Describing any operating system as fun may seem an odd thing for those not enamoured with technology. However, Linux is fun because of the huge amount of customization that is possible.

Vlad Dolezal writes "We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it has excellent community support... But all of that is just marketing BS. We tell that to non-Linux users because they wouldn't understand the REAL reason." The answer to his question probably won't surprise you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The REAL Reason We Use Linux

I feel that once a programmer becomes familiar with the Linux/Unix environment that the constraints of other environments become painful.

On a few occasions when discussing search engine optimization with clients I've mentioned the fact that I think page title and page heading are metadata. "Metadata being what?" is typically the response I get. Then I try to define metadata without using the word "data." Try it...it's hard. When I read this quote today I realized I had been approaching the description from the wrong angle:

On the general concept of metadata, Steve Yegge: "Metadata is any kind of description or model of something else. The comments in your code are just a a natural-language description of the computation. What makes metadata meta-data is that it's not strictly necessary. If I have a dog with some pedigree paperwork, and I lose the paperwork, I still have a perfectly valid dog."

Woof!

Quote of the Month

 

Additional types of metadata will be used by search engines and other information aggregators in the future to improve search results. Google already uses metadata (page titles and page headings) to help improve search results. Metadata like geocoding will allow search engines to group search results around an area (Google already does this with Google Local but I'm not exactly sure how they get their geographic information, I think they are creating their own metadata by examining a postal or mailing address on the site).

Interesting post on Read/Write web about how the information economy is making certain employees in business very hard (and expensive) to replace.

But still, it is now becoming more costly for the companies. Because of the increasing amount of information processing done by individuals and the uniqueness of each, getting replacements up to speed is more costly. Retaining and motivating the digital elite should be recognized as a high priority for any company.

Are YOU Replaceable? 

 

I'm not sure I agree with the digital elite moniker but it's a good read. Another unintended consequence of the information technology revolution?

What makes a web site good. You know it when you see it but it is very hard to relate to other people. Jeffery Zeldman has a great piece on web design that everyone should read.

His attempt to define web design: 

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

 Understanding web design

 

Is one of the best I've heard. He also compares web design to typography and architecture with great effectiveness. 

I especially like the part about chaning gracefully over time. This one fact is why content management systems are becoming so important to the web development process.

Today Intel released a slew of new processors that take advantage of a new more-efficient 45nm manufacturing process. The specs for these chips are pretty impressive. The 45nm process along with increased level 2 cache, new SSE4 instructions (instructions for operating on multiple items of data at the same time), and faster front side bus (among other improvements over previous chips) will make for some substantial performance gains over current 65nm chips (less power usage and cooler operation are also important).

Virtualization is one area where these chips should really be beneficial:

One of the key goals of Penryn was to improve virtual machine transition times—that is, the time it takes to enter and exit a VM. The net result is a 25-75% improvement in entry/exit times. This is all completely transparent, and requires no change in the VM software itself.

Penryn Arrives: Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Review

 

Intel is making some great chips lately...it will be difficult for AMD to stay competitive unless they respond quickly.

I just read an interesting post on Sweating the small stuff by one of the developers of Jottit.

Even though Jotit does not use any fancy Ajax techniques any developer who has done cross browser web application development will understand (and feel the pain) of this quote:

And when you start sweating the small stuff, it's frankly incredible just how much of it there is. Even our trivial site is made up of over two dozen different screens. Each one of those screens has to be designed to look and work just right on a wide variety of browsers, with a wide variety of text in them.

 

In my experience the last 10% of effort  are what make applications a pleasure to use .

Google's finance API looks interesting. Unfortunately it can only be used on Google's properties. I'm sure the providers of this data have some sort of terms of use that prevent Google from making the data available on all sites.

Second, if you're a gadget developer, we've made it a lot easier to make a gadget with market data. We're releasing a gadget API for market data which provides a framework for developers to display stock market information from the American, Nasdaq and New York stock exchanges within a gadget on Google properties. We believe this is the first free gadget API for market data for developers and hope you have fun with it.

API, gadgets, and tabs, oh my!

 

The API really has only has 1 method that gets financial data (as well as an alternative version that gets quotes for an array of stocks). 

This is a great read for anyone who has done any software development. There are some great quotes spinkled throughout.

Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we'll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there's a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.

Software is Hard

I upgraded to a new router about 6 months ago and since then my ssh sessions would timeout after about 10 minutes of inactivity with the message:

Read from remote host xxx.com : Operation timed out

 I did a little research and it turns out that others have had this problem with some routers. The fix involves changing the ClientAliveInterval setting in the sshd configuration file. Read about it here.

