Imagine my reaction when I heard the bozos who work at the University of Sydney’s excuse of an IT department announced that they were abandoning a personal user folder on the  network and replacing it with a SkyDrive account.

Admittedly after brushing up with SkyDrive’s latest updates, featuring a HTML 5 non-uncanny interface along with 100MB per file with a total size of 25GB per person, my interest in trying out the service was rekindled. They apparently also updated photo sharing and manipulation technologies as well as synchronisation with MS Office. Neither feature of which I particularly need or will use, but a nice touch nonetheless that shows at least some departments in Microsoft care about their products.

Apart from playing with it sporadically, this week I had the fortune (that’s right, I wouldn’t say misfortune) to use it within my average work environment, ie. working with graphics and diagrams and scanned images. My other average work environment involves programming, for which anything other than a vcs repository with a local LAMP setup is inappropriate, but that’s something else entirely.

The Good

When working within a relatively small group for a small design project, SkyDrive is great for collaboration. Not only does it solve the issue of always shifting workstations and having to transfer over resources or source material, SkyDrive acts as a replacement for a Dropbox setup. By this I mean that when SkyDrive is operating under an institution, I can very easily tell it to share a directory with 5 of my friends working on the same project as I am, or otherwise interested in my work.

Along with a drag n’ drop interface, it makes it easy to copy over whatever has changed just by looking at the last modified dates and selected the top X number of entries.

SkyDrive is also quick. It doesn’t dally around like other uploaders and gets straight to the point of dumping your files online just like Dropbox does.

The Bad

Unfortunately it’s also completely inappropriate for my uses. The average design save file can very easily exceed the 100MB per file limit, and even when it doesn’t, having to download a ~50MB file, especially when the connection is spotty, is a pain, and can cost you several hours of productive work, or worse, lose a client.

SkyDrive also doesn’t support incremental updating, which I guess is asking too much, but since people have already been spoilt by Dropbox, which does something alike that, I don’t see why I can’t grumble about it.

Brief Conclusion

Apart from not being useful for my usecase I really cannot find much to critique about SkyDrive. Especially when I rarely see other people making use of Cloud solutions other than Dropbox I’m quite surprised not more people are using SkyDrive. With upcoming integration with Windows 8 (of which I have mixed reactions to) and up to 2GB file transfers, I’d say Kudos, MS. Kudos.

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Everything is done CLI for obvious reasons – we don’t want any interface for them to turn off our song. So we need a command line music player. mplayer is also available as a command line player on Windows, and so it was my first choice. A quick download of a build without an interface and we were ready to play any song with a *.bat file containing `mplayer "music.mp3"`

The next step is to make it run without the prompt opening up. This is again easily done by executing the bat file via a vbs file with the following content. Creating a shortcut to this vbs file and dumping it in your startup folder is the simplest and most obvious way to make it play on login. Here’s the code:

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "C:\path\to\my\bat\file.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

Now I wanted to be able to change this song whenever I wanted from a central server. Basically it would check whether or not it needs to update the song, and if it does, delete the existing song and download the new song. This is useful to give a little variety in our fun little player. Some things didn’t work quite as I wanted it to so I have probably used the most horrendous of hacks based on what I could garner from various online references.

First I needed a way to download files akin to wget. I found a small program called url2file which did just the thing. I wanted it to check whether or not a song existed on the server, and if it did, download it. However the url2file program didn’t quite play nice with that idea (it would download a 404 page instead of allowing me to tell it not to do anything), and I didn’t know how to check whether or not a file existed on a remote server. So instead I had to make do with a second "notifier" file which, if it contained a certain string, would mean that a new song was available to be downloaded.

It would download that plaintext file’s contents to a tmp file, search in that tmp file for the string we were looking for, and if successful, would delete the existing music file and download the new one to take its place. Unfortunately doing a simple `if %getnew%==yes` didn’t work (explanations welcome!), so I made do with checking the first 3 characters, which did work. Here’s the final code, with the getnew.txt file including just the single word "yes".

del tmp
URL2FILE.EXE http://foobar.com/getnew.txt > tmp
set /p getnew= < tmp
set _part_name=%getnew:~0,3%
if %_part_name%==yes del music.mp3
if %_part_name%==yes URL2FILE.EXE http://foobar.com/music.mp3 music.mp3

Tada, and worked flawlessly. Not bad for a couple hours work from scratch and not knowing anything about DOS at all.

In unrelated news, I’m looking for good bagpipe music.

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Nifty, no? Well, it’s a good start, but the next stage is getting the applications that allow you to use it To The Max ™. Let’s see what we can recommend.

A good browser. No, a Great browser.

We’re talkin’ powerful, fast, slick web browsin’ here. That nonsense that calls itself Internet Explorer doesn’t deserve a place on your device. Whether or not you’re often surfing the interwebs, ensuring that your web experience is a smooth one will make the difference whether you decide to whip out your phone and wiki something up, or simply say it’s a lost cause. You want a proper browser, one with kinetic scrolling, tabs, and a good rendering engine.

