Complements, Substitutes, and Customers

My latest item from IT Conversations has been Novell’s David Patrick on “Open Source Renaissance”. It’s from OSCON 2004 — yeah, it’s old, but it’s still good.

It’s filled with lots of good stuff but what was really good for me was hearing him talk about substitutes anc complements. When starting a new project, one should look for an open source project that complements what you are doing or an open source project you can substitute for you project. This strategy, overall, should lower the cost of IT resources.

It should be added that to make this strategy more successful, one should be encourage your developers to participate in open source projects — sometimes it would probably be required. If you have a open source product that you want to use but it has a show-stopping bug in it or it doesn’t have a couple of features you would like. Why not put a couple of developers on it and send the code back? Everyone wins — you and the product.

Patrick also discusses that for an open source company to succeed, they have to form a relationship with the customer and serve to their needs and that this mentality is a new one in the software industry. I think that it’s outrageous that forming a relationship with your customers and caring for their needs is a new concept in this industry — but I do agree that it is. Companies for too long have focused on lock-in and not giving customers what they need. I think this is one of the main reasons that open source has been so successful and will continue to be.

Ted Leung on Modern Attraction and Instant Messaging

I think Ted Leung has said it all about why Google Talk is important in his post Modern Attraction and Instant Messaging

To summarize: the fact that Google Talk’s client sucks/doesn’t work on Mac/doesn’t work on Linux, it’s the fact that it’s open. That I can use Gaim to talk to someone using iChat or Google’s “official” client is what is cool. And I think that it’s bad that they are the only ones that say “hey we work on other clients! as opposed to locking out other clients.

I, for one, welcome our new “do no evil” overlords

Getting Cygwin working with strange environments

Cygwin’s bash usually just works — it gets the environment settings from the system (much like cmd does) and then you have it when the prompt starts up.

But sometimes don’t get that — the system you want to use comes with a batch file that sets up the environment and, in order for you to use those variables, etc, you have to use their cmd — what what if you want to use that environment at your bash prompt instead?

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Cygwin’s rxvt without X

Maybe you saw this on my handy de.lirio.us feed over on the sidebar, but it seems that rxvt on Cygwin works without X — so I don’t have to suffer through X on my machine!

Yes, rxvt is better than Cygwin’s standard bash prompt — but “better” if you like Xwindows cut-and-paste and other things you can get used to there.

Writing byte arrays in Jython

I have some byte arrays given to me from a Java API and I want to write it to a file via Jython. I thought it would as easy as:

jpg = open("pic.jpg","wb")
for b in bytes:
   jpg.write(b)
jpg.close()

But, of course, it’s not that easy:

Traceback (innermost last):
  File "getbinarydata.py", line 28, in ?
TypeError: write(): 1st arg can't be coerced to String

I ended up having to reach into the Java API thusly:

out = FileOutputStream(fname)
out.write(bytes)
out.close()

Which works, but I think I should be able to do this with “native” Jython calls. But Google shows me no love.