I’m continuing my survey of what I blogged about in 2010 as I look at the third quarter and add the summery topic of sailing.
Last Time: “Review of the blog for 2010 – April through June”
July started with some fireworks when I made the announcement that IBM was moving its ~ 400,000 employees to the open source Firefox as the default browser. To date this has been one of my most read entries, with more than 66,000 hits since it was published.
Several days later I picked up again on my series of exploring the state of mathematical software on the iPad. In July, three months after the device’s introduction, I found the choices lacking in breadth and sophistication, with a lot of me-too apps in the early education category.
Another thing I picked up again this summer was sailing, after a hiatus of 30+ years. The first blog entry of the summer about sailing announced that I had purchased a used 1988 Catalina 22 and was about to pick it up. I’m looking forward to having a full sailing season in 2011, unlike the 2 months or so I had this last year.
Starting with the question “What questions come up most frequently when I engage with customers about open source?”, I continued my series about the hard questions about open source software in August.
As I got the boat ready to go into Lake Ontario, I talked to a lot of people and did a lot of research about sailing. The blog entry “Sailing: Things to learn and do before the boat goes in the water” includes a lot I learned after and a lot I wish I knew before I purchased the sailboat. To be clear, I’m still very happy I got this particular boat.
In September, I and a lot of other people worried about what Apple’s change to the iOS Developer Program License Agreement meant for app developers. In particular, I was concerned about what it meant for mathematical software that involved interpretation of functions. Though Apple has since changed the rules and made them more liberal, I think a lot of developers believe they understand the legalities more than they really do.
Last winter I took an impromptu visit to the Erie Canal and I went back to the same location to see what it looked like in late summer. Perhaps 2011 will be the year when I rent a boat and take it on a multiday tour along the canal.
As the month ended I again bemoaned the state of presentation software, stating that
I can’t think of one thing I do with presentation software today other than creating PDFs that I didn’t do ten years ago.
Perhaps we are in some way transitioning away from presentations as that may explain the absurd lack of innovation in this part of the software market.
In between these and other blog entries I posted many links to articles about Linux and open source. Though I would really prefer having some sort of private way of saving these to my website, Diigo continues to do the job quite well, and I especially like the daily blog posting function.
Next up: Excitement around OpenJDK, Â apple pies, ApacheCon, open innovation, and predictive analytics.
