Open Source Software Trail

Apparently Microsoft has been granted a patent for ‘Page Up’ and ‘Page Down’ keystrokes.  This prevents anybody else from using the same feature to scroll up and down a page length of their documents.

Interestingly enough it comes a day after I read about Apple receiving a patent on its dock concept, 9 years after it filed for it.  So in the meantime are the developers of the dock I have been using on my SuSE notebook for the last two years in violation of this  patent, and can they get sued?

I just saw in a post on the Register that Mozilla labs released Geode, a geolocation extension for firefox.  I had a bit mixed feelings immediately because, while I have previously mentioned that I know there is no privacy for all that use electronic means to communicate, I am at the same time a bit hesitant to really take the step of being the one actively giving out information that I would rather not.. in this case, my geographic location to all kinds of personalised service location technology.

However, out of sheer curiosity as to how the whole thing functions, I tried to download it but sadly I got a message that it doesnt work on my build of firefox. (3.0.3 on Ubuntu hardy).  Will wait a little while and try again.. if I still remember or have interest!

I first saw something about Cuil on a post on a friend’s facebook profile and I was wondering to myself how long this search engine had been running.  In any case I ignored it; but just today I opened up my feed reader and found an article talking about how Cuil is reliving the days when the internet bubble was booming!  So I started to read up more on it and I have to say so far it is appealing to me.. I even vanity cuil’ed myself. :)  There are two things that piqued my interest.

1.  The people working at Cuil…
More specifically, the President. Ms. Anna Patterson.. mother of four, PhD computer science graduate who programmed a search engine when she was having a particularly difficult pregnancy.  Fascinating when you think that this is the story behind some of the technology that we are using daily.

Besides her, there are a host of other people who have CVs all tied to heavy brands.

2. Their privacy policy.
When you get to the very bare home page of Cuil, there are seven elements.  Logo, search button, search text box, number of indexed pages, a link to information about the company, copyright information and a link to information about their privacy policy.  Seems that this is their edge.  They claim not to store logs of searches done and/or information from cookies.  Considering that google is EVERYWHERE today, and storing logs about searches as well as cookies (apparently the google cookie was previously set to expire in 2038), this sounds like a good idea for people who are concerned about how the trail of information that they leave behind gets used.  “Maybe I want to stand for president one day and Google logs shall show that I was doing searches on how to make weapons of mass destruction!” (actually this very sentence shall probably get indexed and have a few hits on Google!)

On my side I get more and more cynical everyday about how much privacy we really have.  I hear from people who do not want to put their profiles online, share pictures, and not to have their name appear on the internet. To me it is all about perceived privacy.  We carry around mobile phones and send SMS everyday and search on Google.   Basically we leave a trail everywhere regardless.  So unless you are going to completely shun the “digital world” then it seems pointless to be overly concerned about privacy.

In the final analysis, I would agree with the quote from Danny Sullivan that if the search engine turns up relevant results they shall become popular.  Maybe the management at Cuil needs to sponsor Google anonymous meetings as well.. get people to kick the habit!

The problem with writing is that you cannot express feelings on paper, or computer in this case; one cannot be too sure whether I am thrilled or just being sarcastic in the title of this post. To be honest, neither is the case… well I am just a little bit more leaning on the sarcastic side. So the daily newspaper the monitor reported that Microsoft is finally going to start distributing in East Africa through a company Comtel Integrators. Actually the article says that the two have signed a deal that shall enable Comtel Integrators to “to vend its (Microsoft) products exclusively in the East and Southern African region”. Some of the products that Comtel shall be providing - corporate email, data storage, multimedia content, web conferencing, office servers and several others.

