Linux and Solaris – common ground ahead?. SUN’s free software credentials took a big step forward today with Ian Murdock’s decision to join the company. Congratulations all round. Now we have to find a new CTO at the Linux Foundation, and one with big shoes to fill. Hopefully, Ian’s experience will lead to something ISV’s [...]

Indie Tip #2: Build something you can support.  The hardest, most time-consuming part of being an independent developer isn't coding: it's tech support. So as you're building your application, always think about how you can make it easier to support. This isn't entirely self-serving – in fact, it's one of the best things you can [...]

Tips for Independent Developers. Shortly after the Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer panel at SXSW, I was asked for a list of tips for aspiring independent developers. I struggled to come up with a list at the time, so I'm going to try to redeem myself by making this a topic for a series [...]

Updates on Working Virtually (March 2007). I regularly write about the advantages – and challenges – of working virtually. Several recent items are good reading for anyone interested in this concept. 1. Reasons to Hold Out Hope For Balancing Work and Home in the Wall Street Journal (1/11/07) reports that “What’s hot is informal flexibility [...]

Security Theatre   Almost everything that happens before you fly on a plane is not as it seems. In order to deal with anxiety, the airlines put on a show. They've been doing it for a long, long time, and it's starting to show signs of wear and tear. The show is getting old and [...]

Jedi build their own lightsabers. By Marc Hedlund I was down at Stanford recently with Adam, and sat in on one of the classes he's taking there. Later on, I looked around at some of the resources Stanford makes available on the web. They provide a lot of fantastic material for free. One thing I [...]

redMine: Open Source Project Management and Issue Tracking Rails App. redMine is an open source project management and issue tracking Web app, created by Jean Philippe Lang and released under the GPL. There's a live demo of the system available. Features include multiple user support, SVN and diff browsers, LDAP support, support for several different [...]

Microsoft Fails to Spring Forward. As we prepare for the early arrival of Daylight Savings Time (DST) this weekend, there are many opinions as to whether it will cause Y2K-level trouble for computer systems or not. But a number of readers say it's already been a major pain for their companies, primarily because Microsoft was [...]

Freebase and the wars over metadata Like Dave , I find the hype over Freebase confusing. What it can become is a good repository of structured data that is poured into it by anyone with access to something useful. The key to that is how easy it is to both add and extract value from [...]

Petraeus interview MSNBC . His next area of emphasis: Some of the facility protection security forces, particularly, those within the ministry of health and other key ministries, certainly have shown significant sectarian biases and they have to be dealt with as well. So, there's going to be effort required in this area. This is going [...]