You go girl!

Neelie Kroes told the US senate to fix their own problems instead of buggin' about the SUN-Oracle merger investigation: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/09/kroes_oracle/

Linus on GIT

I've worked with CVS and SVN, the biggest problem there is the merging and branching. Linus talks about GIT; a repository system he created.

The following vido is more than just informational, it's also entertaining.

Buggin' me

DARPA has given the word bug a whole new meaning: http://www.physorg.com/news174812133.html

This bug is alive and flies, but it can be remotely controlled with a computer due to microchips stuffed into the brain of the beetle.

Damn bugs...

PortableApps

Yesterday i got a fresh install of new Win7 64bit. Of course my disk got wiped first with all the programs i use for developing stuff. So i decided to become independent of the machine i use.

I use a WD 160Gb USB harddrive and installed PortableApps (http://portableapps.com/). Almost all my tools are installed now on the drive and it works like a charm. This stuff really rocks. I'm only waiting for PHPEclipse to be released as a stable app and then i'm truly independent and a true flex worker.

Architecture pitfalls

Gartner has compiled a list of ten common pitfalls in which a lot of projects tumble into. No more says, just a linkdump: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1159617

About Open Source

"Show yourself and others will improve you"

Some people still don't see the advantages of making Open Source products. They are fond of themselves about what they accomplished and don't want to share their ideas. But they forget that there are probably a lot of mistakes in what they made, after all, they are only human (except for some ofcourse).

When you release your software (for instance) other people just might want to use it and improve it, finding your faults and fixing them. It is not just evil geniuses who look at the source and try to break in on every system that use it. The majority of adopters and users will try to make it better, more useable and more secure. Any caveats in your thinking process are unveiled and that is not a bad thing. Don't bend your head and feel bad about it, they just helped you realise that your not perfect and there is still room for improvement; there always is.

Albert Einstein said: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources". Albert was a genius but he took a wrong turn there. I don't think he realised that a lot of individuals are smarter than one genius. Creativity is the ability to do something with sources, be it raw materials or code. What is better: one individual sitting in the corner satisfied about the fact that he just created something and people can only enjoy the result. Or a group celebrating the creation of something and sharing it with others to create even more?

I know some people are scared to step out in the light, to show what they did and to accept the fact that they are not perfect, that they are not the best, but a comforting thought might be: no one is!

Internet Tax

The Dutch government wants to save the newspapers and their little projects by adding tax to internet connections. It is going downhill for newspapers for quite a few years now, free newspapers and online news sites are far more populair than the paper versions. Lower advertising income is another cause to the deminishing of paper popularity.

As far as i'm concerned this is one of the biggest bullshit and time consuming discussions in the Dutch parliament. The people in The Hague are often busy with minor discussions about things they shouldn't be discussing about so it is not a surprise that they are talking about this. I'm opposed as you might have mentioned to internet tax for the benefit of a complete other business branche just for the purpose of saving that branche. We have a lot of news papers here and if a few go extinct, no one realy cares, it's not the protection of animal or plant life we are talking about, it's just a fucking news paper.

The news papers themselves have invested millions in internet, but every project is failing because they stick to their old conservative way of doing things. Internet is a whole new world, a new generation of users, of individuals. So the news paper companies should adapt or go extinct, don't try to get more money for doing the wrong business and clutter out internet, just for the purpose of journalism. I realy hate the arrogancy of those big companies, they are crying like babies with our government and are themselves not flexible enough to change their way of working.

Or should we introduce more tax on other product to save traditional companies? Should we raise taxes on cars to save the bicycle industry? Should we raise taxes on getting money from the ATM to save the banks? No, this is just another time waisting discussion for which the tax payers pay and which will only cost them more money in favor of a rotten industry.

IE6 on Vista

MS has decided to get rid of one of the most awefull browsers ever. IE6 does not run on MS Vista. And that is a bummer. Why? Because i'm a website developer and some companies still use this archaic stuff. Therefore i need to test my creations on IE6.

So there are some options:
1. don't use Vista
2. find some evil genius who ran IE6 on Vista

The first option is non negotiable, my company decided to install Vista on all workplaces and there is no rolling back.

So that leaves the second option, my friends at Tredosoft haven't found a solution yet (these are the guys that produce Multiple IE's; a package with IE3 and up). But via the comments on that site i found: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

It is not a real IE, but it does the trick, i can now succesfully test IE6 on Vista!

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

A must for every programmer to read this interesting and entertaining article by Joel Spolsky.

