Like anyone reading this dross, I spend my days getting a monitor tan.

Unlike most geeks, however, I don’t see the whole OSS vs. MS thing as a religion. Software are tools; use the proper tool for the proper job (if possible; often not but that’s a whole ‘nother entry).

I was thinking about this recently, having finished up quick Perl and ColdFusion demos for (different) clients.

With the work I’ve done and I’ve seen – and there has been more than a fair amount of each – I am starting to see a general pattern for the use of OSS vs. MS technologies. This is a great oversimplification, but bear with me.

I’m seeing the following:

• MS tools/technologies: Used with tech groups that are not as skilled technologically; used to quickly launch applications/build sites for clients.
• OSS tools/technologies: Used by tech-savvy and tech-skilled groups; tools used to simplify ongoing project work and to automate maintenance tasks (backups, weblog parsing…)

Yes, let the flames begin!

OK, let’s defend what I’ve said:

• Skill level: Some users of MS products are people that can kick my tech butt all over the kernel; however, you don’t have to grok server/DB/code innards to use MS products. That’s part of their appeal. Let’s take MS SQL Server as an example: Beyond queries/stored procs, all other tasks are GUI driven: Add user, create DTS, drop table etc. Wizards and clickable/right-clickable icons are all that’s needed to keep this (pretty damn good) DB running. If you really know what you’re doing, it makes a world of difference, but the point is you don’t have to know what you’re doing. Ditto for IIS, InterDev and so on. On the other hand, even setting up Apache on Linux can be daunting – you might even have to use vi to manually edit a httpd.conf file?? What does that even mean?? With OSS, you pretty much have to know what you’re doing – there is the man file, but you can’t right-click on anything at the command line to get a nice dialog box with help. While this required knowledge is a good thing in most cases, it’s also a barrier to entry – a bad thing.
• Use: Launch: If you want to get a database-driven site launched – say, for a demo – in the fastest time, I still maintain ColdFusion is the best (I’m lumping this in with MS, for this example ONLY – it’s a no-brainer tool). It eliminates all the database connectivity issues for you, and – in conjunction with MS SQL Server – allows you to bang a site out in record time. Also, there is the hosting issue: If you run on an NT server, it will support ASP; Unix sites will not necessarily support PHP (for example). Launching an OSS site is usually a little more complex: Often (usually) have to build the DB tables with scripts (not a GUI!), have to deal with the differences between, say, Perl and PHP as far as DBI is concerned and so on. Overall, slower. And if you go the Java route….way slower, be it servlets/EJB/JSP or some combo.
• Use: Maintenance: As soon as you get into the maintenance mode – assuming there IS such a need/interest, OSS kicks MS butt all over the place. One word: Scripting. OSS is sorta based on this (CLI); MS is not (GUI). I run both NT (2000) and Linux boxes at home; all backups and other maintenance needs are handled where ever possible by Linux: Just more straightforward and flexible (Perl script, Bash shell script, flexible CRON…).
• Caveats: Many caveats have been listed above; please note. Basically, this entry is to show how/why certain projects are begun in a given language (greatly simplified…). For demo or stuff that y0ou need to just launch and not extend much…duh! – Do it as easily as possible. If there will be a need/many needs to expand/extract/maintain the site, other tools – possibly complex – may be better suited. Again, this entry is a vast overview.

As noted above, this is a vast generalization, but I think it’s true.

And that doesn’t make either OSS or MS better/worse than the other.

And it doesn’t mean MS tools can’t be used for enterprise sites, or OSS is only for experts and so on. I’m just seeing trends…

The tool for the job, remember? I’m just seeing the job clearer now; before, I saw only the tools clearly.

One of the blogs I’ve been following for the last few months is Robert Scoble’s.

He really needs no introduction for most bloggers; if you’re clueless, just know that Scoble is a Microsoft higher-up who has a blog that touches on a lot of stuff, mainly Longhorn, as that is his area at MS. This is his personal blog, and he claims little interference from Gates/Ballmer et al, and it reads that way.

