Universal wireless
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, February 27. 2006
With lots of ISPs and Telcos talking about the availability of "universally available wireless" I have to admit that I have a hard time not having that now, thanks to the spread of broadband to the masses, cheap wireless basestations, and clueless consumers.
2 example to prove my point: Whilst on vacation last year, I fully expected to suffer the slings and arrows of dialup, due to being at a beach resort, and the lack of high-speed at the rental property. Imagine my "surprise" when I booted up my iBook and it immediately found and utilized someone else's connectivity from a few house away. They hadn't even changed the SSID or the admin password.
And just this weekend I was again at a remote location (a retreat center) and knew that I wouldn't have much time to do any online work at all, so I didn't even bother bringing a laptop. But some of the people I went with did, and, sure enough, the center had a wireless setup, completely open. Thanks again!
It's all so incredibly commonplace. We live in a sea of free wireless right now, thanks to providers who don't even realize that they are giving it away.
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Berkeley - SleepyCat - Oracle
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Wednesday, February 15. 2006 in Junk Drawer
The first in what is rumored to be an Oracle buying spree.
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Increased diversity
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, February 13. 2006 in Open Source
The January 2006 issue of Linux Format had a nice article regarding the topic of Women in Open Source. In addition to others, I was interviewed for the article and they used a few of my quotes in there, which was nice. Of course, this got me thinking about diverity in Open Source even more so than usual, and although I agree that the female population is not adequately represented, there appears, at least to me, an even more obvious under-represented minority: African Americans.
Although it's true that, at least in the US, African Americans as a whole are a smaller minority than women, when I look at the various Open Source projects, and especially when attending conferences, there is a much smaller percentage of African Americans than one would expect.
Why is that?
Not to take anything at all away from the valid desire to increase diversity in gender, I wonder what can be done to increase the diversity in race...
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Telaen
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, February 6. 2006 in Open Source
I'm having fun working around with Telaen, which is a simple yet powerful webmail client built using PHP. The nice thing about it is that it requires a very barebones PHP build: no MySQL, IMAP, etc, yet it fully supports POP3 and IMAP, and has support for folders, HTML email, etc...
It's an offshoot of Uebimiau, which I liked and did some patches/development on, but that project seems to have stagnated, so a few of us started Telaen. Just this weekend I released our 2nd release candidate. A number of Uebimiau users seem pretty happy that we've kick-started development and support again. It's a nice little project.
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Goodbye to Joe
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, February 3. 2006 in Personal
I admit it: for the longest time, I simply hated coffee. I would always drink tea, and I found coffee way to bitter and strong for my tastes. This continued for quite awhile until about mid-way in my career when everyplace I went, whether a client or contractor site, they always had coffee, but never tea. Or else they had tea (the bags), but no hot water...
So, I "forced" myself to drink coffee. And I grew to like it. Really like it. Until the coffee in most places was way too weak. Yeah, I become almost a coffee snob.
But then I really wanted to lose some weight, and one of the recommendations would always be drop coffee and switch (back) to tea. And then about 2 weeks ago I had my first (and hopefully *last*) kidney stone, and again the recommendation was "cut back on the coffee."
So that was it. I'll have maybe 1/2 cup a day and that's it. For the most part, I'm back to tea: regular old orange pekoe, green, English Breakfast, the occasional chai... and I almost forgot how much I enjoyed it. Tea is subtle but still with a nice kick to it. Plus, I use less sugar (and milk/cream), so I'm feeling healthier as well.
Still, I still get those looks and double-takes from the waiter when, if I eat out, I order tea instead of coffee... But it's getting better.
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