The best thing Jabber can do is to make a server that a moron can install and administrate (they're almost there, I was able to install it).
Once they do that, you'll start seeing jabber servers available on all types of sites (including weblogs like slashdot).
The ability for unskilled Joe Webmeister or Jane Blogger to set up a small (25 users) server that interoperates with other Jabber servers will be a great thing. It's certainly a better option for most users than Java-applet chatrooms, and IRC clients.
You want free software? You get free software. No biggie. As long as the GPL (and other open licenses) exist, Linux and like will always be available.
The point I see about Linux distros, is that they package up what you need for convenience sake. Don't want to support a Linux distro? Fine. Don't expect it to stick around.
Even RMS doesn't have a problem charging people for convenience. The emacs manual is GPLd, but you can still buy a dead tree version from the FSF.
So, grab what you need now and don't contribute, but no fair whining when Turbolinux bellies-up.
An alternative to contributing $$$ is go ahead and contribute some brainpower. Nobody calls Larry Wall a leach.
Anyone remember Ed TV? Remember when Matthew McConaughey was about to get lucky with Elizabeth Hurley? Trojan had the Pop Up ad for Little Ed's "popup", at least until he fell on the cat.
Poor Elizabeth Hurley, she shoulda had a Bonzai Kitten.
I like the way that Jefferson man thinked. Maybe he could write up a few guidelines on how to run a democracy?
The reason the why certain elements of the far right say "founding fathers" is because they don't want to open the can of worms you get when you actually start quoting Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams. None of these cats are the types the far right want you to emulate. Particularly Jefferson...
The quote used at the Jefferson memorial: "I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. is part of a larger quote against the clergy opposing his presidency. Which is bizarre, because that's the quote that all types of people use to justify all types of actions (E.g. Oliver North, poster child for the right wing, used this quote to justify his actions in Iran-Contra.)
The only other founding father IMHO that is deserving of more respect is Benjamin Franklin. In addition to being a statesman and a patriot, he was also an inventor (bifocals, the franklin stove, lightning as an electical phenomenon), and was a successful organizer of the Postal Service, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first american Fire Department. Talk about public service.
But I don't agree totally about your theory on Stupid Names. Killustrator wasn't a great name, but it was catchy. An Illustrator-Killer, heh. Who can remember what the project is called now?
A lot of OSS names are quite inventive and remarkably effective: Linux, the Gimp, Perl, Python, Jabber. And words that decompose to acronyms have been around since Lisp was jokingly called "Lots of Irritating Superflous Parentheses"
Zinf isn't a bad name. It is short, easily recognized, and doesn't have any other associations with it. If the product is good, people will learn the name. For example, what's YOUR search engine? Webcrawler or Google??
The repeated delays in the release of the 5th book might just mean she's having a bit of writer's block. Lots of cash just makes it easier to stay blocked.
I'm sure she enjoys writing and she's actualy quite entertaining, but she might just be getting a little tired of writing about poor old harry.
I think Douglas Adams was in a similar situation after the first three Hitchhiker's books. The series was insanely popular but a little played out after "Life the Universe and Everything". So he put the old series aside for a bit and wrote two very fresh funny Dirk Gently novels.
I don't doubt that she'll finish the 5th book, but it's pretty clear that it's much later than expected.
One other possibility is that she's not blocked on book 5, but she's secretly writing books 6 & 7 at the same time and keeping mum about it.
Ms. Rowling, who was on public assistance when she started the series, is now the third richest woman in England (after HRH and Madonna).
She is literally set for life. She doesn't have to write another word. A full tummy and villas in Spain tend to damp out the writing urges.
Therefore, I predict the already late "Harry Potter and the Golden Phoenix" or whatever the heck the book is named, won't be released until 2003, and it will be the last book of the Harry Potter series.
Lots of people complained that Mozilla was a failure: it was late, it was buggy, it already lost to MS Internet Explorer, yadda yadda yadda.
But now Mozilla is released. It isn't perfect, but it's good enough for me to burn my copy of Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, having the source open means that it will fuel browser-development projects for the next decade.
