For the uninitiated it might feel that choosing a low cost middleware platform is like choosing low cost, small, fuel efficient car. Anyone having driven a cheap small car would feel that it’s not as comfortable as a huge fuel sink SUV. Also your cheap model might not have all the features as the SUV.

When it comes to software however, things are different than the real world. Going for a low cost alternative does not necessarily mean giving up the features that your other big, greedy solution had. It’s like driving a Hummer with the fuel efficiency of a Prius. Who wouldn’t want that? Take it for a test drive and see for yourself!

Plagiarism in written material is harder to detect unless you have read the original article/book etc… It’s a whole different scenario when it comes to web publishing. Anyone can search a vast repository of published content and detect phrases copied from other sources in just seconds. It’s common in academic institutions. But it’s disgusting when grownups just copy paste shit from the internet and publish under their own name. If you’re such a mindless moron, please do spend two minutes to rephrase your sentence in a different way giving the same meaning.

I can understand someone getting carried away with Google and Wikipedia and suddenly claiming to be an expert on anything imaginable. I don’t have a problem if someone is making a living off Google and Wikipedia, they should at least have the decency of mentioning the source where they read it. Or Ctrl-C Ctrl-Ved it. Whichever applicable.

So is open source the miracle cure for every proprietary solutions that cost a fortune on an yearly basis? Although some people talk like it is, reality is much different. A typical CTO will be reluctant to give up an existing deployed solution and go for an open source alternative. This might be for couple of reasons,

• The system works and it’s operational going offline is going to cost a considerable amount of money and business disruption.
• There’s no open source alternative out there that is a drop in replacement for any given large proprietary deployment of an ERP, CRM etc…
• What would happen to existing data? Will they be migrated? Can they be migrated seamlessly?
• If it’s a large enterprise operating in many industry verticals, does the alternative ERP system have modules working on those industry verticals?

There might be much more reasons, and many more specific to a given organizational setup, I’m just trying to list some general barriers off the top of my head. Most of all a formal TCO study might have to be carried out in order to justify the decision to upper management.

This is one area where a proprietary vendor, take SAP for example, thrive. They have a single solution where you deploy, tweak some parameters, do a BPR and everything starts to just work. Looking back at open source software vendors, I’m not aware of a solution like what SAP has to offer. Although SAP is ridiculously expensive a lot of companies are willing to pay money to them. They do have one heck of a product that works for many different businesses. I’m not sure how Compiere is doing compared to SAP. Looks like they’re doing quite ok. But the 3rd party vendors developing extensions and modules for SAP are several times bigger than for Compiere (if anyone is aware of a quotable statistic please do holler).

Let’s take another example. If your company intranet is running on Microsoft Sharepoint and you want to ditch that and go for an open source solution what would you be looking at? There is no single open source solution that you can compare with Sharepoint. Sure you can get a set of open source projects, put them together and make it your infrastructure. People who have done this knows how hard it is. Getting two separate projects to work with each other can often be described with the word nightmare. They’re not built to integrate. Most of them does not expose their data as Web services so you don’t have an effective method of accessing those. IMO, it’s another area where commercial offerings of open source projects can partner with each other and provide more integrated solutions rather than single products.

If you’re a tech startup you could probably put up with 5 different passwords for 5 different systems that you have to use. Wiki, CMS, bug tracker, forums and webmail. Giving single sign on between the applications is an important factor from an end users point of view. It certainly make the system easy to use and accessible. True, you get software like CAS but a couple of years back when I took it for a spin getting it to work with different apps turned out to be a colossal pain in the arse (it might have become more developed with great many plugins for different systems now, I haven’t looked at CAS recently). Doesn’t have to be that way. For solutions like this, built with open source, people are willing to pay money yet nobody is doing it.

So, I believe it’s a great time to think in terms of integrated solutions rather than individual projects and take those open source projects, make them easier to adopt and integrate into a wider enterprise environment.

Compare this with a more traditional method of maintaining an open source project. Alan mentions SourceForce as an example. It’s not the only one. You have a central repository where a few people act as committers who can control what changes can go into its repo. GitHub on the other hand provides a new perspective. See the graph for Ruby on Rails for example. With a decentralized view like that you can quickly find out who meddles with the code and who are the people having a keen interest to contribute.

Amount of politics that’s going to be generated around the project is very limited compared with a centralized cvs/svn repo project. You can get rid of all those private mailing lists and just carry on with what matters most, after all code speaks on everyone’s behalf

Please don’t try this at office.

Here’s a few method calls,

Getting song of the day should be easy. getSOTD() method returns an array, song title, artist and the lyrics. Let’s just fetch the song and display only the lyrics.

<?php
require 'lyricwiki.php';
 
$lw = new LyricWiki();
 
$song = $lw->getSOTD();
 
print $song['lyrics'];
?>

Ok, let’s try to fetch lyrics of a song you know,

<?php
require 'lyricwiki.php'
 
$lw = new LyricWiki();
 
# parameters: artist and the song title
print $lw->getSong('iron & wine', 'boy with a coin');
 
?>

Form factor. First of all, given the width and height of the phone I quite liked the candy-bar form factor. No fugly qwerty maps. Relief. Feel comfortable in the hand too, unlike the N95, which IMO is a bit bulky. In the back there’s no protective cover in the housing over the camera. This has been the case with HTC Touch as well but they have a nice cover to put the phone on. Likewise, you might not wanna use this phone without a pouch unless you’re ok with scratches.

