January 31, 2008
REST vs. WS-*
Heh:
"Now, of course, our managers want Web 2.0 and Flash and a plastic rocket and a pony."
Fantastic comment by Robert Hook on Tim Bray's blog post about WS-Enterprise, 2008. It's worth reading the post and the comments for some serious points.
Technorati Tags: computing, debate, development, internet, open standards, software
SpringSource and Covalent and Apache
Somehow I missed this yesterday, but SpringSource have acquired Covalent, as the January "month of M&A in OSS" continues. Ugo gives his view, as does Marc Fleury and Emmanuel Bernard.
Marc's analysis is interesting, though I think he only lightly touches upon a subject that could do with more discussion:
"[...] the bigger problem is the ASF brand. The Apache and ASF brands obfuscates every other brand [...]"
I agree that the brand is a problem, though in my opinion the problem is that the brand is too weak, and not overpowering as Marc seems to imply. Certainly when compared with the decision makers' mindshare of Microsoft.*, IBM.*, Oracle.* etc.
Whilst I understand that in open source it's not cool to be blatant self-promoters or to use obnoxious marketing tactics, I think the sheer success of Ruby on Rails has demonstrated that sometimes a little bit of commercial savvy can make a huge difference to the success and adoption of a technology.
Having rockstar open source projects such as Wicket or Hadoop in the ASF certainly helps, but it seems to me that Apache comes across more like a sleeping giant than as the dynamic melting pot of best-of-breed that it really is.
I'm not quite sure how a diverse community like Apache could best promote itself, but a good start might be a dynamic and reinvigorated ApacheCon. As some of the "brightest minds in open source" we ought to be able to offer something more fresh and innovative than just the "same old, same old" year after year.
Is it wrong to build a brand around an Open Source project or foundation? Debian resisted and plods along, known by the cognoscenti but otherwise obscure, while Ubuntu is an example of branding success. (Grossly simplifying the situation, I know.)
Technorati Tags: apache, branding, community, marketing, open source, opensource, software
January 30, 2008
Encore une fail
Just before Christmas, in anticipation of Time Machine, I bought a Lacie 1TB disk that was on offer from MediaMarkt. It's a monolith-style black box, with two physical disks inside that appear as one contiguous space when mounted on the Mac. It's fast (for a USB drive), but it's not quiet ... it has a fan that kicks in every 30 seconds or so, runs for 10 seconds, then cuts out again. Still, that's not a big deal, as it's mainly running overnight in the study when everyone's asleep, and one day it will be plugged into an Airport Extreme or Mac Mini, and tucked out of the way.
Except sadly this morning, it had a woeful little red light on underneath the cool blue light. According to the manual, red means "Disk Failure/Error". Oh joy. I think I need to not touch anything technology-related for a few weeks.
Technorati Tags: computing, failure, hardware, lacie
January 29, 2008
Airport down
Last Wednesday I got quite a shock when I opened up my laptop and tried to connect to the WiFi in the apartment:
Fortunately after rebooting a couple of times, the Airport card magically reinstalled itself. Weird.
Technorati Tags: apple, hardware, leopard, osx
(Open Source) software development best practices
Over the next few months I'm planning to post a series of brief pointers to what I see as best practices for team-based software development in an Open Source context (sometimes called Open Development). Some of these may seem to be glaringly obvious, but each one is posted as a result of real-world mistakes I see on a day-to-day basis.
The aim is not just to focus on Open Source, though obviously that's where I'm drawing much of my experience from. These best practices could equally apply in the closed-source workplace. Hopefully these hints and tips will help others make best use of Open Source.
Technorati Tags: apache, development, open source, tips, software
Joost in the style of uncov
Don't get me wrong, I think Joost is a great idea and there are some fantastic people there, but really: FAIL.
Last year: Transformers. Only in the US.
Last week: Star Trek. Only in the US.
This week: MacGyver. Only in the US.
Building a next-generation peer to peer internet television service that is "bringing TV to a global, highly networked community" -- as long as they are based in the USA?
*sigh*
The tag cloud tells us that if all else fails, soft porn will always bring the punters in (and it's probably the only business that worries less about arbitrary geographic borders and more about racking up the viewers).
Yes, I'm just bitter 'cos I'd have to move several thousand miles west to watch all the cool stuff.
