Reddit is the new Slashdot

The programming section at Reddit is is the new Slashdot.

It's a total nerd-time sink.

Slashdot celebrated its 10th anniversary this week and I think Reddit is less than 2 years old, so it remains to be seen if Reddit will be around for the long haul. However, programming.reddit.com definitely reminds me of the Slashdot early days -- sans flame-fest.

SCO is dead!

Well, they are not quite dead yet, but they've filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection -- possibly in order to stave off a judgment in their lawsuit with Novell. Doesn't sound desperate to me, either.

SCO is the company that falsely claimed that Linux developers had included SCO Intellectual Property without permission into the Linux operating system. They made a bunch of very bold and factually inaccurate claims resulting in lawsuits against IBM, Novell, RedHat, and even a few of their own customers (they sued them!).

Turns out that was a bad idea. Oh well, such is the life of a Microsoft pawn.

What is it, you'd say, you do here?

Sometimes I get asked what it is I "do." Well, here's what I currently do, explained on Science Friday. MP3 audio is also available from the Science Friday podcast.

The connect the dots picture in the first link is a graph. I'm currently helping develop a system that draws such pictures using financial data for much the same purposes as described in the interview.

Daring Cuisine - Haggis

Mike Myers claimed that "most Scottish cuisine is based on a dare" in So I Married an Axe Murderer, but I have to say I like haggis, at least in small portions. It's a bit like what many Americans would identify as "hash," though spicier and not as mushy. The spice is of the "Spiced Cider" variety as opposed to the Jalapeno variety.

I should have known that 5 million Scots wouldn't be wrong.

Buy Low, Sell High

Have the US markets gone low enough yet?

I'm not dead!

Hey everyone, I'm not dead; I've just been really busy. I finished up (like software is ever finished) at Avnet a few weeks ago and jumped right into my new job at Wells Fargo. Best perk of WF has to be the sunlight -- my "cube plot" is a room with windows. Natural light! Huzzah!

I attended the Desert Software Symposium, which was a Java/Agile/Dynamic-Languages-on-the-JVM SuperNerd-fest. It was absolutely worth the price of admission and will attend again next year, I'm sure.

P.S. a "cube plot" is a small cube farm

Squatters' Rights in AZ?

We love our new house and it appears we're not alone. Three uninvited, though very welcome, gnomes have set up camp in our backyard.

They brought their landscaping tools, so I think we'll let them stay. I just hope they haven't gained any squatters rights due to their improvement of the property.




I think this guy's the leader.

















Have at those oleander leaves, buddy!


















I'm not sure where you got that apple, but I probably wouldn't eat it.

Thanks Jeff and Tina!

We've Moved!

We moved into our new house this past weekend. We love it. Many thanks to Glenn and Sue and Jordan, Wes and Tara, Matt and Jessica, and Michael -- who toiled away in the hot sun and kitchen to help us move our stuff in just one day.

Microsoft, Software Patents, Concavity

Fortune recently ran an article, Microsoft takes on the free world, announcing that Microsoft was going to be asserting its patent rights against patrons of free and open source software (FOSS). The article starts off all gloom and doom for FOSS, but ends up pretty well-balanced.

However, Fortune senior editor Roger Parloff and I are diametrically opposed when it comes to our conclusions. Mr. Parloff refers to Microsoft's claim that FOSS software infringes on 235 Microsoft patents as "a breathtaking number."

My reaction to this number is: 235? That's it? Microsoft examined their patent portfolio and could only find 235 patents that might be infringed upon by the entire corpus of FOSS?!

That's embarassing.

Microsoft has dominated desktop computing for over 15 years. I'd expect them to have a lot more than 235 patents to trot out considering they are claiming infringement in the Operating System and GUIs (Windows), Office Productivity (Office), and E-mail (Outlook) software. I expect they've kept some in reserve as backup ammunition for the ones that get invalidated or circumvented, but it doesn't seem to even be the right order of magnitude for the industry to be concerned.

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has not been a leading innovator in computing. They aren't even close to holding the good cards in this game. IBM is -- and IBM likes FOSS. IBM was granted the most US patents in 2006 with a total of 3,651. They have been granted the most US patents on an annual basis for 14 years in a row. Microsoft did not make the top ten last year, though HP, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Intel did. Each of these companies makes significant use of FOSS in products or solutions. Microsoft appears to hold between 5000 and 7000 patents total.

Microsoft's announcement is starting to look like a good bit of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). Ironically, FUD was invented, though not patented, by IBM back when they were trying to crush Amdahl.