If having an open-source WinAmp clone feels like overkill, you're not thinking sufficiently long-term. It's only after a large body of code is released and contributed to that new variations appear. An open-source audio player will create new projects that don't exist yet, like "my car stereo has a wireless card and it downloads playlists and music from my mp3 server every night it's parked in the garage".
Without having an open, well-designed, body of code to use, you're either forced to write all the code yourself (always an option, but obviously not for everyone), or wait for somebody else to come up with the idea and pay them (either with $, or your private data (listening trends, demographic data), or 'unused processor time')
We'll just invade a gas producing county (like Alaska).
In other news, the US Team won the first international Battlebots championship held this week in Khandahar, Afghanistan.
America's entry "Ogre" narrowly beat the Russian Entry "Krazy Ivan".
In the developing county bracket, the Pakistan entry "Newcombe High" and the Indian entry "Kashmir Sweat-er" stalemated. The resulting fallout cancelled the rest of the tournament.
We have two iBooks in the "Casa de Officemonkey" and we've been very happy with them.
Hardware
Mrs. Officemonkey runs an older clamshell tangerine iBook running Mac OS 9.2. Her battery is good for ~4 hours per charge.
I have a newish iBook (tail end of 2001) in the snowcase. Sadly my battery is good for only 3.5 hours. It runs Mac OS X and does most of what you're asking about.
We both use Airport to connect to a base station that is hooked up to our DSL modem. The chargers for the iBooks are "Yo-Yo's", so the cords wrap up pretty neatly. I'm told the new chargers are even more compact.
I have big ham fingers, but I like the keyboard on my iBook. My keyboard features an inverted-T cursor pad on the right-hand side which also maps to pgup, pgdn, home, and end.
My iBook is smaller, slimmer, and lighter compared to my 2-year old Compaq Armada laptop, but the iBook doesn't have a floppy drive, infrared port, or card slots. It also gets pretty durned hot.
The one-button trackpad has my vote for the lamest Apple feature holdout. I'd also like a bigger screen, but I was cheap (I bought the system on clearance for $999).
All in all, I like the new iBook's hardware as much, or better than any laptop I've ever used. It reminds me of my Palm V.
Software
If you're interested in web development, Mac OS X is a good platform, but there are a few caveats...
Mark Liyanage packages PHP and MySQL, and Fink does a really good job of making a whole lot of *nix-y things available in Debian-like packages. Between these two sites you should be able to equip your iBook with the necessary tools.
Also, Mac OS X has some unusual directory conventions and the Apache configuration file is a little non-standard. The usual caveats about mucking with the configuration file apply, but if you're a novice with Apache, you'll have a steeper learning curve.
I think BBEdit is the best text editor for the mac. I use it to write HTML and Python scripts. It checks and colorizes syntax and you can use regular expressions for search and replace. I'm usually quite cheap about commercial software, but BBEdit is worth buying.
Mail.app does a good job with e-mail and if you're on a low-Microsoft diet, you can dump Internet Explorer and download Mozilla or OmniWeb. Appleworks (which comes with the iBook) is a 'good enough' office suite and my experience with the demo of Microsoft Office is that it is very very good (but not necessary for my home machine thanks to having a Wintel machine at work).
Don't worry about file formats between platforms. Virtually all software that runs on both Mac OS and Windows will use the same file format. The only notable exception is the line-endings on text files (I eliminated the problem by changing the default options in BBEdit).
Mac OS X application development is taking off and you can run most of the command-line tools you're used to. You can also install the X Windows System and run the Gimp, Xemacs, or whatever.
The Verdict
Even if you get a low-end iBook, you'll get the second-most happening *nix on the planet, solid hardware, and good battery life. Everything works right out of the box and, feature for feature, the iBook is comparable in price to other major manufactuers.
Seriously, if you're going from MA to WA, Chicago to LA might seem a little out of the way (ok, 3000 miles all the way), but once you get to LA, you can drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, which, in my opinion, has some of the most amazing scenery anywhere.
So, my first recomendation is "Route 66" and the PCH.
