Slashdot Mirror

I posted my review at here. It seems to be unapologetic in imitating many aspects of MMORPGs. So you can like that or not, but its there. The good news is that unlike previous editions, when 3.5 goes out of print, there will still be many ways to get the rules. 3.5 is open-sourced (kinda). See d20srd.org. Also Pathfinder will provide new 3.6-ish books for new players wanting to try the old edition. Overall it's going to be a better time for all RPGers, even if you don't like 4th edition.

Someone made freedom ribbons with The Number encoded as colors here (explanation here)

Someone made freedom ribbons with The Number encoded as colors here (explanation here)

I started a page for this, here. It contains ribbons that use 5 colors. The 5 colors are comprised of the "secret" hex code that is being suppressed. Interested parties are free to use these ribbons on their own sites. If you would like to link your ribbon to an explanatory page, I provide one here.

I started a page for this, here. It contains ribbons that use 5 colors. The 5 colors are comprised of the "secret" hex code that is being suppressed. Interested parties are free to use these ribbons on their own sites. If you would like to link your ribbon to an explanatory page, I provide one here.

I started a page for this, here. It includes a link to a page with graphics that use the hex values of the "secret code." While I'm pretty sure my 5-color ribbons are using the hex values correctly, I am not certain that I wrote up my summary of the five colors campaign correctly. Can anyone double-check that I have correctly summed up the issues? I will correct the text if it is inaccurate.

My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too. :)

I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.

I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.

I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release them to the community. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still :)

Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.

My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.

-Tony

My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too. :)

I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.

I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.

I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release them to the community. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still :)

Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.

My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.

-Tony

My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too. :)

I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.

I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.

I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release them to the community. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still :)

Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.

My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.

-Tony

My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too. :)

I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.

I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.

I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release them to the community. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still :)

Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.

My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.

-Tony

Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.

Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).

Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.

I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.

So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.

First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."

It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.

I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.

Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.

What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.

Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa

Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.

Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).

Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.

I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.

So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.

First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."

It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.

I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.

Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.

What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.

Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa

If properly configured, it will return a 304 if you have the most recent version -- however, as many feeds are generated in PHP[1], this header is defaulted off, and you'll end up with your standard 200, or go ahead, code. This single handedly wastes a metric tonne of bandwidth needlessly.

Yes, this is a problem for lots of generated feeds, PHP or otherwise. In fact, in my phpBB Blog tool, this is one of its weaknesses. However, the solution is surprisingly easy: generate the RSS file as an actual .rss file that sits in the filesystem. If you output to the filesystem instead of to the browser, then Apache (or whatever Web server you use) takes over. Apache will serve the file in optimal fashion. This will be a change I make for the next revision of my code, and hopefully many others do the same.

I'm bummed that they didn't pick one of mine. But at least the flag has a creative idea behind it -- namely, keeping the tradition of the original logo alive a little bit.

Oh well. If any developers would like to claim those logos I made, I have SVG (and EPS, I think) versions lying around. I can send them on, possibly with a project name added in. There is a link at the bottom of my logo page that reads, "contact the webmaster." Use that if you're interested.

If you run a phpBB forum, you can grab my add-on phpBB Blog to turn a forum into a blog. Also, I have a beta available of the next release. I'd love input.

Also, since this is the Open Source world where cooperation is welcomed, I thought I'd mention that phpBB Fetch All is a blog system that I didn't know about when I made phpBB Blog. phpBB Fetch All is superior to my system, although it is also bigger and more complicated. But it sure looks good.

If you run a phpBB forum, you can grab my add-on phpBB Blog to turn a forum into a blog. Also, I have a beta available of the next release. I'd love input.

Also, since this is the Open Source world where cooperation is welcomed, I thought I'd mention that phpBB Fetch All is a blog system that I didn't know about when I made phpBB Blog. phpBB Fetch All is superior to my system, although it is also bigger and more complicated. But it sure looks good.

I also understand the "millions of eyeballs" argument, but doesn't that really apply again to the "big guys." Does anyone really believe that literally millions of people have done detailed reviews of the myriad small programs and libraries present on a typical open source operating system?

