OK, so we all know that I have been eating my own dogfood (that is, using Linux on the desktop) for a while now. I even decided not to buy Leopard for my Mac Mini. And, for the most part, I’ve been happy. I’ve been able to do everything I need to do, and do it well.
But there have been a few snags along this road, and I hit a very big one yesterday. I got this brand new, wonderful LCD monitor – 22″, high contrast, 1680×1050 resolution – I was happy. I thought I’d be a pig in sh*t – I have been living with an ancient, ancient 15″ LCD with dying pixels for a while.
But Nooooooooo. No happiness for me. None. I spent 3 hours struggling with the Nvidia drivers (that’s the on-board video that my motherboard has) and my xorg configurations still don’t work. (X Windows and xorg – the current software implementation of X Windows – is the way that Linux displays the graphical user interface.)
Every combination of a new version of xorg.conf leads me down a garden path to nowhere. I downloaded the brand-spanking new nvidia drivers, so that I’d be ready to deal with such a high resolution. No go. At this point, I still have to futz with the configs every time I start up, and it still isn’t right. I’ll send off queries to the right mailing lists and forums, and probably eventually get it all worked out. But plugging in a new monitor just should not be this hard.
X Windows has always been the bane of my existence. I really have come to think that xorg has it in for me. My refrain about it has always been “I hatesssss xorg, I hatesss it.” Someone in an IRC channel last night who was trying to help me as I tore my hair out said “why does xorg suck so bad?”
With all of the amazing examples of really great free and open source software, here is an example of one that just isn’t what it should be.
Miro used to be called “Democracy Player”. Miro is basically a video player, which can recognize RSS feeds, and automatically download videos. There are channels for everything. PBS has quite a number, as do various and sundry video podcasters. I get Democracy Now, ABC politics, the Webb Alert (a daily geek news headlines show,) Bill Moyers Journal, and lots of others. It can download videos via Bittorrent as well. You can search YouTube, Google video or about 10 other video sites, and make those searches a new channel.
It’s a pretty amazing tool. And it makes disseminating your organizational videos easy as well. It’s cross-platform (available on all platforms) and works really well (the old player was a bit buggy, but those have been really smoothed out, of late.)
It is, I imagine, what the future of television will be.
This is a rant. And it is a rant on behalf of the hundreds (thousands?) of nonprofit organizations whose website is stuck behind a custom CMS – one that was written by some web development shop or another, and migration off of that custom CMS is going to be a nightmare.
As the author of a custom CMS (it did have the advantage that it was released as open source, but it never caught on, so it still counts as custom) I know what it is like to put my heart and soul (and time) into a CMS, and want my clients to get what they want. I wrote that CMS back before there were any really good open source ones, like most of the custom CMS out there.
But, that was then, and this is now. There are quite a number of really good CMS systems (both open source and proprietary – I’d say there are a good solid dozen) that have large user bases, many developers and vendors who implement them, and their are lots of new modules and functionality being added every day. There is absolutely no way that one single web development shop can provide a CMS solution that is better in quality or functionality than what is available out there right now. In fact, even if you just focus on the “big three” open source CMS – Drupal, Joomla and Plone, 85% of nonprofits will likely have their needs fully met. The other 15% might want or need a more specialized CMS (like OpenACS, or a proprietary one,) or might need some modules developed for them.
Most custom CMS that I’ve seen lately are sorely lacking in features and/or usability, in comparison to what’s out there, and available. Of course, one could argue that migration off of one of the more popular CMS to another one is difficult – as difficult as migration off of a custom CMS. This isn’t the case for a couple of reasons: 1) The more popular these CMS get, the more people need migration help, and the more resources are available for them (just google “joomla drupal migration“.) 2) More people than just the person who set the CMS up can help do the migration. Unfortunately, relationships with vendors go bad, and being stuck with data in a custom CMS makes migration away from a bad relationship that much harder.
