Monday, January 17th, 2005
The IT world is full with buzzwords. Slashdot links to an article (funny: check out the buzzword-domainname for that article..iWon.com) in this article.
A comment to the article on Slashdot:
My favorite: Web Economy Bullshit Generator [dack.com]
Dilbert-inspired: The Buzzword Generator [luc.edu]
Yet Another Buzzword Generator [1728.com]
And there are many, many more buzzword generators [google.com] out there, implemented using open-architected dynamic algorithms by organic radical policies…
Let’s do some testing? I’ll visit some semi-random websites to see what buzzword bullshit they can come up with. Here’s what I’m gonna visit: Microsoft, Sun, IBM, ZX Factory (where I work) and Apache foundation, and I’ll give the verdict on how easy it was to find some fuzzy buzz:
- Microsoft (verdict: Easy as cake. One click):
“Microsoft Interoperability.Interoperability is all about different software products working together. Microsoft embraces interoperability—helping the software products you have today work together and investing for tomorrow to unlock the benefits of XML-enabled interoperability by design.”
“Enabling Heterogeneous Systems Management Through the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Learn how Microsoft is enabling solutions to work in heterogeneous environments and how we plan to apply the principles of the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) as we move forward.”
Ha ha. Super!. Next up:
- Sun (Verdict: Harder. Two/Three clicks)
“Sun is responding directly to customer needs by offering solutions that go beyond standalone products and services. Sun’s Integratable Architectures and Systems provide the benefits of complex technologies while reducing the time, cost, and risk of deployment.”
Quell bullshit! Integratable Arci-blaaah.
- IBM (Verdict: Tough. Min of 9 clicks)
“Grow your business with technology-based solutions from IBM and IBM Business Partners.
Business process integration (BPI). On demand offers a better response to customers, competition, and markets.”
That’s the best I could come up with at IBM. Good work. (or messy website).
- ZX Factory (Verdicht: Too hard)
Except for some of the names of the different products (‘Managed services’) I couldn’t find any. Perhaps it’s because it’s a small company, perhaps I’m too biased (doubt it though), perhaps I know too much about the company.
- Apache (Verdicht: None found)
Couldn’t find any buzzwords. :(
But the IT sector isn’t the only place we find lots fo buzzwords. I also notice them in the job titles for companies: Account engineer (previously systems manager (previously system operator)), CEO’s, Account manager (no idea what this is supposed to be), etc.
Then there’s the media. I’m only gonna discuss the dutch media buzzwords, so you english folks can skip this: First of all, there’s the latest, greatest ‘Familiedrama‘. A phrase which describes, in essence, anything bad happening in a family. In the media however, it’s linked to killings by one or both of the parents in a family. Then there’s the somewhat older ‘Zinloos geweld‘ (translated: Useless violence). An even more useless and biased oppionionated term for describing any act of violence happen in public in the Netherlands. Every stabbing, shooting, beating-up: Zinloos geweld. Not quite an buzzword, but more a buzz-happening: ‘Stille tochten‘. A silent parade in honour of some guy/gall who got killed/died. Squarrel gets run over by a car? Stille tocht. Kitten dies of old age? Stille tocht. Some time ago there was a phrase, which wasn’t coined up by the media, but rather by the government: “Demoniseren“. There’s so much more idiotic,meaningless buzzwords in the world, I could start writing about them today, and never finish in my lifetime.
Monday, January 17th, 2005
Sick of the default design for this page? You can always change it.
Saturday, January 15th, 2005
Now that I’ve finally completely integrated the GNU building environment with ListPatron, and have fixed the last outstanded serious bugs, I have release ListPatron v0.1. Thanks to Michiel for testing the release package.
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
Dutch cabinet gives 200 million extra for Asia (Dutch, sorry).
The dutch government, most notably minister Van Ardenne, has given an extra €200 million in help-funds for Asia. This is on top of the already given €40 million. Corporations and individuals have also raised an additional €112 million for Giro555.
That’s a grand total of €352 million. Now it’s time to put things into perspective. The Netherlands has a population of +/- 16 million people. That’s €22,- per person, which is a lot. Of course, it’s not as if we can’t afford it, that’s not the issue. The real issue is that our government has been cutting costs left and right just to make the yearly budget, whining in the press about the bad economic situation, savagely slaying much needed health care in our own country, but it’s no problem at all coughing up huge amounts of money for a single disaster. Perhaps people don’t realize this, but help efforts have a certain saturation point beyond which money won’t help. I think the global efforts are exceeding this saturation point. Massive ammounts of money will go to waste on useless stuff like management, coordination and transportation. I’m no expert on this kind of stuff, but it would seem to me that once a certain point has been reached, these sort of costs will rise exponentially.
Another issue I’m having with this ‘donation’ is that it’s overdone. Who does our government think they are just throwing our money away like this. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe sending money will help, I donated myself. But I also believe there are a LOT more people that need help in the world and that spreading the resources around a little bit will do much more good. If the public wants to help, we’ll help. Giro555 has proved that. No need throwing another bag’o’money at it.