SpamAssasin uses a directory to store messages that it thinks are spam. After awhile this directory will be full of thousands (depending on the traffic through your mail server) of files. When I tried to delete these files using the command rm * -f  I got the message:

too many arguments

 I was able to get around this error by using:

ls | xargs rm 

 The reason this works is because, well that's what xargs was designed to do (quoting from Linux in a Nutshell):

Execute command (with any initial arguments), but read remaining arguments from standard input instead of specifying them directly. xargs passes these arguments in several bundles to command, allowing command to process more arguments than it could normally handle at once. The arguments are typically a long list of filenames (generated by ls or find, for example) that get passed to xargs via a pipe.

 This has come in handy a few times.

I've been reading about the potential for WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) for several years. I've told many friends and clients who cannot get high speed internet via DSL or cable that a wireless solution would be available in a year or two (for the past several years). It is a technology whose time has come: high speed wireless internet (like WIFI) that has a range of 30 miles. Businessweek has penned a good read on the technology and politics behind WiMAX.

WiMAX provides superfast connections for up to 30 miles. You could stroll from your house conducting a conference call, pause to exchange hefty data files, and later dial in to your TiVo to download an episode of CSI. WiMAX avoids digital traffic jams by using licensed radio waves that guarantee each customer a certain level of service. "You will be able to access all your own content and get access to other content in many different ways, in many different places," says Philip Solis, principal mobile broadband analyst at ABI Research.

The Road to WiMAX

The demand and technology are coming in place...now we just need some product.

My first exposure to virtual machines was in the late 80's on a IBM mainframe (running VM). At the time I really had no idea how they worked. I did know that I could write programs that might "crash" horribly but would not effect other users of the mainframe (there might be hundreds).

When I discovered in the late 90's that I could get a virtualization product that ran on my PC I was pretty interested. I purchased VMWare Workstation and used it to run Linux virtual machines under Windows (a great way to test and develop).

Virtualization does not eradicate complexity and as complexity moves, corporate IT departments need to ensure storage technologies keep pace with similar progress in server virtualization.

VMware's popularity belies its complexity

My primary interest in virtual machines today is related to distribution of virtual appliances. Virtual appliances will make it feasable to package complete "stacks" (e.g Apache, MySQL, PHP, and custom logic) of products as a single virtual machine. Organization will be able to run this virtual appliance on a server (along with other virtual machines on the same physical server) without having to build or install this software on the server...they will simply install the virtual appliance.

Anyone who has used a computer for more than a few years has had problems with a hard drive. When solid state drives become main stream hard drive crashes will dissapear.

SSDs offer a couple advantages over disk-based drives: they're lighter, consume less power, and are more rugged, making them ideal for laptops and mobile devices. They are also more expensive, but the price gap is narrowing as flash memory becomes increasingly cheaper.

Report: Seagate planning flash-based solid-state drives

These devices will not alleviate the need for backup devices (it will still be possible to accidentally delete files for example) but they should prevent a large portion of data disasters.

In my experience (when properly configured) both operating systems are secure and reliable. Companies and organizations need to do end user education about best practices (e.g. what attachments to open, web sites to stay away from, don't click on website ads that look like system dialogs).

Are Macs more secure than PCs, or not? Either way, the answer always drives Windows users nuts.

The real question about Mac security

With Windows (and I'm speaking of Windows XP...Vista should not even be considered until they make a number of improvements) the bigger problem is rot. Anyone who has used Window XP for any length of time knows that is slows down considerably (and becomes less stable) the longer you use it. Eventually the only way to regain the speed and robustness is to reinstall the operating system (and because of the way DLL are spread throughout the system...many of your applications). I'm not sure if rot has been addressed or if Microsoft is hoping that faster hardware will minimize this "feature."

Google (Webmaster central) and Yahoo (Site Explorer) have had webmaster tools for awhile. These tools allow you to see how the respective search engines see your site. Webmaster central will show you bad links (invalid or unreachable urls), and the last time your site was crawled. You can even see that last time your site map was fetched by Google's crawler. Site Explorer will allow you to submit the url of your RSS/ATOM feed so that Yahoo will "know" when you've published something new.

Later this year, Microsoft has announced that there will be a public beta of "Live Search Webmaster Portal," a collection of tools and information for site owners akin to the Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer offerings from those respective search engines. A private beta of these tools is about to begin.

Live Search Webmaster Portal: SEO Tools Coming From Microsoft

Microsoft is certainly playing catch-up here. I like Webmaster central the best so far. It will be interesting to see what tools Microsoft will offer.

