When A Good Lecture Doesn’t Do It
In getting ready for the Digital Government lecture of tomorrow, I have begun to reflect on the lecture of last week. Overall, I think I liked the lecture. I imagine that this is largely because the speaker had her act together with some very nice slides and a well thought-out list of points to be made. In continuing to think that I liked the talk, I feel like there were a bunch of places where it could have been better.
Firstly, I feel like the lecture was too long. She was skipping over slides only after she ran over the time limit by 15 minutes. Furthermore, when she was discussing the “revolutionary” idea of storing metadata information on the Windows filesystem with shortcuts, it didn’t seem very exciting given that folders and symlinks have been used for ages to store things on Linux.
It didn’t seem like she had metric data for a decent RDB like MySQL or PostgreSQL on a properly configured Linux host.
The other thing that got me was her comment about the failure of the web interface and the success of the so-called “smart client”. It seemed that the smart client was just a standalone version of what could have been done with AJAX. It didn’t seem like the team even gave the web interface a real try.
Ryan took the idea of using metadata associated with files and created a very interesting project.