This is the moment for nonprofits to stop accepting proposals with custom CMS, and to make it clear in the RFP that a custom CMS will not be acceptable. It’s also the time for web developers to let their babies go, and start building their business on a well-developed CMS. (Hint: I hear there is way more Drupal demand than supply of expertise.)
Azureus (now called Azureus Vuze) is the best bittorrent client I have ever used. It’s quite amazing. It’s got a lot under the hood. Way more than I could even talk about intelligently. But that is great – if you know your stuff, you can get a lot of performance out of Azureus. Bittorrent is a bit of an arcane art (and, of course, getting a bit of a bad rep, since it’s the major avenue for P2P pirating.)
It is cross-platform and written in Java (and, I think, shows off the strength of the Java framework.) People have written all sorts of cool plug-ins for it. The next version of Azureus, called Vuze, which I haven’t yet used, looks like it incorporates a media player and channels and such. Basically, becoming a serious competitor for Miro, which I’ll talk about in the next post.
This isn’t really such a useful tool for most organizations, although having a bittorent client around for downloading Linux ISO images is really useful, and on breaks, you can watch the occasional episode of the Daily Show… (just kidding.)
These are tidbits of things I’ve gotten recently from vendors, or gotten via feeds or twitter.
- Kintera opens a Developers Challenge. Developers who code solutions that integrate with Kintera using their open API platform, Connect, can win $15,000 or $5,000 (not the $25 K their big logo seems to suggest – that’s just the total they will award.) But first, of course, you must be “verified” as a Kintera Connect partner. Sigh. When will people learn that to be open, you need to really be open?
- Click and Pledge, a company that does SaaS for nonprofits, released a new product, called “Trio”. Trio is an integration of SugarCRM, Joomla, and a credit card payment system. This is not only cool from the perspective of the integration of two great open source web apps, but it also is a very interesting business model. Setup of all three has a one time fee. Then, all monthly hosting fees are waved if more than a certain amount of money is transacted using the payment system. The hosting costs, if you don’t qualify for free hosting, are pretty reasonable.
- Matt Asay, blogger of all things in open source biz models, thinks Google Code may have overtaken Sourceforge. He asks: “Will the world notice a diminished Sourceforge? I think so, but maybe I’m just nostalgic.” Um, Matt, Sourceforge has been basically irrelevant for years, since people started moving their projects off of that platform, and onto their own platforms. New projects seem to crop up more on Google Code than on SF now a days.
- Mozilla Labs announces the winners of their Extend Firefox2 contest – the best Firefox add-ons. Some definitely cool stuff I’ll have to have a look at.
Those of you steeped deeply in Web 2.0 know danah boyd. She’s a brilliant academic who studies social networks. A couple of days ago, she made a call on her blog for academics to stop publishing articles in closed journals.
On one hand, I’m excited to announce that my article “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence” has been published in Convergence 14(1) (special issue edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). On the other hand, I’m deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it. It is not because you aren’t interested (although many of you might not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you’ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That’s super depressing. I agreed to publish my piece at Sage for complicated reasons, but…
I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.
It’s really worth a read. If I were still an academic, I’d totally take her up on it. She is also realistic – she describes in detail in the post what people can do, whether they are tenured or not.
I agree with her that open journals are the future. She says, at the end of her long entry:
Making systemic change like this is hard and it will require every invested party to stand up for what they know is right and chip away at the old system. I don’t have tenure (and at this rate, no one will ever let me). I am a young punk scholar and I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to stand up for what’s right. Open-access is right. Heavy metal gates and expensive gatekeepers isn’t. It’s time for change to happen! To all of the academics out there, I beg you to help me make this change reality. Let’s stop being silenced by academic publishers.
I decided that most of the tools I’ve been talking about so far (except WordPress and Joomla) are internet clients for one type of protocol or another. I figured I’d keep on this track for a while – there’s lots to talk about.
