The content on this site is my own and does not necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions.
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The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
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Oracle signals an end to OpenSolaris – Computerworld
“Oracle appeared to confirm this week what many in the computer industry already suspected: The OpenSolaris project is dead.
Oracle laid out its Solaris strategy in an internal memo that was leaked to the OpenSolaris mailing list on Friday. It says Oracle’s efforts are focused on a commercial Solaris release that will help expand the sale of its servers and other products.”
tags: oracle opensolaris dead
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Google calls Oracle lawsuit ‘baseless,’ vows to fight it – Computerworld
“Google will put up a fight in response to the patent- and copyright-infringement lawsuit that Oracle filed over the use of Java in the Android mobile phone platform.
Oracle’s lawsuit is a disappointing and “baseless” attack not only against Google but also against the open-source Java community, Google spokesman Aaron Zamost said via e-mail on Friday.”
tags: google oracle java
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Oracle Wields Java as a Weapon – PCWorld
“I’ll say this for Oracle, at least it’s consistently contradictory. The executives will extol the virtues of their partners, then turn right around and kick them in the–well, you know–and deploy an “innovative” copy of their partner’s free software.
Or they’ll claim to love open source, then let a prominent open source project suffer death by ignoring.
Or they’ll tout open standards, then turn around and use patents on a standard programming language, then sue one of the biggest users of that technology.”
tags: java oracle google
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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An introduction to Linux kernel programming
“This is Crash Course’s first offering of a multi-week, online technical course; in this case, a series of 24 (or more) lessons to gently introduce one to the joys and intricacies of basic Linux kernel programming. The first few lessons are publicly readable by anyone (and are, in fact, available under a Creative Commons license) , while the remaining course lessons are available exclusively to subscribers for a course registration fee of only $39 (CAD) for the entire course.”
tags: linux education
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http://thewe.net/tex
“TEX THE WORLD converts TeX formulas anywhere, on any website, into rendered images. All you have to do is put them between [; and ;] (for example: [;e^{\pi i} + 1 = 0;]) “
tags: tex math firefox
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I just confirmed that search was broken on my website. Better yet, I just fixed it. The input box and search button in the upper left corner should now properly return search results from the current blog, archived blog, and the various pages on the site.
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User interface overhaul arrives in Firefox 4 beta
“Mozilla on Tuesday released the first official beta of Firefox 4, the next major version of the popular open source Web browser. Mozilla has completely overhauled Firefox’s user interface and added several noteworthy new features for Web developers and regular end users.
The new user interface represents a major departure from Firefox’s traditional look and feel. It is arguably one of the most significant stylistic overhauls that Mozilla has undertaken since the initial transition from the old Mozilla suite to Firefox.”
tags: firefox interface user overhaul
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Firefox 4 Beta 1: A Visual Tour – PCWorld
“Mozilla recently released the first beta version of Firefox 4, the next iteration of the world’s second most popular browser (after Internet Explorer). The new Firefox offers the usual under-the-hood tweaks you’d expect, such as improved security and better page rendering, and it also supports WebM, Google’s new open video standard project. But more importantly to the average user, Firefox 4 offers a refreshed layout and appearance. Here’s a look at some of the highlights.”
tags: firefox
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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A Youthful Market Spurns the Wares of Microsoft – NYTimes.com
“In particular, the Kin debacle is a reflection of Microsoft’s struggle to deliver what the younger generation of technology-obsessed consumers wants. From hand-held products to business software, Microsoft seems behind the times.
Part of its problem may be that its ability to intrigue and attract software developers is also waning, which threatens its ability to steer markets over the long term. When it comes to electronic devices, people writing software have turned their attention to platforms from Apple and Google. “
tags: Microsoft
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
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Multiple tag / category queries | WordPress Guy
“Did you know that WordPress supports multiple tag queries?”
tags: wordpress, category, tag, multiple
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just saying no to deer, with fencing — A Way to Garden
“I GARDENED WITH THE DEER FOR NEARLY A DECADE, and then I said no more. I’d sprayed, sachet-ed, blood-mealed and Milorganite-d myself into a meltdown; I just couldn’t wrap or pen or hang aluminum pie-plate mobiles or otherwise defend individual plants any longer. After all, the deer would just eat whatever wasn’t “protected,” indiscriminate feeders who were happy to move on to the next course as the previous runs out. So I finally fenced.”
tags: garden, deer
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iPad Apps/Games : Best English Dictionary Apps
“After scouring through tens of pages of dictionaries in the app store from foreign languages, slang, and bibles to medical, law, and pranks (yes, pranks), I’ve decided that the app store is in no dictionary shortage crisis at the moment. Let this AppGuide lead you in the right direction as to what English language dictionary will serve you, your situation, and your iDevice the best.”
