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Archives: [+]
More response to Microsoft exec Jim Allchin's statement about open source and intellectual property, this time from the good folks at RedHat. Here's a quote from RedHat's CEO Matthew J. Szulik: "I'd argue that a worldwide monopoly, enforced by business practices that a federal judge has found to be predatory and anti-competitive, probably has more to do with killing innovation than anything the open-source movement could ever do." Pow!
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Matt Jones's excelent site frownland is one that I surf most every day. He's a designer who lives in London. His blog is insightful and fun. His designs are clean and efficient. There are too many good sites out there right now. Once upon a time, I'd read the daily report at Zeldman's site and that would cover most of the bases for me (it's sort of like CNN for web designers). But now that I'm doing so many different things, I have to go to different places to keep up with events (when I can, when I bother). Not all of them are as entertaining as the ones I've mentioned so far in this post. I read security focus to keep up with Linux security issues (even though the site could be a poster child for bad page design--over half of the screen is eaten up in advertising banners and needlessly large navigational elements). To keep on top of what's going on in the open source/free software communities, I've been surfing NewsForge more, along with the larger, more generalized computer news sites (e.g. ZDNet, CNet, etc.). The only site I've read lately just for the fun of it is Cardigan.
Too much talk. I have a big project to finish and other, smaller ones in the works...
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I have MySQL running on my laptop. I'm spent the weekend sharpening up my SQL skills. Today I'll work up some demos and make sure that MySQL and PHP are configured properly so I can work on database-intensive projects even when I'm away from work.
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I was flattered and surprised to find an email in my box this morning from Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation. He had read an article on ZDNet about Microsoft exec Jim Allchin's dismissive and alarmist statements about open source software (basically, Allchin said open source is an "intellectual-property destroyer" and implied that it was un-American. He also claimed that it stifles competition). The article quoted me saying that people in the open source community are "leery of Microsoft in particular." I chalked Allchin's statement up to marketing hype and said it had no validity. I also commented that "Open source has proven itself already to be a place where a lot of innovation happens."
Stallman read my comment and emailed me to enlist my help in keeping people from confusing the free software movement with the related but significantly different open source movement. After reading many of the materials on his site, I'm convinced that he's right. Linux, the GNU project (especially the GNU Public License), and open source are all important trends in computing which have encouraged inovation and alternatives to older ways of doing things. It's only fair to give credit where credit is due. Many of the programs I use every day are GNU programs developed by the Free Software Foundation (hell, I use the bash shell and that's a GNU product). So, for what it's worth, GNU and open source are not the same thing, even if they have some things in commom. You can read up on them if you're curious and want to deliniate exactly what those differences are. I'm not sure which movement I side with more (I go back and forth on this issue). But I think they've both contributed positively to the work I do every day.
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I just finished installing PHP4 on my laptop. I already had Apache installed. So now I can work on PHP-related things even when I don't have access to my servers (and I can test things out w/o having to upload them to he server). The PHP installer is dead simple. And, as I recall, installing Apache was easy too. If only installing software were as easy on Linux. That's one area they'll need to improve if it's ever to be a desktop operating system (and, for that matter, ease of use is a feather in the cap of any server opwerating system as well).
Next I'll try to get MySQL working with the whole mess, but I'm saving that for tomorow (or next week, or next month). At least now I'll have no excuse not to be honing my PHP skills.
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An update to the Pre-College Programs site and a brand new version of the Upward Bound page went live today. I'm proud of both. The UB site is template-driven. It uses PHP includes to include standardized headers and footers into each page. Trust me: this is the way to build a site. Need to change the header graphic or a navigation element? Change it in the header file and it's changed site wide. The CSS is also in it's own file, so the site is truly modular, which makes updating and/or modifying it incredibly simple. I need to reconstruct my homepage using the same principle.
The only drag of doing things this way is that I have to upload things to my server before I can really see what they look like and test their functionality. I do my coding (these days) on my laptop (running Windows 98) and then upload them to the server (running Red Hat Linux 7). I'm thinking about installing PHP on my laptop and using Apache locally for testing. That would make things easier and allow me to work on dynamic sites even when I'm offline.
I'm also glad that blogger is still here so I can tell you about them without having to roll my own publishing system.