Option B
Of course, the I-90 Route (Boston, Albany, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, South Bend, Gary, Chicago, Madison) is fine until you cross the Mississippi, but after that, it's 500 miles of Wall Drug billboards and prairie as you drive through Minnesota and South Dakota.
Stopping in Mitchell to see the Corn Palace is a good side trip. And of course you have to see the Badlands, Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore, and Devils Tower. I stopped there, but I expect that the rest of Wyoming, Montana, and points west are just as fantastic.
Travel Tips
Bring a laptop with a modem, ethernet card, and wireless card (might as well get all your bases covered). I also recommend getting some cheap pre-paid phone cards. You can make an 800 number call from your hotel room and dial your regular ISP. Once you tweak your dialup settings, it's a pretty good setup. I don't notice a problem with line noise or the carrier dropping, but YMMV. The big benefit of using a pre-paid card is avoiding the (often excessive) hotel phone charges. 1-800 calls are usually free, or a nominal charge (50 cents).
Also, bring a small digital video camera. I agree with someone elsewhere that this is a good icebreaker, plus it's also your camera.
When I travel with my gear, I try not to spend my time in the hotel room on-line. Hotel Rooms are either utilitarian, or else there really cool and (a) really expensive or (b) really small.
If you must work on the laptop, bring it to a coffeeshop or cafe, so you can pretend you're socializing. Better yet, just check your e-mail daily while you're waking up and get out and enjoy the trip.
I know, I know. "Nobody knows python". Zope is fairly mature, so you can run it and do a lot without getting under the hood and mucking with the source.
Also, Zope allows you to write scripts in Perl or Python, so you can implement site logic you need in a language you already know. You can also use it to connect to existing databases.
Plus, it wouldn't hurt to learn a little python.
Zope will take out a lot of the busy work of rolling your own and you can concentrate on customizing it.
The Zope Book is on-line and the software is free, so the initial investment is just you time twiddling with it to see if it meets your needs. I looked at it this spring, but it was overkill for the project I was working on.
A Wiki would be preferable to a weblog for a couple of reasons:
Knowledge changes over time.
Connections between topics are central to understanding.
Each person has something to contribute. It's important to keep the participation threshold low.
A Wiki has these benefits over a Weblog.
Most wikis support a RecentChanges page. This allows you to see what topics have been modified recently. Therefore you can track those projects/clients/topics that interest you.
The participation threshold is very low. You don't have to learn any formatting codes. Links to other topics are created by smashing words together LikeSo or putting them in brackets [LikeThis]. (No bothersome href's to type).
I'd recommend UseMod Wiki because it's simple to setup (it's perl-based and doesn't rely on a fancy DBMS on the backend) and it is fairly free of 'creeping featuritis' which plague some of the other Wiki products.
Hate to be nit-picky, but they stopped making Lead Figurines a while ago. The figurines that are made now are a Pewter-alloy that does not contain lead. Apparently this is a safety thing:
Describe the table structure using an XML format of your own devising. Write a script that will create the SQL commands based on the XML format. For instance, a section of the XML could look like this:
An XML format of a table is about as human-readable as the raw SQL and a diff between two versions should make a lot of sense (Oh, you've changed the "zip" field in the Address table to "postalcode"!)
Writing a python script that would read this and output SQL is pretty easy. You could even do this it in XSL. Once you write the script, it should work great. You can tweak the script to output SQL for different DBMSs.
Make sure both developers are using the same dtd (to make sure your XML is valid). And since XML is verbose (is it _ever_), commits have a better chance of not clashing unless you're both hacking the same part of the schema.
I did just what you suggested on both my iMac DV SE (Jan 2000) and iBook (Sept 2001). Both of them have 128 megs RAM and Mac OS X 10.1.4.
With Mozilla and Finder running I started Terminal. I got a prompt at the end of "3 hippopotamus" on both machines. Earlier when I had a few more programs open in the dock (BBedit, Help Viewer, System Preferences) it went up to "5 hippopotamus". Not great (and my 'stopwatch' sux), but not exactly forever.
I'll take your tip and get some more ram when I have the chance.