To me it almost seems as if the government is using this donation to get on the good hand of the dutch public. The Giro555 fundraiser was an extreme success as everybody chipped in. You could actually say that more people than ever overcame their selfishness and donated money, which in turn created quite a strong group/bonding kind of thing. This donation by our government feels like they’re saying: “Look! We’re doing good stuff too! Let us be a part of this!”. It’s.. too fake. It’s hypocritical almost.
I dunno.. don’t take this the wrong way. I do believe in sending help over there. This is just a little over the top, somehow. Disproportional. Undemocratic.
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
I’m improving this page, which is a slow and painful path to perfection. A lot of ugly stuff has crept into the code underlying this page and log, and I want to get rid of it.
For instance, I was using tables on the project page, so I could get the screenshots aligned properly on the right. Using the CSS property float:right worked, but since it overflows parent elements when they are too small to encompass the screenshot, the result sometimes was pretty crappy. I haven’t really found a solution for this problem, but I’m working around it by taking into account quite a small font-size. Everything is better than using tables, even though for this particular use I believe tables are allowed.
I also fired up the gimp and crafted some new icons. Huge improvement, if I do say so myself. They look all that more crisp, which fits better in the overall design of this site.
Now comes the huge undertaking of revamping the log. It’s so messy, you wouldn’t believe it. But first I’ll work on the printing version of this site some more. *sighs* Oh well. If everything is done, I’ll be able to use stylesheets to completely change the whole appearance of this site without having to recode anything.
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
Okay, first off all, don’t take what I say the wrong way. I know how zealots react to the kind of stuff I’m about to say. They’ll downplay me, call it FUD, tell me ‘works for me’, and all that other bullshit. But what I’m saying here is the truth, okay. Don’t feel the need to defend the product because what it ultimatelly boils down to is the truth. Why? Because I’m confronted with it:
Firefox is buggy as hell.
There, I said it. I’m sorry. I’m having real problems living with this piece of shisoftware. Here’s what’s wrong:
- A DIV element with overflow:auto as a CSS property can’t be scrolled with the mouse. The bug has been open in bugzilla for about a hundredmillion years. (not exaggerated!)
- Pop-ups don’t get blocked. I know, I know it “works for you”. Guess what? I don’t care, because it doesn’t work for me. The problem seems to be that the little ‘Block popups [x]’ option keeps getting turned off, and it’s driving me nuts. If I turn it on, it should STAY on, no matter what.
- ‘Firefox has prevented this site from opening a pop-up’. This feature is pretty nice. If it worked. Which it doesn’t. So I can’t unblock sites easily, but have to go to edit -> preferences -> etc. I don’t like that.
Rendering of overlapping DIV tags is bad. When I scroll, I can see where the hidden DIV’s are because the text doesn’t align with the text which isn’t under the hidden DIV. That’s right, the text is garbled. Unacceptable. When you scroll, it’s even worse.- Various different extentions totally screw up the browser when used, making extentions useless. Some guy from Opera already said this, and he was right. I mean, come on.. I had 4 extensions loaded, and already everything was being screwed up. I know you think this isn’t Firefox’s fault, but it is! It’s firefox who’s not doing any quality control over extensions. And you know, firefox without extensions is just an annoying little browser which can’t be made to do what I want.
- On a clean install, the font-sizes where WAY ot of propertion. I was looking at a menubar with fontsize 26 or something. Had to hack user.js.some.bloody.prefs.js.file.or.whatever.txt.xml.rdf.txt.js and manually put the fontsize on some sane setting. (And NO, this had nothing to do with some preference)
There’s much more to complain about. I could go on and on and on. However, since I’m posting this using Firefox, I’m too afraid the damned thing will crash if I type any further, so I’m gonna quit typing while I have the chance. (Okay, it’s actually not that bad. Firefox only crashed on me once since I installed v1.0, but I’m pissed okay? Let me rant)
Update: As I was reading over this article, I decided to turn on just a bare minimum of extensions so I could at least block some ads and have some better tab preferences. Guess what? I promptly found Yet Another Annoying Bug. When I go to Tools -> Extensions and I rightclick on an extensions it will highlight the extension which I clicked, but I’ll get the context-sensitive menu of the previously selected extension. So when I rightclick on a disabled extensions, I’ll get a option to ‘disable’ the extension. What the hell? It’s already disabled you dumbass browser! I need an ‘enable’ option! Bah, buggy piece of shit.
Update II: It’s even worse than I thought. I’ve got Pop-up blocking set to ‘on’, and my own site set as an exception. When I click on an ‘edit’ or ‘New’ link in my log, it doesn’t open a pop-up, which it should. Even if my site was blocked, which it isn’t, it should still open an pop-up since I requested it by clicking on the link.
