A survey conducted by J.D. Power and Associates found Apple's iPhone generated the highest amount of customer satisfaction among smartphone-using businesspeople.

Living in North Texas, you see this guy on TV a lot. This series of commercials are pretty much the definition of the term gimmick. This commercial makes me want to buy pain medication.

I recently went through some Solaris training to better familiarize myself with some aspects of Solaris. The instructor was mildly experienced and had spent many years servicing Sun hardware. This particular instructor had been drinking the Sun kool-aid for a long time and was not appraised of the alternatives that have become available such as Linux. One of the statements the instructor made was that "Linux isn't ready for prime time."

The training facility used to be run by Sun directly and had since been taken over by a third party to continue training sessions. The facility appeared to have been gutted when Sun left and only two or three classrooms remained out of ten or more. Meanwhile this instructor lauded the capabilities of Solaris and it's firm place among the Server market. Chief among complaints for administrators is that Solaris has never included common utilities that make administrators lives easier, yet they have included a number of graphical utilities that make it easier to use, but only a little easier. Many times the graphical tools fail to work properly and any real system administrator isn't going to use them. I came away with the impression that the whole thing seemed to be a sinking ship.

If all of this sounds critical of Sun, it's because it is. Sun has made some progress with Solaris 10 but only enough to motivate existing users to upgrade, not enough to spark new uptake. So what do you do when no one will pay attention to you? You wave your arms around a bit to try and make a scene, which is exactly what Sun has done with OpenSolaris. For Sun, OpenSolaris is the only way to invest in the future of Solaris. The part of OpenSolaris that Sun doesn't get is that pretending that you're a community does not make you one. For most administrators the only draw of OpenSolaris is ZFS, which is the most interesting part of Solaris, aside from virtualization technologies like Zones.

I don't think OpenSolaris or Solaris are bad products, it's just that Linux for many is a better alternative. Linux is usable, reliable and performs. Linux has what Solaris does not, a massive community of users and contributors and a lot of businesses who are too invested in Linux to let it fail. A whole generation of people who started using Linux 10 years ago, are putting it in the racks right now, and it's only going to become more popular as the "old school" admins support fewer and fewer legacy systems.

Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

I understand that Solaris is still entrenched in many industries and for many businesses it is their only choice because of legacy applications which are not supported elsewhere. I also understand that Linux is a kernel and should not be compared to a complete operating system like Solaris, so I ask that when reading this just supplant the term Linux with the canonical understanding of Linux. That is to say Linux is RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc etc.

• Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?
• Slashdot's take on the same NYT article.

Update: Linux's Next Victim

A Server watch article supposes UNIX is sinking ship.

If I were a rat, I'd certainly be trying on a life vest for size.

Computerworld has an excellent article with the CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst.

"I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said "we're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to help us use open source to reduce our costs".

As budgets shrink in the enterprise, more and more companies are realizing the benefits of open source products and their overall low total cost of ownership.

• Slashdot discusses

Kevin Rose, Digg founder talks about what Digg is doing to advance their vision for news. One interesting goal is for Digg to increase the scope of their taxonomy so that niche content is doesn't fall through the cracks.

I've spent the last week in-and-out of a user-group conference for users of the defacto publishing solution for print media. Users of this particularly complext software get together to discuss all kinds of issues facing their organizations. Their challenges, solutions and culture are explored in an effort to openly find ways to do things better. It is apparent that every news organization is aware of the downward trend of dead-tree news. The general concensus is that online publications are the future, though some still disagree with the notion. What could be agreed upon though was that these media organizations are all becoming more multifaceted. Unfortunately the reality is that the web was 10 years ago, and those just getting to the station will find that the train has left. No longer can you simply build a news portal that looks like every other news portal. You must deliver value to your community and you must do so in an innovative way. The diversification of products has to continue, but with less staff and more content.

How does an organization accomplish this? I think it has to be done programatically and culturally. The applications each organization chooses must be flexible enough to change quickly and to follow trends as they happen. I saw some software during this conference that provided some of this functionality, and it looked very good. Obviosuly just a few days is not enough to make a judgement on anything so complex but I can at least agree with the direction they were going. Moving content out to a community to the extent that the community chooses what is important, generates discussion and organizes events. Part of the problem with traditional print media is that once you've read it, the news has already happened. This is why community contributions are so important, they should be accepted frequently provided they are of good quality.

