It’s Friday and – for no good reason – I’m just lazy. Don’t much feel like doing much.
I guess it’s time to swap the CRT for the BoobTube.
One blue glow for another….
It’s Friday and – for no good reason – I’m just lazy. Don’t much feel like doing much.
I guess it’s time to swap the CRT for the BoobTube.
One blue glow for another….
Was just watching CNN, and there is more unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere that, to a large degree, comes down to religious wars of sorts.
In the GeekSphere, we have our own religious wars, with its own casualties.
Let’s take a look at how those wars are going:
Notice one interesting item re: the preceding list: With the exception of the pure OSS battles (mySQL vs Postgres, vi vs. emacs), Microsoft is one of the combatants. (MS has funnelled $ to SCO, so they are in the SCO vs. *nix battle)
As the largest software firm in the world, MS probably might be expected to be in the forefront of many battles in the software industry.
But this many?
A new version of Postgres has been released – 7.4.
Of course, there was the usual banter on /. about the relative merits of Postgres vs. mySQL, but that’s to me expected. The banter was, for the most part, just that – less of the Holy RDBMS Wars rhetoric that these two tools usually spark.
Not certain why, exactly: Especially since mySQL has made such strides recently (finally getting some serious functionality, such as subselects and so on). Or maybe that’s quieted the mySQL crowd: The additional features being piled on make them more aware that these features were not only missing in the past, but that they are reeeealllly needed.
My stance? Same as ever: I run both. I prefer Postgres by a vast margin, even though I run both DBs at a much less than enterprise level – I really don’t need the higher-end (or even SQL standard) featues that are present in Postgres but not in mySQL. I could work around the shortfalls. But why not run the more complete one?
And I still think mySQL is the “Access” of OSS databases, but I’m not one who is shy about saying that Access has some extremely compelling features (large installed base, no-brainer to use, hides complexity [good for newbies] but provides SQL for queries etc.).
Both are tools. If mySQL was as unpopular – relatively – as Postgres, I would never touch it. I think it’s a vastly inferior database. But it does have the installed base, and it is powerful enough to do much of what is needed on Web sites (my specialty), so it behooves me to learn it.
And – as one /. comment put it – mySQL is to Postgres what Windows is to Linux: One is much more popular despite its (in some ways) perceived inferiority, but that gooses the underachiever to make better products and try harder.
The old competition is good argument.
So, today is Mickey Mouse’s 75th anniversary – his first apprearance in the movies (Steamboat Willie) was 75 years ago this day.
Ironically, for all the bluster bloggers have made about the seemingly endless extension of copyrights – of which Mickey Mouse is the poster child – I haven’t seen any comments on this.
Even Lessig is silent on this. Update: This is a mention of the event, sans any rant, posted a few days ago by Prof. Lessing
Strange. Critics of the copyright extension act (pushed through with the help of then-senator Sonny Bono) often refer to the legislation as the “Mickey Mouse Extension Act.”
Maybe because Comdex is on, but strangely silent on the blogs regarding this (I think Mickey is still safe until ~2038, or something like that).
Odd.
So, Microsoft is going to open a music store – what a surprise (not) there.
And now we’ll hear the caterwalling of Apple fan(atic)s, saying how the beast of Redmond is once again playing follow the (innovation) leader.
Whatever.
To me, what is interesting about this development – and all the music sites springing up now by heavy hitters – is that this is going to either force or ease the way for micropayments to really happen.
I just read an article today on micropayements on the MIT Technology Review. Followed by Gates’ admission today – at Comdex, but I don’t think it was part of his keynote – that MSN is going musical, where, there’s another big push to go micropayments.
On the other hand, there is the Microsoft tradition of doing it all themselves – it might leave micropayment companies – such as the start-up featured in the Technology Review article, Peppercoin – out in the cold.
Either way, it’s another sign that the time may finally be ripe for some – SOME – companies to take advantage of micropayments. It’s going to take a lot to get people pay for some things, simply because of the vast tapestry of the Web: Oh, you’re charging? I’ll go to one of 1,000 similar sites to get/read/browse this or that.
Web = free is currently hard-wired into us, and until there is more of a micropayment infrastructure in place and a demonstrated benefit of such, well, it might just be a tough sell.
This morning I work up without Internet access – my cable connection was dead (looking at my cron jobs, it looks like it died late last night).