I have noticed that performance *has* improved dramatically from the pre-10.0.4 days. Once I upgraded to 10.1 and beyond, Mac OS X doesn't feel sluggish. Of course, YMMV.
Last week foobar104 helped me determine I have a 'so what?' attitude to performance. I guess I've spent too many years on slow computers to care (for example, my current work machine is a Pentium II Laptop).
Just last week I got in a 'discussion' with a guy who complained that Mac's suck because they use harddrives with slower RPMs and that his Wintel desktop machine was better because it could load Photoshop faster. To me, it's what you get accomplished AFTER the software is loaded which makes a difference.
That being said, if I were getting a G4 eMac, I'd probably pop for the extra RAM.
I'm using 128 megs on an G3 iMac (circa Jan 2000) and Mac OS X works great. Of course I don't use it for high end game playing, photoshop or other workhorse apps.
For typical use (e-mail, browsing, an office suite), digital hub stuff (iPhoto, iTunes) and for unix-y program-y stuff, the eMac is likely to be a pretty good choice.
Don't expect a machine billed as an 'educational computer' to blow the doors off your expectations.
I've heard it called "hotelling". One implementation I heard about had a 'locker room' where you could store your personal effects. They got around having filing cabinets in each office by having a central bullpen for all the filing.
Here's a similar story, slightly off-topic, but illustrative of a similar corporate mindthink.
A few years back someone told me of how "Kal Kan", the american dog-food company, operates. The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium. There are no cubes and no offices. Desks were arranged class room style, in neat rows. Everyone, from the president on down, worked from identical desks and identical chairs. Everyone had a single 2 drawer filing cabinet in their desk. At night, the cleaners were instructed to throw away anything that was left on top of the desk. Fax machines, copiers, water coolers, and conference rooms were along the outside walls. Apparently everyone respected everyone's privacy and kept their voices down.
There is a certain comfort knowing that everyone at work is being treated equally. Hotelling is another way to bring that about.
I think it might be most useful for businesses where a lot of staff are always 'out of the office'. When I started out as a environmental consultant, I only had a couple of project files at any one time. A hotelling setup would have been ideal for us most of us were in the field half the time.
Word and Excel 2000 on Windows (which I use at work every day) is not significantly different than Word and Excel 97 on Mac (which I use at home). I've used both since the Reagan administration, so perhaps I have more perspective to compare against.
My point (which I guess I failed to make), is GPL'd code doesn't put programmers out of work. You've demonstated it yourself based on all the other software you talked about. The work will either shift around to other niches or become more service/maintenance/consulting oriented.
Saying RMS is costing programmer jobs is crying wolf. My original post was a reaction to that.
"Hundreds of thousands of people in the US would be out of work."
Untrue. You would just have to get job using your skills in real problem domains.
The shrinkwrapped office productivity software market is done. Excel and Word haven't gotten significantly better since 1997.
The only interesting shrinkwrapped software nowadays are multimedia (audio, digital video), and web-authoring software. Frankly, these are going to reach a 'good enough' dead-end RSN.
Games are probably the only category of software which still has a long long path of improvement. IMHO, games have been driving much of the increase in desire for computer power (For example, Black & White won't run on my 2.5 year old iMac, but I can still run all the software I need.)
The dirty little secret is that once all you hundreds of thousands of people are out of work of all the GPLd software, there will be jobs waiting for you in Government and Industry. These groups will have a little extra money (because they're not paying the Microsoft Tax) and they'll be willing to hire programmers who can solve problems in their own domain. Imagine the brains that have honed Amazon's transformation of bookselling turned on health care record management, or Pre-fire planning, or Building-department workflow.
And there's also XML. Serious SGML people know the benefit of properly-constructed document. The current wealth of free XML tools will mean that small businesses will be able to apply XML to their knowledge. You think MaryJo in accounting is doing to design an XML invoice schema?
In other words, the job won't be "writing software to sell", it will be "other stuff with software". You see that in the Microsoft Ads already: "1 degree of separation" isn't about how groovy Word is or how easy WindowsXP is, it's all about how custom-made software will solve your business's problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I had no idea the Asteroid Belt was Green. How fashionable.
