I have written a small lightweight pure TCL web server called Dandelion — because it is small and light, like Dandelion seeds, and I am no good at thinking up names (its a better name than GIMP though, and that has been pretty succesful!).
More details on the Dandelion server download page.
A discussion about why Linux has been so slow to take off made be realise that, essentially, Windows is like cola, Linux is like fruit juice. Its marketing that matters. Continue reading
Summed up very nicely in this description of how users react when things go wrong. I was sometimes guilty of the same thing when I was still using Windows alongside Linux.
Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.
The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on. Continue reading
MySQL’s decision to produce proprietary add-ons to its highly successful open source database has been widely misunderstood, and in some cases spun to produce the impression that it is a failure of open source. Continue reading
As much as I dislike Microsoft Internet Explorer, and as much as I wish that people would make their own lives and those of website developers better by using better web browsers, I have always taken supporting it as a necessary evil. It is bundled with Windows and most people take whatever it suits MS gives them. Continue reading
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
I noticed that most people downloading Mandriva One using bit torrent were using Windows clients, but almost everyone downloading Arch Linux seems to be using Ktorrent. The latter is to be expected, but the former surprised me. Continue reading
Suppose customer A buys a product combination X + Y, and hires B to install the product for them. Suppose you are the vendor of Z and had hoped the customer would buy X + Z. It looks like you have lost the deal: but someone came up with an ingenious solution. Continue reading