Check ‘em out: www.chumby.com

Hey Hugh, it’s me, Lawrence. I gotta talk to you about this new open standard that’s going to revolutionize the way we drink: It’s called the Dixie Cup.

It’s really great. What we’ve done is wax coated a plain old paper cup, and now it’ll hold more types of beverages… it’s almost universal! I mean, from Grapefruit Juice to a Gin and Tonic, this thing holds up. It’s going to change the way companies think about distributing and consuming fluid.

Right out of the gate we have agreements from Rubbermaid, PG and Acme Co to modernize their fluid distributions to be transitionally contained by this exciting open standard, and Saul’s working on a logo as we speak.

We also see an expanding market for dispenser apparatus; think about it: every house in America with a Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen. You could show up at a party with Dixie Cups and KNOW they’ll fit in the hosts dispenser apparatus.

Oh yeah, we turned the cone shape into a flat bottom to increase lateral stability thereby extending its intra-usage utility. Ted’s doing some R&D around optimal radius to metacentric height ratio to maximize stability.

It was when I was doing a freelance gig, producing the online version of the 1996 Bank of America Annual Report (kindda ironic, as that’s where I work now), and after showing my client the usual four tiers and types of pages the site would comprise, and getting them approved, and going into production to grind out a couple hundred pages just to have the client (yep, that was you, Cliff ) say:

“Blue… could we change all those table headers from grey to blue?”

That I said “enough of this hand-coding, I’m learning Frontier”, and too this very day, having seen millions spent on all the usual commercial CMS products bought and projects wither, having tried out most of the Open Source CMS’ and having spun more then a couple of my own, Frontier still has the nicest metaphor of object hierarchy and inheritance of any I’ve used.

It’s just a shame it’s throwaway knowledge as the scripting syntax and database are not standard. Someone should reproduce the Frontier style of publishing, but using AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP).

And EVERYONE should donate to Dave’s fund!!

/Joe

It gets even better, when a programmer and a designer discuss working Agile methodologies, and gets even better when they have varying appreciations of what exactly agility is.

Designers love to have an open canvas to paint on. They hate to define requirements if it’s going to constrain their designs in any way. They seek agility so they can say “well, we’ll through some stuff up now, and refactor it later.”

Programmers of course see the aspects like “stories are agreements between business and production” ideal places to get formal definition of what they should spend their time on. They do need that… we all need that. Spending your time on low value things isn’t pleasant for anyone, and one of the big contributors to dissatisfaction.

Business folks tend to think of agility as the ability to add and change requirements whenever they want with little to no impact on dates, quality or resource commitment… the eternal “pick any two” triangle. Nothing’s changed.

Of course, there’s a balance to this. Those who have balanced agility with structure have done so after hard knocks in dealing with the different perspectives of business, design and business. One of the inevitable benefits of Agile Methods is getting these all too often separated groups talking together, sharing goals and speaking in English together earlier in the process, before it comes to blows at QA time!