Next up, Filezilla.
I’ve used more FTP clients in my time than I can even begin to remember, from command-line ftp, to WS-FTP, and lots and lots of others (I have this memory of a really old, clunky FTP client for Mac OS 7 or something that I was using a lot, when all filesharing was via FTP.) Sometimes, I wish I had something like Transmit for Linux – which is a Mac OS X client, and the slickest, most feature rich FTP client on the planet (but, sadly, not free in any sense of the word.)
No, it’s not slick, but Filezilla does the job nicely. It has shortcuts for all of your servers, has nice drag and drop for moving files around, allows you to do all sorts of remote actions on files, etc. It handles FTP, SFTP and FTP over SSL/TLS. I use it all the time, and I really like it. I do think that it’s probably the best GUI FOSS ftp client for Linux there is. Oh, and there is a Windows version, too.
If you’re not so connected either to the “twitterverse” or the web industry, you probably haven’t heard a lot about the buzz that is currently happening around the issue of data portability, and the dataportability.org organization and effort. I figured, since I’ve been getting a bit involved in the community, I’d give a bit of a summary of what’s going on, and what will possibly come from this effort.
Dataportability.org – the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others.
So first, what is data portability? Basically, it means that the data that you put into social networking sites, like profiles, social graph (those who you are connected to,) media, etc. are *yours* to do whatever you want with. In addition, they are portable – you can move your data from place to place. And you have control over who can see what. There is a good blog article, which, in some regards, might be seen as a criticism of the dataportability.org group, but which, to my mind, actually defines quite well what I’ve thought data portability means. He talks about data “accessibility”, “visibility”, “removal” and “ownership” – all things that, to my mind, are components of data portability.
I’m involved in the evangelism action group. So, I’m evangelizing. I’ll be doing an entry soon, sort of “how social networks could use open standards 101.” I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 tools, they need to understand the implications of what they do, and demand that the tools use open standards.
While I’m on the subject of chat, I figured I could talk about Pidgin. Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM (Instant Messenger) client. It can handle quite the long list of chat protocols: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC , SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr. A number of these I’ve never heard of. I don’t use it for IRC (see last post,) but I do use it for AIM, GTalk, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo messenger (yes, I have accounts using all of those protocols. Should I hunt up Zephyr?)
Pidgin is available for Windows or Linux. It used to be called GAIM. The engine underneath Pidgin is called libpurple – which is also underneath the FOSS IRC Client Adium, for Mac OS X. (Adium is what I used when I was on a Mac desktop.)
Pidgin is great software. It’s the best FOSS IM client I’ve used so far (and I’ve used quite a few.) It’s got great plug-ins, too.
This is, really a post both about a tool (XChat) and about IRC (Internet Relay Chat.) XChat is one of quite a few IRC clients. XChat is available for both Windows and Linux. There is a port of XChat called XChat-Aqua, that works natively on Mac OS X.
IRC is an incredibly useful tool. It is basically group synchronous chat. It is a tool which is used predominantly in the open source world, for developers and users of open source projects to talk to one another, and get support. I use IRC every day. Quasi-social, quasi-professional. (like right now, on the Linuxchix IRC channel, we are discussing elections, HFS+ filesystems and terabyte switches.)
Of the IRC clients, I like XChat the best, although I’ve tried quite a number. The interface is easy to learn, very clearly laid out, and there are lots of options. It’s also scriptable.
I know that for people who work in real offices, with real other people, IRC is a difficult tool to use – because it takes you away from the environment you are in, and makes it hard to be a part of multiple conversations. On the other hand, a lot of people are IMing, and tweeting, etc. I like it because I can get fast technical help, and since I don’t have many people around me most days, it does provide a bit of a social atmosphere. Like the water cooler to go to when you’re taking a break.
And if you want to find me on IRC, go to either the Linuxchix IRC server or to irc.freenode.net, #nosi and #nptech.
