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Peter Marklund's Home |
Quote of the Day
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Quote of the Day
"Peter and Lars, despite being professional programmers, are not nerds, and they refuse even to feel bad about not being nerds"
Joel, it's seriuosly funny to have you at work, despite you being a nerd...:-)
Salsa Congresses in Spring 2004
The salsa weekends that are being organized all over Europe are just so much fun! I attended the ones in Helsinborg and Stockholm this year and now I'm hooked :-) Here are all the exciting congresses that I would like to attend alone in the first half of next year...
- 20 - 22 February, Salsa Kongress in Zurich / Schweiz
- 1 - 4 April, Salsa Kongress in Regensburg/ Germany
- 7-9 May Helsingborg
- 4 - 6 June Salsa Kongress in Skien / Norway
- 16-18 July, Hamburg
I'm hoping to be able to find more people interested in going to these congresses to travel with, so if you're interested - let me know!
Christmas is Weird
Exploring A Quecha Indian Community in Peru
My amazing friend Alice, always brimming with adventure and exciting projects, is residing in New York these days, and she is organizing an exhibition at the The Nour Foundation about her non-profit work in Peru. I was really impressed and inspired to read about her accomplishments:
"In collaboration with the local municipality and with a budget of only $1,500, Olivia Fox Cabane successfully directed and financed a project to rebuild every street in the village and to revitalize the community."
Curious about the Nour Foundation I browsed their website a little, and I found their objective to be quite beautiful. It really struck a chord with me.
I wish I could be in New York for the exhibition...
It had to come up of the water
One Stop Guide to Copenhagen Social Salsa Dancing
I met some swedes at salsa congresses in Sweden who were curious about the salsa scene in Copenhagen so I thought I'd compile a little guide here. The best salsa portal for Denmark that know of is Hifi Salsa that among much other info has a listing of salsa clubs in Copenhagen. Here are the alternatives that I am familiar with, organized by week day:
- Monday - Cafe Kellerdirk. Great atmosphere, music, and crowd.
- Wednesday - SalsaVida used to have dancing at Cavi club but they had to shut down, probably because they couldn't attract enough people.
- Thursday, Friday, and Saturday - Latin Quarter or Sabor Latino. Sabor Latino has a more cuban flavor, a good location right next to the city hall, and attracts a lot of tourists and locals who have never tried salsa before. I prefer Latin Quarter for the better music and more salsa savvy crowd. Latin Quarter is newly renovated and just opened with an interesting concept of playing hip-hop funk etc. for a small dance floor and the bar downstairs and hard core salsa for the big dance floor upstairs.
- Sunday - Park Cafe. Good atmosphere, interiors, crowd, and music.
An upcoming salsa event in Copenhagen that I recommend is the workshops with Leon Rose on the 21-22 of November, organized by Latin Quarter
To stay updated about salsa events in southern Sweden and Copenhagen, check out the SalsaManiac mailing list.
New Photos from Lund and Helsingborg
Quote of the day
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definetely overpaid for my carpet.
- Woody Allen
Governments like Open Source
Joel Spolsky on Internationalized Software Development
Quote of the day
Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask youself what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
~Howard Thurman
Spelling Unimportant?
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteetr by isltef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Extreme Programming to the Rescue
The software development process is profoundly screwed up. According to the Standish Group, which conducts an annual industry-wide survey, 15 percent of all information technology projects get canceled outright, costing the sector $38 billion each year, and companies spend $17 billion annually on cost overruns. Those products that are finally released contain just 52 percent of the features customers asked for. Throughout the industry, projects are chronically late - only 18 percent hit deadline - and consistently, maddeningly flawed.
My personal experiences with XP (Extreme Programming) are very positive, especially because of pair programming and the communicative and social emphasis of the approach.
Economic Freedom and Prosperity
I read in the editorial of Svenska Dagbladet about this years Economic Freedom of the World Report. The report creates an index for the level of economic freedom of most countries and correlates this index with the GDP. It turns out that the most free economies - USA, Hongkong, New Zealand, Great Britain - are also among the richest. Among the least free economies we find poor countries such as Burma, Kongo, and Zimbabwe.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, and according to Svenska Dagbladet, the freedom index of Sweden has been declining. The size of the public sector, tax levels and bureaucracy are given the blame for this. To end on a positive note though, it turns out that the average economic freedom index of all countries has risen significantly since both the 1970s and the mid 1990s.