Quote:
"So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Nerd law

Ted Dziuba from the register wrote an interesting piece about Nerd Law: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/11/dziuba_firefox_extensions/

Adam Thierer from the progress and freedom foundation even wrote a more interesting piece in reply: http://blog.pff.org/archives/2009/05/nerd_law_vs_real_law.html

Command line

I prefer command line interfaces on all OS'. Vista also has a command line interface, but the guys at Redmond always find something new to irritate me. The DOS-box can't be maximised... argh... crap... suckers. Why god? Why?
Why would you disable this feature? I trully don't understand. Somebody must have thought, hey, I think my users would like to do less, than that they are used to. Yeah, sure, brilliance is bliss, but ignorance rules the world. Thankfully I don't stand alone in this world, and people always find way's to go around these problems.

Thank you Walkernews:
http://www.walkernews.net/2007/06/03/how-to-maximize-vista-command-prompt-window/

Twitter ?!

Het nut van Twitter ontgaat me volledig. De hele dag bazuinen we rond waar we mee bezig zijn zodat een select groepje kan volgen wat we doen. Lekker achteroverhangend op je luie stoel volgen wat je vrienden aan het doen zijn zonder maar ooit contact met ze op te nemen. Het toppunt van contactgestoordheid dus. Het zal wel weer een nerd-uitvinding zijn.

Mij gaat het niet zozeer om de functies van Twitter, maar vrienden zeuren me aan mijn hoofd om ook te gaan Twitteren. Nou ben ik er absoluut nooit te beroerd voor om iets nieuws te proberen, maar het moet wel in mijn huidige communicatiemiddel passen, ergo Miranda-IM.

Dus zoals ik al eerder vertelde dat de Hyves-kwekker alleen leuk is als 'ie in Miranda werkt, zo geldt dat ook voor Twitter. Helaas heeft Twitter de instant-messenger mogelijkheid uitgeschakeld wegens teveel aanvragen. Maar gelukkig zijn er weer andere nerds die daar dan weer wat op verzinnen, een koppelmechanisme voor je Twitter, voer je Twitter en je Jabber/GMail client in en klaar is Kees (https://www.tweet.im/).

Dus ja, ik ben ook aan de Twittert maar wel via Miranda, want dat is cool.

Solaris hel

Zo nu en dan probeer je eens wat anders. Daar een klant gebruik maakt van SAMP (Solaris, Apache, Mysql en PHP) heb ik ook besloten om een test-machine hiermee in te richten. Was ik daar maar nooit aan begonnen. De installatie met een CD was geen enkel probleem, mijn shell is echter brak, zo kent Solaris geen pijltjes toets functies en zijn end en home ook ongebruikt. Gelukkig kan je nog gebruik maken van Bash, maar dat heelt ook niet alle wonden. Misschien ben ik wel verwend met Debian, Red Hat en meer van zulks en is mijn kennis te gering om fatsoenlijk met een distro als Solaris om te kunnen gaan. Het is echter zo dat Solaris breeduit aangeprezen wordt door Sun, dus iets gebruikersvriendelijkheid zou je wel kunnen verwachten.

Na een standaard installatie, de derde poging wel te verstaan, krijg ik een inlogscherm. Wat schetst mijn verbazing, ik kan X niet deinstalleren. Solaris wordt dus met een ingebakken GUI geleverd en die kan je er niet uit friemelen. Noem mij ouderwets, maar een server heeft mijns inziens geen GUI. Dus via een andere machine op de command line ingelogd, en de monitor afgekoppeld. Nu moeten we dus Apache en aanverwanten installeren. Na veel gepriegel en verwend met Yum en Apt-get probeer ik via pkgadd pkg-get te installeren. Dit lukt, maar ik zit helaas in een dichtgetimmerde DMZ en kan geen gebruik maken van deze functionaliteit. Dus ik surf me rot naar een package server van Sun. Helaas, er worden geen packages aangeboden, die moet ik van de CD installeren. En dat wil ik niet. Gelukkig is daar sunfreeware.com die gecompileerde packages aanbieden. De hele reutemeut moet ik downloaden naar mijn laptop en uitpakken, want je denk toch niet dat mijn Solaris installatie ook maar kaas heeft gegeten van Gunzip? Vervolgens is scp mijn grote vriend en upload ik alle packages naar de servert.
Met pkgadd -d kan ik alle packages moeiteloos installeren. Apache nog een beetje aanpassen zodat het PHP snapt en klaar is kees.

Mijn conclusie is dat Solaris niet lekker werkt, alles zit er wel in, maar het kost teveel moeite en dus tijd om het allemaal fatsoenlijk aan de praat te krijgen, daarnaast zijn er niet zoveel vraagbaken op het interwep als bijvoorbeeld voor Debian. Nee, als ik mag kiezen blijf ik bij DAPP; Debian, Apache, PostgrSQL en PHP.