I’ve long had the sneaking suspicion that, from the “free software” point of view, the most “threatening” proprietary software systems were not the most tightly locked down ones, where it’s difficult to do anything without paying a fortune and control is absolute, but rather those that coopt as much as they can from the open source world. You get source code, you get an open and hackable system, you get to talk with the people who wrote the code, who will tell you all about it if you want to know. You can recompile it for different platforms, or tweak it how you want. You get to talk with other users of it, and maybe even share hacks and additions you’ve created. Just that you still may have to pay for it, and you don’t get the rights to redistribute as you see fit.

Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of SourceSense, speaks very well of Atlassian and what they’re doing with systems like JIRA, which is a very open commercial offering:

http://boldlyopen.com/2008/09/11/sustainable-software-look-down-under/

With the challenge “Can your Open Source vendor do this?”. I don’t think he’s far off the mark; the fundamental problem with open source businesses is finding a way to introduce scarcity, as I’ve talked about before:

https://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity

That’s not to say it’s not possible (it is, obviously), or that open source doesn’t work (it has, beyond my wildest dreams), just that we still haven’t figured out the part that connects developers with money. One of the most successful (in terms of making Linux user friendly) companies to date is basically running on the “find a guy who already made a bundle elsewhere and is a good patron” model.

I found this here:

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=291

It’s particularly entertaining for me, as I started my programming career at an ad agency.

http://view.break.com/542649 – Watch more free videos

Since we’re considering a move back to the US, I’ve been idling perusing job ads; a number of which seek “rock star” this and “ninja” that, which sound ludicrous, to put it in polite terms. On the other side of the coin, once an HR department has you in their clutches, you cease to be a person, and are a “resource”, as in “we had two resources working on the problem”.

Maybe they should just come out and say they are looking for “rock star resources”.

I’m back to working at home after completing a recent contract, much faster than the client expected, I’m proud to say, as I was able to leverage some open source software to do exactly what they needed.

While I love being able to see Helen and Ilenia more during the day, it also brings up that old question of Adam Smith’s: the division of labor. It’s pretty difficult to concentrate at all with a baby in the house, despite having an office with a door. When she’s noisy, she’s really noisy, and there’s nothing like the yowl of an unhappy baby to get a parent’s attention, even if he’s not the one currently taking care of her. Also, perhaps most importantly: she’s adorable and full of smiles for me, and loves to play… as do I, certainly more so than working! Since she won’t take a bottle yet (well, I did succeed once, but it’s not easily repeatable), my wife is still the one Helen’s primarily attached to, but even so, needs some time when I take care of the baby so she can do her stuff too.

I’m curious what sorts of arrangements other people have worked out? Fortunately, one option would simply be to spend the time with Ilenia and Helen and forget about work for the most part, but that’s pretty extreme. It’s not as if I don’t have computer time, but the biggest problem is the constant interruptions, which make it difficult to do more than read and write a little bit. Serious coding requiring concentration is pretty much only for late at night or early mornings these days.

If all goes according to plan, Helen, Ilenia and I will be in Vienna, Austria sometime in the next week or two, to register our daughter as a US citizen. As always, we’re interested in meeting anyone local for alcohol/food/coffee/whatever, within the limits of our time there. Send email with a mobile number if you’re interested in meeting up at some point.

I’m not exactly a frequent traveler, but Ilenia and I both really enjoy meeting people when we go places, so I signed up for this to see if it helps put me in contact with people, either in places I go, or people visiting Innsbruck:

http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

I’ve never been a fan of the word “blog” – I believe it sounds like something one calls a plumber to deal with. Even worse is “blog” as a verb. “I blogged it yesterday”. Did you really? Was it expensive to get cleaned up?

Here are some alternatives that I came up with:

• Write. It’s been a pretty effective word for hundreds of years, over the course of many, many new and varied technologies.
• Affirm
• Announce
• Attest
• Aver
• Chronicle
• Comment
• Communicate
• Divulge
• Document
• Express
• Inform
• Make known
• Narrate
• Note
• Notify
• Outline
• Pass along
• Proclaim
• Pronounce
• Publish
• Record
• Recount
• Relate
• Report
• Reveal
• Speak of
• State
• Wrote up
• Report
• Recount

I’m sure I’m missing some good ones…

I’m doing some contracting work at a local firm, and one of the little details that I have been pleased with is the fact that they seem to do introductions for people. On my first day, I was taken around and introduced to everyone, despite the fact that I probably won’t be there long term (depending on where we go and when). Today, they were showing around a guy who will be doing a sort of student internship there, and once again, they stopped by my office.

I appreciate that a lot, and think that it’s a good thing for a group of people to at least have a bit of an idea who newcomers are. One of the things that I have always loathed, and vowed to do differently should DedaSys ever be more than myself, is feeling like an animal in a zoo when The Boss brought someone into the office to take them on a tour, pointing at us developers and talking about what we do, with no reciprocity. “This is Dave, one of our open source guys, who is really into Linux. He once roamed the temperate forests of Oregon and his mating season is from early January to late December.” We get pointed at and talked about, and the other person remains a Mysterious Stranger. Granted, it’s not always possible to disclose everything, but I think that you can still do a lot to make people feel respected without spilling the beans on a big potential customer or investment.