Enter Opera Mobile and Skyfire. Both, as you might’ve guessed by now, are Windows Mobile web browsers. They are also the two best of them all. Opera Mobile is in general more well known and boasts an impressive list of features – tabs, kinetic scrolling, download manager, accelerated page caching (turbo), data synchronisation and cloud computing setups, and even widgets. This does put it on the heavier side of the browser market, with it’s installation file itself a hefty 10MB. On older phones it might take some time to start up and can run out of memory pretty quick. However if your hardware meets the specs, you’ve got yourself a very powerful tool.

The other is a lesser known product – Skyfire. This is definitely slimmer feature-wise but loads pages quick and doesn’t eat up your phone. It’s got the zoom, the drag-scrolling … but most importantly this one displays pages identical to a desktop view whereas Opera tends to wrap text (handy in some cases, not so in others). It also deals with embeddable content very well, allowing you to enjoy flash video without lag pretty easily. It also comes with a nifty start-page which is basically a feed reader – giving you snapshots of the latest news which you can tweak to your interests.

Apps for music and videos

Windows Mobile comes bundled with Windows Media Player, which can play some common files but chokes on anything else you might want.

Here we have a few nominees, including the must-have Core Media Player. The Core Media Player began as freeware but now is available as a paid application. There’s no problem with getting the older free version, it’s still extremely good and will handle almost any codec you throw at it.

Those enjoying the iPhone feel might look towards S2P, a music player that copies the iPhone music player almost completely, not to mention integrates rather nicely with S2U, an application which locks your phone like the iPhone does. It’s also well supported on several home screen media player control applications.

If you’re a multi tasker, it’s normally a huge convenience if you have a way to pause/play, next and previous songs right from the homescreen. In Windows 6.5.1 this is possible with the Titanium layout which integrates with the default Windows Media Player, allowing you to scroll between songs. If not using WMP or not on 6.5.1 this functionality is also available with several shells, including SPB Mobile Shell 3.

The ultimate penknife of utilities

If you’re going to actually use your phone, you need a way to keep it ship shape and mess around when you feel like it. Without delaying further I’m going to introduce you to Total Commander, a file manager (and registry editor, if you’re into that sort of thing) that should exist on every device.

Another would undoubtedly be cleanRAM by htcAddicts.com. It does exactly what it name says – it cleans up lost RAM and can make your device speed up a tad bit after a few days of use – say goodbye to having to soft reset or restart your device whenever it gets too laggy!

Advanced Config (pictured above) makes it easy to tweak your OS to your liking. From which softkeys do what, the layout of your dialer and comm manager, what effects are enabled… it’s all there and you’ll find perhaps one of those little things that don’t look like much but mean much.

A way to read those RSS feeds

People on the go should really take advantage of RSS feeds. Most computer users still remain ignorant of this wonder and it’s time for that to stop. For the uninitiated RSS feeds take the news away from the website and thus allow you to keep track of many news sources at your leisure – be it following the BBC, your favourite blogs, or even the latest Garfield comic. It’s your own personal newspaper that’s updated realtime and only contains articles you’re interested in.

It’s both D-Pad and touch friendly, supports importing opml files and scheduled updates. Yep, it’s pRSS Reader. I’ve tried a good deal and this is the only one that works both reliably and well.

Your own personal library

If you’re still unacquainted with ebook readers that’s OK – perhaps reading from a screen just isn’t for you. If it is, however, you’ll need an ebook reader on your phone. I’d like to recommend Haali Reader. It’s an excellent and small application – it remembers your position in all and any file even after closing (a lifesaver), has customisable fonts, sizes and colours, supports autoscrolling, assigned buttons, fullscreen, UTF, and of course supports a good deal of popular ebook formats. It shows a lovely timeline at the bottom with divisions for chapters (if recognised) and bookmarking support.

That’s enough for part 1, in part 2 we’ll cover another 5 awesome (but less awesome than the first 5) applications that you should dump on your device.

Sponsored link: BestWindowsMobileApps – an unbiased and verbose review site for windows mobile applications.

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Many people on the Windows Mobile platform are not making the most of it – they aren’t using a smartphone as a smartphone. Through this article I hope to touch up on some of the ways your phone could be used.

Improve the overall experience

Before you start trying to use your phone for tasks, you might want to make your phone more usable first. Windows Mobile was designed for a stylus and envisioned as a minature desktop – something that really makes it a terrible OS to use. Windows seems to have made touch-friendliness its main target for improvement and these upgrades are available for all users, without having to buy a whole new phone. However you’d have to search quite a bit, (I recommend the XDA community) to find something that really clicks – meanwhile this introductory article should help.

Flash a newer ROM

This is the equivalent of upgrading your operating system. I wrote a review of it here but development has already progressed much further than those screenshots display. Windows Mobile seems to aim to challenge the likes of the iPhone with its WM7 version coming apparently in Q4 of 2010. With this aim and the rapid ongoing development it’s hard not to expect greater things in the future. Even though it’s not out yet learning how to flash a ROM will grant you access to the ongoing development – and of course making your experience a lot, lot better. I would go so far to say that even 6.5 on my aging Dopod’s hardware (popular name HTC Hermes) is fast, and really makes the device a joy to use (yes, quite shockingly the newer ones are less resource hungry!).

