Posts

  • What Will 2004 Bring for Linux

    Gadgetopia has an entry linking to an article at eweek about what the year 2004 will bring for Linux. The article is very positive, which of course makes me happy. Every year since 2000 I’ve heard from one sector or another that Linux is going to just “blow up” during the upcoming year. While it has gained market acceptance over time, it’s gone through the more gradual adoption process that most technologies do. Many technological advances do take a number of years to really succeed, cell phones being the example that I’ve heard referenced most recently. Linux has put in its time as a technological advance. I’ve been using it for over 10 years, and I wasn’t even the first in my college dorm to pick up the project.

  • Corporate Decentralization

    The trend all over seems to be decentralization of the corporation. This is certainly true of software development here in the US, where more and more of the work is farmed out to lower cost workers in India, China, Russia, or just about anywhere else. But offshoring is just one particular aspect of a general decentralization. Institutions are attempting to become leaner, faster, more responsive. They use technology to farm traditionally internal functions out to external consultants, and they use technology to dissolve the internal hierarchy. The elimination of middle management and bureaucracy in general has called for new tools to support the organization. Traditional ERP and CRM systems fall flat here. Those tools were mostly made to support the old processes, they never enabled the major changes that technology reallyrepresents.

  • Programming Education, Open Source Style

    OSNews has a review of the book “Code Reading: An Open Source Perspective”. It looks like it could be pretty interesting. There’s a lot of great code out there now, produced by thousands and thousands of open source projects. I don’t think it can be stressed enough that the benefit of open source lies not only in the working projects that they produce, but in the millions of lines of working examples that programmers can pull from. This really lies at the heart of the explosive growth of open source, and is one of the major underpinnings of the GPL mindset. Open code begets open code because every project provides a base for new efforts to build on top of.

  • Commodity Wireless Connectivity is Good

    There’s a great article at The Feature that lays out why converged devices are winning in the market, and why this might point to a need for cellular providers to give up trying to pull value from the wrong areas of their network. I’ve agree very strongly with this opinion:

  • WordPress Post From Vagablog

    It’s official now, I’ve tested out the 1.4 release of Vagablog to post to a WordPress blog and it works perfect. Even the title and category work (although the category must be specified numerically). I’m considering adding in support for the b2 version of getCategories before I make it through the 2.0 release. WordPress is a great tool, and now that I’m using it for my own blog I’m very strongly motivated to tweek for it.

  • Phonecam Art Show

    There’s an entry over at picturephoning.com about SENT, billed as “americas first phonecam art show”. It certainly seems like it could be an interesting project. The site for the project says that all of the images used in the exhibit will be available online, very cool. Phonecams have really worked their way out into society as a whole very quickly. Material such as that (anything that’s worked it’s way into the communal unconscious, but especially something that’s done it quickly) can provide some really fertile ground for works. The picture phone commercials run by the big cellular providers here in the US do a horrible job of showcasing the potential of these devices. Maybe once the show site opens up we’ll have something to point at as an example of a novel application.

  • New WordPress Install

    I’ve decided to host my blog myself. I’m still going to test out Vagablog with services like Blogger.com and Journalspace, but there’s too much that I want to explore that isn’t a part of those services yet. For instance I can actually use Trackback URLs now. They’re something I’ve wanted to experiment with for a long time now. Trackbacks are a technique for notifying another blogger that you’ve posted an entry which references one of their posts. It’s one method that’s available for linking together blog postings into something like threads of conversation. It’s something like posting a comment on your own blog instead of posting a comment through some feedback system on the blog you’re reading. I also wanted to be able to make an RSS feed available, that’s what the little XML link down in the Other Stuff area is for. I chose WordPress instead of MovableType because WordPress is open source. If I manage to do what I want, you’ll be seeing some templates and patches over in the Split Bits area of the Bitsplitter site.

subscribe via RSS