Games Money

Sometimes when I’m driving long distances or trying to fall asleep, I give myself little thought exercises along the lines of the following:

If I knew someone who was going to start a small business with 10 or fewer employees and he or she wanted to maximally use free or open source software and services, what would I recommend?

Let me explain a few of the words. By “free” I mean both “free as in beer” as well as “free as in freedom,” as the saying goes. That is, it is ok to use software that does not cost anything, even if it is not “open source,” and it is certainly ok to use “free and open source software” that uses the GPL, Apache, BSD, Eclipse, etc. licenses.

For free services I would include Google Mail, Yahoo Maps, and all sorts of no-cost Web 2.0 primary applications and mashups. I would also include free hosting sites like WordPress.com and Blogger.com. Here something would get extra points if I could not just use it as a remote service but also grab the code and put it on my own site.

Part of the reason for doing this exercise is because I think small business owners will increasingly be using a mix of open source and proprietary software. The use of the latter is well known and is a very large and potentially profitable market category. Because no two businesses are identical, the correct answer to a question as above would depend on technical expertise, type of business, comfort with remote services, local support, and budget.

There might be some applications for which no non-proprietary software is available or appropriate. I give as example one that was offered by an analyst I met last month: “pig farming software.” (Though I should admit that I haven’t searched SourceForge for that one.) There are questions of legacy data handling, and commitment to moving forward with a new IT strategy that might break backwards compatibility. Finally, people need to be able to sleep at night, being comfortable with the risks they have taken in how their computer systems are built and maintained.

My plan is to explore this area in a series of blog posts on no fixed schedule and then perhaps write something up that is more extensive and comprehensive. I am not recommending that people eschew proprietary software if it meets their needs, but I want to look at the free and open source options out there.

In particular, you can find out about my employer’s many offerings at the IBM Small Business Resource Center. (That was a word from my sponsor, for completeness.) Many others provide hardware, software, and services for small businesses.

First question: I said 10 employees above. How large can that number be made before considerations get much different? What are the variables that affect that? Does it need to be smaller in some cases?  I will insist for this discussion that it is greater than zero!

Also See: John Locke’s 2004 book Open Source Solutions For Small Business Problems and the associated website.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: Open Source, Software.
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Today we had the first snow of the season that amounted to more than a dusting. It made it slightly more difficult to get my son to school this morning as I had to deal both with people being overly cautious and those who I will politely say weren’t cautious enough. (I have all sorts of names for the latter group, most of which I mutter under my breath.)

If you recall the rose from the entry a few days ago, here is the same bloom in snow, with a temperature of 27F.

For a larger view of what we’ve gotten, here’s a shot of the porch I worked on this summer.

The shots were taken with a Canon EOS Rebel XTi.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
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• Oblong’s g-speak: the ‘Minority Report’ OS brought to life - Engadget

  “If you’ve been waiting for that Minority Report-style interface to really come to fruition, you can finally exhale. One of the science advisors from the Steven Spielberg film — along with a team of other zany visionaries — has created an honest-to-goodness, real-world implementation of the computer systems seen in the movie.”

  tags: OB, interface, computer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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• What is Thai Curry? Red, Yellow, Green, Massaman | Temple of Thai

  “Curry is a favorite dish in Thai restaurants throughout the world and for good reason. Based on a delicious paste of fresh and dried herbs and spices, curry is unique and unlike any dish in Western cuisine. The endless combinations and fresh taste make curry a popular dish. But what exactly is curry?”

  tags: OB, Thai, food, curry

• Architecture - Buffalo, a City Filled With Architectural History, Looks to the Future - NYTimes.com

  “Buffalo was founded on a rich tradition of architectural experimentation. The architects who worked here were among the first to break with European traditions to create an aesthetic of their own, rooted in American ideals about individualism, commerce and social mobility. And today its grass-roots preservation movement is driven not by Disney-inspired developers but by a vibrant coalition of part-time preservationists, amateur historians and third-generation residents who have made reclaiming the city’s history a deeply personal mission.”

  tags: OB, Buffalo, architecture

• Photography Composition Articles Library

  Many articles about how to compose better photographic images.

  tags: OB, photography, composition, howto

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
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This last week I experimented with a couple of different ways of reorganizing this blog and making it easier for me to extend the website in the future.

The first thing I looked at was drupal. I’ve played with this from time to time and always end up with the same conclusion: while it looks great and powerful, moving my 2500+ blog entries and 2600+ comments to it, with all the design elements would simply be too much work.

