2007 April | Lazycoder

19Apr/070

Why should Open Source meet the needs of CEOs?

Asking where the Open Source CEO billionaires are is a little like asking where the genetic research billionaires are. We have three Nobel prize winners where I work. I imagine all three of them are pretty well off. But I’m sure they won’t be getting a write up in Forbes or featured in Money magazine any time soon.

“How well does Open Source currently meet the needs of shareholders and CEOs?”

I think there is a perception of the TOOL being the solution. Yahoo could build their entire infrastructure using Microsoft tools. The tool doesn’t have to meet the needs of anyone but the solution builder. Whether or not Twitter uses Rails, Grails, web.py on a Linux box or web.py on a Windows box doesn’t matter to the end user, nor to the CEOs or shareholders. It’s all about the implementation. If you have something written using proprietary tools that doesn’t meet the needs of the shareholders, how are you better off? You can argue that open source tools make it easier to develop the solutions you need or that proprietary tools are better documented and supported, but in my opinion it’s not the quality of the clay that makes a great sculpture, it’s the quality of the sculptor.

Filed under: Technology No Comments

19Apr/070

My shared items

I’ve put a widget containing my Google Reader shared items ( feed ) over on the right if you are interested in what I’m looking at. It won’t all be tech related, some science, some game, kind of a crapshoot.

Filed under: General No Comments

17Apr/072

Language performance doesn’t matter when a database is involved

All of the latest Rails/Twitter performance bruhaha made me think about some advice I got a long time ago and that I dish out whenever someone asks me about some performance concerns they have with their code.

Nothing else matters once you hit the disk. Once you do any kind of activity that involves reading/writing to a hard disk, that activity instantly becomes your greatest performance drag. No matter how slow any language is at interpreting/JITing/compiling, it’s still orders of magnitude faster than interacting with a hard disk with physical, moving parts.

Filed under: Database, General, PHP, Rails, Technology 2 Comments

16Apr/070

Microsoft Silverlight Announced

“WPF/E” was the code name, now it’s called Silverlight and has a Halls cough drop for it’s logo.

Silverlight is different from ASP.NET AJAX, mainly due to it’s proper use of capitalization. Although they are two separate products, that both work on the web, use javascript, and are cross platform.

Oh, one needs a plugin.

Q: Is this Microsofts answer to Flash?

A: You mean Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, or Adobe Apollo? No one is really sure. It appears it might be an answer to Mozilla XUL, but no one writes XUL apps so no one cares. We think it competes with Powerbuilder for sure. We know it needs a plugin, so it may be an answer to RealPlayer. But what was the question?

Filed under: .NET, Technology No Comments

10Apr/071

I’m on Jaiku, or am I?

I’ve already mentioned my like of Twitter. Well, the twits were all abuzz about Leo Laporte jumping ship and leaving Twitter for Jaiku to avoid any possible trademark infringement with his popular TWiT show.

I’ll let the lameness of that sink in for a second. Heck, even Leo knows it’s lame. But lawyers gotta do what lawyers gotta do.

I hadn’t planned on getting a Jaiku account, until someone pointed out that it allowed you to add RSS feeds. Most people were using it to mirror their Twitter account. But not me, I added in my Tumblr blog. My Tumblr blog, or Tumble Blog, is mostly an aggregation of all the RSS feeds my sites, photo sites, Twitter accounts, everything generates. It’s a low-cost way to have a presence on a service with out having to lift a finger. I never have to log into Jaiku again and it’ll look like I’m using it all the time.

Filed under: General 1 Comment

9Apr/070

Know your platform

Working for The Man | Tux Deluxe: “Learn the architecture of the machine

Many programmers, especially those who write for virtual machines such as Java or the .NET CLI, think that low-level machine architecture and processor instructions don’t matter anymore. That’s still not true, and I don’t believe it ever will be. Someone who understands what the machine is really doing underneath all the modern layers of glop such as virtual machines, garbage collection algorithms, network and threading abstractions, will always be able to solve problems better than someone who lets the compiler or the ‘execution environment’ they’re using make all the decisions for them.”

I agree completely. At some point, you have to understand what the layers of abstraction you are using are doing to make your life easier. So when your life is hard, you have an idea about how to route around the hard parts.