...more recent posts
Here's an interview with Wilfredo Sanchez, an interesting programmer who was, until last week, the lead open source developer on Apple's Darwin project, and who is now the "open source program manager" at knownow (a just out of stealth mode p2p/2-way-web sort of thingie.) Basically the interview is talking about open source development in general. W.S. has a nice middle of the road (to me) attitude that seems very reasonable (unlike some voices in the open source world.) It's not about the license, or the code per se, it's about the community of people that can form around such projects.
"The way I think about it, a community is a group of people with some interest in a given problem space and a vision for how to tackle it and what to do with the result. They tend to rally around some code, because code sets some nice boundaries for the scope of that problem space, but the code might be tossed out and re-written or otherwise modified and extended to reflect the vision of the group, which evolves the members discover new ideas, or the membership changes. The successful communities I know about have some common characteristics: They tend to have a core group of some manageable size, which is generally comprised of the most active developers, but also of other people who are known to understand the problem space well. The core group and the code are what provide continuity and direction, and they roughly represent the vision of the whole group."
The good folks at Microsoft are really saving us time. "With their high quality, efficiency enhancing software?" you ask. No. They're saving us time by calling their new Secure Audio Path technology (read: music copy protection scheme) "SAP". Now we only have to use one word for the idea as well as for anyone who would agree to use such a thing. Genius.
Evidently, this is the big Zeldman news. The WaSP (Web Standards Project) Browser Upgrade Campaign. Pardon my disappointment, but is that really the announcement he had me waiting for? BFD. I mean I support his campaign (I say from Navigator 4.7) but what about all those hints at something revolutionary? The WaSP is going from bugging software companies to make more standard compliant browsers to bugging the public to upgrade to the new still not totally compliant browsers. Huh? Sure, everybody should upgrade. Right on. But maybe Zeldman should cut the dose on his hype medicine. I was actually thinking he had some sort of middleware universal bad html translator module that was going to make all our cross platform problems vanish.
The new basement office construction had stalled for so long I completely forgot about it. But after MB and H fired the plumber and the electrician things are really starting to move. The new plumber (actually a whole team) is a company called "A Real Good Plumber" which sounds stupid unless you've just had a very bad time with a very bad plumber. In that case A Real Good Plumber sounds like exactly what you want. And they are good. But the electricians are really kicking some butt. They'll be done next week and then I guess the sheet rocking can begin. Then it will feel close.
I think we might be sprouting a few more branches.
I have no time for this, and even if I did I probably don't have the necessary math skills to really understand it, but here's the paper explaining why Gnutella will NOT scale.
The new server is up (in the lab; not online.) It booted right into Red Hat Linux 6.2. It is extrodinarilly loud. (WHAT?) It came loaded with Gnome (graphic interface) which looks much better than I expected. Just doing some poking around while I decide on a course of action. I think I might want to stay running 6.2, although the CD's I have are for 7.0, so if I want to do a reinstall (which I do) I'd have to either get 6.2 or go to 7.0. Not sure what to do, so I'll try to find some discussion of whether 7.0 is really ready for non-experimental use. I know there were initially some problems with the version of GCC they shipped with 7.0, but I don't know if this has been resolved, or whether it ever really was a problem.
No doubt many more thrilling updates like this one to come.
Dan Gilmore has the first brief explanation of what knownow.com is doing (they've been in super stealth mode until yesterday.)
"I didn't know this before today, but it turns out that a Web browser can hold open the connection to the server. Normally, a browser sends a request for information, which is delivered by the server. The connection ends.I don't know. This sounds sort of like just refreshing the page ever second. Must be more than that. Still, this is the sort of thing I am looking for. We need some kind of server (not just browser) on the desktop. For this site it would mean that instead of users (re)loading the main page to see what new messages have been posted since their last visit, those notices would just show up on everyone's desktop every time something new was posted (assuming you had the site open on your desktop.) Like a cross between the web and instant messaging. For those who remember the old days (a few years ago,) this is basically "push" technology revisited. Push was a huge dud, but now the market is ready I think. Just don't call it push.
KnowNow holds the connection open. Then it adds some JavaScript and, voila, you have a mini-server inside the browser. You're not necessarily using lots of bandwidth, but you are pretending, in effect, that you're downloading a very, very long document while the browser keeps communicating with the server."
The new server has arrived It is totally freakin' cool. Too bad I'm going to be in the kitchen for the rest of the day getting ready for tonight. Tomorrow I am going to buy a keyboard first thing in the morning and then dig in. Pictures to follow.
From genehack.org:
"As you go through your day today, stop occasionally, and remember that you're a member of a species that took a hunk of metal and plastic and heaved it up into the dark night, just so we could get a better look at a pebble that spins around our home. Realize that once we had our look, once we'd gotten what we came for, our monkey curiosity still wasn't satisfied, and so we banged our hunk of metal and plastic onto the pebble, just on the off chance that we'd get another glance or two.And as if that wasn't enough, now they are going to attempt to fire the thrusters again and lift off (today at 2:00 pm EST.) Good luck. Here's a nice diagram of the hunk of metal and plastic in question.
And it worked."