As I was reading this article a couple of things made me react internally. First, a Mr Wayne Robinson who is mentioned as the Director of Business Development apparently said that “…the development will now make it possible for local companies, NGOs and other entities to buy and use Microsoft’s software products legally…”. I was thinking to myself, “I would like to see how they pull off THAT one!” Consider that recently, Microsoft had to extend support for Windows XP apparently because of the poor reception of Windows Vista by consumers for a number of reasons, among which is the fact that it is a hardware hog. Now many of the SMEs, and in this case I speak for the few SMEs that I know in Uganda, might own a few computers but they are probably not able to comfortably run Windows Vista. And this hardware hogging issue seems to be a global problem not just for countries where people have less access to computers. Even if we were to assume that the SMEs shall purchase Windows XP, I do not see aUgandan business man spending over $150 on the operating system alone and we have not even started considering other applications that he might have to pay for, when he can get it “for free” from a friend on the street.

The second thing that grabbed my attention in this article was another statement by Mr. Robinson “Today in East and Central Africa we believe we have a calling to impact the population through the way we know best—that is to use computer technology to better the lives of people”. I shall not discuss this too much because it can easily grow into a very philosophical debate, however, I always wonder about these statements about how the computer shall magically better the lives of people some of whom have never seen anything more than a radio!

By the way I had never heard of Comtel Integrators before and so I decided to browse around looking for information about them and came across the client portfolio of Mountbatten Ltd who had Comtel as one of their clients. According to the portfolio,

“..Mountbatten Ltd. implemented a full Joomla! installation including VirtueMart, an opensource e-commerce solution. Now ComTel is selling their catalogue through the web, thereby lowering their costs of sales…. On top of that, ComTel sales and support staff is using SugarCRM to manage their daily work.”

This was a pleasant surprise and then I read the “fine print”.. “Due to a change in Comtel’s strategy from a hardware vendor to a service provider, the Comtel website has been redesigned.” How I wish they had taken on the open source strategy to their product lines!

I recently made an installation of VMware workstation on ubuntu and I do not use it very regularly but I noticed that almost everytime I get around to using it, the software just does not start.  I attempt to launch the application and it shows up in the task bar for a few seconds and then disappears.  The times it has happened I have run the vmware-config.pl utility and that seems to fix everything.. so I started wondering what that is all about and after some digging I came across reasons to reconfigure vmware.  One of them says if you upgrade the host operating system kernel then you are likely to require a restart.  I have been downloading some updates for Ubuntu but none of them were to the kernel as far as I can tell.  Strange….

I found a nice tool.. camstudio that is able to take recordings of activity on a computer screen and save them as videos.  It seems a useful tool for making video demonstrations of your work.. better still for making video tutorials of how to use some software.

“Necessity is the mother of invention”, the saying goes but as far as experiments with software I would rewrite this and say “necessity is the mother of installation”… (I know… real lousy joke.. ) Anyway I had heard about (and even downloaded a while back) VMware software to try running multiple OS’s on my computer but not until this very moment did I put in time to get it running. This is the scenario in brief. I have a machine running Ubuntu and I am working with a group where once in a while I need to edit/exchange some documents in MS office format. I have (barely) tried running wine but I do not really like the way it looks so I thought it was time to experiment with VMware. In otherwords, I am using a bulldozer to get rid of an anthill… looking at it another way, I also get the chance to explore testing software on multiple operating systems, all hosted on this one PC.

Basically I needed to have an installation of VMware in which I could run a windows XP OS as a guest and be able to share files between the windows guest OS and the host Ubuntu OS. For this task I figured I need only the VMware player that is available free. This player is able to run existing virtual machine (VM) configurations but does not allow creation of new ones. I was able to create and download a VM configuration using a VM creator at http://www.easyvmx.com. I found another website “how to create a windows XP virtual machine” which was also very handy for supplying the needed files and base instructions. So I shall not go into rewriting what I found there.

1. Installing the VMware player: The .tar.gz supplied by VMware Inc is pretty straight forward. It requires unzipping and uncompressing and then running the file vmware-install.pl. A lot of the options are suggested by default and most of them I only had to agree with.

2: Installing the guest OS: Using the files and instructions from “how to create a windows XP virtual machine”, I managed to get the windows XP guest OS running without much trouble.