One of the interesting things I always take away from reading him is the notion that – first and foremost – MS is a business: It exists solely to make money. Everything else comes from this.

And I don’t write this in a negative way – it’s just reality.

MS is not out to help you or me; MS is out to make money. It’s called capitalism, and is often practiced in these United States.

OK?

But this capitalistic streak in MS means the following:

• MS can’t fix things that even it wants to: As Scoble notes, he’d love to get IE back up to being the most standards-compliant browser. But as he shares, how can you make a business case for spending, say, $100M to fix an old tool when a new version (embedded in Longhorn) is underway? You can’t.
• Other updates are tough to make: Simply because of the tight integration of tools and DLLs and all that, changes to anything is difficult – to change one DLL, for example, you have to make sure it works on all these platforms (Win 9x line, NT line, CE) – across all languages its deployed – and with all the tools that hit it (will this affect the print driver for the Epson123 printer with the Tablet OS blah blah…). Lots of dependancies. Remember the recent snafu with the Mac OSX update – Panther – that erased some users’ hard drives? That’s bad, but OSX users are (relatively) few. Imagine if the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (coming, I understand) did the same thing? Villagers with torches would be marching on Redmond!….
• MS is going to make decisions that lock you in: Why should this be a surprise? Hell, it’s only after years of squawking that Sun has (sort of) released Solaris for Intel (i.e., non-Sun hardware). This allows the vendor (MS/Sun) to make more money, and also has a benefit for users: If you buy, say, MS Advanced Server, you know MS SQL Server will run on it without a hitch (in theory, OK?). Sure, you can slap Oracle or mySQL on the box, but you don’t have the tight integration to the OS that allows some cools stuff to happen.
• Locked-in software is easier to support/extend (shared APIs etc) So you’re going to see an even bigger push for closed standards. Face it, open standards are great, but to get everyone on board with them is virtually impossible. And the standards formed are often weaker than a proprietary solution, simply because you can’t be all things to all people. You can, however, be all things to some (MS buyers) people much more easily. (NOTE: As indicated above, this integration can come at a cost)

Basically, Scoble frequently points out that MS is a business, a successful one at that. Part of the price users have to, as well as MS itself has to, pay for this success is that MS cannot be as nimble as small companies with a handful of products and one or two business targets. MS is all over the map, and even that small DLL change can effect a lot of stuff, which – in turn – affects the bottom line. MS != evil; MS == pragmatic.

I have to agree, at least to a degree.

Obviously, Scoble is talking from the point of view of a MS honcho, but he doesn’t sugarcoat things. He lightly slams MS in some cases, and in others – such as updating IE6.x – presents compelling arguments as to why that just can’t happen.

He does gloss over some issues – he does not really mention the whole security/lawsuit morass that the MS campus is sinking into, but I can excuse that. He is a MS honcho, and – his own blog or not – with that title comes responsibility.

And no, I don’t agree with him all the time. But he’s a nice counterpoint to all the anti-MS rants (see just about any thread on /.), and he frequently has interesting points of view.

I personally just don’t see how he has the time to write all he does – and he frequently responds in the comments threads, as well.

Information – biased or otherwise – is never a bad thing.

Made a slight tweak to the gallery section today.

Before, if no gallery parameter was present in the URL – or this parameter turned out to be a bogus gallery name (typo of someone messin’ with my URLs…), it would default to the “All Pictures” gallery.

Thinking about it, it made more sense to default to the gallery index.

Which is currently what it does.

Makes URL typing easier, as well. Instead of typing: “….gallery.cgi?gallery=[whatever gallery]”, I can just drop all params to get users to the index, which is the jump off point, anyway. Simply “…gallery/gallery.cgi”

This is good.

Sure, change is inevitable – and, in most cases, a good thing.

