Last week, the nice folks at osor.eu invited me over to do a usability review of their website.

OSOR (Open Source Observatory and Repository) is a multi-year project by the European Commission to promote open source software use in public administrations.

We were able to have a very frank and constructive dialog about usability issues with the current website. The site is a Plone CMS frontend coupled with a Gforge software repository.

There's a couple of design inconsistencies in there that are deeply rooted in the project's mission concept, and fixing them runs into policy constraints. Meaning, it can't be fixed right now.

This confirms my experience, about the way that organizational fuzziness tends to show up as design inconsistencies. Which then translate into technology and usability problems further down the line.

Creating a truly open dialog that connects technology design with business strategy, results not only in better designs, but also improves organizational learning.

Hold your breath for a second, and think about your chances of winning the big one in the sweepstakes. About one in a million, right? That's not very much, but hey, I can spare a few bucks for a one in a million chance of winning the good life.

Now, consider the same one in a million chance in a different scenario.

Based on the frequency of previous asteroid impacts, the probability of an extinction-level (≥10 km) asteroid impact in this century is around one in 1 million. Jason G. Matheny, Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction

Surprisingly effective explanations for the current financial meltdown emerge from the natural sciences. A growing body of work translates insights from biology, physics and mathematics into powerful models for economic interactions.

The key element that binds these narratives together is: emergent complexity. These models skimp on explaining individual behavior. They lack a 'theory of the firm' and 'bounded rationality' concepts. Indeed, such models feature the coarsest imaginable agents, with only very rude binary (positive/negative) relationships to other agents and very rude binary (alive/dead) state.

Stringing such simplex agents together in networks that obey equally simple rules, modeling outcomes are achieved that show an uncanny resemblance to actual, historical, economic data time series. The implications are profound: individual decisions don't matter very much, the actual outcomes are determined by structural properties, i.e. by the network of interactions.

Even more mind-boggling is the cross-disciplinary reach of these effects: a stock market crash very much resembles a traffic jam very much resembles species extinction events: the mathematics is much the same in each of these very different problem domains.

This points to an underlying regularity in the laws governing complex systems, of which the economic system is but a specific manifestation. To paraphrase McLuhan: the network is the effect. It is the structure of a network, rather than the actions of network participants, that determines the eventual outcome.

The crisis on Wall Street is like a Rorschach test: it seduces people into making statements that primarily reflect their own state of mind. Everybody finds something to his liking that he latches onto.

Once upon a time customization of the Plone navigation portlet was easy. You just dropped a customized portlet_navigation.pt into a skins layer and presto.

In Plone3, customizing the navigation is still very easy. But it requires a bit more understanding of the component architecture.

Fast-growing tech companies need fast-growing web applications. This promotes a quick-fix programming culture. The original application is twisted and morphed to serve purposes (and load levels) that are way beyond the original design scope.

The result is a monster of Frankenstein, that everybody is afraid of. Any change can have catastrophic consequences. The system can't be remedied. It can't be missed. It can break down any minute now. So it has to be replaced. Fast.

Such is the irrefutable logic that invites disaster.

TomTom CEO Goddijn reportedly said:

The end of the era of paper maps is near.

Which is a perfectly sensible thing to say, if you're selling GPS devices. Apart from that, this statement offers a tantalizing bit of insight into the impact of ubiquitous computing on our culture.

the end of the era of paper maps

Could it be true? Are large groups of people happy to ditch those cumbersome folds of paper, navigating their way to their holiday destinations with a small computer sucked to their windscreens?

Think a minute about the security challenges involved in creating a health-centered social network. Or, more generally, any web application that has to handle sensitive user data. What if the database server becomes compromised? How do you make sure that, even if the database is stolen, your users' secrets remain confidential? How can any cloud computing application provide any significant measure of privacy?

At Clipperz they claim to have found the solution: they call it "zero-knowledge web applications". Since the term "zero knowledge" has a precise meaning in cryptography, that's a bit confusing. What Clipperz promotes boils down to evangelism for the "host-proof hosting" AJAX programming pattern.

client-side encryption

You still with me? It's a very simple concept, actually. Encrypt any sensitive data on the client-side browser before sending it to the web server. Data is never stored plaintext. Users can retrieve their data, in encrypted form, and only in their private browser is it decrypted and becomes accessible. Should the database server be compromised, an attacker finds only encrypted gibberish in the database.

Wow! Total privacy in the cloud computing age! Why don't we rewrite all our web applications to use this neat trick? Yes, why don't we? Read on to find several answers to that question.

A new green ethos is flowering on the ruins of the "old" environmental movement that buried itself in eighties-style gloom-and-doom sermons.

Note the ingenious change of spin. No more: you shouldn't do harm. Rather: you can and should do good. The message has become far more attractive and empowering.

I recently bought a laptop for my daughter. It came with Microsoft Vista pre-installed. I paid for this in the form of a compulsary Vista license (the infamous Microsoft tax). I carved out some harddisk space and installed Ubuntu Linux as a second option. Ubuntu is free.

This provides a perfect setting to compare the initial Vista and Ubuntu experiences.

• Which is faster up-and-running?
• Which is sponsored by spammy advertisements?
• Which contains more software?

NL online trends

OECD broadband penetration

This is probably a harbinger of a worldwide trend: The Netherlands has one of the highest broadband penetration rates worldwide (second only to Denmark). Expect everyone, everywhere to be online more (and watch less TV), as internet connections become faster, cheaper and more widely available worldwide.

Such a surge in internet usage cannot but translate directly in a surge in demand for internet services. The web development business is booming here. Now we know why