Wests Trade Barriers Keep Hurting Third World
The International Herald Tribune (New York Times) writes:
If it weren't killing them, people in Burkina Faso might get a good laugh at America's unprofitable cotton-growing obsession. Burkinabe, after all, are known for their sense of humor. And what could be more absurd than the sight of the world's richest nation - a fiery preacher of free-trade and free-market values at that - spending $3 billion or $4 billion a year in taxpayer money to grow cotton worth less than that and selling its mounting surpluses at an ever greater loss?
Europe has similar, and probably more extensive, barriers to agricultural trade that are just as harmful and economically non-sensical as those of the US. I never understood the consistency in making farmers exempt from competition when none of our other industries enjoy this privilege.
Above all, I would have thought that the obvious fact that those barriers are a significant impediment to third world development would make not only trade friendly liberals, but also leftists and greens, realize how evil they are.
Software Patents in Europe
Linus on Coding Conventions
I was browsing Jeff Davis's homepage and came across Linus Torvald's coding conventions. I particularly like how Linus stresses the importance of keeping functions short and cohesive. I'll try to keep the following rule in mind when writing my own code:
Another measure of the function is the number of local variables. They shouldn't exceed 5-10, or you're doing something wrong. Re-think the function, and split it into smaller pieces. A human brain can generally easily keep track of about seven different things, anything more and it gets confused. You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did two weeks from now.
Why Headhunters Like Me
Sometimes I think I should change career path slightly... In the last two weeks I've been contacted twice via phone and email by different headhunters searching urgently for SAP ABAP programmers. In an attempt to explain those flattering and unexpected invitations I noticed that if you google for "ABAP programmer copenhagen" or "ABAP programmer stockholm" my CV will show up on the first result page.
Of course, the headhunters were in quite a hurry to contact me since if they would have read my CV carefully they would have seen that my SAP experience is limited to less than half a years time directly following my university graduation...
Interesting Predictions by O'Reilly
I'm not Tempted
""Terminator 3" is essentially a B movie, content to be loud, dumb and obvious, and to leave the Great Ideas to bona fide public intellectuals like Keanu Reeves and the Hulk. Mr. Schwarzenegger, whose main contribution to American culture has been inspiring wicked parodies on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons," acts (if you can call it that) with his usual leaden whimsy, manifesting the gift for uttering hard-to-forget, meaningless catchphrases that is most likely the wellspring of his blossoming reported desire to seek elective office in California. "
But then again, I guess that paragraph could apply to any of the Terminator movies, and I liked the first two, so...
Cartoon Day Continues
The IT BusinessLife as a Laid off IT Guy
Parody on Mac Gaming
Interesting Photos from Spain
An Eventful Weekend
Collaboraid - the company I work for - was elected startup of the year 2003 at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen. Naturally I'm quite proud about the award and especially happy for Lars who founded the company and got it to where it is today through a lot of hard labor and talent.
To top the award off, this saturday Lars got married, and the wedding was absolutely beatiful! A lot of photos were taken and I'm sure many of them will be available online as soon as Lars gets back from his honeymoon (taking place in Sweden, where else?). Today a friend sent me this cynical remark about honeymoons:
The honeymoon is over when the husband calls home to say he'll be late for dinner and the answering machine says it is in the microwave.
InternetWorld lists the best Swedish Sites
Greenpeace.org wins Webby
I wish
The Dullest Blog in the World
Powerpoint Considered Harmful
A modest step back from the PowerPoint culture is to limit one's PowerPoint slides to charts and photos. If you can't resist some text, limit yourself to an opening outline slide dense with structure and a closing summary to remind everyone of what they heard.
Poem by Hillel
Richard Stallman on the first software-sharing community at MIT and the founding of the GNU project:
Later I heard these words, attributed to Hillel (1):
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?
The decision to start the GNU project was based on a similar spirit.
To me, the poem signifies self-esteem, unselfishness, and a call for action.
Bill Gates says...
"Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!"
-- Bill Gates, 1981
"Windows 95 needs at least 8 MB RAM."
-- Bill Gates, 1996
"Nobody will ever need Windows 95."
