Team Member Blog
For quite a while now, Linux enthusiasts have been predicting the arrival of the “Year of Linux,” at which time they anticipate that the operating system will come to enjoy widespread use among the desktops of both consumers and the corporate world. In their view, this will finally put an end to the aging Wintel Duopoly. Recently, Windows has actually recovered some of its lost ground over Linux, as netbook buyers have tended to return a purchased machine with a highly-tuned Linux distribution in favor of one with the outdated, slower, but more familiar, Windows XP. 
The time for Linux is coming, but it’s not going to arrive via the standard Gnome or KDE desktop environments. The big threat to the seemingly invincible Microsoft stronghold will accompany the current rise in popularity of the smartphone. The Linux kernel has already made progress in the smartphone world, with both Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS on board. The biggest hurdle for any OS trying to gain market share is user interface familiarity. When a smartphone OS becomes familiar and comfortable to millions of people, based on their mobile phone usage, it will be much easier to chip away at Windows’ lead for their desktops. After using an Android phone for a some time to manage emails while on the go, it will make sense to manage emails with the Android OS while in the office. At some point, we’ll be connecting a larger screen, keyboard and mouse to our smartphones, and thus eliminate the need for a separate desktop machine or laptop altogether.
Attempts at merging the gap between the smartphone and the desktop are already being attempted. While they’re not likely to be wildly successful yet, they do illustrate a possible future for the world of personal computing, in which Linux is a popular choice.
For more information, check out:
http://moblin.org/
http://www.tecspeak.com/gadgets/pcs/acer-aspire-one-android-netbook
Filed in: Team Member Blog
Railscast Rocks!
I am sending out a big thank you to Ryan Bates for taking the time to do Railscasts. These are the best screencasts I have ever seen. Ryan always has a new episode every Monday morning and the quality is always amazing. The content is always relevant. If it is not related to something I am working on now or some topic that I am hearing about a lot in the community then it ends up being something I am glad I learned about in two weeks. The best part is its free!!! If you are programing with Rails and not watching Railscasts then you should be. This should be required viewing for any class on Rails. Even if you are not programming with Rails I recommend watching these screencasts.
So Ryan:
Thank You!
-Kevin Runde
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For the past three years, my mother and I have created a memories video for the second grade class that she teaches at Arboretum Elementary School in Waunakee. Over the course of the school year she takes pictures and videos of field trips, plays, holidays and other events. Then we compile them with music and effects into a half-hour presentation for the students and their parents. This year, Tammy was able to join us for the screening of the class movie. 
Each student gets his or her own copy of the DVD to take home at the end of the year. We even found DVDs with a picture of a movie reel on the top, and the kids really got a kick out of it!
While I’m usually spending my time at the computer programming, my roots are in multimedia, so it’s always fun to use the iLife software that comes with the Mac. Additionally, it’s fun to work on a project with a member of my family for a change. However, for me, the best part of the project is seeing the reactions of the students in the class as they watch the video – and sing and dance along with the music!
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Performance Tuning – The end of the beginning
When I started these posts I did not want to end up with a list of “If you have problem X then do Y”. Unfortunately, I have used information like that and its usually been wrong. Instead, I wanted to pass on the the process of how I do performance tuning hoping it will help someone else. The tools, the metrics, the patterns don’t do you any good if you do not know how to apply them. If you don’t understand “you don’t know what you don’t know” then you’ll probably stumble around and may never find the cause of the problem and just point at something like the database telling people it’s the databases fault. If you are a persuasive person you’ll get everyone to believe you and your company may spend millions of dollars on hardware and software to upgrade the database. Congrats you’ve probably just made the project a financial failure. If the database is truly the problem you should be able to go to the database team and show them what specific SQL calls are slow. Maybe the data model is messed up or the application is doing way more commits than any database can handle or maybe the database just needs to have the indexes rebuilt or it’s statistics updated.
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In my GET IT presentations, I ask each group if they think boys would be better than girls in an IT job. Until last week I never had a single girl say yes. Between the two GET IT presentations I completed in the last week I suddenly had 3 girls think boys would be better. When asked why they said “yes”, they commonly stated the following responses:
Boys play video games a lot.
Boys are always on the computer.
Boys are just better at that kind of thing.
I was surprised that the first comment made the girls think that is what makes a good IT employee. To me, it shows that we still have work to do in terms of educating young girls about IT careers. I know plenty of people who love and excel at video games but wouldn’t be instant IT experts. Happily, after the program was complete nearly 85% said they were interested in an IT career. That’s progress in the right direction but we still need to keep at it to continue to break the stereotype. If you have daughters, nieces, or know middle school aged girls, ask them the same question and see what they say. I think this may be getting at the core reason why the numbers of women in IT are so low.
Filed in: Team Member Blog
When we received our first order of the new QWANtify pens, I opened the shipping package with anticipation and then dismay. . .
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I’ve been working lately on setting up Ubuntu linux on my home and work computers with mixed success. On one hand, I love how much faster many things are than XP/Vista. On the other hand, I’ve struggled mightily in a couple different areas to do things that XP/Vista do pretty well out of the box. I know, I know, you get what you pay for in many cases. I was really looking forward to getting going in Linux and sticking it to ‘the man’ by dumping Windows altogether, but I’ve found a great degree of truth in what a wise friend once said. After his own initial foray into Linux he posited that “Linux is free … If your time is worthless.” I was hoping, given all I’ve read about Ubuntu, that I would be able to prove him wrong with that distro, but alas, he was right. Crap.
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Every year, there is more evidence that your thoughts, moods, emotions, and belief system have a fundamental impact on the body’s basic health and healing mechanisms. Yes, it’s true, laughing cures sickness. Doctors have estimated that almost 85% of all human illnesses are curable by the body’s own healing system. Building a positive focus in your life plays a huge role in supporting the body’s immune system and laughing really does help. Are you laughing yet?
Filed in: Team Member Blog