The best thing Jabber can do is to make a server that a moron can install and administrate (they're almost there, I was able to install it).
Once they do that, you'll start seeing jabber servers available on all types of sites (including weblogs like slashdot).
The ability for unskilled Joe Webmeister or Jane Blogger to set up a small (25 users) server that interoperates with other Jabber servers will be a great thing. It's certainly a better option for most users than Java-applet chatrooms, and IRC clients.
You want free software? You get free software. No biggie. As long as the GPL (and other open licenses) exist, Linux and like will always be available.
The point I see about Linux distros, is that they package up what you need for convenience sake. Don't want to support a Linux distro? Fine. Don't expect it to stick around.
Even RMS doesn't have a problem charging people for convenience. The emacs manual is GPLd, but you can still buy a dead tree version from the FSF.
So, grab what you need now and don't contribute, but no fair whining when Turbolinux bellies-up.
An alternative to contributing $$$ is go ahead and contribute some brainpower. Nobody calls Larry Wall a leach.
Anyone remember Ed TV? Remember when Matthew McConaughey was about to get lucky with Elizabeth Hurley? Trojan had the Pop Up ad for Little Ed's "popup", at least until he fell on the cat.
Poor Elizabeth Hurley, she shoulda had a Bonzai Kitten.
I like the way that Jefferson man thinked. Maybe he could write up a few guidelines on how to run a democracy?
The reason the why certain elements of the far right say "founding fathers" is because they don't want to open the can of worms you get when you actually start quoting Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams. None of these cats are the types the far right want you to emulate. Particularly Jefferson...
The quote used at the Jefferson memorial: "I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. is part of a larger quote against the clergy opposing his presidency. Which is bizarre, because that's the quote that all types of people use to justify all types of actions (E.g. Oliver North, poster child for the right wing, used this quote to justify his actions in Iran-Contra.)
The only other founding father IMHO that is deserving of more respect is Benjamin Franklin. In addition to being a statesman and a patriot, he was also an inventor (bifocals, the franklin stove, lightning as an electical phenomenon), and was a successful organizer of the Postal Service, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first american Fire Department. Talk about public service.
Your point about Harvard Graphics is spot on.
But I don't agree totally about your theory on Stupid Names. Killustrator wasn't a great name, but it was catchy. An Illustrator-Killer, heh. Who can remember what the project is called now?
A lot of OSS names are quite inventive and remarkably effective: Linux, the Gimp, Perl, Python, Jabber. And words that decompose to acronyms have been around since Lisp was jokingly called "Lots of Irritating Superflous Parentheses"
Zinf isn't a bad name. It is short, easily recognized, and doesn't have any other associations with it. If the product is good, people will learn the name. For example, what's YOUR search engine? Webcrawler or Google??
The repeated delays in the release of the 5th book might just mean she's having a bit of writer's block. Lots of cash just makes it easier to stay blocked.
I'm sure she enjoys writing and she's actualy quite entertaining, but she might just be getting a little tired of writing about poor old harry.
I think Douglas Adams was in a similar situation after the first three Hitchhiker's books. The series was insanely popular but a little played out after "Life the Universe and Everything". So he put the old series aside for a bit and wrote two very fresh funny Dirk Gently novels.
I don't doubt that she'll finish the 5th book, but it's pretty clear that it's much later than expected.
One other possibility is that she's not blocked on book 5, but she's secretly writing books 6 & 7 at the same time and keeping mum about it.
Ms. Rowling, who was on public assistance when she started the series, is now the third richest woman in England (after HRH and Madonna).
She is literally set for life. She doesn't have to write another word. A full tummy and villas in Spain tend to damp out the writing urges.
Therefore, I predict the already late "Harry Potter and the Golden Phoenix" or whatever the heck the book is named, won't be released until 2003, and it will be the last book of the Harry Potter series.
Remember, it takes a borderline autistic to keep at wild success and really make something big. Other talented obsessives eventually burn out.
Lots of people complained that Mozilla was a failure: it was late, it was buggy, it already lost to MS Internet Explorer, yadda yadda yadda.
