Here’s a great read on Wikipedia’s Infrastructure. Two excellent sets of slides. A lot can be done with a LAMP stack. The common theme: caching and careful optimization. There are some really impressive stats in there.
Category: Open Source
The code is out there
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Open Source Corporate Email
According to ZDNet a Yankee Group report to be released next month found that of 1,000 IT managers and C-level executives, “23% of the survey respondents indicated they intend to migrate away from Exchange Server.” That’s a rather impressive number. Quite a few of those could go to Zimbra or Hula/NetMail, which could make great companions for Thunderbird, who buy the way is rapidly developing a calendar, which is starting to look pretty good.
It could be interesting to see what happens.
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HD Photo Follow Up
A few days ago I mentioned there are some limitations with HD Photo in it’s current state. The limitations are in the legal sense. Specifically they prohibit open source implementations. This obviously hinders adoption as many large organizations that work with graphics rely on open source software (think where we would be without GD or ImageMacick among many others). Bill Crow responded on my blog that it is royalty free in “all cases”. Great news. He then goes on to say:
That’s why we announced we’re committed to standardization. Once standardized, the goal is that the appropriate standards organization would then own the format and would publish a full specification. This would allow developers to create their own implementations independent of working with our source code in the DPK, with the option of releasing their implementation as open source.
Awesome. This does leave the question: why not release the DPK, specifically the encode/decode and push to get it in every popular graphics package. The blog has a new post that states:
Now we’re taking the next big step. Our goal is to turn the format over to an appropriate standards organization. Ideally, this will include the publishing of an open specification, making possible to implement compatible encoders and decoders that are completely independent of Microsoft’s reference source code. This should fully address any concerns that have been raised about the option for open source implementations.
That sounds promising. I guess time will tell. That leaves the door open for a browser like Firefox to eventually support HD Photo should it catch on. Who knows, perhaps we’ll all look at JPEG the way we look at 3½-inch floppy disks.
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HD Photo?
Microsoft is trying to standardize it’s new HD Photo (aka Windows Media Photo) format. In general the format sounds pretty decent (though I’ve yet to see it and really compare). From the site:
- Multiple color formats for display or print
- Fixed or floating point high dynamic range, wide gamut image encoding
- Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
- Extremely efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and sub-regions
- Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode
HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding. HD Photo delivers image quality that is comparable to JPEG-2000 and more than twice the quality of JPEG.
Now that does sound pretty good. According to the ComputerWorld article there will be support for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3. So what’s the catch?
I didn’t find this anywhere online, so I thought I’d post it. Norton AntiVirus up to and including 2007 doesn’t support POP3 over SSL. That’s a problem since sending mail without SSL is insecure, and sending mail over SSL with no virus scanning is also insecure. There is a fix.
Please note these directions, and intended to be a casual guide for experienced individuals. I’m not providing assistance or support.
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Iconified Metadata
Once upon a time there were no icons for feeds. Many sites used orange 
icon which really made no sense to the average user (what’s xml?). Then there was a feed icon 
. It then started to become a standard and webmasters were encouraged to adopt it. This was a great thing for users who want easy to find RSS feeds, and publishers who want users to easily find RSS feeds.
Then the idea of an OPML icon. Now there’s the idea of a “Share This” icon and a Microsummary icon (which I could see being a standard as the feature is cool enough for adoption). Then there are MicroFormat Icons.
Standard icons are a good thing, they are one less thing a user has to learn to distinguish between sites/products. But I do wonder if there’s really a need for what seems to be a bunch of icons. My fear is that it will just become a rainbow of colored icons with simple shapes.
For the share icon you could of course question the sustainability of such “user generated content” or “social networking” sites, or just the need to launch into them. They aren’t standardized, a protocol, format, etc. We don’t have a specific icon for news, weather, blogs, or even somewhat standardized things like email or IM. Email and IM at least have some standards, even though IM isn’t shared across the board. There are trends for some of these that tend to be “universal symbols” such as a newspaper for news, envelope for mail, etc. But no standardized icon.
For microsummaries, and microformats, do we really expect users to directly interact with them? Or use them in a more subconscious fashion similar to the <title/> tag on a webpage.
I question how effective all the icons will really be to end users in the long run. I can see the feed icon persisting, since it’s represents two standards at the moment (RSS/Atom) that both do the same thing. Both the technology and the icons are well adopted to further solidify it’s status as a standard icon.
Is there a need for the rainbow?
I’m not accusing or criticizing, but wondering (out loud) what the likelihood of users recognizing all these square icons really is. Should there really be a “standard icon” for everything we do in Web 2.0 (as they call it)? Or should it be more informal like it is for email and news?