3. Defining shared folders: I run into a wall when it came to creating shared folders. The instructions say that you should start VMware player and choose from the menu Player > Shared Folders. However, when I did this I found no shared folders defined and no possibility to define them from within the player. NOTE: This was because I had used a VM configuration from the “how to create..” website. If you create your vmx file from easyvmx.com, you are able to specify whether you want your virtual machine to have shared folders. I created a sample virtual machine from the easyvmx.com and copied out the section with the information about shared folders.

sharedFolder.option = “alwaysEnabled”
sharedFolder0.present = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.enabled = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.readAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.writeAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.hostPath = “/path/to/shared/folder”
sharedFolder0.guestName = “name-of-shared-folder”
sharedFolder0.expiration = “never”

This seemed to work. When I tried the Player > Shared Folders menu, I found the shared folder defined.

The last part to defining the shared folders is to locate them within your windows guest OS and map the shared folder as a network drive. I found that the shared folder was under \\.host\Shared Folders\name-of-shared-folder. Note that the only thing that changes in this address is the part “name-of-shared-folder” The rest stays exactly the same.

There is, however, one thing I am not 100% sure of… is whether you shall be able to see the shared folders with only the VMWare player installation. I did not have a chance to test this because initially I had no idea that the address for accessing the shared folders was literally the one mentioned previously, i.e. \\.host\Shared Folders\name-of-shared-folder; plus somewhere along the way I found a recommendation to install VMWare workstation so as to enable sharing of folders. I installed the workstation (trial version), in the same way as VMware player. After this I installed VMware tools using the menu VM > Install VMWare Tools; with that I was able to easily find the shared folder as described above.

So now I am able to use my windows guest OS and can edit files that are resident on the host OS.

While browsing through some files on my computer to clear them up and backup the essentials, I came across this very interesting screenshot that I was supposed to blog about. It concerns the Bank of Uganda website that was launched some months ago. I was really baffled at the cost… $50,000 but apparently when you are doing projects with organisations this size….

I was immediately curious to see what updates had been made to the website and so I tried the URL and this is what came up…..

Well at least I noticed that they were using an open source CMS, or at least that is what I assumed from the URL… I am not sure whether it is this opencms or that is just the name they use.

I just received an email from the Ugandan linux mailing list that linux certification is available in East Africa through the East African Centre for Open Source Software. It is a positive sign of the progress that is being made as far as spreading OSS use in East Africa. Also it is quite siginificant in terms of employees becoming aware of open source software as an alternative option for them to choose. Considering that many employees need to see some sort of documentation that indicates that the knowledge you claim to have has been certified by an authority, this shall be a real bonus for people who specialise their skills in OSS applications.

In my office room that I share with a couple of other guys, we have a board on which buzz words are posted. When I take a look at the board right now I see: “wire protocol”, “class library” and “service oriented architecture” There is also a section on yesterday’s buzzwords, i.e, buzzwords that are going out of fashion. And when I look at this part, I see “ruby on rails” (RoR) as one of them. How did it get there? I suggested it. Well I kind of mentioned something about a story I read and my office mate figured I was suggesting it should go there.

The whole story started when I mentioned that I was reading another story on slashdot about a guy, Derek Sivers, who decided to switch back to PHP from RoR after two years of trying to develop an application for his CD sales website. (The website itself has a pretty nice concept by the way). But back to the point, this guy was trying to use RoR to build the website and apparently it was not working out for him because the site’s backend design was initially not conceived for implementation in RoR. After two years he decided to switch back and apparently the entire experience was not totally useless because he learnt a lot of tricks that he reapplied to his rewrite.

I thought I would post this because by some interesting coincidence (or not) the very next day I read an announcement in a newsletter from sitepoint.com that they were giving away the complete PDF of the book on building web applications using RoR… for free! Usually they have sample chapters of the books they sell so that you can whet your appetite and decide whether you want to buy it. Perhaps the article struck some fear in the RoR people? Just specualation on my part but I thought it was an interesting coincidence all the same. We all know there is no such thing as free… as in free beer!