Software Free

I’ve mentioned Chris Kelty’s Two Bits as part of my summer reading list. Although I have the PDF sitting in my “to read” folder I think I’m waiting on the hardcover I ordered from Amazon. Seems like the kind of book that requires more reflective reading.

In the meanwhile, here’s Chris presenting at a Berkman Luncheon Series event on June 17th, 2008:

Today VIA launched their OpenBook, an innovative subnotebook platform. You can buy it now and also download the raw CAD files released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareaAlike 3.0 license, meaning you can get the raw machine files to make whatever case or version you want, as long as you release your modifications under the same license and give attribution back to VIA. The VIA press release today states:

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

Lots of good quality discussion on the question of the Future (or Futures) of the Internet. There’s the upcoming conference to celebrate the 10th year of the founding of the Berkman Center, which is titled “The Future of the Internet.”

David Weinberger, whom I’m a clear fan of to anyone who reads this bog, was the keynote speaker this afternoon at ROFLCon, which the organizers pronounce like roffle-con, not spell out like R - O - F - L- con, which is how I pronounce it.

(Photo by kevingc on flickr, creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license).

See my rambling notes below:

He basically argued (riffing on many themes from Everything is Miscellaneous) that the internet has changed the nature of fame - that in the pre-internet, mass communications era, fame was incredibly scarce, and drew it’s power from scarcity - very few people could make someone famous, and the number of ways to become famous was very small.

This created a certain kind of fame we call celebrity, along with a bunch of notions of what that means.

As both a fan and user of the great technologies Python, and the Sun JVM (primarily via Java), I was very happy to come across this eWeek article which says that Sun announced the hiring of two key Python engineers. You can read more about the hiring of Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki at their respective blogs.

This is just a quick entry on how to see which software is using which ports. This comes in handy when trying to install an application server, web server, etc, and are getting errors like "port is in use".

Basically in any Unix type derivative such as Linux such (Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSe, etc.), as well as Mac OS X, all that you need to type this at the command line:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:

1. lsof -i

I remember there being a couple of commands in Windows which you could do this with, but it's been so long since I've used Windows on a regular basis I honestly don't remember how to do it. I do know you can use TCPView to accomplish the same thing, however.

It seems like for at least a couple of years now, I've had problems when trying to login to newegg.com with Firefox. Across different installs of Firefox, on Windows, OS X, and Linux, etc.. no matter what I tried, Firefox just didn't work at all. Today after my typical google search session, I did find a couple of solutions which took quite awhile to track down. If you're having problems logging into to Newegg, give these a try:

Easy solution:

In the address bar of Firefox, type:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:

1. about:config

Search or scroll down to the section called "network.http.sendRefererHeader" and change this value to 1.

For some reason, this was set to 2 on my machine.

Annoying solution:

Oof. The site was offline for a good 30 hours or so. I attempted to add a Ruby On Rails install to FastCGI for a family related project I've been working on and my server totally exploded.. even the file system became unreadable. It reminded me a lot of a 'buildworld' upgrade gone awry on FreeBSD. I think the Debian VPS image was so out of date that it ate itself trying to process all of the updates. Since that happened I decided to move to a shiny new Futurehosting Ubuntu VPS which is bigger/better/faster (1 GB of RAM now, previously 512 MB) and I can already tell that this machine is much faster than the past.

After having to learn a lot of MySQL DBA magic to repair some very broken databases in my backup, get DNS, Apache, MySQL, and all of that other sort of junk setup again, the site is finally back up with no data loss much to my surprise.

I'm going to skip over a rant about how much Axis2 sucks in order to pass a tip on how to include Axis2 artifacts (AAR's, MAR's, etc) into an EAR file using the Maven plugin to package EAR files, maven-ear-plugin. It's a pretty obvious solution but if you're in a hurry like I've been to convert a project from a single WAR to one with several EJB's, a WAR, etc, there are a lot of new things to learn all at the same time (how classloading works with EAR's in JBoss, how to share the same Hibernate transactions between your web app and EJB's, etc), and this was one of those little things which wasn't immediately obvious. If you're seeing exceptions like these when trying to package an EAR in Maven:

UPDATE: I was up too late, and didn't notice that it's update 6 for Java, not Java 6. This is just another update for Java 5... *sigh*

I've been up pretty late doing a little work and tying-up some last minute Christmas shopping, and out of the blue this Apple update window popped-up:

I'm super glad to finally see an Apple release of Java 6! I've been developing with SoyLatte lately and was going to write a quick tutorial on how to get it up and running on MacOS X, so I guess I don't necessarily need to do that now. Although given Apple's secrecy about Java releases and the future of Java on MacOS X, it certainly doesn't hurt to have an alternative around.

I'm still on Tiger-- I assume Leopard users are seeing this update too?

Having came across several interesting stories within the past week or two which were all career related, it reminded me of all of the good resources I've came across over the past few years related to the craft of Software Engineering. Maybe you're just looking to get started in Software Development and aren't sure if it's for you, or maybe you're a manager wondering why your employees are leaving-- all of these items and more are covered here.

1. Getting Started