The State of Open Source

Why would a CEO of a very successful company spend $5M on Oracle BEA software? After interviewing the Java team, I realized none of the them was focused on real work but all of them were focused on keyword engineering. IT was clear to me the company was being led by a group of people trying to pad their resumes rather than help the company do its work better and be more profitable. The company is growing at 30% per year and has a backlog of $5B in work, so, has tons of excess cash to throw around. Unfortunately, they hired "consultants" instead of "engineers" and are now burning their money rather than investing it!  (More)

Sun does not provide a good installer for Java on Linux. Sun has some great technology but this is a huge marketing mistake. The success of Java will only help Sun. Refusing to provide the most basic of tools for Java's usage on Linux is simply down-right self-defeating. Sun is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Is ANYONE listening? (More)

I just ate lunch with one of the engineers from United SWE.

They are running the open source project for the Supercoder for Flex and Java. He explained how it follows afew solid design goals,

1. Keep it simple.
2. Build on the work of others.
3. Make the easy things fast and the hard things easy.
4. Do not create any new hurdles.

It allows one to take an existing database and get to a Flash frontend in hours. They have geared it towards existing J2EE applications so it is the fastest way to get to Flex. 

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Java calls binary code using the Java Native Interface. But you fall into trouble with dependencies. In Windows, this was called "DLL Hell" but in Unix/Solaris/Linux a similar problem can exist. By convention, Unix/Linux/Solaris use a a standard filesystem layout so the problems are less troublesome but what if you get this message "Can't load Sparc 32-bit .so on a Sparc 32-bit platform". (More)

Sourceforge lists 64 projects pertaining to genealogy and the top 20 are so are still under active development. Over the next few weeks we'll check some of these out. We are interested in three capabilities:

1) Web portal for others to see the information and submit edits

2) Read from and hopefully write to the GEDCOM format. But work with a real database for online work.

3) A very nice administrator tool for managing the information. Perhaps#1 and #3 are two separate tools.

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Volume groups are a Linux feature to allow grouping disks into one virtual disk. Because the default name "VolGroup00" is often used by installers then two disk Volume Groups can have the same name. This becomes an issue when moving one disk from one computer into another. How do you fix it?   (More)

One can easily setup a website to encrypt data using SSL. Sometimes the certificate was created to require a password but this results in prompting when the Apache webserver starts up; so, can be a problem for lights-out operations. The password requirement can be removed from the certificate or a password fed to it automatically.     (More)

An Internet backbone company provided me with a DELL laptop to customize some of their code. Copying their code directory on the same laptop took well over 15 minutes. The same copy in Linux on my desktop took about 1 minute from the file manager and 5 seconds from the command line! What's up? (More)

Domain name resolution bores most people. I mean, how hard is it to keep a table mapping the domain name part of web addresses to a numeric IP address? Despite possibly being boring, DNS can be quite important. Often the #1 reason for networking problems is DNS. Equally important, a wrong DNS entry can leave a website unreachable. Fortunately, Open Source offers many options.     (More)

SQuirreL makes a great SQL client. It uses Java Database Connectivity so can connect to just about any database. It seems to do everthing Toad (SQL Navigator) did and more. Of course, issues with Oracle are still issues with Oracle. For instance, when attempting to connect to an Oracle database this morning I got: <database>: Io exception: The Network Adapter could not establish the connection.

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It's frustrating when an application does not respond. One finds themselves looking at a white background of a window which is not redrawing itself and offers no hint at what is going wrong. Experience tells us these are often network errors.     (More)

Open Source continues to march forward and improve. Proprietary software often ceases to innovate on the excuse the software must work with past versions. Open Source has a different paradigm because upgrades are never forced; so, rather than being forced to maintain older and less effective approaches, Open Source is free to march forward. In this example, mod_proxy succeeds mod_jk and ends up being easier to configure. (More)

Looks llke every technology now has a solid open source implementation. While consulting for one of our largest clients we had a chance to explore JacORB. The company is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and one of the top twenty largest companies in the USA. They choose open source. (More)

I've used the open source project db2app several times to create quick JSP-based web applications in Tomcat but now see JBoss has released a code generator called Seam. It apparently allows one to generate EJB 3,0 code with a JSF front end simply from pointing at the database. Here goes, it's 6AM and I hope to finish by 8AM as I have a meeting at 9:30.

 

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My wife worked as a nurse for a team of cardiologists. When she started each team was composed of three doctors, two RN's, and an LPN. Within five years the LPN was replaced with a CMA. She left and came back a few years later. By then the team had only one RN and two CMAs. As the business matured, lower and lower skilled people were expected to do the job. Does this make sense?

 

    The same "maturation dilution" is occurring in the Software Industry. (More)

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• Open letter to CEO of ...
• Sun + Java + Linux = Near-sighted
• Supercoder for Flex and Java
• Java and JNI and shared objects
• Investigating Open Source Genealogy Softwre
• Fun with Volume Groups
• Removing a password from the SSL certificate used for Apache
• Bitching about Windows, again.
• Open Source DNS and Dynamic DNS
• SQuirreL SQL Client and Oracle

• General [671]

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