Should we have an icon to link (via anchor) to the part of your page where you show the various icons your site has? An icon-icon? Perhaps that’s worthy of a Photoshop contest.
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Browser VM
One of the great things about virtual machines is you can test on a virtual machine, destroy it, and recreate it in pristine condition in a matter of seconds. You can do this with browsers as well. Before I mentioned PortableApps is a great thing to have on your USB drive. Well, you can also just unzip a copy to your desktop each time you want a clean version of Firefox. So keep your good install for yourself, and perhaps create another with extensions you want to test, or if you just want to test your site against an older version of Firefox. I believe it will still use plugins installed on your computer, but extensions, prefs, etc are totally separate. So each install is pristine. I keep a copy around of 1.0.x and 1.5.x as well as 2.0. So each time I want to test on an older version I can just run those. The prefs won’t mess anything up since it’s a fresh copy. You can keep your latest and greatest Firefox install with all your extensions and settings alone. This allows me to ensure everything works good in different versions without having to risk my preferences to older versions, or have to go through install/uninstall.
You can get various versions of Firefox here. Just download and extract to your desktop or some other easy to access place. I keep a copy of all the major versions around. Very handy.
I should note you can only run 1 version at a time, even though they use different preferences. Not sure if this is a fixable bug, something with serious work that just isn’t worth the effort, or something that XULRunner will take care of. Update: apparently you can, see comments below.
Unfortunately I don’t think there is a version of PortableApps for Mac/Linux users. So it may be Windows only for now.
In case you missed it, you can test IE7 via VirtualPC thanks to Microsoft.
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PortableApps Suite
If your a fan of running an application completely on your USB drive, check out the new PortableApps Suite. It’s really great. I’ve been using PortableApps for a while, and this is a real nice suite. Now things are easier to access than ever. The next improvement I’d like to see is some Mac versions become available. The ultimate solution would be Mac/Win/Linux versions that use the same data directory. At that point it would truly be portable. It’s also cool enough to work with third party applications, so you can add other things not available through them to the suite such as everyone’s favorite Putty. Great for Firefox on the go.
The advantage of the suite is not only the easy install, but the ability to quickly open applications without navigating to them. There are other tools out there like PStart, but this is in my opinion a little more polished.
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Installer Mess
Benjamin Smedberg has an interesting post on Ubuntu and it’s effort to be a provider of not only the OS, but the software around it. I think the ‘solution’ Ubuntu choose is really a workaround for a fundamental flaw in Linux. Getting software to run quickly and easily without intimate knowledge of the OS is tough at best.
By far the best out there, though not without it’s faults is Apple. Not only are many installs just drag/drop (though that is rather cool), but ones that do require an installer typically use Apple’s installer functionality, providing a very simple interface for the user. Most importantly when Apple switched to x86, they realized users don’t know/care what’s inside their computer, or about the differences in x86 and PPC architecture. The solution they came up with was “Universal Binaries” (similar to how FAT versions of applications were used when moving from 68k to PPC). At the end of the day, the user knows nothing. The software does the work. As good as Apple’s effort is, there is a flaw, uninstalling is not always the best. In most cases it’s just drag it to the trash, but there’s no undo for installed stuff like drivers.
Ubuntu would be best off pushing for the Linux community to follow a model similar to Apple with a few changes:
- Encourage applications to ship in the same package, and encourage distributions to use the same package installation system. Just like Apple, the user will have a familiar and obvious way of adding applications to their computer.
- This is the tough part: 1 download for most popular Linux distributions. So it doesn’t matter what version of ____ your running, you can just install and let the installer figure it out similar to Universal Binaries.
- One up Apple by providing a “roll back” or uninstaller that will remove and restore to what the system was before the installation was done.
Installing software on Linux stinks. Ubuntu is much better than the rest, but I don’t like how you have to rely on Ubuntu in order for that to be the case. There’s a market for someone who can solve the problem. It’s a barrier between Linux and the general user. Until someone solves it, Linux will likely remain a niche product in the desktop market.
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Lightning Strikes The iPod
I started working to implement support for Lighting (project to integrate Calendar into Thunderbird) to sync with Apple iPods via mozPod. Didn’t take to long before I had a successful sync. It’s not done yet, and likely some big evil bugs (read: including but not limited to loss of data or first born child), but it’s well on the way!
That’s right, we now have the ability to sync contacts and calendar to the iPod on Mac/Windows (Linux still on the todo list, though it’s mostly there). It will require Thunderbird 1.5 or later. No release date just yet.
How cool is that? 😀