But now Mozilla is released. It isn't perfect, but it's good enough for me to burn my copy of Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, having the source open means that it will fuel browser-development projects for the next decade.
If having an open-source WinAmp clone feels like overkill, you're not thinking sufficiently long-term. It's only after a large body of code is released and contributed to that new variations appear. An open-source audio player will create new projects that don't exist yet, like "my car stereo has a wireless card and it downloads playlists and music from my mp3 server every night it's parked in the garage".
Without having an open, well-designed, body of code to use, you're either forced to write all the code yourself (always an option, but obviously not for everyone), or wait for somebody else to come up with the idea and pay them (either with $, or your private data (listening trends, demographic data), or 'unused processor time')
This is the second post I've made with factual errors. The heat is getting to me...
Big Sean O: Considering changing his sig to "Big Sean O, certified Idiot since 2002."
After Mac OS XI, they should go with...
Mac OS XInu unIX.
Or they can steal a little bit of Apple history and go with:
Mac OS XIa aIX.
Fun with mirrors.
Sadly, my spell checker wouldn't have caught the misspellings.
I guess I'm just an idjit.
We'll just invade a gas producing county (like Alaska).
In other news, the US Team won the first international Battlebots championship held this week in Khandahar, Afghanistan.
America's entry "Ogre" narrowly beat the Russian Entry "Krazy Ivan".
In the developing county bracket, the Pakistan entry "Newcombe High" and the Indian entry "Kashmir Sweat-er" stalemated. The resulting fallout cancelled the rest of the tournament.
We have two iBooks in the "Casa de Officemonkey" and we've been very happy with them.
Hardware
Mrs. Officemonkey runs an older clamshell tangerine iBook running Mac OS 9.2. Her battery is good for ~4 hours per charge.
I have a newish iBook (tail end of 2001) in the snowcase. Sadly my battery is good for only 3.5 hours. It runs Mac OS X and does most of what you're asking about.
We both use Airport to connect to a base station that is hooked up to our DSL modem. The chargers for the iBooks are "Yo-Yo's", so the cords wrap up pretty neatly. I'm told the new chargers are even more compact.
I have big ham fingers, but I like the keyboard on my iBook. My keyboard features an inverted-T cursor pad on the right-hand side which also maps to pgup, pgdn, home, and end.
My iBook is smaller, slimmer, and lighter compared to my 2-year old Compaq Armada laptop, but the iBook doesn't have a floppy drive, infrared port, or card slots. It also gets pretty durned hot.
The one-button trackpad has my vote for the lamest Apple feature holdout. I'd also like a bigger screen, but I was cheap (I bought the system on clearance for $999).
All in all, I like the new iBook's hardware as much, or better than any laptop I've ever used. It reminds me of my Palm V.
Software
If you're interested in web development, Mac OS X is a good platform, but there are a few caveats...
Mark Liyanage packages PHP and MySQL, and Fink does a really good job of making a whole lot of *nix-y things available in Debian-like packages. Between these two sites you should be able to equip your iBook with the necessary tools.
Also, Mac OS X has some unusual directory conventions and the Apache configuration file is a little non-standard. The usual caveats about mucking with the configuration file apply, but if you're a novice with Apache, you'll have a steeper learning curve.
I think BBEdit is the best text editor for the mac. I use it to write HTML and Python scripts. It checks and colorizes syntax and you can use regular expressions for search and replace. I'm usually quite cheap about commercial software, but BBEdit is worth buying.
Mail.app does a good job with e-mail and if you're on a low-Microsoft diet, you can dump Internet Explorer and download Mozilla or OmniWeb. Appleworks (which comes with the iBook) is a 'good enough' office suite and my experience with the demo of Microsoft Office is that it is very very good (but not necessary for my home machine thanks to having a Wintel machine at work).
Don't worry about file formats between platforms. Virtually all software that runs on both Mac OS and Windows will use the same file format. The only notable exception is the line-endings on text files (I eliminated the problem by changing the default options in BBEdit).
Mac OS X application development is taking off and you can run most of the command-line tools you're used to. You can also install the X Windows System and run the Gimp, Xemacs, or whatever.