Update III: It seems the bug at update II was caused by an extension that wasn’t officially supported by Mozilla Update, namely ‘Tab browser extensions’
Monday, January 10th, 2005
I’ve been working all weekend on getting my latest project, ListPatron (which hasn’t been released yet) working with the GNU Build environment. I had to move a lot of stuff around in CVS, which I don’t particularly like since that means older checkouts won’t work anymore. Alas, nothing I can do about it, except perhaps migrate the application to something like Subversion. Too much work :-)
ListPatron is now being built by autoconf / automake, and it works great. Creating a new release is now as easy as this:
cvs checkout listpatron
./reconf.sh
./configure
make distcheck
and a new tarball will be ready for distribution. Users can simply extract the tarball and issue ./configure && make && make install and everything will be installed properly. Uninstallation? make uninstall. Done.
Doing a checkout and preparing it for development no longer requires all kinds of hacking on flags in Makefile’s and paths in the sourcecode. All that needs to be done is:
cvs checkout listpatron
./reconf.sh
./configure --datadir=`pwd` --enable-debug
make
and I can start developing in the src/ directory.
Even though this all works great, I found out it can be pretty hard setting up your project for use of autoconf and automake. You’ll have to replace all your Makefile’s with weird files named configure.in, Makefile.am, etc. Then you run tons off tools which generate tons of other files, and soon your whole development tree will be messy as hell.
Documentation was available (manual), but I didn’t find it of much use for the beginning user though. I found it lacking of general overview of the utilities and it didn’t really address the things I needed to know (“How do I get this or that feature that I’ve always used in Makefiles/my own scripts to work with autotools?”)
I’ve made some notes during the whole process of getting automake and autoconf working with my project, and perhaps I should take a day or two to write up my own tutorial.
*sigh* So many things to do, so little time.
Saturday, January 8th, 2005
Man, I love this quote I found in the Gaim HACKING file:
“Coding styles are like assholes, everyone has one and no one likes anyone
elses.” — Eric Warmenhoven or Luke Schierer (Gaim HACKING file)
Excellent.
Monday, January 3rd, 2005
Well, today I’ve learned another valuable lesson about software development in the ‘real’ world. Today’s lesson is:
When working on a new version of some piece of software, do not plan on refactoring and/or reimplementing features whilst at the same time planning on implementing new features.
At my job, I’m currently working on integrating an old piece of software (ServerOverzicht) into another, newer, project (ZX Monitoring). The old software has been in use for about 2 years now, and it has become somewhat of a mess. The software and database designs are outdated and need to be cleaned up badly.
We decided to do both at the same time. We wanted to integrate the old software with the new software, clean up the code (or rewrite portions of it), clean up the data and rework the design of the old and new application, whilst also implementing completely new features. Not a good idea, I can tell you.
It’s not that it is impossible, it’s just that you totally lose sight of what needs to be done. Everything you do gets in the way of some other thing you’ll need to do. Redesigning the whole thing means I’ll have to make major changes in all the data. Changes in the data mean it’ll become even more difficult to clean it up without losing information. Cleaning up the information means we’ll have problems fitting the old data in with the other application’s data. Old features can’t be recoded due to the fact that the new features aren’t ready yet. And these are just some of the problems we’re facing right now.
This is also one of the biggest differences between Open Source development and commercial development. When working on Open Source, you can take your time doing what is most important first. It doesn’t matter if it takes a month to carefully redesign major portions of the project, since there’s no deadline. Deadlines in Open Source only get set if the software is already quite stable and the development team can make an estimate about how long it’s going to take to complete it. But commercial software needs a deadline even before a single part has been designed.
Monday, January 3rd, 2005
No money for a hardware monitor/keyboard/mouse switch? Check out X2X. From the description on Freshmeat:
“x2x allows the keyboard and mouse on one (“from”) X display to control another (“to”) X display.“.
Now I can simply run “x2x -north -to eek:0” and whenever I move the mouse off the top of the screen on my laptop, it will appear on my other machine. I can then control that machine as if I was working on it using a monitor/keyboard/mouse switch or as if it was a (semi) multi-head display. Totally awesome.
I’d really like a similar tool for X2Win or something like that.
Also check out teleport. It can move (some) X applications from one X server display to another. Applications that you want to move need to support some kind of protocol, but I couldn’t (be bothered to) find out what exactelly. I’ve tried the program though, and could at least move GTK programs and Xterms to another X server. Pretty cool stuff.
Update:
Hmm, it appears that a similar tool for X to Window exists.. it’s called *drumroll* x2win! Who would’ve thought? On the downside: the tool appears to be dead and removed from the internet. On the semi-upside, there’s a new tool called SDE3k (SuperDesktopExtender 3000). But it’s still in alpha, and I’m not sure wether it’s still being developed. I’m probably gonna mail the author and ask him about it.
Update II:
I’ve found yet another possible sollution to the problem of controlling a windows machine from a Linux machine: X2VNC. (Site seems to be down, but there’s a google cache available here. Just wait until the page works again or install X2VNC from a package in your distro).
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