Get started and learn about flashing ROMs in the XDA-Forums. Highly recommended.

Theme it properly

Whether you have flashed a recent ROM or preferred to keep your old one (I recommend flashing), a theme will do wonders. There are already themes for WM6.5 and can really sharpen up the phone in no time. A good wallpaper, colourscheme and not to forget icons too can spice things up. If you are using shells or widgets then finding matching skins for those will help give your system an integrated feel.

Themes can be found on the XDA-Forums as linked above, as well as on FreewarePocketPC.

Use a Shell/Widget/Plugin for the Today screen

For those already with WM6.5, it comes with Titanium and that is a huge improvement from the today screen, giving you quick access to pretty much all of the phones functions outside individual applications right on the front screen. However many other interfaces are available (most are crap) and some are really quite something, such as SPB Mobile Shell (pictured), TouchFlo/Manilla (2D or 3D), Home2, and various today plugins (available on FreewarePocketPC).

Ensure the basics exist

Make sure that you’ve got the basic set of applications – Windows (Live) Messenger, Windows Media Player, Office Mobile (including OneNote?), and … wait for it … Windows Marketplace and Microsoft MyPhone. This basic set of application should come with every phone and if you didn’t get it, you should hunt it down. Windows Marketplace is Microsoft’s attempt at the iPhone’s App store and Google’s Android Market. It was quite recently released (and even more recently cracked and available for free on XDA) and though I’ve only seen very few applications available on it (and even fewer free ones) it’s been a joy to browse and no doubt has a lot of potential once more developers add their stuff. Microsoft MyPhone is a new service to bridge mobile and web synchronisation. It’s quite nifty allowing two-way synchronising for SMSes, contacts, calendars and todos – all accessible through a web interface. It also allows synchronisation with social networks (though Microsoft’s Facebook application is very good) as well as synchronisation between several devices. Some of it’s “pro account” features involve phone tracking and remote phone lockdowns,

In my next post on this topic I will start going through specific uses and my recommended applications for that use. But taking those first easy steps can really make a difference.

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Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times! as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

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Now, I might not like Windows, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft can only create crappy products. I’ve played Halo, and it’s fun too :) So I decided to try out Bing – this means only using it for all of my web searches throughout the week- and here I am with my review.

Bing is stressed as a “decision engine”, not a “search engine”. It’s meant to be able to provide useful information to help you solve tough decisions, instead of only being able to give you information on a subject – or at least that’s how their little beta introduction portrayed it to me.

I started with some basic searches – those searches that are meant to find out information. Google normally does pretty darn well on these by throwing me right at Wikipedia – you can’t go wrong there, but Bing apparently did. Searching up simple economics terminology (I had an economics exam) would throw me at past year economic sources, news articles, everything – except for “what it means“. A quick poke through some keywords proved that Bing didn’t use their search as a command line – in other words you could do fancy thing like `define: foo` or `"foo" -bar`. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you probably aren’t using Google effectively for your searches. Horrible first impression.

However, certain things did jump out, such as little tooltips that extend on the description, as well as more relevant searches and “links on results page”, oh, and a bunch of new fancy options on the Image search, as well as a load-on-demand thing that’s really nifty that you’ll just have to see for yourself. However, it’s no use saying how good the tech is, it’s better to see how useful the tech is.

So I then decided to see how good Bing was at being a “decision engine”. I threw a couple difficult questions I had floating around:

• What career/university path would be suitable for me?
• I have a hand condition called `hyperhidrosis`, how do I solve it?
• How should I fix the exceptions “claims_sig_not_found” that a random guy’s OpenID library kept throwing at me?
• How can I sync my Windows Mobile phone with Kontact on Linux?
• What is the best picture to use for “Bing” on my blog post, seeing as the image keeps on changing on Bing.com.

As you can see, the questions were varied from being hypothetical, technical, specific, broad-knowledge, and finally image-based … respectively.

What career/university path would be suitable for me?

The first question was initially answered by a collection of “buy our free careers advice” websites. Little scams they were, that wasn’t too good. However some deeper poking found some good personality tests and career questionnaires.

Did it answer the question in the end? No.

Was I expecting it to? No.

I have a hand condition called `hyperhidrosis`, how do I solve it?

This was a pretty technical question. Hyperhidrosis is a condition where you sweat profusely in certain areas of your body – mine being hands and feet. It is normally triggered by certain materials, foods, sounds, etc. It was medical advice I was looking for. Bing fared pretty well on this one. Apparently I found quite a lot of cures, everything from botox injections, surgical lasers burning off my nerves, 30 minute soaks in baking soda to giving yourself a mild electrocution with a 12 volt battery. Needless to say I decided to leave the electrocution to a last resort.