The Verdict
Even if you get a low-end iBook, you'll get the second-most happening *nix on the planet, solid hardware, and good battery life. Everything works right out of the box and, feature for feature, the iBook is comparable in price to other major manufactuers.
If you ever plan to motor west,
travel my way, it's the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route 66.
(apologies to the late Bobby Troup).
Seriously, if you're going from MA to WA, Chicago to LA might seem a little out of the way (ok, 3000 miles all the way), but once you get to LA, you can drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, which, in my opinion, has some of the most amazing scenery anywhere.
So, my first recomendation is "Route 66" and the PCH.
Option B
Of course, the I-90 Route (Boston, Albany, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, South Bend, Gary, Chicago, Madison) is fine until you cross the Mississippi, but after that, it's 500 miles of Wall Drug billboards and prairie as you drive through Minnesota and South Dakota.
Stopping in Mitchell to see the Corn Palace is a good side trip. And of course you have to see the Badlands, Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore, and Devils Tower. I stopped there, but I expect that the rest of Wyoming, Montana, and points west are just as fantastic.
Travel Tips
Bring a laptop with a modem, ethernet card, and wireless card (might as well get all your bases covered). I also recommend getting some cheap pre-paid phone cards. You can make an 800 number call from your hotel room and dial your regular ISP. Once you tweak your dialup settings, it's a pretty good setup. I don't notice a problem with line noise or the carrier dropping, but YMMV. The big benefit of using a pre-paid card is avoiding the (often excessive) hotel phone charges. 1-800 calls are usually free, or a nominal charge (50 cents).
Also, bring a small digital video camera. I agree with someone elsewhere that this is a good icebreaker, plus it's also your camera.
When I travel with my gear, I try not to spend my time in the hotel room on-line. Hotel Rooms are either utilitarian, or else there really cool and (a) really expensive or (b) really small.
If you must work on the laptop, bring it to a coffeeshop or cafe, so you can pretend you're socializing. Better yet, just check your e-mail daily while you're waking up and get out and enjoy the trip.
I know, I know. "Nobody knows python". Zope is fairly mature, so you can run it and do a lot without getting under the hood and mucking with the source.
Also, Zope allows you to write scripts in Perl or Python, so you can implement site logic you need in a language you already know. You can also use it to connect to existing databases.
Plus, it wouldn't hurt to learn a little python.
Zope will take out a lot of the busy work of rolling your own and you can concentrate on customizing it.
The Zope Book is on-line and the software is free, so the initial investment is just you time twiddling with it to see if it meets your needs. I looked at it this spring, but it was overkill for the project I was working on.
A Wiki has these benefits over a Weblog.
Most wikis support a RecentChanges page. This allows you to see what topics have been modified recently. Therefore you can track those projects/clients/topics that interest you.
The participation threshold is very low. You don't have to learn any formatting codes. Links to other topics are created by smashing words together LikeSo or putting them in brackets [LikeThis]. (No bothersome href's to type).
I'd recommend UseMod Wiki because it's simple to setup (it's perl-based and doesn't rely on a fancy DBMS on the backend) and it is fairly free of 'creeping featuritis' which plague some of the other Wiki products.
Writing a python script that would read this and output SQL is pretty easy. You could even do this it in XSL. Once you write the script, it should work great. You can tweak the script to output SQL for different DBMSs.
Make sure both developers are using the same dtd (to make sure your XML is valid). And since XML is verbose (is it _ever_), commits have a better chance of not clashing unless you're both hacking the same part of the schema.
I did just what you suggested on both my iMac DV SE (Jan 2000) and iBook (Sept 2001). Both of them have 128 megs RAM and Mac OS X 10.1.4.
With Mozilla and Finder running I started Terminal. I got a prompt at the end of "3 hippopotamus" on both machines. Earlier when I had a few more programs open in the dock (BBedit, Help Viewer, System Preferences) it went up to "5 hippopotamus". Not great (and my 'stopwatch' sux), but not exactly forever.
I'll take your tip and get some more ram when I have the chance.
