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Based on a very recent experience, I believe open source projects offer students a very good way to learn real world programming practices and improve their skills for the job market.

Recently I inherited maintenance on a project that was originally developed by some computer science professors and their students. It’s a pretty in depth piece of software used to track time entries. The code in this project is, unfortunately, not so good. The application does what it is supposed to do, but trying to figure out all the business rules by looking at the code is a very frustrating task. This project suffers from several deficiencies, such as:

• Lack of standard web based UI conventions
• Lack of sufficient comments
• Unreadable code
• Poor HTML standards

Since this project did involve inexperienced students one should expect some level of amateurism in the code, but with professors reviewing the code I also expect a lot of this stuff to get caught. But the poor quality of this code is not the real reason for this blog post, merely the reason behind the thought I had on how to help students, and apparently professors, learn better coding practices.

Enter Open Source software. Open source software projects may offer a learning opportunity some students aren’t getting in school. The best run open source projects have real standards, and teams of experienced programmers. They provide a place to learn from professionals who have been cutting their teeth on real world business applications. I’m willing to bet that students participating in open source projects will come out with better skills than students who only do the required class work.

So my suggestion to programming students, or even self taught programmers, is this: Find an open source project that interests you and participate. Learn about the other programmers on the project, find out what skills they can teach you, and ask lots of questions. Your skills and abilities will be better for it in the end. And my suggestion to professors: encourage open source project participation. Better yet, make it part of you curriculum the same way you would make an internship part of the course work. And work on these projects yourself.

I truly believe there is much to be learned from working in the open source community. Embrace the opportunities and make yourself a great programmer.

There have been tons of rumors and speculation about Apple switching to Intel processors. Well it appears to have become a reality, and it’s a real blow to IBM. But what does it do for Apple? Well, for one it probably lowers costs, that is one of the primary reasons why Apple would make a switch like this. But I think it also opens up the potential for other markets, and this is something Apple doesn’t seem to be discussing atthe moment.

The transition to the new Intel chips will not be immediete. In fact, it will take up to a year because apple will need to port all of its code base to the x86 chip architecture. They have already been doing some of this, but have never released any code to the public. And here’s where I think the new market is. Once OS X is ported to an x86 architecture, what’s to stop apple from selling its OS to the PC market, in direct competition to microsoft? In my opinion, nothing. And I for one would love the opportunity to have a PC running OS X. I just don’t want to pay Apple’s hardware tax. I think great diversity in the operating system world is a good thing for innovation. If Apple enters this market it will make it the third major OS available to PCs, next to Linux and Windows. Looks like the future could get pretty interesting…

Excuse me while I sit here laughing my ass off…..

Linux and OpenOffice save Microsoft Presentation

About 7 years ago I had a nice Sony Viao Laptop. This baby was top of the line at the time, with 150MGhz Pentium processor, 16MB RAM and a 2GB hard drive. Good stuff. The laptop used to sit on a TV table at the end of the bed (I was living with my girlfriend of the time). At some point a glass of pop was left sitting on the TV table next to the laptop. Big mistake, as it took just 30 seconds to bump into the table and send the pop all over the laptop. Needless to say, this was the end of the laptop.

I did take the laptop into a dealer for repair, but they said it would need a new motherboard and that would cost more than a new laptop. So I put the laptop away, never to be used again.

Fast Forward 7 years to last Tuesday. I found the laptop in its carrying case as I was cleaning up the basement. So I figure what the hell, lets see what will happen if I plug it in and power it up. Holy power surge Batman! The thing actually fired up. I was able to scan through the file system and see several files I’d like to recover.

So last night I sat with the laptop and tried to get a wireless network card installed on it. First I tried a spare Linksys card I had. I should have know better, I had problems with that card on my current laptop. I spent almost an hour fooling around with it and couldn’t get it to see the access point properly. So, I pulled out my current laptop and took the Orinoco Gold card I use on it and put it in the old Sony. 15 minutes later I had a working woreless connection. So I then made a few changes to the network setting so it could see the network domain and then rebooted the machine.

Here is where my victory comes to a complete end. On reboot I log into the domain and the machine comes to a stop. Everything just hangs. So I power it down and try to boot it again. This time all I get is some beeps. Probably signals that would tell a technician what is wrong. So now I’m back to square one with a dead laptop.

Since she won’t work now, I figure I’ll go ahead with the autopsy. Who knows maybe I can figure out how to clean it up enough to get it working again. Or maybe I should just put it away again for another 5-7 years. It might start working again.

Time to do a little dance, or a jig, or something happy. My favorite linux distro is coming out with a new version. Guess I’m going to have to find some way to scrape together $60 for the upgrade.

Over the weekend I have been setting up and configuring my new network attached storage. I now have 160GB of fresh space to store all my music files and downloads. A much needed upgrade from the 30GB hard drive that was being used (28 GB were already in use). I can now continue my project of re-encoding all of my CDs to a higher bit rate.

I have achieved this wonderful state of storage bliss by using the Linksys NSLU2 unit and an Iomega 160GB USB drive. The Linksys NSLU2 is a really tiny device, but it’s full of nice features. You can attach up to 2 USB 2.0 hard drives to it and then create shares on those drives. Since the NSLU2 is assigned it’s own IP Address on your network it lets you access the shares directly across the network. You can even create users, assign them to groups, and then manage group access to shares.

To top it off the NSLU2 even does backup, either from a device on your network to the NSLU2, or from the NSLU2 to a device on your network. Or, if you have 2 drives attached to it you can backup from one drive to the other.

This setup is perfect for small to medium offices; the hell with spending a fortune on other NAS devices.

To me the coolest thing about the NSLU2 was the fact that it runs Linux as its operating system and uses Samba to allow access from most other operating systems (seems to work on Windows, Mac OSX, and other Linux distros).

This has to be one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Well, back to encoding all 1000+ CDs in my collection!

Here’s a quick public service announcement from Novell: http://www.novell.com/linux/windowstolinux/publicservice/

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing around with a copy of Knoppix Linux. Knoppix is a Live CD distro, that means it runs directly from the CD and installs nothing to your hard drive. This makes it perfect for someone who might want to try Linux without commiting to it. I am quickly finding out that it is also good for fixing things on both Windows and Linux machines. Things such as resizing partitions, resetting windows passwords, virus scanning windows and linux servers, etc… I’ve been learning much of this from a book titled Knoppix Hacks. Incredibly handy stuff I must say. I was even able to use a computer with no hard drive in it.

Turns out there are more Live Linux distros beyond Knoppix. Each one having different advantages to it. Read this article to find out about 17 other Live Linux distros.

There have been a couple of big announcements today in the Open Source world. To start with Eben Moglen, counsel for the Free Software Foundation, has agreed to help run the new Software Freedom Law Center. The Center will offer free legal services, including asset stewardship, licensing, license defense and litigation support, and legal consulting and lawyer training, to the Free and Open Source community.

Also announced today, there will be a restructuring at the Open Source Initiative and Eric Raymond will step down from the position of president. We’ll just have to wait and see what effects this has.

Here’s a past look at M$’s Steve Ballmer selling Windows 1.0. It’s almost as good as the original Monkey Dance! And let’s not forget Developers, Developers, Developers…