Opinions

Opinions

Seeking independence?

For Americans, yesterday was an important holiday. It’s the commemoration of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. There are many countries around the world that declared independence from European colonial powers, but the United States was the first, and the language of that declaration was perhaps the more strident and high-minded because of it. It’s a beautiful revolutionary document, both in its language and its ideals. It’s not the first declaration of freedom, nor will it be the last.

.NET? .Not!

My office runs on a hodgepodge of Visual Basic, Python, C, and FoxPro. Since we’re a small company with few programmers, this hasn’t been a problem. Each of us simply chose the language that best met our needs for a given project. However, the seemingly exponential growth in the size of those projects, plus the addition of a few new programmers, means that our idyllic little world is coming to an end. We need to standardize on a common development platform before the proliferation of languages and framework libraries makes progress impossible.

Deep in the Docs

This week, and specifically today, marks a minor milestone in my employment at MySQL—I’m finally a full time employee, no longer on probation. It has also been probably the busiest week since I started at MySQL, except for the week spent at the developers’ conference in Sorrento.

Why so busy?

Because I’ve spent many hours deep in the build process that actually generates the documentation, partly to address some existing errors, but also to improve the documentation after some new content was added. In summary, the following major steps were made this week:

Always look on the bright side of life

Hi all, well it has been a long tiring week. Everyone has those weeks occasionally, the sort of week where the traffic lights are against you. You need to send editors the same documents a couple of times, yes even the mail server is against me and the coffee machine is broken just as you reached the point of no return. Therefore, rather than rave against the world and all its contents. I prefer to look on the bright side and then go get some sleep.

The IP Pirate Kings

And it is, it is, a glorious thing to be a Pirate King (1)

Piracy, and pirates, can conjure a variety of images. One picture it may bring to mind is that of a “Captain Sparrow” type figure buckling his swash in the remoter corners of the 17th century Caribbean, escaping certain death with a flair and style that guarantees nominations at film festivals and a sizable profit at the box office (2). Then there is another picture of a teenage geek in his bedroom copying a DVD of the above story onto another one for his friends. It is interesting to me the Walt Disney glorifies the former, who in reality were ruthless murderers and killers with no thought of their victims, while condemning the latter, whose actions have not yet been proved to hurt anyone and could well improve Walt Disney’s profits through greater exposure.

The pirates I would like to talk about are not “outlaws”, in the same way that privateers were not outlaws in the olden Caribbean. They are the litigation firms that scour the IT industry to extort money using the weapon of inappropriately granted patents...

The price of obeying the law

One thing that separates free software enthusiasts from "pirates" is the desire to be the good guys. We may not agree with copyright law, but rather than break them, we've opted to subvert them—to use them against themselves. The result is much more freedom for the user, who's suddenly liberated in ways that she might not even appreciate or even be aware of. But what would happen in a world where every user of proprietary software was forced to obey all those EULA's to their fullest extent?

Some comments on the Gartner report on FOSS on Microsoft Windows

I had heard about the latest Gartner report claiming that Microsoft Windows will become the dominant platform for "Open Source" (and free) software in the future. While there are certainly a number of reasons why some FOSS has and will continue to be written that also runs under Microsoft Windows, I think the fundamental premise is wrong.

The pull of the fruit

I tried my hardest to help my wife love Unix. When we were still dating, I built a little Debian machine for her so we could chat on ICQ while I was at work (and gave it to her on Valentine’s Day; aren’t I romantic?). That lasted for a while, but I eventually switched it to FreeBSD for reasons I no longer remember. Her computers always worked pretty well, but she was never happy with her inability to install software on her own, or to run games and applications from the local non-geek stores.

Just a thought: free distributed search?

Every once in awhile, I just get a hare-brained notion. Today's was, why do we use a central website for doing internet searches at all? Why Google?

Consider the success of the Planetary Society's distributed SETI project, and the distributed computing architecture that resulted from it. Consider the success of swarming download technology like BitTorrent. Consider how simple a basic web spider could be. Consider the efficiency of spidering networks locally. Consider the architecture of DNS.

See a pattern?

The pull of the fruit

I tried my hardest to help my wife love Unix. When we were still dating, I built a little Debian machine for her so we could chat on ICQ while I was at work (and gave it to her on Valentine’s Day; aren’t I romantic?). That lasted for a while, but I eventually switched it to FreeBSD for reasons I no longer remember. Her computers always worked pretty well, but she was never happy with her inability to install software on her own, or to run games and applications from the local non-geek stores.

The good, the bad, and the downright nasty

Sometimes you feel good about waking up in the morning, and the rest of the day brings you a few extra satisfactory moments.

For example, I got extatic when a n00b friend of mine phoned and told me “I installed Linux on my laptop!”

That felt good.

But then he asked me about something, and I asked him: “what Linux have you installed?” And all I got for my trouble was, “the latest”.

Suddenly I felt a bit... less good.

DRM, guardrails, and the right to be stupid

I’m a big believer in rights. I believe in the right to speak your mind, the right to act however you want, as long as you aren’t interfering with others’ rights; I even believe in more controversial rights like “the right to die”, and one of my favorites is the right to be stupid.

What do I mean by that? Well, I think that if people want to jump out of airplanes, down cliffs, or free-climb El Capitan, like Captain Kirk, they should be allowed to do that—even though it’s very clear that they may be stupid things to do that are likely to get them killed. One of the more powerful and hard to refute arguments for Digital Rights/Restrictions Management (DRM), though, is that it can be used in life-critical systems to prevent failures due to users’ own modifications—and it seems to me that this is a sticky case of balancing the right to be stupid with the right to be ignorant.

How the net was lost

Those who currently struggle to maintain what is called “Net Neutrality” on the internet I think have taken too limited an approach to their struggle. What they ask is to maintain an existing status quo that had already been eroded from the original promise and potential of the internet against those who wish to change it even further. This to me leaves for a poor negotiating position when congress loves to bridge difference with half measures, and even limited compromise between the current status quo and proposed changes would still be disastrous.

This is a sad, slightly unreal IT story

I had to spend 9 hours in Miami, waiting for a connecting flight. 9 hours wasn’t quite long enough to go out and about, but was long enough to get bored to death.

So, I decided that I would pay $7.95 for a “day pass” for the Wifi connection. The WiFi connection at the Miami airport is managed by people who don’t seem to know enough about computers to manage a home gaming LAN, let alone use Microsoft Server software for a real-life application (and, surprise surprise, nothing works).

Vulgar in the open

Over the last week or so, I have been watching the World Cup with growing pleasure. Seeing such teams as the US, the Ivory Coast and Trinidad and Tobago fighting hard and not giving an inch to supposedly superior teams, pricks at the very essence of committed sportsmanship. This positive energy makes you wonder why in a fair universe that these small town heroes do not win their allotted matches.

Programming and philosophising - should we leave it to the experts?

The other day I saw a filler article in an Aussie newspaper that was all about blogging (I would give you guys a link but firstly, I can’t remember which paper, and secondly, it really was a fluff piece). The theme was something along the lines of “Hey, there are billions of blogs out there now. Who reads them? What’re they all about?

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Opinions