RasterWeb!

This InfoWorld article on open-source has the following statement from Brian Behlendorf:

One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn’t just a Web server, it’s a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition.

I heartily agree. I think some of the strongest points for many open-source projects are that they are so open – not just in the code – but in the development process, and in the interaction of the people involved. Through mailing lists, newsgroups, bug trackers, and now weblogs – you can really cut through the crap and see what a piece of software is really about.

And of course without people being involved in these projects, leveraging the work of other people, things wouldn’t be where they are today.

I’ll add my disclaimer here: I’m not against commercial software, heck, I even use commercial software,
but I hate to think of how dismal the software world would be without the contributions of open-source. If we
took all the open-source code out of Mac OS X or even out of Windows, well, things wouldn’t quite work
as well. (Mac OS X wouldn’t even exist!) Of course we wouldn’t even have the internet here to discuss this now, would we?

Ok, so iTunes (and 99 cents) will get you that song you want, but it’s not an MP3 is it? It’s some sort crazy protected format that limits what you can do with it, right? Sure… I think it’s in DRM format or something…

I’ve got a Mac with sound output. I’ve got a Mac with sound input. I’ve got cables. I’m not some audiophile phreak who would care about the degradation of the digital/audio/digital conversion process that much. Wait a minute, that’s too complex, what if I download a song, burn it onto an audio CD and then rip that CD back into MP3’s, what happens? Problem solved?

I guess the problem is still somewhat the laziness factor. I mean, the whole idea behind an easy to use, and affordable online music service is that it’s much simpler to pay for it, and play by the rules than to break the rules, or find creative ways around the rules.

I’ve never liked rules…

Dear Apple, I’m sick of this:

Please fix it immediately.

Thanks…

I was attempting to find the number of characters in a field in Microsoft SQL Server, so I tried this:

SELECT
  length(desc)
FROM
  foo;

That was the logical thing to try, and guess what? It worked just fine in MySQL, but no dice in Microsoft SQL Server, so after some searching and asking others I found out that Microsoft SQL Server has something called datalength, so I tried this:

SELECT
  datalength(desc)
FROM
  foo;

Well, that tells you the size of the field, but not the size of the data within the field… Oh, that’s right, rtrim is your friend…

SELECT
  datalength(rtrim(desc))
FROM
  foo;

Success! We get the number of characters instead of the size of the field itself. MySQL is blunt and just gives you the answer you want… Microsoft SQL Server has to get all technical on you, and make you clarify and specifically ask for what you want…

And if there’s something I missed, or there’s some other way to do it, let me know…

(Special thanks to O'Reilly for their SQL in a Nutshell info…)

Yesterday we had 720 requests from a robot named “Robot”, or maybe it was a spider named “Robot”.

Look, if you’re gonna write a robot, at least give it a cool name like Bender or Calculon, or something…

Hmmm, maybe it was named after “The Robot” from Lost In Space.