The real bad news [for Microsoft and its shareholders] in this story is that it appears Microsoft plans to profit from their patents by:

Smith [Microsoft's general counsel] was not to be deterred. Since the GPL covered only distributors of Linux, nothing stopped Smith from seeking royalties directly from end users - many of which are Fortune 500 companies. He would have to proceed carefully, however, because most of those users were also major Microsoft customers.

Microsoft is going to seek royalties from their own customers when those customers use certain free or open source software. And what will Microsoft do when a customer doesn't want to pay up?

• Will Microsoft not sell them Microsoft products? Is this an anti-trust violation due to Microsoft's monopoly status?
  
• Will Microsoft sue that customer to enjoin them from using the "infringing" software?
• Will they just move on to the next customer / sucker?
  

How long will it take for CIOs and Chief Counsels of Microsoft "customers" to start comparing notes about the deals they got? When will they band together and strike back?

I think this "strategy" indicates that Microsoft's shareholder value curve just hit an inflection point and is now concave down after being flat for the last 7 years. If Microsoft continues this course, the best they can hope for is a repeat of SCO's performance, which is not ending well for SCO. Note that SCO is widely considered as a proxy for Microsoft in the FOSS community. The worst thing that could happen for Microsoft and everyone else is for "patent Armageddon" to be unleashed. Microsoft's Smith knows this is a possibility:

"The only real solution that [the free-software] folks have to offer," Smith says, "is that they first burn down the bridge, and then they burn down the patent system. That to me is not a goal that's likely to be achieved, and not a goal that should be achieved."

Not surprisingly, I disagree with Smith. Microsoft will lose quickly, and authoritatively as patent arsenals 10-100x the size of Microsoft's arsenal are unleashed upon it. The downside for the existing leaders of the software industry is that patent Armageddon would inject massive instability as the concept of software patents gets sorted out. Long-term I suspect this might be a good thing as the USPTO is granting many software patents for derivative, obvious, and non-novel work, but it's sure to cause massive blood-letting in the short-term.

Now, I've got to get back to coding my FOSS project. :)

New Addition to the Family

We (and by we, I mean I) have made a new addition to our family. Please welcome Jeeves. Jeeves is our new bellhop-dog. Not only does Jeeves welcome visitors instead of barking at them, he gladly holds keys and leashes in a most convenient spot next to the front door. We're also teaching him how to take people's coats. This is not going so well, but fortunately for us, this does not come up very often in Phoenix.

If you are interested in a bellhop-dog, check out Bombay Co.

We're Moving

We bought a house and we'll be moving around June 15. For those familiar with Chandler, it's around Ray and McQueen. We have a park and school nearby. Hopefully I can teach Jojo to cool off by jumping in the pool after our runs.

ClearCase is Dead! Long Live Subversion!

I finally met my limit with ClearCase at work today and migrated to Subversion.

I originally thought this migration would cost me about 3 days. It actually only cost me about 3 hours. Many thanks to the "One-Click" Subversion Installer.

Open Source Rocks.

I quite like Subversion so far.

Great Article on Load Balancing

Willy Tarreau, the author of HAProxy, has posted a terrific article on Making Applications Scalable with Load Balancing. If I ever build a site needing to serve more than a few hundred thousand sessions per day, I'll be sure to re-read the article.

ClearCase Considered Harmful

I'm a big fan of Configuration Management, and I am a long-time user of CVS and short-time user of Subversion. My current project uses ClearCase, which is often considered to be the leading product in the industry. Initially, I was very excited to use ClearCase, because it is [supposedly] designed with the software development process in mind -- especially when using the Unified Configuration Management model. This is in contrast to CVS and Subversion which does not force users to work in any particular way; note that this is often cited as a deficiency of CVS / Subversion.

First the good, ClearCase :

• is very good at merging changes or at least, I think it is -- I was warned off branches (activities in UCM ClearCase)
  
• can show you, continuously, what the combination of arbitrary streams of development would look like (say, a development branch and a release branch)

Now the bad, ClearCase:

• sometimes decides not to write changes to certain files to disk, so even though changes are hitting the filesystem in some files, they aren't in others. i.e., your editor sees one thing, your compiler and unit tests another. Get set to reboot and rewrite!
  
• will not let you make any change to any file that is not checked out; this doesn't sound too bad at first, but think about how many times you just want to crack open a file and put a couple of print statements in it to figure out if you need to change it. This also inhibits refactoring.
  