I have two software products, very small, that I've put out into the wild. I licensed them under BSD, so it's open source. My program PHPortfolio had a weakness in version 1.0. It only worked if installed at the top-level of a Web server. The first few people who installed my software coded up patches for themselves, and sent bug reports to me. In a later version, the thumbnailing feature was poorly done, and someone "donated" a few lines of code to improve it. So yes, the "eyeballs" argument seems to work even for small projects. Although they didn't give me their patches in every case (which is OK by the BSD license), they did give me bug reports.

I also have a program called phpBB Blog which, if you look in my forums, has a 1.0 beta out. A handful of people have downloaded it, but I've had no bug reports & no patches so far. In this case, it looks like the extra eyeballs (and there are a few) are not doing me much good. Or else the code is solid, which I doubt. :)

In any case, I think the open source model does work on a small level for small projects and it works on a big level for big projects. I suspect the only place it would fall apart is trying to tackle a big project with only a small base of support/fans. Having only a very few eyeballs scanning over a huge codebase doesn't sound like it can ensure high quality in the majority of such cases. That might need some cathedral-style development.

I also understand the "millions of eyeballs" argument, but doesn't that really apply again to the "big guys." Does anyone really believe that literally millions of people have done detailed reviews of the myriad small programs and libraries present on a typical open source operating system?

I have two software products, very small, that I've put out into the wild. I licensed them under BSD, so it's open source. My program PHPortfolio had a weakness in version 1.0. It only worked if installed at the top-level of a Web server. The first few people who installed my software coded up patches for themselves, and sent bug reports to me. In a later version, the thumbnailing feature was poorly done, and someone "donated" a few lines of code to improve it. So yes, the "eyeballs" argument seems to work even for small projects. Although they didn't give me their patches in every case (which is OK by the BSD license), they did give me bug reports.

I also have a program called phpBB Blog which, if you look in my forums, has a 1.0 beta out. A handful of people have downloaded it, but I've had no bug reports & no patches so far. In this case, it looks like the extra eyeballs (and there are a few) are not doing me much good. Or else the code is solid, which I doubt. :)

In any case, I think the open source model does work on a small level for small projects and it works on a big level for big projects. I suspect the only place it would fall apart is trying to tackle a big project with only a small base of support/fans. Having only a very few eyeballs scanning over a huge codebase doesn't sound like it can ensure high quality in the majority of such cases. That might need some cathedral-style development.

I'll probably be modded down for plugging my own work, but I wrote a very simple blogging tool that uses phpBB to manage blog entries and replies. It's phpBB Blog, and it's available under the new BSD license (no advertising clause). So it's free beer and free speech. I'll have a new version release in early June. Maybe some of the MT defectors here could consider it (although really, it's quite simple, probably not useful to many MT fans).

I hope I'm still in the running. Anyone else enter? I sure wish I could see my competition.

It seems Exim 4 was released Feb 2002. It includes IPV6, TLS, and SMTPAUTH via PAM, LDAP, MYSQL, PostgreSQL and more.

I wrote a Perl-based whitelist program. My biggest problem in the Exim vs. Postfix wars is that Exim (at the time I wrote the whitelist app) doesn't offer all the status codes that Postfix does. So my ability to bounce email with informative messages is limited in Exim. Postfix, no problem. But since you seem to know all about Exim's features, what can you tell me about the last 18 months of development? Do it offer more in the way of response codes?

Gimp 2.0 is a super step foreward but it is moving very slow and does not fill the need for a pure DRAWING app specifically a vector drawing app like corel draw.

Hmm. Sodipodi is a free vector-drawing program that is cross-platform and quite functional. It's not perfect or feature-filled. But what it can do is great. I made all my NetBSD logos using Sodipodi. I think Corel will have a difficult time getting even a vector drawing program to have traction on Linux (although it would certainly do better than Word Perfect).

I put out some free Perl & PHP code, and planned to release some more next week. But I partly rely on the BSD license to protect me from liability. What does this case mean for someone like me? While I think I'm such a good programmer that eventually my code will be super-tight, I know I'm a poor enough programmer that it will take many iterations and bug reports to get there. Should I only release code when I'm certain no security issues exist (which probably means I'd never release stuff)?

Maybe we need to start a little campaign...something along the lines of everyone shouting: "Look, I already paid to see the f***ing movie, didn't I!?!" every time one of these ads comes on.

Done.

...but I had worked up a response the their campaign last Friday, I think. It's called Shout at the Screen. Basically, I suggest using their ads as a platform to reclaim the public domain, or at least make people aware of the issue.