Open source

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The future is going to suck

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006

…if business has any say in the matter. The internet is filled with pop-up advertising, spam, and every sort of scam under the internet. It’s sad that it’s a valid business model to serve up advertisements to people. When a company spends so much money on marketing they are taking money away from R&D and making their product better in the future.

If a product is sound and is the best in the marketplace it will sell itself - there is no need to plague a users computer with garbage, wasting their bandwidth and polluting your screen real-estate with an advertisement for cheap air fares or the latest phone.

Hopefully before the internet ends up wet wired in everyones brain this problem will go away. As looking forward to being “connected” as I am the thought of fucking Viagra advertisements getting spammed to my frontal lobe makes me throw up in my mouth.

Being a grown-up sucks: you realize that the world is headed to a giant conglomerate hell, soaked in advertisements and dripping with the leavings of a capitalist society.

Enterprising hacker makes MsnTV Web cluster

Sunday, February 12th, 2006

Microsoft’s MsnTV console makes an ideal low end server now that I think about it. It has a 733Mz Celeron processor, 128Mb of ram, a 64Mb CF card, and a 10/100 network port. This enterprising hacker has managed to put Linux on it and is working on creating a server cluster.

Given that the MsnTV console can be had for about $1 on eBay I’m expecting to see a lot of cool projects surrounding these consoles starting to crop up. Heck - get enough of them and you could make a spiffy little POV-RAY render farm!

Quick redesign

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006

I promised a new design and damn if I’m not delivering in a half assed kind of way. I’ve still got a lot of plans for this redesign (I like the three column layout and colors) such as removing the tables in favor of some more CSS oriented layout.

Aside from that not much has changed. I’m in a bit of a jam getting everything ready for leaving for my sisters wedding here shortly. Photos and stories to come soon - I promise!

DirIndexFaker

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

Check out DirIndexFaker - it’s a slick little anti-RIAA honeypot of sorts that P2Pnet just posted. The MPAA and RIAA have spider bots that crawl around the internet looking for copyrighted material. They then use the logs from those bots to sue people, many of whom have turned out to be innocent.

DirIndexFaker creates a /media directory on your website with fake files that look like they would be in violation of copyright. The RIAA/MPAA then downloads those files and use them as evidence against the owners of the site, however discovers they have downloaded a file of random 0’s and 1’s.

This slows down the spiders and makes them put more efforts into checking their files. I encourage all website owners to put this script somewhere on their server. It sends a message to big media and complicates their attempts to turn technology against people and restrict what they can do with their media and computers.

Yoga ending

Monday, December 12th, 2005

Today was the final installment of my beginning yoga class and I must say that I feel quite enriched for having come to it. It’s taught me a few cool things about my body and some great stress management techniques. I feel healthier for it and that’s a great thing in my book.

Aside from feeling well rested I’m hard at work now trying to get everything set up for my moms new law office. I’m handling quite a bit of IT stuff for her and getting all the computers ready to go and purchasing software has been quite a drain on my time. Luckily this weekend I’ll get to drive home to drop it all off and be able to take a much more hands off approach to the whole thing.

Although my mom does not know it I’m pushing her in the direction of open source technologies. I’m hosting all their mail on a linux box, and using Wordpress for their website. They are locked into a closed source (legacy) application for tracking their clients and cases, but down the road I want to see if I can make a replacement for them with MAMP. If they can have something more customizable and easier to use then I think everyone would be better off - not to mention the possibility of dropping Windows entirely!

Now for an evening walk with Skype and a good nights sleep before tomorrow comes.

Unix philosophies applied to general programming

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

Ronny has a great blog dedicated to software quality and he just made a really interesting post on the fundamental philosophies of Unix software development. These are simple principals that I think should be applied to all software projects.

Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected with other programs.
Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust.
Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
Rule of Repair: Repair what you can — but when you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for one true way.
Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

What are your thoughts? I think this is very similar to Adam Bosworth’s comments on how Google has been able to make such an extensible and scalable high-performance system. I’m going to spend some time pondering how to apply these principles to more than software development, and rather to life in general.

SugarCRM

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005

I was just informed of a nifty open source CRM solution called SugarCRM. The consulting company I work for will be implementing it and possibly building a practice around doing custom implementations for other companies. I’m quite pleased to see more proof that Microsoft was wrong about open source software not being a good business model.

SugarCRM has made quite a bit of money for themselves doing custom implementations and selling support for their software solution, while giving not only the application, but it’s source away. They benefit by having a legion of free developers who will fix their bugs, and extend their functionality. They have a great development site called SugarForge which is worth checking out.

Because SugarCRM is all made with PHP and MySQL I installed a copy into my MAMP development environment and have been playing with it tonight. It’s quite customizable and because it’s open source it’s easy to add functionality should their base package not exist. Better yet there is a good chance someone else has provided that functionality already so dig in!

I’m hoping that this might be yet another avenue out of recruitment for me. If I get good enough with PHP and learn enough about SugarCRM then I might be able to transition over to a PM/Dev role if my company starts to focus on open source consulting.

Wikipedia drama + thoughts

Monday, December 5th, 2005

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that due to problems with spam and bogus content creation the Wikipedia will be restricting the creation of new articles to registered members. Not that this will change much - it’s still free and easy to register, but still not necessarily a welcome change.

That coupled with a recent flame war resulting from the internet famous podcaster Adam Curry editing articles to minimize others involvement in the current new-media podcast revolution has left the Wikipedia to face the brunt of a wave of bad media.

I think it’s sad that everyone is taking such a negative view of the Wikipedia suddenly. Wikipedia is a great resource, and although it should not be considered the authoritative source for serious research (yet) it is a great source of information and as more and more authors/editors participate it’s becoming a great bastion of collective human knowledge.

It will be interesting to see how wikis grow over the next 10 years or so. It’s a very new concept that I think has some incredible potential. How else can such a disparate group of (potentially anonymous) authors come together and be able to create a melding of intellect and knowledge. I hope that in years to come both the enterprise market and groups of people with like minded interests continue to use wikis as methods of sharing information with each other and the world in general.

Go on - if you have a passion start a wiki about it. MediaWiki and other free, open source platforms are available for the general public to easily set up, use , and share their wealth of knowledge with the world - or just keep it handy and organized.

MAMP is nifty stuff

Saturday, December 3rd, 2005

Even better! So I had been working with the default Apache install on my powerbook, and had installed MySQL, and PHPmyAdmin for my development environment. I had been somewhat at a loss for other tools (aside from trusty TextWrangler) until today when a reader turned me on to MAMP. It’s a simple install, and provides a great separate development environment for my PHP stuff while leaving “production” code for the default Apache install. It makes it even easier to play around with stuff, and comes with a ton of documentation and optimization extensions.

MAMP installs everything I had and more, while keeping everything (including the separate applications and the wwwroot) in it’s install folder making it easy to blow away the databases and development environment if you have to.

Getting back into development sure has been interesting so far. It’s been years since I’ve picked up something in earnest and I’m quite pleased with how quickly PHP is coming back to me.

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