How to make the distinction on what the change Microsoft’s Longhorn will make is a bit perplexing. (Read some of Tim Bray’s observations, or read a Microsoft Avalon article).

Things are changing more than just an OS change. This isn’t just a new OS, it’s a change on par with the DOS CLI to GUI that the original Macintosh introduced (to the masses – don’t flame me on the whole PARC history; I know…).

I don’t quite understand it all – I’ve read too little about it all to venture solid opinions – but it appears to bring the scripting capabilities of HTML to higher-level languages. However, the scripts (in the case of Avalon, XAML – an XML-based language, I guess) are merely wrappers for distinct classes in the API. So, much like a H3 tag in HTML represents – if you will – an API call to the browser’s rendering engine (really a parsing operation, but bear with me), the XAML is an API call to the actual OS.

Youch! That’s powerful.

And allows the representation of objects/text to be the same in applications or the browser (hey, calling the same API).

I’m going to have to look more closely at all this, and see just what the heck it means for those not on Longhorn. Then what happens?

This is bigger than I ever thought.

< A few minutes later >

I just finished the Avalon article, which included this conclusion:

Hey, I was on the money about the Net/desktop (apps) convergence concept. Scary….

Again, end of the gallery, not the end of the galaxy.

No apocalypse now.

By end of the gallery, I mean I’ve finished up the backend of the gallery tool.

As outlined in my last entry, I decided to build a PHP/MySQL backend (uses Perl/flat files for front end). While it was a relatively straight-forward process, it was more work than I anticipated – isn’t it always?

And the [intentional] use of MySQL was a bit of a hindrance, but I wanted to use MySQL because it’s the predominant OSS DB out there, and I need more practice on it. And this project is pretty much a good fit for MySQL: Nothing too involved, just some selects and inserts. And all locally, so it’s a no-brainer (yes, perfect for me).

Here’s how the backend project ended up:

• Add/edit gallery page (all at once)
• Edit image name/desc (all at once)
• Add new image/reload existing image (processes and moves file to local and remote server)
• Gallery-to-Image mapping (gallery at a time)
• Include file for header (menu/DB connectivity etc)
• Processing page to generate all necessary TXT files for front end

I used the same CSS sheet as used for the front end (with some back-end classes additions tacked on), so the UI is the same and that’s one less file to maintain (good…).

As far as the database goes, it’s pretty much a trivial exercise – see the code below:

As you can see, three tables, the last of which is just a mapping table between the first two, so any picture can belong to any number of galleries.

Lots of busy work, but – for the most part – nothing earthshaking.

One of the nice aspects of this project was getting more experience with PHP and files – I’ve done it before, many times, but always separated by large chunks of time. A refresher is always nice.

Actually, it was a nice refresher in PHP, in general. I’ve been working more with Perl and ColdFusion recently, and I keep forgetting about how much I like PHP. And the more of it I learn, the more there is to like.

One new aspect of PHP – for me – was the FTP tools. I’d just never had the occasion to need them in PHP.

When I mentally architected this tool and decided on PHP, I didn’t even know if PHP supported FTP – I knew that it must, and that it probably wasn’t a hack, but I didn’t know. I just assumed that it did, and – if not – I’d just run exec() in PHP to either a shell or Perl script to do the FTP business.

Thankfully, PHP’s FTP tools are as I expected: Pretty extensive and pretty damn accessible.

The two complaints I have with PHP’s FTP functions are the following:

• The syntax is always – GET or PUT – remote, local. I am used to – Unix based – source [space] target. I was hosed on this for about a half hour, until I actually RTFM. Little weird to me, but consistent across the PHP FTP functions, and consistency is good.
• I’m probably missing something, but I don’t see support for MGET or MPUT – each GET or PUT is discrete, as far as I can tell (and, here, I have RTFM). Not a problem in this case for me, as I’m looping through galleries, creating them and uploading them. So it’s a one-at-a-time thing, anyway. But what if I wanted to upload all the JPEGs in a directory? I can’t do a “mput *.jpg .” type thing, as one can with most CLIs. Have to grab list and loop. OK, but still would be nice….maybe in v5

Overall, the Gallery Project was a blast, and it’s turned out well.