When I mention sematic markup (I never mention the sematic web when talking to clients) many people look at me like I'm speaking latin. Sematic markup is basically the HTML that surrounds your content and helps give it more meaning (either to a reader or a search engine). This ComputerWorld article indicates that there is some debate as to how far away the semantic web is:

Semantic interoperability remains a utopian vision without many practical implementations.

"...many smart people feel that automated, end-to-end, standards-based semantic interoperability (where computers exchange not just data but the data's meaning as well) is more than a pipe dream."

Semantic Web: stuck in neutral

I, for one don't think it's far at all. RSS and Atom (or any feed format that supports namespaces) already give an XML "view" of data from many different sources.

For example, Google Calendar feeds have a few "Google data namespace" items. One is gd:when. This element gives additional meaning about the feed entry that it is a part of. I would argue that namespace items like these help give the data more meaning.

When developing Interspring I used this namespace data to give different views of the feed (in this case a calendar view). GeoRSS (georgraphy namespace), mediaRSS (audio/video/photo namespace), and many others help give many feeds rich meta data to left join to some other data source on the web to present a more complete view of the feed item.

Microsoft developed Silverlight to be a competitor to flash (and a development extension for .net, javascript and other languages).

Microsoft is experimenting with search and Silverlight on a Web site called Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili.

Microsoft uses Silverlight for experimental search site

I don't think it makes a very good front end for a search engine. However, the XAML (it's like XML) that makes up a Silverlight document can be modified at run time (and re-rendered like HTML -- similar to the innerHTML property) which creates a way to create Rich Internet Applications in a way which Flash (at this time) cannot.

Mobile phones are what is called the third screen (after television and computer) in the latest tech lingo. 

Google says mobile usage has surged this summer  —  SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - Google Inc has seen a spike in usage of its mobile services since May, partly offsetting the traditional summer slump in computer-based Web surfing for the first time, an executive said on Wednesday.

Google says mobile usage has surged this summer (Eric Auchard/Reuters)

Creating a mobile site typically involves creating a special sub domain of an existing site (mobile.xxx.com) or purchasing one of the .mobi domains.

When repurposing the BransonWorld site for handhelds we created a Branson Mobile subdomain mobile.bransonworld.com.

Fire Fox is my favorite browser for developing and debugging web applications. It sounds as though Mozilla (the developers of Fire Fox) are making security a priority for 3.0 release.

"The SOAP implementation dropped from Firefox 3 was only available to extension authors, who have many other more modern implementations to choose from," Schroepfer explained. "We are, in general, removing as much old code from the core browser as possible to improve security, reduce download size, and allow Web and extension authors to choose the latest support libraries they need."

Mozilla Aims At Cross-Site Scripting With FF3

If the Fire Fox developers can increase speed & reliability along with security then Fire Fox stands a chance to continue to take market share from Internet Explorer.

Dave Winer (the father of RSS, podcasting, etc) had a great post on what it's like when your product doesn't talk to users (they don't know what do when they first see it).

If you want to make a product that people use then you have to pay attention to their experience when they use it. The better you are at understanding, the better your product will become over time. The inverse it true as well. If you deny the value of feedback, your product will never get better.

How things get better

People who don't develop software don't realize how hard this process is. Iteration (refining the user interface), and user testing can be tedious (and time consuming) but a incredibly helpful in the development process.

It's really hard to recommend the new iMac's. The glossy display is just not suited for long hours of work (in my opinion). It's unfortunate because otherwise these are great machines.

more display discussion, migration experience

Report: Aluminum iMac

It seems that even Apple thinks that people will be putting everything in the cloud.

“For people who still want to make DVDs,” he said without much enthusiasm, “we’re going to make it better with iDVD in iLife ’08.” Apple’s prevailing view seems to be: Sharing movies online is the future, whereas burning DVDs is so 2004.

Review: iDVD '08

It can be difficult to describe rich internet apps (whether they be javascript or flash based) to a client. This article on infoworld has a pretty good definition:

RIAs attempt to combine the strengths of desktop and Web applications without falling prey to their weaknesses. RIAs try to present most of their user interfaces at the client so that they can be responsive and the interface can be as complex as it needs to be. RIAs often do need an installation, but usually only for the runtime engine, which tends to be small and most often updates itself automatically. The RIA application itself typically executes on the remote server.

Application development: The new face of Internet apps

Many companies and organizations have traditional web applications and users are confortable with them. It's important to make easy-of-use and user experience an overridding goal with any Rich Internet Application project.

I've finally gotten around to eating my own dog food and posted the new site.

The site uses the Interspring engine for rendering and display. This engine will make it faster and easier to update the site.