Technorati Tags: drm, innovation, p2p, internet, startup, tv
January 28, 2008
Bébé, Chouchou et moi
What's not to like about a restaurant that does something so simple, so well?
A great bit of steak with a delicious jacket spud, relaxed atmosphere and excellent service by a waiter who remembers you and makes you feel at home.
Another "just round the corner from the apartment" place, Bébé, Chouchou et moi is great food. It looks good, too.
As a final bonus, it's located next door to (and run by the same people as) the local Capoue, where you can get great ice cream.
Technorati Tags: belgium, brussels, food, life, restaurants, review
MacBook Crash
My MacBook Pro shall henceforth be known as MacBook Crash.
Since "upgrading" to Leopard, I'm suffering intermittent but incredibly annoying lock-ups. The symptoms are that the processor usage goes up to 200% (both CPUs maxed out). I see that DirectoryService is always the culprit, assuming Activity Monitor was running beforehand. As far as I can tell, it's always when I'm offline.
More often than not, before I'm able to take remedial action (like killing the process), the machine goes into terminal decline. Anything that wants to read from or write to disk will hang, and the only answer is a hard reboot.
According to the Apple forums I'm not the only one with the problem, and there's even a proposed solution. Sadly this doesn't appear to have fixed the problem in my case, as I had my first hard crash since trying the fix on Friday (after the last hard crash).
At this point I'd seriously consider reverting to Mac OS X 10.4, if it wasn't such a pain to do a nuke and reinstall. Although Spotlight didn't work and there was no Time Machine or Spaces, it did at least have the virtue of being pretty stable.
Is anyone else having the same problem?
Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, osx, software
January 21, 2008
Server hosting recommendations
I need to move a bunch of sites away from a server that's due to be decommissioned in the next few weeks, so I'm looking for suggestions on where to host.
My requirements (in order of decreasing importance) are:
- sensible bandwidth allowance (I don't want to end up paying for the spam that hits my domain)
- my choice of OS (likely Debian, Ubuntu or even Mac OS would be nice)
- ability to install whatever I want (e.g. databases)
- control over DNS
- ssh login
- minimum 500mb storage (though much more would be nice)
Any suggestions?
Technorati Tags: hosting, lazyweb, servers, sysadmin
Shower
To start off the New Year, my shower decided to celebrate by going on strike, just under one year since it last busted. I spent most of last year failing to find a spare day when I was in Norwich and could get a builder out to look at my bathroom and price up my renovation plans. So I guess it serves me right that I am once again forking out £30 for a new solenoid instead of luxuriating in a pristine new shower.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, the guy who lives in the apartment downstairs popped round to thank us for the shiny new water feature in his kitchen, where his light used to be. After inspections by the landlord, they suspect some dodgy grout. My money's on the plumbing, but I don't know the French equivalent for the English tradesman's "sharp intake of breath that's gonna cost ya" yet, so I stayed out of the argument.
Anyway, the point of all this is so that when I'm in the same situation next year I remember the shower doctor who provided me with the part number and shower warehouse who will hopefully have the part on my doorstep in time for me to be able to shower when I'm in Norwich briefly this week.
Technorati Tags: brussels, diy, house, life, norwich, belgium, uk
January 20, 2008
Met Jeaninne
Met Jeaninne is one of my favourites in Brussels. The food is straightforward but excellent and the atmosphere is relaxed. It's also in a great location, being just a 5-10 minute walk from our apartment and also on the way back from the office.
The first time I went there I had Duo de croquettes to start and shared the Fondue bourguignonne de bœuf for the main course. Being a typical English guy, the option to cook the beef until it was a blackened lump really appealed to me (though after being properly educated in the Netherlands last year, I was also prepared to try a few pieces that were still going "moo").
More recently I shared the Assiette de jambon San Daniele (which was awesome), followed by the Entrecôte grillée (also great). Next time I'm there I'm probably going to opt for one of their behemoth brochettes.
Probably the only complaint I could make about the place is that it can be a little noisy when busy, but since that's because everyone's talking and having a great time, I really don't mind too much.
The service is always great, and the prices are reasonable, especially if you go on a Monday or Tuesday when they have offers on.
All in all, highly recommended.
Technorati Tags: brussels, food, life, restaurants, review
Brussels Restaurants
One of the benefits of working in Brussels for a long time is that I've been able to visit quite a few restaurants. I kept promising friends and colleagues I'd write-up my opinions so that they know where to go the next time they visit (since their visits unluckily often coincide with my being back in the UK).