tags: ipad, apps, dictionary
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Add-on Developer Hub :: Add-ons for Firefox
“Add-ons empower millions of Firefox users to personalize their browser’s form and function. Why not show off your smarts by creating an add-on the whole world can use? Tools and tutorials you find here make it simple. So take a look and put your ingenuity in motion.”
tags: firefox, addon
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet | opensource.com
“In this morning’s Red Hat Summit sessions, Jean Staten Healy and Bob Sutor of IBM presented on the solutions that communities around the world are implementing using Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet.”
tags: linux, red-hat, smarter-planet
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WordPress Grows Up with 3.0 – Messaging and Collaboration from eWeek
“WordPress became popular by making it as simple as possible to publish a personal blog. Along the way, the project has become a hit not only with personal bloggers, but with publishers as well. WordPress 3.0 comes to terms with its new audience by adding features that are better suited to content management systems than personal Weblogs. The question for most users is whether WordPress 3.0 can scale to handle the big dogs while still retaining the simplicity for single-user blogs that has fueled WordPress growth since its inception in 2003.”
tags: wordpress, blog
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UPDATE: Red Hat 1Q Profit Jumps 30% On Stronger-Than-Seen Sales – WSJ.com
“The company’s results have held up well in recent quarters, thanks to the bulk of its revenue being either recurring or subscription-based. Red Hat’s core Linux product is free, but the company makes its money on providing maintenance and support to corporations and large organizations who use it to operate computers.
Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst said Tuesday that the company had a strong start the year, highlighting its growth in organic revenue and income. He said that the number of large deals booked was up significantly from the year-earlier period, including several with an initial consulting component that the company sees as an indicator of new project spending and future subscription billings.”
tags: red-hat, linux
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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WordPress › Blog » WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”
“Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress. The growth of the community has been breathtaking, including over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, but so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless.”
tags: wordpress, blog
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Not using desktop Linux? You’re wasting your money | Linux – InfoWorld
“Let me be blunt: If you’re not using Linux on the desktop in call center and other fixed-purpose computing environments, you’re doing your company a disservice.
It never fails to amaze me when I see environments with hundreds of Windows XP systems running TN3270 sessions to an AS/400, with a headset-equipped person staring at the green screen and talking to a customer. Even if there were a need for Web browsing and email for those users, why would you pay for Windows on that system in this day and age?”
tags: desktop, linux
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Ballmer says Windows will shame iPad • The Register
“It was a standard Ballmer-and-Microsoft defensive play on the PC’s place in the future of technology, a defense that conflates the idea of the computer with machines that run Windows.
And when it comes to tablets, Microsoft tried and failed under co-founder Bill Gates to rally OEMs on new devices running Windows. Tablets running Windows saw limited uptake, and only in vertical sectors. The iPad is going where Windows failed: into general consumer and business users’ hands.”
tags: windows, ipad, ballmer, apple
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Digital Self-Publishing Shakes Up Traditional Book Industry – WSJ.com
“Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.”
tags: publishing, ebook
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New York State Senate – Drupal Module Reviews and Ratings
“This collection of Drupal modules powers the website of the New York State Senate and is available as-is for use and adaptation by anyone who wishes to build a public-facing website for government or other agencies.”
tags: drupal, politics
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CiviCRM | CiviCRM Community Site
“CiviCRM is a free, libre and open source software constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. Integration with both Drupal and Joomla! content management systems gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents.”
tags: opensource, crm, drupal, cms, civicrm
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How to get rejected from the App Store | Developer World – InfoWorld
“So let’s try to tally the score. There’s no guarantee that anyone’s app will be accepted, but as near as I can tell, here are a few things you can do to get you booted off the App Store”
tags: apple, iphone
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iPhoneDevCon – San Diego
“Software development for Apple’s mobile platforms is hot hot hot. With more than 50 million iPhones sold, along with 35 million iPod touch devices and hundreds of thousands of iPads, there are opportunities for every developer, every marketer, every entrepreneur, every ISV and every enterprise IT professional.
Come to iPhone/iPad DevCon to learn how to succeed with your mobile apps development, deployment and marketing.”
tags: iphonedevcon, iphone, ipad, apple, conference
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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For some companies, IE6’s ineptitude is a feature, not flaw
“In spite of its weak security, poor performance, and woeful standards compliance, a lot of people are still using Internet Explorer 6 as their Web browser of choice. A large part of this user base seems to be made up of corporate users. According to Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Adviser at Microsoft Australia, one of the reasons for this continued usage is that companies have found a virtue in one of the browser’s biggest flaws: it doesn’t work properly with social networking sites like Facebook.”
tags: ie6, browser
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Sprite Something for iPad: retro, pixel-based design
“Old-school icon designers and retro game houses alike will be delighted by the release of Sprite Something from Terrible Games. Whether you remember the days of creating icons in ResEdit, or prefer creating RPG characters with pixels instead of polygons, Sprite Something for the iPad will be right up your alley. Admittedly, the audience is small, but the nostalgia factor is too great for it to be ignored.”
tags: ipad, sprite, graphics
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iTWire – Nearly every supercomputer runs Linux
“Of the 187 new entrants, all but one are running some variant of Linux and in fact 470 of the Top 500 run Linux, 25 some other Unix (mostly AIX) and the remaining 5 run Windows HPC 2008.”
tags: linux, supercomputer
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
Flickr. Diigo. Evernote.