Unfortunately it also enjoyed giving a bunch of scam websites too – but nevertheless those were inevitable to pop up, and after discarding those I did find some really good websites on the subject. So good that I actually did try soaking my hands for 30 minutes in a concentrated mixture of water and … uh, toothpaste – no baking soda. With a quick air-dry I managed to witnes instantaneous crystallisation on the back of my hand, and enjoyed a good 12 minutes of sweat free life.

Did it answer the question in the end? Yes.

Am I going to try out the cures? Maybe later.

How should I fix the exceptions “claims_sig_not_found” that a random guy’s OpenID library kept throwing at me?

This was an interesting one. I had used an OpenID library somebody else had coded for a PHP framework. However no matter how much I inserted traceback calls and tried to debug it- it kept on failing spectacularly. A quick test on my remote server showed it wasn’t a “it’s just you” problem, and several fresh installs failed the same way. The problem was, I didn’t know the name of the guy who coded it, it was somewhat outdated, and not exactly the most popular library in the world.

It did decently- up to the stage where I actually found out the guy’s name, actual email, and…well – it seems as though either Bing is living under a rock or nobody else except me and the creator uses this library. I’ve fallen back to using janrain’s OpenID PHP library, and that works flawlessly.

Did it answer the question? If the answer is “don’t ask the question”, then yes.

Am I happy with the answer? Yes.

How can I sync my Windows Mobile phone with Kontact on Linux?

I have a Windows Mobile phone, and I want to sync my PIM (personal information management – like calendar, todo, contacts, notes, alarms etc) with my computer. Turns out that the only thing Bing can say is that whatever exists is either outdated or non compatible with KDE4 and Kontact.

Did it answer the question? Failed horrendously. Stupid Bing. Not even a glimmer of hope.

Am I happy with the answer? What answer?

What is the best picture to use for “Bing” on my blog post, seeing as the image keeps on changing on Bing.com.

I’ll let the picture it chose speak for itself. The rest were even worse.

Summary:

Is Bing comparable to Google? No. Realistically speaking, in a tie, Google will win.

What’s my idea on what would make a search engine so much more useful? An option to allow people to say “I am willing to spend money” or “I am not willing to spend money”.

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For those that don’t know what SSH is, it is basically a network protocol (for example like FTP, SMTP, etc) that allows you to securely connect to another computer. For those that don’t speak jargon, it is some cool thing that allows me to use my computer remotely.

One of my well-visited locations is my college. I wonder why :P … and like most places, it runs Windows. Using a Windows computer leaves me feeling crippled and with a sense of repulsion at the most innocent of small creatures. Combined with my college’s restrictions, there is a lot of stuff I can’t do. For example, I can’t download a .doc file. Also, it is quite troublesome to constantly transfer files over with a memory stick, so I decided to set up SSH.

Little did I know how pathetically paranoid the IT technicians were.

Problem 1: setting up SSH and connecting to my dynamic IP.

The first step was to install (emerge openssh) and set up SSH. (I run Gentoo- the steps will be different for your distribution or if you are running Windows – say, you can set up SSH on Windows, can’t you?) This was simple. Now the problem here is that my IP keeps on changing. Especially because my ISP’s connection is quite volatile, my IP is dynamic and resets several times a day. The method to solve this was to set up a dynamic dns, available from dyndns.org. This is a free service, and allows me to connect to a sane domain name whilst a client running on my machine updates it regularly on the latest IP.

Problem 2: port 22 is blocked.

The next day I popped PuTTY on a thumb drive and tested it out – or at least tried to. I had a network connection refused error. Later that night I learned that most public networks blocked certain ports, for example port 22 which SSH normally uses.

The fix around this was to change the config in /etc/ssh/sshd_config to use Port 443. You see, whilst http:// defaults to port 80, https:// URLs default to port 443 – and are hence rarely blocked. Et Voila – you can now connect! However, I also run an Apache webserver. This clashes as it also tries to use port 443. As I don’t care to serve SSL webpages on my localhost, I decided it was a decent sacrifice, and I removed Apache’s HTTPS support by removing `-D SSL -D SSL_DEFAULT_VHOST` from /etc/conf.d/apache2. Tada. I can now access SSH at my college.

Problem 3: What about SCP? Surely you’d want to copy files over.

Well, transferring files over is another issue. It’s all good with your vast array of Command-Line-Interface applications for IRC, Vim text editing, file browsing, MSN, email, calendar and PIM, etc – but every so often you will have the need to transfer a file over. Sending yourself an email with a file doesn’t help, as my college blocks almost every single website out there aside from Google.com (note: Gmail is not Google.com – so it is blocked too). At the same time, it also blocks downloading every single file type aside from image files. The quick fix for this was to put the file on my Apache localhost, change the file extension to a .jpg or something then download it from there.

But no. Two problems occured. 1) My website was blocked – haha, and 2) the IT technicians filter it not by extension, but by actual file contents. To get past the website block, I run a proxy script on my webserver (there are plenty of free proxies out there too) to access my webserver. But then of course I’m stuck with the file filter. So looks as though it’s game over.

