Technology

With PC World declaring Microsoft Demands Royalties for Open-Source Software we've now got a repeat of the RIAA's sue our customers strategy!

Suing Your Customers

I use MSWindows, MacOSX, a variety of distrubtions of GNU/Linux, and even Solaris, HPUX, AIX, and other flavors of UNIX in my daily job. Daily. I am a Microsoft customer. I use several of their products beyond just MSWindows. And now microsoft is warning that it will sue me for using Linux. Does that make me want to buy more or less of their product? I'm not really sure, but somewhere in "marketing" is a rule like "treat your customers well". Where does "suing your customers" fall? Is that somehow going to make me feel like I should buy more Microsoft products?

Perspiration, Innebriation, Desperation

So, now that we know Mr. Ballmer is a major perspirator and I imagine he must be drinking a lot given the almost complete failure of Vista. So now desperation. Why would you sue your customers. That just sounds like such a boneheaded move so the only way you might want to do that is if you are really really desperate.

The steady march of open source

In other news I haven't used excel in a year and I just moved my laptop to Linux two weeks ago as did a coworker this past weekend.

Let's say that you are running a command on a linux shell and it's taking a long time. Further, you need to disconnect your session to get on the bus or your session gets disconnected because your net connection is flakey.

Screen to the rescue

Imagine if you could just disconnect from your shell session and then reconnect. Well, you can :)

Screen Cheat Sheet

So - that quick guide should provide the commands you need in the order you need them. And then you'll be more productive and then you'll be happier because you'll be doing it efficiently :)

I recently attended a training that Kevin Kempter hosted. It was a really great two night session aimed at experienced DBAs/Developers so that they could learn PostgreSQL. Kevin has a lot of experience with postgres and wanted to help share that experience with other folks. He's finding a growing need for PgSQL developers in the Denver area and wants to build up a user group and network here so that companies deciding whether to use PostgreSQL or not will see an available local talent pool here in Colorado.

PostgreSQL for my uses in Drupal

His presentation was thorough and well prepared showing Kevin's experience and knowledge of the subject. Personally it wasn't clear to me that PostgreSQL would be better for my needs than MySQL. In some quick tests MySQL was about twice as fast in my benchmarking of a local drupal site (using ab -c2 -n1000). I tried a couple different settings inside of drupal (cache enabled or not) and MySQL was consistently quite a bit faster. Kevin seemed to feel that PostgreSQL by default isn't very fast, but with tuning it can be much faster. However, you can always tune the database and get many times better performance - so if you tune both PostgreSQL and MySQL then which one will be faster - it's hard to say?

Either way I was very please to learn a lot more. PostgreSQL's need for vacuuming seems like a real pain - but apparently autovacuum is on its way to take care of this automatically.

PostgreSQL Training and Services in Denver

If you are interested in training or services with PostgreSQL in or near Denver, I definitely recommend getting in touch with Kevin.

The other day I broached the idea of a security bounty in the Drupal project. I had first heard about this concept from the Mozilla Foundation's Security Bug Bounty which appears to be the most famous of these.

Why Security Bug Bounty's are a good idea

This is pretty simple:

1. It provides at least some motivation for folks to actually look at the code and find security bugs making the software more secure.
2. More folks looking at the code is always a good thing.
3. Just the concept and the existence of the program reminds people that we take security seriously, and informs them of the proper way to report a bug.
4. In the case of the Drupal Association - which can't make decisions about the code based about the statutes (en pdf) (more formats/languages).

Generalized Security Bug Bounty System

This concept seems to me like it could be generalized for any software project. Here are the rules I came up with, based upon the Mozilla foundation's rules.

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OpenOffice.org in my life

I just wrote in an email

Alternatively I believe that Excel has a csv import wizard, but I forget how to get it working (I haven't used Excel in over a year).

That's more than a little surprising because I spent the last 5 years before this past one building models in Excel (among other fun stuff like ColdFusion or ASP webapps that talked to Oracle or SQL Server - I haven't touched those three technologies in more than a year either)! Man does it feel good to be living a more open source life.

Open Formats for the City of Denver

In other news, I complained to the city of Denver that their invitations to bid should be in a more readable format than .doc such as PDF or RTF. The webmaster was apparently as surprised as I was that someone in a department was posting docs to the site because the denvergov.org webmaster asked that the docs be removed quickly for fear of tampering and spreading viruses. The departmental person in charge of posting changed them all to PDFs within a few days.

OpenOffice.org Documents by Default in Drupal

In other news, Drupal has been allowing Oasis document formats in Drupal since 5.0 (due to this patch I made which allowed those by default).

The evil empire's grip is slipping with each year. Open formats are the future, people. The future.

So, privacy. That's kinda an important thing right now. As we go around the internets we leave all sorts of information about ourselves online. That information is valuable. No, I mean really valuable. Even if you don't submit your personal information (like name, or address) to a website you are still leaving providing private information just by visiting a site. Don't believe me? Look at this press release from hitwise about real estate. Notice anything? Like how visits to real estate sites are a leading indicator of home purchasing behavior. Yeah, your visits to sites, or "clickstream" is a predictor of what you think about and what you are planning to do. Looking for a house - you visit a real estate site. Looking for a new job - you visit a job site. Looking for...you get it. Your clickstream is a mirror of you - even without personal information associated with it.

Big Evil Google

What is the company that concerns you most when it comes to privacy? It's GOOGLE right? Man, their search is so good. Their search is good and their information awareness is so strong and not only do they have my clickstream (cause I only find sites through their site and they know what I click) now they also have my email, spreadsheets & text documents, blog, photos, credit cards & address - shoot, they have everything too. Organized. Segmented. Cross referenced. Searchable. Um, yikes.

Privacy of your clickstream

So, not many people understand programming. Here's a funny/interesting way to describe programming in terms of cooking. I like it.

Similarly, I once heard an analogy about asking a software engineer to build a bridge from San Francisco to Hawaii. A software engineer would say "no problem" and then do:


while (notInHawaii) {
buildbridge();
}


Clearly that won't work in general, but in software it does. That's what makes software so interesting in a world of cheap computing resources.