Everybody wants me to work on my machine but then synchronize my data to their site for safekeeping and social functions. I can understand this for situations where I want others to see my photos or my links, but what happens when I have ten or twenty of these services, all of which have separate interfaces, separate logins, separate passwords, and separate liklihoods to still be around in 5 years?
Unless I explicitly want to use their sites as places that others will visit to see my information, I want to store that data on my own site. That will still allow it to be accessed from anywhere when I have Internet connectivity, but I don’t need to worry about the services themselves just vanishing.
Yes, perhaps those sites have backups, but I can deal with a single backup for my one site. Also, I want the information available in a standard format. If one is not available, at least use XML.
I understand this might cause some business model issues with advertising or premium services. Indeed, if I use their software but use my site as the repository, it opens up security risks as well. Nevertheless, my controlling my data and having it available in standard formats will make me sleep better at night.
What do you think?
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, porch building, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
Several weeks ago at OSBC I posed a serious of “hard questions” about open source software. They weren’t meant to demean it, of course, but were really to say that software for the enterprise needs to be held to very high standards, whether it open source or traditional.
One of the sections was this:
Who will maintain your installation of the software?
- If you are planning for your IT staff to install and maintain your software, make sure it doesn’t get orphaned when you have personnel turnover.
- When software updates come along, you will need a plan to decide which ones to install and when, especially if major releases come along every six months or so.
- If you customize open source code for your organization, are you prepared to propagate those changes into newer versions of the code?
Today I saw the story “You may want to avoid hacking your open-source CMS” which discussed The Onion’s experience hacking an old version of Drupal. To give you an idea, version 7 of Drupal is about to come out and the latest official version is 6.16. The Onion highly customized version 4.7. That alone should make you nervous since clearly the software has moved far beyond the point where it was forked.
The original article referenced discussed how The Onion moved from Drupal, a PHP application platform, to Django, a Python framework.
The problems with highly hacking code is that it is very hard to maintain it for functional and security fixes, you don’t easily get improvements to the code base, and you may be doing similar work to what is happening in the community, and maybe not as well.
This reminds me of a blog entry I did in December called “Open source software: modify, extend, or leave it alone?”. There I concluded:
There can be innovation in the core application, but that same application can become a platform for innovation if it has a good extension mechanism. Choose good applications that can be improved or configured outside the core software, and you’ll save a lot of trouble and gain some real advantages. This is true for open or closed source software.
Postscript: As Jonathan Bennett pointed out to me on Twitter, I failed to mention a very important aspect when you do make changes to open source code: offer your modifications back to the community and your code may make it into the main trunk of the project. That is, since you are doing some coding, become a contributor as well. This may not always be possible, but consider it.
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SUSE Linux Enterprise 11’s renewal plans – The H Open Source: News and Features
“Other important features in Service Pack 1 are kernel resource management and support for up to 4096 CPUs and 16TB of RAM in a system. Xen is updated to version 4.0 and Novell SLES SP1 also supports the alternative KVM virtualisation solution. The drivers which Microsoft released as open source for paravirtualised operation when running as a Hyper-V guest are included.”
tags: linux, suse, novell, kvm
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Red Hat Moves Into Desktop Virtualization – PCWorld Business Center
“Open source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced Monday.”
tags: virtualization, desktop, red-hat
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Red Hat KVM Virtualization Finds Early Adopters – Virtualization Blog – InformationWeek
“Citrix and VMware have been leapfrogging each other in virtualization features, but virtualization is more like a marathon than a 100-yard dash. Perhaps the new kid at the back of the pack is going to be closer to front by the time we get to the finish line.”
tags: virtualization, kvm, red-hat, linux
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451 CAOS Theory » Please break our open source business strategy model
“It included a partial explanation of my theory that those strategies do not exist in isolation, but are steps on an evolutionary process, and also introduced our model for visualizing the core elements of an open source-related business strategy.”