Not really, there’s always SCP. I couldn’t send files using my computer as I didn’t know the network information of my college network. So I decided to SCP using the college’s Windows computer. I hear there’s a program known as WinSCP which is pretty nifty, but at the time I only had PuTTY’s collection of tools and thus PSCP.EXE – which pretty much did the same thing – with one catch: it’s a CLI application. You see, they’ve also blocked the command prompt. OK – for understandable reasons.

To get myself a command prompt, I did the age old innocent command.com trick. This involves creating a plain text file (eg: .txt), putting the words `command.com` in it, and then saving it as cmd.bat. (Notice the changed file extension). This will give you a prompt to work with. Now – using that to run PSCP.EXE, I succesfully transferred my target file over – which was in this case a .doc file, which contained some homework.

What about the ethics of this?

Well. I personally feel as though these workarounds are anything but a way for me to do my work conveniently. The computer system is riddled enough with viruses as it is without my doing, and I doubt anybody will be motivated enough to have such a complicated setup unless they were either particularly vicious or needed a file really urgently (such as me at the time). But seriously – a learning centre blocking .doc files?

If you have more experience in networks than me and feel as though this article is innappropriate, feel free to contact me and I’ll willingly take it down.

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In my original post about the practicality of open source business models, I talked about the differences in Kaizen and Kakushin, how they were used, their benefits and disadvantages, and how each could be used to our benefit. In this post, I have decided to go a bit back into basics, take a broader look at things, and actually consider the nature of open-source compared to other models. I left the ending of the last post asking several questions – I will not answer those questions right now, but hopefully the stuff I consider in this post should help understand what solutions are practical and what aren’t.

Let’s start by considering the nature of Linux – the largest open-source project around (technically not, but you get the idea). Linux is essentially a free market economy, whereas Microsoft is more of a planned economy. For those familiar with the advantages, disadvantages and features of each economy, that sentence should summarise a lot of Linux’s culture. However, I believe analysis based on the type of economic system Linux represents, though interesting, has very little realistic value. It’s much more useful to look at Linux from a smaller perspective. Let’s begin.

The Linux community is extremely modular. Imagine a Lego set – there are hundreds of different types of pieces, and new ones come out all the time, the old ones are still there, but over time get lost, don’t fit so well, or get broken. A user has the image of a perfect creation in their minds, and are thrust upon them a huge mess of Lego pieces, with nobody to guide them on how they fit together. Here’s a graphical representation (no, I don’t care if I made an inaccuracy :P):

That, is Linux from Scratch (again, please don’t try and be a smartass here). You build your entire system yourself. There are manuals, but no common Joe is going to bother. Hence we have distributions.  Distributions try to package these Lego bits together, giving you 1) An easier starting point, 2) Easier/faster to get the pieces you need (using the package manager), and 3) a small community which can provide support. There are varying levels of these distributions, such as Gentoo, which still believes in the build-it-yourself philosophy (quite literally! You compile everything!), to Ubuntu, which tends to stick a silver spoon in your mouth.

If you read the first article, you might have noticed that this is actually a very effective use of market segmentation, allowing the average user to enjoy things like Ubuntu, whilst allowing for more hardcore users to push ahead development. It seems as though we’ve already got what it takes – but why doesn’t it work?

Firstly, people are not used to the open-source culture. And it just so happens that the open-source culture is the only culture that gives this sort of choice to “the average user”. The only other place this sort of freedom occurs is in technical industries, aimed at skilled users. Because people aren’t expecting this sort of treatment, they don’t choose this sort of treatment, instead they choose what they’re used to, which are self-packaged monolithic projects. Let’s look at Microsoft’s Windows. Here is a graphical representation:

It’s basically a finished Lego structure, superglued together with a couple bare spots for add-ons.

Looking at Microsoft’s success, does this mean we should get the glue and start merging projects? There are two issues to look at here, 1) Is it really beneficial? and 2) how practical is it?

Competition is beneficial to developers, but what about our users?

Let’s start with how beneficial it is. Due to the large amounts of projects, we get a huge amount of competition. Competition is healthy – it keeps the developers on their toes, always pushing ahead what is expected of them, it increases quality, it increases efficiency of production, and finally also increases the quantity produced. Competition would probably be the child of Linux, and it’s being abused every day. Even though we have competition implemented to breakneck levels, we also have created a hugely confusing world for newcomers who don’t know what’s new and what’s recommended.

Let’s say the TV market had a huge amount of competition and I wanted to buy a TV. If I knew nothing about TVs, I would be at a loss as to what to choose. In this case, I would find a shop assistant (no matter how crappy they really are) to help me. The TV market will not stop its own competition just to stop making it confusing for me, instead, they will simply employ more shop assistants.  Similarly, we should not bring out the glue and stick our projects together.  The interesting point this raises here, is do we have any shop assistants?