-- logical conclusion
Stockholm Growth Hampered by Politics
In Dagens Nyheter I read yesterday how last year, the number of people moving out of Stockholm exceeded the number of people moving in. This made for the lowest population increase since 1988.
Magnus Henreksson at the Stockholm Business School points out how the salaries in the Stockholm region have not been keeping up with the cost of living so that the prospect of moving out is starting to offer compelling economical advantages. Of course, the unions are preaching "Lika lön för lika arbete" so it may not be considered fair to pay a nurse in Stockholm considerably higher salary than a colleague somewhere else (the example in the article being Bollnäs).
There is a redistribution of income from regions with high levels of occupation to regions with low levels, a political program known as "regionalpolitiken". According to a report from Handelskammaren in Stockholm 40% of the direct tax income of the swedish state is from Stockholm whereas the share of the income generated there is only 31%. Stockholm gets 17% of the road budget eventhough 30% of the traffic is there. It gets 10% of the railroad budget but has 20% of the population and 70% of public transport traveling. The income from the housing or property tax (fastighetsskatten) in the Stockholm area has gone up by 10 billion (yearly?) between 1995 and 2000.
There is a project called Botniabanan that aims to build a new railroad track along the coast in the north of Sweden. Magnus Henreksson reminds us that this is part of Regionalpolitiken and that it seems to make little economical sense. He says:
"Det skulle vara billigare för staten att istället betala taxi för alla som ska resa den sträckan. Samtidigt finns inga pengar för en utbyggd tågtrafik i Stockholm, där en sådan investering verkligen skulle löna sig"
In Sweden politicians have regulated the apartment rental market so that for a long time it has in practice been impossible to legally rent an apartment in Stockholm. Of course, people are acutely aware of this problem, after all, housing is almost as important to people as food on the table. Isn't it surprising then that the pressure for change appears to be so low? What percentage of people actually realize that the problem is politically created and that a known solution exists? I can think of no more deterring example of the damage caused by making prices (in this case rents) exempt from supply and demand than the apartment disaster in Stockholm.
While the population of Stockholm has been growing rapidly over the last years the building of new apartments and houses has been disproportionately low. This means that in a situation of housing shortage, demand has continued to grow much faster than supply. How can this happen? Why won't supply and demand meet? Is it because building is too expensive (high taxes and low competition), or because politicians restrict the setting up of new houses in central Stockholm, or is it because building rental apartments is not economically feasible? Probably a combination of all of those and a host of other reasons that haven't occured to me yet. My point, once again, is that the problem is political.
Good Advice
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
More Wisdom
If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.
-- Yugoslav Proverb
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, October 26, 1939
Albert says...
You must give some time to your fellow men. Even if it's a little thing, do something for others - something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.
-- Albert Schweitzer
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
-- Albert Einstein, (attributed)
Temper and Endurance
If you go in for argument, take care of your temper. Your logic, if you have any, will take care of itself.
-- Joseph Farrell
Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Rebooting Webservers
The Strengths of the Open Source Model and the Challenges Ahead
In Open Source: Hype and Reality, Steve Crossan at Runtime Collective discusses the benefits of open source and some of the challenges that lie ahead.
I find the problem of combining upgradability with customizability as well as allowing for custom code to contribute back to the toolkit especially interesting.
Digging up Reliable Information
The Berkeley Library has a page devoted to the invisible web. The invisible web is all the information retriavable through databases on the web that is not covered by search engines such as Google.
There is also a useful set of documents outlining a structured approach to web searching.
Quality Metrics for Search Engines
Searchenginewatch is In Search Of The Relevancy Figure for web search engines. As suggested by their article no quality or relevancy metrics exists for search engines so far. Instead relevance of search results is judged by anecdotes or at best by most peoples subjective experience of it.
The public and media give attention primarily to the number of documents that search engines index. Inktomi (MSN) and Google are currently at about 3 billion, and Inktomi claims that their index is updated at least once every two weeks.
However, consider that just as important as the size of the document base is the relevancy of the documents actually returned during a search. Relevance should be measured relative to the goal of the person performing the search, i.e. how useful are those documents? Note that it is often dificult to know what that goal is, i.e. someone using the words "dvd player" might be looking to buy a dvd player or to learn more about dvd players.