This community generated content should be enriched by content generated by the news gathering organization and vice-versa. This strategy should not negate the importance of professional news gathering and editorial content. It is that content which should spark the community into generating more usable content. To the pubishers of such content, more content means more advertising space, more advertising space means more dollars.

Additionally, there are efficiences gained by having a bloggers participate in the core community. Imagine a blogger whose highly targeted content related to a particular city was enriched automatically by the local news gathering organization. The idea is that you can sponsor these bloggers with small fees and gain link traffic which the blogger is obligated to embed in their content. The blogger is going to blog whether your organization is part of the operation or not, so why not take advantage. The bloggers content can also be shared or syndicated for the news organization. I would not expect this content to be of high value for news purposes but for the purpose of additional content on a website it fits in my model.

This is a very small sampling of ideas that I had simply because I attended this conference. In my opinion that makes the experience I had worth my time. I'm glad I attended.

Bank robber who resembles 'Top Gun' character Goose hits fifth bank

In related news, Anthony Edwards is forced to do all of his banking online, "Until things cool off."

Obviously this Apple event entitled "Let's Rock" tomorrow is geared towards music, but I'm hoping some iPhone software is also in the cards.

There are a few things that bug me about the iPhone. The lack of copy and paste, from application to application is a big one, and one which has been noted by numerous other sources. I'll not dwell on this except to simply note that it's one of the things I'd like to see in a future release.

Another issue for me is the lack of features in the mail client. What I would love to have are basic filtering capabilites. Such that I can filter mail into a folder with simple rules of my choosing. Since I cannot automatically sync my IMAP sub-folder mail I should have some level of control over mail that I must have in the root of my inbox. Simply talking to Exchange isn't quite good enough, I need some power-user features to take control of my email. I would also like to set the polling time on a per-account basis.

My next issue is the Application Store, I'd like to see more and varied applications. While there are currently a large number of applications the jail-broken community comes up with a lot more useful stuff. I don't know if Apple doesn't let these applications into the store or if they just aren't submitted to the store. In the case of the former I hope Apple loosens its grip over what it will allow in the store. The iPhone has proven to be an exciting platform for developers and its full potential should be realized. I don't think Apple should fear application sprawl because the best applications will always float to the top of most purchased and most popular applications.

Overall I'm very happy with my iPhone but as with everything, it could be better. I expect that there are an unknown number of coders, lit by the glow of an unknown number of monitors making it better as we speak.

The current king of microblogging is Twitter. Unfortunately for Twitter users, technical issues plague the service. It's frequently down or overloaded. Every time a world event takes place, everyone puts in their two cents, which leads to the site being unavailable. Sometimes these chaos events take place at seemingly random times.

On the outside it would appear to be an issue of scalability. For instance, one person with a thousand followers posts one update, that update must then be queried by all of those users. Presumably these updates don't happen all at the same time but as usage increases so does the strain on the system.

From the Twitter Developer Blog:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we've tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that's introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. When we're in crisis mode, adding more instrumentation to help us navigate the web of interdependencies in our current architecture is often our primary recourse. This is, clearly, not optimal.

The problem for the community is that since they've spent so much time gathering friends on the site they cannot easily migrate to another service. There are contenders waiting to supplant Twitter though. Laconica is a distributed open-source microblogging system. Laconica has the ability to push updates from one server to another thus making server to server updates possible. This approach makes it possible to follow people across any number of servers. An example of this is Identi.ca. Since the Laconica system uses OpenID all installations will authenticate users in exactly the same way. One username and password across the board. OpenID is a very robust set of technologies and one which many major services already support, you probably already have one and don't even know it.

• Identi.ca and the Power of Microbranded Communities
• Identi.ca Will Succeed Because Its Technology is Viral

Another open-source microblogging tool OpenMicroBlogger.

Finally... an apple store in Fort Worth.

The new Apple store opened at 10 a.m. Saturday in the old Gap location at the Fort Worth retail center on University Drive to a line of more than 200 excited Macfans.

Pictures to follow.

VALLEYWAG: 5 ways the newspapers botched the Web

The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition.

I believe there is a little truth to this statement. The daily pace of the news is intense and it's hard to maintain a focused vision for the future when the news is always happening.

