Nokia to Aquire Trolltech?

I think this is pretty big news (from the Trolltech Website)

There seems to be mixed feelings about it on the QT Mailing list I’m on, but mostly negative.

Read on for some posts and their letter:
Continue reading Nokia to Aquire Trolltech?…

Psssh Yeah Right

I read this post on slashdot the other day. He raises some interesting points, but I think he’s misguided:

Let me start by saying that I am a very strong Republican conservative, and I normally hate labor unions, especially since most of them don’t do much but collect money from workers and use it to buy politicians. That said, in this instance I absolutely think those workers should immediately unionize and walk off the job. IT workers are already treated as slaves just about everywhere, and it’s about time they got paid for their overtime AND STILL recieved a salary commensurate with the difficulty of their jobs and the level of their education.

Furthermore, this move by IBM is complete garbage. Google spends a heck of a lot more money on its employees than this, and it doesn’t have any trouble with the “competitive pressures” cited by IBM. The reason it doesn’t have any trouble is twofold:

1. By treating its employees fairly, it attracts much of the best IT talent around, and this talent in turn is very productive. Their employees probably produce more per hour than the employees most anywhere else through raw skill alone.
2. The really big reason Google doesn’t have these competitive pressures forcing them to pay their workers nothing is because Google has good management and actually produces worthwhile, marketable products. When is the last time IBM produced something good that people wanted to buy? PCs? Gone… IBM completely lost out in that market. Operating Systems? OS/2 is dead. Lotus Notes/other office software? Horribly ugly, clunky, and not even close to as good as Microsoft products. IDEs? They have some, but they are horribly overpriced things like Rational Apex (an ADA IDE) that cost 30,000 dollars a license and are vastly inferior to Microsoft’s Visual Studio. And while IBM helped birth Eclipse and still funds it to some degree, that is an OSS IDE, and a lot of it (plus a lot of the add-ons) were built by volunteers.
   Honestly, the only things they seem to produce anymore are a few supercomputers (and the market for those is clearly limited), some mainframes (again, limited and shrinking market), and some stupid “software development processes” like the Rational Unified Process (RUP). (News Flash for IBM: a process isn’t a product. I can go out and make my own process that suits my work (which is what most people do), or use one of many free and well known process like Agile or UP). IBM also produces a lot of marketing speak and vague references to “services” that they can offer to companies (not sure what those actually are or why I would want them), they produce a lot of commercials about servers spiraling out of control, and they spend a lot of time on clearly stupid strategies like building a corporate office in Second Life and having a director of Internet and Virtual Worlds.
   With all that sort of vaporware and garbage products, it’s no wonder that they are facing big competitive price pressures. They deserve the problems they are having. But the regular employees shouldn’t be the ones penalized. The problems (and pay cuts) should be directly placed in the laps of their management, especially their top executives. IBM has repeatedly had the chance to conquer the world, and they blow it on stupid ideas every time.

I think IBM’s participation in the Open Source market is commendable. They put an entire team into it, and lots of funding (in terms out man-hours). Plus it’s the base for lots of things, like Jazz, which is a really exciting product (having used it for a week or two so far). But more about Jazz later.

Oh Dear

There seems to be a problem with the new ZDLSharp. I wrote some of the code for ZDLSharp 3.0.5.3 on the train on my way to a friend’s place, I also had previously made a backup of all that information. Well it appears I deleted those files on arrival, and started work on 3.0.5.3 again thinking this was the files I had modified, but apparently I was wrong.

Some of the bugsfixes I made for 3.0.5.3 didn’t actually happen. I only fixed one bug, and that was for Mono users. Since the weekend is coming up, I really want to get a new version out ASAP. It has also come to my attention that the source for ZDLSharp hasn’t been released, so I want to put that up on sourceforge, and keep binary releases to my own servers. I think that works best.

Anyways, keep your eyes and ears peeled for new and exciting news!

Prepping for ZDLSharp 3.0.5.3

I’ve made great headway on a couple of the bugs. Unfortunately there’s one that will take some time, so now I’m faced with the decision to either fix it or leave it for another time. I really want to get this version out the door, as it’s taken a long time. Part of the changes I want to implement to fix it are slated for 3.0.6.0. I planning a better configuration backend and doing away with the old ReadINI support. Of course, since a substantial amount of the program is built on this old code, it will take quite a few hours of coding. The current bug is pretty isolated I think.

As for my plans in the wiki for 3.0.6.0, this is what I’m planning:

1. New Update System
• I’ve chosen to do a hybrid between self updating and leaving it alone. I don’t want people to have to open their browser every time just to update
2. Community Functionality
• This feature won’t be in 3.0.6.0 at all. Perhaps in subsequent versions, but it’s not in the pipeline yet.
3. Config File Trampling
• Currently with the readINI() functions, any unknown lines are completely removed. I’m going to change this, plus also keep track of what version wrote the last config file. I recommend that all ZDL ports use this functionality, and warn users if they’re using an old config file. If the user agree’s it’s cool, overwrite it if a better system isn’t implemented. If the user isn’t cool with it, read the config, but do not write it back at the end.

How Bad is Bad?

Here’s a post by Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. The article describes some of the adverse effects Roger’s traffic shaping has on other services.

Sun Buys MySQL

It was announced this morning that Sun has bought MySQL. i think that this is mostly a good thing, as Sun is a pretty big open source advocate. I’ve attached a copy of the article, so if you want to read more, you can click ‘read more’, otherwise you can visit the the real deal
Continue reading Sun Buys MySQL…

Funny DUI Video

In my apparently too free time, I find all kinds of funny videos. This one’s golden:

Best DUI Ever - Funny Very - The funniest bloopers are right here

flickr testr

Okay so I’m just testing out our new flickr plugin here… Picked up Q at the airport yesterday, here are some shots of our fine Ottawa airport…

Welcome to Wordpress 2.3.2

I just finished upgrading my wordpress. It went really smoothly. I was actually surprized, because usually php scripts aren’t so upgradeable. I’m not sure of the new features, but I do really want to change the blog header. I’ll see if I have anything.

Why the Mighty Ducks Really Won