Blog Integration, New Workstation, and "RIAS Killer"

BLOG

Didn't think I'd be making another post on this blog before I integrated the blog with the rest of the website, which is what I had set out to do just a minute ago.

In previous generations of my server-side employment of RSS-pull I was satisfied to simply allow items in the long-term RSS stream expire when the RSS server stopped serving them. Eventually I knew my software would be tagging, organizing, and storing all kinds of items from all sorts of sources / syndication formats / request methods.

I set out to implement this for the first time with the SocSurveys.org Blog. My primary reason for this is because I'd like it to be simple change what sort of Blog you see at SocSurveys.org by switching various tags. I obviously want to be able to blog about general issues pertaining to the website, but it's also important to me that I be able to post sometimes in a more candid manner or on more personal subjects than what's typically appropriate for the SocSurveys.org blog.

At any rate, work on that has halted for a moment. Our server doesn't appear to have any way to access our MySQL database from Python, the language in which I prefer to manipulate RSS. (I actually considered a two-stage process that piped output from a Python script into a PHP script.. momentarily.)

New Workstation

Courtesy of my good friend Tom, I'll be borrowing his old server with 6 times as much RAM as the laptop I've been working on (among other improvements.) I'm going to postpone editor improvements until I am able to pick it up. Expect much more frequent updates when that happens. I expect to open public registration soon after getting my hands on it.

"RIAS Killer"

This is the first mention of this project on the web. For those of you unfamiliar with RIAS, it is a patented coding convention used primarily (as far as I know) for quantifying doctor-patient interaction. (Don't be surprised at all if it is far more generalized than that; I have a very limited perspective on this part of it.)

Casually referred to by the same name is software provided by the company that you go to if you want to license the rights to use RIAS.

It's terrible.

Purportedly, this software hasn't experienced any kind of update in years, crashed or produced fatal run-time errors frequently, is limited to the Windows platform, and appears to be written in Visual Basic.

If I recall correctly, it costs $2,000 per seat? (I'll have to get verification for this.)

This is a problem that often seems to pervade not just a single industry, but every industry. Allow me first to relate a common musing of mine about the relationship that information technology has with an invisible, but financial substantial slice of all IT users. I think it's quite relevant.

After seeing a Super Bowl ad for IBM, or after reading the list of technologies used a prospective employer, or after personally experiencing the horror of some marketing executive misappropriating (or, to use a more specific mathematical analogy, reciprocating) the phrase "embedded Python," it is often a musing of mine that, business success notwithstanding, whether or not Company X makes sound technology decisions involves a great deal of luck.

One of my favorite research subjects is how people make decisions without knowing every detail of every fact that is relevant to that decision. People instead perform a sort of compromised evaluation process that relies heavily upon building a mental network of interrelating evaluations that include people, publications, institutions, factoids, technologies, and more, to try and glean an edgewise view of far-removed factoids with which they have no direct "contact." For example, I might be lead to believe that because Alice uses Product X, it must be a good product. My evaluation process might be clearer, however, if I knew why Alice chose it to begin with: perhaps an intimate knowledge of Product X and its competitors is responsible, or perhaps she chose it because Bob did. But I'd better move on before this digression overtakes the rest of this post..

One of the tenants that capitalism depends on is the claim that people who make the most money are also the people who are the best at making money. The more true this statement is for a given society, the better it is for the economy. There are of course just as many counterexamples to this tenant as there are numbers of ways to come into money without earning it, but the truly interesting question is this: does a good businessman necessarily mean a good IT man?

The answer is "No!" of course. While many highly successful businessmen are so, this is almost always because they had the inside scoop on their own upcoming technological R&D and the lowest-to-the-ground-floor investment opportunity that ever exists. In place of actual technical knowledge, good businessmen must be masters at manipulating and utilizing their mental network of evaluations of people and factoids and all other sources of information. Underlying the businessman's methodology for solving technological problems -- and all problems outside their own realms of expertise -- is the ability to grok the strength and reliability of others' technical aptitudes. Building and maintaining a network of reliable information sources is of the utmost importance to a person trying to tackle diverse problems they are not immediately equipped to deal with.

Now, if you're thinking to yourself this describes more people than just businessmen, then you've gotten back on track before I have. As I mentioned before, this applies to everybody. This methodology of compromised evaluation is the fundamental basis of decision making employed by people making decisions 99% of the time. You don't need to be a biologist to decide to eat an apple.

But do you need to be a computer programmer to decide what technology is best for your company?

The phenomenon whose description I have been leading up to for about ten paragraphs might be aptly described as niche isolation. When a particular cultural niche is particularly devoid of specific technical aptitudes upon which it comes to depend, the problem can go completely unnoticed. Professionals in such a niche will pay far too much for products and services worth far too little, and the niche can be too obscure to be noticed by potential competitors who would help drive prices down and improve the quality of solutions in that niche. What's worse is that the poor products which have already established themselves in the niche can hold on to it through mechanisms such as buyer's remorse, and wariness toward change. If not those, then there's always the simple inhibitory factor of we've already paid for this one, we're not paying for another one. Mechanisms which cement previous solutions in their place deter competitors from entering the market.

This finally brings us back to the RIAS coding software I mentioned before. Living and working with a sociologist has exposed me to a plethora of IT horrors which seem to result from the niche isolation phenomenon, and that really grinds my gears.

Therefore, we are entering our own competitor to this software niche. If you know of any existing solutions we might not have heard of, please let us know!