opensource movie released

As mentioned over at tweakers, the first fully opensource movie has been released. With opensource we mean, it is released under the creative commons license and it is created using opensource tools (mainly blender). I ordered my copy already, so go over there and support opensource software 🙂
If you still have time, read up on the history of blender, its actually a nice story about the power of a community.

Software patents kinda suck

Today in the car I had a funny thought, justed wanted to share it with the world 🙂

I was listening to an old javaposse podcast, they were talking about creative’s patent and how they were going after apple with thei r Ipod.
Now okay, I know software pantents can be good in some situations, but it’s really getting out of hand in the US.
I was thinking about how pantents would effect other sectors.

Just imagine it, patents in soccer or basketball or any other sport. I would just destroy it. You wanted to fool you opponent with a trick and you just happend to use a trick somebody had pattented, you were into a lot of trouble. Every game would be analysed and all the good players would have to give up all of their money because the used a lot of tricks they had seen on tv when they were a child.

Okay, I know I’m being stupid and silly, but hey just look at what everybody’s doing with the patents at the moment. Its really getting out of hand if you ask me. I really wonder how all of this is going to end.

audio vs video

A couple a days ago I was talking to freax about doing a vidcast. why, well it sounded great but also because I want to give something back to the community. I had the idea of doing a podcast about programming, not the things you see on most of the show but actually going rather deep into it.
Some of the ideas about subjects I head were ie doing a podcast on hibernate, so not just telling you what it is but showing you in an IDE an example and building a real world example I would be using on my own website/intranet.
Another Idea was to build an application using a Service Oriented Architecture. And then show some of the benefits that came from doing it this way.
I wanted freax to join and tell his stories about using design patterns in C. Showing some of the neat tricks he used in his day to day work.

While I was explaining this to him, he told me someone had asked him to write a book about design patterns in C. Now a book sounds great, and looks good on your CV, but then I told him, imagine Robert Love had not written his book on kernel programming, but made an iptv show on it. Okay it would have taken several hours but you can do so much more with visual things and movement than static content.

Today I read werners blog, he had a nice comparison chart in there of how much you learn from several mediums. Now in this chart audio/video are the same, but for me that’s certainly not true. My mind more easily stores visual information than audio information.

I’m still thinking about doing such an iptv show, but haven’t got the details figured out yet. I think the release time would be every month or so. But If I start this I want to have a schedule planned out for at least 10 episodes. I’m still thinking about good subjects. Java,Mono and C are already in there, but what precise subject I haven’t figured out yet.

windows vista delayed = Mr Smith

You prolly saw it in the news but windows vista is delayed. My first reaction was, So what, that has happened before, right!? Well guess I was wrong, yesterday evening I was watching CNN and there was a big report on this event. They were questioning Microsofts competence, questions like

  • have they lost their position?
  • can’t they do something easy like an operating system?
  • Are they going under because the company is just to big

The stock of microsoft were already starting to lose ground, it was even taking down big companies like dell with them. So Mr. Dell if you read this, start your linux assembly line please (stop saying it, just do it!!) 😀
They also pointed out that because Microsoft wouldn’t get it out before christmas they would lose all the revenue that came with the christmas sales and that would be a great setback.
I also heared on my podcast (where else) that IBM wouldn’t be switching to vista, but would turn their whole company to redhat (or fedora don’t know exactly). Just imagine that all those fortune 500 companies would do that, first off that would give microsoft a real backset. Secondly they would probably use openoffice, so If they would send a document into the world it would be a pdf or openoffice document type. So every customer of them would have to download openoffice to open and edit/read it. Just imagine the snowball effect this (w)could have. These are exciting times I kinda feel like the first matrix flick when neo is becoming The One, I for one am quite sure that linux is The One (kinda lost all my selfrespect of not being a total geek by this last sentence, but one cannot deny his true self, right?!)

Well maybe the shot we have with the new gnome and kde desktops is bigger than everybody is hoping for. I sure hope gnome will get further than has been planned, I’m really pleased with the outcome of the 2.14 version. It’s really blazing fast, I don’t have Xgl turned on all the time because my hardware isn’t fully supported yet, but even with Xgl on its fast (sometimes even looks faster with xgl turned on than off :D)

Oss reflection

Today while driving to work, I was listening to my podcast (off course) and got to think about the future and the impact opensource will have or maybe already even has on the business. Because opensource means free in many different forms, I’ll point out that I mean free as in no license fees.

Well I know from my former Job that a lot of the deals we made were because we were cheaper than our competitors. But that didn’t mean we were cheaper work forces, no mostly it meant that our sales guy did a good job getting the license fees down. Yeah, why else would you need a sales, right 😀

Well if more and more applications become opensource (and that’s the way we’re evolving imho) those tricks, won’t cut it any more. We will then have to persuide the customer off our skills and show them why we are better than our competitors or tell them why they should pay us more. I think that’s the way business should be done, now-a-days to many products get sold because their marketing team is better not because their product is better. Somebody once told me Oracle runs best on powerpoint. Now I can’t say to much about oracle because I don’t have that much knowledge about competitors in the same league. Mysql is nice, but you can’t compare it to Oracle (but version 5 is coming close).

