Bruce Perens, Open Source evangelist has put together a website countering the Microsoft-affiliated ‘Software Choice’ (aka. choose us) site.

Bruce’s site: http://sincerechoice.org/

The other one: http://www.softwarechoice.org/

Even though I did go through the steps to get the latest Windows Update stuff (SP3 and IE6) I’m actually using this as an opportunity to wean myself off of Microsoft entirely. I’m keeping strict track of the apps I’m installing and only using the apps that I really, really need. OpenOffice is now the only version of Office on my computer. It’s been there, but I’ve always gone back to the old one. By keeping track of which apps I really need and use that are Windows specific, I’ll be able to eventually move to Linux as my main OS and use a bare-bones Win2k install using VMware for those other apps. Now that I’ve got all the cruft off my system, it’s nice to see clearly what I need and what I don’t (Macromedia stuff mostly).

Man, I’m almost Microsoft free… I actually don’t mind Win2k all that much. It’s not horrible. But this is not my OS of the future – I’ll never upgrade to XP or beyond because of Microsoft’s ever-wackier licenses. A Unix variant will be my future, whether it’s OSX or Linux (the later being because I can’t afford the former). So I’m doing what I need to now to be able to interopt with the world. I really can’t wait for RedHat 8… I think that may be the OS I finally switch to on this machine.

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

I hope you succeed. I went dual-boot FreeBSD/Win98 on my old pc in an attempt to accomplish the same thing. Not the most pragmatic move, as there has been something of a delay getting OpenOffice ported to FreeBSD, and the Java support is a way behind Linux. Sometimes my hacker-nature desire for the ‘best’ technical solution is at odds with my pragmatic ‘whatever I need to get stuff done’ side. Now I’m hooked on FreeBSD – for some reason I found it an easier learning experience than the two times I played with Linux. This makes me wish I had the time/knowledge/ability/influence to bring the Java support up to the levels of Linux. OpenOffice is just about there, which will be great, although I can’t fully ditch MS Office until clients stop requiring documents in Word format – OO’s conversion is good, but not perfect, and sometimes there’s no alternative than to tweak things in MS Word before sending them. There is definitely scope for a standard file format – OO’s one has to be a contender. Its files are essentially zipped directories containing XML documents. Plain text – it just makes so much more sense than proprietary (or even open) binary formats for document interchange, now that file size is much less of an issue than it used to be (says the man with a 120 gig hard disk). Zipped XML data sometimes even ends up smaller than the equivalent Word file.

Quite an illuminating FAQ of some of C#’s new features.

http://www.geocities.com/csharpfaq/

Never write code again!

This topic seems to crop up every 3 years or so, with reliable regularity. Some
company proclaims that writing code is dead, their fantastic new tool will do it
all for you. Just tell it what you want by point-n-clicking / writing a spec in
plain english / beaming it directly from your brain and it will mystically
produce your application, exactly how you wanted it!. Hah. I think one
of the earliest one of these appeared some time around 1983. Apparently we’ve
all been wasting our time writing code for the last 20 years. The fact that
this time its Sun doing it might make it a bit more interesting, but not by much.

http://research.sun.com/features/ace/index.html

The java.nio stuff looks good.  The non-blocking sockets classes especially.  It looks similar in operation to the C ‘select’ function.  Wonder how long before some of the app. server products make use of it.  It will be interesting to see how much of a performance benefit there is compared to all the clever multi-threaded connection handling architectures that have evolved in the meantime.

Read more at:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/09/04/nio.html

SPAM.  Sigh.  It won’t even start to get fixed until SMTP servers have a mechanism to athenticate each other (callback with a digest etc). [Part of the problem…..]

Paul Graham has been looking into this very subject, with an interesting approach:

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html.

Bayesian filtering, cool – I should have paid more attention in stats classes.

I’ve been mulling the move over to John Companies Hosting for a while. Check it
out and you’ll see why. Part of the reason I hadn’t is because I don’t know
FreeBSD from my ass. Linux and Unix in general yes, but BSD I have no idea about
the specifics. I would need to set everything up myself which is an effort and a
maintainence nightmare, but then again I would have MORE CONTROL. (Hmmm. I just
checked… they have a Linux server “coming soon” for $10 more than their
standard FreeBSD… hmmmm, maybe I’ll wait…) FreeBSD is supposed to more
mature and stable than Linux. Yahoo, famously, runs on it, so maybe I should do
it just for the learning experience.
[Russell
Beattie Notebook]

If you know Linux, FreeBSD should be simple to pick up. I use FreeBSD at home
for all the things I don’t need windows for: my CVS repository, email, web
surfing, mucking about with perl, python, scheme etc. I prefer it to Linux – it
seems more solid somehow. The filesystem layout tends to be more consistent
too, mostly due to the packages/ports collection mechanism. I haven’t taken the
plunge with Java on it yet though.

Useful links:

The
FreeBSD handbook

Freshports.org

Cool technologies:

JMX looks like a brilliant way to handle application deployment and configuration. Most articles seem to be concentrating on how it could be used for pluggable framework configuration, such as cache management, database access etc. I think it looks like a fantastic way to allow hot-configuration of running applications without resorting to the usual property file hacking. Just wrap your application in an MBean exposing the configuration properties (database URL, resource locations etc), and it becomes trivial to stick a web interface on the front and reconfigure on the fly, or programmatically in response to events. It shouldn’t be too hard to implement clustering as well, so changing the settings of one server in a farm propagates to all of them. JBoss are quite far ahead with this line of thought, it seems – their clustering stuff looks very interesting.

Related links:

JBossMX

A ServerSide article on JMX

Javagroups is a cool multicast framework (used by JBoss’s clustering mechanism).

Had a reasonably nerdish weekend. Got TortoiseCVS on my WinXP box talking to my
CVS repository on my FreeBSD box, which required sorting out static IP addresses
on my two-node home network. All of which was accomplished without fuss on BSD,
and multiple reboots on WinXP. Score one to the free OS.

Finally got around to reading The Pragmatic Programmer, after over a year of
meaning to.

Played about a bit with Scheme. It appeals to my penchant for writing recursive
code.

Realised that there are so many things I want to do at the moment that I’ll need
to take a vacation from work to achieve them all. Then I’ll probably have to
take a vacation from my vacation to recover.

Software as cudgel…

Just finished watching a DVD, and made the mistake of letting it run on into the copyright messages in 20 or so languages that have the effect of rendering every control except the ‘off’ button ineffective.  This goes so against the grain.  Software is supposed to be a tool, not an instrument of control for some corporation to impose their will over that of the individual.  This appears to be increasingly prevalent though.  ‘Digital Rights Management’ – whose rights?  And why do they need managing?  If I buy a DVD, I should have the right to skip through bits I don’t want to watch, not have it hijack my player.  Copyright is being taken to utterly absurd extremes, and software is being used as the instrument of enforcement.  As a consumer I feel insulted.  As a developer, I feel ashamed.