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Spreading the word

My girlfriend is still attending college, she is studying to become a teacher in sports and informatics. She was asked to do a presentation at here school today. As we at home mostly use opensource she is familiar with the linux phenomenon. She is actually quit pleased with the results, ie she fully agrees that firefox is a better browser than internet exploder.

Yesterday she was poking my brain about opensource so she could do the presentation. She took our camcorder and started with recording our mythtv box. She really loves this piece of softwer, I don’t think she wants a normal vcr ever again :).
She also took my copy of an elephants dream the first opensource movie. She also recorded the fancy xgl stuff,just for letting her fellow students see that linux in some fields even surpassed windows already. (in my eyes they already did in almost every field 🙂 )

So I wanted to give here a big kiss and hug for helping me spreading the word of opensource software. I hope the presentation goes well for here. Schools and computers mostly don’t go together that well, I hope the dvd and avi file work on the crappy material they have over there.

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Eat your own dogfood

Well yesterday I told someone, I mostly use the eat your own dogfood rule. Well for most parts I really do that, but today I had to use our webinterface for sending mails. Well we are using roundcube and because I mostly use rich client appz, evolution and thunderbird I haven’t used roundcube that much. Well as I already mentioned today I had to and boy do I hate it now. At first it seems really nice and smooth, you have drag and drop, everything is ajax (buzzword alert!!) nice nice nice. I wrote a mail +60 lines, I hit the send button and I got the alert your session has timed out!!!! Okay hit the back button nothing, again back, still nothing. After hitting that back button like a maniak I realized I had to rewrite my email and believe me that sucks!!! I pulled up my scite editor wrote it in there and copy pasted it into roundcube.

So task for this evening, setup squirrel and imp mail. Maybe even try the new jboss callobaration stuff as the vidcast seemed nice. To bad you have to have the new flash 9 beta installed.

So all suggestions for other good webmail clients are welcome!!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.