L-P Huberdeau

I attended to a conference at the Montreal Software Process Improvement Network this morning. The topic was Innovation Mangement by Anders Hemre. Not only the topic was very interesting, the speaker was excellent. If ever you get the chance to hear him, don’t miss the chance. As a student, I didn’t really expect the topic to be applicable on short term in any way. I just enjoy the SPIN meetings because it’s a great opportunity to see how the senior managers are actually thinking. It’s quite impressive to see how a few numbers and reformulation of ideas can lead to more support from these people. The entire presentation kept triggering new ideas. The bad part is that I probably missed 30% of the presentation because I was evading in my own thoughts (thankfully, I have the handouts).

Sadly for Anders, the group of attendees was very small today. On the other hand, it allowed everyone to communicate and hear everyone’s point of view.

There have been rumors of Oracle buying out all sorts of Open Source companies recently. After buying the makers of InnoDB a few months ago, they now bought makers of BerkleyDB, an other storage engine used by MySQL. They even tryed to by MySQL and they made an offer for Zend. Either they really like the LAMP platform, or they want to kill it, but coming from Oracle, most think it’s the second option. Oracle moving towards Open Source? That would be a big surprise.

Good thing with email spam is that it can be filtered in background without much effort. I just received some real targetted snail mail spam. Some canadian registrar noticed one of my domains was going to expire in around 6 months. I received a letter proposing me to renew with them. I’ve never heard of that company before. This kind of customer friendly service seems to have a price. They charge twice as much as my current registrar, and it’s not the cheapest around (I’m just one of those clients who wouldn’t bother switching for a few bucks).

On a not-so-unrelated topic. I read last month’s IEEE Spectrum closing article (in the printed version, it’s the closing article… online it’s just an article) today and the guy was making parallels between people who abuse the commons (which includes spammers). It reminded be of the entire buzz around Web 2.0. Marcus Whitney has been speaking about this quite a lot lately. I also feel this Web2.0-rich-application-buzz is getting saturated. It’s everywhere and everyone is jumping in before it sinks. As Robert W. Lucky explained, the people jumping in are making it sink. It was flashy when Google released Google Maps and GMail, but everyone has been copying those ideas ever since. I hope this is not going to create an other .com bubble. Is it all needed anyway? Why does everything has to be pushed towards the browser? I can understand for tools that require collaboration, and it also makes the IT guy’s life easyer, but I think desktop applications for reading emails and blogs are still far better. I’m quite satisfied with the Web 1.0 applications (even though I’m not certain on where the Web version change was made).

Yesterday’s declarations about the new government were quite funny compared to this one. Gordon O’Connor, the new minister of defense, used to be a lobbyist for large military equipment. To be more specific, for Raytheon (and quite a few other companies), which is very involved in Bush’s Star Wars. This is quite bad since we will have a lot of pressure coming from the US and from our own governement. The closest comparision I can think of is to hire Bill Gates (which is also retired) as a consultant to set up a new IT infrastructure. Ok, Bill Gates might not be that bad, but still. I wouldn’t trust an ex-lobbyist for such a position.

Thank you M. Harper.

Canada’s new Prime Minister Stephen Harper presented the new government today. Canada is definetly taking a new direction, and it may not be for the best. There are quite a few shocking positions, like Rona Ambrose, who was against Kyoto was placed at the ministry of environment. This was something to be expected as the Prime Minister is from Alberta, that province exploiting asphaltic sands and cause more pollution than any other. Not more unexpected than the presence of the religious right. Since it’s a minority government, I think we are quite safe about keeping that Intelligent Design out of our school, but expect those gay mariage and pro-life debates to come back to the surface.

One of the most amazing event is the ex-Liberal, elected as Liberal this time again, minister switching to the conservative party less than two weeks after being elected. David Emerson got the International Commerce Ministry. Seriously, I find this totally shocking. Considering he was elected with a vast majority by the population as a Liberal, I don’t really see why anyone is supposed to accept this. A similar situation occured not so long ago when Belinda Stronach switched to Conservative to Liberal. At that time, the entire Conservative party was offuscated and claimed resignation. While it was not really acceptable at the time, this situation is totally worst. The guy was elected a few days earlyer! He was even standing by Paul Martin during the counting and spoke against the Conservative Party. I can remember this quote: I’m proud to be a Liberal. Is this really the kind of integrity we want in a governement?

Back to the annomalies. Michael Fortier, who was not elected as a deputy, was named as a Senator and was given an important ministry. This shouldn’t be a problem. It’s the kind of permitted action in Canada as senators are simply named by the Prime Minister. It’s usually all right since senators don’t usually have a job to do, other than sleeping and getting paid. It would also be right if Stephen Harper did not request senators were elected by the population before being elected, back when Paul Martin and the previous Prime Ministers were selecting Liberal senators (which is a life-long position). Again, a great sign of integrity.

For a man who was pretending to clean up corruption in Ottawa, I think he’s having quite a bad start.

I have been very busy in the last few weeks. Between school and work, I didn’t get to have much time to write here. Anyway, I collected a few links I cam across recently. A few days ago, Chris Shiflett posted an entry about ruby on rails. The entire thing is worth reading. It really is a different view made on the new buzz word. The point is that Rails is closer to J2EE than PHP, because of the structured approach. I wanted to try Rails, but I really don’t have time to try things out and honestly, I don’t really see anything Rails can do that I can’t do with PHP in an efficient way. The only thing that really takes a while to develop is the HTML part, and that’s something that has to be done in Rails too (except that they always skip that part in the demos). I always found it fancy to see the things they do with AJAX, but I’ve used the HTML_AJAX library from the PEAR repository, and it’s simple enough to use. All you need to make it as fancy is use their JavaScript library for the fancy effects and transitions. Fancy transitions are nice, but they don’t really add anything to the value of the application unless you are aiming for mass market.

I found a nice article on how memory is managed in Linux. It’s simply one of those informative articles. The conclusion is quite simple: since most applications use a lot of shared libraries in KDE and Gnome, it’s better to stick to one application suite. Most complain that KDE applications use too much memory, but when used together, it’s really not that bad. Still on the topic of KDE, I found an application called Kuroo, which is simply a GUI for Gentoo Portage. There is still quite a lot of work to be made in it to become mainstream, but it’s a good start. It’s quite easy to update packages and navigate the packages in portage.