BitLizard’s Blog

Well, the pain and suffering I went through to get myself down to the FOWA show in Miami was definitely worth it. I drove down to Miami after dinner on Monday night and stayed at the AWESOME DoubleTree Grand hotel that evening. (Thanks for the carboliscious cookie that was so not on my diet!) Up early the next morning, I scooted over to the Knight Auditorium which was a fabulous venue. The acoustics were so good in that hall that I swear I heard some guy’s muffled fart from clear across the room. (Chances are overwhelming that it was a guy – only a dozen females among the 800 or so there.) I’d love to go there sometime for a concert. Totally perfect venue.

But anyway, even though FOWA is short for “Future of Web Apps” (and although there was some mention of that here and there) this was a show about software development; how to do it better, how to get paid, what you are doing right, where you are going wrong, and just what the hell were you thinking???? This was just what I needed personally. Reminders to step back and rethink the process, measure and improve. Plus a good kick in the pants there at the end courtesy of Gary Vaynerchuk.

I really enjoyed Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky. Both were predictably great. This is the first time I’ve heard either of them speak, though I knew who Jason Fried was and I’ve been a customer of Joel Spolsky’s CityDesk and FogBugz for years. Both had great ideas for improving software development and, in fact, business processes in general for that matter. Say Joel, that “General Motors” style of organizing the developer space — that bears a striking resemblance to what I endure daily. Gotta make some changes there.

Jason, Joel and Gary were the highlights of the show for me. I enjoyed the Virgin guy’s “People are the new brand” idea. But I can’t glean anything actionable from it. (Except that I opened a FaceBook account for the first time today so maybe something stuck.)  A lot of people seemed to be very impressed with the Atlas demo by the guy from Cappuccino. To me this was a demo just like a lot I’ve seen in the past that appear to show something akin to drag and drop programming. These products demo nicely, but get them outside the confines of a demo and you start to see the drastic limitations. Then the shine comes off the apple so to speak. So color me skeptical — and I definitely do NOT think software development just changed very much. That comment by Ryan Carson was just a little over the top, in my view. But it was very good theater. And maybe I’m wrong about Atlas. Time will tell, I suppose.

I also enjoyed the demo of Ubiquity which is an wonderful FireFox plugin that definitely breaks new ground. I actually installed it a few months ago and had a play with it. It is definitely impressive. If you use FireFox you most certainly need to check this puppy out.

I wish I was better at networking and going up to strangers and introducing myself.  There was no shortage of interesting looking people to talk to. And after one of these shows I always feel a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t interact with the people more. Another one of those personal things to work on, I guess…

Programming and IT Cappuccino, CityDesk, FogBugz, Future of Web Apps, Gary Vaynerchuk, Joel Spolsky, Miami, open source, software development

Today I was looking around for a photo/image editor. My needs for image editing are fairly basic – touchup, adding text, re-scaling, image maps, etc. Taking my own advice I decided to see what open source offerings were out there. I came across the image editor Gimp. What a wondeful piece of technology this program is. If you are not a professional computer graphics artist, its hard to imagine how you could justify spending $700 for a copy of PhotoShop when GIMP is out there for free. GIMP has a tremendous feature set which includes layering and alpha channels. There are lots of plug-in transforms, filters and color tools that come with it. If that wasn’t enough there are additional tools for creating image maps for your web site pages and an animation tool for creating animated gif’s.

A great way to see what the program can do is to check out the tutorials on the product site. Or there’s some also some great stuff on the fan site gimp-tutorials.net.

So I saved myself and my company $700 today and got the job done in fine style. Can’t beat them apples!

Programming and IT graphics, open source

It amazes me that given the high quality of free software applications these days, that cash-pinched businesses still slavishly and unthinkingly expend large amounts of money on the next version of Windows,  or Microsoft Office, VMWare, etc. Well let me open your eyes, folks. In a lot of cases there are free versions of that functionality which is often better than the packaged software equivalent. And don’t give me that total-cost-of-ownership hoodoo! These applications are well designed, easy to learn and easy to use. Here in no particular order is my list of favorites:

1. Are you frustrated with how long feature-bloated Microsoft Word takes to even start executing? You are waiting and waiting for a host of features to load, most of which you will never in your lifetime ever use. The better choice is the free, leaner and meaner OpenOffice software. The newest version is fully compatible with all the Microsoft Office file formats — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. — and has all the bells and whistles you could want. Even though MS Office was provisioned on my computer at work I use OpenOffice exclusively for my everyday office document needs.

2. The best operating system for the casual home user is not Windows. My recent experience with Ubuntu Linux and Linpus on the Acer Aspire One netbook computer has convinced me that most non-technical users would be far better served by these great Linux bundles. Both distros include OpenOffice and the Evolution email client (similar in functionality to Outlook). The operating system loads quickly, maintains itself with automatic updates and is rock solid. And I don’t get many “Hey Dad!” requests for technical support, unlike the never ending cries from the Windows users.

3. With my day job all about writing Windows software, when I wanted to try out Linux to see what all the excitement was about I decided to go “virtual”. Virtual Machine technology is really quite old – we used it in the 70’s on IBM’s big iron – but has now become popular on the personal computer. Basically VM software allows you to create a virtual computer that runs in a window on your physical computer. So though my laptop runs Windows Vista, I created a virtual machine that boots Ubuntu. VM software can be a little expensive but I decided that I would try out the free VirtualBox software which is a project originated by Sun Microsystems. While it took me several hours of googling and fiddling, I managed to get a decent little virtual machine running Ubuntu on my laptop. Now, I wouldn’t say that a non-technical person could succeed in doing the same thing, but the fact that this can all be accomplished with free software is mind boggling. This is fabulous technology! Today I use my Ubuntu virtual machine to run a few network services that are consumed by the Windows side of my computer. It all works flawlessly.

4. I don’t really know whyI run WinAmp instead of Windows Media Player. But the telling fact is that whenever I receive a new computer, within 3 months I have downloaded and am running WinAmp. I think my usual motivation is to view some media in a format that WinAmp supports and WMP does not. But even if that was not the case, WinAmp is just a better user experience and I much prefer the design.

5. For web browsing and email, I like the offerings from Mozilla. Thunderbird (with the Sunbird add-on) let me retire Microsoft Outlook at last, while Firefox is a great alternative to Internet Explorer. Having said that, I find myself using Google’s Chrome browser most of the time now; reverting to Firefox only when Chrome cannot render a site properly. All of these wonderful programs are free. But Thunderbird remains a cornerstone application on my laptop.

6. And I would certainly be remiss if I didn’t mention the free software with which Iam creating this missive. The WordPress authoring software is a tremendous collection of free technologies for creating and publishing web sites. Even with my minimal php skills I was able to get this blog site up and running in just a few hours. And the depth of the support by the community of programmers for this platform is very impressive. This web site incorporates nearly a dozen pieces of contributed technologies in the form of plug-ins and widgets; all obtained free. It is a great credit to all those involved and I am sure its best days are yet to come.

7. Lastly, I love the functionality of desktop side bars. While Windows Vista and Google both have their good points, my favorite package for this technology is Yahoo! Widgets. It looks good and the functionality is a cut above, in my opinion.

Free software has really come of age. These packages are as good and often better than their non-free counterparts and deserve your consideration. Merry Christmas!!

Programming and IT Linpus, open source, OpenOffice, ubuntu, virtualbox, WordPress