So, I'm finally going to get round to it and post a few reviews. I'm not an expert on either food or drink (other than enjoying both), so don't expect anything other than simple descriptions of what was good and bad. Hopefully someone will find them useful!
Technorati Tags: brussels, food, life, restaurants, review
January 10, 2008
links for 2008-01-10
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useful information for fixing X11 on Leopard
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flickr export for lightroom
New ideas
Many years ago, prior to starting Luminas, I kicked around a lot of other ideas for startups with Paul and MJR. For a while it looked like we might go the product development route, or software as a service. One of the most interesting ideas we had, which we actually did some initial development on, was a news feeder: a desktop service that feeds you the news you want.
The idea was simple: a daemon runs on your local machine and acts as a transparent proxy for your web browser. The more websites you visit, the more the daemon learns about your tastes and interests. After a while, it becomes smart enough to start suggesting websites you might like to visit.
We had a workable prototype but couldn't figure out the correct way to monetise it. Back then, bandwidth was limited and expensive, and there were no simple Google Ad-style services for startups.
Why do I mention this now? Well, it's interesting to see that with the recent move to a free NetNewsWire, the folks at NewsGator are actively focussing on gathering attention data. Knowing who's reading what very quickly leads to recommendation-based newsfeeds - an idea not so far from what we were trying to do a decade ago.
Our idea was spot-on, it's just that our timing sucked :-)
Technorati Tags: development, innovation, startup, software
How Google killed Open Source participation (and business email, to boot)
It's ironic that Google spend an awful lot of money to promote Open Source participation through programmes such as Google Summer of Code, and yet it is Google that has prevented my participation in a number of Open Source communities.
A while ago, I switched all my mail over to using Google Mail (Virtual domains, Google Apps, Google Apps take 2, Mail update). Unwittingly, in doing so I nuked my ability to send email to Open Source mailing lists.
Due to the organic growth of both my use of email accounts and participation in communities, I'm subscribed to various mailing lists under a wide range of addresses. For example, I started participating in the Cocoon community with an old work email address; when I became a committer and later a member, I started using my Apache email address.
One of the neat features about Google Mail (in lieu of being able to actually consolidate multiple Google Mail accounts) is the ability to add multiple email addresses to one account. The idea is to let me use my foo@bar.com Google Mail account to send emails as x@y.com, as long as I also own the x@y.com email address. This should in theory allow me to transparently keep communicating on lists as before, by simply adding all my subscribed email addresses.
The problem is, Google have implemented this feature in a way that leaves it badly broken for real-world use, and although your emails purport to be from x@y.com, it still remains clear that they originated from foo@bar.com. A more technical discussion of the problem appears on Torsten's post about Gmail Sender header.
Why does this matter? Any email I send to mailing lists will probably bounce (especially Apache lists), as I'm subscribed as x@y.com, and the list server only sees foo@bar.com. If I can't send emails to the lists, I can't participate in the discussions (for example the recent vote on releasing cocoon 2.1.11).
It gets worse than that. Any email I send to anyone using Microsoft Windows and Outlook will show up as "From: x@y.com on behalf of foo@bar.com". Imagine if I'm trying to send an email:
From: a.savory@professionalbusinessaddress.com
To: reallyimportantcustomer@theirbusiness.com
Subject: important business message
and what the recipient really sees is:
From: silly@stupidaddress.com on behalf of a.savory@professionalbusinessaddress.com
To: reallyimportantcustomer@theirbusiness.com
Subject: important business message
Ouch.
For years I ran my own mailserver, and was able to configure it so that I was trusted enough to specify my own From: address. I'd kinda expect Google's feature to work the same way. It's trivial to do.
I'm now faced with a tough choice: set up new Google Mail accounts for each of the email addresses that I want to use to participate on mailing lists (bearing in mind some lists and some work obligations require me to use certain addresses), ditch Google Mail in favour of a service that works as expected, or go back to running my own server. None of those options are particularly enticing.
Why am using Google at all? I'm pretty sure it's the best (or least worst) of a bad lot (yes, I have Hotmail, Zimbra and Yahoo accounts too).
Any suggestions welcomed.
Technorati Tags: apache, gmail, google, open source