Yes, we do have shop assistants. In fact, we have some of the most knowledgeable shop assistants in the world, and they work 24/7. We have shop assistants that practice the beneficial concept of dogfooding (using their own products – thus duplicating the roles of a user and a developer, leading to more useful upgrades), that are constantly being trained, that don’t charge a single cent for their services, are self-motivated, and best of all, treat you as a friend (unless you are an idiot – no joking about this one).

The problem lies with the fact that newcomers have absolutely no idea where to find these shop assistants. That’s because they all lurk in IRC Chat – a system brought about by tech users, maintained by tech users, and not at all bothered to be advertised to the average joe – mainly because the average joe is an idiot to the tech users. This is actually a very serious issue – the amount of patience a lot of the developers have once they meet an idiot in IRC drops tremendously. We can’t blame them, everybody has better things to do. In fact, one of the sad truths is that if the IRC channel identifies an idiot who seems to be disrupting the flow of the channel, instead of being helpful, they will actually take it upon themselves to insult the person, start using inside jokes, and in the end be quite mean to the person. People who use IRC quite a lot can recognise this and know when to shut up, but for newcomers, not only do we stop providing support, we actually repel them from our product. We have thick skins – “You don’t like it? Go away. You won’t use our product? OK, who cares.”

Excessive competition has actually brought about specialisation in the workforce – good or bad?

Right, back to the “is it beneficial” question. Another thing to consider is that what Linux is actually pure specialisation and division of labour. The reason competition has brought about specialisation is because 1) we have the open-source philosophy of “one tool per job”, 2) We have a billion tools for a million jobs, and 3) Our developers work on whatever they like. The developers will choose what they like, or what they are good at. Not only does this make the work on what they’re good at, because they enjoy doing what they do, this is a form of self-motivation. Specialisation is meant to increase efficiency, increase quality and quantity produced. These are all benefits.

The disadvantages of specialisation, which are mainly boredom and immobility of labour are also removed, as when the developers get bored, they simply leave and work on something else. There are no obligations to stay, and no managers to get annoyed at them. Developers, also due to their nature of shifting around a variety of projects also pick up a huge variety of skills – meaning that labour is quite flexible. Thus immobility of labour is removed. If a good developer leaves, there will always be somebody with the capabilities to replace the person – true, the rate of development might still decrease, but the project will still survive (unless the project is doomed due to competition or just an extreme lack of developers).

Strangely, even though it seems to be a very one sided argument saying that open-source’s modular construction is beneficial, Microsoft is still (decently) ahead of us. The reasons are obvious – they have backings of lots of other financially structured companies, and it’s this financial backing which causes a lot of the influence around nowadays. A lost cause, then, for Linux, eh? Not really, there are a lot of financially structured companies going for Linux, such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle (which recently bought over Sun), Google, Nokia (yes, Linux is the most secretive monopoly of the mobile phone market – your phone probably runs Linux), etc. And in these economically pressing times, the chances are that Linux will get even more companies running for them. The idea of having backing from financially-structured firms will be very important when I consider the practicality of implementing these ideas in a future article.  This brings us to the practicality of merging out projects together.

How practical is it to actually merge our projects together?

Short answer – impossible. That will be the equivalent of asking America to turn into a communist country. In fact, it’s easier to cause a derogatory schism in the form of resource-wasting project forks. Keeping that in mind, we can say this:

Competition is good, but if applied excessively it can actually waste resources, being a disadvantage to both consumers and the workforce, and hinder development.

As mentioned countless times before, the open-source business model is no longer a business model – it is a culture. Just like any civilisation, we need a government. However, since we’re so good at having different views, I suggest:

We should have a government like Belgium.

Belgium is probably one of the most screwed up countries (sorry – no offence) in terms of governments. There is the Federal Government, the Flemish Government, The Government of the French Community, Government of the German-Speaking Community, Government of the Walloon Region, and the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region. Going to the Belgian embassy? Which one? Haha.

Oh, and we do have a government(s) like Belgium. Except we have too many.  They also seem to be limited to governing a single project. Those, my good sir, are not governments, those are influential boards of directors. A government, in my opinion, is the noble FreeDesktop Project. The FreeDesktop aims to standardize development within the plethora of desktop environments and window managers. For those unaffiliated these terms, suffice to say they are user interfaces that a user can pick. There are a lot of them (ooh, a list! XFCE, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Rox, Fluxbox, Blackbox, IceWM, Ratpoison, Ion, Openbox, and so on). If you had a hundred different interfaces all following their own rules (and using their own toolkits even – thank goodness they don’t), nothing will look integrated, and this will give a bad user experience. The FreeDesktop project realised that, and decided to come along and try to put things in order.  They didn’t actually interfere with development, but acted as a sort of mediator for agreeing on standards. Another type of government would be the Linux Foundation, responsible for representing Linux in legal issues (yeah, a bit hard to sue otherwise).