Some reporter--I can't remember from what organization--called yesterday to ask me how I feel about the increasing presense of for-profit corporations in opensource development. My view is that corporations are a good influence so long as we keep our eyes on them. The money and prestige they can bring to a project is considerable. The danger is that they'll try to put proprietary hooks into opensource products. We'll see how it goes.
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I found two great educational sites to add to the ETS page. One is greatbuildings.com--a very nice architecture site with pictures of just about everything. The other is loggia.com, which is devoted to the humanities in general.
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Life's a little better this week. There was some tension yesterday between me and the workstudy I supervise (and who has a tendence of late to be late and not bother calling in). I noticed that he's an hour early today. But other than that drama, things have slowed down enough that I can start knocking things off my to do list again. I have some revisions of the UBETS page to upload, and I think I'll work today on ordering gear and working up a new page for Upward Bound (that's the old one, designed by my workstudy). I still don't have a solid idea what I want out of it, but I need to pick an idea and go with it. I can allways redesign it latter (and I will anyway).
I'm listening to Bill Frisell's Ghost Town CD. I had downloaded a few songs off Napster. And Gina brought home the soundtrack to Finding Forrester which is about 50% Bill Frisell and 50% Miles Davis (beat that!). He's the guitarist I like most at the moment. I'd always heard his name, but I'd never heard any of his stuff. I love how sparse his arrangements are. He's an amazing player, but he doesn't ever feel the need to prove it to you with fast runs. Instead, he creates a mood, and he's incredibly good at doing that. What he does with the guitar and loops is something close to what I want do do with the bass. My own stuff tends to have a more overt structure. But Frisell's influence might change that. There's an old saying about playing bass: "If what you're playing doesn't seem to work, try playing less." I've heard the adage "less is more" attributed to modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. I'm no sure of the accuracy of that attribution, but of the wisdom of it, I have no doubts. Whenever I'm struggling with a line and can't get it to work against the other instruments, I start dropping notes out. So far, it's never not worked.
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I've honestly been too busy this week to post much at all, so this will be a bit of a recap. The Pre-College Newsletter has left the building, and I couldn't be happier. Printing Services at the University of Arkansas was kind enough to rush the print job through for us, but their lack of skill at working with electronic files was pathetic. I provided them with the newsletter in PageMaker, PDF, PS, and EPS formats on CD-ROM and Zip100. They couldn't make any of those work on their Xerox equipment, despite telling me last week that they could. They ended up scanning in my printed original. I hope that they work some of the bugs out of their system before I have to send a print job to them again.
This morning I uploaded a revamped version of the UBETS splash/gateway page. I'm much happier with the striped-down look of this one. I also coded up an online application form for some summer jobs we have open. I have two more of these to do, but they'll have to wait. Since we're now working with the YOU program, I coded up a very simple page that states the goals of that program.
What's really cool is I have Flash 5 on my machine (installed it yesterday). I'm new to Flash but I've wanted to learn about it for quite some time. I doubt I'll be cranking out anything as cool as once-upon-a-forest.com anytime soon, but I am looking forward to using it (tastefully) to add a bit of animation to our sites (and my own sites).
Vicki sent me a nice Valentine's Day card and gift. (I know you're reading this: thank you).
I didn't get to see my wife, Gina, on Valentine's Day because she's in Morrilton, Arkansas consulting with the local Department of Human Services. I did get to see her on the 13th, though, and that made up for it a bit. Her job keeps her out of town a lot, especially in the past few weeks, but she'll be back Friday and we can celebrate then.
I received a nice letter praising the BassBook today, this one from a kind person in Greece. I also received a strange email asking me to participate in some sort of web-based survey to narrow down the definition of Postmodernism. I'll keep you posted on that one.
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Just finished a quick interview with NewsForge (a good opensource news site). It was a fairly short interview and I was nervous as hell. I think it went okay. I'm waiting to see if they'll end up quoting me. I'm about to make final changes to the newsletter and walk it over to the printer (I could email it, but I'd like to pick out the paper it's going to be printed on, and getting out of the office is always a good thing). Once that's out of my hands, life will get at least 25% better.
Saw Hanibal (pretty good, fairly scarry, a bit too hollywood) and O Brother Where art Thou? (very funny) this past weekend. Gina and I've been on a movie kick of late. But now I think we've seen most everything that we'd wanted to.
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It's not finished yet, but I'm launching it anyway: a new version of my home on the web.