I need to do some tweaking – for example, build an FTP function for my MPUT-type needs – but it’s pretty solid and the damn thing actually works!

Time to scan in more pics….

No, no, no – put away the pointy-ear caps, you Trekkies: Birth of the Gallery, not Galaxy.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been incorporating some pictures of mine into this blog, including a random “Pic ‘0 the Day” (see left-hand column).

OK, so I had all these pics scanned in and uploaded, but … only one a day would appear.

Which was nice, but why not make a gallery of the pictures?

Better yet, how about multiple galleries – the pictures grouped by subject matter or what have you?

Yeah, why not?

So I worked on a method to get this working, and I have half of it done: the user-presentation layer.

OK, as mentioned, I have only half the project done: the part posted. Since I’m on Blogger and run off their database (for text only, not other stuff), I have limitations.

And my host does not allow databases on my plan (didn’t allow them at all until just recently), and the scripting languages supported are thin: Basically, this is a job for Perl and flat files.

It all came together fairly easily; I’m surprised that it worked well. I built it remotely and uploaded it and it worked flawlessly the first time. Wow. That’s cool.

• I have one file that is the list of all images (image name), title and description (since all images are in one directory, file names are unique). Call it the caption list.
• Another file is the list of galleries – the name of the .txt file that lists the gallery contents, the gallery name and gallery description. Currently, only four lines (four galleries)
• One .txt file each for every gallery; just a list of images in the gallery (the caption file contains the details, with the image name acting as the flat-file equivalent of primary/foreign key).

In this way, I can build galleries with whatever images exist; images can exist in more than one gallery – however, the title and description always resides in the caption file, so maintenance is trivial.

Ah, maintenance. That’s the second part.

How to maintain that – on my personal machine – and then push to the Web site daily (or whatever period I pick).

While flat files work great with Perl on my host, maintaining flat files doesn’t make a lot of sense. This really calls for a database app that pushes the data to flat files for publication.

Otherwise, it will be quite difficult to control.

So I’m thinking of building it as a PHP-mySQL application on my local machine. Build tools to add/alter the galleries, and then have a tool push the changes to my host.

Hmm…will be interesting.

Until then, enjoy what I have. I enjoyed building it, the twisted fool I am…

I confess – we geeks are a strange breed. (Actually, it’s surprising that we are allowed to breed…)

I had an algorithm for testing an e-mail address in Perl, but I just didn’t like it. Wasn’t robust enough for me.

I figured – and I’m sure I’m correct – that this has been a million times by a million people, and it would be for the taking somewhere on the Web.

Well, I found a couple of regexes that were close, but – again – not quite what I was looking for.

So I rolled my own (again…), and it think it’s what I want.

If the e-mail address doesn’t match this mask, invalid address:

/^([a-zA-Z0-9])+([\.a-zA-Z0-9_-])*@([a-zA-Z0-9_-])\.([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{2,4})/

Update 11/11/03: Improved below...

/^([a-zA-Z0-9])+([\.a-zA-Z0-9_-])+@([a-zA-Z0-9_-])+\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})$/

Notably, what this does that my other one didn’t is the following:

• Allows periods (dot), hyphens and underscores in first part of address (before @), but does not allow these special characters to be the first character.
• Allows only one @ character (flaw in my last regex)
• Requires 2-4 character domains (.ca, .net, .info). I haven’t checked this out at ICANN, but I think that 2-4 characters is the current upper and lower limits (another flaw in my last regex).

Go ahead, embrace your inner and outer geek…

As usual, Microsoft has been in the tech press recently (when aren’t they?).

There are a couple of issues that caught my interest:

MS Temp Fired for Blog Contents

According to his own blog, Michael Hanscom was fired from his temp position at Microsoft.