I write most of my email (in gmail) and submit most web site content in English, however, a significant portion is also done in Italian. I leave the spell checker in English, because Italian is, in general, quite easy to spell, so that even as a native speaker, a helping hand is occasionally welcome. However, it isn’t as if I write Italian perfectly either, so the help there would be nice as well. I find it quite annoying to go change the language in the spell checker option each time, especially when, as an example, I’m responding to email and do 2 in English, one in Italian, another in English, and so on.

Ideally, some sort of adaptive technology would be possible, where it figures out what language I’m using, out of a preselected list, after a few words, and starts behaving accordingly.

It seems as if there is some discussion, so hopefully a solution won’t be too far in the future.

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about simply reinstalling Ubuntu with the latest CD in order to update it to the latest version. I think that’s a bad habit from other OS’s. For as long as I’ve used Debian and its derivatives, the ability to update the system has been one of its strong points.

Here are some reasons to run the updates instead of upgrading via a fresh install:

• You don’t lose your old configuration information, and by choosing to see the diff’s in configuration files, you can even choose which config files to update, and how.

• No need to shut down a running system.

• By keeping an eye on obsolete packages, you really don’t build up any cruft at all, so that’s not a reason to do a fresh install.

• With a decent internet connection, it’s probably just as fast, if not faster, when you consider it takes a bit of time to get everything installed just the way you want it.

Indeed, yesterday, I upgraded a server I run in Texas from Ubuntu’s edgy eft to hardy heron, remotely, with one reboot at the end to make it pick up the new kernel, and the whole thing came off without a hitch!

A little off-topic exercise conducted in the “eye of the storm”, when Ilenia and Helen were still in the hospital:

A post on Seth Robert’s blog brings up the idea that many Chinese restaurants were opened as a way to go into business without competing with native male workers. The post made the rounds of several other online journals.

That was the push I needed to get up and go collect a few statistics of my own, regarding an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. My theory is that the number of restaurants of a given type, divided by the number of immigrants from that country might be an interesting way of guaging the popularity of the cuisine in question.

In order to simplify things just a bit, I actually used data from Italy, for the following reasons:

• Most immigration to Italy is pretty recent, so it’s not necessary to account for the length of time different immigrant groups have been present, and the effects that may have had on the diffusion of a given cuisine.

• Immigration statistics were readily available: http://demo.istat.it/str2006/index.html

• Italian the language almost completely corresponds to Italy the country (outside of a chunk of Switzerland, San Marino, and the Vatican), something that makes things that much easier.

• I speak Italian, so it was easy to find out all the information I needed

Unfortunately, finding out the number of restaurants of various types is far from an exact measurement, and since this is a quick fun project, I just went for Yahoo search (they deserve credit for keeping their search API open when Google’s was closed) results on terms like “Ristorante Turco” (Turkish), “Ristorante Messicano” (Mexican), and so on. This was the most expedient means of gathering information quickly, but this approach does present a number of obvious problems, listed here in the hope that someone without diapers to change and a business to run might come up with some good answers:

• Some hits likely come from people talking about a restaurant that happens to be in a country, like “ristorante americano”. “Nel tipico ristorante americano, ….” or in other words, “In a typical American restaurant”, rather than an American-style restaurant in Italy, which is what we were looking for in the first place. This is probably also true of countries close to Italy, where people go on vacation and thus have occasion to write about their experiences in a “ristorante tedesco” (German), rather than going to eat in a German restaurant in Italy. Perhaps the search query could be improved in an attempt to eliminate this sort of false positive.

• Some restaurants probably are not known as, nor brand themselves with a country name, but instead utilize titles like “Middle Eastern”, “Arab”, “South American”, “African”, or others that do not correspond with any one country in particular. It would be possible to group countries together with other adjectives, and get statistics for these clusters as well.

• Measuring hits is measuring what people are talking about, rather than simply restaurants that exist, so if restaurants from a certain country are more talked about than others, that would muddy the statistics a bit. However, it seems reasonable that people would mostly talk about restaurants in proportion to their popularity, and I don’t see a particular reason why there would be more talk of Vietnamese restaurants, say, than Thai restaurants, compared to the actual numbers.

That said, for a quick project, this approach seemed to work out ok, and the results appear credible. Obviously, the results also reflect people discussing certain cuisines, rather than an actual number of restaurants, but since it does reflect interest, we’ll use the number in any case.

Since the number of restaurants/interest in a type of restaurant was clearly not correlated directly with the number of immigrants, other factors must come into play. For instance, “ristorante giapponese” turns up 125,000 hits, but the stats say only 6873 Japanese nationals live in Italy. As above, hits don’t mean actual restaurants, but clearly Japanese cuisine is not being popularized through immigration.

Here’s my guess: these statistics show, to some degree, what people in the host country actually like to eat. Food that tastes good means more restaurants. Things that aren’t that popular mean few restaurants, even if there are many immigrants. To pick on one country, there are many Philippino immigrants in Italy, but very few search hits – and anecdotally, I’ve never seen a Philippino restaurant in Italy either, whereas even smaller towns like Padova have Chinese, Mexican (well, it’s called that, even if it’s a shadow of the real thing), Japanese, various Arab and middle eastern restaurants, and even a few less common things like Eritrean. And I know that many native and foreign restaurants employ Philippino cooks.

Below is the chart I whipped up showing the number of Yahoo hits per immigrant. The Italian names shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. A few tricky ones: Giordano-Jordanian, Giamaicano-Jamaican, Spagnolo-Spanish. If you’re interested in numbers or source code, contact me.