The Sikh Geek

I think this is a really good question and I’m extremely glad I asked it. I’ve just been reading the submissions from my fellow PALs to Andrea Russell, who is composing an email to her Managers on the achievements and the associated metrics. I have to say that I’m completely amazed and I’ve been literally reading the responses with my mouth wide open. It makes anything I’ve done look like a quick jaunt around my own living room for about 5 minutes. I would publish it all but I would need many many pages. I just hope my colleagues publicise their own efforts and Microsoft puts this information out publicly and not just to the “Powers that Be”. If anyone says there is no leadership or good things aren’t happening in the SBS Community then I will laugh in their face and unveil a parchment of good deeds and sacrifice which will stretch many parsecs!

I was reading Viral Tarpara’s blog post about Facebook possibly Open Sourcing its code. Viral hoped that they didn’t choose the GPL because it would stop others commercialising derivative works. This is quite a common perception and something not helped by the Free Software Foundation itself. But is this true? Now, only a Judge and a Court of Law can actually make those decisions about the provisions of a License. What we do know is that GPL Software is commercialised and so are derivative works. Linux is an example of GPL Software and which is incorporated with proprietary code such as device drivers and sold on a subscription basis by companies such as Red Hat and Novell. Last time I looked these were fairly commercial organisations. There is a great book entitled “Open Source Licensing” by Lawrence Rosen which looks at these issues from a legal perspective. It is true that the FSF has not wanted the linking of non GPL code with GPL code but as Rosen points out in his book, what matters is the actual terms and conditions which don’t directly preclude this happening and also having this tested in Court and therefore the Precdents that would go with it. Linus Torvalds has been fairly vocal on this and wanting the freedom to incorporate/link non-GPL and GPL code.

The GNU project was started back in 1984 to create a Unix Like Operating System but the kernel was never completed and so the GNU suite of programmes were used with the Linux Kernel and Linux is a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds who has chosen to license the Linux Kernel using the GPL v2. It’s strange that an organisation like the FSF promoting Software Freedom, doesn’t want people to have the freedom to chose the Licenses under which a system/product is put together.

Well, it’s actually going to be a combination of Ubuntu LTS 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and OpenSuse 11.0 (hopefully when that gets released sometime in June). The main needs are to use Bugzilla and Subversion and also to look more closely at Mono and see how far we can really go with cross platform development with it.

In the recent Linux Format Magazine review Ubuntu 8.04 got a 7/10 and I can see why now. It’s a good distro, easy to install and configure but it’s not trying to be anything spectacular or cutting edge. One of my previous pains with Linux has always been getting stuff installed and having to build stuff from source and resolve library dependencies. It’s not pretty and life is just too short to be messing with things like that. I know some see it as a test manhood but not me! The Synaptic Package Manager and the .deb files of Debian are about the best things around and the online respositories are extremely fast for downloading from.

Accessing email from Cougar is done from Outlook Web Access via Firefox 3 beta as Evolution doesn’t support connecting to Exchange 2007. I don’t know whether there is a resolution to this at the moment. Also, I cannot browse my network shares on Cougar but having looked at the latest Samba version (3.0.29), I think I might have to upgrade to that.

I had the usual having to install libdvdcss to watch DVDs as most Linux distros won’t provide this because of the legal implications. I’ve installed Skype and I’m using Kopete for Messenger and how could I forget Twitter, which is sorted out with the Firefox addin TwitterFox.

There’s also a great game called Open Arena which is a Quakesque like experience, so shooting up some badies is catered for. So, for now I think I’m equipped for general day to day usage.

It’s fast and responsive on my lowly laptop and with Vista on it, things are frustratingly slow.

An American Car Dealer is giving a free handgun or a $250 fuel card with each new truck or car that you buy. Apparently the offer is working really well and pretty much everyone has opted for the handgun except for one woman who said that she had loads at home already! So, I was thinking that maybe this could be great promotional offer for SBS 2008 and if you couldn’t get it installed in three easy steps you could just blow your brains out with the handgun:-)

… and to think Vlad is always goading me on the crazy things Indians do !!!