It came up only a few hours after I noticed it (had non-techie stuff to do this AM), but for a second there, there was the big “Now what do I do, without a connection??”.
I felt lost.
That’s probably not a good thing.
Yes, the old battle, CSS vs. the traditional positioning tool: Tables.
As much as I hated to do it, I’ve ripped out the DIVs that defined the left-hand column (blogroll etc) and the main content area and made that into a table.
I didn’t want to do this, but I was having too much trouble across browsers getting things stable. This does it, and it does it in a very good way, the way we expect tables to behave.
I’m not giving up on CSS for positioning, but I just spent about five hours trying to get what I want (not much, really, two columns, full length color in each, fluid).
I know it can be done; I’ve done it a few different ways, but I’m looking for behavior that is, well, table-like. Specifically, I want the following (and remember this is just for the left-hand and main content column):
That’s really not a lot to ask, but … it’s a challenge.
But that’s fun, too.
And – thank ROOT for the Web – there are a lot of resources out there. I just have to find the help I need somewhere and make it work. I’ve done this before on other projects; just having issues here and I’m not sure why, which is the wild card.
Onward.
Like anyone reading this dross, I spend my days getting a monitor tan.
Unlike most geeks, however, I don’t see the whole OSS vs. MS thing as a religion. Software are tools; use the proper tool for the proper job (if possible; often not but that’s a whole ‘nother entry).
I was thinking about this recently, having finished up quick Perl and ColdFusion demos for (different) clients.
With the work I’ve done and I’ve seen – and there has been more than a fair amount of each – I am starting to see a general pattern for the use of OSS vs. MS technologies. This is a great oversimplification, but bear with me.
I’m seeing the following:
Yes, let the flames begin!
OK, let’s defend what I’ve said:
As noted above, this is a vast generalization, but I think it’s true.
And that doesn’t make either OSS or MS better/worse than the other.
And it doesn’t mean MS tools can’t be used for enterprise sites, or OSS is only for experts and so on. I’m just seeing trends…
The tool for the job, remember? I’m just seeing the job clearer now; before, I saw only the tools clearly.
One of the blogs I’ve been following for the last few months is Robert Scoble’s.
He really needs no introduction for most bloggers; if you’re clueless, just know that Scoble is a Microsoft higher-up who has a blog that touches on a lot of stuff, mainly Longhorn, as that is his area at MS. This is his personal blog, and he claims little interference from Gates/Ballmer et al, and it reads that way.
One of the interesting things I always take away from reading him is the notion that – first and foremost – MS is a business: It exists solely to make money. Everything else comes from this.
And I don’t write this in a negative way – it’s just reality.
MS is not out to help you or me; MS is out to make money. It’s called capitalism, and is often practiced in these United States.
OK?
But this capitalistic streak in MS means the following:
Basically, Scoble frequently points out that MS is a business, a successful one at that. Part of the price users have to, as well as MS itself has to, pay for this success is that MS cannot be as nimble as small companies with a handful of products and one or two business targets. MS is all over the map, and even that small DLL change can effect a lot of stuff, which – in turn – affects the bottom line. MS != evil; MS == pragmatic.
I have to agree, at least to a degree.
Obviously, Scoble is talking from the point of view of a MS honcho, but he doesn’t sugarcoat things. He lightly slams MS in some cases, and in others – such as updating IE6.x – presents compelling arguments as to why that just can’t happen.
He does gloss over some issues – he does not really mention the whole security/lawsuit morass that the MS campus is sinking into, but I can excuse that. He is a MS honcho, and – his own blog or not – with that title comes responsibility.
And no, I don’t agree with him all the time. But he’s a nice counterpoint to all the anti-MS rants (see just about any thread on /.), and he frequently has interesting points of view.
I personally just don’t see how he has the time to write all he does – and he frequently responds in the comments threads, as well.
Information – biased or otherwise – is never a bad thing.
Made a slight tweak to the gallery section today.
Before, if no gallery parameter was present in the URL – or this parameter turned out to be a bogus gallery name (typo of someone messin’ with my URLs…), it would default to the “All Pictures” gallery.
Thinking about it, it made more sense to default to the gallery index.
Which is currently what it does.
Makes URL typing easier, as well. Instead of typing: “….gallery.cgi?gallery=[whatever gallery]”, I can just drop all params to get users to the index, which is the jump off point, anyway. Simply “…gallery/gallery.cgi”
This is good.