software Archives - Sky's Blog

Null pointer at Starbucks

6 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Approaching the cash register at Starbucks I noticed this perhaps puzzling message on the little LCD display. It has nothing to do with the economic meltdown, or the amount of cash in the cash drawer, but instead reflects a programming error!

Generally a register displays a short greeting on its display when it is “off” like Come back soon (or at Squaw Valley Winter’s here). In this case the string of characters that usually contains the greeting was probably missing, and the software, encountering the situation, displays the message “null” meaning null pointer error. Made me laugh out loud, and I’d guess that nobody else who saw the message that day had the slightest idea that this little word represented one of the oldest programming mistakes in the book.

Essential Strategies for Eventually Launching a Site

22 February, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I was reading Dion Hinchcliff’s “50 Essential Strategies for Creating a Successful Web 2.0 Product” (you should go read it when you have more time) and I’ve cherry-picked the points that ring true for me. His points are good and very interesting, but some are real gems of wisdom^[1]. And I’ll add some of my own observations to this article. I’ll limit mine to 10 and if you’re ambitious you can read the 50 in his blog. One of the overarching principles is that, as he says, “The Web Community Gets Smarter Every Time It Builds A Product” – which I will exend to add that we marketers and developers are constantly learning, and the more we involve people early in our development processes, and the more closely we listen to them, the faster and better our development cycles will be.
[Read more…]

Ubuntu desktop (LTS) 8.04

30 May, 2008 by sky 1 Comment

Ubuntu is an always-free desktop (and server, if you wish) operating system. It has all of the comforts of home. I’ve been running Linux for many years, but mostly in its server-flavor, not desktop. Over a year ago I was playing with Debian Linux and for reasons I don’t recall I decided to load up Ubuntu. It is really a great little system! Why should anyone care about Ubuntu? Well there are many reasons that it’s good to have alternatives – and free ones at that – to the big operating systems. For one, these systems are free. For another, they are for the most part open source, which means that anybody can modify or add to them. [See video of Richard Stallman talking about free software at AirJaldi 2006]

The most impressive thing about it is that it can coexist with Windows XP on the same computer. I found out about this entirely by accident.

For the most part this was a great and very positive experience. Details follow… [Read more…]

On again, off again, the future of connectivity

15 January, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

If you live in the US and a few other parts of the world, you might think that “being connected 24/7” is the future of the entire world. That we will have mobile communication and memory and computing devices with us everywhere we go and that they’ll be connected to the network and consequently the rest of the world, at all times. That the world will be Twitter-like. Especially tweens may think this way. I suppose that US tweens don’t even think about there being any alternative. They’re just connected and that’s the way it is.

Well, there are more than a few barriers to “being connected 24/7” which lead me to believe that our real connectivity model will be “on again, off again.” And that what developers need to focus on is memory/computerpower that is self-sufficient and can operate standalone most of the time, but can instantly “sync” itself to the rest of the world when a connection is available. If you have a PDA or iPod or practically any device that utilizes large files, you’re already acquainted with the term sync.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about this. Vis the (last month) announcement of the Kindle, an e-book reader on steroids, that syncs itself whenever it has a network connection and otherwise doesn’t seem to care. (I’ve used e-books for years, but in the form of downloaded files and “reader” software on my computer.) Groove, which I haven’t used for a couple of years, also had this kind of model – opportunistic syncing. Google Docs (documents) currently works only when you’re actually online, but there’s lots of talk about how to enable it for offline work, including perhaps a big Ajax (Ajax==”lots of javascript on the browser side manipulating DOM objects”) effort that would allow offline work that would later on upload to the big server in the sky. And I’ve blogged already about Ecto and other tools that let you create blog entries while offline and then upload them when you’re connected.

What’s the real future? Well, it’s obvious to me. Ultimately we’ll all carry devices that are capable of functioning “quite well” in standalone mode, but which sync up whenever there’s connectivity, refreshing information from the network while at the same time updating our own information on the net. Remember in 2013 to remind me of this and see if I was right.

Looking back at video and ICT4D

23 December, 2007 by sky Leave a Comment

Every once in a while I look back at resources that I’ve created and/or blogged, and suggest that you take a look at them.

The AirJaldi 2006 Summit, held in Dharamsala, India, was a several-day sequence of presentations, panels and then a week of workshops, dealing with Wireless infrastructure and how these can be used to further the development of the world into a place where veryone can live a healthy, happy life. The meeting was attended by social activists of many sorts, all of whom had an interest in using communications technologies.

Here’s your action item for today: The Video page for Airjaldi I would recommend that you take a look at what’s available there.Here are two of my favorites:

Dr. Rodger Downer, keynote speaker, and President Emeritus of the University of Limerick (Ireland), A Global Perspective on Sustainability {28 minutes running time}

Dr. Richard Stallman, keynote speaker, On free software, human rights, development and GNU. {52 minutes running time IMPORTANT NOTE: the camera was not rolling until shortly after the talk was underway}

Everything else on that page is worth viewing! Just a reminder.

You can find all of my articles on AirJaldi here in my blog. I tried to blog the conference in real-time, since we had wi-fi available in the hall, but it was really a challenge. It’s hard to estimate how much bandwidth, and how many routers, to provide for so many tech-literate participants. So I ended up writing blog entries each evening, and then posting them during the day. This set off an inquiry into offline blogging tools (like MarsEdit and Ecto) which I use to this day. And an overview of blogging tools. And it continued my series I’m a Turtle about how I carry my “home” (computer) on my back(pack) everywhere I go (cyber-nomadics).