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Where to, next? Part III

By on October 25, 2003 in Home Page

It sounds pretty obvious, but after you’ve gotten the machine installed
and flubbed around with it for a while (“Look, Mozilla is pretty cool!
Check out OpenOffice.org!”) the next thing to do is… figure out what
to do next. Everyone has their top priority… a print server, a file
server, a web server, a database server, an office workstation, a
kiosk, a router, a firewall. There a million different configurations
and permutations and combinations you can figure out for your new
machine. Pick one. Take your time and research it and configure it and
try it out. In the process you’ll learn lots about the command shells,
the security model, the different ways of packaging and installing
software. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

And, not all of these experiements have to occur on the Linux box
alone. My MySQL experiments used the Linuxbox as the database server
and VFP on a Windows laptop. One of the several Perl and Twiki
installations I’ve made was also on a Windows server, using the CygWin DLL to provide command-line equivalents for RCS functionality in Windows.

Where to next, Part II

By on October 19, 2003 in Home Page

Perhaps switching off the Microsoft OS is not possible for you right
now, or you can’t afford a second machine to mess with. There are still
alternatives. On my main development machine, a Windows XP Professional
machine, Mozilla is my default
browser. Mozilla is more than just a browser, it’s an internet
application development environment, with HTML markup editors and
javascript debuggers. And OpenOffice.org
is my default office suite, with built-in word processing, spreadsheets
and presentation packages competitive with any of the commercial
suites. I used the OpenOffice.org Write and Impress packages at the
recent Great Lakes Great Database Workshop conference to present my white papers and slides, without any problems.

And, if you’d like to dip your toes into the water without fully committing to a Linux install, check out Knoppix.
Knoppix is a full Linux distribution that boots and runs from CD,
without writing to your hard drive at all. This is a great way to try
Linux out without messing with your machine, although, of course, you
lose any changes when you shut down your machine. I’ve heard that
people have gotten their USB storage devices to work with Knoppix to
save documents. Check it out. It’s free.

Information Week: Staring Down Linux

By on October 19, 2003 in Home Page

Information Week has an interesting articled called Staring Down Linux
that has some thoughtful points about how Microsoft plans to play the
game when dealing with customers and partners and Linux. Not
surprisingly, the word uncooperative describes much of their
\”strategy.\” Also, read the embedded surveys on why customers choose
Linux vs. why Microsoft. Pretty interesting stuff.

So, where to, next?

By on October 19, 2003 in Home Page

So. You heard Whil’s keynote (or read Andrew’s summary)
and you’re ready to take the next step. What to do? Here’s how my
experimentation has gone, so far (I’ve been messing with Linux
part-time for about four years now, btw). First, if there’s any way you
can do it, find a separate machine you can experiment on. Invariably,
an install will go awry or some piece of hardware won’t work and need
to be swapped out, or you’ll just want to blow the whole box away and
start over. If you’ve got a junker designated for that purpose, it gets
so much easier. It doesn’t need to be a state-of-the-art machine,
although of course, speed and memory and power contribute to a better
feeling with all machines. A beater you’ve retired as a development box
or a $400 eBay special can do the trick nicely.

At TR&A Labs, we’ve got three machines we’re messing with: at the
tr.com web site, a dual PII-333 Dell Workstation is an alternative web
server. In-house, a white box we assembled ourselves runs an Athlon
processor and coffee-stained keyboards and mice on a borrowed
monitor, serving as file server and intranet web and wiki server.
Finally, on the road, a Dell Lattitude PII-366 is the road warrior.
Download the latest ISO files for your favorite distribution, burn CDs,
and try a couple of installs just to see what happens. Once you’re
feeling like you’re getting it, try installing a spare (but properly
licensed, of course) Windows installation and see if you can get the
machine to dual-boot.

Find a support group. There are many Linux user groups worldwide (check our GLUE: Groups of Lunux Users Everywhere),
and there are many mailing lists and forums for support as well. Don’t
ask dumb questions: check the man pages and help, rtfm second, Google
it third, search for likely synonyms, and then ask a question with
sufficient (but not excessive) Who-What-When-Where-How information to
get a good answer. Volunteers on newsgroups don’t want to answer the
same question all day long, or a question who’s answer is already on
your machine. I’ve taken several old boxes with non-standard or
relatively unsupported hardware and gotten them running through this
technique. You can, too. Good luck!