tags: 451, open-source
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An Easy and Inexpensive Quad-Core System for Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux
“My son’s hand-me-down motherboard recently gave up the ghost, and I decided that was a good excuse for an upgrade. Shopping around, I found that multi-core CPUs were finally in my price range, so I decided to build him a quad-core system. This build worked out extremely well, with almost no configuration problems, not even for accelerated 3D graphics or ALSA sound — all using the latest Debian GNU/Linux (which means it’ll also work with Ubuntu or other derivatives). This one has that “classic” feel — everything just clicked into place. So I wanted to document it here. This also serves as a technology update to my earlier article on selecting hardware for a free-software-friendly system.”
tags: debian, ubuntu, linux
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How to get content for a business grid – Hypergrid Business
“One of the common problems I hear about opensim is that if you create a private grid, you’ll have to create all your content from scratch. That was the case a couple of years ago, when OpenSim was still new, but for most users, this is no longer the case.”
tags: opensim, second-life, virtual-world
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Do You Need Absolute Privacy? | BloggingPro
“The Absolute Privacy plugin by John Kolbert does exactly what it the title suggests; it turns your blog into the ultimate private blog”
tags: privacy, blog, WordPress
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I don’t know about you, but the presentations I create today are much simpler in design than those I created ten years ago. For example, I now never create presentations that include
- animation and builds
- slide transitions
- sound
- video
Any presentation I create today that will be shared with others ultimately ends up as a PDF file. Therefore the above features won’t necessarily work nor do I think they really add much other than being distractions.
I do care about
- good support for templates, including the ability to efficiently change templates and merge parts of presentations that use different templates
- precise and easy placement of presentation slide elements
- translation to compact and full fidelity PDF files
Note that the best presentation software can allow people to create truly ugly slides. Conversely, someone who is a true presentation artist can use crummy software to create pretty good slides, at least some of the time.
So just how much is really needed to create and represent presentations like those above? For the representation question, an appropriate query would be “what subset of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is necessary to include all the information necessary, and nothing more?’.
The creation side can vary quite a bit. Assuming you are using ODF, it would be possible though tedious to use a text editor and command line tools to create a file. I wouldn’t want to do that and would expect something with a better user interface to make slide creation and reuse easy.
Because of all the features they need to support, I think most presentation software is overkill when it comes to creating my kinds of presentations. They do much more than I need.
On the other hand, I’ve been very impressed with the progress made in visual editors in Web 2.0 software such as WordPress. While not truly WYSIWYG, they visually support features such as tables, lists, font styling, and images. Within five years I expect them to have much better support for CSS while editing, and hence be even closer to the final browser rendering while the document is being created.
This begs the questions:
- By 2020 will current presentation formats and software be completely obsolete?
- Will we instead be using HTML 5 and CSS to hold the content, structural, semantic, and formatting information?
- Can we use in-browser applications to create and show beautiful slides?
- Can we move to something simpler and without the legacy baggage?
If we do this, move to something more minimal that still allows us to create beautiful but static slides, we can then start adding back in some of the features that HTML 5 will support.
Browsers as well as software like Drupal, WordPress, and fully formatted email have significantly reduced the need for word processors. I think presentation software will be the next category of productivity application to be affected, with spreadsheets coming last.
Also see: “Presentations: Still too hard to mix and match”
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Rackspace hires to align with MySQL offshoot – BusinessWeek
“A number of former Sun Microsystems employees who worked on Drizzle, an offshoot of the MySQL open-source database, have ended up at cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace, where they will continue their efforts, developer Jay Pipes wrote in a blog post Monday.”
tags: sun, mysql, rackspace
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Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal « What I Couldn’t Say… (Jonathan Schwartz)
“As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business. So that interaction was good preparation for a later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.”
tags: sun, apple, oracle, microsoft
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Sunday Morning SEO: Using Google’s Spam Report to Fight a Cloaking Scraper « BloggingPro
“In my situation though, the scraper was also cloaking. Cloaking is a black hat tactic that Google frowns upon because it tricks the user into thinking they are visiting a page but instead they are redirected to an unrelated page.”
tags: spam, seo
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Webmaster Tools – Spam report – Google
“We think that’s a bad thing, and so we request that, if your Google search returns a result that you suspect is spam, you please let us know by using this form. We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they don’t show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we’ll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.”
tags: spam, google
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash – washingtonpost.com
“Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”
tags: second-life, virtual-world
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What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld
“HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”
tags: HTML
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Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events – NYTimes.com
“ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”
tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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The web designer’s guide to WordPress | News | TechRadar UK
“So what can WordPress do for designers? A lot, my friends! First and foremost, WordPress is a CMS.”
tags: wordpress, cms, open-source
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How to run almost any OS on your Mac | News | TechRadar UK
“In fact, as a Mac user, you’re uniquely positioned because an Intel Mac is the only computer in the world that can legally run all three major operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Indeed, you can, if you like, load all three on the same computer and pick which one you want to load when you switch your Mac on.”
tags: mac, osx, linux, virtualization
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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