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When I started using NuSphere MySQL on our two Linux servers, I liked it so much that I flashed the company an email telling them thanks for making such a good product (their installer takes 98% of the trouble out of getting MySQL, PHP, and Apache to play nicely together). A few days later, I got an email back asking if their PR people could call me and get a more detailed account of my opinion of their product. So we did a phone interview and they quoted me in a press release. That was fun, actually. Pontificating is always fun.
A week ago, I got an email from a writer doing a news piece on MySQL and other opensource database systems (like Postgres) as an alternative to the big guys (Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server). I answered his questions and he quoted me in a piece he wrote for a networking news site called NetworkFusion. You can read the article here. It's a short quotation in a short article, but I'm happy with it. I'm pretty far from a database guru. But it's fun to play on one the web. :)
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Jesus: I've been busy as hell for three weeks now. I finally got that 6th-8th grade workshop project off my desk. So now it's full-speed-forward with the Pre-College Programs newsletter (print media--yuck!). I have it layed out in Adobe PageMaker. It's ten pages. We're at the copy editing and last-minute layout tweaking phase. I'd like this thing out the door by Friday. I still have lots of web revisions to do and a workshop for 9th-12th graders to finish up (that one's due March 1). The redesigned version of the Upward Bound page is also due March 1. I'm not sure if I can pull that off or not. We'll see.
James Cohea, the drummer in Nancy, used to play for a very good band called Cars Get Crushed. He loaned me a bunch of CDs and I've been enjoying them quite a bit.
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The sysadmin nonsense will never end. I've started upgrading everyone in the office to Norton AntiVirus 6.0 (2000). It's a fine product and I highly reccomend it. But I guess I'm going to have to do some training on how to upgrade your virus definitions. Even though Norton makes that a fairly automated process, the software still asks you too many questions, which can confuse some users.
We're still having some SAMBA problems. I need to get the SAMBA book from David and read it. I'm not in the mood for adding one more sysadmin task to my already overly-long list, but some has to do it. If I ever get to a point where I can sit down and design something again, I'll be a very happy person. But it will be a real joy to actually have SAMBA up and running well. The entire time I've been here, it's been acident prone, and there's not reason why that should be true. Maybe I'll try it out on lithe first, so I understand the process, before I look into the larger network (all of which I need to map out).
We saw Traffic today. It was great. Today is also day six, for me, of the diet and I'm doing fine....
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I was deeply saddened to learn that even blogger has been hit by this downturn in the web economy. Blogger is a really fine service. And there has to be a way to make a buck off of it in order to keep it going (if that's what it takes to keep it going). If you're only on the web to make money, your on the web for the wrong reasons. It's hard to make money on the web. But the web is a fantastic asset to any company that already has a product to support. Just today, for instance, I needed to hook my USB Zip250 drive up to my laptop. I didn't have the installer CD because I thought I'd already installed the drivers. Five years ago, I would have had to drive home for the CD. If I'd lost it (or if is stopped working, or if they upgrade the drivers and other software), I'd have had to write the company or call them and work through their automated answering service and get them to send me a new copy (with me paying postage). Turnaround time? Probably two weeks. But today, I just went to iomega.com and downloaded the drivers. No problems. It probably took ten minutes of my day..
That's the sort of thing the web is great for. You can distribute electronic files very easily. But, so far, it works better if you're distributing files to support a physical product that you're selling (that is, if making money is part of your goal). Besides making money, of course, there are lots of other great things you can do with the web. No profits use the web extensively to get their message out and help serve their clients.
Saddened as I am by the shrinking web job market, the web was still a fine place before everyone got into the game and tried to make a buck at being on the web. I've been around long enough to see this come and go. I've surfed with Mosaic. I had to go to a lab in order to use such high-fire-power software. From home, I had to use lynx through a telnet connection. I remember when Mosaic turned into Netscape. And I remember when Netscape 3.0 came out and I didn't like it because it ran too slow on my 68040-based Macintosh (in fact, I only kept it around for running pages that wouldn't work in my default browser--Netscape 2.1). I'm not one of those neo-luddite techheads who think the web and making a buck can't mix. They *can* mix, but it's been a painful learning process to figure out in which ways they can mix. At first, businesses lacked caution in approaching the web. Now they're too cautious. I hope these things level out before I find myself in the job market again.
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