Are there areas where Open Source won't work?

One of the biggest shockers for me at OSCON happened during the first day. I was sitting in the second row of the Rails session and I looked behind me to see what type of laptops people were using. I would guess that 80% were PowerBooks. Of the x86 laptops …

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IBM opening the secret sauce for Web Fountain?

Up above Silicon Valley, IBM has a big research facility. One of the big projects they are working on over there at Almaden is called Web Fountain. Think of it as Google on steroids. A search engine that can determine sentiment (can determine what ambiguous terms on pages actually mean …

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Gems from OSCON

I'm going through my OSCON notes and compiling my notes and a list of interesting websites. The websites will be found here (using my oscon2005 delicious tag):

Yaml

This is the markup language that the Ruby on Rails is using (rather than xml). There are bindings for various languages. The …

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2005 OSCON Ruby on Rails Presentation

I'm up at OSCON and have attended 4 sessions in the past two days. My favorite so far was the Rails talk.

David Hainemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) did a great job presenting, and I was very impressed by the framework he has implemented. The main gist of Rails …

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Testing - an afterthought for opensource?

From my experience commercial testing of software consists of manual qa (grunt labor). Little is automated. I personally feel that even with a slight investment by developers to create unit tests, that effort would pay off later (especially in the crunch time before a big release where fixing a bug …

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Preaching to the choir

I guess that's one of the benefits of the "long tail" of blogging. I can get on my soapbox and speak directly to my audience. I know what to say and how to tweak their buttons. Most of my family and friends stay pretty far away from my blog since …

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