Some of the ad hoc relevancy tests mentioned are searching for a person or company name and checking for the homepage of that person or company. Searchenginewatch performed a relevancy test where they selected a number of high quality sites in different areas and then performed various searches and checked whether those sites were easily found.
The argument here is that the industry needs accepted standards for performing relevancy tests. Also, the whole premise of SearchEngineWatch.com is that we need to monitor the behaviour of search engines and make sure that they behave. This may make sense given the importance and power of search engines today. Google sometimes chooses not to list certain sites, and as they say, if you don't show up on Google, you don't exist.
The Hours
I recently enjoyed the magnificent movie the Hours starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne More, Meryl Streep, and Ed Harris. In fact, I've already seen the movie twice in two different movie theatres... I think it's the best movie I've ever seen.
The Movie Review Query Database delivers an amazing number of quality reviews for the movie. Below are some review highlights.
Stephen Holden of the New York Times writes:
"Some of the movie's most wrenching moments show Leonard Woolf (Stephen Dillane) frantically reaching out to his troubled wife and being rebuffed. It's not that the Woolfs don't love each other, but the agony Virginia is enduring can't be touched by love or reason. These moments bring home the film's deepest and most intimidating insight about the essential aloneness of the individual and its feminist corollary: that appearances to the contrary, women in their deepest selves do not and should not define themselves in terms of men."
Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com sums up the movie nicely in this paragraph:
"Comparing a movie to a musical composition is one of those commonplaces of upper-middle film criticism that's almost never true. "The Hours" is the exception that proves the rule. Director Stephen Daldry (of "Billy Elliot") and screenwriter David Hare (an esteemed English playwright) have done what seemed impossible, rendering Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a meditative exercise in which not much happens, into a meticulously constructed and richly rewarding film that dissolves the boundaries of time and narrative. Cunningham's book and Daldry's film are musical in the sense that each is essentially an exercise in counterpoint, a theme and variations based on Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway," which attempts to distill a woman's entire life into the events of a single day."
Top 100 Websites
Tax Systems are too Complex
It's April, spring has come to Copenhagen, and to those of us who worked in Sweden last year the privilege has also come to declare our incomes to the swedish tax authorities.
A handful of colorful forms and over sixty pages of instructions have been sent to me. You can really tell that a tremendeous effort has gone into producing these forms and making them so pedagogical that any citizen can fill them in. Still I find myself turning to friends and family in Sweden for advice on how to submit these damn things.
I am one of those people who really isn't all that amused by the idea of reading up on the intricacies of the tax system. I once heard a friend boasting about his ability to do the tax declarations and how he was doing them for his friends and family. It almost seemed like a sport to him and like he was contemplating it as a business.
I once told an austrian friend about the swedish tax system with its yearly income declaration and she gave me a surprised look. It turns out that in many other countries (from my own experience this applies to Austria, Germany, Denmark, and the US) you are informed by the authorities yearly about the taxes deducted and you are free (but not obliged) to make any corrections or objections. This means that by default, and for most people, no action is required.
How much time is invested each year in maintaining and understanding the tax system? The administrative aparatus is naturally enormous, but it's not just that, it's also all the time spent by citizens trying to understand the system. Citizens and companies put significant energy into figuring out how to minimize their taxes.
So what is the value of this tax complexity, surely it must exist for a good reason? I'm not in a position to confidently answer that question. The primary reason I suppose is to collect taxes in a fashion that is deemed fair and in line with the political agenda.
Still I can't help but wonder if we wouldn't all be better off if the tax system was kept really simple. Let's say we for example had a flat salary tax of 40%, and a tax for stock trading of 20%. A simple system like this would save the society billions each year, money that could be funneled into areas adding more value such as education and health care. In addition citizens and companies would better be able to predict and understand which taxes they are paying.
Interview with MySQL CEO
InfoWorld is featuring an interview with MySQL CEO Marten Mickos.
MySQL is by far the most popular open source database and it is distributed by the MySQL company in Sweden. The database software has a so called dual licence which means that if you modify the software you must either pay the 550 Euro licence fee or share your modifications with the rest of the world (presumably you can also do both). Not surprisingly, only a small fraction of all MySQL installations (4000 out of an estimated 4,000,000) are contributing the licence fee to the MySQL company.
