What do you think? Could it work?

Ok, so they got JJ Abrams to executive produce the next Star Trek Movie.  That’s exciting.  According to IMDB, Matt Damon is slated to play Captain Kirk.  I’m not sure what to think about that.  Last week, a teaser poster for the movie was released.  Looks cool.  It’s too bad the movie is 2 years off.  Here’s the official site for Star Trek XI info.

Last night my wife was enrolling in her university’s health insurance plan.  The insurance company’s website committed one of my biggest web development pet peeves: using a Java applet for a navigation menu.  This brings up my question: when is it appropriate to use a Java applet on your web site?  I’d appreciate your responses in the comments thread.

(As a side note, it was also very poorly implemented.  I got an error saying that I needed to make sure Java was installed for Internet Explorer on my version of Windows.  We were using Safari on the Mac!!)

Yeah, I know it’s absurd, but I love absurdity. The Samsung Q1 is the first consumer Ultra Mobile PC released. It uses some cutting edge technology developed in a joint venture with Microsoft and Intel. The Newton Messagepad 2000 was released in 1997 by Apple Computer. Which one will come out ahead?

So, when you sell something on eBay for more than you expect and they want you to ship it to Nigeria, you’re probably being scammed. If you’re still not sure, wait and see if you receive an email from “PayPal” claiming payment has been sent but won’t be posted until the item is shipped. If you get such and email and the grammer is poor, you’re probably being scammed. Still not sure? Read these:

• Beware of Fraud
• ebay scam?

We’re selling Megan’s computer on eBay right now.  It’s a great machine in great shape; she just want’s something smaller.

He’s back!

In one of my web searches for ThinWire and Ajax frameworks, I stumbled upon Wikipedia articles about some other frameworks. I decided that if these other frameworks deserved articles, then so did ThinWire. In an attempt to get something up there quick, I used the text from our submission to Ajax Patterns. Within minutes, it had been flagged as a copyright violation. Despite my protests and claims that I authored both the Ajax Patterns and Wikipedia article, it was deleted.

My second attempt involved copying the text from the ThinWire.com site into an article. This submission was flagged by an editor as advertisement (which is technically true). Today I rewrote the article, making it more objective and less of a sales pitch. I then invited other people to download the framework, and add their more obective analysis to the article. I was reprimanded by the editor again because apparantly original research is not allowed in a Wikipedia article. But the artcle remains because I qualify as an expert on the subject, and expert writings are allowed. Those guys are strict!

Of course some would argue that I’m already there.  Regardless, the following songs have been stuck in my (and my wife’s) head for a few days now.  Enjoy:

• We Didn't Start the Fire
• Big, Buckin' Chicken

I know what I just said is considered blasphemy, but it’s the truth.  SourceForge is the undisputed king of Open Source project hosting.  They provide Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects much needed tools like bug tracking, mailing lists, forums, and download mirrors.  They also collect activity statistics so that project managers know how many people are visiting the project page, downloading the software, etc.

Being hosted on SourceForge is great from a marketing perspective as well.  Having your project listed on SourceForge gives it a sense of legitimacy in the open source community.  Project managers can publish press releases and news articles to appear in SourceForge’s main news site.  Also the projects with the most activity get listed on the home page.  Sounds good,  right?

Well, the feature list is excelent, but SourceForge has a lot of technical problems.  I haven’t been able to check any project statistics for 3 days now.  There were 2 full days this week where the site was completely down, and then when it came back up no one could log in.  The tools themselves (with the exception of the download mirrors) are all pretty weak.  There are much better (free) alternatives to the SourceForge provided tools.

Having said all that, I realize that we will probably stay with SourceForge.  Brand loyalty is very strong even in the open source community.  There are better services out there now, but SourceForge was there first, and that’s why they have over 100,000 open source projects hosted with them.  I can deal with some sub-par admin features, I just hope they can become more reliable.

The past few weeks have been very interesting at work. It has been frustrating to be without my website because I’ve had many things I wanted to write about. It’s been about two weeks since we released ThinWire under the GNU General Public License. Since then, it has been a new experience watching the project slowly grow. Every day we look to see if someone has reviewed it. So far only this Japanese site has written a review. Since I don’t speak Japanese, and the Google Translator is less than helpful, we’re not really sure if they like it or not.

This past week, we joined the thousands of open source projects on SourceForge. We’re now able to accurately track downloads, which are growing by the day. SourceForge does a good job with download mirrors. Their other services are lacking. (I’ll probably have more to say/rant about this later)

This is a new experience for me and for my company. I’ll continue to chronicle the open source journey here. If you haven’t checked out ThinWire, you should go download it. It has the potential to change the status of web applications.

Ok, let me just say that iicinternet.com hosting sucks.  They offered an impressive package that looked good on paper, but the service and general quality of the hosting was very lacking.  While I decide where to host next, I’ll be pointing my domain to this free Wordpress blog.  I’d also like to mention that godaddy.com rocks!  You can’t beat their prices and the services that you get for free are exceptional.  My plans for the site was to redesign it using the Wordpress engine anyway, so I figured I’d let them host it for free as well. I’m losing some flexibility here, but when I can combine this with the host of other free online services available, I should be able to handle this just fine.

Note: You should be able to post comments without logging in. If you are interested in posting stories to the main page (like the old site), you will need a free wordpress.com login. Once you have that, just send me the email address you registered with, and I’ll add you as an author.