Having a Microsoft Day

What a day yesterday.

I had the dubious pleasure of delivering a SharePoint 2007 development course. The course was set on a Windows Server 2008, running SharePoint, IIS, SQL Server, Visual Studio and Office 2007.

My training career spans more than 10 years, and I've seen courses that went smooth as silk and courses that went terrible. However, I have never encountered a course as difficult as the one I just delivered.

A couple of crashes is to be expected, but to have Internet Explorer 7 crash every five minutes (literally!), and Visual Studio crash at least two dozen times and IIS blow up for no reasons is something I have never seen. As for the overall performance, let's just say that the course made very powerful machines look rather wimpy.

At least the participants had a chance to learn what they came to learn, and left reasonably satisfied. On the other hand, I'm not satisfied, since I know the course could have gone much more smoothly.

Oh well, it's water under the bridge and another nasty Microsoft story to add to my bible. for now, I'm back with my Linux machines, where souped-up hardware is not necessary to gain decent performance. Things work. I'm happy.

Been a while

I haven't posted in a while. I was on vacation, so please forgive me. However, I'm back at work, but then, I'm expecting my baby boy in about three weeks, so there may be silence for a while again.

There has been many minor events in the world of free software, but nothing earth shattering. My only frustration is ISO and their handling of the OOXML appeals.

Also, some of you may have heard that Viacom is suing Google over YouTube. Viacom is the owner of MTV, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. The suit has been ongoing ever since Google purchased YouTube. Viacom's claim is that YouTube is a haven of illegal movie uploads. To prove their point, Viacom has asked the judge that Google hand over all their user accounts as well as a list of all the videos they watched. The idea is that Viacom wants to demonstrate that copyrighted videos are more popular than non-copyrighted videos.

I think that it's only fair that Viacom attempts to protect their copyright. However, I cannot accept Viacom's request for identifiable user information. This means that Viacom would not only be able to know which videos are more popular on YouTube, they know immediately know who are the copyright infringer.

On one hand, it's true that whoever illegally uploads and whoever watches a copyrighted video on YouTube may be breaking the law. On the other, it's setting up the Internet to become a corporate police state.

In my opinion, Viacom is simply playing dirty to win the lawsuit against Google — a rather short-sighted strategy to control their copyright-catalog. It's the type of corporate action that pits David against Goliath — David being Google, the good guy.

Though I don't foresee this backfiring too much in Viacom's face, I'm of the opinion that Viacom will loose more than it will gain from this lawsuit even should they win.

On a personal note, I've aquired a mayhem device, also known as a video camera. Of course, the first victims of my mayhem device was the pets. The following video is the result.



Of course, it has been posted on YouTube ;). You may notice I've used copyrighted music. I would like to claim Fair Use.

Hope you have a great day!

KDE 4 - Is it really bad?

KDE, which stands for the 'K Desktop Environment,' is one of the many graphical environment for Linux. Some of the environment include Gnome & Xfce.

I use all three regularly for different reasons. I like Xfce on my Eee PC because it's lite and takes little resources. When introducing someone to Linux, I stick to the default Gnome environment since I find it reasonable easy to get started with. For my day-to-day, I recently switch to KDE 3.x.

In January 2008, the KDE team released version 4 of their desktop environment — a dramatic departure from the original design. The original reviews were remarkable positive for a first-generation desktop.

However, now that the party is over, the hangover starts. The bugs are starting to make itself known and users are getting more and more impatient to see their favourite KDE 3.x feature ported to version 4.

So, this begs the question: Is KDE 4 the new Vista?

I would like to answer the question with an emphatic no.

It's true that it's easy to draw parallels between KDE 4 and Windows Vista. For starters, it was late, it did not include all the promised features and was riddled with bugs upon delivery.

So, why is this different?

For starters, I don't think KDE 4 is mean to immediately replace KDE 3.x. Both are being developed in parallel. It may be preferable to think of KDE 4 as another desktop environment as opposed to the next version of KDE. The changes are too dramatic to liken it to an upgrade. Think Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X.

Another important point is that KDE 4 is available for early adopters. As opposed to Microsoft which is scrambling to get everyone to upgrade to Vista, the KDE developers are not forcing anyone to move to the next version. Of course, anyone who is interested can try it, and having used KDE 4 since before January, I can tell you that it's an impressive endeavour. It's a bold departure from KDE 3.

Finally, KDE 4 is free software, and that's what matters. You like it? Great! Don't like it? Then fix it! Don't care to fix it? Then go back to KDE 3 or Gnome or Xfce or whichever desktop environment tickles your fancy — and I think that this is what makes KDE 4 so different from Windows Vista. As opposed to Vista, where the license clearly states that 'you may not
work around any technical limitations in the software,' KDE 4, like any free software, encourages you to work around any limitation of the software.

Just like anything else in Linux, it's about choice. I personally congratulate the KDE developers for their bold foray into new territories with KDE version 4. It may not yet be to the level that KDE 3 users out of their environment, but it's getting there. And in a few years, I think that we'll see KDE 4 become an important player in the realm of desktop environments.