But alas, talking about governing our legal and marketing issues is to be saved for another post. At the moment I am talking about competition and the nature of the open-source culture. So what I suggest is that we have more mediators like the FreeDesktop project to govern development. These will be grouped by project type – such as Desktop Environments, Linux Distributions, or Kernel Development.  Unfortunately, as I’m not a developer, I cannot say which groups would be the most effective, so that is where you, the community, come in.

These government bodies will have the responsibility of deciding standards and taking major decisions on which technologies will be brought forward. One example of when this would be useful is the recent controversy between Webkit and KHTML. Perhaps if this were decided users won’t have to choose between so many browsers (I’m not saying only a couple of them aren’t crap – choice is always good!). Another function of these government bodies will be to decide when technologies can be shared. One great example is KDE creating all these behind-the-scenes systems for audio and semantic desktops. These resources can be shared within other desktop projects, such as GNOME. (eg: Phonon can be used by GNOME too).

Overall, these government bodies will have one function – to reverse the effects of competition when deemed necessary. Or as a spin doctor would put it: to act as a mediator to allow synergy between projects.

IN A NUTSHELL.

As examined in the beginning, we saw the modular nature of Linux. We also saw how the user was unused to this concept, and then moved on to seeing how this competition can actually be harmful to development. I also deviated for a short while to consider the structure of our support system, which seems very well hidden ;) We then considered how financially-structured organisations have much more influence than a hundred smaller projects, and finally I propose to have these government bodies to tackle the fact that:

Competition in the short term is good, but in the long-term, what we need is synergy.

Well, that’s about it for this post. I apologise for the lack of fun diagrams, and hope that I touched upon a simple idea that should be implemented. I left a lot of points open for discussion in the text above, and I hope to use that in a future post, meanwhile, I can only hope it serves to bring about other beneficial ideas about the open-source culture. Thanks for reading, the support I got in IRC, and I hope one day these posts will become more than just a post (is that even grammatically correct?).

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Firstly, hello Planet Larry! For existing readers, thinkMoult is now also a citizen of Planet Larry, which is governed by a cow named Larry (isn’t Larry a guy’s name?), and is mainly populated by geeky blogs. I decided to delay my next article about the practicality of the open source business model/culture and instead have a very quick post about a feature I read about in Slashdot. The next part of my analysis will likely come soon after.

Ok, now for the actual post itself.

Apparently Windows 7, the upcoming buzz from Windows land will have as a “free” feature (add-on, actually) for its professional and ultimate (hence, not really “free”) editions which will allow virtualisation of the Windows XP operating system. For those casual readers of my blog, it’s like running an operating system on an operating system, a bit like what I did when I reviewed Windows 7, except instead of Linux, you’re running XP on Windows 7. I wrote about how the majority of US businesses had stated that they would not switch to Windows 7 due to worries over compatibility issues, but this just might be overdoing it.

On one end of the spectrum, you have Windows Petite, which is supposed to take over the mini-computer market, with one super feature: you can only run 3 programs at one time. Oooh, then they can advertise along the lines of “Hey guys, we don’t lag at all!“. And then you’ve got the other end of the spectrum where you’ve got two operating systems lumped into one. This got me thinking. What if I wanted to install Windows Ultimate on a netbook, then run XP on it at the same time, will it explode or something? (Wait, do netbooks even support hardware virtualisation?)  Obviously somebody in Microsoft’s marketing departments didn’t talk with the product design department.

Not to mention the support hell it will all create. Where you once had to support 10,000 copies of Windows, you now have to support 20,000. (yes I ripped that shamelessly off somewhere I can’t remember now) Oh, and what was that about Windows stopping their support for depreciated Windows versions? Looks like it might not happen.

Seriously, somebody please help me understand the thinking that goes behind all of this. “Let’s create two products to cover all our bases. One will only allow 3 programs to be run at one time, and another we’ll simply take our 7 year old product we once said we wouldn’t support anymore, and lump it in one big package.”

Oh wait a minute, why didn’t they choose to lump Vista with it?

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Let’s start off by saying I do not hate Microsoft with a vengeance. True, I do think their Windows operating system is a flop, but let’s not have that impression taint the new Windows 7, eh? For the more technically inclined, I ran Windows 7 build 7000 – amd64, on a VirtualBox. The actual OS underneath was Gentoo Linux. Let’s take a look at what we see first (after it’s all installed):

Well, the install process was…slow. I had to leave it overnight. (started the install at about 12:00AM), and things has a knack of staying at 0%. Choosing the date and time seemed a bit bugged, as I could change the time, but not the date (which was wrong). Of course, the slow install could’ve been because I was running it on a virtual box. (Compared to the Ubuntu install, the Ubuntu was faster, and more user friendly).

The start up screen was nice, and had a flashy little animation showing the Windows logo glowing somewhat. The logon was pretty dumbass proof (type. in. password), and up there you see the screen it shows when you log in. I think there was something wrong because I expected compositing of some sort, but I didn’t get any. So as you can see, the taskbar there is pretty darn opaque. This also meant I didn’t get a lot of the eyecandy, including the well-publisized show desktop effect (which I don’t see what the hype is about anyway).