His crime? Taking pics of Apple G5’s being unloaded at the MS Campus and publishing the pics – and the loading dock’s whereabouts – on his blog.

OK, a lot of people seem outraged.

Why?

Mainly because of kneejerk anti-MS feelings, apparently.

This guy – in all innocence, to be fair – took pictures at work, published them on the Web, and disclosed the contents of what was being unloaded, where the dock was, where he worked and so on.

This isn’t good – even if there is a certain paranoia on the MS campus, why would they risk keeping this guy (only a temp, as well)? What will he photography/copy and post next? Code samples, meeting agendas, manager schedules? Sure, that sounds paranoid, but you just don’t out your employer in this manner, unless it’s a matter of public safety (which is why there are whistleblower laws).

Hanscom even tips his hand – in his blog entry – that he felt that pictures and postings could cause issues:

But then he posts the pictures with information about where the dock was and so on.

I’m sorry, I don’t feel too sorry for this guy – he screwed up, and – true – he didn’t mean anything malicious. But he did screw up.

Play you pay…

Microsoft Bets the Company on Longhorn

Even C|Net is getting into the speculation that this latest acknowledgement (not that it’s new info) from Redmond that Longhorn is a “bet the company” move, calling the gambit a

gamble.

I don’t get it.

This is a fulcrum point for MS – they can either (try to) keep selling WinNT-based OSes and virtually identical new editions of Office (is there anything in Word2000 that you cannot live without that’s not in Word95? Not unless you’re trying to used Word as a Quark-substitute).

This is the next stage in the evolution of personal computing, one that actually is predicated on the needs of business – like it or not, the DRM features, new file systems, services support and so on are squarely targeted at businesses.

Because it will make it simpler for Web services to (finally!) become commonplace.

Which is an interesting statement (if true) because that means that Web services won’t become commonplace for another four years or so (Longhorn due sometime in 2006; widespread adoption will take another couple of years after that).

But as far as the gamble MS is taking; I don’t think so. By the time the OS (and support tools, such as Yukon [new SQL Server]) rolls out, businesses will be ready. Businesses have been slow to embrace XP – sticking to 2000 or NT (but support is now gone, since June, I believe). Unless the OS is delayed too much (always a possibility) and businesses finally move to XP, there should be a real need for a new tool.

Especially if the businesses want to jump onto this new-fangled XML/Web Services thingee…

Loosely used on the ‘Net (especially in the Blogsphere), a meme is a sort of zeitgeist, something/someone with that intangible buzz. At least that’s how I’m going to refer to memes in this entry.

Today, some obvious memes are Google and the act I’m performing right now – blogging.

But – for reasons best left unwritten (not because I’m hiding anything, but the reasons are…meaningless and pretty darn boring – I’m been thinking about memes lately.

Mainly, I was thinking about memes of the past – things like that.

Expired Memes:

• Zdnet: Remember Zdnet? Next to C|Net’s news.com, it was my favorite tech news site for a few years. And then C|Net bought it. And it’s been going downhill ever since – a couple of good columnists left, but not much else. And it really doesn’t differentiate itself from news.com, so what’s the purpose? (Yeah, ad dollars..)
• Jon Katz: Love him or hate him, he has pretty much evaporated ever since he left/was cut from Wired.com – but he was relevant in some fashion for a while. Hell, Slashdot even has preference where you can suppress Jon Katz stories. While newbies probably never heard of him, Katz was a strong voice for some of the Web’s seminal years.
• Browser Wars: Remember the browser wars? Sure you do… There are actually a new set of browser wars going on, this time not for installed base, but for standards support. It’s not in the regular media much because the fight is different: In the first browser war, MS wanted to own the browser to control the desktop. That didn’t really work out the way anyone thought it would. Today, the browser war is standards bodies and developers crying for standards…and MS doesn’t much care. How does that help them?
• Netscape: Do I really need to comment?
• Content is King: While I think the pendulum will, to a degree, swing back to this meme, right now it’s more flash (literally – Macromedia’s Flash) than substance.
• Webmonkey: Remember when Webmonkey was relevant? A daily must-read? No more. Very sad.

