besides the Plone.com work I wanted to get done there were a number of other things going on. Maurits van Rees has a good summary writeup on his blog.

It wasn't all heads in laptops though as there was time for a quick splash in the pool before lunch on most days. Oh lunch... wow.... another reason I love this place.

One of the other things I found very interesting was chatting with a developer I met there, Giampiero Lago. He is a relative newcomer to Plone and came from a Wordpress background. He was working on a document to help those coming from Wordpress to Plone as to the similarities and differences. It covers things such as terminology differences and some basic information to get started. I am currently working with a client to look at migrating their Wordpress sites to Plone or perhaps their Plone sites to Wordpress. It is a bit undecided yet. One idea I had was if we could somehow create collective.wordpress or similar as a product that was mainly UI changes that made a blog in Plone a bit more familiar to Wordpress users. Giampiero gave me a tour of the Wordpress admin are and what bits are used by authors. It seems though that a lot can depend on what theme you are using in Wordpress, so it looks like moving from one theme to another in Wordpress could be as different as moving from Wordpress to Plone. He also showed me just how easy it is to break out of Wordpress and potentially mess with the underlying OS if you happen to get access as a regular user with the web interface. Scary.

All in all it was a great event, and I wished I had another day or two to enjoy the area. As it was we ended up literally sprinting through the airport terminal to catch our plane home as they called our name over the PA system. Easyjet managed to not print all our boarding passes correctly and I had to turn back from security to go back to the check-in desk.

Thanks to the organisers of the event, in particular Maurizio Delmonte and Vincenzo Barone for their hospitality and putting on a fantastic event. See you next year!

World Plone Day 2012: Bristol, UK

Matt Hamilton — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:40:00 +0100

World Plone day is happening this Wednesday the 25th of April. What is World Plone Day? It is a chance for companies and organisations all across the globe to run some kind of event related to Plone. Whether it is a marketing event aimed at business people or a technical event aimed at developers, each location is free to choose how they want to participate.

You can find out more about World Plone Day on plone.org and see the list of the hosts worldwide. So far this year there are 36 events planned.

This year, Netsight will be running a very informal event aimed at getting local Plone developers to do a bit of a show and tell about what they are working on. Whilst Plone is a global project and we are great at attending event worldwide we often neglect the local level. The last time the Netsight and Delib developers got together was in San Francisco, despite our offices being only half a mile away from each other in Bristol!

So, if you are doing something with Plone or want to find out a bit more about it 'from the horse's mouth' then feel free to come along. Netsight will be providing beer and pizza and we'll just take some time to chat about what we are doing and a few brief demos and lightning talks.

When

25 April 2012 from 18:00 - 21:00ish

Where

Netsight Office, 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton, Bristol, UK. We are in the corner of Berkeley Square above Jones Lang Lasalle (previously King Sturge). Ring the buzzer marked 'Netsight' to the right of the door.

What

Whilst Plone is a great global community, we rarely take time to actually chat with local Plone developers. This will be a chance to get people together and chat about some of the cool and interesting projects we are all working on. It will also be a chance for those who want to find out about Plone to come along and find out more 'from the horse's mouth'

Netsight will be providing some beer and pizza.

Why

Fun, education and Plone marketing

Who

The people at Netsight and various others around Bristol.

'10 Intranet Lessons' event moving to new Birmingham venue

Astra Baker — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:05:00 +0100

After the success of our last two events '10 Lessons learned from building successful corporate intranets and portals' we have decided to host another event, this time in Birmingham.

We have managed to find a venue as exciting and unique as the SS Great Britain, and by choosing a more central location we are aiming to encourage a new audience.

The event will be held on Thursday 28th June at The Science Museum "Thinktank" at Millenium point in Birmingham.

Delegates will have the opportunity to walk around the museum free of charge after lunch. This will be another free, half day event, ideal for anyone involved in the implementation or management of a corporate intranet or portal, or anyone considering building an intranet.

For more information:

Download our event overview PDF

THE DATE

28th June 2012

THE PRICE

It's Free

THE VENUE

Thinktank
Millennium Point
Curzon Street
Birmingham
B4 7XG

HOW TO REGISTER

Secure your place either:

online

10intranetlessons.eventbrite.com

or by email

info@netsight.co.uk

(Attendees will be entitled to free entry to the science museum either before or after the session programme.)