Software

I don't use Windows myself, let alone Vista, since I am an open source advocate, and have no need nor desire for Windows.

That being said, I had a brief encounter with Vista. I bought a laptop, which as all of today's computers, comes with Microsoft Windows Vista. As I always do, I reformatted the drive and loaded Kubuntu on it.

IDC has a report titled “The Momentum of Open Source: Adoption Plans and Challenges in Australia, Korea, India and the People’s Republic of China”.

As you can see from this blog post summary, security factors in very high on the list of criteria. "Budget constraints" and "better management tools and utilities" are next.

Drupaller Noel Hidalgo is traveling the world in seven months, on a budget of $7,777.

The purpose of the trip is documenting Drupal, Open Source, free cultures, social innovators, and global change, as well as many other aspects of his experience.

Check the web site, aptly named Luck of Seven.

Noel met Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, In Antwerp, and interviewed him.

The Dilbert cartoon strip has a very funny, yet telling one today.

Pointy Haired Bossess (PHBs) often treat number of sheep in a herd like number of programmers on a team. So, for a project that requires 300 man days, the PHB hires 300 people to finish the project in one day!

Hint: See The Mythical Man Month for more details. 

Also see it in the archives.

As I noted earlier, Open Craft knew that I was in Egypt, and invited me to give a Drupal presentation. I chose Drupal performance tuning and optimization, and userpoints as the topic.

This is one is via XKCD.

Too bad this is no longer applicable to scripted/interpreted languages like PHP, Python and Ruby ...

The bulk of web hosts are still on PHP4, despite PHP5 being out for years. PHP5, and specially PHP5.2, offers a lot of features that make developing in PHP far better than being held back with PHP4's feature set.

So, a bunch of activists in the Drupal community started talking to other PHP based applications to say enough is enough, and push for more adoption of PHP 5.2 by web hosts and projects alike.

Go ahead and Digg the story, and click the banner below for more information.

It seems that some Arabic words are being used subconsciously for open source software projects.

Here are some recent examples.

A new GPL licensed transactional engine for MySQL is now available.

It is called PrimeBase XT (pbxt). It provides all the benefits of transactional engines such as InnoDB. This includes referential integrity (RI) and multiversion concurrency control (MVCC).

The benchmarks are good for this engine.

Software projects are by definition people centric: software can only be produced by humans, and therefore all it requires is human capital and what goes with it (budget, communication, ...etc.).

Since people are the main component, communication is crucial. Like every project involving humans, communication can break down, and the results are suboptimal to say the least.

In IT projects, this was immortalized using the Tire Swing Cartoon. I recall first seeing this cartoon in the late 1980s. It depicts how each stakeholder in the project envisioned the product, or delivered his part.