tim ferro
ramblings of a code monkey, fanboy, and uber-geek

“The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available.
This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development
and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that
long road!

While compatibility is not perfect yet, thousands of applications have
been reported to work very well. Check http://appdb.winehq.org to see
the details for your favorite applications.” - Source

“Google today is announcing Android, the mobile OS and the Open Handset Alliance. Google will be releasing the first version of the software development kit for Android on November 12.” - Source

“JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today’s browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of MS’s IE team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language.” - Source

“Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.
The first of these experiments is based on Webrunner, which we’ve moved into the Mozilla Labs code repository and renamed to Prism.” - Source

“In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication.” - Source

This was too funny not to post…

“The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite’s software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.” - Source

Do you grok open source? I grok open source, and it’s awesome. The challenges, depth, commitment, and advances continue to amaze me. There are tons of amazing projects (Firefox, Fedora), books (The Cathedral and the Bazaar), users (Linus Torvalds), user groups (NOVA-LUG), and blogs (linux today).

To grok is more than just to know, it means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed. I think I have done that. I started and open source project (Anchuan.Org), volunteer for Tux.Org, have given speeches about open source (at Marymount University), and am now the chief contributor of an open source software business blog (OSS-biz).

All of these things have enriched my life and given my great feelings of accomplishment. I recommend that everyone get involved with open source anyway you can. It can be anything from just using Firefox to writing kernel code. Open source is a community, and new members are always welcome.

The fight for programming talent… - Source