The taskbar, as you can see, is the most obvious change. The first thought that came across my mind was “This looks like KDE 3.x”. In case you don’t know, KDE is a user interface for Linux, and the 3.x version is … old :) I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying Windows has stolen an old idea of Linux. Apparently each application now only shows as a huge icon on your taskbar. At the same time, you have quicklaunch icons which look pretty much identical. I found it a bit disconcerting at first, but to be honest it wasn’t hard to confuse against. However, this concept also made each application have to group, and since I tend to run quite a lot of applications (especially because Windows doesn’t have any concept of multiple desktops – gosh they are slow) this new task bar would personally act as a cripple to my workflow. It would make it hard to manage a lot of open windows. Especially because it doesn’t show the names of the windows, which can show a lot of useful information (eg: file browser – which folder you are in, web browser – the website you’re on, email client- which folder, irc- which channel, etc). Of course, I’m sure there is a legacy option, but I believe this change was for the worse. The ratio of the size of things on the taskbar to the area of the taskbar seem very uneven, and so I also find that there is a lot of space wasted – which is a sign of bad design. Of course, some times these can have good aesthetic effects, but not in this case (in my opinion).

When initally poking around, I was quite impressed with the changes. As you can see, the calculator has been beefed up (small things do count), you can see the grouping in the taskbar, some desktop widgets, and a theme that has been applied. When poking around a bit more, I found that the experience got worse and worse. My initial reaction to the possibility of the themeing support (in the control panel – more about that later) was “finally!”, but apparently all it does is change your wallpaper and your clock design. Ooooh. Innovation. What a anticlimax. The grouping likes to split the tabs in internet explorer into separate items. What a waste of tabs in the first place if you’re going to treat them like separate applications in your task bar. I was also quite disappointed with the packaged set of desktop widgets – hardly any of them would be actually practically useful for me.

Next up was IE. They apparently did upgrades. And yes they did. It looks…bulkier than ever. The menus and such take up about 300 pixels, if not more. The bookmark support is pathetic, the url bar doesn’t guess well, the new compatibility mode is well… hell for web designers, as now we’ve got even more stuff to try and insert hacks for, the refresh and stop buttons are put… well, at the opposite end of the interface. This is quite daft to be honest. THe search uses live search which is next to useless, and it still likes to block my downloads randomly. The zoom has improved though, and I have heard the speed has increased, but since I use TMNet as my ISP, this is uncertain. If you look on the taskbar, you can also see that  a little extra line has appeared next to the IE icon, this shows I have more than one tab open. This is useful. However treating tabs as separate applications like I mentioned before, is not.

Finally we look at the start menu and the control panel. The conrol panel is a maze. There are about a hundred options, and within them cross links to each option, and further subsections. Take a look at the screenshot. See how many are shown (there are two columns), then look at the scroll bar. Thankfullly they’ve implmented a Control Panel Search option – however the search doesn’t yield very useful results. That control panel really needs to be completely redone -it’s horrible.

The start menu is … well, not much of a huge change since vista.  For some reason they thought it might be a good idea to put a “screen capturing” application as one of the options in the main start menu. Personally I believe that space should be reserved for the most often used and important applications. Oh well. Also, all the other power management options have been put into a menu that you can access when you press a tiny little arrow next to the shut down button. There are 5 options you can do there. So much for keeping things simple – mark my words: that menu’ll confuse people. Oh, and here’s the really great thing, the shut down doesn’t ask for any confirmation. Once you click it (especially easy because it’s right next to “My Programs”, some options, and the power management options) it just shuts down whether you like it or not. Who cares about your work, now Windows wants you to be able to shut down with one click. Might as well pull out the power plug whilst your at it. The lack of session management is also disappointing.

Oh, and finally for general things I didn’t like. The sticky notes seemed to be a whole other application on itself, and not integrated at all. I might be wrong, but that was how it seemed to be managed. Solitaire lagged like crazy (maybe because I was on a VirtualBox, but all the same, nothing else seemed that laggy – just the usual Windows speed). Paint had stolen some ideas from Linux’s KDE Paint (KolourPaint I think it was called) and now has a ribbon – wow, how complex do you want to make it? Also, the file structure has gone bonkers. The Documents and Settings has been replaced by “Users”. Also, who uses My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures etc as they should be used? (eg: Documents only for office docs like .doc, .ppt, etc, music for music files, pictures for picture files) Most people create their own structure all within My Documents. Windows trying to enforce some crappy file directory structure upon people, telling them how it should be organised is pathetic. Especially because now we have My Docuements, My Pictures, My Videos, My Music, My Links, My Saved Games, My Notes, My Bookmarks, and a whole bunch more “My” folders.

Now, it wasn’t all that bad. There were a lot of new special effects, and enough glowing items to make me die of epilepsy if I move my mouse across the screen of the regular file manager. They’ve really overdone the characteristic glossy style that Windows has been employing lately, and though I hate that style, maybe some like it.

A change nonetheless. A change worth a couple hundred bucks and the next gen hardware? Probably not.

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