Last year when developing web applications on top of MySQL and JBoss for Nordic Wave in Stockholm I was very frustrated by MySQL not having referential constraints and soon convinced my colleagues to shift to the PostgreSQL database. Rumors have it that the MySQL database is ACID compliant these days. I recently talked to the OpenACS project leader Don Baccus about why we don't use MySQL, and as the interview with Marten Mickos confirms, MySQL is still lacking fundamental database features such as views, triggers, and stored procedures. Allegedly, if all goes well, MySQL will have these features in production in version 5 sometime next year.
Mr Mickos doesn't forget to mention that he is from the same community in Finland as Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux). He says that the tradition of community and openness in Scandinavia provides fertile ground for open source. This fertile ground however didn't keep the authors of the Statskontoret Open Source Report from calling Sweden "Microsoft Country" and point out Germany as a role model in terms of open source adoption in the public sector. Let's hope that Marten is right though and that the nordic countries are waking up now and will be catching up. The media coverage and interest in open source that I have noticed over the last year suggests that this is actually the case.
What is a Biotech Company?
A pharma company without sales - according to John Wilkerson of Galen Associates, a health-care investment company in New York.
About a month ago the Economist featured a survey on Biotechnology. As any Economist survey it was quite well written and interesting. The articles covered the investment drain of the industry, controversial concepts such as cloning (which hasn't shown too promising signs yet), improvements to medicine and agriculture, the danger of biotech weapons and much more.
Also featured was a Biotech Industry "Cluster Analysis". It identified San Diego as an up-and-coming hot-spot (promoted as Biotech Beach), alongside concentrations in the San Francisco Bay area, Boston, Cambridge UK, and, as I was very proud to note, Uppsala in Sweden...
Responsibility
The price of greatness is responsibility.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
A fantastic Conference and Social
We had a fantastic .LRN seminar and OpenACS social at Collaboraid last week. Quite a lot of great photos were taken. I particularly like the photos that Jarkko took.
Open Source Web Publishing
And the nominees are...
Interact
To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
-- Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Todays Quotes
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.
-- Erich Fromm
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
-- Michael J. Fox, quoted by Lorne A. Adrain in 'The Most Important Thing I Know'
Nerd Humor
Happy Birthday Lars!
I dag er det Lars's fødelsedag Hurra, hurra, hurra! Han sikkert sig en gave får, som han ønsket sig i år, og dejlig chokolade med kager til. Hvor smiler han, hvor er han glad, hurra, hurra, hurra! men denne dag er også rar, for hjemme venter mor og far med dejlig chokolade og kager til. Og når han hjem fra skærmen går, hurra, hurra, hurra! så skall han hjem og holde fest, og hvem, der kommer med som gæst, får dejlig chokolade og kager til, Til slut vi råber højt i kor: Hurra, hurra, hurra! Gid Lars længe leve må og sine ønsker opfyldt få med dejlig chokolade og kager til.
A Day and Night in Malmö
I made a nice little excursion to Malmö this weekend and took a few photos.
When I arrived in Malmö I was greeted by the anti war demonstrations at Stora Torget. Undeterred by the loud demonstrators, I soon found my way to Lilla Torget where I ended up doing way too much shopping at the Folk å Rock CD store.
I was looking for a place where I could pratice my salsa in the evening but neither the Petri Bar nor the Deep bar would be playing any latin rhythms that particular saturday. To perfectly be able to monitor the salsa scene I am now signed up to the Malmö/Lund/Helsingborg salsa list.
As a reward for having walked a fair bit up Amiralsgatan (looking for the closed salsa club) I had a cup of tea at the Cafe CD and LP which has very nice interior and a cosy atmosphere.
I was recommended by my friend Mats to go to the Slagthuset Nattklubb that opens at midnight. I tried hanging out at a few bars/cafes around Lilla Torget such as Victor's, Gökboet, and Mello Yello and they were all very nice, but there was just too much time to kill between 7 pm and midnight.
Luckily I ran across Spegeln/Cinemateket (Triangelfilm), a large cinema right on Stora Torget, with a good repertoire of international/alternative movies. It seemed the cinema is underappreciated by Malmö residents as it was almost empty on a saturday. I decided to watch Punch Drunk Love by Paul Thomas Anderssen (Magnolia) starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. This is by far the best Adam Sandler movie that I have seen, however, I know that is not saying much :-) The movie had good acting though, a lot of funny moments, plenty of suspense and unpredictability, and was even quite touching. I recommended it.