Many daily paper publications are being dragged into the future. The primary problem facing all of them is finding the balance between slowly accepting shrinking circulation and being at the very edge of that ever shrinking bubble and migrating to a purely internet presence. News organizations need to maintain a connection to their community so that when there is no longer a paper reminder of who produces the news on their doorstep, the community is still aware of the source for quality news and information. A transition to a low-overhead increasingly web based presence will happen fast or many of these publications won't get the chance to make it happen. The other problem with paper news is that once printed and delivered is yesterdays news, it's not relevant to the news-now, news-everywhere crowd.

The area of concern for me, as an infrequent news website reader, is quality. I'm concerned when I am overwhelmed with advertisements and have trouble navigating. I most often visit news sites which are simple, clean looking, and informative. They should be simple to navigate, be friendly to mobile browsers and should offer feeds. I don't even care if there are high quality advertisements within the feeds if they are relevant. I want more community, which is something generic news portals don't have. Take a site like Digg for instance, it should be instantly apparent what is important to people right now. What Digg lacks is quality, generally because the content is 99.999 percent generated by its users. I'm not saying another Digg is what is needed but certainly there is a trend towards social networking, dynamic content based on an individuals preferences.

• The Slashdot community ponders this article.

The 3G iPhone looks like a pretty amazing piece of technology. Apple has managed to fix all of the things I didn't like about the first incarnation. The most amazing thing about the iPhone 3G is how Apple will gain mind share and market share from the millions of people who are likely to get one. The reason they'll gain so much is the thing which bites a lot of people who a low up-front cost. Though some have complained about the increased data plan costs, most who take issue fail to understand that 3G provides real broadband network connectivity. The value of the service has inceased.

The real value though is in the potential of the platform in the form of applications. When you compare what Apple has done in just two years for the mobile telephone market and contrast against a platform like windows mobile, there is no contest as to which company is on top of their game.

It's almost as if they build their products because it fills some developers personal need versus building a "product" for the express purpose of making money. This is a strategy that I really admire because so far it tends to produce really interesting stuff.

With that said, hopefully the line will not be long.

Update:

I finally managed to get an iPhone. After having spent two days with it I'm very impressed. The only minor issue is battery life, probably because I've been using wifi quite often. The application store is incredible but since there are many competing applications it's hard to know which one is the best. I've yet to find a good source of high quality iPhone application reviews. Some applications also don't disclose information such as third party servers involved in communication, for instance some chat applications proxy certain requests between you and the destination. It's amazing to me that this device is so far ahead of anything else on the market and in some cases the horizon. It makes every other phone look rather shabby by comparison.

Just nine months before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government's news agency, Xinhua, reported that gymnast He Kexin was 13, which would have made her ineligible to be on the team that won a gold medal this week.

The unidentified man swung his leg over the ledge at 7:27 p.m. and walked about 50 feet back to a line of squad cars accompanied unhandcuffed by a group of Fort Worth police officers.

So far, this is the 10th straight day of triple-digit heat for Texas. Interestingly enough, an increased draw on the power grid is predicted.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the Public Utility Commission urged Texans to reduce their electricity use Tuesday during peak electricity hours from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

It is common knowledge that the city of Arlington in Texas has no public transportation. It is a large city whose streets are packed with cars, students and Dallas Coyboys fans soon enough. Befitting that it is also the only city where GM will continue to produce the SUV.

It's no secret that a lot of industries are feeling the gas crunch. GM

• GM is losing one billion dollars every month.
• Four North American GM plants will close.
• GM is cutting health insurance for retired employees.

That last bit is really terrible in my opinion. Instead of leaving that kind of mark on your legacy, find the money somewhere else. The people who spent their lives in your service are worth more than the phrase "Times are tough". It shows current employees that they have no future with the company.

I have to remind myself at times, this is the way the market sorts itself. I think often times we are so comfortable with institutions we've known our whole lives that we forget there are a dozen or more competitors who are ready to step in and offer what the market wants.

Utah goes to 4-day workweek to save energy.

In a yearlong experiment aimed at reducing the state's energy costs and commuters' gasoline expenses, Utah is about to become the first state to switch to a four-day workweek for thousands of government employees.

The environment and common sense seem to have won over stodgy business paradigms. In an increasingly connected world expanding telecommuting options is a good thing for both employee and employer.

"This is validating some of the critics who said they were opening stores too close to one another," said James Walsh, an analyst at Starbucks investor Coldstream Capital Management.

I enjoy an occasional starbucks, I would also enjoy seeing one only occasionally.

