the

Little Projects

of Shawn M. Jones

In light of the arrival of the iPhone 4, I’ve been confronted with an age-old question:  what is the current state of open source?

Apple is ruling the future of the phone market with iPhone.  Android is the up-and-coming competitor.  Google is betting on their Linux phone, and betting hard.  Google’s goal is to make money with their ads.  I figured it would work, until I saw that Apple had iAds, something far more media-rich than Google Ads.

Apple is creating the tablet market with the iPad.  Some manufacturers have been working on Android tablets, but they will be late to the game.

Apple is moving into the mobile gaming market with the iPhone/iPod/iPad.  Android hasn’t really started to achieve the level of choice available in the Apple App Store.

Microsoft is continuing to hold onto its desktop OS market.  OS X is making inroads into this market because of Microsoft’s failure to get wide adoption of Windows Vista.  It remains to be seen if Windows 7 can recoup those losses.  Desktop Linux failed on many fronts for many reasons.  OS X and Windows have something Linux lacked, a consistent interface for applications.  Ubuntu is the most promising Desktop Linux available for the average user, but it can’t overcome the inconsistency across the UIs of the thousands of applications it supports.

Microsoft is continuing the hold onto its business server market.  This is the market of file sharing and directory services.  Neither Apple nor the Open Source world have been able to offer an alternative in these areas that has the level of adoption as Windows Servers.

Linux seems to be best suited for appliances, like wireless routers, but it remains to be seen how many hardware manufacturers see it as beneficial to continue to use Linux rather than implementing their own OS and utilities.

Linux seems to be the platform of choice for hosting application servers, like JBoss.  Unfortunately for Linux, most (all?) of these application servers can also be easily run on Windows or OS X.

Linux seems to be the platform of choice for web servers.  This is largely because Linux is inexpensive and IIS is not as feature-rich as Apache.  Apache can be easily run on Windows or OS X.

So, where does Open Source fit into this new world order?

There are several options for the Open Source developer (not in any particular order):

1. Write applications in Java, Scala, or some other language that is platform independent, in hopes that it will be available on the largest number of platforms.  This will not help you on iOS, where you are stuck with Apple’s API and Apple’s implementation of Objective-C.
2. Continue to develop applications for the LAMP platform.  As most of the these apps only need the AMP without the Linux, get used to the idea that folks might run it on Windows or OS X.
3. Write some libraries that can be incorporated into iOS apps.  This may violate Apple’s terms of use, so be careful.
4. Continue to write desktop applications that only run on Linux.
5. Android.  Google is actually achieving some consistency for apps on its Linux platform, but not to the degree that Apple’s draconian tactics have achieved.
6. Make something NEW.  Actually innovate in a way that forces the Apples and the Microsofts of the world to fear, and, eventually copy, the idea/concept/software.  This is an area where open source once shined.

I’ve been spending the last few days updating this site to something more useful, or so I hope.

I have a desire to share what little I learn from day to day, yet I don’t have an interest in maintaining a lively conversation about it.  I like writing articles, but not blog posts so much.  I also needed a place to point folks to when they asked for a resume or anything about me.

For years, I maintained multiple web sites, littleprojects.com and littleprojects.org.  The org site was for my personal endeavors and the com site was to be more professional.

Now Facebook takes care of my personal needs and I can focus on just keeping this site up to date with articles and the occasional blog post.  My hope is to have a place I can point to for my writing should prospective employers, colleagues, and others want to see what I can do.

Recently, I had to set up Samba on a new CentOS 5 system. Samba is used to provide Windows file sharing from non-Windows systems and can be quite a pain to set up. Red Hat, from whom CentOS is derived, has included a default configuration that works pretty well out of the box for what most people use Samba for: sharing home directories.

So, I fired it up and found that I could browse the shares on the server from my Windows XP system, but got the following message when I tried to open one of them (Iris is the name of the file server.):

Iris is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Access is denied.

After beating up Google a bit, I decided to actually journey into the smb.conf file again and noticed that Red Hat had left a comment about SELinux.

Viola! Typing the following solved my problem:
/usr/sbin/setsebool -P samba_enable_home_dirs on

Today I am sitting at the HAmpton Roads Lego Users Group (HARDLUG) table in the midst of FantaSci 2009. I’ve just finished repairing the LEGO Millenium Falcon and did my best to work with the limited pieces we could find for the LEGO Trade Federation MTT.

HARDLUG does these shows to promote their clandestine LEGO agenda while having fun talking to prospective new recruits. Also here are the Tidewater Alliance and a host of vendors.

I noticed when ripping and encoding my CD collection that GRIP crashed on certain CDs. Thinking this had to do with poor handling of CD scratches, I started setting CDs aside.

I should have known better. Having used it for years, I’d never seen this behavior before in GRIP.

It turns out that there is a buffer overflow that manifests itself when the genre of the music is set to something “nonstandard”, so, as a workaround, I have to check and sometimes set the genre on CDs to “Alternative” or another “standard” genre.

This isn’t really a problem solved, but more a problem identified and worked around. There is a patch in Ubuntu to fix this problem, but I guess it hasn’t made it into my version (Intrepid Ibex) yet.

Ref: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grip/+bug/283658