Blog
Open Document Format
My mom called a couple days ago and said she read in the paper that Microsoft was going down the tubes. I didn't know about all that, so I thought I'd figure out what she meant. (Silly mom, even if you read it in the newspaper you can find it online in seconds and e-mail me a link. It works just as well. Oh wait, you'd have to dial into the Internet - nevermind. ;-) )
A writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press was covering the fact that Minnesota is considering using Open Document Format. It's really a simple but often overlooked issue. In 10 years when you need that Excel document of your finances from 2001 to open, will you be able to? How about in 50 years?
Right now, if you're using Office or Adobe Acrobat to distribute your documents, you only partially own the document. Anyone who wants to read the document needs to go to Microsoft or Adobe to gain the ability to look at it. And what happens if Microsoft or Adobe do not exist in 10 years? What about in 50 years? When thinking on a governmental records scale, digital documents sounds a bit scary and, right now, paper is sounding really good.
The answer that the state of Minnesota is considering and that some European countries have already put into effect is the Open Document Format (ODF). But what if, in 50 years, no one supports ODF either? Will the government have to make sure some company is making an ODF-compatible reader program?
And will Microsoft die? I'm not selling my stock yet. They do have a competing OpenXML format that has yet to be ratified by the standards bodies. But even so, the idea that they're pitching an open format is encouraging because they see their business would flounder in this day and age without an open format. They might not have everyone in the world hooked on Word because it's the only way to open their documents, but they'll still sell the most full-featured word processing software around.
Open Source Development
Angie over at Lullabot put an interesting, short document together of "Best Practices in Open Source Development". I enjoyed reading it, and I think it's true.
Last week I spent a lot of time at work making my first-ever real custom Drupal site. (My other Drupal sites weren't real because I never really messed with the code much.) It was interesting. I submitted bug reports, I searched for solutions to the problems I was having, and I hung out on the IRC channel. It was sometimes helpful to have people to bounce ideas off of and who knew how to fix the problems. Other times, I was on my own and had to fix it myself.
Obviously, Lullabot has had a ton of success with participating in the already-flourishing Drupal community. However, in my experience of actual development at work, it just seems that submitting my changes back to the community would take a lot of my time. Sure, right now the company I work at won't pay me for my time to give back to the community so I have to do it when I get home, but even if we did would we see that much benefit? Maybe not, because we rarely use Drupal or WordPress in a way that we add new functionality. We usually only take the tool that fits best and make it happen. If it's not a blog or community-oriented site, then we usually build it in-house or with Zend Framework or CakePHP.
Maybe one of these years my company will become involved in Open Source. Until then, we'll just take the free ride. ;-)
The Design Side
I don't do design too much, but enough to get my hands a bit dirty. I kinda enjoy it, although I rarely get really inspired works that look amazing. So I mostly stick to programming. However, this funny post of "23 Signs That You're Becoming a Design Geek" has some funny things that mostly only designers will understand. Thanks to Leo and Amber for pointing this out on their enjoyable podcast along with the rest of fun links for geeks.
People of Praise and Blogging
OK, so this one's more like two topics. First, yesterday TJ posted and interesting link to a documentary about the blogosphere. It was an interesting look at the people that make up blogs and how blogs have changed the landscape of news. (Man, if I would've found that strike blog I would have felt a lot more connected.) The video's embedded below the jump.
In other community news, Dan Reinbold started off his new blog with some great posts: one about his story and another about what the People of Praise is. Very good reading. Also, a longtime friend, Josh, seems to be chiming in with an almost minute-by-minute look at his life in Allendale. I hope he keeps it up.
Google Buys AdScape Media
In an interesting move that proves Google is as much an advertising company as a research company, it seems that Google has decided to buy AdScape media. AdScape has been in the news a lot recently because of a bleeding-edge market that they've almost created, and that is advertising inside videogames. Apparently last year Microsoft bought Massive, another prominent in-game advertising. It also continues the Google trend of buying non-web advertising companies. Google has recently been testing selling ads on the radio and in print newspapers in magazines as well. Apparently they are setting out to bring the highly-targeted advertising systems to less-targeted places such as TV and such. It may be working, because profits are way up this past quarter. But we'll only find out as time goes on.
People of Praise Member Blogs
The number of People of Praise members with an online presence has been growing immensely. And now, we have a way to track it. Justin has created a del.icio.us tag called peopleofpraisemember. It's a great way to keep in the know of the latest of many people throughout the community.
To add some benefit to this post, I added all the RSS feeds of these sites to my Google Reader and have shared the page. If you're looking for one page too bookmark to stay up-to-date with People of Praise around the 'net, this may be it. You can also access an RSS feed of that page if you're looking for one way to get all the blog information. Of course, if you find that I don't have all the feeds or want me to change something, feel free to contact me.
Yahoo! Pipes
Some people have called it a "mash-up generator". It's Pipes and it's now in the Web 2.0 Beta over at Yahoo!. You can take data from RSS feeds or other sources and cross-reference them with something else. For example, I found a Pipe that would allow me to view only the eBay auctions that match Phil Keaggy and are priced between $5 and $20. To be honest, most of the Pipes look like they're just a copy of the RSS feed, but whatever. Someone claims that they're similar to relational databases, but I don't know if I agree with that. I'm sure people will do cool stuff because there's even such things as a Google Maps module. Who knows, somebody might create the next big thing on this, I dunno.
Huge Funnels (Drowning In Love)
Just in case you wanted to tell your girlfriend that the relationship isn't going well, I've got some good pictures of some of the biggest drains in this world! (Just kidding and Happy Singles Awareness Day!)
These huge drains are situated to make sure that the dam does not overflow: when getting to a close height, it starts going down these funnels to bypass the dam. Cool stuff! Thanks to the kids at Digg for this story
Linux and MythTV
The folks at GeekBrief.tv are looking to set up a Linux-based Home Theater PC system. I definitely don't blame them. One of my coworkers has one and the folks at Systm have done a video podcast about them. They look amazing.
All you need is some hardware (and the GeekBrief.tv people are looking at the best and possibly most expensive). But then, the Linux and the open-source PVR system are all entirely free! Check out the features and screenshots of MythTV for an idea of what you can do with getting TV on your computer. It gets the program schedule right off the Internet for free so you can automatically record every episode of 24. You can even view the schedule and record from any web-accessible computer anywhere in the world. Of course, you can play DVDs and music and view photos on it too.
Now if there was anything I wanted to watch on TV, I'd get one...
A Windows History
Last week the Infuze Magazine news blog mentioned a great, quick look back at Windows over the years. It's great to remember how far we've come from the maturity of DOS to a large, resource-heavy graphical interface just to type up text documents and play games. I mean, look at Windows 3.1 in its 265-color glory:
Stunning. Those were the days.