Gedit is not a perfect editor. Making it a little better is easy. One of the best features of Gedit: plugins.

• Auto Completion Plugin - Auto complete words.
• Scripting Plugin - Execute scripts using the script defined interpreter.
• File Browser Pane - This built-in plugin makes jumping from file to file much easier.
• Snippets Plugin - Enabling the built-in snippets plugin allows tab expansion of language specific keywords to help save keystrokes.
• Darkmate Theme - The darkmate theme approximates textmate's dark theme.

I should note that I use MacOS at home and Linux at work, the theme and plugins above are meant to approximate TextMate. I own a copy of TextMate and I think it's one of the best text editors I've ever used.

Merge/Diff

Another editing application with potential for Gedit integration is called Meld. Meld is a graphical diff and merge tool. Sometimes regular old diff can get you down, especially if you're looking at lots of similar looking text. If you need some visual cues to make spotting differences easier Meld is a good tool for the job.

The best sandwich is the california club at Jasons. Period.

Toyota recently announced plug-in hybrid cars by 2010. While this is a good thing I would like to suggest an alternate solution. I have a few simple requirements.

• All electric.
• 200 mile range at reasonable speeds, 60Mph.
• Competitive pricing.

Get right on that automakers.

ZFS read and write support has been included in the forthcoming Mac OS X Server. An announcement that in all the iPhone news went seemingly unnoticed.

Snow Leopard Server

For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.

While ZFS exists other places like FreeBSD, OpenSolaris etc, it's good to see a commercial product include support for one of the cooler things to come out of Sun. If you want to see how to take advantage of ZFS check out the links below, it's pretty much the same on every operating system excepting what the os calls your physical disks.

ZFS Basics - A look at ZFS from the OpenSolaris community.
ZFS Quickstart Guide - FreeBSD and ZFS.
ZFS on FUSE - Linux and ZFS.

I guess I'm an adult now, I just got my cholesterol checked at the doctor. I'm sure there are other qualifiers for this kind of event, but for me, having awareness of something I was previously never concerned about is a milestone. Apparently, everyone age 20 and older should have their cholesterol levels checked at least once every 5 years. So if you haven't done it, consider this a reminder.

I wonder if there is a correct way to write technical documentation. I think I do a decent job of it, but perhaps that is because my brain correctly filters the text through the blob from whence it came.

I've somehow managed to get to the point where my operating system and general computing environment has become a bit crufty. I really hate to have to do it but I think I'm going to have to start from a fresh installation. There are many Applications in Activity Monitor which I can't remember installing or probably shouldn't be running. UserEventAgent is nicely colored red and is apparently "Not Responding", as is coreaudiod. I have the ability to track these things down, but I don't have the time or motivation because I know why these things are in this state.

This brings me to a question which I'm not sure I've seen discussed before. The cleanup of post upgrade and uninstalled applications from MacOS. When your system is littered with years old plists, drivers, application enhancers, general hacks and such. I have found that there is no tool sufficient to clean all of these locations where files reside. I find this to be frustrating. Tools such as AppZapper do a fair job at cleaning things up, but I find this to be more of an infrastructure problem.

It would be nice if Apple supported uninstallation. According to the Apple documentation regarding the limitations of Managed Installs the Installer application does not support uninstalling products.

It would be pretty simple to include a manifest of files and.. oh nevermind, instead of duplicating the features of many package management systems already available lets just adopt an open source tool like dpkg. Lets top dpkg off with a really slick looking front-end designed by Apple. Lets also figure out a way to let users place applications where they want but maintain the ability to uninstall them even if moved by the user after install.

Sounds complicated but such are the adventures of software giants.

My line of work comes with a special taxonomy. When something funny happens in the sphere of what I do, usually only one percent of people are going to really get it. Even then, sometimes a percentage of that one percent will truly get it. This is not by virtue of elitist exclusivity, it's just not that many people do what I do.

Sometimes it's really easy.
Somtimes it's a little harder.
Every now and then, serendipity.

Even the media is starting to pay some attention to a really excellent comic called xkcd.

The local zoo has African Penguins.

A Penguin.

Another Penguin.

In the middle of something.

I've taken a simplified approach to presenting content suitable for the internet.

For the curious, a set of basic content managment scripts called laguna2 thrown together in a few hours by Steven Frank. These scripts provide a really simple method of taking a text file and turning it into that which we have come accustomed to seeing on this internet of ours.