[Fri Jul 27 12:50:30 CEST 2007]

According to Computer World, the Mozilla Foundation is getting ready to ditch Thunderbird:

In a posting to her blog Wednesday, CEO Mitchell Baker said that Mozilla's first priority is, and will continue to be, its open-source browser, Firefox. "As a result, Mozilla doesn't focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox, and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future", said Baker.

Thunderbird's community, which includes a large number of unpaid programmers, should be cut loose "to determine its own destiny", she said.

[...]

Baker laid out three possible fates for Thunderbird, including creating a new nonprofit organization similar to the Mozilla Foundation to focus on the e-mail program; building a new subsidiary of the foundation just for Thunderbird; and releasing Thunderbird into the wild as a community-only project. The latter was the path taken by SeaMonkey, the name for what was once called Mozilla Suite, when the latter was dropped by Mozilla in 2005.

It's the end of the concept of the Internet suite as invented by Netscape back in the mid-1990s, it seems. Back then it seemed like a good idea to dump together a bunch of different Internet applications (a browser, an email client, a calendaring application...) in what was termed an "enterprise-ready integrate suite". It didn't work. Actually, it marked the beginning of the end for Netscape as the dominant browser on the Web (yes, due to many other reasons, not only to this move, but an argument could be made that this was yet another contributing factor to their demise). Personally, I am not sure there is a need for a standalone email client like Thunderbird anymore. Those who love basic but flexible and powerful text-based client will undoutedbly prefer something like mutt, those preferring a large multi-tasking application that can also do contacts, calendaring and appointments will run Evolution or Outlook and, finally, those who like basic GUI clients will run Apple Mail or KMail. {link to this story}

[Tue Jul 17 16:59:50 CEST 2007]

I attended a PAM presentation put together by an engineer that included a cool cartoon from UserFriendly in its last slide:

The users' comments to the strip are pretty good too:

Solaris-nigiri:
Lots of cooked rice, nowadays for free, but had been very expensive in the days of old. No additional components. Find them yourself. Comes in an almost unusable state to give you weeks of happy preparation.

Windows-nigiri:
Looks pretty, but the rice is uncooked so it falls apart too easily. It's also quite flavorless.

{link to this story}

[Thu Jul 12 12:14:05 CEST 2007]

Apparently, no matter how mainstream Linux becomes, there are still journalists out there totally unable to show any sort of objectivity towards the OS, journalists who are capable of coming up with the sort of review of Ubuntu Linux written by Alexander Wolfe and published by Information Week. Mind you, I am convinced Linux is still not ready for the non-technical user out there, at least if such user is supposed to install it and configure it. However, anybody who provides free technical support to friends and relatives with their Windows machines knows that, your "regular home user" out there wouldn't know how to install or upgrade any version of Windows either. Heck, I'm still helping people even to set up their email accounts! So, this Alexander Wolf took an HP Pavilion ze4200 laptop lying around his house, and decided to test install Ubuntu FeistyFawn on it with such a bad luck that even the LiveCD wouldn't boot. When he finally managed to install the OS after many hiccups, he ran into a bug falsely reporting that the processor is overheating that caused the system to shut down. So, yeah, it sucks. However, it is something that could happen with pretty much any OS. Not only that, but to show you how biased the reviewer is, here is just a little detail from page 3 of his review:

All I told, I had spent a good deal more than Ubuntu's promised 25 minutes to work my way through an unsuccessful installation. More problematically, in failing to install itself successfully, Ubuntu also screwed up the OS I already had on the system. After shutting down, removing the Ubuntu install disk, and restarting, the laptop was unable to load Windows XP.

Haha! This is a good one! So, he claims that simply attempting to boot from the LiveCD (he explains in the article how to, up to this point, he has been unable to even boot from it and see a working desktop due to some cryptic GNOME errors) has rendered the laptop unusable (?!). Good one! Does this guy even know what he is writing about? Anyways, the very fact that he wasn't able to boot into Windows XP after his failed attempt to install Ubuntu leads me to believe that there is something wrong with his hardware. I have installed Ubuntu on multiple desktops by now (both new and old), and never ran into such problems, which is not to say that nobody will ever run into problems, of course, but I'd think twice before extrapolating from a one-off type of situation. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 11 16:19:38 CEST 2007]

Here is another good one. For those of you who don't know, irssi is a well known text-only IRC client that's extremely customizable. Well, it looks as if someone who may be hooked onto IRC and doesn't want his boss to find out came up with this excellent theme to disguise the application inside what looks like a Java IDE. Nice trick.

