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Before it falls through the cracks, I’m posting my slides from the CRM API session I led at DrupalCampToronto: pdf ppt keynote.
The session was an introduction to the CRM API that some of the folks at Trellon have been working on. It’s basically an interface layer that allows module writers to add CRM functionality to their work without having to know the ins and outs of the various CRMs that are compatible with Drupal. For instance, a web contact form module may want to insert mailing events into a CRM, so that it can keep track of who’s used the form. There shouldn’t need to be a separate version of the module for SalesForce and one for CiviCRM. That’s what the API is for.
My demo served mainly to tell folks that this was happening, and to get feedback. There isn’t much to show at this juncture, because we’ve just started and we’re looking for community involvement. Here are some other resources:
Technorati Tags: barcamp, development, drupal,drupalcamptoronto ,interoperability
Quick thought:
There are enough applications. If you can think of something you want a computer to do, there are probably five ways to do it, with five more coming down the pipe. An important part of computer science has been the development of tools and methodologies for writing big applications that do lots and lots of things (or, more accurately, for managing teams that produce such applications). That’s changing. Most of the cutting-edge development programs, standards and strategies nowadays are geared towards maximizing interoperability instead of functionality. The proliferation of applications creates demand for glue code that can get these applications to share data. Interoperability has always been a part of development to some extent (market pressures force Word to understand non-Microsoft document formats), but it’s only recently that demand has turned it into a science on par with application development.
Open source is especially conducive to this. Most open-source software is written to scratch an itch, and “my two favorite applications can’t talk to eachother” is a very common itch. It’s a lot easier to write some glue code between two applications or services than it is to write a whole nother application or service, especially when there are documented APIs and libraries ready for use.
Readwriteweb.com has a link-rich summary of this, centered around the conceptualization of Firefox 3 as an “information broker”, with the aid of microformats and web services.
Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you can instead use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too. So say I use the 30Boxes online calendar - Firefox 3 would automagically transfer any (microformatted) events data I come across while browsing, into my 30Boxes account. And it could likewise put all my contacts into Gmail, locations into Yahoo Maps, phone numbers into Skype, etc.
I get worked up over election issues. I’m all about the voter-verified paper trails and the open-source voting software. The race for California Secretary of State is the most important contest to me this year — I extol the virtues of Debra Bowen every chance I get (vote for her, by the way).
But Phil Keisling spun me around in his perspective-altering book review of Aviel Rubin’s Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting. Rubin is one of the top researchers of voting machine security. Ed Felten writes about him a lot.
Keisling is the former Secretary of State of Oregon. He basically labels voting-machine concerns as paranoia, which isn’t be endearing at all until he follows it up with a good alternative. The only way for Oregonians to vote is by mail, he says, and other states should follow this lead. It eliminates many of the security concerns and, more importantly, ameliorates the social concerns by raising voter turnout.
I’d known about Oregon’s vote-by-mail law before, but its importance relative to other voting issues had never been made clear. I still think election issues should be a top domestic priority, and Diebold machines should be relegated to elections for bowling leagues and middle-school class officers, but vote-by-mail is now the election policy that occupies my daydreams.
(He does spend a leettle too much time equating folks like me, who worry that closed-source, for-profit voting machines are toolboxes for centralized election fraud, with folks who gin up fears about illegal immigrants in order to pass stifling voter ID laws. The equation makes sense on a certain level: there’s no evidence that either nightmare scenario has come to pass. But my team’s scenario is both more frightening and more likely. Closed voting machines make it easy to commit a lot of fraud with a little effort, which in turn boosts incentives to try something, whereas, Keisling points out, illegal immigrants are unlikely to go through all the trouble of forging documents just so they can vote.)
Anyway, it’s a really good piece.
Tags: elections, security, technology
So they figured out which came first, the chicken or the egg. It seems like a sensible enough solution, and it also makes the other chestnuts (One Hand Clapping, the Tree in the Forest, blah blah blah) seem a little more tractable. Perhaps with a couple of well-placed grants from the National Institute of Deep Thinking, we could have the inner workings of the entire koan canon published in our journals, a triumph of focused human energy accomplished in the same spirit as the moon landing and the Golden Gate Bridge, though perhaps not as useful.
But if we solve all the great riddles, what questions will serve as shorthand for the deep unknowables of life? One possibility:
What is punk rock?
First I read Molly Ivins’ remarkably candid apology:
CROW EATEN HERE: This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.
It takes up half the column. I’ve never heard an opinion-writer give such a detailed account of the origins and circumstances of a screwup without trying to exclulpate herself at all. I respect that.
I don’t often see that on the red side of the fence, and I was going to say something about that disparity until I read Eliot Cohen’s more restrained, but still refreshingly honest, admittance of misplaced faith.
You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it?
As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending.
So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that’s what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.
I wish that column had comments enabled–it would be interesting to compare the responses.