• is slow to perform common operations (checkout, refresh) and fast to perform uncommon ones (baseline, graph history)
• has many separate user interfaces for no particular reason, as far as I can tell. There's no equivalent of WinCVS or TortoiseSVN. Note, I'd probably rather be using the command-line interface (cleartool), anyway, but I am having such a difficult time grasping it (see next point) that I'm afraid to try it. In particular, the UI presented by the IBM Rational Software Development Platform, which is based on Eclipse, is abysmal. I actually find the ClearCase plugin for NetBeans far more usable, which is pretty amazing considering that the Rational SDP is a product sold / bundled by IBM and the NetBeans plugin isn't.
  
• causes everyone around to disavow any knowledge of it -- maybe some people do know it and just don't want to share because they're busy, but I doubt it. Nobody seems to get ClearCase and all mumble about using something easier.
  

In the end, I think ClearCase is too sophisticated for its own good, even when using the simplified UCM model, especially for small teams. It's clear to me that I'm probably not going to get much better at ClearCase without some training by an experienced user. I've already got one of the best books available for ClearCase and it's not helping.

I think I might just set up a Subversion repository, do all my work there, and check it into ClearCase when I'm done. I'd probably have a net time savings after the first 3 days of use.

Essential Browser Plugins for Web Developers

I'm developing a web application that makes significant use of AJAX to improve usability. Inspection of the live DOM and JavaScript is the easiest way to debug the code. In Firefox, there is great plugin support for this:

• HTML Tidy - validates HTML against the referenced DocType; I treat this as sort of a "compile" check
  
• Web Developer - supports live DOM inspection, live CSS editing, resizing the window to particular resolutions, cookie and cache management, and much more
  
• Firebug - live inspection and debugging of JavaScript, CSS, and DOM
  

I also found a really nice plugin this week for Internet Explorer, the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. This plugin does most of what the Web Developer plugin for Firefox does, except for the live CSS editing.

Being able to "find element by click" makes working in both browsers much easier. I am still looking for a JavaScript inspector / debugger for IE. Unfortunately, the current code's HTML and JavaScript is tied to IE in certain places because I haven't had the chance to add id elements and such so I can't just do the debugging in Firefox. I will probably integrate MochiKit so I don't alert myself to death.

The Art of SQL - Book Review

The Art of SQL teaches the general skills and describes the subtlties necessary to use a relational database management system (RDBMS) properly. Stephane Faroult focuses on why and when the strategies he details are appropriate. This is not a tips 'n' tricks for [PostgreSQL / Oracle / MySQL] book.

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to anyone responsible for designing an application's data model or improving an existing one.

The Art of SQL is written in a very personal, humorous way and I could tell I was learning from Faroult's hard-earned lessons. I read most of this book while attending an "Art of Teradata" class / seminar taught by a top-shelf Teradata consultant. Both the Art of SQL and Teradata are strong proponents of properly normalized data models and I have to say I've drunk that Kool-Aid. That I've also fixed several de-normalization problems probably helps with that, too.

Remember...schemas are forever. This book can help you to avoid creating a mistake or help you get out of one.

New Job - Avnet

Oops, I've done it again.

I've accepted a position at Avnet and I'm really looking forward to it. I'll be the technical lead for a team building applications to support Avnet's supply chain. Since Avnet's business is distribution of electronics (like what Freescale, my soon-to-be-former employer, manufactures), my work will have a direct impact on the revenue-producing portion of Avnet's business.

This is my favorite place to be.

LEGO - Circle Circle Dot Dot

I ran across this on YouTube today. If you like LEGO, you gotta check it out:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-tkqpHnxTI

The song, 'Circle Circle Dot Dot' is from Jamie Kennedy's 'Blowin Up' album. I'm going to have to check that out...

If you've personally posted something on YouTube, please send me a link.

I Love Poppers - the T-Shirt

Our friends Allie and Jason gave me an custom made t-shirt that says:

I LOVE POPPERS

on the front above a Jalapeno.

I love this t-shirt.

The shirt has entered my favorite t-shirts rotation and will be making bi-weekly appearances at Costco and Target. See you there.

The t-shirt was made at uberprints.com.

'95 Eclipse GSX - For Sale

My 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX is for sale:

The car has a lot of performance parts installed and is in good shape, mechanically. Full details and more pictures are available. I am asking $6,250.

If you or anyone you know is interested, drop an e-mail to skuenzli "at" gmail "dot" com.