Keypad. Housing doesn’t feel great compared to other models, specially given my previous HTC Touch experience. For example it’s not easy to press the end key. Even if you do manage to press this, sometimes it has pressed the right selection key instead. This can get annoying. Ditto for left selection key and the call key. Rest of the keys are ok, but compared with the keypad designs in N95, it’s doesn’t feel natural when composing a text message/email.

Camera. N78 comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera which gives quite decent picture quality. Heck, my old digital camera is a 3.2 megapixel one. The phone has 3G so you it does have 2 cameras. Install vigo and you can transform your phone as a wireless web cam.

GPS. Phone comes with integrated GPS which you could use to do all that GPS jazz with maps etc… Also it has A-GPS support which gives you more accurate results.

Radio. It’s nice to have a radio on the phone so that you could tune into house music on local radio channels when you’re in a situation where you can hear horrendous music in the background In addition to the visual radio, you could listen to a large number of online radio stations.

FM transmitter. One cool feature of N78 is the built-in FM transmitter. You could play a song and then transmit on a frequency of your choice. Didn’t quite check the exact distance but the receiver was able to play quite nicely when the phone is about 10 meters away. No more burning of podcasts into CDs to listen while you’re driving. Just tune in and listen to stuff playing on your phone!

Storage. Comes with 90MB of RAM, 76MB of phone memory and a 2GB microSD card. Quite enough for the podcasts, indie music plus some techno.

WiFi. I’m really happy that the device has wireless. So there’s the option of being always connected without having to run your mobile phone bill sky high. Works seemlessly with access points with WEP+hidden ESSID.

3.5G. You can enjoy HSDPA speeds upto 3.6Mbps with Nokia N78. I just enabled dual mode, and enjoying 3.5G HSDPA with my Dialog connection. Armed with the webkit based browser, life cannot get any better

Message reader. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there’s message reader. Which reads out your SMSes and emails at a surprising rate of accuracy. It was nice to hear it reading xyz LKR as xyz Sri Lankan Rupees.

Navi Wheel. This is another really cool feature where you could scroll by touching the outset of the ok button in clockwise/anti-clockwise direction. This doesn’t work for all the menus though.

Apologies for not having any screenshots. For the life of me, I can’t seem to get either Best Screen Snap or Screenshot to work.

I’ve got HTC Home Customizer which adds 6 tabs instead of the boring 3 tab default layout in the home screen. This also allowed installing the vista icon set which is quite nice. HTC Touch doesn’t have 3G nor GPS but the device is quite functional and does have WiFi. Also, get PointUI installed if you like smooth animation effects like in an iphone.

Task scheduling functions which comes by default in WM6 is superb. You could schedule a task, which repeats from say, Monday to Thursday or which ever days you could pick and set reminders etc… The flexibility it provides for this is just fabulous and the interface is really easy to use.

The only minor annoyance I could think of is inability to use headphones when the phone is plugged into the charger or to the USB. Default on screen keyboard might be best used with the stylus. It’s not easy writing a text message with your thumb. There are plenty of free on sceen keyboards which makes writing with your thumb an easy task. PocketCM and TouchPal comes to mind. You have the word/excel/power point set but I haven’t used any of these. I’m not a big fan of wordpressors myself so that might be the reason for the lack of usage, then again other than reading a doc file that doesn’t have any fancy formatting it’s really hard to imagine someone doing their useful wordprocessing tasks using these. Adobe PDF viewer which comes with it is pointless. Why? when you zoom the text in a PDF to a readable level you’ll find yourself constantly having to scroll horizontally to read a sentence. This is the case with Adobe PDF viewer in almost all the mobile phones with a limited screen size.

Will rant about the current mobile device later.

Then I migrated to wordpress and started to blog under chintana.wordpress.com. By this time I had about 5 – 6 different blogs where I wrote with various pseudonyms. I imported my blogger archives to wordpress and continued to blog under my real name. When I felt the need to write about whatever that comes to my mind I would resort to do that anonymously. After some time, for a reason that I cannot recall I decided to get rid of the wordpress blog. Although I blogged anonymously I thought I should write with my real name also and then got trevet.blogspot.com. I’ve completely forgotten the time period I had this.

Anonymous blogging does have the freedom of writing whatever you want and not be associated with a gross misinterpretation from some dolt later. You could write your opinions about terrorism, human trafficking, donkey porn etc… It doesn’t matter. People don’t know who is at the other end. The moment people know who’s writing, they stupidly and incorrectly starts to form your character by stuff you write. I’ve been bitten by this numerous times. Freedom to write whatever I wish without getting it associated to how I am in real life, is too much to ask, apparently. This is why I’ve been writing anonymously and getting rid of all the archives on my previous blogs. Now, I don’t have an anonymous blog, don’t plan to get one either.

After a similar confrontation recently, it made me realize that these compulsive judgemental cretins are not worth bothering about.

[fedora-dvd]
name="Fedora 9 i386 DVD"
baseurl=file:///media/Fedora%209%20i386%20DVD

Note that the %20s are necessary for spaces. After a yum update, yum away to your heart’s content.

Just saw Suran’s blog being redirected to some shitty search site (gasp) and worked correctly a moment later. When I felt a weird feeling I never thought the next moment sheer evilness will be poured over my cerebral cortex. Should never smoke the green thing for any extended periods of time, I tell you.