David Adams Archive

In an "as told to" article for CIO.com, Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the Linux people and software on-track. Arguably the most surprising facet of Linus' management style is that he's perfectly willing to flame people when he thinks they're wrong--though he's also happy to be corrected himself. "Part of that, by the way, is not feeling shy about saying impolite things or showing some emotion. So I'd rather flame people for doing stupid things and call them stupid, rather than try to be too polite to the point where people didn't understand how strongly I felt about something." That's particularly interesting in light of several OSCON presenters who believe that the way to grow the open source community is to make projects more welcoming to would-be contributors. Do these attitudes actually contradict one another?

On August 1 2007, I published an article called "My Month with the iPhone" wherein I examined the iPhone's now well-known advantages and deficiencies and speculated extensively on where Apple was likely to take the phone, development-wise. Now that the new iPhone and the iPhone 2.0 software have been out for a few weeks, and there's been a whole new storm of praise and gripes raging, I thought it would be illuminating for me to re-visit my prognostications and take my lumps.

Terry Hancock offers a detailed dissection of the critical difference between power and freedom when it comes to understanding why Microsoft and GNU/Linux respectively are playing different games - and freedom is the only game in town for the free software.Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

I have recently been in the market for a new smartphone. The iPhone looks like some nice hardware and I'm already an AT&T customer, but after Apple's trend of pulling Apps from iTunes lately I'm just not buying. Apple has proven to me that I don't want to live in a closed ecosystem. It made me realize what my real issue with Apple is: their business practices.

In technology environment, keeping things simple takes lot more effort and maturity than keeping it complex. These 10 items are guidelines more than rules, that I have learned over the years doing intensive work on the IT infrastructure. These guidelines are mostly common sense and can be helpful for anybody who administers an IT system, including Linux/Windows Administrator, Network Administrator and DBA.

Take a look at the strategy of treating Linux instances as managed objects. Previous generations of management technologies all suffer from the problems of excessive complexity, heavyweight implementations, too fine-grained an approach, and so on. In effect, the area of Linux systems management infrastructure is wide open for a root and branch review.

"The Japanese love those things!" That's what I've heard a lot of people say when I've talked to them about my latest obsession, the Coco 6035Re Bidet toilet seat. As part of OSNews' ongoing project, "Building The Wired Home," I wanted to try to see what the march of technological progress has brought to the bathroom, so we installed a bidet seat in OSNews' House of the Future. It turns out, I'm pretty impressed.

Microsoft rarely gives out sales numbers, but Vista is another story. Due to bad press, the company apparently wants to remind everyone that Vista is still selling well. The software giant recently announced that it would be putting resources into launching a marketing campaign that will fight back against Apple's ads and incorrect Vista assumptions and will instead tell the "real Vista story."

Microsoft's Windows beat operating system rivals Mac OS X and Ubuntu in a three-month test of update server uptime, according to Pingdom, a Swedish uptime monitoring company.

InfoWorld's Curtis Franklin reviews the four leading contenders to supplant Microsoft Office in business and finds that, while Google Docs is not ready to take on the full mantle, OpenOffice and Zoho provide viable alternatives should IT endeavor to wean business off Office.

Neil McAllister raises questions regarding Web development skills in an era of constant innovation. Sure, low barriers to entry give underdog technologies ample opportunity to thrive without the backing of name-brand vendors. But doesn't this fragmentation of the Web development market put undue pressure on developers to specialize? The result is a crisis, McAllister concludes, one in which maintaining a marketable skill set and hiring for a particular Web project gets more difficult as the state of the art changes on an almost daily basis.

An ancient (at least 33 years old) stack-overflow bug has been discovered and fixed in yacc, thanks to a new malloc() implementation by Otto Moerbeek. More info and a complete description of the bug can be found here.

Although Mobile Safari is more than adequate at rendering normal Web pages, many Web developers created versions of applications aimed at the iPhone. Here in Part 2 of this series learn the common use of drill-down lists as a navigation method. Part 1 of this series took an existing Ruby on Rails Web application and began the process of augmenting it to serve iPhone users.

It's no surprise that Vista's vanilla operating system hasn't fared too well with some users. That said, why not customize it to make it better? ExtremeTech describes five useful and free Vista utilities designed to enhance Microsoft's latest operating system. One such application is TweakVI Basic, which allows users to customize Vista's user interface. Another is Launchy, which is a handy startup/launching application.