I have noticed that performance *has* improved dramatically from the pre-10.0.4 days. Once I upgraded to 10.1 and beyond, Mac OS X doesn't feel sluggish. Of course, YMMV.
Last week foobar104 helped me determine I have a 'so what?' attitude to performance. I guess I've spent too many years on slow computers to care (for example, my current work machine is a Pentium II Laptop).
Just last week I got in a 'discussion' with a guy who complained that Mac's suck because they use harddrives with slower RPMs and that his Wintel desktop machine was better because it could load Photoshop faster. To me, it's what you get accomplished AFTER the software is loaded which makes a difference.
That being said, if I were getting a G4 eMac, I'd probably pop for the extra RAM.
I'm using 128 megs on an G3 iMac (circa Jan 2000) and Mac OS X works great. Of course I don't use it for high end game playing, photoshop or other workhorse apps.
For typical use (e-mail, browsing, an office suite), digital hub stuff (iPhoto, iTunes) and for unix-y program-y stuff, the eMac is likely to be a pretty good choice.
Don't expect a machine billed as an 'educational computer' to blow the doors off your expectations.
I've heard it called "hotelling". One implementation I heard about had a 'locker room' where you could store your personal effects. They got around having filing cabinets in each office by having a central bullpen for all the filing.
Here's a similar story, slightly off-topic, but illustrative of a similar corporate mindthink.
A few years back someone told me of how "Kal Kan", the american dog-food company, operates. The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium. There are no cubes and no offices. Desks were arranged class room style, in neat rows. Everyone, from the president on down, worked from identical desks and identical chairs. Everyone had a single 2 drawer filing cabinet in their desk. At night, the cleaners were instructed to throw away anything that was left on top of the desk. Fax machines, copiers, water coolers, and conference rooms were along the outside walls. Apparently everyone respected everyone's privacy and kept their voices down.
There is a certain comfort knowing that everyone at work is being treated equally. Hotelling is another way to bring that about.
I think it might be most useful for businesses where a lot of staff are always 'out of the office'. When I started out as a environmental consultant, I only had a couple of project files at any one time. A hotelling setup would have been ideal for us most of us were in the field half the time.
Word and Excel 2000 on Windows (which I use at work every day) is not significantly different than Word and Excel 97 on Mac (which I use at home). I've used both since the Reagan administration, so perhaps I have more perspective to compare against.
My point (which I guess I failed to make), is GPL'd code doesn't put programmers out of work. You've demonstated it yourself based on all the other software you talked about. The work will either shift around to other niches or become more service/maintenance/consulting oriented.
Saying RMS is costing programmer jobs is crying wolf. My original post was a reaction to that.
Regards,
BSO
"Hundreds of thousands of people in the US would be out of work."
Untrue. You would just have to get job using your skills in real problem domains.
The shrinkwrapped office productivity software market is done. Excel and Word haven't gotten significantly better since 1997.
The only interesting shrinkwrapped software nowadays are multimedia (audio, digital video), and web-authoring software. Frankly, these are going to reach a 'good enough' dead-end RSN.
Games are probably the only category of software which still has a long long path of improvement. IMHO, games have been driving much of the increase in desire for computer power (For example, Black & White won't run on my 2.5 year old iMac, but I can still run all the software I need.)
The dirty little secret is that once all you hundreds of thousands of people are out of work of all the GPLd software, there will be jobs waiting for you in Government and Industry. These groups will have a little extra money (because they're not paying the Microsoft Tax) and they'll be willing to hire programmers who can solve problems in their own domain. Imagine the brains that have honed Amazon's transformation of bookselling turned on health care record management, or Pre-fire planning, or Building-department workflow.
And there's also XML. Serious SGML people know the benefit of properly-constructed document. The current wealth of free XML tools will mean that small businesses will be able to apply XML to their knowledge. You think MaryJo in accounting is doing to design an XML invoice schema?
In other words, the job won't be "writing software to sell", it will be "other stuff with software". You see that in the Microsoft Ads already: "1 degree of separation" isn't about how groovy Word is or how easy WindowsXP is, it's all about how custom-made software will solve your business's problems.