June 2009 Archives

It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond

Congratulations!

Yesterday in Pittsburg Tim Appnel announced Melody, an open source fork of MovableType. I would like to congratulate everyone who has worked very hard to make this happen. I am uncharateristically excited about this project. The main reason for the excitement is that I have never witnessed a fork up close before. I know some of the players, and I am familiar in passing with most of the rest. I have wanted to see this happen since I first read about the evolution of fetchmail in The Cathedral and the Bazaar .

Beyond the fanfare of Fork and hype of Community

At this time, the code of Melody is not stable and can only be obtained though GitHub. Information about obtaining the code is available on the download page. The web site states that they hope to have a consumer release in the "Fall of 09".

Melody is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.

Ah. "C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y" Great. Yes, a community of users is required for open source projects to make sense. But the details of Melody's goals seem to be the same thing that MovableType.org promised .

What will make Melody different from Movable Type Open Source?

Well, to hear Ben Trott, the original author of Movable Type tell it, MT is stable and Melody is experimental. But Ben also acknowledges what I find to be an intriguing, if under-publicized, aspect of the project, "integration with the code of other open source projects".

In February of 2008, Tim Appnel argued eloquently on the MTOS mailing list, "...there are other more important reasons for migrating away from homebrew solutions and to module in CPAN that exist beyond MTOS." One of the specific open source modules that was being discussed in that post was CGI::Application . cgiapp is a framework for constructing CGI applications. (Movable Type is a CGI program.)

Tim's stated benefits included:

• "effectively leveraging resources" He wants to use existing CPAN code instead of inventing every function and subroutine in-house.
• "better embracing open source" He thinks that if we contribute parts of the system to CPAN, some new people will use the parts, and some of those will become part of our community.

And so it starts.

Although I knew in advance that Melody was being announced on Tuesday, the first time I was made aware that it had actually happened was on the CGI::Application mailing list. Mark Stosberg, advocate of simplicity (I think I like this guy, I hope I get to meet him sometime) and technology, and (one of ?) the lead CGI::Application developers has given Melody a positive write up. on his blog.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Windows 7 is the first release of a MS operating system I have actually been looking forward to. I have used the beta and the RC a little; and as soon as I can get my hands on a non-expiring version, I am going to switch my main desktop over to Windows 7 and move forward. Earlier this week Microsoft announced that will happen on October 22nd when Windows 7 will be available in stores . (I would do it now, but Murphy's Law states that the expiration date of the RC will be on a day when I do not possibly have time and the day before I cannot be without my main desktop PC.)

Here's a sneak peak at the desktop, Notice that the task bar and start menu can be positioned on any side of your monitor, not just the bottom? When I first noticed this, I thought about Xorg, or MacOSX that have this UI element configured differently. I wondered if the position of menu bars made any difference to usability, or adoption. (For historical purposes, you may be interested to know Start has been more or less stuck in the lower left since Windows 95 and NT 4.0) Gizmodo has an even more optimistic take on the Task Bar updates.

Microsoft has created a couple of gestures for dealing with windows. To Maximize a Window you can move the window off the top of the screen and drop it. To size a window to see it next to other windows (Side-by-Side view) drag it to the side of the screen and drop. (I am not sure if this works exactly as intended or even very well on multiple monitor configurations.)

It is my understanding that many of the early adopters to Vista suffered a lot of hardware issues. This has not been that case for me with Windows 7, but I run all my desktops under VMWare. I understand that Microsoft has learned their lesson from the problems that happened under Vista and modern hardware will be supported. (Your mileage may vary.)

And finally all those of you who don't want the your computer to tell you before you do things that might mess up the system, the UAC (User account control) settings are adjustable. All the way from "Bug me as much as Vista did or a little more" down to "Just let me break my computer now". In actuality there are 4 settings and the default allows users to change Windows settings without warning.

Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to explore the XP Mode virtualiztion is available for Windows 7. This is supposed to allow users to run Windows XP as a virtual machine in Windows 7. I'll let you know what I find out.