Prolly the future isn’t going to be as black and white as I see it, but I hope it will change more to what I described here. I’m not saying everything should be opensource either, I’m just saying clients should have the best person for the job. If somebody’s better than you and asks the same price for his services, he should get it. If you get the job because you cut a better deal with the reseller that’s not right in my eyes, but then again I’m no suit.

Gnome 2.14 + Podcast review

Yesterday evening I did an apt-get dist-upgrade (Mabye upgrade alone was enough, not quite sure. For the moment I mostly do dist-upgrade, if there is no dist to upgrade it seems to fall back to the normal upgrade).

48 MB to upgrade, that seemed a lot,off course upgrade. Today I logged in and checked the about gnome dialog. It seems 2.14 has arrived on my ubuntu dapper drake. Haven’t noticed that much changes to the 2.13.9.? I was running before. So I’ll reread the release notes 🙂

Yesterday evening I was talking to a client and the popup came that new updates were available. He’s a microsoft guy, so I explained him a bit about what the updates and all were all about. I explained to him, imagine that microsoft would popup something saying, we have a better and newer version of the kernel, drawing dll’s,… He said, well they do that, that are the service packs. Hmm I wonder, Windows xp is out around 2001 – 2002, right? There are 2 service packs available. Just imagine that on linux. My guess is, we would be still running 2.4 or 2.2 kernel. Okay I know there are still companies out there that prolly run a 2.4 or a 2.2. But they have the choice to upgrade and off course, linux fixes it own problems you don’t have to buy other software to protect you from bugs they can’t or won’t fix.

Makes you wonder if microsoft would go as fast as linux is going at the moment. Or would the bad rap still stick and nobody would join? That is off course if there were people who had the knowledge,brains and will to understand the source code of microsoft.

On another note, I was listening to my daily podcast during my commute from Bree or Leuven to Diegem (Brussels). On the linux link tech show there was the head of open source of sun. At first they off course made some jokes about sun and opensource, but in the end it got really good. I especially liked a part that goes something like this.
Sun donated openoffice to the community. First they bought the company that was working on the source and afterwords they just gave it away, now why could a company do that?
Well, imagine this: Sun has more than 100.000 employees wolrd wide, they were all using microsoft office. The costs of linces compared to the costs of buying the company that was working on openoffice were more favorable to buying the company. So we bought the company and released the code.

Now that’s something I really dig, why aren’t all big companies like that? We would have a lot more good opensource software.

He afterwards did admit that sun had a bumpy ride. He pointed out that sun first started as a real opensource company, but due to a lot of factors they weren’t as openminded as in the beginning, but now they were again focussing on opensource and we would see more news of sun in the oss community. He even said that the sun jvm would become opensource, unfortunately he didn’t say when.

So go over to the linux link techshow site and download their podcasts, they’re really good and very informative!!

Never put an image (or static file) into a db

Here’s a nice article on what exactly happens if you put static content in a database. Okay, it may look nice and stuff, but just check here what actually has to happen to just serve that static file.
Just a confirmation of what I’m always saying to people who do want to do it! So read it, if you want to store or in a former project stored images in the db!

reading kernel development by robert love

Last week I spent a week home, call it vacation if you wish. Other years I was always very busy doing all kind of geeky stuff, you know what I mean, right? Well, this year I wanted to really do nothing and just reload my batteries and get some extra sleep (in my normal life, i sleep about 4 hours a day).

Because I didn’t want to spend most of the time behind a computer, I picked up a book a had bought half a year ago. The book is kernel development by Robert love. I’m only at page 40 or something, but I have to say I already learned a lot. Because i’m always programming in higher languages you tend to forget sometimes how the underlaying system works. Because you are used to programming to a virtual machine, you don’t have to think about freeing you objects and how your datastructures are aligned,…

Reading the book I came to think about how different those 2 kinds of programming really are. I wonder if there are people around who like both, philip probably does, but for the rest I don’t actually know people who love the beauty of low level programming as wel as high level programming. To bad I haven’t got that much experience in the low level field. Besides a small patch in liferea and a patch I’m working on at the moment, my ansi C knowledge isn’t that great :s. Besides if you want to do kernel programming, you don’t have glib available and if I remember correctly you don’t even have libc available?!
Who knows, maybe after I’ve finished the book I’ll give a custom kernel module in a xen environment a swing, I’ll call it the helloworld-module or foobar-module 😛 and I’ll finally test out the remote debugging philip is always bragging about 😀

working at google sounds nice

I went to fosdem as I said, heared some good talks, on of them was the talk of Jon Trowbridge. He’s really hilarious, the one joke that stayed with me all this time, wasn’t really a joke but an anecdote.
As you might know, Jon stopped working at novel and went to google. He couldn’t say much about his job, but he did say this:

If there’s one reason why you should come work for google it would be that every developer get’s 2 24 ” tft’s to program on!! If I come home my 21 ” tft seems so small!

Now why don’t all managers think like that? That’s why I would never buy a laptop with 1024×786 resolution, once you’re used to programming on a bigger resolution, or even worse dual screen your really stuck. That is, if you use it the right way. Have your documentation,UML model, DB,… open in you other screen and are developping in your current screen. There are off course better reasons why it’s handy …
Okay I know, everything you can do with a dual screen or high resolution you can do on a small resolution 2, but hey I’m a geek and I like to do geeky things! 😀