Great Lakes Great Database Workshop Day Three

By on October 15, 2003 in Home Page

Another great day in Milwaukee. Saw more good sessions: Rick Borup on InnoSetup, Cathy Pountney on File Factories. Missed Predrag Bosnic on UI Design, but I hear it was a great session. Dan Jurden on SQL Server UDFs and Paul McNett on Linux Programming Tools. I wrapped up the sessions by presenting my Software Licensing session at the last time slot, and finished up well with my best session of the conference. Conference is well-attended; I’d guess around 200 people, which fills the facilities here pretty well.

We had a night off from planned events, so Laura and I and Rick Borup enjoyed a dinner at Mader’s, [updated link] one of the many fine German restaurants in downtown Milwaukee. Finished off the day with a good can-you-top-this session in the conference hotel bar with “Oh, yeah? I once worked on software so bad…” All in all, a great day.

Great Lakes Great Database Day Two

By on October 13, 2003 in Home Page

Three sessions down and one to go for me. The \”Internet Subscriptions
using VFP and XML\” session went really well. The Software Licensing
session was surprisingly short, but I at least folks got to lunch early
and enjoyed themselves. The Linux InstallFest was the surprise of the
conference for me — the turnout was spectacular. Many successful
installs, many questions answered, much interest generated.

Dinner at the Water Street Brewery with friends was a welcome intermission, too.

Great Lakes Great Database Workshop begins

By on October 12, 2003 in Home Page

Sunday morning, 8:30 AM started the pre-conference sessions. Four sessions all seemed well-attended: Whil Hentzen did an Introduction to Linux, Kevin McNeish an Introduction to .NET, Steve Sawyer a session on client-server, and Dan Jurden a session on integrating Crystal Reports with Visual FoxPro. Opening keynote starts at 12:30 PM. Looking forward to the conference kickoff!

Knoppix 3.3 is out, and BitTorrent is the way to get it.

By on September 24, 2003 in Home Page

Knoppix 3.3, a self-booting Linux-on-a-CD distribution great for
demoing the product or rescuing a badly mangled install, is now
available for download. Instead of trying to get an image downloaded
from one of the mirrors, consider participating in the BitTorrent
technique for downloads. With BitTorrent installed and running, it took
most of the afternoon to get the image, but I got it on the first try,
and while I was downloading, BitTorrent could provide the parts I’d
downloaded to share with others, a real win-win situation. Slashdot
commentary and links to download sites are here.

Since I had nothing better to do with a few background CPU ticks, I’ve left the BitTorrent client running, sharing the wealth.

Who’s reading RSS Feeds?

By on September 22, 2003 in Home Page

It’s interesting to browse through the web logs and see who is read the
FoxCentral and FoxForum Wiki RSS feeds. All four (both have 1.0 and 2.0
variants) are available from http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. Here
are some snippets from Saturday’s logs so you can see what kind of news
aggregators and accumulators are reading the subscription feeds:

lwp/trivial
FeedDemon/1.0+Beta+5a+(http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon
Bloglines/1.0+(http://www.bloglines.com
Feedster+Crawler/1.0
NIF/1.1++(http://www.newsisfree.com/robot.php)
PostNuke:+Rogue:+0.7.2
Syndic8/1.0+(http://www.syndic8.com/)
nntp//rss+v0.3+(Linux+2.4.18-386+i386;+http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/)
AmphetaDesk/0.93.1+(MSWin32;+http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/)
RPT-HTTPClient/0.3-3
Jakarta+Commons-HttpClient/2.0rc1
Radio+UserLand/8.0.8+(WinNT)

What nonsense!

By on September 9, 2003 in Home Page

Forrester: Linux development can be more costly than using Microsoft software.
“The Microsoft-commissioned study estimated the cost of building custom
J2EE and .Net applications within large and medium-size organizations.”

“The price gap was primarily the result of the
difference between the prices of the BEA and Oracle software and those
of Visual Studio .Net and SQL Server.”

 What nonsense. So, it is possible to spend more money on
expensive software and end up with a more expensive solution. Duh. And
what if they used Apache, JBOSS and PostGreSQL?
[Computerworld News]

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