Let me explain that the blog is just part of the overall website. It is currently built on WordPress, but the CSS design applies to the entire site. Thus the essay section uses the same style as the blog. The blog is embedded in a more general design so that, for example, the left sidebar is common to everything. Thus WordPress does not run all the content, but is just one part of it.

The photo application that I wrote uses the style but shares no code with WordPress. The early stage Second Life book has a lot of PHP processing in it but, again, shares nothing with WordPress. This means that I can’t just move to a new WordPress theme and expect the rest of the website to follow. I also can’t let WordPress run the whole site, though I could probably such a few things such as the essays under WordPress as pages.

So I left the overall website architecture intact but started moving a few things around. You’ll notice that it is no longer the “Open Blog” but just the blog. There is just one blog on this site, so there is no reason to call it out specially. Also I talk about a lot of things that don’t necessarily have “open” in their names. This doesn’t mean that I won’t talk about open source and standards.

I moved some things that were on the blog-specific right sidebar to the site left sidebar. I tweaked a bit of the CSS. Generally I’m going to try to smooth out the rough edges when moving from one area to another.

I would like to change the overall style but I every time to play with something, I always come back to this one. It’s not bad, but I’ve been staring at it for over four years. I’m coming to the conclusion that any style change would involve changes to some colors and some font tweaks, not wholesale reshuffling of elements. Ideally I would develop a sequence of little changes and put them in place over time.

For some reason I keep coming back to thinking that I want green to be the dominant color rather than blue, but just switching the background and a few font colors doesn’t do it for me. Let me know if you see a site with a dark smoky green whose style I should emulate.

By the way, in my experiments, typically around midnight, I tried to create a new WordPress blog and import the full contents of this blog into it. This involved exporting the current blog into XML and downloading it, then uploading it into the new blog. I had to tweak several PHP parameters to get the upload to work at all (such as the sizes of upload files and files retrieved by POST), but I never got it to work completely.

The fie would upload and then things would crash in the middle, leaving me with partial contents. If I tried to import again, I would get multiple copies of categories. It’s possible that PHP is just quitting, though I upped the usual script runtime parameters. Nothing was obvious in the error logs.

I know there are various schemes to hand edit the 12M XML export file and break it up into smaller pieces, but since this was just an experiment, I didn’t bother. So while it made me nervous that the import didn’t work smoothly, I’m confident that it would be possible with more work.

By the way, using the WP-DBManager plugin to suck the old blog into the new blog did not work. The database would get bigger but the blog entries would not show up under WordPress. Otherwise, I love this plugin and recommend it for maintenance of a single WordPress blog’s database.

This is all I want: simple and 100% reliable export of one WordPress blog of arbitrary size, and import into another one. They can even be on the same physical website, so I don’t want to have to download and upload big files.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: Blog and Website.
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• Mathematica’s New Cloud Computing Partnership - Analytics - InformationWeek

  “Last week, Wolfram Research announced that it was developing a cloud computing service for users of its Mathematica software used to graph and understand complex mathematics, physics, and engineering problems.”

  tags: OB, Mathematica, software, mathematics, cloud

• Obama To Post Fireside Chats On YouTube

  “So the weekly chat is skipping TV entirely and going straight from radio to YouTube. The address (which will still be broadcast over the radio) is usually only about four minutes long, a perfect length for YouTube.”

  tags: OB, government, web2.0, Obama

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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Lately I’ve been thinking about doing a writing project, possibly a book. This is not new, as I have this urge on a fairly regular basis. One thing that’s holding me back is that I’ve already been involved in two book publishing activities.

The first was in 1991-92 when Dick Jenks and I set out to write a book for the computer algebra system that Dick’s team developed at IBM Research. The original system was called Scratchpad, then Scratchpad II, and finally AXIOM. It was an interesting system and it included a state-of-the-art object oriented programming language that some other languages are only now just catching up to. At the other extreme was a user-facing interpreter that sucked in mathematical expressions and emitted the results of calculations. Having a very tightly typed back-end with a very loosely typed front-end was a real challenge.

For example, when a user entered ‘x’ we could just leave it as a symbol or a basic expression. If the input was ‘x+1′ then you got a Polynomial(Integer). If you typed ‘x+1/2′ then you got a Polynomial(RationalNumber). AXIOM was great at sophisticated mathematics, but the inherent overhead made it a bit slow for simple calculations. I described the document aspects of the system in another blog entry and the code itself is now open source.