Today’s Memes:

• Google: While the Google backlash is certainly building and has been noted here, Google is still to search engines what Windows is to OSes – except most consider Google the best engine, while Mac and Linux/*nix users will – and can – present strong arguments for their choices.
• Blogs: Again, there is a backlash in the works here – and the whole divisive nature of many eminent bloggers/blog tool makers has damaged adoption – but blogs have filled several important voids for many authors and readers:
  

  • Unbiased voices – single voices making a difference
  • Additional data – for reporters such as Dan Gillmor, blogs offer a way to supplement their stories, publish additional information that would never make it into dead tree publications (for many reasons). This cannot be a bad thing: Hey, don’t care about this extra stuff? Fine. It does not interfere with your print reading and so on. But it’s there if you care.
  • Publication ease – I’ve always maintained that the Internet’s killer app is not the Web, but e-mail. In the same way, blogging – for all its benefits – is (in my mind) most powerful as a simple way for anyone to publish. Sure, MS FrontPage is pretty easy and all that, but one still needs a domain (what’s a domain?), has to sorta understand FTP and so on. Fuggetaboutit. With some blog tools/services, all you need to know is how to use a browser and type. THAT’S damn powerful.
  • New life to the Home Page of yesterday: Today’s blog is yesterday’s My Home Page, to a large degree.

• Wireless: Not a strong meme, but certainly one that is almost past meme because it’s been adopted so widely. Hell, it’s expected nowadays at tech conferences, and this will bleed over to regular conferences and other areas. Wireless is a stealth meme because there are so few reasons to fight against it. One may consider, for example, a tablet PC to be either an oversized Palm or a crippled laptop. OK. But the argument against wireless is probably only one of two: 1) protocol issues (a, b, g…), or 2) Security (hard-wired more secure than wireless, in general. Beyond that, wireless is a good thing. And these arguments are not Windoze vs. Linux issues. These arguments are for specific instances and are can be easily reconciled.
• *nix: Linux is a meme in itself, but its also part of a larger meme, which can either be described as a Windoze backlash (in this case, not necessarily a knee-jerk reaction) or as a real trend: People are looking for a stable OS. With hardware becoming a commodity and increasingly powerful, OS software is becoming more interesting to folks. And Linux (stable, cheap, hard) is earning a lot of attention, as is Apple’s OS X – a BSD variant with a solid GUI slapped on top of it. While I run Windows, and will until it’s unnecessary (necesary now because most others do – vox populi standards compliance), I like the concept of Apples OS X – runs the Windows-type programs I need (MS Office, Photoshop) plus has the command-line interface that so many hate but I love. I’m always amazed that all the Linux talk and KDE vs. Gnome GUI flames take place without the explicit declaration that Apple has done what GNU/Linux community (Lindows, Wine…) has been trying to do for years: Rock solid OS with *nix underpinning that has a stable, attractive GUI and runs software people know and love – not just GIMP.

Yes, it’s time for most of the country – except most of Indiana and Arizona, I think – to revert back to Standard Time.

Time to reset all your clocks and change the batteries in the fire/smoke alarms.

I’m always amazed at just how many clocks there are in just my small house/small life:

• Kitchen: Coffee maker, microwave, wall clock
• Living rook: Just a wall clokc (Cuckoo clock, if you care..). I never use the VCR anymore, so that’s not touched
• Bedroom: Couple of alarm clocks
• Office: Desk clock
• Bathroom: Wall clock

And this does not count the five computers I have (all currently set to auto change, by the way – Windows and Linux), cell phone (again, auto) and a wristwatch.

And I would say that I don’t have as many clocks as many – No clock in the dining room, none in the basement other than one on the computer there.

We are a time-obsessed society.