A Great Holiday Gift

February 11, 2007· by Tammy Adler

QWANtify team members did something very cool this year for the Christmas holiday.

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Madison Barcamp

February 11, 2007· by Scott Fradkin

I’ve finally decided to go to Madison Barcamp.  It should be a whole lot of fun.  It’s taking place on March 3 and 4 at the Inn on the Park on the capitol square.  Barcamps describe themselves as an un-conference.  What it seems to me is a whole bunch of people hanging out and talking about a bunch of really fun technical things.  The website is http://www.barcampmadison.com.

One of the rules about attending Barcamp is that you have to help out in some capacity.  I’ve decided to give a presentation about Gentoo Linux.

I’m real interested in seeing some of the other presentations, too.  It should be a good place to meet a bunch of people and have some fun learning about a lot of different things.  Be sure to sign up soon.

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Google Performs Testing on the Toilet

January 27, 2007· by Scott Fradkin

I’m still trying to figure out whether Google’s Testing on the Toilet blog will actually be helpful.  It’s an interesting premise, though.  According to their blog, they regularly write some stuff about various testing topics, then plaster their bathrooms with what they wrote.  The first official testing entry includes a PDF link that will let you plaster your own bathroom.

This is pretty cool, though.  There are all kinds of rumors about Google’s development process and how it’s extremely agile.  I can’t imagine they’d create this blog if they weren’t big into testing.

I’ll certainly be checking it out regularly to see what kind of tidbits of information they’ve got.  Here’s a handy link for your favorite feed viewer: Google Testing Atom Link

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Emacs vs. vi - Editor Wars

January 6, 2007· by Scott Fradkin

I ran across a thread on Slashdot [it.slashdot.org] that linked to an article on the Register [theregister.co.uk] talking about Bill Joy, his impending retirement from Sun, and how he created the vi editor.  It’s interesting that someone decided to post a thread about an article that was written almost three-and-a-half years ago.  But, that’s not the point.  It brought up the whole Emacs vs. vi argument.

It seems like this argument rears its ugly head every so often on Slashdot for some unknown reason.  It’s well known in the UNIX and Linux circles that more often than not, developers/sys-admins/etc. either use Emacs or vi to get all their editing done in the terminal world.  It’s a similar argument to whether you like the Xbox or PS2 better.

Which do I use?  Well… if I had to choose, I’d choose Emacs.  I tried… really, really tried to figure out vi when I was back in school, but to no avail.  Even though people tried to tell me that vi was waaaay better than Emacs, I would have none of it.  I turned to Emacs.  For me, Emacs did the job better than vi.  It just seemed more natural.  I couldn’t get used to what I thought were incomprehensible control keys and no easy to find documentation with vi.  So, my entire college career was Emacs-ful and I still maintain that bias.

Truth be told, though… At home, I don’t even use Emacs anymore.  When I need to do some quick editing of a file from a terminal window I just use Nano.  Now, Nano isn’t the greatest text editor in the world.  It’s not even close.  It’s a Pico clone [wikipedia], so you get all the un-robustness (is that a word?) of that type of editor.  Why do I use it?  It’s simple to use.  There’s no hassle in learning all kind of key combinations.  I just want to edit text quickly, and Nano fits the bill.  This may be somewhat of a bias from using Gentoo since Nano is the default terminal editor that is installed, but it works for me.

This gets me thinking.  What does make a good editing program?  I use Nano from a terminal.  For quick text editing in the GUI realm I usually use gedit [wikipedia] (think glorified version of Notepad).  For programming, I use Eclipse.  In the Windows world I’ll use TextPad [textpad.com].

For the most part, the editors I’ve chosen are fairly simple, uncluttered, and don’t require vast tomes of information to figure out how to use.

What it really comes down to, I think, is pure personal preference.  The reason that there are so many different text editing programs available for so many different operating systems is because people’s preferences range so widely.  Still, it seems that there’s a large contingent of developers and sys-admins that treat this as some sort of polarizing thing.  Either you’re with us or you’re against us.  I find the whole Emacs vs. vi debate to be amusing.

Can’t we all just get along?

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Presentation on January 22

December 26, 2006· by Scott Fradkin

On January 22, 2007, I’ll be giving a presentation at the Madison Rails meeting.  The meeting is at MATC downtown and the presentation should start somewhere around 6:15ish.

The title of the presentation is Web Development Framework Comparisions.  During the presentation I’ll show the development of some administration pages for a simple store application using Java/J2EE, Ruby on Rails, and Grails.  Full demo applications and presentation materials will be forthcoming.

For more information check out the Madison Rails website athttp://www.madisonrails.com.

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Searching for a Revolution

December 16, 2006· by Scott Fradkin

I ran across a link to an article on Slashdot [Slashdot] that purports to be a list of search engine evolutions for 2007.  What it amounts to is a press release by a company called Hakia trying to garner interest in their search engine product.  The press release dredges up all kinds of search buzzwords such as “semantic analysis” and “fuzzy logic”.  It is a beta product, but even so, if you take a look at the Slashdot comments, others have written that this company really doesn’t do a good job returning relevant results.  I’m sure Hakia would add, “yet” to the end of that sentence.

This does bring up an interesting subject, though.  What would make a search engine better?  And, would it actually make any difference?  Has Google done such a good job pulling all of us in that we won’t look elsewhere for our Interweb searching needs?

Google has some amazing resources at their disposal.  They hire the best and brightest programmers, many of which are Phds that know academic programming.  They have an extremely agile programming process in place.  They seem to have endless money to throw around.  Are they in it for the long haul?  I have to believe so.  I just can’t believe that they’re sitting back on their laurels and not trying to advance the state of searching.

Certainly, even as good as Google is most of the time, their searches could be better.  Hakia is definitely on to something.  Searching needs to branch away from using keywords and meta tags and try to make some sense out of page content in order to categorize it correctly.  Being able to write your searches in the form of a real question is also a good move.  I know that’s been tried before, but I think the problem is that it’s hard to pull out the real meaning of the question and apply it to a search when you’re searching with keywords.

One of these days, some company or individual will figure it out.  How to parse page content and index it in such a way as to allow people to search with more than just keywords so that we can have a better search experience and retrieve better results.

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One Laptop Per Child

December 7, 2006· by Scott Fradkin

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization [website] is creating a laptop aimed at children that only costs 100 US dollars.

Wikipedia has a really nice entry about it [wikipedia].

This laptop is a really impressive feat of engineering as far as I’m concerned.  The amount of stuff they’ve packed into this machine for 100 bucks (well… apparently 130 to 140 dollars to start out) is astounding.

It uses Linux as its OS, flash RAM rather than a hard disk, ad-hoc wireless mesh networking, a video camera, microphone, sound, USB, and a pretty decent LCD screen.  It’s engineered to use 2 to 3 watts of power for long battery life.  There’s even a separate power unit that will allow you to use hand power or foot power to recharge the battery.

The OLPC is interested in using this laptop as a modern learning tool for children living in some of the poorest places on this Earth.

There are a lot of interesting discussions that surround this project ranging from people who think that what the OLPC is doing is great, to people who believe that this is money better spent on the basics that these children need to live.

I think it would be kind of neat to be able to get one of these to see what it can do and what it can be made to do.  Unfortunately, the OLPC website says that it won’t be available to the general public.  Hopefully some of their ideas make their way into consumer models in the future.

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