Commercial systems like Maple and Mathematica have long since eclipsed AXIOM in common use, though our system was remarkable and leading edge in its time.

The breadth of mathematics covered by the system was and is impressive, and so the book came in at 742 pages. We handled all the formatting for the book. All the displayed computations in the book were real; I developed a workflow where the book copy was transformed and run through the system, with the output captured in place. Then some clean-up and post-processing took place. We eventually delivered the camera-ready pages to Springer-Verlag.

It was a tremendous amount of work to both write and process the book. This was also the time when I was completing my doctoral dissertation. These activities drove me to near exhaustion. I remember walking into my IBM office after having some time off and just being hit with a psychological wave of fatigue. I get tired thinking about it now, and that was sixteen years ago.

This book was written as part of my job. I never received a dime in royalties, just my salary, which I was very, very happy to get. Nevertheless, the book easily took up a year of my time in total labor, with many other activities going on concurrently for the duration of the effort.

At various times I’ve authored and co-authored articles that ended up in books. In 1998, Michel Goossens and Sebastian Rahtz asked me to write a chapter for a book they were putting together. The LaTeX Web Companion was a collection of topics about how to combine the LaTeX technology so suitable for mathematical and scientific publishing with web technologies.

My chapter was about techexplorer, a C++ software application and Netscape plugin my team I wrote for mathematical publishing. I wrote the chapter over the Christmas holidays and it came in at 28 pages. That included several images, including one of my daughter, and many examples. It took some time to produce and was basically easy to write.

Michel and Sebastian were very generous royalty-wise with the other two sub-authors and me. I still get a few hundred dollars every year on sales of this book.

So my two personal experiences range from “long, exhausting, time-consuming, with no royalties” to “short, quick, and profitable.” As I think about doing another project, something in the middle would be fine, but more toward the short and profitable side would be better!

Whether I end up writing something that resembles a book is an unknown, but I’ll use this blog entry to kick off my exploration of modern publishing methods. Lulu? Amazon Digital Text Platform? I’ll investigate and comment on them occasionally as time permits. This may end up just being a thought experiment, but will be fun to examine.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: Books.
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• Doug Mahugh : ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC (OIC TC)

  “I’ve had a few people ask recently whether Microsoft would be participating in the OIC TC, and I’m glad to report that as of today we’ve signed up.”

  Excellent news, Doug. The ODF train just keeps on rolling!

  tags: OB, ODF, OASIS, Microsoft

• Dartmouth Junior Wins County Election - NYTimes.com

  “Vanessa Sievers, a Dartmouth College junior, was not content to wait tables or make coffee as a side job. Instead she ran for treasurer of Grafton County, N.H., and won, unseating the incumbent and unleashing a war of words.”

  tags: OB, politics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Posted under: Document Formats, News, Politics.
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The weather up here in northwestern New York has been pretty dreary the last few days. It’s been cold and wet, the forecast for the weekend is the same, but today it’s 60 F and sunny. I took advantage of this to run out at lunch time and spray some Wilt-Pruf on the evergreens that I planted a few weeks ago as part of the side porch restoration project.

Though I’ve never used it before, Wilt-Pruf is supposed to reduce the amount of water that is lost through the leaves of a plant and is especially recommended for winter. Since our first-snow-to-last-snow time span is about 5 months, I thought it would be good to try it on our new landscape investments. I’m hoping, in particular, that it helps a rhododendron survive the cold.

According to its website, Wilt-Pruf is an “anti-transpirant,” which is my new word for the day.

Two years ago I published a photo of the “last rose” of the season. That was on October 15. That same plant is still yielding blooms this year, though I doubt they’ll last much longer. The first photo is of the best of the flowers on the bush.

While I had the camera out, I shot some photos of two of our four cats, the two males.

Gideon, the tiger, is 13 and Beatnik, in black and white, is 3. Gideon is the older cat in what we consider our second generation of felines and Beatnik is the younger of the third generation.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
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• How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You

  Best just to take a look at this.

  tags: OB, cats, humor

• James Governor’s Monkchips » IBM Joins Obama’s Coalition for a Smart Planet: Change!

  “But this time around I feel things could be different. Why? Because IBM is choosing to work on exactly the right problems- that problems that Obama has also pledged to make his own. The kind of problems that Greenmonk is trying to help tackle.”

  tags: OB, smarter planet: green environment

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor’s Website and Blog, 2008.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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