Despite it’s downtime and its questionable interpretation of its Terms of Service, I’m increasingly finding Twitter a great place to connect with people. I’m not going to try and persuade you to join Twitter, you’re all grown up people who can make their own decisions on that.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vriyait and it would be great to follow you back.

Now, before you get too excited I think this is US only. But there are details of an Autotask offer to SBSC Partners which I believe is quite interesting and after David Salzberg of Autotask came to our SBS Group meeting, I understand this might arrive in the UK sometime as well.

If you’d be interested in this being available in the UK, then maybe leave a comment and I can try and feed this back to Autotask.

Yes, the Worldwide SBSC Team have created a Facebook Group for anyone who wants to connect, ask questions and discuss topics for the WWPC SMB Forum. The people who really matter and can actually do something with your feedback are on there such as Andrea Russell and Deanna Trencher.

So, don’t say "nobody ever listens to us" or "Microsoft is such a big faceless organisation"…

… okay, I’m off to try and persuade them to open a Twitter Account now or maybe that should be a Friend Feed Account?

The Mother of All Social Networking Conferences is now FREE and has been shortened to a one day affair. It seems the conference fee would’ve tipped the scales for many businesses in the Global Credit Crunch crisis but I think we know what the real reason is and it begins with "T" and rhymes with "right"!

The Programme is now a one day agenda but still has an evening Dinner and I won’t have the pressure of presenting, phew! I can sit and absorb from the pews although I will have the honour of introducing Steve Clayton.

But, if you are seriously interested in learning about 21st Century Networking ideas and some amazing face-to-face conversations, then sign up now and you have absolutely no excuses whatsoever now.

I love the pleasant surprises that being part of SBSC and a PAL throws up and today was one of those moments. I had a Messenger contact to accept when I logged in today and even though I didn’t recognise the person, I accepted it. It was from Gregory Lemmon who is based in the British Virgin Islands and is a new SBSC Partner and has been running a Group of IT Professionals for a couple of years and is wanting to grow the Community there and hopefully spread it around the Caribbean. We chatted on Messenger for a while and he said he’d come across my blog. I asked him to email me some details which I sent on to Andrea Russell, the Worldwide SBSC Programme Lead and she straightaway found the right people for Gregory to hopefully work with from Microsoft.

I’m really impressed with what Gregory is doing and that he’s seeing what is happening around the SBSC World and wanting the same to happen in his area. Good luck to you Gregory and I’m glad you connected with me.

Also, you can see the commitment of people like Andrea to drive SBSC forward and I will be personally thanking her for it when I see her in Houston in July.

This is a GREAT COMMUNITY and I really don’t care what anyone else thinks. If I can affect some positive change somewhere then that’s fantastic even if it is quite small.

… and if Microsoft want a Community Evangelist for the Caribbean then I’m their man

One of the things that I’m doing at the moment is looking at putting together a distributed software development environment. It’s one area where having knowledge of Open Source applications is a plus because there are some great tools for setting up a scalable environment where people across the globe can work independently and track issues. In an earlier life I set up a development environment for a software consultancy that I worked for that was based on Ant, CVS and Bugzilla. This was for Java development using Netbeans and developing plugins for it as well. It all worked beautifully and once I’d explained the concept of non-exclusive check outs to the developers (as they were all used to systems where you locked checkouts to yourself) and merging/resolving conflicts everything was sweetness and light.

Obviously things have moved on and now I’m having to look to Subversion as the source code system but with plugins that will work with Visual Studio. Whilst the venerable CVS was great it had some limitations, with one of the major ones being unable to rename files/directories in your respository.

So, whilst we could invest in something like Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, I’m thinking why? This mixed approach could bring major advantages to us without having to make a large upfront investment.

If you have any thoughts/suggestions on this I’d be interested to know?