If you are interested, here is the source file for the theme. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 11 11:58:36 CEST 2007]

Here is a funny one. A friend just gave me a link to a Windows version of the UNIX command grep. It definitely is a functionality that has been missing from their OS for quite sometime now. What I always found so interesting about porting tools like this to Windows (there was a time when I also used putty or vim for Windows) is that actually using them is a true pain in the neck. In other words, the tool and its functionality may be there, but the whole user environment is gone. It is in cases like this when one discovers how the Windows OS is only suited to do things its own way. Any attempt to bend it a bit and make it more flexible are deemed to end in failure. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 11 11:42:24 CEST 2007]

Paul Murphy writes an article for ZDNet where he recommends managers to staff for Linux, and not for a particular distribution. I have to agree with him. First of all, most distributions are similar enough that it doesn't take a long time for a good sysadmin or developer to get acquainted with it. Yes, there are lots of people out there spreading FUD about the myriad of Linux distributions and how this makes it more difficult for companies (and users) to adopt it as their default OS. For the most part, this is just that, FUD. Second, and most important, precisely because all distributions are so similar, companies out there do switch back and forth between one and another as they see fit. So, it just makes sense for them to hire people who are familiar with Linux in general, instead of "specialists" who prefer this or that distro. Besides, chances are that, by doing this, they will also get people who are more open minded, which has its own advantages in any organization. {link to this story}

[Mon Jul 2 16:46:39 CEST 2007]

LinuxWorld publishes an interesting story about the contributors to the Linux kernel. Greg Koah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in the kernel, gave a talk at the Ottawa Linux Symposium on the topic.

In the latest kernel release, the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago, the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes, he said. Kroah-Hartnman himself is now doing more code reviewing than coding. "That's all I do, is read patches these days", he said.

(...)

A graph of all the developers involved in the upcoming 2.6.22 release, and the relationships of who reviewed whose patches, extends to a 40-foot-long printout with names in tiny type. The graph is on display at the Ottawa event.

Enterprise Linux distributions that pick a single kernel.org release and maintain it for five to seven years are another reason for the "mess". Instead of waiting for a stable upstream release and then modifying it to include new functionality from development kernels, an enterprise distribution can QA and support any of the 2.6 releases, which come out every 2.5 months. "The patch loads carried by the distributors have shrunk quite a bit", Corbet said.

Despite Red Hat's dominance of commercial Linux sales, the spread of actual development contributions is much more diverse, with Novell, where Kroah-Hartman works, punching above its weight at 9.7% of kernel contributions to Red Hat's 11.8%. The next three companies in the rankings are IBM, Intel and SGI, which has installed a 4096-processor supercomputer, the largest single system image Linux box yet.

But just above SGI in the listings are "amateurs". Although the great independent Linux hacker has been thought extinct, a casualty of corporate recruiting, known amateurs still count for 3.9% of kernel changes. Reflecting the large number of tiny changes, the top category is still "unknown", but everyone with 10 or more changes in the kernel is accounted for, Kroah-Hatman said.

A different article on the same conference can be found here. {link to this story}

[Mon Jul 2 14:09:11 CEST 2007]

A good friend sent me a link to a story published by Computer World about the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills that looked sort of interesting. After all, I work in the field and the last thing that I should let happen is for me to fall into one of these dead or dying technologies. Some of the items on the list could easily be guessed by anyone:COBOL, non-relational databases, Novell NetWare, non-IP networks (!), cc:Mail and ColdFusion. No big surprises there, I guess. However, it surprised me to see C programming included in the list with the following description:

As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant, according to Padveen [Stewart Padveen, Internet entrepenur and founder of AdPickles Inc.]. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill", he says.

Let me be clear. I'm no fool. I know that almost any modern scripting language out there (Perl, Python, Ruby...) will let you write a small app in far less time than either C or C++, and chances are that with far less bugs too. However, I also know that operating systems, drivers, heavy apps, compilers and language tools are still written in C for the most part. Not only that but anybody who wants to know about kernel internals and figure out how things truly work inside has no choice but to become familiar with the language. Yes, I also think that web development will sooner or later take over. Yes, I also think that scripting is already a serious alternative for most applications. Still, I wouldn't include C in the same category as COBOL, non-relational databases and NetWare. Doing so is, I think, a big mistake.

Incindetally, the comment according to which it is difficult to find a C-only programmer today applies to pretty much any other language. I don't think this is a field where one could survive knowing just one programming language, just like few people would survive as a top business executive these days without speaking English. It's the name of the game. Interestingly enough, another article also published by Computer World on the topic, titled Hot Skills, Cold Skills starts with the following paragraph:

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the US or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" —those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

By the way, just to show you how much we should believe these articles, this last piece I mentioned lists supoprt and help desk among the "cold skills" when about a year ago or so the same magazine published another piece stating quite the opposite. Oh, well. {link to this story}