An acquaintance from the local meetup.com scene, Nathaniel Talbott, made a very interesting analogy between ‘Rails’ (the Ruby platform) and ‘rails’ as in the railroad industry of the 1800s.  His article is here, although I can’t find a specific date on it.  Regardless of date, it’s certainly got some good insight into not just Ruby, [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, Microsoft, Ruby, linux, opensource No Comments »

This topic has been on my mind for awhile now.  My current position has me doing about 95% maintenance on existing code.  While I enjoy the challenge, the work is often frustrating.  The optimal solution to any problem is never an option due to time constraints.  This mirrors ‘new development’ as well, because business concerns/timelines/budgets [...]

Posted in Business, Development, MySQL, PHP, Uncategorized, linux, opensource 2 Comments »

Keith over at dotnetpimps (see trackback) has written a decent piece on the state of open source software and what it has and what it doesn’t. Really not anything that hasn’t been said before, but nicely summed up.
I’ve had discussions with mark on this topic over years (and with keith occasionally) and Mark’s take [...]

Posted in Apple, Development, Google, Microsoft, MySQL, Web, linux, opensource 2 Comments »

I was pleasantly surprised to just learn that there’s a beta of Google Earth v4 for Linux.  I’ve heard some good stuff about Google Earth, and saw it running on a Windows machine once, but had never installed it (even when using a Windows machine).  So, I thought I’d give it a try out today.  [...]

Posted in Google, Ideas, linux No Comments »

I’ve got a new project in development, and will need some initial testers. Right now, the primary requirement is that you have a Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher account. If you’re interested in helping out, and would like more details, please email me at mgkimsal@gmail.com.
 Did you like this post? Buy me [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, PHP, Web, linux No Comments »

I was having an interesting discussion the other day about the role of Microsoft in setting technology trends and what their overall impact on the tech world is today. I’d say compared with 10-15 years ago, it’s much less than it was, and the major impacts today are coming from the open source world. [...]

Posted in Business, Development, General, Ideas, Web, linux No Comments »

I got the domain name opensourcetorrents.com a while ago with the intention of having a place for open source projects large and small to post torrent files of their projects. Especially on larger files, using bittorrent helps share the bandwidth costs associated with downloading. I’ve just put up a basic tracker system, and [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, PHP, Web, linux 1 Comment »

As some of you who listen to my podcast may know, I recently took over a project at work - a PHP project. While I still have the perl/rt system I maintain, more of my time has recently been in the PHP world getting up to speed with the code my predecessor left. [...]

Posted in Development, PHP, Web, linux No Comments »

I’ve started a mysql group at meetup.com for the Raleigh/Triangle area. Our meetup.com page has a bit of info, but not all the much. I’m hoping some people will join, but I’m not sure exactly what I should do to promote it yet. First thing first is that we need a place [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Personal, Web, linux No Comments »

I’ve futzed around for years trying to keep up with having a handy search/replace utility on linux, and always end up having to google for some crappy “find ./ -name $1 sed/$2 blah blah blah” bash script that inevitably feels rickety and/or like black magic.
http://www.laffeycomputer.com/rpl.html is a great open source package which you can compile [...]

Posted in General, linux No Comments »