After the movie I walked down to the harbor just to confirm that Slagthuset was indeed very closed and would not open until midnight. I found my way back through the cold to Victor's where I hooked up with the two nice girls Tilde and Matilde. The house/hip-hop music at Victor's was quite good but we decided to move on to a place where we could dance. After a brief dismissive look at Harry's we spent what seemed like a very long time in the line to the Etaget club. Etaget is quite a big place that alternates techno/disco and hip-hop on the main floor and plays the golden oldies on the second one. It also has a lounging area on the uppermost Etage.
At 3:04 am I got on the bus back to Copenhagen very glad that I had finally given Malmö a thorough visit and knowing that it wouldn't be the last.
Quote of the Day
If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right.
-- Mary Kay Ash
Kids views on Marriage
HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHOM TO MARRY? You got to find somebody who likes the same stuff. Like, if you like sports, she should like it that you like sports, and she should keep the chips and dip coming. * Alan, age 10 No person really decides before they grow up who they're going to marry. God decides it all way before, and you get to find out later who you're stuck with. * Kirsten, age 10 HOW CAN A STRANGER TELL IF TWO PEOPLE ARE MARRIED? You might have to guess, based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids. * Derrick, age 8 HOW WOULD THE WORLD BE DIFFERENT IF PEOPLE DIDN'T GET MARRIED? There sure would be a lot of kids to explain, wouldn't there? *Kelvin, age 8 HOW WOULD YOU MAKE A MARRIAGE WORK? Tell your wife that she looks pretty, even if she looks like a truck. *Ricky, age 10
A new boat - a dream come true
Congratulations to my dad who has just bought this nice looking day cruiser!
I have been suggesting to my dad for as long as I can remember that he should get a new boat. When I was little we had a big sailing boat and some of the best memories from my childhood are from sailing on that boat.
Coming home to Umea will be extra exciting this summer! I can't wait!
Life is Easy
Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work.
-- H. L. Hunt
Why Nerds are Unpopular
New Photos from Frankfurt and Copenhagen
Back on the Edge of OpenACS Development
Yesterday I did another update of the software that is running my homepage - OpenACS. Things went surprisingly well and I experienced only minor glitches. There are a number of advantages to keeping my homepage running on the latest source code (cvs head):
- I help monitor the upgradability of OpenACS.
- I can do some testing of newly developed features
- Fixes and enhancements that I make on my site can be directly contributed to the OpenACS project to benefit the rest of the community
I think it is unfortunate that so many OpenACS sites diverge (fork) from the development of new OpenACS versions. We need to be very serious about upgradability going forward to give people enough confidence to upgrade. I am aware that with highly customized sites upgrading is a challenge. However, if upgrading is a prioritized goal from the beginning you will attempt to keep customizations very localized so that they can be merged with new OpenACS versions. You will also monitor OpenACS development and try to align it with the interests of your own site. This will not only benefit your particular site but the whole OpenACS project as its direction will better reflect real needs. Avoiding forking is key to getting more involvement and momentum in the OpenACS community.
A great Keyboard
I've just gotten a new keyboard at work (the Kinesis Essential Keyboard) and like it a lot. Although I'm still very slow at typing with it I am already convinced that it will make my programming fingers last longer (no more Emacs little finger problems...). The keys are much closer together than on a normal keyboard so you don't have to stretch as much. Also, the keyboard makes you use your strongest fingers - the thumbs - for frequently used keys such as space and enter. Take a look at the keyboard here.
Many thanks to Lars for buying me the keyboard. Now I can pretend to be a really hard-core programmer just like him... :-)
A nice Groupware Product from Suse
Homepage Server Upgrade Completed
After much blood sweat and tears I have now upgraded this server to run on the latest and greatest version of the OpenACS platform. I have also installed dotLRN just in case I would like to host some group collaboration here.
The old version of the server is still running here. I'll probably take it down in a couple of weeks.
The User is Your Best Friend
How Anyone can Fail to like Apple is Beyond Me
Open Source is Disruptive
"The task of the software industry is to create the best business solutions. The advent of open source means that the cost of some of the components has dropped, while the control over them increases for the solutions integrator and the IT department. From a market perspective, the major difference is that the point of greatest profit shifts from the software provider to the service provider."
